She wasn’t frightened at first, just bewildered. Continuing to lie there on her side, head cradled by the pillow, covers pulled up around her neck, she looked at the slice of room she could see, the gray wall and the brown kitchen chair and the closed old-fashioned-looking door, and she wondered, Where am I?
Her clothing was on. She suddenly realized that. She was in bed with the covers pulled up, but underneath the covers she was fully dressed. She was wearing everything but shoes.
She sat up abruptly and looked around, and it was a room she didn’t know, a large bedroom with old furniture in it: the brass double bed she was in, two dressers, a vanity, night tables, and two more brown kitchen chairs. The bedside lamps had pleated pink shades. The windows had white curtains and dark green shades, the shades halfway down. Gray-white daylight poured through the lower half of the windows. Two windows, both along the wall opposite the bed.
There was no one else in the room. Claire listened, and there was no sound from anywhere in the house.
Where was she? How had she gotten here?
It was hard to think with this pounding headache, hard to make sense out of anything. She bent her head and massaged her temples, and that seemed to work a little. She continued to massage gently and tried to think.
Where had she been last night? Where had she been at all yesterday?
She’d gone to a beauty parlor yesterday afternoon, downtown on Franklin Street, she remembered that. And then she’d gone looking to buy a fall, but she couldn’t find anything she really liked that matched her hair color. She’d gone back to the hotel, hoping Parker would be there today it was nine days today or at least a message from him, but there had been nothing. She hadn’t felt like dinner alone in a restaurant so she’d ordered something from room service, and while she’d eaten she’d looked at the paper to see what movie she wanted to sit through tonight or if there was anything at all bearable on television.
Had she gone to a movie? She couldn’t remember any movie, couldn’t remember any television either. What had she done after dinner? The last thing she could remember was eating dinner sitting on the chair at the writing-desk, the dishes spread out on the desk, the paper propped up against the wall in front of her. And feeling tired. And waking up here.
Drugged? Could that be the reason for this headache and the vagueness of her memory of last night? It had been a different waiter who’d brought in her dinner, but that hadn’t meant anything at the time; there were several different waiters she’d seen in the last nine days.
But that was what it must have been. She could remember eating dinner, not noticing any odd tastes about anything, and then growing very sleepy. Sitting at the writing-desk, the dishes in front of her, food left uneaten and she growing sleepier and sleepier.
Had she gotten up from the desk and gone over to stretch out on the bed? She couldn’t remember exactly. It seemed as though she’d done that, or at least had wanted to do it, but she couldn’t remember whether or not she’d actually made it out of the chair and over to the bed.
She rubbed her head. If only the pain would stop. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t concentrate.
Who would do this?
She looked at her watch. It was still running and it showed twenty-five minutes past four. Past four? It must be afternoon; she must have been asleep nearly twenty hours.
She pushed the covers off and slowly put her legs over the side of the bed. She was very shaky, nerves all ajangle. The pain in her head was worse when she moved, so she moved slowly, gingerly. Also, she didn’t want anyone to hear her and know she was awake. If there was anyone around to hear.
Standing made her dizzy. She kept one hand on the wall and tiptoed in stocking feet over to the door. It was locked. Gently she turned the knob, easily she pulled, and the door was locked.
The windows? She took the long way around, always keeping next to the wall, one palm flat on the wall for support. She reached the first window, remained leaning against the wall beside it, and bent her head to the glass to look out.
Second floor. A lake, with partially thawing ice, looking very cold and very bleak. Mountains beyond the lake, also cold, also bleak. A scruffy brown yard between the house and the lake, with a few bare-branched trees and some woody bushes. A dark, squat boathouse, and beside it a concrete deck.
A key grated in the door behind her and she spun around, suddenly terrified, losing her balance and almost falling, but leaning against the wall instead. Staying there beside the window, she watched the door open and a man come in.
It didn’t surprise her that he was one of the three who had been at the beginning of all this, before Gonor had shown up.
He looked at her and said, “You’re awake. Good.” Then he frowned, studying her across the room. “Something wrong?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t find anything to say, and she was terrified of what he might do.
He kept frowning, standing just inside the door, and then he seemed all at once to understand and to be made strangely embarrassed by it. He spread his hands, palms down. “You’re all right here,” he said. “You’re safe here. Do you want something to eat?”
She shook her head again. Her fear was beginning to fade, not so much because of his assurances as his embarrassment, but there was still nothing to say to him.
He looked around, apparently at a loss, wanting to establish contact and not knowing how. “If you need anything,” he said, “just knock on the door. I’ll come by.”
“I need to go home,” she said. “Back to the hotel.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not yet.”
“When?”
“Pretty soon. You sure you’re not hungry?”
She surprised herself by asking, “Do you have any aspirin?”
He smiled happily. “Sure,” he said. “Be right back.” He left, and she noticed he took the time to lock the door behind him.
Now she was angry at herself for having asked. It had given him the contact he wanted; it had given him her acceptance of the situation. She felt as though she had allowed him a victory he didn’t deserve, and she considered refusing the aspirin when he brought it, but realized that would be an empty gesture and wouldn’t reclaim the loss.
What a stupid way to be thinking. She looked around the room, cold and bare and minimal.
She needed Parker.
2
Jock Daask liked his women with meat on their bones and brains in their heads, and this girl Claire had both. He sat across the kitchen table from her, watching her eat the corn flakes and milk that was the only food they had for her, and he reflected that he would have liked to have met her some other way. He reflected also on the sexual implications of their current roles in relation to one another kidnapper and victim but the possibilities for rape didn’t really interest him. Jock Daask wasn’t that sort of man.
He wasn’t all that sure what sort of man he was, in fact. His current roles could only be described in negatives he had kidnapped but was not a kidnapper, he would steal but was not a thief and it seemed to him his whole life was expressed only in the same terms of contradiction. He had been born in Africa, but was not an African. His parents were Europeans, but he was not a European. He had done well at the university in England, but he was not an intellectual. He had been a mercenary soldier in various parts of Africa, but he was not a rootless adventurer. There was nothing about him, it seemed, that did not include its own negative.
Jock Daask was the son of a wealthy plantation owner in Africa, and he had grown up always knowing that everything and everybody he saw belonged to his father and would one day belong to him. His friends in his youth were the children of other white landowners, and even then they had all seemed to be aware of their essential dislocation, at once the ruling class and exiles. Still, it was worth exile to be a member of the ruling class.