He was still not alarmed — but a quiet, reasoning, deductive part of his mind told him that this was November and the temperature outside was somewhere in the low thirties, and whereas the boys of the 87th might be spirited, they certainly weren’t stupid or cruel; they would never have taken Augusta out of the hotel without a coat. Well, now, wait a minute, he thought. Who says they had to take her out of the hotel? They may be sitting in the lobby, or better yet, the bar, right this very minute, having a few drinks with her, laughing it up while they watch the clock till it’s time to call me. Very funny, he thought. You’ve got some sense of humor, fellows. He went to the phone, picked up the receiver, and then sat on the edge of the bed while he dialed the front desk. He told the clerk who answered that this was Mr. Kling in 824, he’d just checked in with his wife, a tall girl with auburn hair…
“Yes, sir, I remember,” the clerk said.
“You don’t see her anywhere in the lobby, do you?” Kling asked.
“Sir?”
“My wife. Mrs. Kling. She isn’t down there in the lobby, is she?”
“I don’t see her anywhere in the lobby, sir.”
“We were expecting some friends, you see, and I thought she might have gone down to meet them.”
“No, sir, she’s not in the lobby.”
“Would you have seen her if she’d come down to the lobby?”
“Well, yes, sir, I suppose so. The elevators are just opposite the desk, I suppose I would have seen her if she’d taken the elevator down.”
“What about the fire stairs? Suppose she’d taken those down?”
“The fire stairs are at the rear of the building, sir. No, I wouldn’t have seen her if she’d taken those down. Unless she crossed the lobby to leave the building.”
“Any other way to leave the building?” Kling asked.
“Well, yes, there’s the service entrance.”
“Fire stairs come anywhere near that?”
“Yes, sir, they feed into both the lobby and the service courtyard.”
“What floor’s the bar on?”
“The lobby floor, sir.”
“Can you see the bar from the front desk?”
“No, sir. It’s at the other end of the lobby. Opposite the fire stairs.”
“Thank you,” Kling said, and hung up, and immediately dialed the bar. He described Augusta to the bartender and said she might be sitting there with some fellows who looked like detectives. He was a detective himself, he explained, and these friends of his, these colleagues, might be playing a joke on him, this being his wedding night and all. So would the bartender please take a look around and see if they were down there with his wife? “And, listen, if they are there, don’t say a word to them, okay? I’ll just come down and surprise them, okay?”
“I don’t have to take a look around, sir,” the bartender said. “There’s only two people in here, and they’re both old men, and they don’t look nothing like what you described your wife to me.”
“Okay,” Kling said.
“They kidnapped my wife on our wedding night, too,” the bartender said dryly. “I wish now they woulda kept her.”
“Well, thanks a lot,” Kling said, and hung up.
It was then that he saw Augusta’s shoe. Just the one shoe. Lying alongside the wastebasket on the floor there. Near the dresser. Just to the left of the door, near one of the dressers. The pair she’d put on when she changed out of her bridal costume. But no longer a pair. Just one of them. One high-heeled pump lying on its side near the wash-basket. He went to it and picked it up. As he looked at the shoe (telling himself there was still no reason to become alarmed, this was just a prank, this had to be just a prank) he was suddenly aware of a cloying scent that seemed to be coming from the wastebasket at his feet. He put the shoe on the dresser top, and then knelt and looked into the wastebasket. The aroma was sickeningly sweet. He immediately turned his head away, but not before he’d seen a large wad of absorbent cotton on the bottom of the otherwise empty basket. He realized at once the smell was emanating from the cotton, and suddenly recognized it for what it was: chloroform.
It was then that he became alarmed.
She had lost all track of time and did not know how long she’d been conscious; she suspected, though, that hours and hours had passed since the moment he’d clamped the chloroform-soaked piece of cotton over her nose and mouth. She lay on the floor with her wrists bound behind her back, her ankles bound together. Her eyes were closed, she could feel what she supposed were balls of absorbent cotton pressing against the lids, held firmly in place by either adhesive tape or a bandage of some kind. A rag had been stuffed into her mouth (she could taste it, she hoped she would not choke on it), and then a gag, again either adhesive tape or bandage, had been wound over it. She could neither see nor speak, and though she listened intently for the slightest sound, she could hear nothing at all.
She remembered… he had a scalpel in his right hand. She turned when she heard the hotel door clicking open, and saw him striding toward her across the room, the scalpel glittering in the light of the lamp on the dresser. He was wearing a green surgical mask, and his eyes above the mask scanned the room swiftly as he crossed to where she was already moving from the suitcase toward the bathroom door, intercepting her, grabbing her from behind and pulling her in against him. She opened her mouth to scream, but his left arm was tight around her waist now, and suddenly his right hand, the hand holding the scalpel, moved to her throat, circling up from behind. She felt the blade against her flesh and heard him whisper just the single word “Silence,” and the formative scream became only a terrified whimper drowned by the roar of the shower.
He was pulling her backward toward the door, and then suddenly he swung her around and shoved her against the wall, the scalpel coming up against her throat again, his left hand reaching into his coat pocket. She saw the wad of absorbent cotton an instant before he clamped it over her nose and mouth. She had detested the stench of chloroform ever since she was six and had her tonsils removed. She twisted her head to escape the smothering aroma, and then felt the scalpel nudging her flesh, insistently reminding her that it was there and that it could cut. She became fearful that if she lost consciousness, she might fall forward onto the sharp blade, and she tried to keep from becoming dizzy, but the sound of the shower seemed magnified, an ocean surf pounding against some desolate shore, waves crashing and receding in endless repetition, foam bubbles dissolving, and far overhead, so distant it could scarcely be heard, the cry of a gull that might have been only her own strangled scream.
She listened now.
She could hear nothing, she suspected she was alone. But she could not be certain. Behind the blindfold, she began to weep soundlessly.
His voice startled her.
She had not known he was in the room until she heard him speak, and she reacted sharply to the sound of his voice, almost as though someone had suddenly slapped her in the dark.