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Penny is so mad she can’t sleep. She only thrashes around in the bed until it’s a total mess. But by three o’clock that morning, her rage at Holly has morphed into nagging disquiet. Her daughter is gone, as if she stepped on one of the world’s many hidden trapdoors and vanished from sight. What if the same thing has happened to Holly?
While her anger was burning hot she called Holly useless, but she hadn’t seemed useless. On the contrary, she’d seemed very competent, and her track record—Penny had done her due diligence—bore that out. Sometimes, though, even competent people made mistakes. Stepped on one of those hidden trapdoors and boom, down they went.
Penny gets up, retrieves her phone, and tries Holly again. Voicemail again. She’s reminded of how her unease grew when she kept trying Bonnie and getting her voicemail. She can tell herself that this isn’t the same, there’s a reasonable explanation, it’s only been six hours since the missed appointment, but at three in the morning the mind fills up with unpleasant shadows and some of them have teeth. She wishes she had a personal number for Holly’s partner as well as the one listed on the website, but she doesn’t. Only Holly’s personal and the Finders Keepers office number. So she’s out of luck, isn’t she? Besides, who leaves their phone on active duty at such an ungodly hour?
Lots of people, she thinks. The parents of teenagers… people on the night shift… maybe even private investigators.
She has an idea and goes to the Finders Keepers website. The partner’s name and office phone number are there, also a list of services and the hours when the office is open: 9 AM to 4 PM, just like Penny’s bank. At the bottom of the web page is After hours call 225 521 6283 and below that, in red: If you feel you are in immediate danger, call 911 RIGHT NOW.
Penny has no intention of calling 911; they’d laugh at her. If anyone answered at all, that is. But the after-hours number is almost certainly an answering service. She calls it. The woman who picks up sounds sleepy and has an intermittent cough. Penny pictures someone who’s working a job that can be done from home, even when sick.
“This is Braden Answering Service, which client do you wish to reach?”
“Finders Keepers. My name is Penelope Dahl. I need to speak to one of the partners. His name is Peter Huntley. It could be urgent.” She decides that isn’t strong enough. “I mean it is. It is urgent.”
“Ma’am, I’m not allowed to give out private num—”
“But you must have them, don’t you? For emergencies?”
The answering service woman doesn’t reply. Unless a coughing fit is a reply.
“I’ve been calling Holly Gibney, she’s the other partner. Calling and calling. She doesn’t answer. Her private number is 440 771 8218. You can check that. But I don’t have his. I need a little help here. Please.”
The answering service woman coughs. There’s a ruffle of pages. Checking her protocols, Penny thinks. Then the woman says, “Leave me your number and I’ll give it to him. Or more likely leave it on his voicemail. It’s three-thirty in the morning, you know.”
“I do know. Tell him to call Penelope Dahl. Penny. My number is—”
“I have that on my screen.” The woman is coughing again.
“Thank you. So much. And ma’am? Take care of yourself.”
When twenty minutes pass with no callback from Huntley (she didn’t really expect one), Penny returns to bed with her phone beside her. She drifts off to sleep. She dreams her daughter comes home. Penny hugs her and says she will never interfere in her daughter’s life again. The phone stays quiet.
3
Holly doesn’t regain consciousness, she rises back to it and into a world of pain. She’s only had one hangover in her life—the result of a badly spent New Year’s Eve she doesn’t like to think about—but it was mild compared to this. Her brain feels like a blood-soaked sponge in a bone cage. Her bottom is throbbing. It’s as if a bunch of wasps, the new kind they call murder wasps, sank their poison-filled stingers into her back and the nape of her neck. Her ribs on the right side hurt so badly that it’s hard to draw each breath. Eyes still closed, she presses there gently. It makes the pain worse, but they seem intact.
She opens her eyes to see where she is and a bolt of pain goes through her head even though the lights in the Harris basement are low. She lifts her shirt on the right side. That makes the wasp stings hurt worse than ever and another bolt of pain goes through her head, but she gets a good look—better than she wants to—at a huge bruise, mostly purple but black just below her bra.
She kicked me. After I was out, that bitch kicked me.
On the heels of that: Which bitch?
Emily Harris. That bitch.
She’s in a cage. Crisscrossed bars form squares. Beyond them is a cement-floored basement with a large steel box at the far end. It’s standing in what looks like a workshop area. Above the cage, the lens of a camera peers down. There’s a kitchen chair in front of the cage, so the Fire Engine Man wasn’t a dream after all. He was sitting right there.
She’s lying on a futon. There’s a blue plastic potty squatting in one corner. She’s able to get to her feet (slowly, slowly) by grasping the bars and pulling herself up by her left hand. She tries to add her right, but the ache in her ribs is too much. The effort of standing makes her headache worse, but standing takes some of the pressure off her bruised ribs. Now she’s aware that she’s fiercely, fiercely thirsty. She feels like she could drink a gallon of water without stopping.
She takes shuffling baby steps toward the potty, lifts the lid, and sees nothing inside, not even water laced with that blue disinfectant that looks like antifreeze or windshield washer fluid. The potty is as dry as her mouth and throat.
Her memory of what happened is blurry at best, but she has to get it back. Has to get her wits back. Holly has a good idea that she’s going to die in this cage where others have died before her, probably at the hands of the Red Bank Predator, but if she doesn’t get her wits back, she’ll die for sure. Her bag is gone. Her phone is gone. Bill’s gun is gone. No one knows she’s here. Her wits are all she has.
4
Roddy Harris is sitting on the front porch, wearing slippers and a robe over blue pajamas covered with red firetrucks. Emily gave them to him for his birthday years ago as a joke, but he likes them. They remind him of his childhood, when he loved to watch the firetrucks go by.
He has been sitting on the porch since sunrise, drinking coffee from his tall Starbucks travel mug and waiting for the police. Now it’s nine-thirty on this Thursday morning and there’s been nothing but the usual traffic. This isn’t a guarantee that no one knows where the woman has gone, but it’s a step in the right direction. Roddy believes that if noon comes and goes with no police, they can begin to assume that Miss Nosy Girl hasn’t been missed. At least not yet.
