Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,71
that it was perfectly okay to keep her sister unconscious for days on end, just as long as they hadn’t “hurt” her while they regrouped. When there was the mere possibility that plan B was going awry, Jake had been all too eager to “abort the mission”—as if in real life you could just reset your score to zero, or simply get up and leave the game.
Shaking with rage, Diana struck out. In slow motion, the metal rack toppled, rubber tubing flailing in the air like an angry snake. She grabbed a pillow from the bed and held it to her face, muffling a cry.
Had Daniel and Jake stayed up nights thinking up ways to bring her in? That limousine she’d seen on her street, like the one she’d seen parked in the mill’s loading dock. The delivery van that had pulled into her driveway but hadn’t delivered anything. Had those been them?
After Daniel’s supposed death, she’d trusted Jake. He’d set up her computers. Her video surveillance. They shared the e-mail account and used its drafts folder as a drop for shared information. Jake had assured her that it was far safer to communicate that way than to broadcast messages across a network.
He had access to every mail message she sent. He could easily have discovered that she’d registered her avatar for the improv event at Copley Square. She’d been telling him she was feeling stronger, almost ready to venture out, so he would have been expecting her to do something like that.
She crept back into bed, shivering. Jake had been there, along with Ashley, to pull Diana back from the brink when she was wallowing in grief. When she still couldn’t move on, he’d brought her news that Daniel’s remains had been recovered. But he’d played her for a fool. He must have known that there was no way she could fly back to Switzerland with him. He hadn’t gone to Switzerland alone; he hadn’t gone there at all. She wondered whose ashes she had been given, or if there were any ashes at all in the urn he’d supposedly brought back along with documentation that was essential for Daniel to be declared legally dead so she could collect the insurance settlement.
That had been months before Daniel claimed he’d returned to the States. Was his tale of crawling to safety and recovered memory a fantasy too? She was determined to find out.
More important, why were they doing this—what was at stake now that made them risk exposure in order to bring her in? All she knew for sure was that instead of watching her back, all the while Jake had just been watching her.
Two could play that game. Diana spent the rest of the night awake and thinking. She ran scenarios for the next day through her head, doubling back from dead ends and branching to account for the unexpected. By morning she was exhausted and stiff with cold. If there was heat, she didn’t know how to turn it on. The sky had turned light and she was still alone.
She headed to the makeshift bathroom. As she sat on the toilet, she eyed the modular shower stall. A hot shower would have been heaven, but she knew she’d never be able to let down her guard long enough to step naked into what looked like an upright coffin, especially not with that security camera staring down at her from the ceiling.
She snagged a washcloth and one of the pale blue towels stacked on the floor and sniffed them. A sponge bath would have to do.
Later, she dried off and put on clean underwear from a stack of neatly folded items that she recognized as her own. She put her jeans back on. It seemed easier to get into them. No wonder. For five days she’d barely eaten.
She found her fleece turtleneck pullover among the clothes folded in the little bookcase. Over that, she wore Nadia’s leather jacket.
When she reemerged, the door to the passageway that connected to the silo stood ajar. She padded across the floor and peered out into the stairwell. On the floor were her red boots. When she went to pull them on, inside one of them she found a handwritten note: Follow the tape.
Chapter Thirty-One
Follow the tape? Sure enough, a line of duct tape had been stuck to the floor on the landing, leading down the stairs. Overhead Diana spotted a small surveillance camera, tucked into a heavy beam and aimed at the doorway