“Oh, baby,” I say, crouching down, “how’d you get yourself into such a mess? Here, give me your hand.”
He sobs. Shit. Oren never cries. I put down the flashlight and flatten myself on the cold, wet ground, reaching into the dark. “Take my hand, baby.”
His hand clasps mine. It’s so cold it scares me. How long has he been lying here?
“I’m so sorry, baby,” I say. “I’m sorry I yelled, I’m sorry I didn’t get you away sooner. I promise it will be better from now on. I’m gonna take care of you.”
He squeezes my hand and I feel something cold and hard press into my palm. And then his hand is gone. It’s not like he’s let go; it’s like his flesh just melted away.
“Oren?” I scrabble closer to the hole and sweep my hands inside. There’s nothing there. Could he have crawled in even deeper? I inch back, find the flashlight, and aim it into the hole. The light shines onto a stone wall two or three feet in. I crawl farther in, feeling every inch of the wall for an opening Oren could have slipped through, but there’s no way out of this hole.
In fact, I’m not 100 percent sure I can get out.
Fighting off rising panic, I push my way back. Then I search the rest of the alcove for Oren, but he’s not here.
Maybe I imagined him.
Or maybe that wasn’t Oren.
Suddenly I can’t stand another minute here. I squeeze myself past the furnace and into the basement.
“Did you find him?” Mattie asks. “Is he stuck back there?”
I don’t know what to tell her. Instead I hold out my hand and open it, palm up. Mattie shines her flashlight on my hand and plucks up the cold hard thing he—it?—pressed into my grasp. I had been holding it so tightly that it’s left a pattern imprinted on my flesh, some kind of complicated seal like you see on old buildings and stamped on official papers. It looks kind of familiar. It must be to Mattie too. She’s looking at it like it’s a puzzle piece.
“Where’d you get . . . ,” she begins, but her words are drowned out by a loud grating noise coming from the slanted doors on the other side of the basement. We both turn our flashlights on them in time to see the doors fly open. Snow comes pouring in, then a man’s booted legs appear.
Mattie grabs my hand, pushes me to the side of the stairs, and turns off her flashlight. I turn off mine too, but not before I see Mattie take a gun out of her sweater pocket. As the man comes down the stairs, shining his own flashlight in front of him, Mattie raises the gun over her head. She waits until he reaches the bottom step, then brings the gun down on his head with an audible crunch.
The man falls to his knees, arms flailing, flashlight flying. I hear a thump and a groan, and I thumb on my own flashlight to see Mattie sitting on top of the man, one knee pinning down his right shoulder while she struggles to pull his left arm behind his back.
“There’s a roll of electrical tape on that shelf over there,” she shouts at me.
I find the tape and try to unpeel it, but my hands are shaking too hard. The man is moaning and bucking under Mattie’s weight. Any second now he could get free and come at me. And then what? When Davis hit me I froze. I’d crawl into a ball and pray for it to be over. But here’s middle-aged soft-hearted Mattie fighting like a hellcat.
I force my hands to work and unpeel the dusty end and hand it to Mattie. She wrenches the intruder’s hand back and uses, like, half the roll of tape to wrap both wrists together, then pulls out a knife from her sweater pocket to cut off the tape.
“Do you have an Uzi in there too?” I ask like a smart-ass, trying to sound less scared than I really am.
She barks a laugh and then eases her weight off the man. “Help me roll him over.”
We shove him over like a sack of potatoes. His face is smeared with blood, but I see to my surprise that it’s not Davis. “I could’ve sworn it was Davis in the study,” I say.
“You weren’t wrong, darling.”
The voice—his voice—curdles my stomach. I look up and see Davis on the stairs at the other end of the basement. He’s got a flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other, and a smug, satisfied look on his face.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mattie
I START TO reach for the gun, which I’d lain down on the floor, but I hear the click of a hammer being pulled back along with a soft tsk.
“I wouldn’t do that, darling, unless you want me to put a bullet through your head.” The man comes down the stairs, aiming the revolver straight at my forehead. I force myself to look away from him, glancing at Alice to see her staring at him with sheer hatred. Ah.
“Davis, I presume,” I say, turning my attention to the man’s face. He’s slight, in his mid-thirties, with feathery brown hair and a wispy goatee, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned flannel shirt over a Nirvana T-shirt. He looks like half a dozen interns I’ve trained over the years.
“No shit,” he snarls. Then he points the gun at Jason. “Who’s this asshole?”
The asshole himself answers. “Hey, man, this nosy bitch got up in my face defending a towel-head at the Stewart’s. She’s one of those nosy social workers. I came out here to teach her a lesson.”
“That so?” Davis asks, kneeling to pick up the other gun from the floor. He slides it into his back pocket, then pokes his gun in my face. “Is that what you get off on, bitch? Defending women from nasty men? Is that what you’ve been doing with my Allie? Cuddling her to your bosom?”
When he says bosom he moves the gun to my left breast. My skin crawls.
“Aw, you’re blushing! Have I figured out your big secret? As if all you ‘domestic abuse’ sob sisters”—he makes air quotes with both hands—“weren’t just dykes out for some damaged pussy.”
He points the gun at Alice’s groin and I can feel her tense beside me. He’s groping us with his words, and he’s had a lot of practice at it. But I’ve had practice dealing with this kind of man. “You sound like you’ve had experience with domestic violence services before,” I say.
He tilts back his head, revealing a scrawny neck pitted with acne, and laughs. “If by ‘domestic violence services’ you mean the legion of feminazis who like to butt their fat asses into a man’s business because they’re jealous they don’t have a man, then yes, I’ve encountered my share.”
I’m tempted to point out the inconsistency in his characterization of social workers as lesbians being jealous of not having a man, but I hear Doreen’s voice in my head suggesting I listen for the emotions beneath the words. “I can hear a lot of pain and loss in your voice,” I say.
He’s dead quiet for a moment, and I think maybe this could work. I’ve been trained to talk to people in crisis, after all. I just have to keep him talking until Frank gets here—
Then Davis swings back his arm and hits me on the side of the head with the butt of the gun. As I go over I hear Alice shriek and Jason snicker. A darkness swells in my head, black satin spreading over my eyes, and suddenly I’m in that basement cell at Hudson where they sent the bad girls for punishment. I can smell piss and mold and fear. I can hear the steps of the guard on the stairs, feel his arm on my arm—
No, please, I plead.
What’s the problem, sweetheart? This is what you were sent here for. I read your file. Making out with your boyfriend in the backseat of his daddy’s car. Little slut—
“No, please.” It’s not me pleading now; it’s Alice. I can’t make out all her words over the ringing in my ears but I hear the fear and desperation in her voice. It’s my voice all those years ago, pleading with the guard not to hurt me. But it didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Men like that guard and Davis feed on the powerlessness of women and children because they need to feel better than someone else. Someone made them feel weak once, and the only way they can make that feeling go away is by hurting a weaker person.