Chapter 10
CHAPTER 10
Emi followed Kalea to the guest suite.
A pretty blonde was pulling a padded chair close to the couch so that there was only a couple of feet between them. Once she had it in position, she straightened, smiled and held out her hand. “Hi, I’m Sachie. You must be Emi.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Emi took the woman’s hand, appreciating her firm grip. It spoke of confidence.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Kalea said and left the room, closing the door behind her with a soft click.
Sachie waved to the couch where she’d positioned the floor lamp to cast a soft glow over the space. “Have a seat on the sofa. I know the chair is kind of close, but it helps us to get to know one another.” Sachie’s smile and softly spoken words helped ease some of Emi’s tension.
Emi took off her cap and sat on the edge of the couch.
Sachie eased into the chair.
For the next fifteen minutes, Sachie asked questions that had nothing to do with finding Sara and everything to do with making Emi feel more comfortable in her presence.
She told Emi how she’d earned a master’s degree in counseling and worked with troubled teens. She’d trained in hypnotherapy, hoping to help the teens overcome drug addiction.
“One thing led to another, and I was helping the Honolulu Police with victims who’d been attacked or abused.”
“You must have helped a lot of people,” Emi said.
Sachie nodded. “I have.” Her lips turned downward. “But I couldn’t help all of them. Those are the ones that leave a mark on my soul. The ones whose addictions ended their lives.”
She leaned toward Emi and took her hands. “But I’m here to help you.”
“I’m not addicted to drugs.”
“No, but you might have some memories with details that could help you and your friends. I know you want to find your daughter. I want to help in any way possible. I can’t guarantee we’ll discover where she’s being held, but maybe we’ll come up with a clue that will lead us there. Are you ready?”
A chill rippled down Emi’s spine. She wasn’t ready to return to that dark place she’d lived in for the past eight years, but she was ready to find Sara and get her out. “Yes, I’m ready.”
“Good.” Sachie released Emi’s hands. “First, I want you to lie down on the sofa and close your eyes.”
Emi swung her legs up onto the sofa and laid her head on the throw pillow. She laced her hands over her torso and closed her eyes, her pulse pounding through her veins.
“Take a deep breath and let it out slowly,” Sachie said.
Emi drew a deep breath and let it out as slowly as she could.
“Now,” Sachie said in a soft, calming tone, “breathe in through your nose and release it through your mouth.”
Emi did as she said.
Sachie had her repeat the controlled breathing several times.
With each repetition, her pulse slowed until it was almost back to normal.
“Focus on your skin, the fabric touching it, how the air caresses it. You’re in a safe place where you can let yourself relax and feel everything around you without fear.”
Emi thought of George somewhere past the door of the room. Knowing he was there made her feel safe and allowed her to fall under Sachie’s spell. The therapist talked her through several awareness exercises designed to relax her even more.
By the time Emi was so relaxed she could have fallen asleep, Sachie said in that same, calming voice, “Remember, you are in a safe space. No one can hurt you in that space. I want you to take me back to that day you fell in the ocean. Hover over the boat and describe to me what you see.”
When Emi’s pulse increased, she breathed in and out like Sachie had taught her.
“The yacht is shiny. The sun glints off the chrome surface, right into my eyes as I come up from below deck.”
“Look around and describe the furnishings and the layout.”
“The main deck has white leather couches and tables screwed to the deck. You can’t move them. There’s a bar in one corner.”
“Go around the room slowly, looking closely at everything. Is there any embroidery on the furniture or writing on the bar or walls? Remember, you’re safe. No one can hurt you.”
Emi looked down at the white couches, the bar and the walls. “There’s an emergency data card on the rear wall next to a fire extinguisher.”
“Can you read the words on it? Maybe the name of the company that produced it?”
Emi shook her head. “No. The letters are too small.”
“That’s okay,” Sachie said. “Keep moving around the room. Are there any distinguishing marks or designs anywhere?”
Emi continued around the room, looking for anything that stood out, her body tensing when she came up blank. “No. Nothing.”
“Don’t worry, just keep moving. Take me to another space. You say you came up from below deck. Can you describe where you were?”
“They bound my wrists behind my back with zip ties and blindfolded me. I was transported from the compound to the yacht and carried down to Fallon’s suite. I sat there for what felt like an hour before someone cut the zip tie and told me to put on the red swimsuit. Fallon was waiting for me at the helm.”
“With your hands free, you were able to remove the blindfold,” Sachie said. “What do you see?”
Emi looked around the room. “The bed is covered in white satin sheets. The cabinets and drawers have shiny brass hardware.”
“Are there any monograms or logo designs on the cabinets, sheets or walls?”
Emi swept the room and found nothing like that. Her heart sank. “No.”
“It’s okay,” Sachie said. “Where did you go from there? Take me up the stairs. What do you see? Are the stairs metal, wood or carpeted?”
“Metal,” Emi said.
“Are there any designs on the risers or the steps themselves?” Sachie asked. “Can you feel your hand sliding along the rail?”
Emi nodded. “I can feel the rail. It’s chrome and shiny. I think about how often the deckhands have to polish the fingerprints off it.”
“Where did you go once you reached the top?”
“Through the main floor and up to the helm.” Emi tensed.
“Who is there?” Sachie asked quietly.
“Fallon and the captain.”
“I want you to look around the space and tell me what you see.”
“Fallon. I see him turn toward me and scowl.”
“Emi, you’re in a safe space. He can’t touch you here. Look past him as if he doesn’t exist. As if he isn’t there at all. What do you see?”
“Windows all around,” Emi said, “looking out at the ocean ahead and to each side.”
“Good,” Sachie soothed. “Now, focus on the surfaces—walls, counters, seats, floors. What do they look like?”
“White and chrome. The captain’s seat is leather. The steering wheel is chrome.”
“Is there any writing on the seat or the steering wheel?” Sachie asked.
Emi focused on the helm. She’d been on the yacht once before, in the room she was viewing. “There’s some kind of cursive writing.”
“How many letters?” Sachie asked.
“Four,” Emi said.
“I’m going to give you a pad and pencil,” Sachie said. “Don’t open your eyes. Keep focusing on the writing.”
Emi studied the letters and their shapes.
Sachie placed a pad and pencil in her hands. “Can you draw what you see?”
Emi placed the pencil lead on the paper and traced the letters the way she saw them in her memory. When she was done, Sachie took the pencil and pad from her hands and had her continue through the rest of the yacht, describing everything from the type of decking to the rails on the outside.
“Now, take me off the boat.”
Emi frowned. “You mean from when I was in the water?”
“Yes,” Sachie said. “Remember, you’re safe here at the ranch, lying comfortably on a couch. Hover above the water and describe what you see of the yacht.”
“When I finally make it to the surface, the yacht is speeding away.” Emi’s heart beat faster. “They didn’t slow down or come back for me.” She shivered. “The water is so cold.”
“You’re warm, Emi,” Sachie said in that beautifully calm tone. “You’re on a couch in a lovely ranch house. Your friends are nearby.”
George’s face found its way into Emi’s mind. She was lying in bed with him holding her close. His body warmed hers.
“Emi, take me back to what you saw of the boat as it drove away. Did you see any numbers or letters on the back?”
Emi pulled herself back into the cold water and stared at the back of the boat as it disappeared. Salt water splashed in her face, stinging her eyes. “I see nothing.”
“Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth,” Sachie said in her soothing voice.
Emi breathed in and out until the terror of being left out in the middle of the ocean faded to the back of her mind.
“Emi, you’re safe here at the ranch, lying on a warm, comfortable couch. I want you to take me into the compound where you and Sara lived.”
“Sara,” Emi whispered. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.”
“Sara is there. She’s waiting for you. Take me everywhere you went in the compound, one room at a time. Start with where you slept.”
Emi described the little cell where she and Sara shared a single bed and the bathroom with the tiny shower, sink and toilet.
“When you step out of the room, which way do you go?”
“I’m only allowed to leave when one of the guards escorts me. I go to the right if they’re taking me to Fallon. To the left if they’re allowing me to take Sara out to the tiny courtyard. It used to get sunlight until they hung camouflage netting over the top.”
“Did they let you and Sara go to the courtyard often?” Sachie asked.
“Every day for an hour if Fallon was away. Except recently. The week before Fallon came, they didn’t let us go out to the courtyard the first few days.”
“Did they say why?” Sachie asked.
“Something about installing a new security system.”
“Did you go out after they completed the installation?”
Emi nodded. “We had two days in the courtyard.”
“Take me through the corridors as you and Sara walked to the courtyard,” Sachie said.
Emi remembered holding Sara’s hand as they followed the guard. It was so small and precious. Her throat tightened.
“Do you see anything different?” Sachie asked.
“Sara and I walked behind the guard. When we came to where we had to turn right in the corridor, Sara pointed up and said, ‘Blue.’ I looked to where she was pointing. The old black camera that had been there had been replaced by a white one with a blue light shining from it.”
“Could you see any writing or a logo on the camera?”
Emi focused on the camera in her memory. “The blue light was at the center of thin lines in the shape of an eye. I remember now that I thought it was appropriate that the new security cameras were just that—eyes following our every move.”
Sachie had Emi take her around every turn that got her to the courtyard, describing the number of doors she passed on each side.
“The one at the end of this corridor leads into the mountain,” Emi said.
“How do you know that?”
“We were passing it one day when a couple of men came out. I could see a little of what was beyond. The walls weren’t uniform in color or consistency like the concrete walls of the bunker. They were darker gray with lines in it like sedimentary layers.” Emi inhaled. “It smells damp, like earth.”
“Emi, are you ready to come back to the ranch?” Sachie asked.
Emi shook her head. “I want to see Sara.”
“Take me to her,” Sachie said. “Make me see what you see.”
“I’m walking back to our room. She’s with Maria. I’m opening the door.” Tears leaked from the corners of Emi’s eyes. “There she is. Maria’s holding her. She’s crying. She doesn’t want me to go.” Emi swallowed hard on the lump in her throat. “I’ll be back soon, baby,” she whispered.
“Hover over the room,” Sachie whispered. “Now, bring yourself out of the compound and hover in the sky. Let the clouds wrap around you like a warm comforter.”
Emi drifted out of the room, out of the compound and wrapped her arms around herself like the clouds enveloping her in a warm blanket.
“You’re back at the ranch, Emi. You’re safe. Your friends are waiting for you.”
George’s face swam into Emi’s mental view.
“Whenever you feel like it,” Sachie said, “open your eyes.”
Emi memorized everything about George’s face, from the blue of his eyes to the way his lips turned upward on the corners. When she’d committed it to memory, she slowly opened her eyes.
“How do you feel?” Sachie asked.
Emi thought about it before answering, “Strangely rested and exhausted at the same time.”
Sachie chuckled. “It can be cathartic to relive incidents as if from a spectator’s point of view. At the same time, it can be mentally taxing.”
Emi swung her legs off the couch and sat up. “Did we find anything that will help us locate the bunker?”
Sachie glanced down at her notes. “I don’t know. A couple of things might have merit. If you’re up to it, let’s meet with Hawk and go over what you revealed.”
Sachie offered Emi a hand and helped her to her feet.
Emi retrieved her hat where it had fallen onto the floor and then led the way across the floor. She
pulled the door open and stepped out into the hallway, nearly tripping over George, who was leaning against the wall beside the door.
He straightened, caught her arm and steadied her. “Hey,” he said, staring down into her eyes with a concerned frown creasing his brow. “How’d it go?”
Emi shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
Sachie came out into the hallway carrying her notebook. “I’d like to meet with you and Hawk to go over what we discussed during our session.”
“Hawk is in the war room,” George said.
Sachie cocked an eyebrow. “War room?”
George grimaced. “The Brotherhood Protectors’ office building.”
“What?” Sachie said with a twist of her lips. “You can take the man out of the military, but you can’t take the military out of the man?”
George grinned. “Something like that. It’s what we know.”
“Then what’s the old military saying?” Sachie waved a hand. “Lead, follow or get the hell out of my way.”
Still grinning, George took Emi’s hand and led the way out of the house across the yard to the outbuilding where the Brotherhood Protectors’ office was located.
Once inside, Emi smiled at Sachie’s reaction to the tack room camouflaging the secret door and the corridor leading into the war room.
Hawk pushed away from a computer terminal and stood. “All done with the hypnosis session?”
“We are.” Sachie moved ahead of George and Emi. “If you’d like to gather around, we can go over my notes to see if there’s anything that will help with your search.”
“Let me bring my tech support personnel in on the discussion,” Hawk said.
Sachie nodded and sat in one of the seats at the conference table. “Do it.”
Moments later, Swede and Kyla’s faces appeared on the giant monitor.
“Swede, Kyla,” Hawk said, “this is Sachie Moore, the hypnotist. Sachie, meet Swede and Kyla, the Brotherhood Protectors’ expert data miners.”
“Nothing better than a giant head staring down at you unless it’s two giant heads,” Sachie muttered.
“I heard that.” Swede chuckled. “It takes some getting used to. What have you got?”
Emi sat beside George, her hand warming in his.
Sachie read through the notes, starting with Emi’s description of the yacht. She condensed some of it, skimming over the parts where she’d been blindfolded and going quickly through the lower deck and the main cabin.
When she got to Emi’s description of the helm, she opened a page on her pad and showed the people in the room and on the monitor Emi’s drawing of the writing on the steering wheel.
“Because Emi drew this with her eyes closed, it’s distorted,” Sachie said.
“The first letter is clearly an R,” George said.
“Agreed,” Sachie said.
“The second one is a loop like a cursive, lower-case E,” Hawk said.
“The third letter could be a lowercase cursive N, U or V.”
“That last letter is a lowercase A,” Sachie said.
“Reva,” Kyla said. “The yacht is made by Reva. I’ve been on one. Reva’s logo is its four-letter name in cursive.”
An image flashed onto the screen with an uppercase R and eva in lowercase cursive. “This is Reva’s logo,” Kyla said.
Emi nodded. “That’s what it looked like on the yacht.”
“So, we have a manufacturer,” Swede said. “If Reva isn’t a popular brand, we can narrow down the list of potential owners.”
“You have more notes,” Hawk said, pointing to Sachie’s pad. “What else do you have?”
She turned to a page with pencil lines drawn like a maze and held it up for all to see, including the two on the monitor. “This is amockup of the path Emi took to get from her cell to the compound’s courtyard.”
Sachie pointed to thicker lines along the path. “These are doors along the corridor. Emi thinks the one at this junction leads into the mountain. She saw it open one day and said it smelled damp and earthy. That might not help you find it from the outside, but you might need this drawing to locate the room Emi and Sara lived in for so long. And it might help you find your way back out.”
Emi stared at the drawing. “That’s pretty accurate. How do you do that?”
“It took practice,” Sachie said with a smile for Emi. Turning to the men, she said, “One other thing Emi said was Fallon recently installed a new security system.” She pointed at the corners in the bunker corridor drawing. “The cameras were mounted in the places of the original ones. They had blinking blue lights at the center of what looked like an eye.”
“A great reminder that eyes were on us anytime we left our room,” Emi said.
Sachie turned her pad toward Emi. “Is this what it looked like?”
Emi stared down at the thin black lines of a hand-drawn eye and nodded. “Almost exactly like that.”
Sachie showed the eye image to everyone in the room and on the monitor.
“I took a screenshot of the yacht name, the corridor map, and the all-seeing eye,” Swede said.
Kyla smirked. “So did I.”
“We’ll do some research to find all the people in Hawaii who own that brand of yacht,” Swede said.
“I’ll start work on identifying the eye logo and company that supplied the hardware,” Swede said. “Then I’ll crosscheck that brand with the people in Hawaii who purchased the system recently.”
“Anything else from the session?” Hawk asked Sachie.
“No,” Sachie said. “If you’re done with me, I need to get home and let my dog out.”
“Go,” Hawk said. “You’ve been very helpful. Thank you for dropping everything and paying a house call.”
“My pleasure.” Sachie turned to Emi. “Will you walk me out?”
Emi’s eyes widened. “Yes, yes, of course,” she said, wondering what else Sachie had to say she didn’t want the others to hear.
Emi walked with Sachie through the corridor and into the tack room, holding the hidden panel open with her foot.
Once in the tack room, Sachie turned to Emi and handed her a business card.
“I figure you’ve been through a really bad eight years. You’re probably suffering from PTSD. Here’s my card. When you’re ready to work through all that, give me a call. If you’re not comfortable working with me, I can recommend other therapists on this island and most of the other islands.”
Emi took the card. “I’d rather see you. If I’m still in Hawaii after I get Sara back, I’ll be sure to look you up.” She took Sachie’s hands and squeezed them gently. “Thank you for everything.”
Sachie gave Emi a crooked smile. “I hope you find Sara soon.” She pulled Emi into a quick hug and stepped back. “Let me know if I can help in any other way.”
“I will. Thanks.” As Sachie exited the tack room, George joined Emi.
She looked over his shoulder into the corridor. “Were we done in there?” she asked.
George nodded. “Swede and Kyla are working with what you came up with. Now, we wait.”
Emi shook her head. “I can’t sit still forever. I need to move.”
“I might have just the thing to keep you moving,” he said with a secretive grin.
Emi’s eyes narrowed. “What do you have in mind?”
“Follow me,” George led the way to another outbuilding, threw open the door and stepped inside.
Emi followed, allowing her eyes to adjust to the dark interior before she went too far and tripped over something.
George left her by the door and walked away as if he had no problem seeing in the dark.
Once Emi could make out shapes, she smiled.
The building was a storage place for various kinds of farm equipment, including tractors, implements and four-wheelers.
George sat astride one and looked across to where Emi stood. “Do you want to drive one, ride on the back of one with me or skip it all together?”
“I’ve never driven one before,” Emi said. “On the back with you would be best.”
Her pulse rate increased at the thought of straddling the seat behind George. She could wrap her arms around him for a reason other than because she wanted to.
And she really wanted to.
Was that bad? She’d been held captive for eight years and raped whenever Fallon came to the compound. She’d thought that if she survived and finally got free, she would never want to be intimate with a man ever again.
But with George, she’d felt stirrings of something inside. Was it...desire?
Emi pushed that word to the back of her mind, not at all ready to explore her feelings. She’d probably need a lot of sessions with Sachie to come to terms with the trauma she’d endured before she’d be ready to date or make love with any man, no matter how handsome or kind.
But when she got to that point, she’d want someone like George.
The voice in her head said, Don’t fool yourself. You don’t want someone like George. You want George.