Chapter 44
Marisa leaned into a moaning scream behind the tape, pulling for all she was worth against bindings at her wrists and ankles.
She couldn’t see who stood behind her, only that someone lurked there. The chair she was secured to scraped against the floor, threatening to topple as she panicked and thrashed.
I rushed into the room. “What is going on? Are you—?”
I was on my knees, reaching for the bindings. She collapsed against my shoulder, shaking and heaving.
“What is happening?” But she couldn’t answer me.
The bands on her wrists were tight. I pushed her head off me and found a loose corner on the tape across her face.
Under the tape, her lips were chapped and the skin around her mouth red, lashed with welts from the adhesive.
She was crying too hard to speak. I could picture that truck out in the alley, still running.
Still running.
“We need to get out of here,” I said. I plucked and pulled at the straps on her wrists, wishing, desperately this time, for one of Oona’s knives.
“I thought I was going to die here,” Marisa said. Her voice had a pack-a-day rasp. “I thought they were going to kill me. I thought…”
“We have to be quick.” I tugged at the nearest wrist binding. I had so many questions. “Who put you here?”
“I don’t know who they are,” Marisa said. “A man. A young man.”
I finally had loosened the knot, and pulled that hand free. “Work on your other hand, while I get your ankles. A young guy?”
I was thinking about Joey, dead in the alley. Had he been mixed up in something bad?
Marisa’s attempts at releasing her other hand weren’t going well. Her fingers were stiff, and she was shaking violently.
“Have you seen him today?” I asked.
“Not today.”
“Recently?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice pitching upward again.
“I don’t know what day it is. I’ve been here …
four? Four nights? I think? He let me see his face.
That’s not— He would only let me see his face if they were going to kill me, right?
I have to get out of here. Dahlia, I have to…
” She pulled at her tethered hand until it was turning red, purple.
“Calm down. Stop. I’m getting you out of here. See?” I had one of her ankles loose, and showed her the tie as a confidence booster. “They? You said they. Who else? A young guy and who else? A woman? Edith Maxwell?”
“Edith?” Marisa said breathlessly. But she had stopped thrashing. Her hair hung across her face. “She’s working for terrible people, Dahlia. They’re capable of anything. You can’t get mixed up with them, or Alex—whatever you do—”
“I won’t let Alex sell the pub to her,” I said. “This guy at the pub told me…”
I tore at the other ankle binding, silenced as another thought snapped into place.
Quin was another young man, wasn’t he?
A young guy hanging around a pub all day, nursing a beer until it was long warm. Sneaking off for phone calls every day, just out of view of the security camera. He could be some kind of lookout for the people lifting the floorboards downstairs. But to keep Marisa trapped here—what was it all for?
And if Quin was involved in this, what kind of game was it, pulling me into his confidence?
“Edith thinks she’s got it figured out,” Marisa said. “She can’t see that she’s given up the best part of herself. Sold it. Ever since her husband died, she’s been struggling—to keep up appearances, you know? And more than that, not just money. Struggling to find her way.”
“Aren’t we all?” I muttered into the knot at her ankle.
“But then she was doing so well, so busy,” Marisa said. “She needed office help, and I thought I could do that. And maybe I’ll get my real estate license, now that … I had more free time.”
She was crying again.
“Is that why you came to the pub? To warn me about Alex selling the pub?”
“And other reasons,” Marisa said softly, her cow eyes on me.
“Don’t,” I commanded. I’d left that snowflake-wrapped package back in another lifetime.
“I tried to warn you,” she said. “And I don’t blame you for not—but Alex wouldn’t listen either. I think the only people willing to listen to me that night were the guys sitting at the bar.”
“They like a show,” I said. I could picture the three Jims lined up, listening and pretending not to. “He wouldn’t have wanted to talk about selling the pub in front of them. Or with me in the room.”
“And then Edith was driving by,” Marisa said. “She spotted me leaving the pub. She thought I’d been drinking and wanted to drive me home. But it felt like … like a setup or something. I guess I had stopped trusting her.” She shook her head sadly. “We used to be good friends.”
“Her asking you if you were drinking gave you the idea to say you were going to check back into rehab?”
Marisa’s eyes roved over me, confused. “How did you…? I just needed to buy a little time. I had a plan to get my, um … to get out of town. Then I could figure out what to do, who to call. I never got to my car.”
I got her right foot freed, and reached for the last binding, the one she hadn’t been working on at her right wrist. She sucked through her teeth, her left hand fluttering toward it. “It hurts.”
“I’ll try to be gentle. Then what?”
“It was so fast,” she said. “He came out of nowhere. He covered my mouth and dragged me … here. I was sure they were going to kill me. Ah!”
I’d hurt her wrist. “Sorry. They, again. What did the other one look like?”
“I’ve never seen him, only heard his voice. He’s older, I think. He said— Oh, God, I don’t want to hear his voice again.”
“But you saw the young one?”
“He’s … tall? But I was always sitting, so maybe not that tall. Oh, I don’t know. Just a regular person.”
“Curly hair?”
“No. I don’t— No. Not curly.”
Not Joey, then. At least I didn’t have to think of him as a kidnapper and whatever else all this was. But it certainly didn’t let Quin off the hook.
“I did see a man with curly hair,” she offered. “In the alley.”
The last binding was still tight around Marisa’s swollen wrist. The tips of my guitar string–calloused fingers were opened up and raw from digging at the knots. “Like … lying in the alley?”
“He was falling down drunk.” She hissed through clenched teeth at my efforts at her wrist. “What kind of place is Alex running?” she muttered.
But Alex didn’t overserve people. “Falling down drunk,” I said.
“He was out of it. His friend was trying to help him but it was icy.”
Oh, man, star witness here to someone manhandling Joey’s body—and snatched to keep her mouth shut?
Until they could wrap up downstairs? I thought again of the truck in the alley.
Or had they meant to come back and shut her up completely?
We had to get out of here. I worked at the knot, trying to be careful.
“What did that friend in the alley look like?” I asked conversationally.
“Was he, like … fit? Like he just came in from chopping down a tree?”
“What does it matter— Ah!”
I had finally found purchase with the last binding. Marisa cradled her wrist against herself.
“You might have sprained it,” I said.
She looked up at me, tears in tracks down her dirty face. “Dahlia…”
Somewhere, deep in the building, I heard a thump.
“No time,” I said.
I had her up and through the door almost before the words had left my lips. We clipped the trash bag outside the door and scattered food containers, the gray recycled kind Alex hated. Tater tots tumbled out, old French fries. Marisa stumbled, weak, against me. My foot found the creaking board.
We froze.
“Footsteps,” she whispered.
I could hear them, too. Someone was coming up the stairs from the alley. The only exit was blocked.
“It might be the other one,” Marisa whispered, her voice rising into panic. “He’s the one who scares me.”
They both scared me. Everything scared me. I’d never imagined I would die in this place I’d played in as a kid—
I hauled Marisa around and back toward the bedroom.
“Not in here!” she cried, but I hushed her, dragging her back over the threshold and toward the closet.
“Like he’s not going to find us—”
“Shh!”
The closet door opened with a small squeak, like air being let out of a balloon. I shoved her inside, shuffled over our footprints in the dust leading up to the closet, and closed the door behind me.
Marisa whimpered as I pushed past her to the back of the closet. It was dark, but I knew what I was looking for. The door to the passage between the two apartments. But on this side, the door was—
Small. Smaller than I remembered. I pushed at the low panel. A shaft of dull light lit up my boots.
“Is that an opening for the tooth fairy?”
I’d been a kid, okay? Six years old, discovering a magical portal into another realm. It should be a tiny door. That was canon.
I could hear Marisa’s uncertainty. She sucked in a breath to tell me it wouldn’t work. I reached back and grabbed her leg.
The front door to the apartment had just opened.
I knelt down and put my head through the opening.
The scuttle space, known only to mice and six-year-old transients, was about ten feet across.
There was just enough dim light to see a few misplaced boxes—and my destination.
On the opposite wall was the door at the back of Oona’s closet.
A nearly full-sized door—if we could reach it.
I wiggled through the fairy door up to my waist, and then pushed against the doorway and pulled my legs through. I sat up on the other side, dusty, among boxes of old holiday decorations and outdated vinyl menu holders.
Marisa was shaking her head at me through the opening.
Come on, I mouthed, and stretched out my hand.
A floorboard creaked.
Marisa dove head and shoulders through the opening, but almost immediately had an arm wedged awkwardly.
I pushed her back through, pantomimed with my hands to give me hers, and pulled her through whimpering over the sprained wrist. She got stuck at the hips. “Suck it in,” I hissed.
As soon as Marisa’s feet were through the opening, I dropped her arms and dove past her, closed the little door, then planted my back in front of it, heels dug in.
On the other side of the wall, the footsteps quickened, came closer. Marisa crab-walked back. I held out my hand to stop her. Any noise …
Behind me, the needle-thin sound of air let out of a balloon. The closet door was open.
Marisa pulled her knees up to her chest and pressed her mouth against them.
The guy was knocking on the walls of the closet. But he soon discovered the little door and poked it tentatively.
I concentrated: heavy, weight-bearing thoughts.
He pushed against the door. I could feel the pressure at my lower back.
I looked at Marisa and calculated how long it would take the guy to get through. She could get through Oona’s closet and down to the pub to get help. I could stomp and kick at fingers, and keep him on the other side. He’d never get his shoulders through, right?
A man’s voice barked something angry. The sound of his voice was so close, I felt it inside my chest.
Did I know that voice?
Marisa closed her eyes. She knew it.
We waited in silence, breathing shallow. Afraid to move.
Marisa opened her eyes, and we stared at each other. I shook my head slowly, picturing a foot reared back.
And then the world exploded.