Standing next to Joyce was Susan, looking nervous. She kept fidgeting with something in her hands and wouldn’t look up to make eye contact with Laura.
“Want to come inside where it’s warm?” Laura offered.
“That sounds lovely,” Joyce said.
Joyce gingerly took a step forward, and Susan moved with her. That’s when Laura noticed the gun, held between Susan’s hands like a cancer. She held it against Joyce’s side, her finger looped through the trigger and the entire set-up almost entirely hidden by the baggy folds of Susan’s pink coat.
“Why do you have a gun?” The sight of the weapon made Laura want to scream. Laura had never seen a gun in real life before tonight. A small part of her mind wondered if maybe it was just a toy, and this was all a misunderstanding.
Susan finally looked up. A large bruise was forming over the crest of her left eye. “Because this one here was going to kill me with it,” she said, jabbing the barrel into Joyce’s side.
She flicked her head towards the door. “Now open up. We have a lot to talk about.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE ADDY
She woke up in the musty dark. A dim light streamed out from around the edges of wherever she was, so dim that she could barely see her hand in front of her face. Addy reached up, but her hands met with a hard surface above her. She was crouched into a fetal position, her knees up around her mouth.
Her brain was foggy, and she couldn’t place at first where she was or what had happened. Just that she was alone and aching all over. And trapped.
It was that word which stuck with her. Trapped.
She’d been in her office, ready to move out of the door and into the safety of the hallway when she’d felt a hand on her shoulder and screamed. A hard edge had met the nape of her neck and she’d fallen over and then away, into unconsciousness, by the time the second blow had come. She hadn’t been able to see her attacker’s face.
And now she was here, inside a cramped space. If she could move her arms around more freely, she’d feel the base of her skull to see how badly she was hurt. It felt slick on her neck, and Addy wondered if it was wet with blood or just sweat, although it was freezing wherever she was. It could be tears, dripping down her face. She felt like she’d been crying in her sleep, her throat aching from the effort of it.
Addy tried to move her arms and legs apart and found that her hands weren’t tied together. Her feet were bound with some sort of loose rag, and it slipped off over her tall leather boots easily. A shiver ran up her back as the adrenaline from waking up in a dark, locked box leached out of her and was replaced with a full awareness of her situation.
She could barely see anything.
She didn’t know where she was, or what was enclosing her.
Panic started to work at the back of her mind, and Addy found her breath ratcheting up into faster and faster intakes. What if she ran out of air in here? Her mind played tricks on her, fear overtaking reason, so she fought back. If light could seep in, then air was getting in too, she reminded herself.
She told herself to be steady. Work the problem. Do you want to die in here? Do you want to wait for whoever put you here to come back, and then do horrible things to you? Of course, the answer was “no”.
Figure out what you need to do to get out.
It was no different than standing in front of her committee at her comprehensive exams, some of the professors supportive and others intent on making any student look ill-prepared and idiotic. It was a very different level of harm, but harm all the same. And how had she handled that? She’d focused her mind on her abilities, reassured herself that she could do it. She’d ignored the fear clawing at the back of her mind and steadied her thoughts into the logic of her preparation.
She hadn’t prepared for this, but any woman can tell you that their entire life has been an act of courage against the dangers of the world. You walk home in the dark, carrying your keys between your knuckles because that’s what your parents and teachers taught you. You listen for footsteps behind you and avoid dates at a person’s house until you know them better. You use the buddy system at parties and carry pepper spray in your purse. You don’t go running alone on the fire trails in the woods by your town, no matter how much you’d like to be alone, because women are never really alone in this world.
Addy stopped first and listened. Could she hear anything distinctive? Wherever she was, she was certain she wasn’t moving. There were no sounds coming from outside. Except—she held her breath. There were soft rustlings, like someone wrapping themselves in a blanket on top of wherever she was. And then there was the sharp snap of a door closing.
She felt around, her fingers brushing something hard and plastic with bristles along one side. Addy inhaled deeply, smelling beyond the mustiness the sure scent of gasoline and snow. She was in the trunk of a car. Her fingers brushed against the bristles of a basic ice scraper. She moved her feet, hoping to find more. She pushed against something soft and crinkled, rectangular in shape.
It was a stack of reusable grocery bags. Addy had used them often enough herself.
It was an odd juxtaposition her mind caught on. Someone would take the time to store shopping bags in their car, to carry an ice scraper for winter weather—such normal, well-intentioned things—and then carry a woman in the back of their car after knocking her unconscious.
Relief seeped in as Addy considered these were signs she wasn’t in the hands of someone insane and sadistic—how could somebody who brought their own shopping bags not be somewhat reasonable?—when she thought about something one of her professors said in her first abnormal psychology class.
“Nobody is normal.”
What she’d meant was that human beings were by nature layered creatures. Someone who was kind to their child and baked them a cake for their birthday was also able to murder a man for looking at them the wrong way. Someone who shook their baby could be an excellent employee and always give customers a smile. People could be incredibly kind to strangers and then call their spouse a cunt for forgetting to buy more milk at the store.
Someone might be perfectly capable of reusing grocery bags and dumping a body in a vacant lot.
The irrational relief she’d felt a moment ago was replaced with urgency. Addy needed to get out of there.
She tried to latch onto something she’d read in the newspaper, back when she was a kid. There’d been an article about car trunks, and a new feature to pop the trunk door open in case a child got locked in accidentally. They’d started manufacturing cars that way after several children climbed into trunks and were hurt when they couldn’t climb back out.
Addy needed to find that latch, but she couldn’t move her shoulders up or flip herself around comfortably. She’d have to feel around with her hands, hopefully popping the trunk open and then climbing out before whoever had put her there noticed.
Her fingers searched, feeling the cheap felt of the trunk’s interior and the cool metal of the mechanisms for the trunk door, but no latch. She tried to think if she’d put her phone in her pocket. Was her purse there?
Not that she could feel.
And then her hands landed on a switch. It felt like cheap plastic, with a cord attached. She prayed that it wouldn’t crack or rip apart as she pulled.
The trunk door flipped open and Addy blinked as bright artificial light poured in. Someone stood in front of her, their features blocked out by the light shining from behind.
“I was just coming to get you,” the figure said. They moved slightly and Addy saw a stylish woman, her clothes and haircut expensive-looking. Her face was drawn, shadows darkening the skin beneath her well-groomed eye makeup and brows.
“Hurry up,” someone shouted from behind her.
“I’m Joyce,” the woman said, before she yanked Addy from the car.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR JOYCE
How exactly had this happened? Joyce couldn’t quite believe it herself. She had her gun in her glove compartment, certain Susan was clueless.
Although, there was the situation with Simon showing up at the police station. Had that prompted Susan to search Joyce’s car, hoping to find something incriminating?
Joyce had landed a decent defensive blow to Susan’s forehead before Susan pointed the gun at her. It was satisfying to see the bruise swell up, marring Susan’s well-maintained face.
At least Susan hadn’t done a thorough search. It was a small pleasure seeing Susan’s face react to the revelation that a young woman was stowed in the trunk of Joyce’s car.
“Just another count of kidnapping,” Joyce told Susan coolly after informing her of their extra cargo. That had earned Joyce another sharp jab in her ribs.
In reality, Joyce would have figured something out, gun pointed at her or not, if Susan had insisted she drive them somewhere out of Joyce’s way. Joyce wasn’t in the habit of doing things she didn’t want to.
Joyce learned about Laura a while ago—Dermot could barely shut up about the girl. How damaged she was, chaotic, desperate for love. The exact opposite of Joyce, which she’d assumed was part of her own appeal to Dermot. Although she hadn’t thought Dermot and Laura were actually intimate.
The girl, now that they were here, had all the signs of being a mother-to-be. Sickly pale, shying away from Susan’s expensive and potent perfume, a greenness around her chin and eyes that suggested food poisoning. But no, just a fetus growing inside.
Dermot’s baby. How quaint, Joyce thought.
They sat in Laura’s living room, waiting for Susan to convene this meeting of the women of Dermot’s life, apparently. Laura, Joyce, and that grad student whose name Joyce could never remember.
