“Metzger’s,” a female voice answered.
“Good afternoon.” She kept her tone cool and professional. “This is Barbara Allen, calling from Allstate Insurance. I’d like to confirm an estimate for one of our clients, Harold Gund, policy number seven-six-two-three-eight.” The five digits came out of nowhere; insurance people always gave the policy number, and she didn’t expect the receptionist to check. “The vehicle in question is a Chevrolet Astro van, license plate…” She recited the memorized number.
“Hold, please.”
Silence. Annie clutched the hard plastic shell of the handset and tasted a sour flavor at the back of her mouth.
Click, and the receptionist was back. “Sorry, but we have no record of any estimate on that vehicle.”
Her heart slammed into overdrive. “It was my understanding”-she fought to betray no reaction other than mild consternation-“that our insured party, Mr. Gund, took his van to Metzger’s for inspection earlier this afternoon. He’s informed us that Metzger’s provided an estimate of twelve hundred dollars.”
“Well, we have no record of that.”
“I see. There must be some mix-up, then. Thank you.”
Even after she had replaced the handset on the plungers, Annie kept her hand on it, as if afraid to let go.
No record.
He hadn’t gone to Metzger’s.
Hadn’t gotten an estimate.
Then what had he been doing? And where?
Briefly she considered calling Walker. No, waste of time; she had nothing, really. Nothing specific, nothing tangible.
For the time being, she was on her own.
Okay, then.
Erin had sent an SOS. A distress signal. A cry for help.
Annie would do her best to answer it.
Tonight.
39
Even after she awoke, Erin lay unmoving on the futon for long minutes, taking inventory of every separate pain.
The cramps in her abdomen and thighs had loosened their grip, to leave only a dull, throbbing ache. Rubbing at the rope for hours had taken its toll; her shoulders and arms were agonizingly stiff. When she turned her head, a hot needle lanced her neck.
The worst pain, however, was not internal but external-the searing sunburn on every inch of her exposed skin. Her gaze drifted to her right arm, lobster pink. It looked boiled.
The burn would torture her for days. Every scrape of her clothes against her skin would be a minor agony.
But at least, for the moment, she was alive.
Grunting, she propped herself on one elbow and threw back the cheap cotton blanket. A gleam of metal caught her eye.
For a disoriented moment she imagined she was wearing an anklet. A large, curiously bulky anklet glinting on her right leg.
Then her mind cleared, and she recognized what she was seeing. A loop of chain, wound tightly around her leg just above her boot, with a padlock’s hasp inserted through two heavy links.
The chain snaked across the concrete floor to the wall, where a second padlock secured it to the sillcock.
Slowly she bent forward, wincing at the residue of pain in her abdomen, and studied the chain. The links were rusty and soiled, as was the padlock. They had been used outdoors.
The gate. It had been chained and locked. Yes.
And the other padlock, the one fastening the chain to the spigot, most likely had come from the rear door, which she’d tried to open last night.
While she slept, her abductor must have removed the chain and both padlocks, then brought them in here and shackled her. Christ, shackled her to the wall-like a prisoner in a dungeon.
Well, what else was she? What had she ever been?
She struggled to her feet, gingerly testing her legs. Though her knees were stiff and her balance uncertain, she could walk.
She tried reaching the door, couldn’t. The chain, drawn taut to a length of six feet, stopped her when she was still more than a yard away.
He was taking no chances, quite obviously. He didn’t want her escaping again.
Little likelihood of that, anyway. He’d cleaned out the room, removing all possible lock-picking tools, leaving only a bare minimum of necessities. Besides the futon, all she had left were the two chairs, a roll of toilet paper, the milk jugs and coffee cans she used for bathroom purposes, and, in the cardboard box, a few items of food-none requiring the can opener, which was gone.
Painfully she shuffled over to the sillcock. Crouching down was an exercise in self-torture so intense it was almost pleasurable. She turned the handle and cupped her hands under the lukewarm stream from the spout, drinking until she was satisfied.
A memory of the awful thirst she had known in the arroyo returned to her. It was said to be impossible to remember physical sensations, but the sandpaper dryness of her mouth, the swollen thickness of her tongue, the ache of her gums-all of it was abruptly vivid in her mind, as shockingly real as direct experience.
Not again, she promised herself, straightening up with a renewed protest of sore muscles. She would not be staked out again-to endure the elements or to burn. If he tried to take her, she would fight. She would make him kill her here.
Would it come to that? She blinked at the question, then nodded slowly. Of course it would.
She had been granted only a reprieve, a stay of execution. He would never let her go. Never.
She had seen his face.
Only dimly, it was true-in weak light outside, and through a haze of visual distortion in this room. Nonetheless, she had seen it.
And the ranch, too.
The ranch.
There it was again, startling as a slap-the wordless certainty that she had visited this place before.
Baking in the sun, she’d had no strength to ponder the riddle. Now she did.
A horse ranch in the desert, near the interstate.
Barbed-wire fence, wood-frame house, barn and paddock. The buildings painted green, white, and orange.
Green, white, and orange…
“Oh, my God,” Erin whispered, remembering.
Her knees unlocked. She would have crumpled to the floor if she hadn’t gripped the brick wall for support.
In her mind she saw it suddenly-the ranch, this ranch, spread out before her, not in starlight but in the crisp May sunshine of another year, the buildings dressed in faded colors, paint peeling in strips like sunburned skin.
And at the entrance, a padlocked gate that displayed a hanging sign.
The sign was gone now. She hadn’t seen it last night.
But on that spring day in 1985 she and Annie had paused before that sign, reading the inscription grooved deep in the rust-eaten iron.
A single word in block letters: CONNOR.
This was the old Connor ranch. Lincoln and Lydia’s homestead, where they had spent the twenty years of their marriage.
Erin knew it, knew it with certainty, even without the sign as proof. The distinctive color scheme was confirmation enough. Green, white, orange-the colors of the Irish flag.
After the deaths of her husband and son in 1968, Lydia Connor had relocated to a bungalow in town, where, later, she raised her orphaned nieces. She rarely spoke of the ranch, never took the girls to see it, but in her photo albums there were pictures of a house and barn, a paddock with a split-rail fence, horses grazing on a few bleached acres.
In the second semester of her freshman year at the University of Arizona, Erin signed up for a course on the history of Tucson. At the library, hunting through the archival files of local newspapers to research her term paper, she came across contemporaneous accounts of the Connor case. One of the stories gave the couple’s address.
The next weekend, impelled by curiosity, she and Annie visited the ranch. The map they used was disappointingly inaccurate, and it took them forty minutes of searching in Annie’s old rattletrap Dodge, with the vents blowing hot air and the brakes squealing ominously, before they finally pulled to a stop outside a spread that matched the faded photos. The location, Erin recalled with a low incline of her head, was a side road off Houghton, just north of Interstate 10.