Chapter 23
Paige tossed what was left of the video camera in the sink.
“What the hell are you doing?” Chris demanded. “You’re just going to piss him off.”
“I won’t be watched like a caged animal at the zoo.”
“That won’t work. He has hidden cameras, too. They’re everywhere. You’ll never find them all.”
Paige spun around to face Chris. “I don’t have to find them all. That’s not the point. Now if you don’t get out of that tub and help me find a way out of here, so help me God, you won’t have to worry about him killing you. I’ll do it myself.” She raised the leg of the chair to emphasize her point. “I’ll beat you to death with this.”
“Okay. Okay,” Chris said, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m getting out.”
She stood up, wrung out her hair, and climbed out of the tub. The snake tattoo and scar writhed and glistened as she moved. “Just let me dry off.”
Paige looked around the bathroom for a towel but couldn’t find one.
“Where are the towels?”
There was no towel rack, no towel sitting atop the sink, no towel draped across the back of the toilet. There were no towels on the floor and only one small cabinet under the sink. Paige opened it but only found a small plastic trashcan.
“There aren’t any,” Chris said. “We air-dry. Although sometimes he has me dry him.”
“Jesus.” No wonder Nicholas had been in the bathroom with her for so long. “We don’t have time for that.” She didn’t even want to think about how he made Chris dry him. Ick.
Paige yanked at the medicine cabinet door, looking for something that might be of use, but it wouldn’t open. A small key lock mounted flush with the cabinet held the door fast. Grabbing Chris by the arm, Paige dragged the woman to the cabinet. “Do you know how to open this?”
“No. He has the only key.”
Paige pulled her out of the bathroom.
“What’s the rush,” Chris said. “We have plenty of time. Nicholas won’t be back for a while.”
“How do you know?”
“I told you. He’s gone after Eddie. To bring him here.” Chris flapped her arms like a bird in an attempt to dry them. “You realize I’m dripping all over everything, and we’ll have to clean all this up before he gets back.”
Paige hoped Nicholas would die in some horrific car accident before he made it to Eddie. But she knew she couldn’t count on something like that happening. She had to stay calm, think things through, act.
“We won’t be here when he gets back,” Paige said. “How do you get into the cabinets?”
Chris folded her arms across her chest and somehow managed to leave her breasts exposed. “You’re being stupid.”
“Just tell me how you get into them.”
“You can’t. They’re locked too.”
Paige ran her hands over the surface of the kitchen cabinets but found no place for a key. “How? How do you unlock them?”
“With a key.”
“No kidding. Where does he put it? Where’s the lock?”
“It’s magnetic,” Chris answered. “The locks are magnetic. He uses a little remote transmitter on his keychain to unlock them. He carries it with him and when he isn't carrying it he keeps it locked up in a safe in the floor of his bedroom.”
Paige turned and looked around the house. “Are there any tools in the house? A screwdriver maybe?”
“Nope.”
“What about this door?” Paige pointed at the steel door Nicholas had left through. “Where does it lead?”
“His bedroom,” Chris said. “There’s another door in his bedroom that opens into a foyer where there’s a door that leads outside. But the door to the foyer is stainless steel, just like the one that leads to his bedroom. You couldn’t get through them with a battering ram.”
Paige took a closer look at the door. The hinges were on the other side of the doorjamb and the frame around the door appeared to be metal as well. Lightning lit up the living room through the big bay window dragging her eyes back to it. Maybe they didn’t have to get though the doors. Maybe there was another way out. “What about that window?” Paige said pointing at it. “Can we get out through that?”
“You tried the window in here, didn’t you? I could hear you banging away on it. I don’t know what they’re made out of, but it isn’t glass.”
Chris snapped on a switch flooding the front yard with light.
“The big window is the same stuff, only there are two layers of it, and even if you managed to get through both layers it’s about a thirty foot drop to the rocks below.”
The grounds in front of the house were open all the way to the road. No guard dogs. No chain link fence with razor wire surrounding the property. There was just a decorative white wooden rail fence that anyone could easily climb over and an iron gate blocking cars from entering the drive. Obviously, Nicholas was supremely confident they wouldn’t be able to get out of the house.
“What about the walls?” Paige asked. “Have you tried going through the walls?”
“My adopted dad was in the construction business,” Chris said. “The walls aren’t sheetrock. They’re wood, and thick. You could throw your body against them all day long and not make a mark on one. The ceiling is the same as the walls. I told you this is pointless. This place is like a vault.”
Paige twisted the chair leg in her hand. “There has to be a way out.”
“There is,” Chris said. “The way you came in. With Nicholas.”
She thought about an air conditioning vent into the attic space but immediately dismissed the idea. There was no way either of them would fit through the opening. She looked down at the floor. “What about this?”
“The floor? What about it? It’s a floor.”
“What’s it made of?”
“Tile?”
The kitchen, bathroom, and dining room were ceramic tile, but the floor in the living room was white carpet.
“Not in the living room,” Paige observed. “Does the house have a basement?”
Basements were unusual in the area. She thought it had something to do with costs and the soil, something about the red clay and moisture, but considering what Paige had learned about Nicholas in the last few hours, she suspected a man like him might find use for a basement. And he certainly had the means.
“Yeah, sort of. It’s his studio,” Chris said. “Why?”
“How do you get into it?”
“There’s a staircase that leads down into it, but you can’t get to it and you don’t want to go there.”
“Why not? What’s in there?”
“That’s where he works. The place is like a medieval torture chamber. That’s where his machines are. And there’s no way out of the house from down there. That door is steel as well.”
“Machines? What kind of machines?”
Chris shrugged. “His tattoo stuff, a freaky looking microwave, inks, a wooden bed with ropes that stretch you out by your ankles and wrists, a chair that holds you and pokes you in the a--”
Paige brought her hand up in a stop gesture. She didn’t want to hear the gory details. She’d learned enough to realize there were probably tools down there. Maybe even something she could use for a weapon.
She rushed to the place where the ceramic tile of the kitchen and dining areas met the living room carpet. A small portion of the living room, the part closest to the bay window, hung over the edge of the small cliff. Here the large room shifted from dining area to living area. This was the point where the carpet was farthest from the big bay window and the cliff.
Chris gasped and Paige turned quickly to find Chris with a hand covering her mouth. She stared into the living area. “You broke his rocking chair,” she said. “You shouldn’t have done that. His grandmother gave that to him.”
“And I’m going to break a lot more,”
Paige said wondering where else the woman thought she could have gotten the wooden leg she carried.
Setting the leg down, Paige got down on her hands and knees. She dug at the thick carpet where it met the tile and pulled up until a portion ripped free. Then she yanked up the pad so she could see what was beneath it. A wood floor.
“Bingo,” she said.
Yanking back the carpet, she exposed about a five by five section of the wood floor. She didn’t know if she would be able to bust through it, but she was sure as hell going to try.
“That isn’t going to work,” Chris said.
Paige looked up at her. Chris had stayed on the tile presumably to keep the water dripping from her nude body from getting on the carpet. She shifted from one foot to another. The snake adorning her body rippled and undulated with her every little movement. It had a hauntingly hypnotic quality that pulled at Paige’s psyche. She couldn’t help herself. It was a disturbing image that drew her eyes and left her wondering at her character. It pulled at her the way a car wreck or someone jumping from a high-rise pulls at a person with a voyeuristic fascination for the morbid.
Despite her revulsion, Paige admired the work as a student of art. Purely from an artistic standpoint, Paige thought the work on Chris’s body was amazing. The vivid copper and red tone details and shading were exquisite. The snake breathed with its own life. She wondered how many hours it had taken to complete it. How painful its creation had been.
But why a snake? Snakes gave her the willies. Even paintings of snakes gave her the willies. She shook her shoulders to shake off the thought. Something less creepy would have been more aesthetic. She remembered something about a Lébé god in her African art studies. Something about the god visiting the members of the tribe in the form of a serpent and licking their skin in order to purify them and infuse them with power. Or was it life force? She couldn’t quite remember the details, but what she did remember didn’t sound appetizing.
Water ran down Chris’s body, over the snake, dripped to the tile floor where it formed a small puddle. The puddle gave Paige an idea.
She went to the sink, turned it on, and ran her own hair under the water. She rushed back to the spot where she had exposed the wood flooring, wrung her hair out onto the wood, then headed back to the sink for more water.
“What are you doing?” Chris demanded, her arms crossed, her head tilted to one side. Somehow she managed to pull off both puzzled and outraged quite well.
Paige wrung more water from her hair onto the floor. “The water will weaken wood,” she explained, heading back to the sink.
“There’s no way you're going to weaken the floor enough to break though it with your body weight. That water would have to sit there for several months, maybe longer. You’re just making a mess. You’ll get us both in trouble.”
Paige stopped. Chris was right. It wouldn’t work fast enough. Frustration rushed through her and quickly turned to anger. Blind anger.
She marched back to the carpet, got down on her hands and knees, and ripped at it with her fingers, tore at it with her nails, yanked at it with her fists. It felt good. If she couldn’t get out of the nightmare house then she’d do her best to destroy it. To hell with Nicholas. To hell with his damned house.
Chris told her to stop, but Paige’s feeling of revenge was too satisfying. She was doing something, dammit. She knew Nicholas or Edward or whatever the hell his real name was would be pissed when he saw what she had done to the floor and she would probably suffer for it, but she didn’t care.
She stood up, marched to the wall. She reared back and kicked it, throwing her weight and hip into the blow. A sharp pain spiked through her heel. She ignored the pain and kicked the same spot. The pain leapt from her heal all the way up to her hip. She took several steps back, sprinted directly at the wall, lowered her shoulder. She bounced off it like a speeding car off a concrete highway barrier.
Chris sat down in a dining room chair. “You’re wasting your time.”
Paige ignored her, turned her attention to the big bay window. She beat against it with her fists, bringing them against the glass like two hammers. She stepped back and kicked it. Nothing.
The armoire. In a frenzy she grabbed the edge of the armoire, put a foot up and the wall for leverage, and pulled. She pulled until her muscles ached and burned from the effort, but the armoire would not budge.
She bent over, her hands on her hips, and gasped for breath. At some point in her rage she’d lost the throw blanket. It lay in a pile on the floor. She snatched it off the floor, wrapped it back around her. She looked around the room. The walls and window didn’t have so much as a nick on them, and the armoire hadn’t moved an inch. She’d accomplished nothing, nothing except bruising her foot and shoulder. But at least she was trying. At least she was fighting.
A stitch made its way up her side and she winced as it tightened. She looked at the carpet, the stupid white carpet. Who buys white carpet anyhow? White carpet made selling a place a complete nightmare. Homebuyers know it will stain eventually. Just a matter of time.
What was she thinking about? White carpet? At a time like this? She’d slipped into real estate mode. Imagine that. Here she was, kidnapped, naked, stuck in a hellish nightmare of a home, and she was thinking about how hard it would be to sell the place with its white carpet. She shrugged off her carpet thoughts.
She’d been working without thinking. She needed to think. Blind rage wasn’t going to get her out of this mess. Nicholas had been calculating in the creation of his home. She needed to be equally calculating if she hoped to escape.
The basement. His studio. There had to be a way into it. If not through the wood floor then some other way.
Paige turned to Chris. “Where’s the staircase that leads to his studio?”
“You don’t want to go down there. You won’t find what you’re looking for.”
Paige circled the couch, looked down at the floor. A large chunk of carpet was pulled away from wood floor. At least she’d made some progress in destroying the carpet. It was better than nothing.
“Please don’t,” Chris said. “I’m begging you.”
Paige stopped, studied the couch. Something about it wasn’t right. What was it? It looked normal enough. Standard everyday plaid couch. But something wasn’t right about it. She felt it. It drew her eyes like a spot of dirt on a painting.
She got down on her hands and knees, began pulling the carpet away from the floor in the direction of the couch.
Chris stood back up. “What’s wrong with you?”
Paige ignored her, clawed at the carpet like a beast, every twisting twinge of pain in her face and chest and every other part of her body completely forgotten. She yanked at the carpet, wrenched it back and forth and ripped at it until the wood floor was exposed all the way to the couch. Then Paige pulled and shoved at the couch, but it wouldn’t move. She kicked it.
“Come here and help me,” Paige yelled.
Chris made no move toward Paige or the couch.
Getting down low, Paige pulled up hard while shoving on one end of the couch. It teetered on the edge of upward movement. She moved around to the back and pushed up on it trying to turn it over. The couch rotated forward on hinges, revealing a metal door mounted in the floor. The same kind of metal door used for Tornado shelters.
Paige’s heart nearly leapt out of her throat. The success filled her with purpose and hope.
“We’re getting somewhere now,” she said.
There was no handle on the door, nothing to grab to pull it open with. The gap between the wood floor and the metal door was too small for her to pry it open with fingers. But that didn't matter. She’d find a way to open it.
Chris stepped out of the dining room and moved closer. The movement caught Paige’s eye and she glanced up at her. Chris had the broken leg from the rocking chair in her hand.
&nb
sp; “That’s a good idea,” Paige said. “Maybe we can pry it open.”
Paige got down on her hands and knees. The door was ice cold. A small lip protruded around the edge of the door. The door was metal but didn’t look to be anywhere near as strong as the steel door that led into the bathroom and Nicholas’s bedroom. If she could jam something between the lip and the floor she might be able to bend it open.
She looked up at Chris to take the chair leg from her and saw Chris bringing it down on her like a woodsman bringing down an ax to split a log.
No! she thought, bringing her hands up to protect herself from the blow. But it was too late. She heard a loud crack, felt her body slump to the floor.