who had apparently rounded out the posse that had come in search of her. “Where is he now? Where’s Ms. Pettistone?”
“She took him to the emergency vet. I had to crawl between the container and the house to get him out, and that’s how I got scratched up.”
Barry’s voice was rueful, the nice guy who’d tried to help out and gladly paid the price for it. And even worse, Darla thought in despair, the ex-debate captain’s story sounded reasonable.
“I told her I’d call a car service so she could take him to the vet, but she said her own car was parked in the garage nearby, and it would be faster for her to go get it.”
“Why didn’t you go with her?” Jake’s tone was accusatory, disbelieving. “How was she going to drive and carry a hurt cat all at the same time?”
“I told her I’d go. Hell, I volunteered to drive her car. But the cat was going crazy. I guess I caused him some pain when I pulled him out from where he was stuck, and he didn’t want me anywhere near him. Darla said it was better for me to stay here. I should have thought to call you, Mr. James, but she said she would phone you as soon as she got to the vet.”
“I have Dr. Birmingham’s phone number in my contacts,” James said. “Let me phone her now and see if Darla is there.”
“I’ll try Darla on her cell,” Jake said. There was a pause, and then Darla could hear Jake’s voice again, saying, “It goes straight to voice mail. James, did you get the vet?”
“I reached a recording saying that the vet’s offices are closed on Sunday, and it gave an emergency number to dial. If what Mr. Eisen is telling us is indeed the truth, then perhaps they have sent Darla elsewhere.”
Darla barely heard this last, however, for she had finally tugged off the final bit of tape. Though the delicate flesh around her mouth burned painfully now where she’d lost skin in the process, her emotion was one of triumph. It didn’t matter that her hands and feet were still bound. All she needed to do was scream and her friends would come racing to her rescue. She took a swift breath and let it out again in what she meant to be a primal cry for help.
But what came out of her ravaged throat was nothing more than a whispered croak.
Horrified, Darla tried again, but with the same results. Though it had been brief, the pressure of Barry’s hands around her throat apparently had been sufficient to do some damage. In fact, the pain that somehow had stayed on the fringes of her consciousness now swept over her. Her throat felt scraped raw and was painfully swollen, the sensation far worse than the time she’d been rushed to the emergency room as a child when the strep throat she’d contracted had set fire to her tonsils and made breathing almost impossible. And that didn’t even count the raging headache from where she’d struck her head on the doorjamb.
Think! If she couldn’t make some sort of noise, Jake and James and Robert might well leave without finding her. And that meant Barry would return upstairs to finish what he had started.
Trying to hold back a wave of dread at the thought, she pounded her bound hands against the wooden subfloor. The resulting sound, however, was muffled by the tape, and the vibrations absorbed by the floor’s surface. At this rate, she’d never catch anyone’s attention two stories down. If only she had a hammer, or something with some weight behind it!
She frantically scanned the room for something malletlike, even though she knew all Barry’s tools were downstairs. She heard Jake say, “I think I should call Reese, anyhow. And we can send Robert over to the garage to see if Darla’s car is still there.”
“I agree with your suggestion,” James said. “In fact, I—”
“Now wait a minute.”
Barry’s voice had cut James short, and Darla could hear the anger in his tone.
“I don’t mean to be rude, and I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t care about Darla or her cat, but I’ve got some projects I have to finish here. I was supposed to be in Connecticut for Curt’s funeral, but one of the building inspectors was giving me a hard time about the wiring we just did. So I really need you people to leave right now