IN THE DARK, page 31
“So you’re the one who caused all the excitement, huh?” The voice of Dennis sounded amused.
“I guess so. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Well, it sure perked things up around here.”
Things were mighty perky before I got there, she thought.
And she felt herself blush, remembering what she’d seen through the window.
That was this guy.
This guy, not Brace.
Apparently.
“What apartment number are you in?” she asked.
“Twelve. I used to be upstairs, and Brace had this place. He sort of traded with me for a wedding present.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Still checking up on him, huh?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t bother. The guy is crazy about you. He’s been a basket case for the last week. If you’ve got any sense, you’ll get back together with him.”
“What’re you, his PR man?”
“I know him, that’s all. He’s such a good guy it makes the rest of us look like shit, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“So, how long have you been living in apartment twelve?”
“It’ll be exactly a month, tomorrow.”
“Would you tell me… I’m sorry, but… I’ve been through so much weirdness lately, I just hardly know what’s going on any more.”
“I’ll help any way I can. You know, I wanta see Brace happy, and…”
“What was going on in your place when I looked in the window?”
He hesitated. “For starters, we were bare-ass naked. We’d been… fooling around, you know. And we no sooner got done than Lois realized the curtains weren’t shut all the way. That’s when she got up to pull them shut. She was right up there at the window and there you were… It was you, huh?”
“Yeah. I’m afraid so.”
“She said you snarled like a maniac.”
“I was pretty upset. I’m awfully sorry, though. Will you tell her how sorry I am?”
“Want to talk to her?”
“No, that’s all right. Thanks. I’ve gotta go, now. Goodnight.” She hung up.
Brace raised his eyebrows. “Well?”
“How do I know you didn’t coach him?”
“It’s possible. Anything’s possible. Didn’t you once say something like, ‘When anything’s possible, nothing makes sense?’”
“Did I?”
“I believe so. But the thing is, I had no idea the Peeping Tom might be you.”
“Maybe you saw me.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t see you. I had no idea who it was until you told me about it a few minutes ago—which didn’t give me much of an opportunity to coach Dennis.”
Jane stepped away from him. She slumped on the couch, kicked off her shoes, and put her feet on the coffee table. She rubbed her face. “I’m so wasted,” she muttered.
“Maybe I should leave, now—give you some time by yourself to figure things out. You can give me a call later, if you want… or drop by and see exactly who is living where.”
Still rubbing her face, she said, “No. Don’t go.” She raised her head. “Everything’s… don’t leave me. Okay?”
He sat down beside her and reached an arm across her shoulders.
“I’m such a mess,” she muttered. “It’s good to have you back, though.”
“I am back?”
“As far as I’m concerned.”
He gently squeezed her shoulder. “So what else has been going on? You’re still playing along with Mog?”
She reached into the front pocket of her jeans, clutched the thick block of paper and pulled. It was in there very tight against her thigh, but she felt it move a bit. Slowly, she was able to drag it out.
“Is that money?”
“I think so.” She unfolded the envelope and tore it open, revealing a small brick of bills wrapped in a sheet of paper. She tossed the paper aside. With her thumb, she riffled the bills.
“Good Lord,” Brace said.
“More than fifty thousand bucks,” Jane told him.
“What’d you have to do for it?”
She hesitated, then said, “Break into a house.”
“An abandoned place like…?”
“No. A big expensive place up on Mayr Heights.” She watched him. “Do you know where that is?”
“Mayr Heights? Yeah. The head of the English department lives up there.”
“His name isn’t Savile, is it?”
“Ketchum.”
“Well, that’s where I had to go tonight. To a house up there. But I didn’t think anyone was home. I rang the doorbell, and knocked, and everything. Nobody heard any of that—luckiest thing that ever happened to me, probably. Anyhow, I had to break in through a window. I planned to pay for it, leave a few hundred bucks behind to make everything all right.”
She saw the look on Brace’s face.
“I know, I know, the money wouldn’t have really made everything all right. But at least it would’ve paid for having the window fixed.”
“True. So what happened next?”
“If you’re bothered by a little matter like breaking a window, I’d better stop right there.”
“It gets worse?”
“I’d say so, yeah.”
He looked into her eyes as if studying them. Then he said, “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t think I can. Not right now. Is that all right?”
“It’s fine,” he said, rubbing her shoulder.
“The thing is, I’m done with it all. It went… way too far. So you won’t have to worry about me going out to strange places in the middle of the night. Never again.” She stuffed the thick stack of bills back inside the envelope and tossed the envelope onto the coffee table. It landed near her feet with a solid whop.
“Let’s just find out,” she said, “where I won’t be going.” She picked up the note, spread it open, and held it over to her right so that Brace could see it, too.
She started to read it.
And felt heat rush through her body.
I must be nuts letting Brace read this!
My dear Jane,
No pain, no gain, as the body-builders say. Your body, I must say, is coming along splendidly.
I can think of some sweeties who would give an arm and a leg to be in your condition. Ho ho ho ho ho.
Please don’t think too unkindly of their keepers. Boys will be boys, you know.
Hope you get out of here in one piece.
Tomorrow night, take a refreshing dip in John’s pool. You’ll feel like a new woman.
Love and kisses
and licks
MOG
She smashed it into a tight, hard ball and hurled it across the room.
“What’s this stuff about women with keepers?” Brace asked.
Jane shook her head. “I just don’t feel up to… it’ll probably be in the papers, tomorrow. And on the radio and TV news… the whole nine yards. Why don’t we wait and talk about it then? Okay? I’m just too wasted. I’d probably go haywire if I had to talk about it tonight. But it’s over. It went too far. There’s not enough money in the world to make me go to that pool tomorrow night. Wherever it is.”
A corner of Brace’s mouth curled upward. “Bet I know where it is.”
“Well, don’t tell me. It’ll make it easier not to go there if I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”
Brace laughed softly. “I won’t tell.”
“Good.” She swung her legs off the coffee table and leaned forward, elbows on her thighs. “I’d better get out of these,” she mumbled, and let her head droop. “A nice shower.”
She felt Brace’s hand roaming over her back, rubbing her gently through the heavy fabric of her shirt. Then he was rubbing the nape of her neck. She moaned.
“In a little while,” she mumbled.
Feeling almost too weary and comfortable to move, she turned sideways and lifted her legs onto the sofa and sank backward. Head on Brace’s lap, she stretched out her legs.
“Were you… going somewhere?” she managed to ask.
“No,” he said. “It’s all right. You’re fine right here. Just rest.”
Jane woke up and tried to scream, but her mouth wouldn’t open. The scream became a siren muffled inside her head as she searched the black night with eyes sealed shut, as she writhed on her back unable to move her arms or legs, as she felt the blade slicing her, the blood spilling.
What’s happening? What’s happening?
Where am I?
Where’s Brace?
Why isn’t he stopping this?
Maybe he’s the one doing it!
She willed herself to stop screaming. And fought to suck in air through her nostrils. And tried not to think about the blade carving trails of raw pain in the space between her ribcage and navel.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“JANE!” The agonized bellow startled Jane awake. She opened her eyes. The bedside lamp was on. Squinting against its brightness, she saw Brace rush toward her.
She had never seen him looking so terrified.
It scared her.
He stopped beside the bed and gazed at her, gazed at the area below her chest where she felt strangely stiff and burning. He was shaking his head. His hands were raised in front of him. He looked like a guy who had just dropped a priceless vase, watched it explode on the floor, and couldn’t come close to believing he’d been so clumsy and lost so much.
Wanting to see how bad it was, Jane propped herself up with her elbows.
And joined Brace in staring at her body.
It came as no surprise that she was naked. But she’d expected to find her torso coated with blood. The cutter had obviously mopped up after himself; her skin was clean except for the handprints and the word.
He must’ve dipped his hands in her blood, then placed them on her breasts and hips and thighs—being careful to leave clear, unsmeared prints. They were extremely large hands.
The word across her midriff was no longer bleeding. Its four big letters were made of slits that looked juicy inside but not very deep. The only letters she recognized at first were those at each end—the Y beneath her right breast and the O beneath her left.
Her mind reversed all four letters, and she understood Mog’s message.
She almost told Brace that he needed to turn the letters around in his head. If she told him, though, he might figure out that she’d learned the trick by studying previous messages. She didn’t want him to know about any of that.
“What does it say?” she muttered.
Brace, frowning, shook his head. “I don’t… I can’t think. This is… Who did this to you?”
“Mog. It has to be Mog.”
“God!” he cried out.
“Take it easy, okay?” She tried to smile. “I’m the one who got cut up around here.”
“The bastard!”
“Shhh.” She frowned down at her word. “It looks sort of… backwards.”
“We’ve gotta call the cops.” Glancing about the room, Brace muttered, “Do you have a phone in here?”
“No cops,” Jane said.
“We gotta call the cops.”
“No, we don’t.”
“He butchered you! The bastard butchered you!”
“I’m not butchered. I’ll be all right. This was just a warning… whatever it says.”
Brace stepped out of the way as Jane sat up and swung her legs off the bed. She felt shaky. She walked slowly past him until she was standing in front of the full-length mirror. The first thing she noticed was the blood on her neck and face. More prints from Mog. Her stomach gave a nasty little twist. These weren’t fingerprints.
Mog must’ve kissed her a dozen times with lips that he’d dipped in her blood.
Brace came to her side and she saw him looking at her reflection. She turned her own eyes to the word carved across her midsection:
OBEY
Brace was looking at the word, but also shifting his gaze up and down.
He’s checking me out, she thought.
Don’t be an idiot, he’s inspecting the damage.
In the mirror, she saw that his shirt was untucked. It draped the front of his gray trousers. She quickly lifted her gaze to his face.
It was slack, flushed.
Is he shocked or turned on? she wondered. Or maybe both.
“How could he do this?” Brace asked, his voice husky and quiet.
“I’m sure he enjoyed it.”
“But I was just in the other room. I never heard anything.”
“I screamed.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t hear you. God, I’m sorry. If I hadn’t fallen asleep…”
“That’s okay,” Jane said. “It wasn’t much of a scream.” She turned away from the mirror. Bloodstains on the sheet formed a general outline of her body. Off to one side were a couple of wadded silvery clumps. “Duct tape,” she said. “My mouth and eyes were taped shut. My hands and feet must’ve been tied—I couldn’t move them.” The only foreign articles on the mattress were the wads of duct tape. She looked at her wrists. No sign of having been bound.
Walking slowly around the bed, she looked for other indications of what might’ve happened.
She found no ropes, no cords, nothing that might’ve been used to bind her.
She did find her royal blue pajamas on the floor at the far side of the bed. She picked them up. The buttons were missing from the front of the shirt. From the neatly sliced appearance of the thread clusters, she guessed that buttons had been shaved off—no doubt by the same blade that had scribed OBEY on her skin.
As she slipped into the shirt, she asked, “Was I wearing these pajamas?”
Brace shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Must’ve been. But I thought I fell asleep on the sofa.”
“Yeah. You zonked right out. But then you woke up at about two o’clock and went to your room. You were still in your jeans and that big heavy shirt when you left.”
Stepping into her pajama pants, she tried to remember. Couldn’t. “What else happened?”
“You were really out of it,” Brace said. “You know, disoriented. Like you didn’t know what you were doing on the sofa. You don’t remember?”
“Not really.”
“Actually, I thought you were planning to come back. You mumbled something about getting comfortable, and went staggering off. I stayed on the sofa. I heard your bedroom door shut. But I kept thinking you’d come back in a few minutes. Then I must’ve dozed off, myself.”
“And you didn’t hear anything at all?”
“No,” he said. He looked miserable. “God. I slept right through it.”
Jane felt herself grimace. “I slept through some of it, myself. I guess the pain when he started cutting woke me up. I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe.” She found herself gasping now, as if the memories were robbing her of air.
Brace came around the bed and put his arms around her. He pulled her gently toward him. Jane wrapped her arms around him. They embraced, his body pressing solid and warm against her, but not quite touching the sore area where Mog had sliced his command. Jane pressed her face into the curve of his neck. She felt his hands glide slowly up and down the back of her pajama shirt.
After a long time, he murmured, “I’ll never let anyone touch you again.”
She knew he meant it. But she doubted that Brace—or anyone else—would be able to protect her from Mog.
“Don’t think about it,” she whispered.
“You could’ve been killed.”
“I wasn’t. He just wanted to hurt me.”
“He doesn’t want you to quit the game.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Brace laughed softly, blowing a few small puffs of breath through her hair. She kissed the side of his neck.
“Maybe you’d better do what he wants,” Brace said.
“No. It has to end.”
“But he’ll keep at you. He won’t stop at this. If he’s nuts enough to sneak into your room and cut words into your skin, he’s… he’ll keep at you until you cave in and do what he wants.”
Jane eased backward a bit and looked up into Brace’s eyes. “I’ve got news for Mog,” she said. “I don’t cave. The Game’s over.” In a loud voice, she said, “Do you hear that, Mog? The Game’s over. You can whittle on me from now till Hell freezes over—I’m done with following your orders.”
“Do you think he can hear you?” Brace asked.
“Wouldn’t surprise me. The way he comes and goes.”
Narrowing his eyes, Brace stared past the top of Jane’s head as if studying the far corners of the ceiling. “We’d better call the cops,” he said. “Maybe they can find him.”
“No.”
“Yes. Look what he’s done to you, Jane. It was different when he was just sneaking around and giving you money… he’s committed a real crime now. It’s gotta be at least assault with a deadly weapon. They can put him away for that.”
“They can put me away for murder,” Jane said, and watched Brace’s eyes react.
They might look the same way if she suddenly shoved her switchblade into his belly.
She stepped away from him. “But go ahead and call the cops, if that’s what you want. I have to take a shower.”
He stood there, stiff and hunched over slightly, and watched her walk out of the bedroom.
The strong hot spray of the shower made her cuts burn, but it felt wonderful everywhere else. With a bar of soap, she scrubbed away the bloody handprints and rubbed her face to take off the marks put there by Mog’s lips.
She wondered if Brace would call the police.
She doubted it.
Such a damn straight arrow, though, he just might do it.
She could hear him now. As much as I care for you, Jane, I can’t condone murder. You left me no choice but to turn you in.
Her back to the spray, she blinked water out of her eyes and looked down. The scratches and bruises from the dog attack had finally gone away, just in time to leave her skin unblemished for Mog’s assault with the blade. She saw, however, that she’d gotten all the handprints off. Her skin looked shiny and clean except for the raw, carved letters.
“I guess so. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Well, it sure perked things up around here.”
Things were mighty perky before I got there, she thought.
And she felt herself blush, remembering what she’d seen through the window.
That was this guy.
This guy, not Brace.
Apparently.
“What apartment number are you in?” she asked.
“Twelve. I used to be upstairs, and Brace had this place. He sort of traded with me for a wedding present.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Still checking up on him, huh?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t bother. The guy is crazy about you. He’s been a basket case for the last week. If you’ve got any sense, you’ll get back together with him.”
“What’re you, his PR man?”
“I know him, that’s all. He’s such a good guy it makes the rest of us look like shit, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“So, how long have you been living in apartment twelve?”
“It’ll be exactly a month, tomorrow.”
“Would you tell me… I’m sorry, but… I’ve been through so much weirdness lately, I just hardly know what’s going on any more.”
“I’ll help any way I can. You know, I wanta see Brace happy, and…”
“What was going on in your place when I looked in the window?”
He hesitated. “For starters, we were bare-ass naked. We’d been… fooling around, you know. And we no sooner got done than Lois realized the curtains weren’t shut all the way. That’s when she got up to pull them shut. She was right up there at the window and there you were… It was you, huh?”
“Yeah. I’m afraid so.”
“She said you snarled like a maniac.”
“I was pretty upset. I’m awfully sorry, though. Will you tell her how sorry I am?”
“Want to talk to her?”
“No, that’s all right. Thanks. I’ve gotta go, now. Goodnight.” She hung up.
Brace raised his eyebrows. “Well?”
“How do I know you didn’t coach him?”
“It’s possible. Anything’s possible. Didn’t you once say something like, ‘When anything’s possible, nothing makes sense?’”
“Did I?”
“I believe so. But the thing is, I had no idea the Peeping Tom might be you.”
“Maybe you saw me.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t see you. I had no idea who it was until you told me about it a few minutes ago—which didn’t give me much of an opportunity to coach Dennis.”
Jane stepped away from him. She slumped on the couch, kicked off her shoes, and put her feet on the coffee table. She rubbed her face. “I’m so wasted,” she muttered.
“Maybe I should leave, now—give you some time by yourself to figure things out. You can give me a call later, if you want… or drop by and see exactly who is living where.”
Still rubbing her face, she said, “No. Don’t go.” She raised her head. “Everything’s… don’t leave me. Okay?”
He sat down beside her and reached an arm across her shoulders.
“I’m such a mess,” she muttered. “It’s good to have you back, though.”
“I am back?”
“As far as I’m concerned.”
He gently squeezed her shoulder. “So what else has been going on? You’re still playing along with Mog?”
She reached into the front pocket of her jeans, clutched the thick block of paper and pulled. It was in there very tight against her thigh, but she felt it move a bit. Slowly, she was able to drag it out.
“Is that money?”
“I think so.” She unfolded the envelope and tore it open, revealing a small brick of bills wrapped in a sheet of paper. She tossed the paper aside. With her thumb, she riffled the bills.
“Good Lord,” Brace said.
“More than fifty thousand bucks,” Jane told him.
“What’d you have to do for it?”
She hesitated, then said, “Break into a house.”
“An abandoned place like…?”
“No. A big expensive place up on Mayr Heights.” She watched him. “Do you know where that is?”
“Mayr Heights? Yeah. The head of the English department lives up there.”
“His name isn’t Savile, is it?”
“Ketchum.”
“Well, that’s where I had to go tonight. To a house up there. But I didn’t think anyone was home. I rang the doorbell, and knocked, and everything. Nobody heard any of that—luckiest thing that ever happened to me, probably. Anyhow, I had to break in through a window. I planned to pay for it, leave a few hundred bucks behind to make everything all right.”
She saw the look on Brace’s face.
“I know, I know, the money wouldn’t have really made everything all right. But at least it would’ve paid for having the window fixed.”
“True. So what happened next?”
“If you’re bothered by a little matter like breaking a window, I’d better stop right there.”
“It gets worse?”
“I’d say so, yeah.”
He looked into her eyes as if studying them. Then he said, “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t think I can. Not right now. Is that all right?”
“It’s fine,” he said, rubbing her shoulder.
“The thing is, I’m done with it all. It went… way too far. So you won’t have to worry about me going out to strange places in the middle of the night. Never again.” She stuffed the thick stack of bills back inside the envelope and tossed the envelope onto the coffee table. It landed near her feet with a solid whop.
“Let’s just find out,” she said, “where I won’t be going.” She picked up the note, spread it open, and held it over to her right so that Brace could see it, too.
She started to read it.
And felt heat rush through her body.
I must be nuts letting Brace read this!
My dear Jane,
No pain, no gain, as the body-builders say. Your body, I must say, is coming along splendidly.
I can think of some sweeties who would give an arm and a leg to be in your condition. Ho ho ho ho ho.
Please don’t think too unkindly of their keepers. Boys will be boys, you know.
Hope you get out of here in one piece.
Tomorrow night, take a refreshing dip in John’s pool. You’ll feel like a new woman.
Love and kisses
and licks
MOG
She smashed it into a tight, hard ball and hurled it across the room.
“What’s this stuff about women with keepers?” Brace asked.
Jane shook her head. “I just don’t feel up to… it’ll probably be in the papers, tomorrow. And on the radio and TV news… the whole nine yards. Why don’t we wait and talk about it then? Okay? I’m just too wasted. I’d probably go haywire if I had to talk about it tonight. But it’s over. It went too far. There’s not enough money in the world to make me go to that pool tomorrow night. Wherever it is.”
A corner of Brace’s mouth curled upward. “Bet I know where it is.”
“Well, don’t tell me. It’ll make it easier not to go there if I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”
Brace laughed softly. “I won’t tell.”
“Good.” She swung her legs off the coffee table and leaned forward, elbows on her thighs. “I’d better get out of these,” she mumbled, and let her head droop. “A nice shower.”
She felt Brace’s hand roaming over her back, rubbing her gently through the heavy fabric of her shirt. Then he was rubbing the nape of her neck. She moaned.
“In a little while,” she mumbled.
Feeling almost too weary and comfortable to move, she turned sideways and lifted her legs onto the sofa and sank backward. Head on Brace’s lap, she stretched out her legs.
“Were you… going somewhere?” she managed to ask.
“No,” he said. “It’s all right. You’re fine right here. Just rest.”
Jane woke up and tried to scream, but her mouth wouldn’t open. The scream became a siren muffled inside her head as she searched the black night with eyes sealed shut, as she writhed on her back unable to move her arms or legs, as she felt the blade slicing her, the blood spilling.
What’s happening? What’s happening?
Where am I?
Where’s Brace?
Why isn’t he stopping this?
Maybe he’s the one doing it!
She willed herself to stop screaming. And fought to suck in air through her nostrils. And tried not to think about the blade carving trails of raw pain in the space between her ribcage and navel.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“JANE!” The agonized bellow startled Jane awake. She opened her eyes. The bedside lamp was on. Squinting against its brightness, she saw Brace rush toward her.
She had never seen him looking so terrified.
It scared her.
He stopped beside the bed and gazed at her, gazed at the area below her chest where she felt strangely stiff and burning. He was shaking his head. His hands were raised in front of him. He looked like a guy who had just dropped a priceless vase, watched it explode on the floor, and couldn’t come close to believing he’d been so clumsy and lost so much.
Wanting to see how bad it was, Jane propped herself up with her elbows.
And joined Brace in staring at her body.
It came as no surprise that she was naked. But she’d expected to find her torso coated with blood. The cutter had obviously mopped up after himself; her skin was clean except for the handprints and the word.
He must’ve dipped his hands in her blood, then placed them on her breasts and hips and thighs—being careful to leave clear, unsmeared prints. They were extremely large hands.
The word across her midriff was no longer bleeding. Its four big letters were made of slits that looked juicy inside but not very deep. The only letters she recognized at first were those at each end—the Y beneath her right breast and the O beneath her left.
Her mind reversed all four letters, and she understood Mog’s message.
She almost told Brace that he needed to turn the letters around in his head. If she told him, though, he might figure out that she’d learned the trick by studying previous messages. She didn’t want him to know about any of that.
“What does it say?” she muttered.
Brace, frowning, shook his head. “I don’t… I can’t think. This is… Who did this to you?”
“Mog. It has to be Mog.”
“God!” he cried out.
“Take it easy, okay?” She tried to smile. “I’m the one who got cut up around here.”
“The bastard!”
“Shhh.” She frowned down at her word. “It looks sort of… backwards.”
“We’ve gotta call the cops.” Glancing about the room, Brace muttered, “Do you have a phone in here?”
“No cops,” Jane said.
“We gotta call the cops.”
“No, we don’t.”
“He butchered you! The bastard butchered you!”
“I’m not butchered. I’ll be all right. This was just a warning… whatever it says.”
Brace stepped out of the way as Jane sat up and swung her legs off the bed. She felt shaky. She walked slowly past him until she was standing in front of the full-length mirror. The first thing she noticed was the blood on her neck and face. More prints from Mog. Her stomach gave a nasty little twist. These weren’t fingerprints.
Mog must’ve kissed her a dozen times with lips that he’d dipped in her blood.
Brace came to her side and she saw him looking at her reflection. She turned her own eyes to the word carved across her midsection:
OBEY
Brace was looking at the word, but also shifting his gaze up and down.
He’s checking me out, she thought.
Don’t be an idiot, he’s inspecting the damage.
In the mirror, she saw that his shirt was untucked. It draped the front of his gray trousers. She quickly lifted her gaze to his face.
It was slack, flushed.
Is he shocked or turned on? she wondered. Or maybe both.
“How could he do this?” Brace asked, his voice husky and quiet.
“I’m sure he enjoyed it.”
“But I was just in the other room. I never heard anything.”
“I screamed.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t hear you. God, I’m sorry. If I hadn’t fallen asleep…”
“That’s okay,” Jane said. “It wasn’t much of a scream.” She turned away from the mirror. Bloodstains on the sheet formed a general outline of her body. Off to one side were a couple of wadded silvery clumps. “Duct tape,” she said. “My mouth and eyes were taped shut. My hands and feet must’ve been tied—I couldn’t move them.” The only foreign articles on the mattress were the wads of duct tape. She looked at her wrists. No sign of having been bound.
Walking slowly around the bed, she looked for other indications of what might’ve happened.
She found no ropes, no cords, nothing that might’ve been used to bind her.
She did find her royal blue pajamas on the floor at the far side of the bed. She picked them up. The buttons were missing from the front of the shirt. From the neatly sliced appearance of the thread clusters, she guessed that buttons had been shaved off—no doubt by the same blade that had scribed OBEY on her skin.
As she slipped into the shirt, she asked, “Was I wearing these pajamas?”
Brace shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Must’ve been. But I thought I fell asleep on the sofa.”
“Yeah. You zonked right out. But then you woke up at about two o’clock and went to your room. You were still in your jeans and that big heavy shirt when you left.”
Stepping into her pajama pants, she tried to remember. Couldn’t. “What else happened?”
“You were really out of it,” Brace said. “You know, disoriented. Like you didn’t know what you were doing on the sofa. You don’t remember?”
“Not really.”
“Actually, I thought you were planning to come back. You mumbled something about getting comfortable, and went staggering off. I stayed on the sofa. I heard your bedroom door shut. But I kept thinking you’d come back in a few minutes. Then I must’ve dozed off, myself.”
“And you didn’t hear anything at all?”
“No,” he said. He looked miserable. “God. I slept right through it.”
Jane felt herself grimace. “I slept through some of it, myself. I guess the pain when he started cutting woke me up. I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe.” She found herself gasping now, as if the memories were robbing her of air.
Brace came around the bed and put his arms around her. He pulled her gently toward him. Jane wrapped her arms around him. They embraced, his body pressing solid and warm against her, but not quite touching the sore area where Mog had sliced his command. Jane pressed her face into the curve of his neck. She felt his hands glide slowly up and down the back of her pajama shirt.
After a long time, he murmured, “I’ll never let anyone touch you again.”
She knew he meant it. But she doubted that Brace—or anyone else—would be able to protect her from Mog.
“Don’t think about it,” she whispered.
“You could’ve been killed.”
“I wasn’t. He just wanted to hurt me.”
“He doesn’t want you to quit the game.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Brace laughed softly, blowing a few small puffs of breath through her hair. She kissed the side of his neck.
“Maybe you’d better do what he wants,” Brace said.
“No. It has to end.”
“But he’ll keep at you. He won’t stop at this. If he’s nuts enough to sneak into your room and cut words into your skin, he’s… he’ll keep at you until you cave in and do what he wants.”
Jane eased backward a bit and looked up into Brace’s eyes. “I’ve got news for Mog,” she said. “I don’t cave. The Game’s over.” In a loud voice, she said, “Do you hear that, Mog? The Game’s over. You can whittle on me from now till Hell freezes over—I’m done with following your orders.”
“Do you think he can hear you?” Brace asked.
“Wouldn’t surprise me. The way he comes and goes.”
Narrowing his eyes, Brace stared past the top of Jane’s head as if studying the far corners of the ceiling. “We’d better call the cops,” he said. “Maybe they can find him.”
“No.”
“Yes. Look what he’s done to you, Jane. It was different when he was just sneaking around and giving you money… he’s committed a real crime now. It’s gotta be at least assault with a deadly weapon. They can put him away for that.”
“They can put me away for murder,” Jane said, and watched Brace’s eyes react.
They might look the same way if she suddenly shoved her switchblade into his belly.
She stepped away from him. “But go ahead and call the cops, if that’s what you want. I have to take a shower.”
He stood there, stiff and hunched over slightly, and watched her walk out of the bedroom.
The strong hot spray of the shower made her cuts burn, but it felt wonderful everywhere else. With a bar of soap, she scrubbed away the bloody handprints and rubbed her face to take off the marks put there by Mog’s lips.
She wondered if Brace would call the police.
She doubted it.
Such a damn straight arrow, though, he just might do it.
She could hear him now. As much as I care for you, Jane, I can’t condone murder. You left me no choice but to turn you in.
Her back to the spray, she blinked water out of her eyes and looked down. The scratches and bruises from the dog attack had finally gone away, just in time to leave her skin unblemished for Mog’s assault with the blade. She saw, however, that she’d gotten all the handprints off. Her skin looked shiny and clean except for the raw, carved letters.
