Right to Life

ONE

New York City

June 8, 1998

10:20 a.m.

They drove to the clinic in silence.

The night before they’d said it all. Now there was nothing left to say.

It just remained to do it. Get it over with.

Morning rush hour traffic had ended over an hour ago and traffic was fairly light. The streets of the Upper West Side seemed strangely still and dreamlike, the blue-green Toyota van in front of them drifting from stoplight to stoplight like a guide taking them from nowhere to some other nowhere while they followed to no determinate end.

Running on empty, Greg thought. Both of us.

The silence turned him back in time to their bed last night in her apartment, making love through a haze of tears which came and went with the gentle anguished regularity of waves at low tide, their very heartbeats muted, the two of them drawn more closely together than they had ever imagined or wished possible in the grim sad knowledge that pleasure now was also pain and would remain so for a very long time. Her tears cooling on his cheek and mingling with his own, the musky smell of tears and then the feel of them falling to his chest as she sailed astride him like a ship on a windless sea and when it was finished, the long dark night embracing in warm attempted sleep.

Then stillness too through the loud morning rituals of water, razor and toothbrush, both he and Sara alone now in these things as they would ever be. Then coffee drunk in silence at the table, Greg reaching out to take her hand a moment across the polished pine to feel the warmth of her again, to bind them for a moment before walking out through the door into the cool bright morning air. To the morning errands of New Yorkers along 91st and West End Avenue, the cars and cabs and delivery trucks. And then down to the car parked deep in the cooler echoing basement garage next door, Greg driving them across to Broadway and then downtown. Bringing them forward along the wheel of time to this awful empty place. This quiet, this exhausted drift of feeling.

“Are you all right?” he said finally.

She nodded.

The clinic wasn’t far. 68th and Broadway, only five blocks away. One of only three of them left open on the entire West Side from the Village to the Bronx.

“It’s a girl,” she said.

And it was that, he thought and not his question that truly broke the silence.

“How can you tell?”

“I just know. I remember the way Daniel felt, even at this stage. This feels… different.”

He was aware of something thick and heavy inside him again. He’d heard the story many times in the six years he’d known her. Her perceptions of the thing varying slightly over time and distance and depth of understanding. Daniel, her son, dead in a frozen lake in upstate New York at the age of six. Even his body lost to her beneath the ice and never found.

If there was ever a woman he would have wished to have a child with, to have raised his child, especially a girl-child, it was this one.

His hands were sweating on the wheel.

Because of course it was impossible.

“Why don’t you drop me off in front,” she said. “Find a place to park. I’ll go in and register. Less time waiting.”

“Are you sure?”

“The front will be fine.”

“What about those people with their goddamn picket lines. They’ll probably be out again.”

“They don’t bother me. Except to piss me off. They’ll let me by, don’t worry.”

He supposed that — no, she was not about to be intimidated. Last week going in for her examination there had been seven of them on the sidewalk by the entrance to the Jamaica Savings Bank, the building which housed the clinic and held its tenuous lease, seven men and women standing behind blue police barricades, carrying cardboard signs saying HE’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE and ABORTION IS LEGALIZED GENOCIDE and waving pamphlets and holding out tiny plastic twelve-week foetuses cupped in the palms of their hands.

One of them, a surprisingly handsome fortyish man, shoved his own little specimen at Sara’s face and Sara turned on Greg’s arm and said you stupid shit and walked on by past the three policemen lounging at the door who were guarding these creeps on his and her tax dollars thank you very much, and into the building.

Then this other one, this ordinary-looking woman about the same age as the man, who followed them to the elevator and up and sat there with a magazine across from them in the waiting room staring until Sara’s name was called and then got up and left. A more subtle form of harassment. Were they even allowed to do that? They’d never said a word to her though he’d wanted to. And she’d evidently known what he was thinking. To hell with her, she’d whispered, she’s not worth the effort.

She could deal with them.

Still he’d feel better if he was with her.

“What’s another minute or two?” he said. “Let me just park this thing and we’ll go in together.”

She shook her head. “Please, Greg. I want to get this over with as soon as possible. You know?”

“Okay. Sure. I understand.”

But he didn’t. Not really. How could he? For all the talk last night it was impossible to gauge how she felt at just this moment. Not now in the light of day, far beyond the familiar comfort of home and bed and the comfort of lying in his arms and even the comfort of tears. He wanted to know suddenly, needed to know, that she didn’t hate him, didn’t blame him fundamentally — though twice last night she’d said she didn’t and he’d believed her. But now it was different. He wanted to know she forgave him. For everything. For his marriage. For his son. Even for his sex. For being born a man so that he didn’t have to carry — couldn’t possibly carry — the full weight of this. He’d have done it in a minute if it were possible.

Her diaphragm had failed them. It happened sometimes. They were adults and they knew that. It was her diaphragm. It didn’t matter. He’d never felt so guilty in his life.

Do no harm, his mother had told him when he was a boy. The physician’s rule. Her personal golden rule. And here he was, doing harm to the woman he loved.

Still more harm.

He could see it in the distance on the corner of 68th Street a block and a half away, an undistinguished grey highrise that was probably built back during the mid-sixties, the bank on the first floor and offices above. Across Broadway a Food Emporium and the huge Sony movie complex. And yes, there were the long blue sawhorses and the two cops standing at the door and people crying signs walking back and forth along the curb.

“Pull up behind them,” she said. “I don’t feel like getting out right in the middle of that.”

He glided to a stop. She opened the door.

He put his hand on her arm and stopped her and then he didn’t know what to say. He just sat there moving his hand slowly over the warm smooth flesh of her arm and then she smiled a little. He saw the worry and sleeplessness that ambushed her just behind the smile. The eyes couldn’t lie to him. They never had.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he said. “I can probably find something on 67th or over on Amsterdam.”

“I’ll be fine.”

She got out and shut the door and he watched her walk away toward the dozen or so people ahead of her moving in circles curbside at the oilier end of the block and then he pulled out slowly past her and she glanced at him but didn’t smile this time, only hitched her purse up on her shoulder. He passed the stem-faced, holier-than-thou types milling across the sidewalk like flies on a carcass and then he turned the corner.

Go on, she thought. You have to do this. You’ve got no choice. He’s got a wife and he’s got a son. You knew that going into this and in your heart you never did believe he was going to leave them. Not until his son was grown. Despite what you wanted to believe and despite what he said he wished to do. Greg was faithful as hell in his own peculiar way. It was part of what she loved about him.

In a way it was a shame just how good they were together. In a way it was almost cruelty. If only it had been just an affair. If there hadn’t been love, caring, tenderness, sharing. All of it, the whole ball of wax.

You had it all, she thought. And couldn’t really have anything.

She realized she’d been thinking about them in the past tense.

Now why was that?

She glanced at him through the window as he drove on by. It was impossible to smile for him again though she knew he needed it. She knew how he was feeling. But a single smile was all she had in her today and she’d spent that currency in the car.

The sound and feel of her heels on the sidewalk seemed to jolt straight through her. The cold hard streets of New York City. She realized she was trembling. A young hispanic delivery boy on a bicycle shot past her. Going the wrong way, against traffic, and on the sidewalk no less. She shot him a disgusted angry glance that he was moving too fast to see.

Her hands were cold. Her face was flushed. Already she dreaded the picketers moving ahead of her a few yards away. Despite what she’d said to him.

Because this was no examination. This was the real thing.

A life was going to end here.

For a moment she was angry with both of them. Sara and Greg, playing at love.

No, she thought. Give the devil his due.

They weren’t playing.

And that was the saddest part of all. Because it wasn’t fair. Years and years alone after Daniel’s death and her shattered marriage and finally someone comes along who’s got everything Sam never had and more. Kindness. Consideration. Sobriety. And he loves her. Not just wants her or wants to fuck her but loves her and she loves the man back with a power she finds quite astonishing. And then having to learn all over again that love protected nothing. Love was as necessary to people in the long run as food and shelter but love was also a cruel joke, a trick, both at once, two sides of the same coin. And you never knew when the coin would be turning. Because if it didn’t wind up this way, wind up stranding you between love and necessity, even if it did work out between you, then one of you was going to die before the other and leave you all alone again. Love was also about the death of love.

Like this.

Like killing the child inside, their child, who should have been a wonderful child alive and whole and made of all they had together.

Sara even thought she knew when she’d conceived her — on a warm windy beach that night in St. John just three months past, both of them so crazy over each other especially in that place with his other life so far behind him that they were downright ridiculous together, unable to stop touching, stroking, laughing, all through drinks and dinner. And then later making love in the Carribean sea, the warmth of the waves, the huge gentle womb of stars and sky.

Which led here.

It was as though it were love itself they were killing.

In the eye of her flesh she saw a beautiful baby girl.

And knowing that the child was there and knowing already the empty pain of the loss of her, so unexpectedly like that other loss so many years ago, here and now on this busy sunny street, she wondered how long she could go on with him afterwards. If this were not the turning point for both of them.

If she weren’t killing the child inside in more ways than one.

She’d begun to cry again. A thin haze of tears as she approached the picket lines. She blinked them back instead of wiping them away. These people might notice. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

How can you do this? she thought. How can you be so small and misty and so monumentally selfish as to approach me now, when I’ve never been so vulnerable?

But of course they would.

They saw it as their right, their mission.

There were many kinds of evil in the world and as far as she was concerned this was definitely one of them.

She heard a car approach slowly behind her close to the curb, wheels over pebbled glass and gravel. In her peripheral vision she saw the fender and the light blue hood, the driver’s-side window and roof and noted that it was a station wagon, one of those fake woodies, maybe ten years old. A city transit bus pulled laboriously around to the left of it. She passed an elegant slim young woman pushing two infant babies in a double stroller. A teenager on a skateboard.

And then the car stopped moving beside her and the passenger door opened in front of her and she felt someone’s arm wrap tight around her from behind just beneath her breasts, pinning her arms to her sides while his hand sought and covered her mouth to stifle the protest, the scream, grasping at the jaw so she couldn’t bite and then she was shoved inside, his hand still over her mouth and she glanced back to the sidewalk and saw that one of the protesters, a man wearing a dark blue windbreaker, had noticed her, was looking straight at her, is seeing all of this but was saying nothing, not one word to the others nor to the police at the clinic door, astonished by this as she felt a needle pierce the bare flesh of her upper arm and saw that it was the driver, a woman, holding a plastic syringe between her fingers and grimly clutching the wheel with her other fisted hand while the man who’d grabbed her slammed the door.

As darkness descended over all her sudden fears and long familiar sorrow they slowly pulled away.

He walked by an old woman with a shopping cart full of groceries and then past the picketers, barely noticing them this time and past the pair of cops, one male and one female, who were standing at the entrance. He walked through the revolving doors and past the bank’s ATM machines to the elevators, got in and punched eleven. The door to the reception room swung open ahead of him and he stepped aside for a young blonde woman in jeans and a teeshirt who smiled at him. Or maybe she was just smiling at the world that day.

At least somebody was happy.

He walked in and the reception room was empty. He thought my god, had they taken her in already?

Was anything that had to do with medicine or New York City ever that fast?

The receptionist behind the sliding glass windows smiled at him too. A purely formal smile, meant to be reassuring. See? We’re harmless here.

“Sara Foster.” he said quietly.

She checked her clipboard.

“Yes. She’s got a ten forty-five with Doctor Weller.”

“He’s seeing her already?”

The clock on the wall behind her read ten thirty.

“No, it’s a ten forty-five appointment, sir.”

“She’s not here?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. But if you’d want to take a seat 1 imagine she’ll be along shortly.”

“I don’t understand. I just dropped her off. Right here in front of the building. Just this minute.”

The receptionist frowned, puzzled. “I’m sorry. She hasn’t signed in.” Sara wouldn’t do this, he thought.

Something’s not right here.

“There’s a drugstore a few doors down and a smokeshop just next door to us. Maybe she needed something. Why don’t you have a seat and wait a moment. I’m sure she’ll be right along.”

“Why would she…? Okay. I’ll be back.”

He took the elevator down.

After the cool of the overly air-conditioned office the summer sun hit him hard and he was sweating as he peered through the open door to ihe cigarette shop to see nothing but an old man buying a Lotto ticket and then into the drugstore next to that. He looked around him on either side and then scanned Broadway across the street toward the Sony complex and the shoppers in front of the Food Emporium but he didn’t see her. He walked around the picketers again and directly to the cops at the door.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Did a woman just go inside?”

The female cop was almost as tall as her partner, nearly six feet. Her hair was blonde pulled up under the cap and she stopped chewing her gum the moment he walked up to her.

“Just now? No, sir.”

“Did you see a woman, five, maybe ten minutes ago, white short-sleeve blouse, blue skirt, early forties, long dark hair?” He pointed. “She’d have been coming this way toward the building. I dropped her off over there. She has an appointment at the clinic.”

The officer glanced at her partner. So did Greg, actually noticing him for the first time. The cop looked shockingly young. He was big and trim but to Greg he looked barely out of his teens. He guessed the woman would have a good ten years on him. The cop shook his head. “Sorry, sir,” the woman said and glanced behind him.

“Is there a problem?” Greg turned and saw a much smaller woman in a brown business suit and baggy trousers. Her tailored white shirt was unbuttoned at the collar so that the tie hung slightly off to one side. She wore no makeup as far as he could tell and the medium-length hair was a frizzy red.

“I’m Lieutenant Primiano, 20th precinct.” She produced a wallet and shield. “You said something about a woman?”

“She’s disappeared.”

“How so?”

“I let her out on that corner. I went to park the car. I drove past her and around the block and parked on 67th. She had an appointment for ten forty-five and she was headed right here, walking right toward you when I left her but I went inside and the receptionist says she never showed. She suggested maybe the smokeshop or the pharmacy but I just looked in both places and she’s not there. This isn’t like her. Sara does what she says she’ll do. She should be up there.”

“You folks have any kind of fight? Quarrel over anything?”

“God, no. We’re fine.”

He felt himself flush at the use of the word. They were not fine. Not today.

But that was their own business.

The woman studied him a moment and then nodded. “Ella, keep an eye on things here a minute, will you? Dean, ask around and see if any of these people noticed her. Your name, sir?”

“Greg Glover.”

“This is Officer Kaltsas and Officer Spader. Mr. Glover, let’s go on back inside.”

She questioned the receptionist and Weller’s nurse and then the doctor himself. She was brisk and to the point. It took maybe ten minutes tops but to Greg it seemed forever. Weller volunteered the notion that it happened sometimes, that at the last minute people changed their minds. You really couldn’t blame them.

“Not Sara,” he said. “She wouldn’t do that. Not possible.”

When they were outside again she asked the young cop, Kaltsas, about the picketers.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nobody saw her. I got a small problem with one of them, though.”

“What kind of problem.”

“Maybe he’s just weirdo, I dunno. Didn’t answer me right away. Something not right, maybe.”

“Which one?”

“Bald guy with the beard in the blue windbreaker. With the sign says PRO CHOICE IS NO CHOICE. Right there.”

Greg looked at him. Middle-age man with thinning hair, parading in a rough circle between two older women.

“Okay. Talk to him again. Get his name, address, phone number. If you can, see that he sticks around a while but go easy. I’m going to take a walk with Mr. Glover, see if we can spot her on the street.”

“Will do.”

“Have you got a photo of her? Of Sara?”

He dug it out of his wallet. It was his favorite shot, taken on summer vacation a year before on the streets of Jamaica, Vermont, the Jamaica Inn’s garlanded white porch in the background. She always hated having her picture taken and was wearing a goofy smile because of that but to him both then and now she looked lovely, her long hair swirling around her face. He had snapped and snapped her that day out of pure, almost adolescent pleasure, until she practically had to scream to make him quit.

She studied the photo and handed it back to him. “She’s very pretty,” she said. “We’ll start with your car. Maybe she went looking for you for some reason. Where’d you park again?”

“Down on 67th.”

She began walking slowly downtown. He matched her pace.

“This is crazy,” he said. “People don’t vanish.”

“No, sir. They don’t,” she said. “I think we’ll find her.”

Of course they would, he thought. There had to be some normal explanation. Maybe the doctor was right. Maybe Greg didn’t know her as well as he thought he did. Maybe she was sitting in a restaurant a block or two away over coffee, wondering if she should go through with this after all, mulling it over on her own.

She never breaks appointments at the last minute and she’s never late. She’s not secretive and she’s never lied to me and she’s not a coward.

No. Something’s wrong.

You damn well know something’s wrong.

He felt the unreality of it all wash over him and for a moment he felt dizzy, almost as though he were about to faint. Twenty minutes ago he was looking for a place to park, an empty meter, pummeled by guilt at what they were about to do. Now he was walking along peering into storefronts, at people coming out of doorways, pedestrians passing, the pour and turmoil of New York. Srching for a glimpse of her. Walking at what seemed to him a crawl when what he wanted to do was run, look everywhere at once. Police in his life all of a sudden while he’d never had pvious occasion to say ten words to a cop. And this cop, this brisk and nonsense young woman like a lifeline to him now, his only potential link to Sara. He felt a sudden incredible dependency, as though his life had just spun out of his hands and landed into hers, a stranger’s.

His heart was pounding.

People don’t just vanish. Not unless they want to. Or unless somebody helps them.

Whether they wanted to or not.

TWO

Sussex, New Jersey

12:30 p.m.

She woke in dark and panic.

Her first thought was that they had buried her alive.

That she was in a coffin.

She was lying on her back against rough unfinished wood, thick wood planks to the left of her, to the right of her, so close that she could barely raise her arms to feel that — yes, there was more rough wood above, she could smell it. Pine. There was a pillow beneath her head and that was all. Panic raced through her like a breath of fire. She had never been aware of being afraid of tight spaces but she was very afraid of this one.

She balled her hands into fists and pounded. She heard the pounding echo and knew she was in a room then, in some kind of box, some kind of room and not underground — at least not buried underground thank god — because there would be no echo if that were so but the panic didn’t recede any. She could hear her own fear in the wildness of her heartbeat. She screamed for help. She pounded and kicked at the lid of the thing and side to side at firm unyielding wood and it hurt, they’d removed her shoes and stockings, she was barefoot and it was only then that she realized that her skirt and blouse were gone too, she was wearing only her slip and panties. And that fact too was terrifying.

Why? she thought. What am I doing here?

What do they want with me?

It was cold.

She was not underground but it must have been some kind of basement she was in because it was summer, the day was warm and yet in here it was cold.

Where was she?

She was crying. The tears went cold on her face the moment she shed them. Gooseflesh all over her body.

She kicked harder. Kicked until her feet were sore and maybe bleeding and then kicked and pounded again. Her breath came in gasps through the sobbing.

Calm down, she thought. This isn’t doing any good. Think. Control yourself, dammit. Concentrate.

Look for weaknesses.

She had maybe two feet between her chest and the lid above. Maybe she could press the lid off. She raised her arms, took a deep breath and pushed with all her might until her neck was straining, the muscles of her arms and shoulders spasming.

It didn’t budge.

She let go of the breath and rested. Then took another and tried again.

She brought her knees up under her as best she could until they pressed tight against the lid, trying to get more leverage, took a third deep breath and pushed until finally all her strength leeched out of her. She lay back, exhausted.

The footboard and headboard, she thought. Maybe there. She slid down until the soles of her feet touched wood, the slip riding up her thighs and then drew her arms up over her head, the palms of her hands against the headboard. She was sweating now despite the cold, as in clammy film, all over her. She pushed and felt the headboard give a quarter inch and then stop. She relaxed immediately and used her fingers to explore it on either side.

She touched metal. The headboard was hinged to the left. That meant there was probably some kind of lock on the outside. Which also meant the headboard was the entrance. How had they gotten her in here?

She lowered her arms and felt around the base of the box opposite her thighs and found a half-inch space between the base and sideboards on either side. On a hunch she pushed off with the soles of her feet and felt the base slide minutely toward the headboard and then stop.

She was on rollers, casters.

They’d rolled her in.

Then locked the headboard behind her.

Somebody had gone to a whole lot of trouble planning this, constructing this. Building this trap for me.

It didn’t change anything knowing that except to scare her further.

Who were these people? Suddenly she was desperate to know.

There was a woman involved. The woman with the needle. She’d been driving. Why would a woman do this to another woman? How could somebody do that?

She willed herself to stop thinking, to go back to the original plan. The lock might give. It was possible.

It didn’t.

She pushed until every muscle in her body was shaking with the strain and that was when the fear set in deep and final so that she lay still, trembling wide-eyed in the dark. Because she had no choice then but to accept the fact that there was no way out until they decided to let her out to whatever purpose they had in mind, which could be to no good purpose because here she was. Half naked. In a hand-built coffin. Alone in the swimming dark.

Or maybe not alone.

She heard scratching, light raspings, like claws, something working at the top of the box and growing more and more determined-sounding as she lay there helpless, frozen, listening.

Something wanted in.

A rat?

She took a deep breath and shouted. “HEY!” Why that word she didn’t know. The word simply burst out of her, angry and scared, unnaturally loud in that closed space. Hey! She listened. Waited.

The sounds had stopped.

The trembling didn’t.

What do they want with me? she thought.

Am I going to die here?

Why me?

There was no answer she could think of to any of these questions that wasn’t frightening and nothing to do but ask them over and over again while she waited for whatever deliverance would come in whatever form, in however vast and slow an eternity.

The scratching sounds did not return. The cold did not relent.

Greg, she thought. Somebody. Find me.

I’m here.

THREE

1:05 p.m.

Was it day or night?

She was so cold. Colder every minute. She was thirsty. Her throat was sore from screaming, her hands and knuckles raw from pounding.

What time was it? How long had she been here?

Inside the box there was no benchmark for time, nothing to do but wait and think, thoughts turning in on themselves like the track on a model railroad, like the double-ring symbol for eternity, the snake swallowing its tail.

Why me? bled seamlessly into what do they want from me, which dovetailed into is anyone looking for me, searching or when will I get same water or see some light or a thousand other questions which all line down to one question, how will I get out of here? Alive. Sane.

She felt permanently stunned to find herself here. The feeling colored all reality. As though suddenly she were not even who and what she thought herself to be anymore. The Sara Foster she knew had come unstuck, uprooted from everything that grounded her. The Sara Foster who taught English and drama to LD kids at the Winthrop School on 74th Street, who was daughter to Charles and Evelyn Schap of Harrison, New York, lover to Greg Glover and pregnant with his child, who was once the mother of a wonderful beautiful boy drowned in a lake, who was ex-wife to Samuel Bell Foster and best friends with Annie Graham since childhood — all these people who had cradled her identity in embraces loving and not so loving for as long as she could remember meant nothing here. Were now almost irrelevant. What mattered was not the known world but the unknown world beyond the box.

These people.

They mattered.

What the dark held mattered. The meaning of the box.

And when she heard the footsteps on the wooden stairs they mattered. So that her heart began to race and the air seemed to thicken so she couldn’t seem to get her breath, worse as she heard them on the landing and then move toward her, shoeleather scraping concrete and she began to twist and turn inside the box in a frenzy to get out of there to whatever freedom or whatever fate those footsteps might imply, clawing at the box, slapping at the box, her voice a shrill high-pitched squeal in her ears and while still she gulped for breath. And when she heard the man’s laughter at the sounds of her fear and struggle and heard his fingers rattle the lock outside the headboard, rattling it again and again, playing with her, her body betrayed her utterly and she saw a sudden burst of red and fainted away.

He lifted her out and placed her on the bare stained mattress. Studied her a moment.

She didn’t move. She wasn’t faking.

He lifted her head and set it carefully into the headbox.

Then he clamped it shut.

The headbox was half-inch plywood about the size of a hatbox, split in two and hinged at the top, with semicircular neck-holes carved into its base on either side and a padlock to secure the halves together. It was insulated and carpeted inside. It muffled all sound, shut out nearly all light.

He’d tried it on himself.

It was scary.

The red plush carpeting pressed close to your face, sending your breath right back at you no matter how shallow your breathing. It was hot and claustrophobic. About ten pounds of weight sitting on your shoulders. And once it was on there was no way in hell you could get it off again. It was sturdy. You could bang it against a concrete wall all day long and do nothing but buy yourself a concussion.

He’d done a good job on this one.

The first two tries were failures. The problem was mostly weight, too much or too little. He’d built the first out of quarter-inch ply and when Kath tried it on she pointed out to him that if you pressed your face into the carpeting and held it that way, making space between your head and the back of the box so you didn’t bash your brains in, one good slam against a wall could crack the plywood.

She proved this by demonstrating.

Back to the drawing board.

He built the second box of three-quarter-inch ply and it was tough as nails. But the damn thing also weighed about twenty pounds. You fell with that on, it could snap your neck.

The new box halved the weight. Ten pounds was still a lot and he’d have to watch for that but he felt satisfied it was manageable.

Kath had worn it all day long once just to see. She hadn’t wanted to but he explained to her that a trial run was a necessity. He knew she hated the thing from the minute he put it on her. Knew it scared her, made her dizzy and sick to her stomach and later she said it pinched her neck all the time she was in there but that was just too damn bad in the long view, somebody had to try it and it wasn’t going to be him. Besides the point was could a woman wear it all day long, not a man. Could a woman stand it.

When he let her out at dinnertime her collarbone and shoulders were chafed red and sore and she complained about a stiff neck for nearly a week. Nothing that wasn’t going to go away. The point was that yes, it was manageable.

He smiled. If Miss Sara Foster here thought the Long Box was scary — and she obviously did — wait till she woke up again and found herself in this one. He’d have put her in the thing in the first place but he was afraid she might vomit from the pentothol. And vomit was easier to clean off the base panel of a pinewood box than to get out of carpeting.

He’d have to keep an eye on that too. On the vomiting. Kath had said the headbox was stifling and made her queasy in and of itself, never mind the pentothol.

He slipped her wrists through the black leather manacles and pulled each of the straps tight and threaded the ropes through the silver rings attached. The ropes depended from the a pair of pulleys at the top of each arm of the brand-new X-frame he’d constructed for her. Taking the two ropes together he slowly and carefully hauled her up until only her feet rested on the floor, legs slightly bent beneath her. Her head lolled forward heavily so that the box now rested on her breastbone. That probably hurt but as yet, not enough to wake her. He tied the ropes off quickly to the the climbers’ pitons hammered into the concrete floor and then stepped forward and slipped a small brass hook screwed into the headrest he’d attached to the X-frame through the corresponding eye at the back of the box so that her head would stay upright and take the weight off the back of her neck.

He’d thought of everything.

He stood back and looked at her. All his creation.

You couldn’t see her face and that was good. Control was important. And she was very pretty.

He needed to control himself now.

The only thing that remained at this initial stage was to finish undressing her but he’d wait until she woke for that and was able t fel the cold blade of the knife cutting away her slip and panties. That kind of control was very important too.

Afterwards he and Kath could come down and have some dinner and watch her, see how she took it all and he could go over again with Kath what the next step was supposed to be so there’d be no fuck-ups, no misunderstandings. This he’d do daily. There was a progression of events to this that he needed to be sure Kath would follow. They could speak as freely down here in front of her as they could upstairs. Sound not only didn’t get out of the box it didn’t get in much either.

FOUR

1:15 p.m.

And now there was nothing in her life but terror.

Her legs and arms were manacled and she knew what that meant. She’d read enough in papers and magazines. Seen enough on the evening news. She was in the hands of some sex freak and dear god, she was probably not the first. Not the way he’d worked this out. There was somebody out there beyond her own vivid dark who liked to hear screams and pleas and whimpers. Before they killed.

Invariably they killed.

She knew that too.

She was aware of the terrible frail vulnerability of her body, of her cold nearly naked breasts, her exposed bare arms and legs against the scratchy wooden beams. Inside the box her eyes could not accommodate the dark. The heavy air was suffocating. She could smell her own breath. Sweat stung her eyes. She blinked to clear them and finally closed them while her body heaved with sobs that were wholly beyond her control wrenched from deep inside her. She heard her own quick gasps for breath. They never seemed to satisfied her aching lungs or still her pounding heart.

She felt the heavy weight at her collarbones.

The chafe of leather on wrists and ankles.

Then the cold touch of metal just below her right wrist, sudden, seemingly out of nowhere. Felt it travel from wrist to elbow-joint and stop there. Then from elbow-joint to armpit, slowly, a sharp prick at the delicate flesh there of a knife or sharp scissors and then travelling again, exploring the slope of breast to pause and prick once more at her fear-swollen nipple, her body jerking back then and the blade moving down again sliding over her trembling stomach to her navel and stopping to poke her harder this time at the tender fleshy remains of what once had linked her to life and then moving on.

She felt rough fingers graze her shoulder pulling away the strap of her slip and then felt that side go slack against her breast and fingers on the other shoulder and then the slip falling softly away across her thighs. The blade inserted itself thin and cold between her panties and the flesh of her hip on the right and she felt it pull and cut and now she was completely exposed to the room and the knife and the man who was doing the cutting, the fingers were a man’s fingers she thought, felt herself choking inside the box on tears and mucus, then felt the left side go.

She was naked but for the box. But for the insanity of the box.

Naked and against all reason ashamed to be.

She was glad he couldn’t see her face reflect her shame.

And feeling that shame despite the fact that her body had done nothing to cause it, that she had done nothing to cause it, feeling that made her angry. So that the first harsh access of fear began to bleed and blend and fade into stubborn black anger and finally to a strange defiant pride which was the other side of shame.

She hung suspended. Open.

Waiting.

“Lady’s got guts,” he said.

Kath agreed. Though she said nothing, merely watched him take a bite of the half-eaten tuna sandwich, chew and swallow. And then munch at the potato chips which surrounded it on his plate.

The cat sat in front of them near the X-frame, glancing back at the woman naked on the frame and then nervously at each of them, interested in their sandwiches, wondering who to try to hit up for a bite of tuna, but also clearly interested in this strange new arrival standing here. Stephen was eating while Kath as yet was not. She figured the cat would eventually make her move on Stephen.

It was just The Cat. It had no name. Last summer there’d been moles in the back yard ruining the lawn and they’d noticed the occasional water rat down by the brook. So they’d got the cat from the ASPCA to drive the moles and rats away and the cat was successful at that in an amazingly short time so they decided to let her stay, figuring that if moles tried once they might just try again. The cat was the color of champaign with streaks and spots of white, with one almost-perfect circle of white behind each of her front haunches. Neither of them really cared much for cats but they fed her and paid for her shots and put up with the dead or dying birds or mice she brought home now and then, dropping them on the back porch like some disgusting present.

She watched the cat inch toward Stephen. She’s been right about the cat’s decision. Stephen looked up and saw her and kicked at the air in front of her and she was only a cat but she wasn’t stupid. She backed away. Sat back and seemed to ponder her luck with Kath.

She took a bite of her sandwich and thought that it definitely needed more mayo. She was actually surprised Stephen hadn’t started complaining. But they were out of mayo. She’d forgotten to put it down on the shopping list again.

She was forgetting too much lately. He was always telling her and she thought he was probably right.

Maybe it was stress or something. She didn’t know.

But she agreed with him that this Sara Foster person had nerve. Was probably not going to be all that easy to subdue and subvert. She knew first-hand what the headbox was like and to have calmed down so fast took guts all right.

She wondered if he’d chosen correctly.

Though for some reason he was sure he had. Intuition, he said. The way she walks.

Follow her. Get her name.

“Did you phone in all the stuff to Sandy like I said?”

She nodded.

“What’d he say?”

“He said no problem, give him an hour. The mom and dad’s phone number are probably a New York exchange, he thought maybe somewhere in Westchester or Long Island. The Winthrop School is definitely Manhattan. So he’ll get us the street addresses on those and trace her boyfriend’s plates. He asked was there anything else and I said I guess we’d get back to him.”

“Good. We’ll go through the rest of her address book tonight, see if there’s anything else we can use.”

“Jeez, Stephen. I wanted to watch that movie tonight.”

She took another bite of the sandwich. Wished it had some chopped celery in it. The damn thing was way too dry.

He glared at her.

“Couldn’t we go through her book after the movie?”

“No, we couldn’t go through it after the movie. Can’t you fucking prioritize?”

She wished he wouldn’t use that voice with her. That condescending tone.

She knew better than to argue with him per se. But she wasn’t exactly ready to let it go at that either.

“You were going to get the VCR fixed. I mean, I could’ve taped it.”

“Fuck the VCR! Jesus! What’s more important, Kath? This or your goddamn movie? Do you realize what we’ve done here? Do you remember what’s going on? Do you realize how important this is?”

Important to who? she thought. But she didn’t want to say that to him either. It was an ego thing and she didn’t want to insult him. Stephen prided himself on being a careful hunter and a good profiler of people and a very organized personality. He thought that he had managed this pretty much perfectly so far. He also thought that it was important, that it wasn’t just a matter of his own satisfaction.

She wasn’t so sure about that part.

He saw the look on her face though and relented.

Good. She really did want to see the movie.

“What’s it called?” he said.

“It’s an HBO Original Movie. It’s called COVEN and it’s based on a book I really liked a lot.”

The cat made up its mind and walked over. She picked off a pinch of tuna and held it out to her. She didn’t much like it anyway.

He sighed. “All right,” he said. “After the goddamn movie. But you’ve got to get more serious about this, Kath.”

“Jeez, Stephen. How much more serious can I get? I drove the car, I brought home the pentathol from the hospital, risked my job, risked arrest. I shot her up for you for godsakes! I’m in this up to my neck, y’know what I mean?”

The cat was looking for more tuna. She picked off a chunk and dropped it on the floor. The cat purred and set in.

“I know. But from here on in everything’s got to go by the book. Exactly by the book. And it’s going to be a very long haul. We’ve got to be diligent as hell.”

“Don’t worry. I will be.”

She got up and walked over to his chair and bent over and kissed him. He smelled like tuna and Old Spice aftershave. She glanced at Sara Foster five feet away, still breathing hard but managing to control it, a bead of sweat rolling down off her collarbone from inside the box. She thought that for a woman her age Sara had a damn good body. Her pubic hair was bikini-waxed, unlike her own. She thought she’d like to get that done someday but there was never enough money around for extravagances like a bikini wax. The tan-line from her two-piece was very clear. Forget about the clumsy headbox and she was very attractive. Made her feel sort of dumpy, tell the truth.

All this and fertile, too, she thought.

She wondered if Stephen was going to keep his promise about not having sex with her. Not real sex, anyway. If he’d be able to do that.

He’d better.

“How long you going to leave it on?”

“Well, I’ve got to get her out of the cuffs in about an hour or she’s going to have problems with circulation. But by then she’ll be hurting and compliant enough so that she won’t be hard to handle. I figure we’ll just tie her to the chair here and you can hold her head still for me while I take off the box and blindfold her from behind. I don’t want her to see us yet. I want us to stay anonymous. We’ll turn off the lights and leave her an hour or so and then I want to come back and try to feed her. I’m betting she refuses. So then we put her up on the rack again and I’ll give her her first beating. Show her what things are going to be like from now on. She’ll get the idea.”

“What if she doesn’t? Refuse I mean.”

He grinned. “If you were in her shoes, would you accept food from us right now? But even if she does, fine. Establishes dependency. Either way we can’t lose.”

She collected his empty plate off his lap. The cat tried to nuzzle her leg but she stepped away.

Dumb animal.

“Are you going to stay down here a while?”

He nodded. “I want to make sure she’s basically okay, that she doesn’t throw up inside the box or anything. I’ll hang around. But you go on ahead. I’ll give you a yell when I need you. If Sandy calls let me know.”

“Okay.”

She walked upstairs through the doorway that led to the dining room and kitchen and put the plates in the sink and rinsed them and stacked them in the dishwasher. Outside the window over the sink a pair of jays were harassing a small flock of sparrows attempting to feed by the cherry tree next to the garage, diving at them from the white birch on the opposite side of the lawn. Scattering them but making no real effort to feed. Just flying back to the birch and perching there until the sparrows returned and then diving back down to scatter them again. Seemingly just for the hell of it. Or maybe it was the sparrows themselves the jays were after.

Were bluejays predatory? She didn’t know.

Nowadays, who wasn’t?

In the basement he thought of all the things — the things he would do to her before she broke, all those things which would make her break in the course of time. It would take time he knew and that was fine because the good part was in the breaking. Once the will to resist had disappeared they were like herd animals, like cattle, without motivation other than to go on living with a minimum of pain. The pleasure was in the taming of the will and the mastery of the spirit and he was only in the second true hour of that, the second true hour of all that lay ahead yet already h hard-on was irresistible so he grasped it in his warm calloused hand and looked at her breathing flesh just a few feet away and stroked and stroked.

The cat sat watching him. The cat made him uncomfortable.

He wished it would go away.

When he was finished he went to the sink to wash the scum off his hand and remove the smell of his body and sat down and gazed at her again.

Screw HBO. He had his own Original Movie. Right in front of him.

It was going to go on and on.

FIVE

5:25 p.m.

“I don’t want it,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you? Please. Just let me out of here. Why can’t you just leave the blindfold, let me get dressed and drive me back where you found me? Or anywhere. My god, I’m not going to tell anybody. How can I? I don’t even know who you are or where I am!”

“Eat your sandwich,” he said.

“Please. I can’t. Just the smell of it’s making me sick!”

“When I tell you to do something you do it. I don’t care what it is. You understand?”

“You want me to throw up? Is that what you want?”

“I don’t care what you do as long as you do what I say and eat the sandwich. Now take a bite.”

He held it under her nose.

Tuna salad.

She wasn’t lying about vomiting. She felt like a drunk at the end of a long night on sweet cheap wine. Waves of nausea rolled through her, making her sweat. It was worse than being inside the box. She shook her head side to side, trying to escape the reek of it. It was all she could do. The leather manacles were attached tight to the arms and legs of the chair. There was a rope around her shoulders and another around her waist.

“Please!”

She began to cry again beneath the blindfold. The blindfold her only garment now. How long and how often could you cry before it was impossible to cry anymore? Did tears have a physical limit? She hoped they did. Like her nudity the tears shamed her.

He shoved the sandwich roughly to her closed lips. It crumbled. Cold clammy bits of bread and tuna falling across her chest and thighs. Some of it clung to her lips. She sputtered it away.

He sighed. She heard a plate set down on a table. He walked around behind her.

She felt the rope around her waist fall free and then the one around her shoulders. He drew them off her.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I guess this isn’t working. I thought maybe you’d sort of get into all this. Some people do, you know.” He sighed again. “I guess we’ll just take you back like you say. You sure you won’t tell? I mean, you promise?”

Some people get into this? Was he crazy?

“I won’t. I swear.”

“You remember what we look like?”

“No. I mean, it was so fast. How could I?”

He seemed to think about it.

“Good. Okay. I guess we’ll do it then. Too bad though.”

One by one the manacles fell free from the chair legs. She felt a sudden surge of hope. Maybe if he was crazy, he was also crazy enough to take her out of here. Let her go. Give her up. Or even if he had something else in mind, something she didn’t even like to think about, there still might be a chance to get free. Everything, every hope, began with getting out of here. Beyond that she’d take her chances. It occurred to her that he could kill her just as easily here as anywhere. Easier in fact.

She was healthy and strong. Anything but this she might possibly deal with.

She felt something brush her ankle. Suddenly wet then smooth and soft. She jumped.

“What’s that?”

“The damn cat. Don’t worry. Hey! Outa here!”

He released the manacles from the chair arms. She moved her wrists and jangled the rings.

“Aren’t you going to take these off?”

“In a minute. First I have to go upstairs and get you some clothes. I sort of ruined the ones you were wearing, you know?” He laughed. “Got to make sure you don’t try to run away on me in the meantime. Stand up.”

He took her hand. His was hard and calloused. Not a big hand but definitely a laborer’s hand.

“Come with me. Over here. Nice and slow. Be careful.”

He led her blind across the room. Then he stopped her and raised her hand and snapped it to a ring on the X frame. Suddenly she was scared again.

“No, wait. You said…”

“Just for a minute. While I get you some clothes.”

He raised her other hand and attached that too so that she was facing the frame, arms spread wide above her. She heard him step away. At least her legs were free, she thought. Not like last time. For a moment there was only silence.

She heard a whistling sound and fire climbed her shoulder.

She jumped and screamed. The pain settled slowly into a stinging glow, a thousand tiny pinpricks along a fireline of hurt.

“Fooled you,” he said.

Then suddenly the blows were coming furiously, fast and hard across her back and buttocks and arms, the tender flesh of her underarms, across the backs of her legs and thighs, then even her breasts and stomach as she tried to twist away, the whip finding the same burning places over and over, uncanny, lighting them with bright new pain like lines of bee stings, like lines of biting ants, no matter how hard she tried to evade him, her wrists burning too scraped raw as she twisted inside the manacles, and whatever he was using it was bloodying her, she could feel the wetness inside the pain that was nothing whatever like the feel of sweat though she was sweating too, every muscle straining, bruising herself as she jerked and twisted against the heavy boards of the X frame. She could hear him grunt with the exertion and her own gasps for breath, the blows crack-crack-crack-crack like pistol shots in her ears and it was like there were two of him, three of him, four of him, coming at her from everywhere at once.

Ah ah ah ah! she heard and it was her own voice leaping startled out of her at the fall of each blow, mixed with a high wining’ keen and that belonged to her too though she’d never heard her voice or any voice make a sound like that. She could take no more no more and she twisted from yet another blow to her anguished shoulders and the whip found her breast again burning across it like a laser cutting deep and PLEEEEEESE! she screamed, not in protest nor even begging but a prayer to the grim gods of pain, the gods of the body’s disaster.

He stopped. She heard him breathing behind her.

“You’ll get that every time you disobey. Each and every time. And worse,” he said.

From her calves on up her body trembled from the sheer effort of standing. Somehow she found a voice.

“Why? Why are you doing this to me? What did I do to you? I didn’t do anything.”

“Oh. You’re innocent? Is that it?”

“I…”

“Let me tell you something, Sara.”

She started at hearing her name. Almost as though he’d hit her again.

“That’s right, I know who you are. And I didn’t just lift your name off your driver’s license either. I know plenty about you. But we’ll get to all of that later. Let me tell you something. The only innocent on God’s green earth is an infant, Sara. A baby. Some people would say an unborn baby. But I’d extend that to, say, the first six months of life or so. In my own opinion. What’s your feeling on the subject?”

“I… I don’t know. I…”

“Let me ask you something. What were you going to do with your unborn child? Your baby. Your innocent…” He laughed. “I know perfectly well what you were going to do with him. You were going to let some fucking jew doctor kill him and flush him down the toilet. Now that’s real nice. I don’t think that makes you exactly an innocent yourself, do you? I honestly don’t think so. Plus you had to do a little fancy fucking in order to get yourself knocked up the first place, didn’t you? And I don’t see any wedding ring on your finger. So you tell me. Who’s innocent here?”

She heard a series of snapping sounds and realized that he was taking her photo. Walking around her, getting her from various angles. She heard what sounded like him opening and closing a drawer behind her and then heard his footsteps approaching.

“This won’t hurt,” he said.

And then his hand was moving over her, rubbing some viscous scentless lotion over her shoulders, down across her back and waist. The relief was immediate. But he was wrong about the hurting. In a way it hurt like hell. When he got to her buttocks it hurt and when he got to her breasts. It hurt that this sick son of a bitch should be touching her in these places and that she had no say in the matter. She was learning that there were realms of hurt she’d never imagined.

“You’re doing this because I…?”

“I’m doing this because I can, Sara. Get that through your head. Because I can. But yes, I also have an agenda. Let me tell you how it’s going to be,” he said almost gently. “Have you ever heard of the Organization?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Open your legs.”

She’d been holding them tight together. She didn’t want him touching her there. The whip hadn’t touched her there thank god so there was no reason and even if there were a reason she…

“I said open them. Do you remember what happened to you just now? Just a couple minutes ago? You want me to turn you around maybe, try the other side?”

She uncrossed her legs and braced herself, shivering. She felt his lingers smooth the salve over each of her upper inner thighs. His fingers coarse, the salve soothing. But the fingers went no further. They left her alone there.

“That’s good,” he said. “You’re cooperating. I could have forced you. But that’s not what this is about. This is about you doing what I ask you to do because I ask you.”

She felt him stand and heard him walk around in front of her. “I’m not going to tell you much about the Organization right now. Except to say that the Organization has a very long reach. And that you’re involved with it now, like it or not. Just like I am. I told you I know a lot about you. Well, here’s just a little part of what I know.

“Your full name is Sara Evelyn Foster. You were born Sara Evelyn Schap in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 6th, 1955. Your parents are Charles and Evelyn Shap of 221 South Elm Street in Harrison, New York. Your mother is sixty-eight and your father’s seventy-two. You teach learning disabled kids at the Winthrop School at 115 West 77th Street in Manhattan. You’ve got a boyfriend named Gregory Glover who lives at 224 Amity Street in Rye and who dropped you off for a ten-forty-five appointment this morning with a Dr. Alfred Weller, to abort your three-month-old fetus. How am I doing?”

Her head was swimming. How long had he been stalking her? To know this much?

“How can you know all that?”

“It’s not what I know personally, Sara. It’s what the Organization knows. And believe me, we know plenty. This is nothing but the tip of a very big iceberg. But the point is what I said before. That we’ve got reach. And we get what we want, one way or another. So don’t think you’re in this alone. You’re not. Your mother and father are in it. Glover’s in it. Your kids at the Winthrop School are in it. Along with plenty of others. This is not just your problem.

“So it all depends on you, Sara. If you do exactly as I say you’ll not only avoid another beating like this you’ll be keeping a lot of other people you care about safe and sound and out of some very deep shit.”

“Why? What is this about?” She was practically screaming at him. She couldn’t help it. It was crazy! She felt like a receiver on overload, could practically smell her fuses burning. “ What do you want from me?”

“I want you to calm down, for starters.” He sighed. “Look, I’ve got some stuff that needs taking care of. I’m going to take you down, put you in the Long Box again. You can rest.”

How could she rest?

“You’re not going to give me any trouble, are you? If I take you down? Remember what I said. The lives and safety of a lot of people are depending on exactly how you handle this.”

Could all this possibly be true? Could there really be some kind of Organization out there waiting to pounce on her parents or Greg or the kids? Or was this some invention of his, something he’d made up just to scare her?

All this planning, she thought. So much planned ahead of time. The coffin — what he called the Long Box. The whipping frame. That horrible confining thing he put over her head. The abduction itself, so fast and clean. They’d targeted her specifically. Could there be something to what he was saying?

Then the woman. Who was she? Part of this Organization, whatever it was? The woman hadn’t made an appearance since the car to her knowledge.

She remembered the quick deft plunge of the needle.

She needed more information. A lot more. Right now it wouldn’t do any good at all to resist him.

“I won’t give you any trouble.”

“Good. Do you need to go to the bathroom? I can bring you down a pan.”

“No.”

When he’d uncuffed her and was leading her across the room she asked for some clothes but he refused. He told her she could take off the blindfold once she was inside and that he would tell her when it was okay to do that but that she’d have to keep it handy and put it on before he let her out again. She asked him for a blanket because it was cold in there and he handed her one made of light cotton, thin and soft like a baby’s blanket and she wrapped it around her against her nudity as she lay down on the sliding board and he began to push her in. And then she had to ask him one more time.

“Please. What do you want from me? What do I have to do?” she said softly.

“Lots of things,” he said, no harshness in his voice either. Almost as though he were somehow in league with her now. “You’ll see. Most of it won’t all be as bad as today. Though I have to be honest with you, some of it will probably be worse. I know how these things go. But it’s all for your own good, believe me. I’m not so bad. You’ll find that out in time. After a while everything will be fine. I don’t want to hurt you any more than I have to, Sara. Honestly.”

He slid her into the dark.

“Why would I?” he said. “You’re pregnant. You’re going to be a mother. You ’re going to have a baby.”

He went upstairs and saw Kath on the couch with a bag of potato chips open in her lap.

“How’s your movie?” he said.

“Good. Book’s better, though. I don’t like some of the casting.”

“I decided to go through her address book myself. I want to get back to Sandy soon as possible.”

“Did she buy it?”

“It got her thinking, that’s for sure.”

He went into the bedroom and opened the closet door and took Sara’s purse off the floor in back and fished around inside for her book. He sat down on the bed. He took a notepad and pen off the nightstand, opened the book and began making notes. Half an hour later he had what he wanted. He dialed Sandy.

“What’s up, old buddy?”

“I’ve got some more stuff I want you to see if you can find out for me. Got a pen?”

“Hang on a sec. Okay. Hit me.”

“First, her parents. Can you find out what her father does for a living or if he’s retired or what? Any way to do that? Also if the mother works or did work?”

“Sure. IRS records.”

“You can do that?”

He laughed. “You hurt me, old buddy. Easy as getting the clinic’s files.”

Sandy was probably one of the top two or three hackers in the Slate of New Jersey, had been ever since High School when he’d break into the school computer on a regular basis and rearrange grades for his friends. It was a game to him back then. Still was. But Stephen practically owed him his diploma.

God knows what he’s hacking into now, he thought. The FBI? He decided he didn’t want to know.

In that way they were a lot alike. Sandy never even watched the TV news. For a guy with the ability to do damn near anything computer-wise, to peer into any electronic corner, he had very little curiosity. Which made him fine for Stephen’s purposes.

“Okay, then this Glover guy. What’s he do for a living.”

“Already found that. He and his wife run a travel agency in Rye. The company’s online.”

“His wife? He’s married?”

“Her name’s Diane.”

“They have kids?”

“I don’t know but I can find out for you. What’s this all about, anyway? Why are you so interested in these fucking people? Playing amateur detective?”

“You really sure you want to ask me that, Sandy?”

He laughed again. “Nah. What’re friends for, right?”

“It’s nothing illegal. I can tell you that much.”

“Did I ask if it was illegal? So. Anything else?”

And that was the extent of Sandy’s curiosity.

“Yes. Two names. Annie Graham at 914-332-8765. And I guess this is a sister or maybe an aunt — Linda Schap. 603-434-9943.” They were the only two names listed in the book without an accompanying address so he guessed she must know them by heart. That meant these two were probably close to her. He needed people who were close.

“That last one’s a New Hampshire exchange,” Sandy said.

“Okay, but I need the addresses and anything else you can find out for me. I also need her teaching schedule at Winthrop. And list of her students if possible.”

“Easy. School computer. Hey, just like old times, buddy boy!”

“Just like old times.”

He hung up and joined Kath on the couch for the tail-end of the movie. Gory shit.

Not bad.

She’d finished the goddamn chips though.