It, too, was unoccupied, but the bright lights illuminated several large bloodstains and bloody shoeprints on the hardwood floor. A closet door stood open. There were several objects scattered on the floor. O’Connor immediately recognized one of these and felt woozy, as if he had taken a hard, unexpected punch.

“Her jacket,” O’Connor said brokenly, starting forward, then heeding the pressure of Lefebvre’s hand on his shoulder, did not move into the room.

“Yes. I recognize it, too. The one she had on today,” Lefebvre said. “And that’s her purse, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

They could also see a wallet, some bloodied tissues, a rag, and a small bottle.

Lefebvre moved cautiously into the room, avoiding the bloodstains and spatter. O’Connor saw him briefly glance at the shoeprints-which seemed to have started when someone stepped in blood in this room, and became fainter as he had walked down the hall, toward the stairs. Lefebvre spent a little more time studying a handprint on the floor, and then looking at the bottle, although without picking it up.

“Chloroform,” he said.

O’Connor leaned against the door frame. “Jesus…”

Lefebvre looked up at him. “She probably left here alive. They wouldn’t have bothered moving the body if all they wanted to do was kill her.”

O’Connor said nothing, but Lefebvre perhaps read his next thought, because he added, “No use thinking the worst just yet.”

He put on a pair of gloves and carefully opened Irene’s handbag. He held up a reporter’s notebook, then a wristwatch.

“Hers. If he’s done something to her…” O’Connor said angrily.

Lefebvre ignored him and reached back into the bag. He found another wristwatch, a man’s watch-and a wallet.

O’Connor felt briefly puzzled. Two wallets? Two watches? Were they both attacked?

Lefebvre verified that the wallet from the handbag was Irene’s. “There’s some cash and a credit card here, so apparently she wasn’t robbed.” He gingerly opened the man’s wallet. Something wrapped in a piece of paper fell to the floor. Lefebvre ignored it for the moment and looked through the wallet’s contents. “Max’s temporary California driver’s license. And it doesn’t appear that he was robbed, either. I’d say they’re both in trouble, though.”

Lefebvre reached for the fallen paper and opened it. “A New Hampshire driver’s license. Kyle Yeager-Max’s old license.” He read the note that had been wrapped around it-the paper had been torn from a spiral notebook.

“What does it say?” O’Connor asked anxiously.

“It says, ‘Warren Ducane knows where we are.’”

47

I OPENED MY EYES IN UTTER DARKNESS. FOR A PANICKED MOMENT I WAS convinced I had been blinded. My cheek lay against a cold surface-hard and smooth. Concrete or marble, I thought. I could smell dried blood on my clothing. I remembered Max then. I tried to move and found that my wrists were taped together, as were my feet.

“Who’s there?” a voice called from nearby.

“Max? It’s Irene.”

“Irene? Oh God…”

“How’s your head? You were bleeding…”

“Never mind me-did they hurt you?”

“Not really. They used some kind of drug on me-chloroform or ether- I don’t remember anything after that.”

“Are you all right?”

“A little woozy, that’s all. Max, it’s you I’m worried about. Your head was bleeding so much. And you sound-I don’t know, you just don’t sound like yourself. Worse off than I am, anyway. Are you still tied up?”

“Yes. I’m-I’m okay. I don’t think I’m still bleeding, but I’m tied up. You are, too, I take it?”

“Yes. Your head must be killing you.”

“They hit me pretty hard, I guess.”

“Your cousins?”

“I can’t be certain, but I think so. Whoever it was hit me from behind.”

I had no idea how long I had been knocked out, and began to wonder how late it was. My father-I had to get out of here. He would worry…

No use thinking of that right now, I told myself. I felt groggy, but the chill air was helping to clear my head.

“Any idea where we are?”

“No.”

“Somewhere in the house?”

“It has a big basement,” he said. “Maybe that’s where we are. No-wait. The basement floor has linoleum on it.”

We decided to try calling for help. We shouted a few times. It made my head ache worse than before.

“We could be anywhere,” Max said. His voice sounded odd, with a drowsy quality to it.

“I’m going to try to scoot over to you.”

I moved slowly and not in a very controlled way. I was now sure the surface below me was concrete; too rough to be marble. It felt like a cold, damp sidewalk.

I lost track of Max’s location in the dark. “Talk again,” I said.

“What?”

“Are you falling asleep?”

“I guess I kind of drifted off.”

It was enough to help me find him. Sort of. I found his shoes with my face. It startled him as much as it did me.

“Okay, I’m going to work my way up to your hands. You’re lying on your right side?”

It seemed to stump him for a moment, then he answered, “Yes.”

I remembered that his hands had been bound behind him with duct tape, as mine were now. It took me a while, but eventually I positioned myself so that we were lying back to back. He must have passed out again or fallen asleep by the time I reached his hands. A horrible third alternative occurred to me, and I called his name.

“What? Huh? Oh…Irene?”

“Try to stay awake, Max. I think you have a concussion. Talk to me while I try to get the tape off your hands.”

So he talked while I fumbled with his hands and tried to find an edge or end of the tape. His wrists had been bound much tighter than mine. I noticed his wristwatch was missing, and only then realized that my own was gone, too. While I worked at freeing him, he told me about Estelle, his adoptive mother. He told me about the military school, and about befriending the son of one of the instructors, a boy who was also a student at the school, of that boy’s family virtually adopting him into their own. His voice kept that sleepy quality. As I gradually started to work the tape off-a process that was not as easy as it looks on television-I urged him to keep talking. Every now and then I’d hear him start to drift off, and I’d yank a little harder, and he’d keep going. I began to wonder if he would pass out just as I got his hands free and be unable to help me.

But when that moment came, he was awake and fairly focused. I heard him let out a breath in the darkness. “Thank you,” he said. It took a little while for the circulation to return to his fingers. Both that and his head injury must have been painful, but he didn’t complain. He rolled toward me and, as soon as the numbness left his hands, tried to free mine.

It took him less time to return the favor, but undoubtedly longer than it would have if he hadn’t been injured. I spent a moment savoring the easing of the tension in my shoulders and back, then went to work on the tape around my ankles and helped Max to do the same.

We moved to our knees on the hard floor, staying close to each other, at first holding on to each other’s shoulders just to steady ourselves. Without speaking, we embraced in the darkness, held fast to each other in sheer relief. He felt strong and warm and good, and I could not help but think of how much worse it would have been if I had been there alone.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I nodded against his shoulder. “Yes, and you?”

“I’m doing okay.”

“Dizzy?”

“A little. Weird in the dark.”

“I don’t think they took us far. I can still smell the ocean.”

“Yes, I can, too. Maybe we’re in the basement, just some part of it I haven’t explored yet. There was a laundry room and another storage area that I didn’t look into.”

“I guess we’d better try to find a way out of here before they come back to finish what they started.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe we should crawl along on all fours, shoulder to shoulder. Trying to walk might cause us to trip over objects we can’t see, or run into things, or fall into a pit or something.”