She walked back into the room just as Mr. Smith was replacing the mattress. The old pee-stained mattress was resting on its side against the bedroom wall. He patted the new mattress. "Have a seat. I'll be outside nailing up that window." He exited the room and she stood there for a moment, her mind numb and reeling. After a few minutes, she sat down.
She heard him clomp outside to his vehicle, then a few minutes later she heard him at the side of the cabin outside the bedroom window. She heard the sound of pounding along with his mutters, and then he began putting the wood up, securing it over the window. She sighed and tried to drown out the sounds of Mr. Smith hammering nails in the wood that would secure it to the windowsill. The room was dark from the boards already blocking the sun from the inside. She looked up at the ceiling, feeling her eyes grow heavy with tears again. The sound of those boards going up over the window was like nailing the lid of her coffin.
She sat on the bed and tried not to cry as Mr. Smith worked on boarding up the window to her prison. Her mind retraced yesterday's nightmare quickly: leaving the rest stop, the van's grille suddenly filling up the rearview mirror, Brad's panicked voice as the van dogged their every move for the next mile or so down the highway, then the whirling lights and sirens of the Highway Patrol. She had known the minute she saw those lights appear in the rearview mirror that it had something to do with the van, that the driver had pulled some kind of stunt. And when that cop had pulled them over with his holier-thanthou attitude and told them it was Brad that was driving around like an asshole, she'd felt an impending sense of doom. She had felt a sense of disbelief as the officer told her why he had pulled them over, and why he couldn't really give a shit about them-after all, the law is the law, and I'm only doing my job. And now as she sat naked on a bare mattress in a small cabin somewhere in Big Bear in the San Bernardino mountains, her mind flashed on something she had almost forgotten.
They had still been at the rest stop. They had stopped for bathroom breaks, and as usual Brad had finished first. Lisa had exited the women's restroom and joined Brad at a little scattering of picnic tables. There was a yellow sign with a blocky-looking drawing of a snake on it, a warning to tourists that rattlesnakes were in the area this time of year. Lisa had stood by the sign with a wild grin as Brad snapped a photo of her, and it was then when she had seen him walking by, casting his gaze on them.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember, summoning the image in her mind. Yes, she was positive it had been Mr. Smith. He had been wearing sunglasses, and the more she thought about it, the more the picture came to her mind. He had been standing by a large tree that overlooked the rest stop. She didn't remember him being there when they had pulled up, but she surely remembered glancing over at him when she left the ladies' room. She had quickly dismissed him, figuring he was just another tourist waiting for his wife or significant other to exit the ladies' room. There had been four other women in the restroom besides her, and she had dismissed it from her mind until she and Brad were shooting photos and horsing around, and then he had walked past them slowly, casually, and then Brad had said something that distracted her and then they were laughing over something and the guy was forgotten as they gathered their stuff together and headed toward the Lexus. He was gone anyway, both physically and from her mind, when they climbed into the Lexus and backed out of the parking space to hit the Interstate.
But hadn't there been a red van parked at the rest stop? Now that she thought about it, she could have sworn that there was. She could picture it now: him sit ting at the rest stop, carefully but unobtrusively watching as tourists came and went, waiting for just the right people to come along. And then she and Brad had dropped in. How did Mr. Smith pick them? Did he overhear a scrap of conversation they might have had as they walked to the restrooms together? Some bits of information that told him everything he needed to know? Did that information-talking about their vacation plans this long weekend-give him what he needed to know to convince himself that he would have at least two days to do what he needed to do before any alarm was raised about her disappearance?
The feeling of dread settled in her belly further. Now she was more terrified than before. The story he'd told the officer was bullshit. The thought of actually feeding her to this guy he called the Animal for a snuff film, all for the satisfaction of a faceless group of perverts, was more frightening the more she thought about it. He didn't appear to be bothered by the fact that he was playing a key role in her murder. He didn't seem to care when she told him she was pregnant. All he had been concerned about was the money he was being paid.
There was no question about it. She had to get out of here at any cost. She would run through the woods naked if she had to. She didn't care. What mattered more than anything was getting out alive. She didn't have just herself to think about anymore-the life of her unborn baby was at stake.
A thought suddenly came to her as she remembered being knocked out by Mr. Smith: Did the chloroform he gave me yesterday… did that hurt the baby?
Oh God, please no, please let my baby be all right!
The sound of Mr. Smith working outside became background noise as she sat on the bed and thought about what to do. When Mr. Smith left later today, she was going to have to do some roaming around the room to see if she could find something to help her escape with. She inspected the bed she was sitting on. Maybe she could take a piece off of it, use it to batter down the boards he had nailed over the window Surely if she was able to do that and wriggle out the window she wouldn't get very far because she was chained up, but if she stood outside and yelled long enough, wouldn't somebody hear her? Even if the closest cabin was a mile away, surely somebody would hear her during the day and-
"Hey, Tim? Jeff? Anybody here?"
Lisa's heart froze. For a moment she thought it was Mr. Smith, but then she heard the sound of nails being hammered into the wood outside the room. Mr. Smith was still outside boarding up the window. Which meant that-
Footsteps clumped from the back of the cabin and grew loser. "I was wondering when you would be coming back up. I saw your van and-" It was a woman's voice, and now Lisa looked up just in time to see her stop in the middle of the living room, silhouetted against the rays of the sun that streamed in through the halfboarded-up window. The woman looked like she might have stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. She was tall, with dark hair that fell to her shoulders. She had high cheekbones and a sharp nose, with full lips and dark eyes. Now those lips were open in a round 0 of surprise, her eyes wide with shock as she looked through the doorway at Lisa sitting naked on the bed, her ankles and wrists shackled together. "Oh my God!" she said.
Lisa was so stunned by the sudden intrusion that she didn't know what to do. Her brain was frozen. She thought the woman standing in front of her was an illu sion, a wishful thinking of her imagination. The woman took a step closer, her face still frozen in that Fcan't-be- lieve-I'm seeing-this expression, and said, "Are you okay? What the hell is-"
Mr. Smith suddenly appeared in the living room, grabbing the woman from behind, one arm locked around her throat in a chokehold, the other around her waist. The woman struggled, her eyes going wider, and Lisa watched as Mr. Smith tried to wrestle the woman to the ground. The woman tried to scream, but all that came out were muffled, strangled sounds of fear and anguish. Lisa watched, her stomach in a tight ball.