Taken (11 page)

“Your baby is safe and sound,” Gregg said. “See? She's right here. Nothing bad is going to happen to her, right, Steph?” I nodded. “And you haven't slept a wink all week. Come on. Up we go.”

My mom wrapped her arms around his neck, and he helped her get up. He slipped an arm around her waist. As I watched them, I understood for the first time what my mom saw in him. Okay, so he wasn't my dad. But he wasn't that bad. And he sure seemed to care about her.

“I'm going to stay down here for a while and watch tv,” I said.

Neither of them argued with me.

The house was quiet by the time I finally shut off the tv and climbed the stairs to my room. When I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, there were clothes all over the floor—Gregg's clothes. Including—yuck!—his underwear. Instantly I felt the same old revulsion that I'd had for him before. My dad never left his clothes lying all over the floor for other people to pick up. But Gregg was like a spoiled teenager, and my mom never seemed to mind. Well, I wasn't going to pick up his disgusting clothes. I hadn't changed that much. Instead I kicked them aside.

Then I remembered how I had felt when I was out there alone in the woods. I remembered how overjoyed I had been when my mom had finally been allowed to see me at the police station—and how sensitive Gregg had been to me and how attentive he'd been to my mom. She must have gone through hell the whole time I was missing, and Gregg was the one who had been with her the whole time, looking after her, comforting her. I bent down and gingerly picked up his jeans and underwear—I wished I had rubber gloves on—and put them in the hamper. Then I picked up his socks—they were white but the soles were black, as if he'd been walking around in his sock feet outside—and his shirt. I dumped them in the hamper too. I was closing the hamper lid when I noticed a mark—a sweat stain?—on the inside of the shirt collar. I picked up the shirt again and looked at it. I touched the mark. What
was
that? Something disgusting, no doubt.

Sunlight was streaming into my room when I opened my eyes the next morning. I glanced at my clock radio. Wait a minute. It wasn't morning at all. It was afternoon.

I heard a shriek from outside.

I got out of bed and hopped over to the window. My mom and Gregg were outside in the driveway washing Gregg's truck. My mom's T-shirt was soaked through. Gregg must have turned the hose on her. That's what that shriek was all about. Now he was grinning at her breasts. I wanted to like him. I wanted to feel the same way about him as I had felt when I was lost and afraid. But he made it so hard.

I got dressed and went outside. Gregg and my mom were wrestling over the hose like a couple of kids. My mom got the hose away from him and sprayed him the way he had sprayed her. He laughed and peeled off his T-shirt. Then he grabbed her and hugged her. She shrieked again. Mrs. Pendergast across the street looked at the two of them and shook her head. Maybe she did it because she was old and disapproved of everything. But I like to think she did it because she thought Gregg was as juvenile as I did. I turned to go back inside. That's when I got a good look at Gregg from behind. I stopped and stared at him.

“Stephanie,” Mom said, finally noticing me. She looked refreshed and happy. “We thought you were going to sleep around the clock.”

I thought about the night I had been taken. I thought about where everyone was.

“Stephanie?”

I jumped when someone touched my shoulder. It was my mom.

“Are you okay?” she said.

I nodded.

“Are you hungry? Do you want me to make you something to eat?”

“I'm good, Mom. I—I think I'm going to take a bath.”

“You took such a long shower last night that we ran out of hot water,” Gregg said.

“If we have to run out of hot water everyday for the rest of our lives because Stephanie wants to take long showers, that's okay with me,” my mom said. She gave me a huge bear hug.

“Mom! You're soaking wet!”

“And you're going to be soaking wet in a few minutes too.” She pointed the hose at me. I yelped and hobbled inside. I went straight upstairs to the bathroom. I tore the lid off the laundry hamper. It was empty.

The shirt was gone.

FIFTEEN

I
made my way down to the basement. It was a lot harder going downstairs on crutches than it was going up. My mom must have done the laundry first thing in the morning. Both the washing machine and the dryer were empty, and the laundry basket was heaped with clean and carefully folded clothes. I pawed through it until I found Gregg's shirt. I opened it and looked at the collar. It was as clean as new. There was no trace of the mark I had seen the night before.

I was trying to decide what to do when I heard footsteps on the basement stairs. I threw the shirt onto the top of the hamper just as Gregg appeared.

He looked surprised to see me.

“What are you doing down here, Steph?” he said. “I thought you were taking a bath.”

“I…I came down to get some clean clothes.”

His eyes went to the hamper. Was it just my imagination or was he wondering why his shirt wasn't neatly folded like everything else?

“You should have tons of clean clothes in your room,” he said. “Did you look?”

I shook my head.

“I did the laundry a couple of days after you disappeared,” he said.

“
You
did the laundry?” Gregg never did the laundry. He always dumped his stuff in the bathroom hamper and left it to Mom, who sometimes left it to me. I nearly gagged every time I had to touch a pair of his underwear.

“I know how to do laundry,” he said. “I've been on my own for a long time. Besides, your mom was a real mess. Someone had to take things in hand.”

He didn't expect me to believe
that
, did he? I had a pretty good idea why he had decided, for the first time ever, to take charge of washing the clothes. I hobbled past him and hurried upstairs. My mom was in the kitchen.

“I'm going over to Allison's,” I said.

“Oh,” my mom said. “I forgot to tell you. Allison called this morning. She wanted to know how you were.”

“She was probably worried. That's why I want to see her.”

“She
was
worried. But I told her you're all mine today. After what happened, I'm not letting you out of my sight. I want us to spend what's left of the day together. You can see Allison tomorrow.”

“But—”

“Allison is fine with it, Stephanie. She understands how I feel.” She hugged me again. I had never gotten so many hugs in one day. “Remember when you and I used to spend a whole afternoon in the kitchen making a gourmet dinner for your dad?”

I did. Every now and then my mom would decide she wanted to do something special. We'd go through cookbooks and magazines looking for delicious dishes that we had never tried, and then we'd be in the kitchen all day, making appetizers, a main course and a fancy dessert. We'd set the table with a linen tablecloth and the best china and silver, and my mom would light candles. My dad would choose music—always something classical—and we would pretend we were royalty, dining on the best food while an orchestra played just for us.

“I thought it would be fun to do that today,” my mom said. “Just like we used to.”

“But Dad—” I bit my tongue when I saw the flash of pain in her eyes. It was the first time in a long time that I'd seen that look, and I realized that no matter what I had thought and no matter who she was with now, she did miss my dad. She really did.

“Those were the best times, Stephanie,” my mom said in a quiet voice. “The very best.”

I wanted to cry when she said that.

“Okay, Mom.” If that's what she wanted, I would do it. Besides, being in the kitchen together, it would give me a chance to check something out.

Gregg came upstairs.

“You two need some help in here?” he said.

“No. We're fine. We just need you out of the kitchen so that we can get busy.”

“Mind if I watch the ball game on tv?”

“Yes,” I said at the exact same time as my mom said, “No.”

“I thought we could put some music on,” I said to my mom. “Like we always used to.”

She smiled. “We'll be fine without it. Go ahead and watch the game, Gregg. It'll be nice for us to be here all together.”

Gregg grabbed a beer out of the fridge, took his run book off the desk in the corner of the kitchen and went into the family room to turn on the tv. He was there all afternoon, drinking beer and watching tv.

My mom and I cooked for the rest of the afternoon. I would have had a great time—if things had been different. But they weren't.

Gregg liked the food okay, but he wasn't crazy about the classical music. He switched to a rock station instead. My mom let him. She asked him to open a bottle of wine, but he wouldn't drink any of it.

“I'm a beer guy,” he said. He sure was. And he didn't even bother with a glass. By the time supper was over, there were three empty beer cans on the table with the good china, my mom's best silver and a white linen tablecloth. I couldn't believe that I had ever thought I would be glad to be home as long as he was there.

Gregg volunteered to help me clean up the kitchen—he said my mom deserved to put her feet up after such a great meal—but he was too rough with my mom's china, so she told him, never mind, she'd do it instead. He insisted that he didn't want her to have to do anything, so I ended up helping him. He cleared the table and handed me the dishes, and I put them in the dishwasher. I must have looked at that newspaper article on the fridge a couple of dozen times as I worked—the one with the picture of those two girls and all the details about their disappearances, including the dates. As soon as we'd finished with the cleanup, I excused myself and went up to my room.

I lay on my bed in the dark, waiting. It took forever before I heard my mom's bedroom door click shut. I waited some more. I wanted to be sure they were both asleep. Then I eased my way downstairs to the kitchen. In the glow of a streetlight, I saw Gregg's run book. It was back on the desk near the phone. I grabbed it, carried it to the window and opened it to the date when the first girl had disappeared. Just as I had suspected—Gregg had been on a run that day. He'd been gone for two days. My fingers trembled as I flipped to the date the second girl had disappeared. Gregg had been on a run then too.

The kitchen suddenly flooded with light. I turned, hiding the run book behind my back.

“Hey, Steph,” Gregg said, surprised. “What are you doing down here?”

“I—I was hungry.”

“After that meal?” He was staring at me. I leaned back and put the run book back on the desk.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Your mom wanted some cold water.”

“Can you pour me some too?”

He frowned at me but finally turned to the fridge. I quickly checked to make sure that the run book was exactly where he had left it. Then I went to him and took the glass of water from him. My hand shook as I drank it down.

“Thanks,” I said.

I headed for the stairs.

“Hey, Steph,” Gregg said. “I thought you said you were hungry.”

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything at all. I went back to my room and closed the door. I wished I could lock it, but I couldn't. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark, waiting. It seemed like forever before I heard Gregg come back up the stairs and go into my mom's room. I waited some more. I waited forever. I wished I had a cell phone or a phone in my room, but I didn't. And I was afraid to go back downstairs again until I was sure Gregg was asleep. Even then, my heart was in my throat as I made my way back down the stairs on my crutches, clutching the card that Sergeant Andruksen had given me.

SIXTEEN

T
he doorbell rang first thing in the morning.

Gregg answered it. I heard a familiar voice. It was Sergeant Andruksen.

“Good morning, Mr. Hamilton,” he said. I hobbled to the door on my crutches and stood beside Gregg. Sergeant Andruksen nodded at me. Detective Carlysle was with him and there were two uniformed police officers on the porch. “We need to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Me?” Gregg looked confused.

My mom came out of the kitchen to see who was at the door.

“Sergeant,” she said. “Come in. Do you have any news for us? Did you catch the man who took Stephanie?”

Sergeant Andruksen and Detective Carlysle stepped inside.

“We'd like to see the back of your neck, Mr. Hamilton,” Sergeant Andruksen said to Gregg.

“The back of his neck?” My mom looked completely lost. “I don't understand. What does Gregg's accident have to do with this?”

“It's okay. Let me handle this, Trish,” Gregg said. “Why don't you go and put on a fresh pot of coffee?”

“What accident?” Sergeant Andruksen said.

“Gregg had an accident at work last week,” my mom said.

“I said I'd handle this, Trish,” Gregg said. His face was red, and he spoke through clenched teeth.

“What kind of accident?” Sergeant Andruksen said, asking the question that had just flashed in my mind. Had I made a huge mistake?

“It was nothing really,” Gregg said. “It was stupid.”

“Was it a car accident?” Detective Andruksen said.

“No. It happened at work,” my mom said.

“Trish, please!” Gregg looked like he wished she was anywhere but in the hall with him.

“It's nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said. “I gave Gregg a medallion on a chain. It was supposed to be for good luck, but it sure didn't bring any.” The two cops frowned, and I bet they were wondering the same thing that I was—what did she mean? “Right after I gave him the medallion, everything seemed to go wrong after that. Two days later Stephanie vanished. Then—and I know this doesn't even begin to compare with what happened to Stephanie—but the chain got caught on a machine when Gregg was at work. He was alone when it happened. There was no one to help him. He was lucky he was able to stop that machine. Otherwise he would have been seriously hurt. As it was, the chain cut into his neck before it finally broke.”