Page 45 of Dread

I faced forward again and concentrated on keeping my breathing controlled.

“You need to take me back.”

He didn’t look at me. His gaze stayed on the highway, his profile sharp against the afternoon light coming through the driver’s window, and for a moment the only sound was the tires on asphalt and the low rumble of the engine.

“We’re going to be a family again.” He spoke with the certainty of someone announcing a decision already made, one that had never required my consent. “Whether you want it or not.”

My stomach turned. Not metaphorically. Physically, the lurch of nausea that came from hearing a truth spoken by someone dangerous, and I pressed my back harder against the door and felt the handle dig into my kidney and welcomed the pain because pain was data and data was control and control was the only thing I had left in a truck doing fifty-five on a Missouri highway with a man who had just announced his intentions in the language of ownership.

My right hand moved. Not quickly. Not dramatically. A slow shift, my fingers finding the edge of my purse where it lay against my thigh, and the fabric was warm from the sun coming through the windshield and my fingertips brushed the zipper pull -- a small metal tab, cold against skin that had been sweating -- and I began to work it backward one tooth at a time.

“Don’t.”

The word landed like a door slamming. His hand hadn’t moved -- still on the console, still two inches from my knee -- but his voice hardened, an edge creeping in that traveled through the cab to where I sat with my fingers on the zipper pull and my heart hammering against my ribs.

I stopped. The zipper pull rested between my thumb and forefinger, the metal cool, and I held it there without moving it farther because the calculation was immediate and brutal: phone now meant he would take it, and phone taken meant no phone at all, and no phone meant no GPS, no call, no way for Dread to find me if by some miracle he was looking, and the value of the phone intact -- hidden, waiting, its battery at seventy-three percent -- outweighed the value of a call I might not finish.

I let my hand settle back on my thigh. The zipper pull slipped from my fingers, and Marcus’s hand didn’t move from the console and the truck maintained its speed and the farmland rolled past the windows in waves of gold that had no end.

The turn came without signal. A gravel road branching north from Route 9, the intersection marked by a faded stop sign tilted at an angle that suggested it had been hit by something larger than a passenger vehicle, and Marcus slowed the truck -- forty, thirty, twenty -- and turned onto the gravel with a smoothness that said he’d driven this road before or had studied it well enough to approximate familiarity.

Gravel crunched under the tires. The sound traveled through the frame and into the seat, a constant white noise that masked the smaller sounds -- my breathing, the faint electronic hum of the dashboard that hadn’t registered on asphalt. The road narrowed. Ditches on both sides, overgrown with summer grass that reached waist-high in places, brown at the tips where the heat had found it. A rusted fence ran along the left ditch, barbed wire sagging between posts that leaned at angles the soil had decided were correct.

Fields on both sides. Gold. Rolling toward a distant tree line that marked the property boundary or a creek bed or simply the place where someone had stopped plowing, and the truck followed the gravel road with the patience of a thing that had nowhere else to be and all the time in the world to get there.

The dash clock read 4:23. I’d noted the time when we turned onto the gravel road six minutes earlier, after enough miles on the highway that the grain elevator and water tower were long gone behind us. I watched every turn now, trying to build a route in my head from whatever landmarks I could find. Trees. Fence lines. A rusted mailbox with no house visible behind it. Anything I might recognize later.

I pressed my back against the door. My shoulder found the handle again, the plastic cool through my T-shirt, and I let it dig in and focused on the sensation.

Dread’s voice in my head. Not imagined. Remembered. Standing on the back porch three nights ago, his hand warm on my shoulder, his breath moving against my hair while the cicadas built their chorus beyond the fence line. Stay calm. Pay attention. Remember everything you can.

I repeated the instructions in my head until they gave me something to concentrate on besides fear. Panic wouldn’t tell me where he was taking me. It wouldn’t help me remember roads or turns or how long we’d been driving. I needed to notice what I could and hold on to it. Most of all, I needed to believe someone would realize I was missing and start looking.

I observed. Gravel road. Ditches. Rusted fence. Golden fields. Tree line in the distance. No structures visible from here. No power lines. No vehicles passed us going the other direction. Out here, surrounded by Missouri farmland, there wasn’t much reason for anyone to use this road unless they lived somewhere along it. The lack of traffic left me with no one to flag down and no indication of where we were headed.

My right hand found the purse again. Slow. Deliberate. My fingers brushed the fabric near the zipper, not touching the pull yet, establishing exactly where the bag sat against my thigh where Marcus couldn’t see it without turning his head, and he wasn’t turning his head. His gaze stayed on the gravel road, his hands on the wheel, his right still resting on the console two inches from my knee like a promise he hadn’t decided whether to keep.

The zipper pull was cold between my thumb and forefinger. Small. Metal. The teeth of the zipper were nylon, the kind that made a sound when they separated -- a rhythmic click that traveled farther than it should in quiet spaces -- but the truck was doing twenty on gravel and gravel was loud and the engine was rumbling and the white noise covered a multitude of sins if you moved slowly enough.

I worked it one tooth at a time. Backward. The opening widening by millimeters, the fabric parting along the seam, and inside the darkness of the purse my phone lay screen-down against the lining, its case warm from the heat, and I didn’t reach for it yet -- not with him watching, not when movement this close to him would cost more than it was worth.

One tooth. Another. The zipper gave way beneath my fingers with a patience I didn’t know I had, and the opening widened to three inches, then four, and inside the bag the darkness held its shape and the phone held its charge and the gravel road stretched ahead toward a tree line I didn’t recognize. Not recognizing it was its own kind of fear, because not knowing where you were was the same as not knowing how to get back.

Somewhere beyond the tree line -- somewhere beyond the gold fields and the rusted fence and the ditches overgrown with summer grass -- help was coming or it wasn’t, and the difference between those states was a phone and a zipper that was opening one stubborn tooth at a time in the particular, desperate rhythm of a woman who had stopped running three weeks ago and was not going to start again.

I wasn’t going to make this easy for him. Somewhere behind us was the life I intended to get back to, and I refused to treat it like something already lost. I kept working the zipper pull, careful not to draw his attention, testing it a fraction at a time while the tires crunched over gravel. He thought getting me into this truck meant he’d won something.

He was wrong.

Chapter Fifteen

Dread

The siren hit the compound at 5:42. One long wail that climbed through the trees and cut across the gravel and found me standing at the back steps of the house with a glass of water in my hand and Ellie’s voice still hanging in the air from the kitchen where she’d been telling me about the rock that looked like a turtle but only if you held it sideways.

The glass didn’t drop. My hand tightened around it instead, the water going still, and my body went still with it. The siren held for three seconds. Released. Held again. The rhythm of a perimeter breach, not the all-clear, and the cold moved up my spine in a wave that had nothing to do with the water and everything to do with the fact that Katy had left for the store at 3:15 and it was now 5:42 and I had not heard from her.

I set the glass on the step. Stood. The back door was open, Ellie still at the table with her colored pencils spread across her homework, and I stepped inside and said, “Stay in the house. Cotton’s coming.” Her head came up, her blue-gray gaze finding mine with the focus of a child who heard the shift in tone before she processed the words, and I was through the front door before she could ask.