hell had I been thinking? Or maybe more importantly, what could I have done differently to not have ended up here? I should have tried harder to escape from the abandoned house, or fought harder when I first fled from the SUV. I rubbed my temples and considered the possibilities. I could have grabbed a piece of the glass from the floor, looked for something to write on the wall with so someone might have known I had been there but then after finding my blood they had already known I was there…I shivered at the idea of what the crime scene probably looked like.
At least then I didn’t give in to the tears. My anger was too ferocious to let me cry, at least not then. I could blame myself, and I probably would for the rest of my life—regardless of how short it might be. But the true fault lay in the deviousness of my abductors. What did these people think a teenage girl could do to them, anyway? Even if I had gone to the police with what I saw, they probably wouldn’t have taken a teenager seriously.
I was gnashing my jaws together as I slid further down, adjusting myself so I was completely on the floor. Charlie was possibly the worst of them all—showing me some of what the media had to say, letting me in on the Internet access, only to deny me the smallest contact with Dad, which could be a great source of comfort to him in the days to come. Maybe it was a sick kind of game to him, a way of getting people’s hopes up and then watching them sink like so many stones into the ocean.
And why hadn’t they just dumped me overboard when they had the chance? My family didn’t have any money; they must know that by now. I was still somewhat confident that my body was safe, but my mind couldn’t formulate reasons why they would bother keeping me alive at all if I wasn’t any use to them. I considered what Charlie said about a murder conviction and trembled at the thought. I pictured Dad on the steps of some courthouse demanding justice for a dead daughter. So they hadn’t killed me for any sort of morality, but merely for practicality’s sake.
None of them wanted to go back to prison.
I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the ship. The nausea had receded and for that I was grateful. I had hoped this meant I neither had a concussion nor seasickness, though time would tell.
The coolness of the floor felt good against my scalp. And though my body begged for more sleep, the little switch of common sense in my mind told me to keep vigilant, reminding me I was not in a safe place. I opened my eyes again and stared at the dim light of the desk lamp. Though it didn’t offer much, I deemed it efficient for the little room.
I sat up slowly and pulled the lamp up to the bed. I reached for the piles of papers and notebooks. I knew I shouldn’t look through them, after all, what if they were some intimate correspondence and reading them guaranteed my death? Still, reason hadn’t exactly been my forte in the last 24 hours. Yet I felt entitled to this. If they held information that could give me insight into my abductor, I had a right to them, didn’t I?
So even though I could feel myself biting my lip, a sign that something was amiss, I reached for one. I did take a second and third glance at the door to assure myself no one would come raging in as I curled up with a notebooks. As I opened the front cover and my hand explored the thin paper, I understood it was actually a sketchbook.
Inside, nearly every page was full of some image or another. It seemed strangely intimate looking through those drawings—almost like seeing someone without their clothes on. The first was the intricate drawing of a sunrise, the ripples of the ocean were shadowed with whitecaps and some kind of bird was flying in the distance. The one that followed was a field of trees that looked like they were just coming into bloom, then there was an antique car, an empty dock…
I traced my index finger just above the lines of each sketch and tried to imagine the picture in my head. I attempted to think