CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Mackenzie came to slowly. Everything hurt and she didn’t understand it. Her head hurt. Her arms hurt—her wrists!—it felt as if they were being flayed and her limbs were being dragged from her body. She visualized being on a rack and slowly pulled apart. Shuddering, she finally opened her eyes and looked at her right hand. It was strung with twine through a ring that was screwed into a concrete ceiling. Both hands, arms . . . were strung up. She was hanging from the ceiling and her body weight was cutting off her circulation, turning her hands white. With an effort, she got her feet underneath her and released the tension. Felt immediate relief. Thank God she could stand.
Why? her dulled brain asked. How?
She blinked and felt the cold.
She was naked.
Memory flooded back. She was driving . . . driving to Taft’s place and . . . there was food. The burgers! She’d picked up burgers and she’d stopped to get her clothes and...
She heard footsteps and a man was suddenly standing in front of her. He was bare-chested, stripped down to his jeans. He looked familiar but she couldn’t place him.
“You’re awake,” he said, grinning. He was breathing hard and sweating. “Had to sneak you in, pack you down here, but I did it. I did it!”
“Who are you?”
He stared at her, a flash of anger in his eyes. “You know. You’ve been tracking me, bitch.”
She didn’t have the strength to argue, just waited, her mind racing. Where was she? How long had she been gone?
Very slowly the man reached for a cowboy hat on a metal shelf and jammed it on his head. She had a glimmer of recognition then. He was the man who’d tried to pick her up outside the Waystation.
“Chas,” he said.
“I haven’t been tracking you.”
“I saw you. I saw you with her.”
“Her? I don’t know you, Chas.”
“On Wishing Well Street. I saw you with her!”
“Stephanie?” Her pulse leapt. This was about Stephanie? Had her stepsister been right about the connection to Rayne and Brenda? But this was someone new. Someone else. Who?
“I don’t know you,” she tried again.
“But you were with her. And she knows who I am, doesn’t she? She knows very well.”
“You saw me outside her house tonight?” Mac said, thinking of the gray F-150 that had cruised by as they were standing together on the porch.
“Things need to be in the right order, but you got in my way, didn’t you?”
Mac willed her sluggish mind to catch up. She needed to play along. To buy time. “Where am I?” she asked.
“You’re with me.” He spread his arms and turned around. “You like it? It’s where we’ll make love until you die.” He pointed behind her and she carefully turned her head to see a whiteboard with names written in different colors and crossed out with the same: Rayne’s in red, Bibi’s in green, and Brenda’s in yellow. Her own name was written on the board in blue, still viable.
As she watched he walked over with a pink Sharpie and added Stephanie to the list.
“You’ll be pleased to know you’re the first to visit me here. Rayne got close, but I made mistakes with her. She knew too much.”
“Rayne didn’t fall. You killed her,” Mac said, her eyes on the whiteboard.
“I didn’t want to,” he answered regretfully.
“And Bibi . . . ?”
“I didn’t want to kill her, either! But Rayne talked about me to her. I wanted to make love to her, like I did Rayne. And Brenda, Brandy,” he sneered. “She wanted me. Things just got out of control, so . . .”
Mac wished she knew what time it was. Wondered if Taft was starting to question where she was.
“So, now it’s just you and me, and we’ll make love all night and all day. Forever.” Mac tried to hide her feelings of revulsion, but he must have seen something in her expression because he drew near and whispered coldly, “Don’t worry. Nobody’s coming to help you. You’re mine now. . . .”
* * *
Emma clipped the leash on Duchess’s collar, and the two of them walked down the hallway and stood outside the dining room where Harley was taking orders from a table of four men who usually sat together. They all seemed to be flirting with Harley. That’s what they did with pretty girls.
Harley managed to walk away from them before she rolled her eyes on her way to the kitchen. She nearly ran into Emma on her way.
She looked down at Duchess and said, “Oh, I wish I could pet you, but I’m working.”
“How are you doing?” Emma asked.
“Good. It’s okay. You taking Duchess for a walk?” she asked.
“We’re going to Mrs. Throckmorton’s house.” Emma had already been there once today. She’d knocked on the doors of all the three houses and of course it was the last one where Mrs. Throckmorton’s daughter, Lorena, had finally opened the door.
“Wait a minute. I said I’d go with you. I can’t right now and it’s getting dark.”
“I went earlier but Mrs. Throckmorton was taking a nap. I said I would come back today. I have a flashlight.”
“Whoa. If you wait till tomorrow we can go together. I’ll come here directly after school.”
“I want to look for the cat, too.”
“Somebody said they saw Twinkletoes earlier,” said Harley.
Emma wasn’t so sure, and it could be that Harley was just saying that to get her to stay. Old Darla had died at the hospital today and Jewell and everybody else was blaming the cat. “Supercilious Bob tried to catch her. They want to get rid of her.”
“I don’t know that that’s true.” She looked toward the kitchen. “I have to put this order in.”
“Okay.”
Emma watched her leave, then headed out the door with Duchess. She would have liked Harley to go with her, but she’d told Lorena that she would be coming back today and it was important to keep her word.
* * *
Thud, thud, thud.
Mac heard the noise above the pounding inside her own head and realized someone was beating on a wall somewhere above them, maybe a door. Chas’s face grew rigid and fury made his eyes bulge. “Bitch!” he screamed.
“Thad?” a woman’s distant voice called.
Chas ran across the room and then up a stairway; she could see the bottom concrete step. “Go away!” he screamed. Mac shivered. Just how unhinged was he? It made her heart go cold.
“There was a young woman here today to see Mom. She seems kind of off and she lives at Ridge Pointe.”
“You let her in?” Chas demanded, aghast.
“No. But she’s coming back.”
“Well, don’t let her in.”
“She said it was confusing which grandson kissed Rayne at that place. She said Mom thought it was you. I don’t know what she really wants, but I told her it couldn’t be you because you’re so damn anal about no public displays of affection, in fact no displays of affection whatsoever.”
“JUST DON’T LET HER IN!”
“Stay down there in your fucking den and die,” she snarled. “You’re as crazy as your bipolar father.”
Mac heard a bolt turn, a heavy metal door slide back and slam into the wall with force. There was a sharp, “Thad!” and then a quick, aborted scream. Scuffling and shrieking and Thad roaring in fury. The sounds of the fight grew more distant and Mac quickly examined the twine around her wrists. It was pulled tight, knotted. Could she work her way free? No . . . She needed a tool. Where? How?
There were books on the metal shelving in front of her, across the room a ways. And office supplies of a sort. A box cutter. That was a box cutter!
If she swung herself by her wrists, her feet could reach the shelving. She would have to wrap one foot around the metal corner post of the shelving to stop her momentum, then attempt to grab the box cutter with the toes of her other foot.
Impossible. Her head was throbbing. Her wrists were killing her.
She gritted her teeth and ignored the pain. She swung herself forward, moaning against the burn at her wrists. Her feet came up and she missed hooking her right around the post and swung backward, but she’d dislodged several of the books. One dropped to the floor. The box cutter shifted and she held her breath. If she pushed it back much farther it would be out of reach.
She heard footsteps on the stairs, stomping heavier than when he’d ascended. If she’d thought he was breathing hard before, now his chest was rapidly rising and falling. The cowboy hat had fallen off during the tussle and there was a streak of blood across his torso she didn’t want to think about. His eyes were bright, almost feverish.
He came at her and grabbed her face and started kissing her. It took Mac by surprise and she wasn’t quite sure how to handle it. She held herself still as his tongue thrust into her mouth. She wanted to bite it off but knew that would serve no purpose other than making things worse for her. She concentrated instead on fighting back the pain in her head and wrists.
“Who was that?” she managed to get out when he finally moved from her mouth to her ear. One of his hands was painfully crushing her breast.
“Oh. Lorena. Mother.” He laughed, almost a giggle. “She won’t be bothering us anymore.”
“Who’s the girl from Ridge Pointe?”
He pulled himself away from her, angry. “Stop talking. She’s not a girl. She’s a woman. And a retard. She’s attractive, though. Her name’s Emma.” He seemed to get hold of himself again and cocked his head, as if listening, maybe thinking. Then he walked away and searched through the Sharpies, producing one in purple. He added Emma on to the whiteboard. “Don’t worry,” he said, coming back to Mac and running his tongue down her cheek. “We’ll have enough time together.” He touched his fingers to her chin, which was swollen and tender. She realized he’d hit her with an undercut. “Sorry about that. I didn’t want to hurt you. I just had to get you in the truck. You’re not like those gossips.”
“Like . . . Rayne?”
“And Brenda and Stephanie. The mean girls. The trio.” He stepped back and said in a falsetto, “Mr. Toad! Mr. Toad!”
Mac wanted to defend Stephanie. There wasn’t a mean bone in her stepsister’s body. But that line of conversation wasn’t going to get her anywhere. “She called you Thad. Lorena.”
“Nope. There’s only Chas. As of today, Thad is dead.” He sounded as if he’d just decided that.
Mac could feel a swirl of air in the dungeon-like room. Thad, or Chas, had left the door open at the top of the steps. She didn’t think he would be foolish enough to leave it open by mistake. She guessed that Lorena might be dead as well and any hope of help from her was over.
* * *
Emma knocked on Mrs. Throckmorton’s door. It had a metal ring she could smack that made a thunking sound. She’d used it earlier in the day and Mrs. Throckmorton’s daughter, Lorena, had answered right away with a scowl on her face. Emma had told her she should turn that frown upside down, to which she had said some very rude remarks, and when Emma had said she would come back later in the day, she’d said, “Don’t bother,” in a snarly tone Emma hadn’t liked. That’s why she’d brought Duchess with her this time. She thought Old Darla might have been right and they—Lorena and Thaddeus—were keeping Mrs. Throckmorton in the house with too many stairs. And besides, Emma had promised she would be back.
This time Lorena didn’t hurry to answer.
Emma knocked again and waited. She looked through the skinny windows on either side of the door. Her eyes widened as she saw that funny chair on the stairs was coming down the side of the stairway. She watched as it came to a stop. Lorena was sitting on it. She stared through the window back at Emma and Emma went cold from the inside out. “I see his eyes!” she whimpered, causing Duchess to growl low in her throat.
Lorena lifted an arm to point at Emma. Her face was covered in red, red blood as she tried to get out of the chair. One foot was out, then the other, and Lorena suddenly pitched forward and down the steps to slide onto the cream-colored marble floor with the big rose in the center.