With the one free hand she pulled herself up enough to work loose the rope around the leg of the armoire, tearing two nails to the quick. When the rope fell away, when she was free of the armoire, she rolled painfully to the center of the room. Her own weight on her doubled-up legs, as she rolled over on them, was excruciating.
Pausing to rest, she tried again to remove the gag, pulling and jerking at it. The blood from her hand at last turned it slick enough that she was able to slide it down around her chin, down until it circled her neck. Everything was bloody—her face, her clothes, the carpet were all smeared with blood.
She rested again, then tried once more to free her hand, which had gone to sleep beneath the tight rope that bound her waist and legs. She fought the knots until she was convinced she couldn’t loosen them. She looked toward the phone again, and again began to squirm across the carpet, heavy and clumsy and hurting, with her legs and one arm bound. She had gone only a little way, to the edge of the flowered easy chair, when she realized she was whimpering like a hurt puppy, a pitiful, begging sound.
Silencing herself, she wriggled like an injured beast toward the fallen phone, toward the one item in the room that could liberate her, toward her one contact with the world beyond her own walls.
It seemed to take another eternity before she reached the phone. She felt weak and confused. Could feel the double beating of her heart that sometimes happened when she was under stress. Hunching forward, she pressed her face against the fallen headset.
Of course it was dead, having been off the hook for so long. With her bleeding hand she depressed the button, waited with her face to the phone for the dial tone to resume. She waited a long time. When the phone remained silent, she pressed the button again, held it longer this time. Then again, her ear to the fallen phone, listening.
No dial tone, no sound. No little canned voice telling her to hang up and try again. Just a hollow emptiness as vast as eternal space. After a third try she pulled the cord toward her. Watched it snake away from the wall, the cut line slithering to her, the cut wires sharp and useless against her fingers.
The only other phone was upstairs. Bound as she was, she didn’t think she could make it up the steps. And had they cut that line, too? Cut both phone lines, intending to lead her on uselessly? Imagining herself hunching and crawling up the stairs only to find that phone dead, too, she lay down with her face against the carpet, tears spurting uncontrollably. She felt destroyed, beaten, beyond trying to think what to do.
All her windows were closed against the chill evening and because, how ironic, she was wary about break-ins. Praying that some neighbor was home and would hear her despite those glass barriers, she tried to shout. She was very hoarse, her voice so weak she didn’t think anyone would hear. She wondered if young Bobby West might have his window open upstairs despite his mother’s complaints. Beverly said he’d have the house freezing all the time if she didn’t make him close that window. Expecting no response, still she tried. Even the effort of shouting hurt so badly, and exhausted her.
Death from thirst and starvation seemed impossible, right here in the little village among the closely crowded cottages, with neighbors all around. She had no relatives living close who might call or come by, wanting to check on her. How long might it be until one of her casual friends tried to reach her, tried so many times they grew impatient and reported her number out of order? And would the phone company actually come out to take a look? Despite her friends’ admonitions to get a cell phone, she had never wanted one. Until now.
When her strength returned a little, she thought about the cut phone line, and she hunched toward the wall until she found the other cut end. With one hand, she managed to hold the two cut ends together, hoping they might connect and allow a signal to come through. But she was too clumsy, the wires wouldn’t join just right. The blood was so slick, everything slippery and her fingers so stiff, too. Twice she thought she had the wires joined right, but when she bent her face to the handset there was no sound, the phone remained dead. At last, so weak she couldn’t think straight, she lay limp on the carpet, defeated, wondering if she would die there—and wondering, inanely, if she could ever get the blood out of the Persian carpet.
21
MAX’S PICKUP MOVED so fast that Joe Grey lost it only a block from home. He raced on across the night-dark roofs stubbornly following its sound as it sped south. He could see, away in the center of the village, a gathering of bright lights and whirling red lights reflected against the sky and could hear the distant mutter of police radios—that would be the restaurant break-ins, but Max wasn’t headed there.
The sound of the pickup grew fainter, still bearing south. Joe had traveled a dozen blocks when, far ahead, the truck’s soft rumble died, faded into silence. Racing on over slick roof tiles and mossy shingles, and across shadowed tree branches above dark and tangled gardens, he listened for the truck door to open. He heard nothing, only the hushing of the sea, five blocks away. Ahead against the night sky rose the spire of the Methodist Church, thrusting above the black silhouettes of surrounding houses. Leaping from a pine tree onto the church roof, he raced up its highest peak. Had he lost Harper?
Through the trees below him, no car lights reflected, the neighborhood was uniformly dark. At this height, the sea wind hit him full in the face; the balmy evening had grown chill, the shingles cold beneath his paws. In this residential area, even at this early hour, most of the houses were dark, as if the more elderly occupants were already tucked in for the night, while maybe the younger ones were out partying. He was cursing himself for having lost Harper when the scream of a siren blasted nearly below him, flashing red lights stained the sky and an emergency van raced past—he took off after it as if the devil himself were on his tail.
Ahead, the siren whooped and died as the white emergency van swerved into a driveway—and there was Max Harper’s pickup, parked and waiting. The van nearly grazed a police unit that was pulling in. Another patrol car drew up across the street from them, in front of the church just beneath where Joe crouched, his claws in the shingles trying not to slide down its steeply angled peak.
The house was a small, two-story Craftsman-style cottage, its wood siding painted off white with a soft blue trim, its front door set deep beneath a sheltering roof and flanked by climbing vines. The front garden was excessively neat, the small, manicured lawn edged with borders of bright impatiens. Joe came down from the peak of the church to its lower roof, pausing with his paws in the metal gutter, watching the emergency unit as its side doors opened and three medics piled out, heading for the shadowed front door. Max pulled shards of jagged glass out of the broken front door, reached through and released the lock. Pushing the door open, he eased through, gun drawn, and soon disappeared inside, where Joe could hear a faint cry. Behind Max, two officers entered, their weapons drawn; the three medics waited for them to clear the house.
A light came on from deep within; Joe heard Max’s voice and a woman’s faint, hoarse reply. As the EMTs hauled out their emergency medical equipment, Joe watched the street and the dark yards. He saw no movement, no one hidden among the neighborhood’s overgrown bushes, no one slipping away. Surely by now the perps were long gone. When the medics moved on inside, Joe dropped onto the roof of their van. There he waited until wiry Officer Reynolds, who stood by the front door, glanced the other way. Quickly Joe dropped to the driveway, slipped into the bushes and inside the house, melting into the shadows beneath a broken end table. He wanted, before the officers’ various personal scents compromised the scene, to try to pick up the invader’s trail, maybe even find the unlikely scent of old fish that had so intrigued Kit.