Pursuit (17 page)

C
heryl felt vibrations
from below. Rattling, whirling, then smooth. The street. She must be in a car. If she were dreaming, she would like for it to be over.

She could think only of a suffocating rag being clamped over her mouth. A threatening voice.

Her shoulder hit hard as the car braked. Something in her mouth couldn't be spit out. Stay strong. Had Billie been with her when she felt woozy and went to sleep?

Soon after they were hooded, she remembered falling. Then a long trek through damp weeds, the man's voice sparked with anger. Heavy rain fell, and the occasional snap of a rope around her neck, and then the clumsy pushing and groping to get into a vehicle. Billie may or may not have been with her when they got in the car.

It felt as if she were lying on her side for hours, her hands and feet numb from being bound. She sensed a cloth covering her head, wet from the rain and ripe with the scent of laundry soap.

The ride got smoother, the engine noise a bit louder. What did the man want? What would he do to her? Cars
passed to the side of her. A freeway? She couldn't see. She willed herself to fade away, to sleep.

They jolted to a stop. “Pull your legs toward me.” The same voice.

A hand grasped her ankle and pulled hard, and then fumbled and tugged at her waist. She felt herself falling onto damp, clean grass, sweet and safe.

Once again the voice, “Roll onto your side, pull your knees up to your chest, then straighten up.”

She complied the best she knew how. Her head felt stuffed, the man's legs against her back, his searching hands clasped across her breasts and armpits. A sharp tug, and then she was standing. She thought owls squawked through what might be a wooded area.

Once again the rope looped around her neck. In the near distance, water lapped against a shore. They trudged up a stone path.

“Two steps up.”

Her right foot searched out the first step. After a slight stumble, the warmth of a room. Beyond the scent of the hood, she smelled the remains of a wood fire and maybe bacon. Then the man's rough grip on her arm.

“Steps going down. If you fall”—laughter—“you're dead.”

Her foot thumped on a hollow wood step. She continued down until the air cooled, and she landed on a hard, rough floor. Then the screech of a door opening. A different smell. An artificial floral scent. And a slight hum, like a fan. Once again the man's hands caressed her arms. She felt him too near, tugging on the ropes around her wrists. A knife cut through her restraints.

“Stay,” he ordered. “Do not move.” He continued to
work her bindings. “When you hear the door close, you can take off your hood. Not until, understand?”

Cheryl nodded.

The heavy door slammed. Cheryl yanked off the hood and pulled the cloth from her mouth. “Billie, where are you?” Her voice trailed off.

Cheryl rubbed at her wrists, looking around the eight-by-ten-foot room lit by a bulb hanging in a wire cage over the door. Above the bulb, an electric fan had been installed behind a rectangular grate. No windows. Pushed against one wall, a cot with blanket, wrinkled pink sheet, and thin mattress. In one corner, a commode. In the opposite corner, a small refrigerator. Next to that, a faucet jutted out from the wall with a circular floor drain below. Images of children dancing through a fantasy woods papered the walls, all set off with a ceiling painted black.

C
huck and Bink
played in the woods next to the Tucker “spread.” Father figure Tuck liked calling the foster home a spread. He said it harkened back to the old days when ranches covered miles and people were limited to their acreage only by how far they could see.

Tucker's double-wide mobile home sat cockeyed on concrete blocks. Three abandoned cars were parked next to a junked motor home along with a two-wheeled truck, all in mixed stages of disrepair. Most of the vehicles sported bullet holes in their windshields from the responsible Mr. Tucker's target practice. A bent wire fence contained a dozen chickens and a hutch for rabbits. A second, temporary corrugated-steel building housed the boys. The girls occupied a run-down cabin.

“You and Bink stay close. Did you do your chores? Your homework? Brush your teeth?”

He recalled infuriating Tuck by answering only with a quick nod.

“I will teach you a passel of manners, little smart-ass. You and your asshole buddy Bink Boy will toe the line, got it?”

Chuck answered with an “Uh-huh” grunt.

Among the other six kids at the foster home, two were girls: one fourteen, the other seventeen. Chuck and Binky called them Boots and Saddle. Boots had big feet and was awkward, but she was sweet and compliant. Saddle was built tall for a seventeen-year-old. She had a funny way of speaking—always a little too knowledgeable about almost any subject.

She wasn't fat but carried a protruding stomach and a swayed back; hence the name Saddle. Chuck, on many a night, snuck around to the windows of the girls' hut to peek. One night on the way to his private show, he turned the corner of the house to see Mr. Tucker spanking the monkey while bent over a gap in the window blind. He laughed. Tuck turned, monkey in hand, as Chuck ran.

He paid dearly for that little indiscretion. Tucker escorted him into the woods the following day, where he was forced to drop his pants. While bent over a fallen tree, he was beaten with a switch until he wept. Months later, he took out his revenge not on Mr. Tucker but on Saddle. She mocked him and his palsied gait. It was easy for him to transfer his anger. She paraded around the bottle-strewn yard swinging her right leg stiffly in front of her left. “I'm midget Charlie, and I have a mighty leg that I throw about when I want to gain sympathy! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”

The rest of the kids laughed and pointed. Chuck thought she looked ridiculous.

On her eighteenth birthday, she announced her righteous departure. “I'll see you jokes—I mean
folks
—down the road. I love you all and wish you good fortune. I'll miss you, I mean it. I'll miss the heck out of you. Everyone except Creepo Charlie.”

“Creepo Charlie! Creepo Charlie!” the kids chanted.

His face reddened while the rest of the kids, including Bink, kept up their chant.

Saddle saved pennies from her meager allowance and had enough to buy a trashed bicycle from Mr. Tucker. Her plan was to ride the bike south through the Ozarks into Arkansas and on to Little Rock to complete her emancipation.

The kids gathered to see her off. All except Chuck, who, after lunch, had snuck off into the woods. Mr. Tucker stood waving as one of his moneymakers pedaled off.

Chuck waited a mile from the spread in a shrub-filled area next to the country road. When he spotted her, he felt a thrill, seeing her pumping hard down the slight incline. Her hair lay straight against the wind. A small pack with straps flying bobbed on her crooked back. The long, heavy fishing pole he'd stolen from the work shed jammed easily into the rear wheel spokes as she passed. Saddle went flying over the handlebars. She lay looking like an
S
curve groaning in the middle of the asphalt road.

When he envisioned this little adventure, Chuck wasn't sure what he wanted to do with her. But from the moment of her first profane retort to him while sprawled on the two-lane blacktop, it all became admirably clear.

Years later, when he built the “spa,” as he liked to call it, in the corner of the basement, he dedicated it to Saddle. “A wonderful ride.”

He lined one side of the stone cellar with vertical two-by-fours sixteen to twenty inches apart, filling the spaces with heavy insulation; then he did the same to the adjacent wall. The small basement window, hidden in a similar
treatment. He covered the interior with thin plywood instead of the soft wallboard. It was not quite a square. In one corner, he tapped into the septic line and installed a toilet. An overhead water line strapped to the ceiling joist was easily diverted inside the wall down to the toilet and a faucet. He ran an extension cord through the wooden studs to join the refrigerator with the house circuit. An electric fan and energy-saving lightbulb with the switches on the outside of the room completed his private little spa.

These guest quarters had served him well in a number of trials over the previous few years.

A
dog barking
in the distance awakened Julie. She had drifted off, and her back and neck hurt from the awkward position in which she'd fallen asleep. The illuminated dial on the clock read four thirty in the morning. Two hours. She'd slept too long; it felt disloyal. Where was Cheryl? She would not allow herself to think of the possibilities; the odds of Cheryl being harmed. She knew the pinch that Captain Walker was in—local police had jurisdiction—but, still, she'd wasted so much time before convincing her boss to let her search the woods. She might even have saved Billie if she'd gotten there sooner.

Having a man around the house felt different. Todd had been adamant about staying. He was probably right. The abductor was coming out of nowhere. Targeting Cheryl didn't make sense.

Wandering around the bedroom, she stopped at each passing of the window to look out as if the answer would be hidden among the trees and hills along her country road. She ran her hand along the rough edge of the windowsill. The weathered house held bittersweet memories.
The birth of her daughter, a failed marriage, the deaths of her parents.

She stood at the sink in the kitchen, waiting for her coffee to brew. She thought about Billie. How in the world had she gotten involved? Surely by accident; wrong place, wrong time.

“How about a cup of joe?” Todd had rolled off the couch, slipped on his trousers, and stood in the kitchen doorway.

“Sorry to wake you. Can't rest, can't get this craziness out of my head. You don't have to be here. You know that, right?”

“I know. I've been lying there thinking how strange this is, starting with your being sequestered in the basement at work and then the nutty business with the truck.” Todd got his coffee and sat at the kitchen table. “And your interviews with the known relatives of the missing girls.”

“They're long shots to be involved, but this all has to be connected. Has to.”

Julie sat across from him, taking slow sips of coffee.

“The lady Preston. What's her name? Beverly?”

Julie nodded. “She's different but harmless.”

“I didn't meet the other guy you told me about.”

“Preacher. Garthwait. A touch on the defensive but okay. The executive at the factory whose niece had gone missing, Drew, got upset when I spoke to him. Felt guilty about his not calling the cops and seemed apologetic. That low-life bastard.”

“Who, the factory guy?”

“No, the bastard who took Cheryl and Billie.” Julie stood to get more coffee, wanting to crush her cup. “It's about me, isn't it?”

“What do you mean?”

“He wants me, right? Why? He wants me to know he's coming for me or he's going to bargain with me?”