In the haunted Chrysler, Mitch set out in search of Anson.
Chapter 39
Holly works at the nail even though she makes no progress with it, because if she doesn't work at the nail, she will have nothing to do, and with nothing to do, she will go mad.
For some reason, she remembers Glenn Close playing a madwoman in Fatal Attraction. Even if she were to go crazy, Holly is not capable of boiling anyone's pet bunny in a soup pot, unless of course her family is starving and has nothing to eat or the bunny is possessed by a demon. Then all bets are off.
Suddenly the nail begins to wiggle, and that's exciting. She is so excited that she almost needs the bedpan that her kidnappers left with her.
Her excitement wanes as, during the next half-hour, she manages to extract only about a quarter of an inch of the nail from the floor plank. Then it binds and won't budge farther.
Nevertheless, a quarter of an inch is better than nothing. The spike might be — what? — three inches long. Cumulatively — discounting the breaks she took for the pizza they allowed her to have, and to rest her fingers — she has spent perhaps seven hours on the nail. If she can tease it out just a little faster, at the rate of an inch a day, by the Wednesday-midnight deadline, she will have only an inch to go.
In the event that Mitch has raised the ransom by that time, they will all just have to wait another day until she extracts the damn nail.
She has always been an optimist. People have called her sunny and cheerful and buoyant and ebullient; and annoyed by her unflagging positive outlook, a sourpuss once asked her if she was the love child of Mickey Mouse and Tinkerbell.
She could have been mean and told him the truth, that her father died in a traffic accident and her mother in childbirth, that she had been raised by a grandmother rich in love and mirth.
Instead she told him Yes, but because Tink doesn't have the hips for childbirth, I was carried to term by Daisy Duck.
At the moment, uncharacteristically, she finds it difficult to keep her spirits up. Being kidnapped fractures your funny bone.
She has two broken fingernails, and the pads of her fingers are sore. If she hadn't wrapped them in the tail of her blouse, to pad them, while she worked on the nail, they would probably be bleeding.
In the scheme of things, these injuries are insignificant. If her captors start cutting off her fingers like they promised Mitch, that would be something to bitch about.
She takes a break from her work with the nail. She lies back on the air mattress in the dark.
Although she is exhausted, she does not expect to sleep. Then she is dreaming about being in a lightless place different from the room in which the kidnappers have imprisoned her.
In the dream, she is not tethered to a ringbolt in the floor. She is walking in darkness, carrying a bundle in her arms.
She is not in a room but in a series of passageways. A maze of tunnels. A labyrinth.
The bundle grows heavy. Her arms ache. She doesn't know what she carries, but something terrible will happen if she puts it down.
A dim glow draws her. She arrives in a chamber brightened by a single candle.
Mitch is here. She's so happy to see him. Her father and mother, whom she has never known except from photographs, are here, too.
The bundle in her arms is a sleeping baby. Her sleeping baby.
Smiling, her mother comes forward to take the baby. Holly's arms ache, but she holds fast to the precious bundle.
Mitch says Give us the baby, sweetheart. He should be with us. You don't belong here.
Her parents are dead, and so is Mitch, and when she lets go of the infant, it will not just be sleeping anymore.
She refuses to give her son to them — and then somehow it is in her mother's arms. Her father blows out the candle.
Holly wakes to a howling beast that is only the wind, but beast enough, hammering the walls, shaking dust down from the roof beams.
A soft glow, not a candle but a small flashlight, brings minimal relief from the darkness in which she has been imprisoned. It reveals the knitted black ski mask, the chapped lips, and the beryl-blue eyes of one of her keepers kneeling before her — the one who worries her.
"I've brought you candy," he says.
He holds out to her a Mr. Goodbar.
His fingers are long and white. His nails are bitten.
Holly dislikes touching anything that he has touched. Hiding her distaste, she accepts the candy bar.
"They're asleep. This is my shift." He puts on the floor in front of her a can of cola beaded with icy sweat. "You like Pepsi?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"Do you know Chamisal, New Mexico?" he asks.
He has a soft, musical voice. It could almost be a woman's voice, but not quite.
"Chamisal?" she says. "No. I've never been there."
"I've had experiences there," he says. "My life was changed."
Wind booms and something rattles on the roof, and she uses the noise as an excuse to look up, hoping to see a memorable detail of her prison for later testimony.
She was brought here in a blindfold. At the end, they came up narrow steps. She thinks she might be in an attic.
Half the lens of the small flashlight has been taped over. The ceiling remains unrevealed in gloom. The light reaches only to the nearest bare-board wall, and all else around her is lost in shadow.
They are careful.
"Have you been to Rio Lucio, New Mexico?" he asks.
"No. Not there, either."
"In Rio Lucio, there is a small stucco house painted blue with yellow trim. Why don't you eat your chocolate?"
"I'm saving it for later."
"Who knows how much time any of us has?" he asks. "Enjoy it now I like to watch you eat."
Reluctantly, she peels the wrapper off the candy bar.
"A saintly woman named Ermina Lavato lives in the blue-and-yellow stucco house in Rio Lucio. She is seventy-two."
He believes that statements like this constitute conversation. His pauses suggest that obvious rejoinders are available to Holly.
After swallowing chocolate, she says, "Is Ermina a relative?"
"No. She's of Hispanic origin. She makes exquisite chicken fajitas in a kitchen that looks like it came from the 1920s."
"I'm not much of a cook," Holly says inanely.
His gaze is riveted on her mouth, and she takes a bite from the Mr. Goodbar with the feeling that she's engaged in an obscene act.
"Ermina is very poor. The house is small but very beautiful. Each room is painted a different soothing color."
As he stares at her mouth, she returns the scrutiny, to the extent his mask allows. His teeth are yellow. The incisors are sharp, the canines unusually pointed.
"Her bedroom walls hold forty-two images of the Holy Mother."
His lips look as if they are perpetually chapped. Sometimes he chews at the loose shreds of skin when he isn't talking.
"In the living room are thirty-nine images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by thorns."
The cracks in his lips glisten as if they might start seeping.
"In Ermina Lavato's backyard, I buried a treasure."
"As a gift for her?" Holly asks.
"No. She would not approve of what I buried. Drink your Pepsi."
She does not want to drink from a can he handled. She opens it anyway, and takes a sip.
"Do you know Penasco, New Mexico?"
"I haven't traveled much in New Mexico."
He is silent for a moment, and the wind howls into his silence, and his gaze drops to her throat as she swallows Pepsi. Then: "My life changed in Penasco."
"I thought that was Chamisal."
"My life has changed often in New Mexico. It's a place of change and great mystery."
Having thought of a use for the Pepsi can, Holly sets it aside with the hope he will allow her to keep it if she hasn't finished the cola by the time he leaves.