Stanton had gone to Florida, perhaps to her lake cottage in the Chicago area.
“I wasn’t concerned, just a bit disappointed, as we’d been investigating kilns,” she says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s basement, of work recently done and of the unusual tools on the table down there.
Not for baking but for pottery, and I ask her if Peggy Stanton might have been thinking about installing a kiln in the basement of her home and if she might have hired Howard Roth on occasion to do an odd job or two. Very possibly, she says, but she can’t be sure, and she offers to give me a tour of Fayth House.
“I’ve held you up enough,” I reply, and I thank her as a chime sounds on my phone.
A text message from Lucy.
Who is Jasmine? I read, as I’m leaving.
Mildred Lott’s missing dog that turned up later, I text her back in the dark, returning to my SUV, which is next to another SUV that wasn’t parked there earlier.
A silver Jeep Cherokee with a silver mesh grille right next to me when the whole damn parking lot is practically empty, and I get an eerie feeling, a sensation that flutters.
Missing??? Then why’s she outside at night calling it?
About to get in the car & will call, I reply.
The silver Jeep Cherokee that passed me a little while ago when I first got here, it occurs to me. The same one I saw earlier in my own parking lot or one just like it. I point my key to unlock my SUV while part of me wants to run, and another text chimes.
Jasmine! Jasmine! Where are you? Come!
thirty-nine
I’VE BEEN TAKEN BY PIRATES.
The boat I’m in has a metal hull with carpet. It is moving fast on a heavy surf. It is cold and claustrophobic, and I’m groggy and in pain. I want to sleep.
Don’t sleep.
I’m going to be sick, motion sick, vertigo. My stomach lurches as if it wants to climb up my throat, and I wonder if I was hit on the head, if that’s how they got me here, dumped me in the cargo area of an old boat. On my back, a fishnet wound around me, I’m nauseated, about to gag. My stomach has nothing in it, and I don’t want dry heaves, mustn’t start retching uncontrollably. They can’t know I’m conscious, and I focus on every part of me, not sure if I’m injured. I don’t feel pain, just my pounding head.
“Are you awake?” a man asks loudly.
I’ve heard his voice before.
I don’t answer, and my head clears some. I’m in a car. In the cargo area in back, lights from oncoming traffic illuminating him intermittently. Surrounded by boxy shapes behind the front seats, I do the best I can to gather the darkness around me. To hide in it.
Make him think you’re dead.
“You should be awake,” says the man driving what I thought was a good idea for the CFC, a small crossover SUV.
I struggle to remember his name and envision his complete lack of empathy when he sat across from me. Soulless. Empty. Emoting nothing.
“Don’t fake it,” he says.
Play dead.
“Your fakery can’t save you anymore.”
I recognize the textures of the clothes I put on this morning, I think it was this morning. The corduroys, the cable-knit sweater, and a down jacket I wore because the temperature was freezing.
I rub my feet together, and they are bare and very cold, and I push them against the net and they find the resistance of something hard and square. It is completely dark, and I hear traffic. While I don’t remember what happened, I am beginning to be certain I know. Then I think I’m dreaming.
This is a bad dream. I need to wake up. It’s a terrible dream, and you’re fine.
I take a deep breath and choke back bile as my head throbs, and I take more deep breaths and realize I’m awake. I really am, and this really is happening. I mustn’t panic. I push the hard square shape with my netted bare feet, and whatever it is moves very slightly and feels like plastic.
A scene case.
He speaks loudly from the driver’s seat, asking if I’m awake, and again I don’t answer, and I know who he is.
“Now you won’t have to figure it out anymore,” Al Galbraith says, and I can tell by the sound of his voice, the fluctuations in the volume of it, that he continues to turn around, looking in my direction.