A new thought sent a shiver rippling through her.
Wasn’t Tanner Farnsworth at that party that night?
Jill looked around Mitchell’s computer and noticed a flash drive lodged in the USB slot. She dragged a bunch of the images onto the desktop icon for that storage key.
As it copied, she opened the folder where all the images seemed to be stored. Hundreds of pictures were listed within. She opened one and saw a naked picture of Gretchen Stiller—one of the witches. Like Lindsey, Gretchen looked proud to be taking her own picture. Unlike Jill, Gretchen was wide awake and smiling at the camera. Jill dragged a bunch of those images onto the flash drive as well.
She took the storage key from the key slot and put it in the pocket of her jeans. She took out her cell phone, thinking she’d text Lindsey to ask what she should do next. Her hand brushed up against the rippled metal of the toppled Coke can. The contact summoned her back into the moment. God, how had she lost track of the time!
Jill was in the process of shutting down the image application when Mitchell entered the room.
His mouth fell open when he saw what she was looking at. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Jill’s heart pounded so fast that she felt it might burst. She set her cell down on the table. She wanted to look as innocent as possible. But she felt the flash drive in her pants pocket, with all the images that she copied to it, like a hot coal searing the skin of her leg. “I was just trying to check my e-mail,” she managed to say.
“Don’t lie to me,” Mitchell said, closing in. “I can check the recent activity, you know.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Jill said, though her voice wavered the way it did just before she cried.
Mitchell, undeterred and unconvinced, stepped even closer. Before she could slip past him, he had his hands wrapped around her neck. Jill’s eyes bulged in their sockets as he began to squeeze.
“What did you see?” he growled in her ear. “You were just supposed to be using the Web browser, not snooping around my files.”
With one hand Jill tried without success to push Mitchell away from her. She stretched the fingers of her other hand and hoped beyond hope to find her phone still in reach.
Mitchell tightened his grip around Jill’s neck. He didn’t seem to notice her hand, and she found her phone. She tried to relax as she brought the phone to her side and out of Mitchell’s view. Mitchell wasn’t squeezing her neck anymore. But he kept his hands there, holding her immobilized.
Jill felt the ridges of the phone. By touch and memory she pushed the right button to redial the last number called. Jill almost never used her phone to make phone calls. Texting had become her communication method of choice. But she remembered whom she last dialed. The phone began to ring in her hand, but Mitchell didn’t hear it, because he was yelling at her again.
“Did you see anything? Answer me?”
“No.”
The phone rang and rang.
Mitchell let go of her throat. “I need to think… need to think….” Mitchell let out a heavy breath. He was still blocking her way out of the alcove.
The phone kept ringing. Jill covered the speaker with her hand. Mitchell was still pacing. He didn’t hear the rings.
“Just take me home, okay?” Jill said.
“I can’t do that yet. I gotta think. That was really stupid of you, Jill.”
Mitchell turned around and put his hand to his head. He walked out of the alcove and back into his bedroom.
Jill faked a move to her left and went right, emulating her best soccer technique for getting by an aggressive defender. Mitchell wasn’t fooled and positioned his body in such a way that he effectively blocked the door—her only exit out. Jill knew there was no way she’d get by him.
She heard a click and a voice, which gave her a pulse of hope that she’d escape from this alive.
“Jill? Honey, is that you?”
She didn’t answer her father, though, because Mitchell had turned around. He was coming toward her again.
Chapter 53
Tom tensed and gripped his cell phone tighter. He pressed the phone hard to his ear because he couldn’t hear the caller otherwise. The ringing had awoken him from a deep, drugged-induced slumber, and it took him a moment to convince himself he wasn’t dreaming now.
It took less time, though, to realize that the voice he’d just heard belonged to his daughter. He called her name again, but something in the few words he picked up made him stop speaking so he could listen.
“Mitchell… don’t worry… saw nothing… Don’t be angry….”
Tom sat upright in his hospital bed, quicker than he should have moved. Blood rushed to his head. An intense pain exploded from behind his eyes, painting his vision white. He sat still until the pain receded into something he could breathe through again.
“Jill, honey, is that you?” Tom asked into the phone. “Are you okay? Where are you?”
Tom’s voice sounded weak. His throat was parched. Worse than the thirst was the constricting fear wrapped tight around his chest, telling him something was horribly wrong.
A nurse making her nightly room checks glanced at Tom with concern. Tom pointed frantically to the phone pressed to his ear and motioned her back into the hall.
This could be nothing, he thought. What did Jill once call it—ass dialing—when you accidentally called somebody because you sat on the cell phone in your back pocket? Maybe that was all this was. But what had caused the urgency in what few bits of conversation he actually could hear?
No, he had instincts for this sort of thing, and a growing certainty that this was a call for help. The next four words that he picked up, spoken in his daughter’s stricken voice, confirmed those suspicions in the gravest of ways.
“Please… don’t hurt me….”
Tom slid his feet off of the bed. He stood on shaky legs. Had he heard her right? God, where was she? He wanted to scream to her to talk to him but didn’t say a word. What if the person she was talking to didn’t know she’d called him? The situation could escalate if her assailant became aware that she’d dialed for help. But he needed to know her location before he could take action.
Tom took his first few steps in hours and stumbled. He nearly toppled over the food tray by his bed. His IV was still attached. He turned and frantically pressed the call button, summoning the nurse he’d just shooed away.
“Get this IV off me,” he demanded. “Please, do it now. It’s important.”
The nurse looked at him in confusion but failed to take a single step. Tom put the phone tight against his lips and whispered, “Jilly-bean, give me something. Say something. Tell me where you are. Come on. Tell me.”
He held his breath, willing himself to become calm so that he could focus all his energy on listening. Compartmentalizing fear was a battlefield requirement Tom could access in a way similar to muscle memory.
He removed the tape that secured the plastic IV tube to his arm, oblivious to the painful pull against his skin as it lifted. There was tape on his wrist, too, which he unsecured with the same haste. Tom had dressed war wounds before, so he knew to shut off the flow of medicine before extracting the needle stuck into the back of his hand. Blood flowed, but less than Tom had expected. Now he needed to find his clothes.
“Sir… Mr. Hawkins… you haven’t been discharged.”
Tom covered the phone’s receiver before he spoke. “Where are my clothes?”
“Mr. Hawkins, Dr. Prince wanted you here overnight for observation.”