By the time someone pinched at her eyes and pulled the fabric away, her head was swooning toward unconsciousness. She heard a sound she assumed to be the glove box, followed by another familiar sound she couldn’t place. She struggled, attempting to whip her head side to side. Her initial fear was rape-these were men, and she was a woman, and she’d been immobilized and her hands taped apart. Her ankles were bound too, now that she thought to try to move them. But sitting up? In the backseat of a car? When the first of the two eyeholes was cut away and she saw the front seat of the van empty, she braced herself, expecting to be groped or molested. Instead, her vision was temporarily blocked as a hairy wrist crossed its path and a second eyehole was cut from the fabric. Then she heard a metallic click, thinking first and foremost of Lou’s Leatherman all-in-one tool, a gift she’d given him not too many Christmases ago, but a gift she’d never seen him use since.
They’re going to cut me. The thought threw her into a sudden frenzy. She feared anything to do with fire, drowning, or cutting. She’d have rather gotten struck by a train or hit head-on by a truck than any of those three.
The van’s door slid shut, silencing her surroundings. Only a small hum penetrated the vehicle. She tugged at her arms, but to no avail, then quit altogether as she tired and took in more of her surroundings. The sounds she’d heard had been the operation of the van’s VCR and a videotape being inserted into a deck that hid in the console between the front seats. She knew this because the tiny television screen that folded down from the ceiling shone a bright blue, a bold white arrow pointing to the right.
When the first of the sordid images filled that small screen, she thought this some kind of perverse, sick joke-someone tying her up and forcing her to watch pornography. Terror again stole through her as she imagined some stranger sitting directly behind her in the third seat, watching the video as he contemplated where to start with her.
But then the woman, naked and on all fours, her blurry bare backside toward the camera, slowly turned around, a man’s chest and shoulders seen behind her. All at once the background looked far too familiar, logs, a lamp, a clock. All at once Liz couldn’t breathe, choked, the tape and hood pressing so tightly into her open mouth. She screamed, but barely heard her own voice. She squinted her eyes shut as that face on the screen slipped first into profile and then turned toward the camera’s hidden lens. But she looked again, driven by a defiant curiosity. The bare breasts and shoulders so familiar. The hair. The line of the neck. The curve of the hips.
A face, all her own.
For all her endless hours in this vehicle as driver, Liz realized she had never once sat in these backseats. The minivan’s VCR typically ran nothing more offensive than Peter Pan or The Wizard of Oz, something to occupy the kids in bumper-to-bumper traffic, or for the nearly two-hour drive up to their cabin. Liz looked away but found her blurry eyes wandering back to the small screen in a wave of self-loathing. The video was date- and time-stamped in the upper right-hand corner, a date she would have done anything to erase from her life.
The camera angle, possibly shot from inside the cabin’s closet, offered an unobstructed view of the bed, where Liz, sporting a haircut she would never have again, a haircut that also dated the event, once again turned to face the camera. The contact of skin, the silent motions captured in grainy black-and-white, the pursed lips and agonized faces all added up to an unattractive, disgusting carnal dance that debased her.
From outside the parked van, one saw only the flashing blue light from the screen playing out on a woman’s face wet with tears, and a gaping mouth held open by silver tape. As the woman struggled to be free, the van rocked side to side, as if driven by a strong wind. Inside, atop the stained carpet floor, lay her daughter’s second favorite doll, a coloring book, and a plastic bag of crushed Goldfish crackers.
She felt half dead as she watched, amazed at the familiarity of the whore on the tape. Strange coincidences. Even the birthmark on the outside flank of her right buttock looked just like her own. “My little Martian,” her husband called it.
It couldn’t possibly be she who had done these things, her heart told her, but of course her eyes proved otherwise. Back and forth she went, wife, mother, sinner, slut.
Slowly, in timing with her efforts to free her wrists, she came to understand the effect this videotape might have on her own and her husband’s careers. Their lives. More important, their children if the tape ever went public. What kind of looks would the children endure from their teachers, the parents of their friends? How would it affect her own relationship with her children, for the rest of their lives? She attempted to measure the fallout if the tape were sent to Phillip, the date confirming a connection to David Hayes at the time of the embezzlement. The Seattle Times. Posted on the Internet. Her world shrank.
Her cell phone rang from the front seat, where it had been dumped from her purse. With one mighty effort the tape tore and her hands came free, and only then did she see that one edge had been cleanly cut, only then did she connect this with the sounds she had heard just before she’d been closed inside. The Leatherman tool. They had wanted her to free herself.
She tore the tape from her mouth and slipped off the hood, slammed the retractable video screen up into its locked position, and lunged for the phone. She fell to her knees, her ankles still taped.
“Help me!” she hollered into the phone before her mind registered that this tape must never be revealed to anyone. Any kind of help was the last thing she wanted.
A deep male voice that nearly hid the rich, Eastern European accent said, “Next time you are asked to do something, we will expect you to do it yourself, not send a replacement. Cooperate, and you can be the last person to ever see this tape. Be ready to act at a moment’s notice.” Disconnected.
Standing away from the van, listening carefully, one could hear, along with the whine of passing traffic, a woman’s painful sobbing from within. A woman stretched thin between the past and the present, a woman faced with the reality of self-loathing and the disintegration of all things good, of all things held dear and sacred. Bared before her eyes. Destroyed.
TEN
BOLDT MUMBLED THROUGH AN APOLOGY, embarrassed, humiliated, even, that Miles had not been picked up from his piano lesson and was awaiting a ride. Like every aspect of private education, admission to concert pianist Bruce Lavin’s afternoon session had required an application, referrals, a waiting list, and a substantial deposit. Six months later, Miles had finally been “asked to join.”
“A confusion on our end,” Boldt said, sucking up to Lavin and feeling like a sycophant. He realized how stupid this explanation sounded.
“I don’t run a babysitting service,” Lavin clarified. “The schedule here is-”
Boldt interrupted, “-very tight. I know.” Lavin had nearly beaten this mantra into parents. Preparation and punctuality were his credo. As long as his students practiced and showed up on time, Lavin kept them in the program. “I’m on my way.”
“If it should happen again… ”
“It won’t,” Boldt assured the man. The cost of the course, paid in full and up front, was nonrefundable if a child was let go. Expulsions could not be appealed, but the child could reapply for future sessions.
Boldt tried Liz at the office, and then on the cell, ready to give her a piece of his mind. But when she failed to answer either phone, his anger quickly shifted to concern. He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t heard from her since their meeting out at Beth LaRossa’s house, earlier in the day.