Authors: Hallie Ephron
Come and Find Me (14 page)
“S
hit, shit, shit!” She held on to the steering wheel with both hands, waiting for her vision to clear, her heart to stop galloping.
She turned around. Jake was sitting in the backseat. He looked transformed since they’d last met in person, his head completely shaved, a reddish Vandyke beard and mustache on his face. If it hadn’t been for the voice and the John Lennon glasses, she’d never have recognized him. He’d caught Daniel’s walking stick and had it pointed at her like a javelin.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” she said, her voice shaking. It felt as if Jake had sucked the oxygen from the air in the closed car. She gasped for breath. That’s when she saw the cell phone, sitting on the seat beside him.
Idiot!
A pall of mortification settled over her. No wonder GROB had used a voice synthesizer. GROB was Jake.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy, please, don’t freak out.” In a single fluid move, he slid between the front bucket seats and into the front passenger seat.
Diana screamed and pressed herself against the door. She had to get out of there. She clawed for the handle, but before she could open the door there was a dull
thock
. Doors locking. Diana felt her blood thrumming in her ears. Her keys were no longer in the ignition.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” Jake said. “I’m sorry for freaking you out.”
“Let me out,” she said. “Jake, please, let me out now. Whatever you have to say to me, you can say it out there.” He didn’t move.
“Help!” she screamed, banging at the window. “Help, help!” She screamed as loud as she could, but not a single person was near enough to hear, and the tinted glass made her invisible. She started to reach into the backseat for the walking stick.
“Stop!” Jake cupped his hand behind her head, twined his finger in her hair, and pulled it taut, immobilizing her. “Calm down. I was afraid you’d be like this.”
“Ow!” she cried as he tightened his grip, and she felt the skin pulling at the corners of her eyes.
“I can explain.” He brought his face close to hers and stared back at her. “Let me explain. Okay?”
Diana could smell coffee breath, aftershave, and the metallic scent of her own fear. She took a shuddering breath and managed a nod. Jake loosened his grip.
“Okay?” he said.
She nodded again. Slowly Jake let go. They sat in silence for a few moments, and Diana felt as if she were in a cage staring out at him. Her chest hurt as she took in air and exhaled.
“O-kay. Let’s start over,” he said. “I’m sorry I had to do it this way, but I need you to come with me. Diana, it’s okay, really it is.” He was talking to her like she was a child. “You can trust me.”
“Trust”—Diana’s voice was hoarse—“is something you earn. You trick me to get me to come here. Hide in the backseat and then scare me half to death, and now I’m supposed to trust you?”
“I’m sorry. I had to wait in the Hummer because I wasn’t sure it was you. You look . . . different from what I was expecting.”
“I thought I was meeting . . . There’s nothing wrong with my sister, is there?”
His silence confirmed it.
“You made me think she was deathly ill. My sister, the last person I can trust in this world. Except for you, of course. Don’t you realize—?”
He returned her entreaty with a blank stare. Of course he didn’t realize. Couldn’t, really. Jake had never been able to fathom anyone’s emotions but his own paltry array of them.
“Jake, why didn’t you just ask me to meet you?”
“And you would have come?”
She thought about that. “Maybe not right away. But eventually I—”
“I couldn’t wait for eventually.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can explain, but not here. Not now.”
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated. I wanted to show you this amazing place we’ve got set up.”
“We?”
“You’ll see. I promised I wouldn’t tell you. But you know how you wanted to track down the hackers who’ve been after our clients? Well, now you’re going to get your wish.”
This was about Volganet? Were they part of Jake’s post-Daniel business model? Nadia set up the chumps and then Volganet fleeced them—with Jake collecting from both sides.
“So we have a silent partner?” she asked.
He gave her a narrow look, as if he was trying to glean what she knew. “I guess you could call it that.” Uncertainty was something she’d rarely seen in Jake.
“And what if I don’t want to go with you?”
“Diana, after what happened with your sister, I’d understand. But I think you’ll change your mind, once you see everything. And if we get there and you decide you don’t want to stay, I promise you can leave. Trust me.”
“Trust you? I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
“Fair enough. But come with me and let me show you.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out her keys. “Here. You can get out right now, or you can drive.”
As Diana stared at the keys he offered to her, she realized that she really didn’t have anywhere to go back to.
T
he wipers swept slowly back and forth, across the windshield, and drizzle had turned to a steady rain by the time Diana drove past the town’s final convenience store and the driveway to the last house abutting the road. Jake, who’d looked tense when she’d started the car and pulled back out into the street, had settled into his seat.
When they reached the highway entrance, he said, “Just stay with the road we’re on.”
The terrain was hilly and the road narrowed as it snaked through dense forest, a blur of trees surging past on either side. Jake leaned forward and peered through the windshield as the wipers stroked and cleared.
“We’re almost there. Slow down,” he said.
She remembered the map of this area and tried to imagine where “there” was—north, or maybe northwest of Mill Village, five or six miles. There’d been a lake or reservoir in this direction.
“Turn there,” he said, pointing to a dirt road.
Diana slowed and turned onto it. It was impossible to go more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour on the rutted surface.
“It’s a ways in,” Jake said. “Just keep going.”
In a thicket of brush and trees, Diana could make out what had once been a building foundation. The chimney and the remains of a brick wall seemed to be standing in a shroud of fog. Beyond that they passed a field and a small pond.
The car lurched and once again they were on paved road, skirting a perimeter of chain-link fencing that surrounded a multistory brick complex that looked like an old industrial mill. The first-floor windows were boarded over, but on the floors above, glass was all still intact.
The Hummer rocked in and out of potholes before Diana had to come to a halt at a sliding gate. Jake took his own cell phone from his jacket pocket, punched in a number, and a few moments later the gate clanked and slid open.
“Go ahead,” he said, pointing ahead. “Not much further.”
Diana hesitated.
“Change your mind?” Jake said. “Because I can get out right here and walk the rest of the way. You can turn around and go home. But if you want to know what’s going on, the answer is here.” He pointed straight ahead.
Diana drove the car through the gate. On the other side, she stopped and twisted around, watching through the rain-shrouded rear window at the gate sliding shut behind them. She turned and peered through the front windshield.
“We’re almost there,” Jake said.
Diana drove past what looked like the building’s main entrance, now a padlocked door, and on around the corner. Jake opened the car window. Cold, damp air surged into the car, anchoring Diana’s senses. She exhaled a puff of dragon’s breath.
“Smell that?” Jake said.
Diana sniffed and noticed the air was tinged with sweetness that reminded her of an ice-cream shop.
“This was once a chocolate factory and that”—Jake indicated a massive white silo, about thirty feet in diameter and standing about eight stories tall; a metal ladder spiraled around the outside of it, ending in a small doorway two-thirds of the way up—“is where they used to store the chocolate.
“Is that cool or what?” Jake said. He rolled the window back up. “In warm weather the smell carries for miles. Kids used to say the water in the reservoir tasted like cocoa. It doesn’t.”
Above the hum of the car engine and the steady rain, Diana could hear water rushing. She continued driving slowly around the complex, and on the other side of the building was a body of water maybe a half mile wide, its surface dimpled like orange skin by falling rain. At the end nearest the silo, water cascaded over a dam.
“Park in there,” Jake said, pointing to a covered bank of loading docks at the back of the building. The car rocked side to side as it rolled over brush that sprouted from holes in the cement approaches.
Already backed into one of the shadowy bays was a black limousine. Diana pulled in alongside it and shut down the engine.
“You want this?” Jake asked, handing her Daniel’s driftwood walking stick.
She took it and got out of the car. The smell of mildew and rotting leaves overwhelmed the chocolate. She touched the hood of the limo. It was warm, like it had been recently driven. Was that how Jake had gotten to Mill Village? One of his new partners drove him there? She wondered if this was the same limousine she’d seen cruising down her street. Was it the car that had blocked her into her driveway?
When Jake got out, he had her backpack and laptop. “I’m going to need all that?” she asked.
“Once you see the setup, you’re going to want to stay.”
As she slipped from between the cars, Jake fell in close behind her and ushered her up a few broad steps and onto a loading platform. A door along the back wall was propped open with a cinder block. He grabbed a flashlight that was sitting on a capped standpipe and turned on the beam. “You ready?”
Diana took a deep inhale of the chocolate-scented air.
“On belay,” Jake said. It was what the belayer told a climber after he’d anchored the rope, the equivalent of
I’m ready and I’ve got your back
.
“Ready to climb,” she said.
“Climb on.” With a hand on Diana’s back, Jake guided her inside.
D
iana’s heart was banging in her chest and sweat prickled across her shoulders and neck. Fortunately, the flashlight seemed to grow brighter as she and Jake penetrated deeper into the building’s basement corridor. The floor ramped upward and the rectangle of light—the doorway to the outside world—receded behind them.
Diana remembered following Jake and Daniel through a dark Swiss railway tunnel, a shortcut to the base of Waterfall Pitch that Daniel had discovered researching the climb on the Internet. As Jake’s flashlight beam played across boarded-over windows and whitewashed cement walls covered with mold, she remembered how the lights of their helmet lamps had bobbed on the ground in front of them.
She’d been crazed eight hours later when she’d raced back alone through that same tunnel, desperate to find rescuers in time to save Daniel, terrified when she’d heard a rumble and seen the headlight of a fast-approaching train. Only just in time she’d found a recess in the tunnel wall. She’d clung there, screaming, as train cars roared past.
Afterward, in the heavy silence of the empty tunnel, she’d felt the first stirrings of that feeling of utter helplessness. That feeling had still been with her a week later when she’d reluctantly boarded an airplane for home. She’d sat in a window seat, clutching the armrest on the American Airlines flight from Zurich to Boston. When the flight attendant announced that the doors were closed, she’d begun to sweat.
“I want to get out,” she’d whispered to Jake. He’d held her hand, told her not to worry. “No!” She’d pulled free and pressed the flight attendant call button. “I need to get out now!”
Passengers across the aisle had given them uneasy glances. When the flight attendant came to see what was wrong, Jake reassured her and by then Diana had managed to regain a semblance of calm. But when the plane started down the runway, her heart had begun to race. Her throat went so dry she couldn’t swallow. As the plane had gained altitude, she’d sat there rigid, unable to breathe, imagining the engine stalling. In her mind’s eye she’d seen the plane dropping like a rock, slamming into the ground, shattering like glass and spewing bodies.
“You feel out of control,” Dr. Lightfoot had explained weeks later. “Anxiety is your body’s natural response to danger. But now you’re becoming conditioned to respond this way even when there’s no real reason to be anxious.”
It had been one of their first Skype video call sessions over the computer, and Dr. Lightfoot’s quiet voice and compassionate expression had calmed her. Now she shuddered at the thought that someone might have been listening in, hearing everything she said and reading everything she typed into her computer.
Dr. Lightfoot had said, “You can’t always stop yourself from losing it, but you’re a very logical person. In some situations, recognizing what’s happening and analyzing the situation may help you maintain control.”
Dr. Lightfoot had been right. Logical analysis helped.
Now Diana tried to build a map in her mind of the mazelike path they’d followed as Jake guided her through the dark corridors that snaked through the basement of the old mill. As he led her through yet another passageway and up a stairway, she visualized the schematic she’d make to replicate this place in OtherWorld. In it, she envisioned two yellow dots—her own and Jake’s—climbing the stairs. She’d feel calmer still if she knew where other yellow dots were lurking in the complex.
They emerged onto a landing. Jake held open a door to a stairwell so Diana could continue up. He kept a firm grip on her arm. After two flights, the stairs ended at an open metal door. She stepped through into a vast space, an entire floor of the mill building.
Jake closed the door and bolted it shut. Then he punched some numbers into a keypad mounted on the wall. A light on it began to blink yellow, and she heard a metallic click as the door locked. The light turned to a steady red. The door at the opposite end of the floor was closed, its keypad light red too.
She was locked in. Diana touched her jacket pockets. The GPS was in one, the cell phone in the other. Either of them would be able to pinpoint her location.
“What have you got in there?” Jake asked.
Diana reached into one of the pockets and pulled out her pills. She offered the container to Jake. He read the prescription label. “I didn’t know you still needed these.” He handed it back to her.
“So now you do.” She shook some pills out into her palm. Jake watched as she placed one on the back of her tongue and swallowed. “Not everyone just bounces back the way you did.”
“I . . .” He looked back at her, tense and tentative. Off balance. He watched as Diana poured the remaining pills back into the container and closed the lid. Then he seemed to shake himself out of it. Maybe she had some advantage—one that she had yet to understand.
Diana tried to focus on the space around her. Pipes and conduits crisscrossed overhead. The center of the floor was stacked with hulking pieces of rusted machinery along with a pile of defunct sinks and toilets.
The outside wall was a massive bank of multipaned windows. From the sound of rushing water, she wondered if she was near where she’d seen the cascade of water over the dam alongside the building. Rain pattered on the roof and rivulets dripped down the windows.
The far corner of the loft had been screened off with sheets of wallboard set into hinged wooden frames. Jake dropped her arm and Diana approached the sheltered area. She came to a halt when she saw what was beyond the wallboard screens. There was her four-poster Shaker-style bed, the one she and Daniel had bought together. It was made up with her own flowered sheets and white down comforter. In the high-ceilinged space, the bed looked like a piece of doll furniture. Next to it, on her grandmother’s bedside table with its serpentine carved legs, was a vase containing a lavish burst of red roses. Jake tossed her backpack on the bed.
She stood there, stunned and shaking with mute fury. Jake had lured her out, invaded her home, and moved the furniture that he knew meant the most to her. She approached an unfinished bookcase that wasn’t hers. The clothes neatly folded on its shelves were.
“Just because my things are here doesn’t make it home,” she said.
That’s when she noticed a metal rack, standing in the corner. An empty plastic pouch hung from it, upside down. She went over to it and lifted the plastic tubing attached to the pouch. A spicy licorice smell filled her head and she remembered the tender spot on the back of Ashley’s hand.
“What did you do to her?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Four days of nothing?”
“Just kept her quiet. Even you admit that’s an improvement.”
He could be such a smug bastard. “Why?”
“It was”—there was a pause, like Jake was carefully picking the word—“a mistake. A complication I didn’t anticipate.”
“She’s not a complication? She’s my sister.”
“I know, I know. But I thought . . . I didn’t realize . . . she looked just like—”
“Me.” Diana finished the thought. She closed her eyes and let the realization sink in. This was her fault. She’d known that if she let her guard down, something terrible would happen. And then, without thinking, she’d dressed Ashley up as Nadia and launched her into a world that she knew was too dangerous to set foot in.
“Why can’t she remember anything?” Diana asked.
“Rohypnol. It’s a sedative that prevents memories from forming.”
“I know what it is. You just happened to have it on you? Were you going to use that on me if I’d been there and didn’t toddle along with you?”
He didn’t bother to reply, and in his silence, the enormity of what he’d done sank in. “You kept my sister unconscious for four days?”
“I didn’t want to hurt her, but it took me a while to figure out a way to get her home.”
The hospital release forms.
That explained the odd assortment of tests that never would have been run, the prescription with Pam’s signature forged on it.
“So Pam doesn’t have anything to do with this, does she?” Diana asked.
Jake dismissed the question with a pitying look.
Diana shivered. It had been such a practical solution, warehousing a human being until Jake had figured out how to throw her back. She scanned the walls and ceiling. Mounted in the corner she found what she was looking for, a pinpoint of red light. She waved at it.
“So where’s Big Brother?” she asked.
“Exactly. That’s why you’re here,” Jake said.