Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,60
with sweetness that reminded her of an ice-cream shop.
“This was once a chocolate factory and that”—Jake indicated a massive white silo, about thirty feet in diameter and standing about eight stories tall; a metal ladder spiraled around the outside of it, ending in a small doorway two-thirds of the way up—“is where they used to store the chocolate.
“Is that cool or what?” Jake said. He rolled the window back up. “In warm weather the smell carries for miles. Kids used to say the water in the reservoir tasted like cocoa. It doesn’t.”
Above the hum of the car engine and the steady rain, Diana could hear water rushing. She continued driving slowly around the complex, and on the other side of the building was a body of water maybe a half mile wide, its surface dimpled like orange skin by falling rain. At the end nearest the silo, water cascaded over a dam.
“Park in there,” Jake said, pointing to a covered bank of loading docks at the back of the building. The car rocked side to side as it rolled over brush that sprouted from holes in the cement approaches.
Already backed into one of the shadowy bays was a black limousine. Diana pulled in alongside it and shut down the engine.
She took it and got out of the car. The smell of mildew and rotting leaves overwhelmed the chocolate. She touched the hood of the limo. It was warm, like it had been recently driven. Was that how Jake had gotten to Mill Village? One of his new partners drove him there? She wondered if this was the same limousine she’d seen cruising down her street. Was it the car that had blocked her into her driveway?
When Jake got out, he had her backpack and laptop. “I’m going to need all that?” she asked.
“Once you see the setup, you’re going to want to stay.”
As she slipped from between the cars, Jake fell in close behind her and ushered her up a few broad steps and onto a loading platform. A door along the back wall was propped open with a cinder block. He grabbed a flashlight that was sitting on a capped standpipe and turned on the beam. “You ready?”
Diana took a deep inhale of the chocolate-scented air.
“On belay,” Jake said. It was what the belayer told a climber after he’d anchored the rope, the equivalent of I’m ready and I’ve got your back.
“Ready to climb,” she said.
“Climb on.” With a hand on Diana’s back, Jake guided her inside.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Diana’s heart was banging in her chest and sweat prickled across her shoulders and neck. Fortunately, the flashlight seemed to grow brighter as she and Jake penetrated deeper into the building’s basement corridor. The floor ramped upward and the rectangle of light—the doorway to the outside world—receded behind them.
Diana remembered following Jake and Daniel through a dark Swiss railway tunnel, a shortcut to the base of Waterfall Pitch that Daniel had discovered researching the climb on the Internet. As Jake’s flashlight beam played across boarded-over windows and whitewashed cement walls covered with mold, she remembered how the lights of their helmet lamps had bobbed on the ground in front of them.
She’d been crazed eight hours later when she’d raced back alone through that same tunnel, desperate to find rescuers in time to save Daniel, terrified when she’d heard a rumble and seen the headlight of a fast-approaching train. Only just in time she’d found a recess in the tunnel wall. She’d clung there, screaming, as train cars roared past.
Afterward, in the heavy silence of the empty tunnel, she’d felt the first stirrings of that feeling of utter helplessness. That feeling had still been with her a week later when she’d reluctantly boarded an airplane for home. She’d sat in a window seat, clutching the armrest on the American Airlines flight from Zurich to Boston. When the flight attendant announced that the doors were closed, she’d begun to sweat.
“I want to get out,” she’d whispered to Jake. He’d held her hand, told her not to worry. “No!” She’d pulled free and pressed the flight attendant call button. “I need to get out now!”
Passengers across the aisle had given them uneasy glances. When the flight attendant came to see what was wrong, Jake reassured her and by then Diana had managed to regain a semblance of calm. But when the plane started down the runway, her heart had begun to race. Her throat went