Chapter 53
The following year, on a December evening, I was the last one in the office, reading through the latest submissions.
Vince called to say it was dinnertime. This often happened, particularly in the winter when it got dark so early.
I would get lost in a fictional world and not notice the time slipping by.
I locked up the office and headed homeward, a five-minute walk through the snow.
There was no moon. It was darker than usual.
I had my head down, buried in my thick fleece collar.
It was bitterly cold. As I passed an alleyway, suddenly I felt a sharp blade at my throat as a hood was shoved over my head from behind.
‘Don’t make a sound. If you scream, I’ll cut you.’
I was too frightened to absorb the words and too shocked to make a sound.
The next thing I knew, I was dragged backwards into the alley and shoved into the back of a van.
My attacker took my bag off my shoulder, searched my pockets and found my cellphone, muttering, ‘Shut up … shut up …’ all the time, though I was too terrified to utter a word.
I felt my arms being wrenched back from my shoulders and something hard and tight – cable ties, I guessed – securing my wrists.
Then he pushed me down to the floor on my front.
‘Stay down, bitch,’ he warned.
I didn’t hear anyone else. He seemed to be on his own. There was something vaguely familiar about the voice, but I couldn’t place it. I could hear the doors closing and feel the van shift as he sat into the driver’s seat.
‘What do you want with me?’ I said, crying now as the shock wore off and the seriousness of my situation became obvious.
‘I told you to shut up, bitch.’
I was almost immobile, but I was able to kick the side of the door with my feet. He roared at me, ‘Stop that, stop!’ And I did.
For the next fifteen minutes he drove in silence.
I tried to remember the route, a right turn and then a left, another left and it felt like we were on the freeway, but then I realized we had stopped at a pedestrian crossing because I heard the beeper for blind people.
I was completely disorientated. I couldn’t tell where we were.
Then the van swerved and stopped. He turned the engine off and got out.
I screamed, as loud as I could, but then I heard him pull the back door of the van open, and he must have hit me because I lost consciousness.
I came to. I was in a cold room, probably a basement.
I felt pain all over. I must have been pushed down the steps.
A sack was over my head and tied around my neck.
I could just about breathe through it. I was terrified.
I had to fight hard to control my panic.
I could hear him shouting on the phone in a room above me.
‘But I got her for you … Don’t you think she should be punished? … She must pay for what she did …’
I realized then that this was the person who was behind all the messages, the letters, texts and emails. He was deranged.
‘I only roughed her up a bit, no broken bones … What?’ Then he was arguing with whoever was on the phone, because he screamed, ‘Fuck you!’
I shouted, ‘Let me go!’ and then a door slammed, and I could hear only muffled sounds as if he was pacing up and down in the room above me, occasionally shouting indistinct words.
The next sound I heard was music to my ears: police sirens, a lot of them. And then there were screeches of tyres and a loudspeaker.
‘Come out with your hands in the air.’
I felt like I was in an episode of NYPD Blue. Thunderous steps surrounded the building I was in and then there was a splintering sound – a door was being broken in. And then the sweetest sound of all, ‘Ma’am, are you okay?’ and gentle hands lifted me to a sitting position and removed the hood.
I looked around me. I was surrounded by four police officers, with another one standing at the top of the basement stairs.
‘Are you Erin Cooper?’
I nodded but I felt faint. I knew there was a gash on my head. When they snipped the cable ties, I pushed my hair out of my eyes and, looking at my hands, saw they were covered in blood.
‘May I have some water, please?’ I couldn’t stand up straight when I tried, my right ankle would not hold me, and I was embarrassed to discover I had peed myself. Then paramedics came with a stretcher and carefully lifted me on to it and out of that dank basement.
When I got upstairs and outside, I was surprised to find that I was in a very ordinary suburban house. The garage door was open, and cops were all over the van and in the hallway and up and down the stairs. Then I passed out.
Later, I woke up in the hospital, feeling queasy and thirsty. Vince was right beside me. ‘My God, are you all right, honey? Erin?’
‘It was Milo,’ I said, ‘one of Milo’s friends.’
Vince took his hands in mine. ‘Erin, it was Milo who called the cops. The guy who kidnapped you is Leo Bermingham.’
I was confused.
‘Principal Bermingham?’
Whatever sedation they had given me was strong. I couldn’t process what I was being told.
I woke early the next morning. I had a fractured ankle, which had been operated on, and some cracked ribs, as well as a laceration to my face.
He had hit me with a wrench. My skull was intact, but they had to keep me under observation for twenty-four hours because the cut around my eye socket, which had been stitched up, was long and deep.
It was black and purple. I was lucky to keep my left eye, they said.
I would be only mildly disfigured, a nurse told me, which is not what anybody wants to hear, but I was grateful to be alive.
Vince never left my side. I didn’t want to talk much. The girls from the office all wanted to see me, but I didn’t want to see anyone.
Detective Sergeant Hernandez paid me a visit later that day.
She confirmed that Leo Bermingham had the old typewriter.
They had found the burner phone that I’d thought was Margie’s, Photoshopped images of me on his home computer, as well as the emails to Watling and Harris.
He had already spent several spells in a psychiatric institution and those times coincided with the periods when I got no messages.
Hernandez said Leo Bermingham had become fixated on me, because he couldn’t get to Ruby.
He blamed us for ‘framing Milo Kelly’. Milo had been his pet project.
He claimed to have been ‘a father to that boy’.
He had been forced to quit his job the year I left school because of unspecified ‘erratic behaviour’ but I guessed it must have had something to do with Ruby or me.
He had even admitted to the attempt to burn down Dad’s church.
It was a blessing that Dad wasn’t alive to see this.
Hernandez and I had let him believe that it was some teenage vandals.
Bermingham had been a regular visitor to Milo in prison for the first year or two until Milo took him off his visitors’ list. On his release, Milo had tried to get a restraining order against him coming to the diner, but as a convicted rapist, he didn’t have much success.
Bermingham fully believed in Milo’s innocence and had decided I was the evil one who had ruined Milo’s life. I’d never told anyone about the campaign of hatred against me except for Detective Sergeant Irene Hernandez and my oldest friend, Saima. Bermingham got a four-year sentence.
Hernandez assured me that neither Milo nor Margie was complicit in Bermingham’s harassment of me or my abduction.
She reminded me that she and I owed an apology to Margie.
I tried, but Margie didn’t want to see or hear from me.
Hernandez gave her a letter of apology from me and told me she tore it up right in front of her.
She talked about suing me for harassment and she could have, but I never heard anything.
Vince was angry that I’d never told him about the campaign that had been going on for years.
But I could not deal with another angry man.
I didn’t want anyone to touch me, not even Vince.
I stayed in the spare room. From that point on, I drove to the office and back.
I constantly looked over my shoulder and startled easily.
I was unable to get past the fear I felt in that basement.
Even though I probably spent less than two hours there, I had truly believed they were the last hours of my life.
I was put on an anti-anxiety medication, a low dose during the day and a higher dose at night so that I could sleep.
Of all people, Nick was the one I related to most. He’d had years of paranoia.
He understood fear. He shared books with me, by Gabor Maté and Eckhart Tolle, and taught me to treat my anxious self like another person, to welcome her in with compassion and to meditate in the moment.
He taught me some breathing exercises that helped too.
My physical wounds healed. I had my hair cut into bangs again to cover my forehead, and the scar around my eye socket faded. Vince told me it was invisible, but I could see and feel it. I was Frankenstein’s monster.
Milo did his best to convince me he had nothing to do with Bermingham’s actions and never knew about the messages or the fire or any of it.
I wasn’t sure I believed him. I did not want him back in my house.
Vince understood and kept him away. I let Carla take the reins at Cooper Rivera for a while as I tried to recover from the trauma.
I began to write stories again. I could find an escape only in the alternate worlds I created.