One Way Ticket Page 4

  She grabs his shoulder. "Where is that coming from?"

  "I don’t know!"

  The disembodied voice of the killer continues. "I butchered him. The man sitting in 8A, car one. This is your last warning. I have a hostage. They’ll die if you stop the train."

  For a moment there’s nothing but the sound of the tolling bell between them.

  "If the train doesn't reach its final destination, the hostage will."

  Chapter 6

  12:15 PM – Somewhere

  Candace waits until the tremble of his footsteps disappears, when the roar of his car is a distant noise, and for the sun’s rays to poke her hard in the eyes. For hours she sits and pretends she’s dead. Only when she’s sure he’s gone does she curl her hands into fists and try to escape.

  The ropes that keep her confined are thick. They scrape at her skin and rub raw patches that the man who took her has to soothe with a clear gel. He scolds her for fighting against her bindings. She won’t get out of them. It’s pointless to struggle. She spits in his face, and he calmly wipes it away. She calls him names: Idiot, pigface, and sometimes asshole. They’re better than what she used to call him: brother.

  Her brother, the man who took her, comes and goes like a moth. Drifting in and out, pale, harmless. He tells her he doesn’t want to hurt her, and she believes him, but he’ll kill her if he has to. She believes that, too.

  At first she behaved like a scared little girl, cringing from his touch and sobbing for Mommy every night, but the fear ebbed away the longer she stayed here. He wasn’t interested in hurting her. As a matter of fact, she wondered if he forgot she existed. The only times he’d scare her were when he’d take out his toy trains and play like a toddler. He’d make the train sounds with his mouth, and dare to glance up at her with a hopeful grin, "Wanna play?"

  Thankfully, Candace’s stammering "N-no thanks!" was enough to stop him from asking her that ever again.

  God, she hates being in here. The more she fights, the tighter the ropes get, and there’s nothing to do. He leaves the music loud so that when she screams, her voice is drowned out. No one complains about the noise.

  She’s learned to conserve her energy. Screaming won’t help her, but getting out of these ropes will. If she could just squeeze her thumb out. Candace tries. The rope cuts into her wrist until her hand turns a dark red. Giving up, she stops yanking and it slackens. It is pointless.

  Gazing around the apartment for anything that might help her survive doesn’t yield much. He’s obsessed with trains. He’s even got collector’s editions of that stupid children’s book series, the one with the white face on a locomotive’s body. Thomas the Tank Engine in Go Train, Go! and Thomas’ ABC Book and on and on. It’s silly, but he has the whole set.

  He has her tied up in the living room, with the ropes attached to big hooks in the ceiling that won’t budge no matter how hard she jerks on them. She even tried using her body weight in a running jump. All she got was a searing pain in both hands and a lot of time curled up on her side, sobbing. It has been days of this and mindless boredom with nothing but C-SPAN to keep her entertained when he took pity on her and left the TV on.

  Until he forgot the knife on the coffee table.

  It’s a crappy little thing. Good for peeling potatoes. Not sharp enough to dig through a solid half-inch of rope in a hurry, but if she had it all day… Maybe she could get the heck out of here and run straight to Five Guys for a cheeseburger. She’s dying for one.

  Candace’s giggles echo through the lonely apartment. "I’m so sick of egg whites and salad."

  Time to get to work.

  Extending herself as far as her bindings allow her, she uses her toes to nudge the edge of the coffee table. The ropes tighten like a noose around her wrists. Her skin burns and turn dark-red, but she takes a deep breath and slips her feet under the table. They catch—yes!

  Whooping with delight, she drags the table closer to her. It’s light enough that she doesn’t have to work hard. There’s a tense moment where the knife spins, almost skittering off the surface, and then with trembling hands she grabs it.

  "I got it!"

  She can’t believe her luck and how stupid the man was for leaving it within easy reach. The short handle feels friendly in her grip. She takes one thick rope, sawing it with the blunt edge. This will take a long time, but it’ll work, and then she’ll be free. After weeks of being stuck in this miserable apartment with nothing but a bucket to pee in.

  A nervous voice whispers in her head: What about the bomb?

  When he left her the first day, he pointed toward the round, stainless steel object sitting next to her and told her it was a bomb rigged to explode if she escaped his apartment. She looked at it and silently judged that he was crazy. It’s a cooking pot, the same kind her mom uses to boil potatoes in a hurry.

  Still, she looks at it warily. Didn’t she hear something in school, once? About terrorists?

  After turning it over in her head for a moment, she decides it’s nuts. Just like this room and her crazy brother holding her captive. He thinks she’s a stupid little girl who'll believe his lies. No one blows up people with a dumb pot.

  Chapter 7

  11:00 AM – Sunol

  The neighbors can suck a dead dog’s nose for all Naomi cares. Across the street, they stare at her with judgmental eyes because she’s doing a Channel 6 interview. A woman she never saw before knocked on her door to tell her she was an attention-seeking bitch. Another man gave her a dirty look when she went out to meet the reporters on her lawn. The sudden hostility from complete strangers should’ve been enough to give her pause, and she supposed it would have if this were a community she cared about. They didn’t even bother to send their RSVPs with a yes or no for the ice cream social. Why should she care about their feelings when they’ve done nothing but ignore her? It’s jealousy, plain and simple. The foot was something that happened to her. No one’s taking that away, not when she spent hours looking for that poor girl.

  One person standing on the sidewalk shakes their head and leaves, disappearing into their mobile home.

  "Has anything like this ever happened in Sunol?"

  Naomi turns her attention to the reporter. "I wouldn’t know. I’ve only been here six months. It seemed like a nice community, at first."

  "And you discovered the foot nearby?"

  "Yes, right down that path to the nature reserve. My dog found it. He was barking. I knew there was something wrong, 'cause he never gets excited like that. Then Cooper comes out of the bush with an object in his mouth and drops it at my feet."

  "What did you think?"

  "I thought it was a dead animal. Then I looked closer and realized the object was a foot, cut off at the ankle."

  "Wow," the reporter says, apparently at a loss for words. "Can you describe the foot? I mean, was it skeletal?"

  "Well, it had hair and big toenails. Honestly, I didn’t want to stare. I’m squeamish about blood."

  She imagines the headlines of articles quoting her after seeing this interview: "It had hair and toenails."

  "Do you have any idea where it came from?"

  "I don’t think it dropped out of the sky," Naomi says. "Someone put it there."

  "How does that make you feel?"

  "Scared as hell. We have to be vigilant. A maniac is on the loose."

  "All right. We thank you for coming on today to speak with us."

  "But, don’t you want—"

  "That’s all the time we have. Thanks so much, Naomi."

  Naomi barely has a moment to grunt before her mic is switched off and the reporter makes a segue into a weather storm alert. Seriously? That’s what they interrupted the discovery of a severed limb for?

  "Thanks for coming out," the producer says.

  She shakes hands with the sandy-haired man. "That was really short. I thought you guys would want a blow-by-blow account."

  "Nah. Our viewers have tiny attention spans so we try to keep these human interest stories less than a minute long."

  "I wanted to talk about the missing girl who’s from this community, Candace. You interrupted me before I could even mention her name."

  He laughs. "Look, you had your fifteen seconds of fame."

  Offended, Naomi drops his hand and stomps out of the patch of grass near the nature reserve to return home. This wasn’t about fame. She was supposed to use the interview to bring everyone’s attention back to the girl who went missing weeks ago. Naomi felt a ray of hope when she found that damn foot, as much as it disgusted and frightened her, because maybe Detective Landry would take the case more seriously. Maybe he’d restart the search party. She was told that the department didn’t have the budget for anymore organized searches.

  An icy drop hits the back of her neck. She looks skyward, into the voluminous clouds. The billowing blackness drowns out the blue, swallowing all light. She wishes it would stop raining. Naomi’s shoulders roll forward in defeat as she trudges toward her home, where Cooper is barking frantically. She hears the high-pitched sounds across the street and cringes. Damn it, he’s so loud. The neighbors are sure to complain.

  "Cooper, shut up!" she calls out, marching at the door.

  A scrape against the asphalt makes her pause. Her sneakers crunch something hard, and she looks down to notice a broken piece of glass. What the hell? Bending down, she picks it up and heads for the garbage bin, and walks past her shattered living room window.

  "Oh my God!"

  The jagged glass points toward a good-sized hole in the center, and she pokes her head inside. There are shards all over her floor, and there's a brick sitting on her coffee table. Cooper walks all over the broken pieces like an idiot, barking his throat hoarse. There’s no note attached, no explanation for this random act of vandalism that’ll set her back a couple hundred dollars.

  Little teenage shits.

  She scans the bushes across the street, the darkened windows of the house, and then her gaze falls on that damn bike sitting in the Parkers’ lawn. A swell of pain rises in her throat and expands.

  Then a flash of white catches her eye. She looks at the Parker house as the shadow of a hand moves behind the billowing curtains. Naomi stands so swiftly that blackness overtakes her vision. If some kid hurled a brick through her window, Mrs. Parker would have seen the attack. She’s always home.

  Making up her mind, Naomi dashes inside her house and grabs a broom. She sweeps the shards into a pile before checking Cooper's feet. The dumb dog is fine. Then she heads out. She keeps her fists clenched at her sides as she marches across her lawn to the Parkers’ badly tended one. A deep breath hitches in her lungs as she raps her knuckles against the door.

  "Mrs. Parker? Are you home?"

  What a stupid question. The volume of the TV inside dials down like it always does when Mrs. Parker has visitors.

  The polite thing to do would be to pretend she never noticed the hand and go on her way, but Mrs. Parker had a front-row seat to the jerk that smashed in her window, and she needs to find out what happened.

  "Mrs. Parker! I need to talk to you for a second. Could you please open up?"

  Nothing.

  Her throat fills with bile as she watches the unmoving door, imagining Mrs. Parker hiding in her living room, and a fresh wave of annoyance beats down the nagging voice telling her to calm down.

  "I know you’re in there, and I’m not leaving until I get an answer from you! Mrs. Parker." She knocks again. "This is silly. I saw you looking at me. Ignoring me won’t make me go away."

  Naomi waits an appropriate amount of time. "It’s not like anyone vandalized my property! Come on. Open up!"

  The door rattles with her violent shove, and then it opens.

  Naomi’s hand flies to her mouth—she didn’t mean to do that. She stands there, paralyzed with fear as she waits for Mrs. Parker to storm out of her house and call her a nosy busybody and attention-seeking bitch and everything she deserves for busting down someone’s door.

  But no howl of outrage follows its feeble groan as the door swings inside. It hangs open as though inviting her. Naomi takes a tentative step forward and clutches the handle. She hesitates, sweeping her gaze over the untidy home and grimacing at the smell.

  What little light filters through the dirty windows is blocked by the mountains of trash piled up in giant columns. Dozens of cardboard boxes sit high enough to almost touch the ceiling. Rooms are boxed off into a series of tight hallways. There's a small space cleared out for a couch wrapped in plastic, one of those floral-patterned ones from the eighties, and a coffee table covered with junk.

  She gapes. What a grim place for Candace to grow up in. No wonder that poor girl lingered at Naomi’s house for so long every day. She has half a mind to charge into this cluttered hellhole and drag Mrs. Parker out of her hiding spot, but it’s none of her business. In this crazy world, she’s the one who’d get in trouble for barging in her neighbor’s home. Even though a single match would set this tinderbox up in flames.

  "Mrs. Parker?" She clears her throat, tries again. "Hello!"

  The cardboard mutes the sound of her voice. What if, God forbid, one of these boxes fell on Mrs. Parker? She’s not the picture of health, what with her chain-smoking and her swollen ankles. It’s easy to imagine her flat on the ground, a box sitting on her chest and squeezing the life out of her lungs. There’s no way she’d have the strength to save herself. Mrs. Parker only goes outside to smoke cigarettes and leans heavily on her walker while doing it, her breaths coming out in harsh wheezes that always made Naomi glance at her unused elliptical machine with guilt.

  Now she’s staring into her neighbor’s home for the first time, wondering if she ought to check on her. Naomi takes a tentative step, wrinkling her nose and trying not to feel claustrophobic.

  "Mrs. Parker?" she calls out, her voice muffled. "I’m coming inside!"

  A tower of boxes wobbles when she bumps into it. Swearing, she holds the sides still, and when they stop moving, she heads toward the coffee table with the only open space. Piles of dirty newspapers sit on its surface. There’s a twist like a knife in her heart when she sees Candace’s half-hidden, beaming face on one article. Dozens more of the same issue are spread out.

  That’s weird.

  Even weirder is the collection of porcelain dolls sitting on an end table. They’re similar to the ones her mother likes to collect.

  You’re not here to snoop.

  Abandoning the table, she heads into another walled path of boxes. God, she doesn’t like this. Maybe it’s the narrow space or the fact that many of these paths lead into dead ends, but her heart’s beating hard, as though taking a wrong turn will get her lost in this godforsaken place. So much junk.

  Her foot catches on something and she stumbles, looking back to see a toy train. The red paint is chipping in a lot of places—an old plaything of Candace’s? It unnerves her, but so does pretty much everything in this house.

  The path leads her to a fork. Left and right are equally unappealing, so she walks ahead into what looks like a child’s room. Old computers are piled high on the small bed, whose mattress sags so low it touches the filthy floor. There are newspapers, more boxes shoved into a corner, odd trinkets and baubles. God, they turned Candace’s bedroom into junk storage.

  How dare they?

  Naomi’s fists shake at her sides as she takes in the Transformers posters and the almost-hidden comforter. She squints at it, making out a shiny red-and-gold helmet that looks like a spacesuit. Weird, Candace didn’t seem the type to be into spacemen. When Candace came over, she was usually covered head to toe in pink. This doesn’t look like the room she’d have. Her foot stubs a deflated soccer ball. It bounces with a wheezing sigh. She watches it roll right into a nightstand and knock a picture frame off. The photo falls to the ground with the unmistakable sound of shattering glass.

  "Shit!"

  Naomi picks it up, groaning at the crack splitting the photograph. She rubs it with her sleeve fruitlessly. A jagged cut streaks down the old photo of two children between Mr. and Mrs. Parker. Wait—two children? She recognizes Candace’s blond hair and chubby, beaming smile. The pallid teenager next to her wraps his arm around her little shoulders, his mouth unsmiling. What a creepy kid. There’s something soulless about him that makes his embrace seem perfunctory. A moody teen is one thing, a dead-eyed cretin is quite another. Is he their son? If he is, why hasn’t she ever seen him? Why didn’t Candace mention she had an older brother?

  The photo is at least ten years old, and the boy must be a man by now. He moved out a while ago.

  Then why does this room feel like a grave?

  Her foot rolls on something that pierces her flip-flop. A sharp Lego piece protrudes from the bottom; she yanks it out and kicks aside the toy train. Then again, maybe they’re just slobs.

  "This is ridiculous."

  A thump sounds behind her, followed by a sharp intake of breath. "What are you doing here?"

  Naomi lets the piece fly as she whirls around. "Mrs. Parker! Oh—Did you hear me knocking outside?"

  "What the hell are you doing here?"

  "I was—I wanted to know if you saw anything. I knocked and waited, and then I sorta—" Naomi quails under her fierce gaze. "Look, you can’t blame me! The door was open!"

  "And you thought that was an invitation?"

  "I was worried about you and Candace. This isn’t a safe environment to raise children."

  Mrs. Parker flinches at that. Then she snatches the photo out of Naomi’s hands and glances at it, the heat momentarily fizzing out of her gaze. "This room hasn’t been used for years." It returns the moment she looks at Naomi. "Why don’t you keep your fat nose out of people’s business?"

  "Because your daughter is missing! All you’ve been able to tell me when I ask about her is: I dunno."

  "Get the hell out of my house," she says in a low voice that brooks no argument.

  Naomi doesn’t care. She gestures toward the boy in the photo. "Is he Candace’s brother? Maybe he’s seen her."