Repressed Page 20

  He stared at the state of birth.

  California.

  Karen Palmer had been born in California. The kidnapper had taken her place. Had the kidnapper known the real Karen Palmer? Had she known … him? And if so …

  Shannon’s kidnapper had come to Michigan for him. And he couldn’t for the life of him remember why.

  “In our endeavors to recall to memory

  something long forgotten,

  we often find ourselves

  upon the very verge of remembrance,

  without being able, in the end, to remember.”

  ~Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia

  29

  Shannon’s arms ached, every muscle burning from the position she’d had to take, balled in the corner of what used to be a closet. No straitjacket now. Her breasts throbbed with unexpressed milk, nipples itchy and raw from letdown and the dried fluids on the inside of her shirt.

  Panic came and went in waves, and more often than not she felt the tug of depression: the desperation, the hopelessness. Like now.

  She hadn’t fed Evie in what had to be days. Sometimes she heard her baby crying through the wall when they opened the door to toss in a bottle of water. Her own stomach was gnarled with anxiety and hunger and her nerves were so frayed that it felt like she was brushing up against raw wires in the walls. But she could perceive nothing with her fingertips even when she scratched so ceaselessly at the cement she swore she was exposing the bones in her hands. And sometimes the shocks seemed to originate inside her head, an electric pulse in her brain.

  She was probably losing her mind. Maybe had already.

  Shannon leaned her head against the back of the closet, the cement board cold and hard and surely insulated well enough to muffle the sound of her echoing sobs. The air reeked of vomit and shit from the bucket in the corner. She had never considered that she’d long for the cold, barren bedroom where she’d awoken. But every piece of her ached for that freedom … and for the ability to see her baby girl whether she could touch her or not. Was Evie alive? Stop, don’t think.

  In this dark chamber, time stretched and compressed and bent on itself—she couldn’t be sure if it was day or night. But Karen came to see her regularly, her full lips whispering poisonous words into the dark. Always at the strike of a grandfather clock somewhere in the house, as if the woman had a planner and at seven and twelve and three o’clock each day she’d written “Fuck with Shannon” in scrawling red ink. Karen told her all kinds of things. That she was still angry at Shannon for breaking her collarbone the night she’d attacked Shannon by the lake. Shannon thought it was Griffen she’d fought off that night, but not according to Karen, and Shannon had no reason to disbelieve her. Nor did she disbelieve it when Karen hissed that she’d helped Griffen frame Morrison for murder last year. That Griffen had never set out to harm anyone, that he had flown off the handle and broken a man’s head, but that he’d lacked the guts for premeditated murder. Griffen: Shannon’s friend for more than a decade. Her friend that she’d killed, because he’d been sick—he’d been a murderer. Though maybe he hadn’t. And if that were true, what did that make her?

  Karen was playing on the guilt that had been eating at her every day since she’d put a bullet through Griffen’s eye socket. Maybe Karen had gotten into McCallum’s files—besides Petrosky, who had taken the fall for Griffen’s death, only the psychiatrist knew what she’d done. Even Morrison didn’t realize she was a killer too. She’d have to tell him she was sorry. And he’d tell her there was no sorry, only love, but … she’d lied to him. He might not forgive that.

  Even as Shannon rationalized each issue away, new ones were introduced. Karen whispered about hurting Morrison. She said Shannon’s husband was a murderer—that she wanted him to suffer, to make him feel helpless too. But none of it made sense, not any of it.

  Visit after visit, Karen asked her how it felt to be without Evie. Told her that her baby girl was starving as they spoke, as milk stained Shannon’s clothes and soaked her front. Evie would be better off without her, Karen said, and maybe they’d kill her baby girl just to spare Shannon the trouble of doing it herself: “Isn’t that what you want, Shannon?”

  Maybe Karen was messing with her head, but Shannon felt the correctness of each lancing blow in the deepest parts of her soul because she’d said those words to herself. Every fear she’d ever had, every irrational thought embedded itself into her consciousness—as though these terrifying convictions were right in a way that McCallum and her husband couldn’t see. Maybe Evie did deserve better than her. Evie might still be fine at home if she’d had a different mother. Shannon tried to tell herself it was the depression talking, but she was having trouble believing it. The days were bleeding into one another, the darkness and lack of life rhythm pulling at the edges of her thoughts until she feared it would drive her mad. Though insanity would surely have been preferable to the hopelessness encroaching on her like a malevolent fog, cocooning her in despair, imploring her to give up.

  What kind of mother was she? She wasn’t even trying.

  She stared across the closet—the dungeon—but everything was just black. Above her, she knew, hung a huge wooden strut attached to either end of the closet with brackets. If she could loosen it perhaps it’d make a good weapon, but it was at least a foot square and too cumbersome to swing at her jailers from the confines of the closet. And with any action she took, there was risk. She could not leave without her child. Would they kill Evie if she tried to escape?

  She prayed Evie was asleep. Babies slept through worse in third world countries, right? And when the man in the boots had come to take Evie away, he’d seemed rather … uninterested. He hadn’t hurt Evie, hadn’t even looked at her daughter, just took her. If he wanted to hurt her, he’d have done it in the room, made Shannon watch, wasn’t that what psychos did? She might be wrong. Maybe even now they were burying Evie out back, alive, her tiny body being slowly covered with dirt until it filled her lungs and—

  Her empty stomach clenched and she heaved, gagged, but nothing came up.

  Evie. She could almost feel her baby’s breath against her neck. Surely if they’d killed her child, she’d have felt it—a snapping of her own lifeline, deep in her gut like the very cord that had tethered them to one another for nearly a year before Evie’s birth.

  No, Evie was alive, Shannon was sure of that. But she was being hurt, traumatized, if only by her mother’s absence. Her sweet baby girl! And Karen didn’t give a shit. Nor did the man outside the closet.

  The door was thick, but she knew he was there. She could feel him. Smell him.

  Milk dripped onto her jeans from below the hem of her T-shirt, but she made no move to wipe it away. Even her body knew Evie was still alive. And Evie still needed her mother. “Please let me feed her,” she called into the darkness. There was no response, not that she had expected one. He couldn’t hear her though the padded walls, but she was almost certain that he felt her too—surely he must sense the rage that was growing in her belly like a demon ready to emerge and slash at her captors with razor-sharp teeth.

  “Hello?” she cried out, louder this time, and again her plea went unanswered. “I know you’re there!” Panic mingled with desperation, and then it was there, the fury, a storm brewing without means for release. Her arms and legs twitched with anticipation.

  She clawed her way to standing along the wall, probably leaving more trails of red from her already weeping fingertips. Dizziness pulled at her, and she grabbed the beam, wrapping one shoulder over it. The fury burned, hotter and blacker, until it cloaked her entire being in unbridled hatred. If they wanted to kill her, then god-fucking-dammit, they needed to just hurry up and do it. She wasn’t about to starve to death in a tiny closet wondering if her child was already dead.

  Please don’t let her be dead.

  She kicked the door with her bare foot, a move gleaned from years of CrossFit and kickboxing, but the door wouldn’t budge. She’d tried this before—the spa
ce wasn’t large enough to get leverage. The sound of her kick thundered back at her, reverberating in her ears as her heel burned deliciously from the exertion.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed, then kept screaming it over and over: “Fuck you, you piece of fucking shit!” She kicked the door again, the dull thud of the impact jittering through her leg bone and into her hip, a welcome sensation after the black numbness of rotting on the closet floor. Again and again and again she kicked, tears sprouting in her eyes at the pain of the impact. At the helpless fury writhing in her gut.

  Then … something. A sound, a scrape, and the light came then, so glaringly bright that she was forced to squint into it or go blind. And a silhouette in the now open doorway: Karen, red hair engulfing her face like hellfire.

  You fucking bitch. Shannon tried to lunge under the beam but the world blackened at the edges and she had to hold on to avoid falling. She couldn’t fight Karen. Had they put something in the water? She shivered in her wet shirt.

  “Why are you doing this?” Shannon whispered, straining to hear Evie—a cry, a coo, anything to hint that she was alive. But there was only Karen’s breath, steady and soft above the frenzied throbbing of Shannon’s heart.

  “Your husband is an asshole.”

  Shannon tried to let go of the bar again, but her legs shook and she tightened her grip.

  Karen smirked, teeth yellowed by the dim light. “Let’s call him, shall we?”

  Shannon tried to nod, scanning the room behind Karen for something she could yell out to Morrison, any clues that might give him some idea of where she was, but there was just the black bed, its pillows dark as night. No sunlit window. Nothing to indicate direction or location or even the type of building they were in. For all she knew, she could be locked in a high-rise.

  Karen was holding her cell, tilting it back and forth like a snow globe. “Let’s see if he killed your ex yet.”

  “Roger?”

  Karen smiled, venomous, a look that Shannon had once thought beautiful, but now it radiated malice—hatred. And then Karen froze, staring at—

  He loomed just outside the closet doorway, terrifying with his bald head and thick boots and the room felt heavier with his presence. And with that awful mask, more frightening than it had been the first time, because she knew, she knew he’d keep her here, knew he didn’t want her to see his face because he was going to do atrocious things to her. He was bare-chested today, thin, scrawny even, but wiry—probably stronger than she’d guessed from his height alone. The scars of what looked like small puncture wounds, maybe burns, maybe an ice pick, glared at her from his stomach, and in the trail of hair on his lower belly the wounds were deeper, larger: some old and healed, others fresh, gaping stains like drips of black oil across his torso.

  It must be morning. He only showed up in the morning, or so she thought because he usually came with coffee and a bagel, watching to see if she’d beg for a bite of his meal. She never had. And he’d never given her any.

  Karen smiled at him and straightened her shoulders.

  Shannon eased her weight onto her jelly legs and tried not to wobble.

  Karen whirled on Shannon, her eyes narrowed, lips still smiling which was more unnerving than if she’d snarled. “You come at me, I’ll kill Evie in front of you.”

  “I won’t. Please.” Shannon eased her weight back onto the bar, her head spinning. Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed, again and again, but Shannon couldn’t concentrate enough to count the hour.

  “Why are you talking?” He spoke to Shannon, maybe, voice muffled under the leather, but it sounded oddly careful. One of his fingernails worried at the molding around the closet door, and he was staring at Karen from inside the mask. His angular shoulders were slumped like an old beaten dog though he outweighed them by at least fifty pounds.

  From the next room, a whine blossomed into a wail, one thin, long howl of exhausted hunger. Evie. Alive. Blood pumped into Shannon’s legs, urging her to run to her daughter, to take her from this place. Can’t run. They’ll kill us both. She held the bar tighter as the man straightened, muscles corded. He glanced toward the door, toward Evie’s screams.

  “Please—I can make her quiet,” Shannon said, hating that she sounded like she was begging, but she was begging. God, please let me feed her.

  “I can make her quiet too.” His voice was more menacing now as he dropped his hand from the wall and advanced. Unafraid of her, apparently, only wary of Karen. Because they were … together? Because she’d seen him without the mask?

  “I’ll get her quiet,” he said and he turned to the door.

  No, oh Jesus, don’t hurt her. “She’s hungry, just let me—”

  “Her agony is well-deserved.”

  Her agony. Was he enjoying watching Evie starve? He had laughed their first night here, laughed at Shannon’s screams as he held his blade over her daughter. He wanted to see their misery. “Hurt me instead.”

  He turned to her and lowered his face so he could look into her eyes. His irises shone even in the dark of the mask, as if madness could escape through his pupils. Where Morrison’s pacific blue lenses were always so full of hope and promise and kindness, behind this man’s eyes lay only the glittering promise of pain.

  “She doesn't understand what you want,” Shannon said.

  “Then she’ll learn,” he said with a lilt that made it sound like he was smiling.

  “No, she won’t,” Karen said suddenly, her bottom lip between her teeth. There was something strange happening, a discontent, an aggression building between her captors—he took a step backward, away from Karen, shoulders tense like a kid being admonished by a parent. Was he … young? Was Karen his mom? How can I use this to get us out of here?

  “Children don’t learn from pain the same way adults do,” Karen said. “Like that boy who never should have happened.” She glared at the man in the mask and he shrank farther from her.

  What boy? There have been others. This wasn’t a new game to them; this was an old game, and Shannon and Evie were only new victims. Perhaps the boy was buried out back. Maybe he was in another room like hers, hanging by his ankles from his own wooden beam. And … this man’s boots. They’d been covered in blood, hadn’t they?

  Karen stepped over to the masked man, and he flinched. Then she ran a hand over his abdomen, hooking a fingernail under a scab near his belly button and slicing it off. He grunted and righted himself, taller suddenly, muscles rippling as the wound welled and blood tricked toward his belt line.

  Karen’s face cleared—no longer angry, or perhaps she’d decided there was a better way to accomplish her goal. “The kid will just cry more. We’ll never get her to shut up. But this one…” She gestured to Shannon, and Shannon’s blood ran cold. “She’ll never bother you again with her whiny bullshit.” Karen’s eyes were dead, stony, the beauty draining from her face as the blood drained from the masked man’s wound.

  He appraised Shannon, fingers practically vibrating with anticipation, and left the room.

  Oh god. Shannon’s heart throbbed and each beat drove a spike of fear into her chest. Was he going to get that barbaric weapon with the hooked blade? Was he going to cut her open? Would he … cut Evie? No, please, no.

  Her eyes darted around the room, peering at the doorway. “Please, Karen …” Could she overpower her? But in her weakened state, she could never take on both of them … and the masked man had her child. Evie—

  She heard him then, his footsteps growing louder, returning, and every muscle in Shannon’s body quivered. Please let us go. Please don’t hurt Evie.

  Then he was there, brandishing a small cloth bag in one hand. In his other hand a collar, the inner part of it, the part that would touch the throat, glinting with what looked like razor blades.

  Shannon’s mouth filled with cotton and her throat constricted painfully. The masked man stepped in front of her, his leather face turning this way, then that, the spines on top of the mask stabbing at the sky above hi
m, the vicious beak sharp and deadly. One head butt and she’d be gone. Every panel of the mask seemed to leer at her of its own accord. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I don’t want to die.

  He reached for her and she stepped away, almost fell, but he wasn't after her, not yet. He attached the metal clamp to the front of the beam by threading a bolt through a small hole, securing the collar to the post.

  “In.”

  She stared at the blades glinting evilly from the inside of the collar. “But it’ll …” slit my throat.

  “In. And don’t move.”

  Her eyes filled. Then she saw her.

  She hadn’t noticed Karen leaving, but now the woman walked into the room carrying Evie, her daughter barely struggling in Karen’s arms. Evie cried weakly. Shannon’s insides leapt and flipped, and she shook with the effort not to run to her.

  The man turned his head to look at her daughter, then back. “In the collar, you can hold her, feed the bitch, whatever. You're going to make good on your promise.”

  Her promise. Shannon’s lip quivered, but she stiffened it. Fuck you. She watched him set the bag on the beam next to the collar and open it. A sewing kit. Curved instruments glinting in the light, though dimmed by the closet’s oppressive shadow. What the hell is he going to—

  The thought froze in her brain as he produced an upholstery needle, the tip glistening like a shard of broken glass, and it felt as if he were going to stab her with a piece of her own shattered sanity. And … would he stab her? Would he shove it into her eyeball, blinding her? Every muscle in her body tightened in anticipation. Run. Run!

  She dragged her gaze from the needle as Evie kicked one foot, weakly, her tiny mewl tugging at Shannon’s gut more fervently than any instrument of torture he could dream up. She steeled herself, glanced once more at Evie, and stepped to the post. As carefully as she could, she leaned her neck against the back of the collar where there were no blades.