Remember to Forget (2 page)

The riverbank, soft beneath her bare feet. Cool water lapping at her toes. And overhead, towering trees that whispered in the breeze, calling her to step deeper into the river’s flow. She lowered her eyelids to half-mast, letting herself drift.

Behind her eyelids, a moon like the one that hung over New York tonight cast a yellow glow over the countryside. Except the moon of her imagination was far, far from the city. Where, she didn’t know. It only mattered that it was far away from where she was now.

Opening her eyes, she reoriented herself to the road. But the scene remained, warming her from the inside out—in a way that had nothing to do with the sticky summer heat.

She tried to go deeper into the daydream, but ahead, a traffic light turned from green to amber. Hers was the only vehicle in the intersection. She could run the light and probably get away with it. Instead she tapped the brakes and prepared to stop. The light meant she could spend another ninety seconds in her tranquil fantasy world.

She could truthfully tell her boyfriend it was just the traffic. No help for that. He couldn’t blame her. She rehearsed her excuse and touched
the paper bag once more to reassure herself that her cargo was safe.

Closing her eyes again, she counted out the seconds before the light would turn green and returned to the riverbank in her mind.

The cool water, lapping at her
—

Boom-boom-boom!
A series of sharp thuds vibrated the hood of the car. Hot air and acrid exhaust fumes rushed over her, carrying with them the city’s distinctive music of distant sirens and taxi horns.

Maggie jerked to attention. A blurry image loomed in her driver’s side window. A man dressed in gray sweats . . . a hooded jacket over his head. A fleece-clad knee held her driver’s door open.

He pounded again—louder—on the roof of her car. “Get out! Get out of the car!” He spit the words like machine-gun fire.

Heart racing, Maggie tried to yank the door shut on his knee. But his leg pried it open wider. Fingers of steel reached through the opening and clamped around her arm, wrenching her sideways from the seat.

She flailed at the steering wheel, trying in vain to sound the horn. Would anyone pay attention, even if she could? The street was deserted.

“Get out of the car!” the man screamed again, his voice as shrill as a woman’s.

She jerked her head from side to side, trying to make things come into focus in the moonlight. Then she saw his hand. His left hand was hidden inside the wide center pouch of his jacket. The shape of a blunt object was outlined against the fabric. A gun?

Panic clawed at her throat. “What do you want?”

“Shut up and get out of the car!”

Her eyes fell on the brown bag beside her. If she went home without the precious Jack Daniel’s . . . She shuddered, knowing that whatever this guy might do to her couldn’t be much worse than what she’d have coming at home.

She checked her rearview mirror. Traffic whizzed by on the freeway in the distance, but no other vehicles were stopped at the light. Could
this guy be bluffing about having a weapon? She wasn’t about to get out of the car in this part of the city in the middle of the night.

When the light turned green, another car eased to a stop at the intersection on her left. The man in the hood opened her door wider. He hissed a curse and wedged himself through the opening. In one smooth motion, he undid her seat belt and, with a meaty hip, shoved her across into the passenger seat. The momentum left her sprawled between the seat and the floor.

He slammed the door and gunned the engine. The car lurched through the intersection.

Maggie cowered from her precarious half-prone perch on the edge of the seat, clawing at the dashboard to regain her balance. “What do you wa—”

“Shut up, I said!” He raised a sharp elbow and used it like a weapon.

She dodged his aim with a practiced bob and clung to the car door. The whiskey bottle dug into the small of her back. “Here.” She reached behind her. “Take this. It’s the good stuff. Just, please . . . let me go.”

The man glared at her, meeting her eyes for the first time. He snorted, then trained a laser stare on the road as if he wouldn’t dignify the likes of her with a response.

She dug in the pocket of her khaki slacks and took out the change from the fifty-dollar bill Kevin had given her for the liquor store. “Here.” She thrust the money at him.

“Keep your money,” he barked. “And keep your mouth shut.”

Cowed, she returned the cash to her pocket and sat in silence beside him. She gripped the sides of her seat, bouncing at every bump in the road, her mind accelerating to match the engine as the car flew over the city streets. If booze and cash didn’t interest him, she hoped the use of her car—Kevin’s car—was the only thing he was after.

As they reached the end of Lafayette, the traffic picked up a little with early-morning commuters. With one glance in the rearview mirror,
the man merged into the flow of vehicles.

Maggie was in unfamiliar territory now. No matter what happened from this point on, it was a safe bet she wasn’t going to be delivering anything to Kevin. At least not anytime soon. And maybe never. She stared at the digital clock on the dashboard, watching the numbers flick forward. They’d driven at least half an hour in the opposite direction from the apartment. Kevin would be pacing the foyer and cursing her by now.

She eyed her captor before she angled her body back to attempt a glimpse at the gas gauge. Even so, her view was skewed. But she was pretty certain there wasn’t enough gas in the Civic to get her back home.

What would this guy do if the car ran out of gas? A flash of memory took her back to another day on another highway. Kevin had been late for a job interview—and he’d called her at the office and coerced her into picking him up and driving him to the interview. The car had run out of gas, fueling a rage in Kevin like she’d never seen before. In the end he didn’t get the job and pinned the blame on her for not filling up the tank. It was the first time his verbal lashings had threatened to turn physical.

Now her mouth twisted at the irony of finding herself a literal captive to this stranger when, in truth, she’d lived as a virtual hostage to Kevin Bryson for almost two years.

If she felt any fear, it was in imagining Kevin’s accusations when she told him about her abduction.

Chapter Two

H
alf an hour later, Maggie’s captor slowed the car. She stiffened in the passenger seat, her eyes darting from the road to the man’s face, still partially obscured by the fleece hood. Only his sharp nose and a scraggly brown goatee stuck out enough to give her anything to identify him by in a police lineup.

His pale, slender fingers tapped an impatient staccato on the steering wheel, and his neck and shoulders twitched as though the confines of the hooded sweatshirt irritated him beyond his tolerance.

As they crossed an overpass, she could make out a thin line of pink between the buildings on the eastern horizon. She panned the landscape, trying to get her bearings. It would be dawn soon. Headlights flickered ahead at intervals from the highway. If only she could attract someone’s attention . . .

The man punched the accelerator and merged onto I-287.

Kevin would be livid by now. She couldn’t even guess how he’d react when she told him what had happened.

Watching her captor in the edge of her vision, she supposed she should be more frightened. After all, she had just been kidnapped by a man who most likely had a gun. At least he kept fingering the bulky object in his pocket, as if preoccupied with making sure it was still there.

No doubt her abductor intended to use the gun on her. A quiver of some strange emotion—was it relief?—skittered down her spine. She didn’t know what to make of her odd calm.

If she felt any fear, it was in imagining Kevin’s accusations when she told him about her abduction.

He would never believe her. But maybe when he found out the truth, he’d finally see the value in letting her have a cell phone.

But as the road signs sailed past outside her window, her genuine fear returned and escalated. They were headed out of the city. The Civic ate up the expressway at a speed faster than she’d ever driven. In a few minutes they were crossing the Hudson, driving on the Tappan Zee Bridge. Soon after they got off the bridge, she saw a sign for Saddle River. She’d only been to Jersey once, but she was pretty sure they were now well over an hour from the apartment she shared with Kevin.

Her abductor seemed to relax a little. He pushed the hood back off his forehead to reveal stringy blond hair. As if sensing her perception, he glanced over, then quickly into the rearview mirror. Tapping the brakes, he pulled onto the shoulder of the thruway. They bumped along for a full minute with the rumble strips grinding and buzzing beneath the tires. Finally, still hugging the shoulder, he veered onto an off-ramp and brought the car to a complete stop. He made no effort to exit the car but leaned over the steering wheel and peered into the dusky light at the other traffic on the knot of intersecting roads.

Maggie studied him . . . the way his steely gray eyes darted in every direction. Was he watching for a ride, waiting for someone to pick him up? But when his gaze came to rest on her again, her heart stuttered. She edged toward her door and crossed her arms over her midsection.

Her captor’s eyes seemed to pierce her thoughts. Her stomach knotted, and a bitter taste rose in the back of her throat. She had feared pain in the past, but she’d never been afraid to die. In fact, on another night not so long ago she had prayed for death. Prayed to a God she wasn’t even sure existed. It shamed her to think of it now, but at the time, she’d only wanted to escape the agony Kevin had inflicted.

It hadn’t been physical in nature—not that time anyway.

No, that night,
words
were his weapon of choice. And they had inflicted far deeper wounds than his fists would in the months that followed. She was still nursing those wounds. And unlike bruises that eventually faded and scabs that fell away, she suspected those words would leave her with scars that might never heal.

Again she turned to the stranger behind the wheel. He stared straight ahead, waiting for something.
For what
? she wondered.

Then, swiveling abruptly in his seat, he drilled his gaze through her and ordered, “Get out.”

“But there’s—”

“Get. Out.
Now
.” He rationed the words through clenched teeth, as if every syllable were in danger of extinction.

She moved her hand to the door handle, purposely fumbling with the lock. Stalling. She couldn’t give up this car. Kevin would kill her for sure.

A sudden movement to her left jolted her as her captor withdrew something from the pouch of his sweatshirt. The flash of metal revealed a small handgun.

He leveled it at her. The violent shaking of his hands assured her it was loaded. But it told her something else: this man wasn’t accustomed
to doing things like this. Either that, or he was high on something.

“I said get out. Get out, or you are one dead chick.” His face showed he meant it.

She opened the door and scrambled out. Then she remembered Kevin’s bottle. If she had the whiskey, at least she could prove to Kevin that she’d been where she was supposed to be—where he’d told her to go.

She grabbed the Civic’s door handle, but a sudden
screak
of tires caused her to let loose of the door handle as if it were alive with high voltage. The car lurched forward, pelting her with a spray of fine gravel.

The impact sent Maggie tumbling backward off the road’s narrowing shoulder. She clutched at a fistful of weeds on the way down, but it barely broke her fall. She landed with a thud in a spongy drainage ditch.

Rubbing her eyes, she waited for the dizziness to subside. When she’d regained her bearings, she tied a loose shoestring and scrambled up the steep incline back onto the roadway. She swiped in vain at a grass stain on her white blouse and dusted the sand from her khakis. Brushing her hands together, she saw that her palms were imprinted with specks of sand and asphalt. They stung as if they’d been burned.