Sleep Tight (35 page)

This life is an illusion, he thought, mentally quoting Graham Morris. The words often gave him comfort in times like these.

The girl. He had to deal with the girl. He had to do something with her while he went to work. Normally, spending the day among acres of roses brought him comfort. How could it today if he spent all the time worrying about her!

Last night he'd left her tied to the bed, her mouth covered with tape in case she woke up and decided to start screaming. He could leave her there. Not even look in the room. He could leave for work and forget about her for eight hours.

It all seemed so hard. It all suddenly seemed stupid. That was perhaps his biggest fault—allowing an idea to carry him away so that he jumped into new situations without giving them enough thought.

Wearily, he made his way to the bedroom.

She was awake. Her eyes were open, and she was watching him. Even though she was wearing his sister's clothes, she was just a girl.

There was nothing special about her.

She reads Proust. How many people do you know who read Proust?

None.

True, but that didn't mean she understood it. Lots of people read books and listened to music they didn't understand or care to understand. It didn't mean she could spend hours discussing Proust.

You haven't given her a chance.

She'd disappointed him, just like the others.

What was he going to do with her?

When he was little, he'd read a book about a dog, and suddenly he wanted one. His sister took him to a kennel, where they bought a mutt. He'd wanted a real dog like a collie or Labrador retriever, but Jo insisted on getting one from the pound. "To save him from being put to sleep," she'd explained. She'd spent her life caring for strays of all kinds, so he couldn't speak against the very thing that defined who she was.

The dog was an ugly, pathetic thing, with big brown eyes and soft hair, and the most irritatingly timid nature. If Mason as much as frowned, it would tuck its tail between its legs and piddle all over the floor.

Mason knew nothing about dogs except what he'd learned from television, books, and movies. It turned out that those dogs—the kind with leading roles on screen—were lies. He'd expected the mutt to be smarter, to be able to communicate with him and understand everything he said. At the very least, it should have been able to entertain itself.

The dog was an annoyance. A horrible, time-consuming annoyance. It had to be taken outside when it wasn't convenient, and it chewed up the furniture. Worse, it chewed on Mason's books.

It constantly wanted to play. It constantly wanted attention, and didn't like to be left alone even for ten minutes. It was a pathetic, useless creature that took and took and took, and never gave anything back except for ruined books and stained carpet.

Jo adored the pathetic creature, the way she seemed to adore all pathetic creatures. "We're all made by God," she'd say, smiling. She would toss sticks to it and pet it, talking to it in her soft, quiet voice. When she did so, the dog would actually calm down and mind, at least a little.

"Isn't he wonderful?" she'd sometimes say. "Isn't he adorable?"

The more Jo liked it, the more Mason hated it. Stupid dog. Stupid, worthless dog. Eating and shitting, eating and shitting.

Mason tried to lose it. He took it miles from home. Then, when it wasn't looking, Mason ran away. But the dog—Seymour was its name—found its way home. Which meant it wasn't as stupid as Mason thought. But that was just instinct, Mason had argued with himself when the dog had arrived panting and happy on the doorstep. Turtles had instinct. Salmon had instinct. Worms had instinct.

The girl on the bed was making Mason feel the way he'd felt toward Seymour. She was an irritant that was creeping under his skin. Someone who'd lured him with promises of being more than she was. She'd tricked him into thinking she was the prize, that once he found her, his life would be complete and the happiness that had eluded him for so long would be within his grasp.

But nothing had changed. Right now he was sad. It was an old, familiar sadness that was like a smothering blanket.

He would feed her and put her away for the day. And later he would think about what to do.

When he got so sick of the dog that he couldn't stand it anymore, Mason—in order to save his sanity and his place in the household—was forced to take drastic measures he hadn't wanted to take. But it had been Seymour's fault. If Seymour had lived up to his expectations, nothing would have happened.

One day Seymour disappeared. "Up and disappeared," the locals would have said. But he and Jo weren't locals; they'd moved in when an uncle left Jo the house in his will, plus enough money to live on for several years. Mason and Jo had moved there from Louisiana, driving all the way in an old station wagon packed with their belongings. "A new beginning," Jo had called it.

But the people in the nearby town had never really let them in. Mason hadn't cared. "They can all go to hell," he'd told Jo. She'd been hurt by their rejection. Fifteen years later she gave up and decided it was time to go. When she left, only a handful of neighbors stopped to tell her good-bye.

Mason had stayed. He had his roses, and his roses were a part of him. He couldn't leave.

When Seymour vanished, he and Jo searched the area surrounding the sprawling farmhouse. They checked the outbuildings and the barn. They looked along the pond and stream that ran through the property. Then they got in the car and drove, going door to door, asking if anyone had seen a cute little brown dog.

No one had.

"He's gone," Mason told Jo after a week had passed.

"Where did he go?" she asked, sobbing in her handkerchief. "Why did he want to leave us?"

"Maybe he followed some other dogs," Mason suggested. "Or maybe he followed a car down the road. You know how he was, always chasing anything that moved."

Mason and Jo had clung together that evening, crying in the darkness. "Don't feel too sad about him," Mason had said. "He was faithless. He was a faithless mongrel."

With the dog gone, a heavy burden lifted from Mason.

He never forgot the lesson he'd learned from Seymour. Life was full of disappointments, and nothing was what it looked like from the outside.

He let the girl named Gillian go to the bathroom; then he made her walk downstairs. He shoved her along in front of him, down the aged wooden steps into the stone basement with its dirt floor. The smell of dampness and earth hit him, and again he thought of Seymour.

The bare lightbulbs that lit the way from room to room were dim.

They wound along to finally come to the door with the chipped green paint. He reached around the girl, opened it, and then gave her a push.

Gillian stumbled forward, her heart hammering. The room was no wider than six feet across, each side lined with wooden shelves. On one of the shelves was a thin gray mattress and pillow. Attached to the shelf supports were handcuffs. In the back of the room, lying horizontally on the ground like a coffin, was a mustard-colored refrigerator. Dangling above her head, covered with cobwebs, was a bare, low-watt lightbulb.

He spun her around and yanked the tape from her mouth.

She didn't respond to the pain. "Mason, please, let's talk. I want to talk to you—" When she talked to him, he changed.

"I'm going to work," he said.

He pulled a wrapped sandwich out of his sweatshirt pocket and put it on the mattress. Out of his other pocket came a jar of water. He put that next to the sandwich. "If you scream, nobody will hear you. But I don't want you to scream. If I come home and hear you screaming, I'll have to discipline you. I'll have to hurt you. If you're bad, you'll be punished. If you're good, you'll be rewarded."

"Mason, please—"

He turned and left, shutting the door behind him. She heard the jingle of metal as he locked the lock, then muffled footsteps as he walked away. A minute later the light above her head went out, plunging her into darkness.

Trying to keep her fear tamped down, she felt her way to the door and ran her hands across the rough wood. There was no handle on the inside. She pushed, then threw her weight against it. Solid, with no movement. She threw herself at it again and again until her shoulder ached.

She expected her eyes to adjust to the dark, expected the room to eventually lighten, but that didn't happen. It remained as dark as it had been when Mason turned off the light.

She thought about prisoners who'd been secluded in dark holes for months, sometimes years. If they hadn't been crazy to begin with, they were when they got out.

He was coming back, she told herself. He'd just put her down there while he was at work. Yet she couldn't keep from wondering, What if he never returns?—either intentionally or unintentionally. He could be in a car wreck. He could be killed. Nobody would know where she was.

Every instinct told her to scream as loudly as she could.

What if he hasn't really left?

What if he's upstairs, listening, waiting to see if you've disobeyed?

What if he's standing right on the other side of the door?

She rapped lightly on the door. "Mason?" she whispered. "Are you out there?" She paused, listening for an answer.

Silence.

Left alone in the dark with just her thoughts, she felt fear begin to grow.

He was different this morning.

He didn't like me this morning.

Even though he was a kidnapper and a killer, he seemed to be in awe of women in his own weird, twisted way. But this morning he'd been all business, hardly looking at her. She'd sensed disappointment in him. What had she done wrong? What had set him off?

Was he riding the downside of a manic episode? Now that the thrill of the capture was over, had the high evaporated, leaving him deflated and depressed?

She crossed her arms at her waist and pressed them to her empty stomach. It hurt. Her stomach hurt. She remembered the sandwich he'd dropped on the bed, along with the jar of water.

She couldn't inspect it with her eyes, couldn't examine it for bugs or anything else he may have decided to put inside. Even if she could see, she wouldn't be able to tell if he'd laced it with anything from rat poison to some kind of drug that would knock her out for the rest of the day.

Maybe that would be a good idea.

No, she decided, thinking of lying down on the filthy mattress, virtually unconscious for hours while roaches nibbled away at her. No, she couldn't make herself eat the sandwich or drink the water.

How much time had passed?

Two hours?

Five minutes?

Impossible to tell.

She had to focus her mind on something solid. Think about getting out. Think about what she would say to Mason when he returned to convince him never to put her here again. Think about not doing anything wrong. Think about being good.

But thoughts of Mason's return increased her anxiety and made her more aware of the slow passing of time. She had to dwell on something else, had to think of something nice.

A picnic in the park.

Fried chicken.

No, can't think about food.

Still standing, she leaned her back against the door and closed her eyes. "Swimming," she whispered to herself. She'd always loved to swim. When she was in high school, she used to force the air from her lungs. Airless, her body lost all buoyancy and she would let herself sink to the bottom of die deep end. She would he there, looking up at the surface from her skewed perspective. When her lungs could wait no longer for air, she'd fold herself, then push against the pool bottom, shooting up to the surface, flying into the sparkling light, feeling exhilarated because she'd flirted with death.

"What are you doing?" Mary would shout in a frantic voice from the edge of the pool.

"Pretending to be dead."

"Don't scare me like that! I was ready to dive in and pull you out!"

Mary rescued people. It was what she did.

Gillian used to be brave. She used to be tough. She used to be scared of nothing. But that was all a facade. A teenage facade.

Fear is a terrible thing. An awful, horrible thing.

Maybe the most terrible, awful, horrible thing. It made you rearrange yourself, made you willing to compromise all principles. Made you desperately want to please a sick man.

Mary pulled up in front of Gavin Hitchcock's house, turned off the ignition, and got out of the car. After Gillian's abduction and Holly's statement, Gavin's confession had been tossed out and he'd been released on bail, the rape charge still standing. Now Mary was after reassurance and information. Sometimes killers worked in pairs, and she needed to be absolutely certain Gavin wasn't in some way connected to the recent murders—and possibly to her sister's abduction.

He answered the door dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, his hair clipped close to his head, his face clean-shaved, his eyes dark-rimmed and hostile. Evidence of his overdose clung to him. He was pale and thin, and he looked as if he'd dropped thirty pounds since the day Mary had seen him at the auto repair shop.