Sydney stared at him apprehensively. “I don’t think I can do that. Not without knowing for sure that my father is behind it. That would be… a really vicious thing to do.”
Something that her mother would be capable of, but not Sydney.
The detective nodded thoughtfully. “I understand. It was just a thought. I’m going to go back to the station for awhile. You have my cell number. If you need me, call. In the meantime, until you hear from me, lay pretty low. Sydney, don’t do anything in a scheduled pattern. If you normally go somewhere, don’t. Do it at a different time. Shake up your routine. Make it difficult for someone to follow you.”
She nodded and he turned on his heel, taking two steps before he turned back.
“Sydney? We didn’t get off on the right foot and I know that is my fault. I apologize. I’m so used to people from your circles being insincere and entitled. And you are not. I never should have assumed otherwise.” His voice was quiet but firm.
Sydney was astounded, but before she could even respond, he had spun back around and continued walking to his car with long, graceful strides. She could see his gaze spanning the horizon, looking for anything out of place with his trained detective’s eye. She supposed that she should start doing that as well, always being on alert. The thought was depressing.
Stephen stood and offered his hand to her, which she gladly took. He pulled her to her feet and then to his chest.
“It’s going to be okay, Syd. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
She knew that he meant it and that he wouldn’t let anyone hurt her if he could at all help it. But what worried her was that Stephen was a kind-hearted person. She was pretty sure that in order to anticipate the actions of a psycho, you would need to understand them. There was no way that Stephen could think like that. Of that she was certain.
“Thank you.”
She didn’t voice her concern, only brushed a kiss across his soft lips and then quickly walked through the shadowy darkness to the car. She was done with this day—it had almost done her in. Literally.
* * *
She still dreamed that she was a mother. For the first several weeks after losing the baby, she had dreamed that she was rocking her daughter in a snowy white rocking chair.
The dreams would change and sometimes she dreamed that she was cradling an infant swathed in pink clothing in her arms. The baby’s tiny hands rested against her chest and she could practically smell the powdery, heavenly baby scent.
Other times, she was rocking a beautiful little girl with caramel colored hair, just like her own. She was reading to her, relishing every minute of the quality time with her daughter. And then she would wake up. Every time. And every time, she felt the horrible, devastating emptiness of her loss rushing back to her.
As bad as those dreams were to wake up from, at least they were pleasant while they lasted. She had a taste, however brief, of what it was like to hold her daughter. Her new dreams were different. She dreamed that a baby was crying somewhere and she couldn’t find it. She inherently knew that it was hers, but she couldn’t find it no matter how fast she ran or how hard she looked.
Tonight, she had woken up with a start, her body sticky with sweat—both as a result of the heat and of the panic that she felt while she was dreaming. The dream was so real that she could still taste the fear in her mouth when she woke up. The fear that she wouldn’t find her baby.
As she lay still so she wouldn’t wake Stephen, she stared at the crackled popcorn ceiling, faced with the reality that her baby was lost to her. It wasn’t a fear, it wasn’t a dream… it was her truth.
She would never hold her daughter, never find her daughter because her parents had thrown her out like medical waste. Sydney didn’t even have a grave to visit her at. Resentment formed in her mouth and she swallowed hard to get rid of it. Dwelling on it wasn’t going to make it any better.
She swung her feet over the side of the bed and sat for a moment to collect herself. She was never going back to sleep right now. Her mind was too restless, too disturbed from all of the events that had been jammed into her life lately.
For the last week, she had been on virtual lock-down. Stephen hadn’t let her leave the house since the mystery assailant had tried to run them down. She had fallen asleep tonight while trying to put a face to the unknown attacker which is probably what had triggered her nightmares. She needed to clear her mind.
She walked as quietly as she could over the creaking boards of the aging house to the kitchen to grab a glass of ice water. As she stood at the sink, she stared out the window for a moment.
The light in her neighbors’ house was on and she could clearly see into their home. The little blonde boy ran quickly through her field of vision before disappearing through a doorway that was out of her line of sight. Interesting. It was 2:00am. What kind of parents allowed their ten-year old to stay up until 2:00am? The boy had still been fully dressed. Apparently, he wasn’t even thinking about going to bed yet.
She briefly wondered if his parents were even home before she shook her head and turned to walk into the living room, but she quickly turned back. She had caught something out of the corner of her eye… something not right. She scanned the side yard of their little house. It was empty, just as it should be. But the hair on her arms was standing up and she felt a strange sense of unease. Something was wrong.
She padded lightly to the back door and peered through the glass, leaving the light off so that her silhouette wouldn’t be illuminated to anyone outside. Nightfall had turned the back yard into a palette of blue, gray, violet and black, with the silvery light of the moon falling upon the trees and creating rustling shadows.
She could see nothing that wasn’t supposed to be there. The rickety wooden back fence, the faded red BBQ, some of the neighbor kids’ toys. Everything was perfectly normal.
Just as she was shaking her head, amused at her own ridiculousness, a hand sheathed in a black glove plunged through the window of the door. Her immediate and single thought was only of the extreme noise that the shattering glass made in the stillness of the night.
She sprung backward, but not quickly enough. The hand snaked around the corner and flicked the lock. A figure dressed totally in black with his face obscured by a ski mask lunged inside, snatched her arm and had yanked her back outside before she could even scream. It was just that quick… as smooth as a machine. The intruder had clearly done this before. He knew what he was doing.
He now had her clenched to his chest, one hand over her mouth. He shoved her roughly forward, his hand bunched up in the back of her nightgown. He didn’t let go- he kept his hand there, in the small of her back, grasping the thin cotton. All she could do was comply, her knees bending woodenly as she walked barefoot through the backyard.
It had happened so fast that she knew there was no way that Stephen would have time to help, if he had even heard the noise at all. She hadn’t had time to even blink or breathe. Her heart began sinking and didn’t stop until they reached a white utility van parked down the block. The man yanked the back door open and threw her roughly inside. He bent over her, quickly wrapping duct tape around her wrists several times and then slapping a long piece over her mouth. The sides of it stuck in her hair and she felt sharp twinges of pain as her hair pulled against the tape. He slammed the back doors and she was alone for a brief second.
There was no way she was coming out of this intact. She knew that.
A mesh metal screen separated the driver’s seat from the back of the van and she sat hunched over as far from it as she could. Thoughts of survival raced through her mind as the van started to move.
She could kick the windows out… no, wait. That was what you were supposed to do if you were trapped in a trunk- kick out the tail-lights. But that was of no help to her now, because there was no way she could kick through the laminated safety windows.
Her mind sped through her options until she bleakly realized that she didn’t have any. Not a one. He
r hands were bound, her mouth was taped. The only thing she could do was wait until the van stopped and maybe she could kick the guy when he opened the doors again.
She didn’t have to wait for long. Twenty seconds later the van abruptly came to a halt.
“What the hell?!”
It was the first time the man had spoken and he wasn’t happy. His thick voice curled around the last word, emphasizing his impatience with something that Sydney couldn’t see.
He threw his door open, jumped out and slammed the door behind him. Sydney could hear muffled voices- too muffled. In a normal vehicle, she would have been able to discern words. But she couldn’t, which meant that this van must have sound proof walls and glass.
Her stomach sank. But before she could panic too much, the back doors were wrenched opened again, the large man’s shape loomed menacingly over her while he tossed in another victim.
She quickly registered the familiar face of the little boy next door. Her heart sped up and her chest started heaving as she tried to breathe.
What the hell was a good way to put it. Why was this kid here? His face was pale and terrified as their assailant slapped tape on him as well and then closed the doors again. Five seconds later, they were flying down the street. Away from her house, away from the safety of Stephen.
She looked at the little boy again. He was staring at her with wide eyes, unable to say anything to her. But his expression spoke a million words. And there was no way she could reassure him because she was in the same situation.
She leaned her head back against the cold metal of the van. The sky flying past the small tinted back windows didn’t reveal any kind of clue whatsoever about where they were going. Once they turned left at the end of her street, she lost her sense of direction. Not being able to see anything but sky was incredibly disorienting.
As they waited in the dark, she tried to imagine what Stephen was doing. Had he heard the noise? Had he realized that she had been taken? Or was he still asleep- thinking that she was safely lying right next to him? A lump formed in her throat as she thought of him and she fought hard to swallow it.
The ride seemed to take forever but at the same time, she didn’t want it to end. She was pretty sure she knew what was going to happen next. Her life was going to end. She wondered if it would be painful. Would she be brave? She gulped hard. Any hint of moisture in her mouth had evaporated from fear.
The van slowed and she tried to see out the window. The boy across from her looked at her in desperation, but there wasn’t anything she could do. Didn’t he see that? She was sure that due to his age, he was still under the impression that adults could fix anything. She was sorry that he had to learn this way that it wasn’t always true.
She heard muffled footsteps outside the doors and then suddenly they opened. As their assailant leaned in to reach for her, she kicked out at him with all the strength she could muster. Her heel caught him squarely on the chin, spinning his head to the side from the impact. She looked at the boy, motioning for him to jump out and run, but neither of them had the opportunity. The man yanked them both out, one in each hand, and pulled her up next to his face.
“If you ever try that again,” he rasped, “I will kill the boy. Do you want that on your shoulders?”
She assumed it was a rhetorical question, but he shook her hard.
“Do you?” he demanded.
She quickly shook her head no and he nodded in apparent satisfaction.
“Good then. We have an understanding. Behave yourself.”
He turned his attention to the blonde boy.
“Bet you wish you hadn’t tried to play the hero, huh?”
He yanked both of him along with him to a small white house. The house looked perfectly normal with the only thing of note about it being the fact that it was so small. And that it was apparently in the middle of nowhere.
Sydney looked around her as best she could and couldn’t see any other signs of life. They were in the country somewhere. But she couldn’t imagine where. There were only in the van for an hour at the most. An hour would have gotten them to Gary, but she didn’t smell the sulfurous smell that surrounded that town. She had no clue where they were. And she guessed that was probably the intention.
He dragged both of them with him into the house which smelled like wet, old carpet. She could tell that it hadn’t been opened in a while. The air was so stale that it lingered in her nose like moldy cheese. She briefly wondered if this little house was actually a holding cell for their kidnapper’s victims. She was certain by now that he did this fairly often. He had the mark of a professional.
He pushed them through the door of a small bedroom. She knew it was a bedroom only because of the small bed in the middle of the farthest wall. The room was utterly devoid of anything else and the one window was boarded off and nailed shut.
The man shoved both of them roughly to their knees as he stood behind them. Sydney squeezed her eyes tightly together. This was it. He was going to shoot them both. She could feel it. She wished there was something that she could do, but there was nothing. She couldn’t even fight for her own life. Having her hands restrained was completely debilitating.
Suddenly he yanked the tape off of her mouth, resulting in pain a thousand times worse than yanking off a bandaid. A good-sized chunk of her hair came out with the tape and her cheek was left stinging sharply. She spun around so that she could look at him again, just in time to see him raise his arm in the air above his head.
The blow to her head was shocking in its intensity, but it happened so quickly that she didn’t even feel it. She simply fell limply forward onto the floor, lying in a crumpled little heap.
The man didn’t waste a second, quickly cold-cocking the little boy, as well, and leaving both of them unconscious on the floor as he closed and locked the door behind him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stephen stirred. Even in his sleep, he knew that something was different. He snaked out his arm to draw Sydney back up against his body, but her side of the bed was cold. And empty.
He opened his eyes quickly and sat up. Ever since she had lost the baby, she hadn’t gotten up in the night to use the bathroom. He guessed that she was pacing the house, unable to sleep. With all that had gone on lately, he couldn’t blame her and instantly felt guilty for not hearing her get up. She needed his support now more than ever.
He didn’t bother pulling pants on, but instead strode out to the living room in his underwear. He figured that if someone wanted to look in his windows at this time of night, they deserved what they saw. Streetlights shone weakly in through the windows, both illuminating and emphasizing the emptiness surrounding him. He stood in the middle of the living room, staring around him at the empty chair, empty couch, empty desk. Everything was empty.
“Sydney?”
His voice sounded hollow in the quiet house. As he examined his surroundings, he decided it probably wouldn’t echo so much if they had more furniture. He was abruptly aware of the sparseness of his home. He had never really noticed before; but truthfully, he didn’t really care. He was never one to need things just for the sake of having them.
Sydney didn’t answer him, which was odd. The house was so small that normally he could hear a cricket breathing outside the bathroom window from the comfort of his bed. And that was only a slight exaggeration. If Sydney were here, she would have heard him.
“Sydney?” he called again, louder and more anxiously this time, rapidly moving through each room. She wasn’t in the bathroom, the living room or on the front porch. His heart was accelerating with each step that he took. Surely she wouldn’t have gone out by herself at this time of night- not now. As he stepped quickly into the kitchen, his heart lodged in his throat and stayed there, frozen.
The window in the back door was shattered… the glittering shards of glass scattered on the linoleum floor in haphazard disarray, a blatant signal that something was horribly wrong. Nothing else was disturbed, but nothing else n
eeded to be. It was clear what had happened.
He froze in place, trying to breathe…struggling to swallow. His gut tightened up within him as though he had been sucker-punched. The cool night breeze rustling in through the broken window drifted over his naked body and formed goose-bumps, bringing him back to reality quickly.
Sydney had been taken. He knew it without taking one more step.
He darted back through the house, quickly finding his pants on the floor in the bedroom. He dug through the pockets as quickly as he could, finding his cell phone. He pulled it out and dialed Detective Daniel’s cell phone number with shaking fingers. It was of little consequence to him that it was 3am. He could literally taste the adrenalin in his mouth as he waited.
The detective’s voice was surly as he answered the phone on the fourth ring.
“This had better be important,” he growled into the phone. Stephen knew the detective probably didn’t know or care who was calling.
“It is. Sydney’s been taken.”
Stephen didn’t know how he managed to speak, because it felt like his entire body was frozen, completely numb. But his words came out normally, as though he was making a casual phone call. As though the girl he loved hadn’t just been kidnapped from his house while he slept peacefully and blissfully unaware. His fingers betrayed him, though. They shook as they held the phone to his ear.
“I’ll be right there.”
The phone went dead and Stephen held it motionless for a moment before snapping it closed and laying it down beside him on the empty bed. The silence was deafening. He gazed out the window mindlessly, not feeling capable of coherent thought, aware only of the loss and guilt that was consuming him already. It was difficult to say which weighed more heavily on him.
Both things collided together in his mind and he groaned. He had promised Sydney that he wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. He was all she had… and he had failed miserably. She was gone and he was to blame. He dropped his head into his waiting hands.