Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The plastic comes away from the wall in my hand, cold and heavy. The smell reaches me first.
Beneath the raw wood and wet plaster, another smell rises. Human sweat and something medicinal. Under that, the sour smell of a body kept too long without washing or fresh air.
It doesn’t belong in a house.
My stomach turns over.
I cover my nose and make myself go in.
The flashlight beam swings ahead of me across bare studs and a stack of drywall gone soft at the corners.
There’s plywood bolted over the opening where a window will go, but rain is getting through every seam.
Halfway across the room, the subfloor gives way to open joists.
Between them is a gap where the framing drops into the crawlspace below.
I move the flashlight beam along the far corner, and it finds her.
For a second, my mind refuses to understand what I'm seeing. Then it does.
Julia.
She’s curled in the gap between the open joists where the flooring stops, on a padded blanket somebody laid there. I go down onto the boards, and they give under my knees. I wedge the flashlight against a stud so its beam holds on her face. Then I get both hands on her.
"Julia."
Her face is fully in the light now. There is a bruise gone yellow-green across one cheekbone, older than tonight.
Her mouth is sealed. Someone has taped it shut.
One strip of white tape is laid across her lips, another pressed over it the other way.
The edges are clean and square. Careful work.
I’ve watched David do exactly that a hundred times, over a dressing, over a wound, smoothing the tape flat with his thumb.
Her eyes are partly open.
That is the thing that breaks me. They’re moving.
She’s alive. Drugged, I think, because they can’t focus on me. They drift, swim back, find me, drift again. But she is alive.
A sound comes out of her from behind the tape, low and formless.
"I'm here," I say. "I'm going to get you out of here."
My hands are already at the tape. I get a nail under the edge of the top strip. It won’t come at first. It pulls her skin white before it lifts, and I peel it slowly, as carefully as I can, but fast enough to get it off her.
She makes the sound again while I do it.
The second strip comes away. Her lips are cracked, dried blood crusted at one corner. She drags in air, and it rattles in her.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
She tries to talk.
Nothing comes that I can use. Her voice is thick and slow, the words collapsed into shapeless vowels. The storm is too big. It is on top of the house now, thunder rolling in over itself until the walls hum. Between the thunder, the rain is a solid wall of sound.
I turn my good ear toward her and press close to her lips, but I still get nothing. "Slower," I say, which is a stupid thing to say to a woman who can only lie there and push sound at me that doesn’t become words.
Her hand moves. I follow it down.
Her wrists are bound in front of her, wound many times in the same white tape, tight and neat. I pick at it, but it is hopeless with my fingers.
The band she gave me slides down my wrist as I work. I feel in the dark for anything to cut with and find nothing. No box cutter, no key.
So I use my teeth. I catch an edge and tear at the tape until her hands come loose and drop into her lap.
Her ankles are next, the same tape, the same winding. I work at it in the beam and my hands won’t stop shaking. I keep talking.
“Stay with me,” I say.
The ankle tape gives. She’s loose now, all of her, but she doesn't push up off the floor. She lists against my arm. I get her half up. Her head lolls back, and I catch it in my hand.
"Julia. We have to go. Can you stand for me?"
Her eyes come to mine, and I can see her trying to tell me something. Not with sound. She has stopped trying to speak. It is all in her face now, in how she holds my gaze and won’t let go.
I read it as fear for me. I think it’s David she is afraid of, David who did this, David who could walk back in at any moment.
"I know," I say. "That's why we need to go now."
She makes a sound, one hard sound, and her head turns toward the hall, toward the far dark where I found the phone.
The phone.
The thought of the message that lit my screen out in the garage with her name over it comes back to me.
Mallory.
Julia's phone was lying in the hall, feet from where she is now. But her hands were taped in front of her.
The two things don’t fit together. She couldn’t have sent it.
Her eyes stay on mine.
I set the thought down. There is no room in me for a question I can't answer, not with her weight against my arm and the storm coming apart over the roof.
Get her up. Get her to the car.
That’s all there is now. Her, the road, and enough distance from this house to call for help.
But drugged like this she is a dead weight, more than I can carry. I lift her anyway. I get my shoulder under her arm, and we come up off the boards together. She sways into me. I hold her, steadying myself for a moment.
That's when she goes rigid in my arms.
Something catches her attention. Her eyes have gone past my shoulder, to the dark mouth of the room. They fix there and won’t move. I’ve never seen her so afraid. The fear is all in her eyes, because the rest of her body is too drugged to show it. One hand lifts an inch off my arm and stops.
I start to turn.
Behind me, one of the subfloor boards shifts with a small dry creak beneath someone's weight.
I never heard them enter.