“Return her!” Absalom said angrily, pushing past them and leading back the way they had come.
She was taken again to the windowless room in which she’d been confined since her arrival and thrown onto the bed, the door closed and locked behind her.
And there she stayed.
Food was delivered while she slept, enough for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so she never saw another person. She knew this solitary confinement was supposed to break her, and she vowed she would not let that happen, but being so alone, with no computer or television or radio, with no book other than the Bible, began to take its toll. She actually found herself looking forward to the day when she could see one of the Teachers or even one of the Children, though that was not something she would ever admit.
She had no conception of time in here, but once, she attempted to sleep after she ate lunch rather than after dinner, and several times she tried to stay awake and not fall asleep at all, in hopes of catching someone bringing food or emptying her bedpan. But she must have been under surveillance somehow because neither ploy worked and, as always, her food arrived and her bedpan was emptied while she was slumbering.
She was given new clothes, Home clothes, which she did not have to make herself, probably because they wouldn’t trust her with a needle. She would have welcomed the opportunity to sew—it would have given her a way to pass the time and the clothes would have actually fit—but she put on the oversized blouse and pants anyway. Her old clothes were getting dirty, and she no longer felt comfortable wearing them.
The next morning, her jeans and shirt were gone.
Finally, after what felt like a month but was probably only a couple of days, the door was opened again. Joan was daydreaming, thinking about the trip to the beach she had taken with Gary and wondering where Gary was at this moment—whether he was here in the Home or in his dorm room or in a class or at a police station demanding that she be found—when there was an unexpected rattling of the doorknob. She instantly jumped out of bed and faced the door. She’d pictured this moment many times, and in her imaginings she unplugged the floor lamp and used it as a spear or cudgel to attack the person entering her room, but here it was happening, and she was completely unprepared.
The door swung open and in walked Absalom.
Unlike last time, he was not smiling.
And he held in his hand a rope with a muzzle.
“Father wants to see you,” he said.
Eighteen
An address.
They had nothing else to show for their long interrogation, for all of their questions and threats, and though they’d gotten exactly what Gary had wanted—the specific location where Joan was being held—the lack of context unnerved him. For Ape Arms gave up the address almost instantly, with a slight, mysterious Gioconda smile, as though he knew of some secret reason why Gary would never reach the place. But after that he would say nothing else, not who he was, not who would be at that location, not why Joan had been taken, not why Kara was missing, not why Gary himself was being targeted. His companion just kept crying.
Gary looked down at the address in his hand.
Joan was in Bitterweed, Texas.
Texas. That was far away, but Gary remembered the Lone Star license plate of the car his abductors had driven, and it was one of the reasons he believed the information to be true. The fact that it was given so freely made him uneasy, though, and while he intended to head out immediately to find Joan, he was worried that he might be walking into a trap.
The two men they’d captured stood before him, unmoving. It was still hard for Gary not to think of them as Outsiders, but if there was any other reliable information they’d obtained during their exhaustive questioning, it was that these two were not Outsiders. The very idea seemed to enrage them, and that was the only point on which they would argue or engage, although Gary and his crew were not sophisticated enough interrogators to be able to use that as leverage to pry more information out of them.
But if they weren’t Outsiders, who was?
That was only one of a hundred questions for which he had no answer. He had the address, though, and once Joan was back safe and sound, then he would have the luxury of trying to figure out what was going on.
Reyn sidled up next to him. “What’s the plan?” his friend asked, nodding toward the captives.
“We’ll have the film society take them out.”
Reyn stared at him.
Gary smiled weakly. “Joke.” He looked from the tall one to the short one. What was to be done with them? If they turned the men in to the police, they risked being arrested themselves. Detaining the men in the way that they had was not immediately obvious as self-defense, and while he might be able to make a case that it was, he would doubtlessly have to do so in court. There wasn’t time for that.
On the other hand, if they let the men go, the two of them would probably contact their cohorts immediately and Joan would be taken away and hidden somewhere out of reach.
That was something that could not be risked.
Gary realized all of a sudden that Ape Arms was grinning at him, and he looked away with an involuntary shiver. Something about that smile was extremely disconcerting, and he could tell by the reactions of those around him that they found it unnerving as well.
Who were these people? he wondered again.
Brian had his BlackBerry out and had typed in the Texas address, using Google Earth to try see where it was and what it looked like. “Check this,” he said, and Gary leaned over to see that the area outside the town of Bitterweed, where the address was located, was not available for viewing. Instead of a rural landscape, they saw a gray screen and the words “Image Not Obtainable.”
Brian quickly cross-referenced two other satellite photo sites, but they, too, were blacked out.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Reyn said.
Stacy pulled them away, telling Dror and the others to keep an eye on the captives for a moment, and she led them down the path until they were out of earshot of the others. “I don’t know what the plan is now,” she said once they’d stopped. “But we need to tell the police what we know.”
“She’s right,” Reyn agreed. “We’ve done all we can. This is where we hand it off.”
Gary was already shaking his head.
“We have to!” Stacy insisted. “Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?” She ran a hand through her hair, exasperated. “What’s your idea? Drive halfway across the country and try to mete out some vigilante justice? Are you going to bring a gun and Rambo her out of whatever predicament she’s in?”
Gary didn’t know what he was going to do. All he knew was that he needed to rescue Joan. He looked to Brian for support, but Brian for once was oddly noncommittal and lifted his shoulders in a gesture of vague equivocation.
“They killed Teri Lim,” Stacy reminded him. “Killed her. And kidnapped Joan and Kara.”
“And drugged us,” Reyn added.
“The point is: this is not something we can handle. We got lucky here tonight. But we’re a few college students up against… God knows what.”
Gary thought for a moment. She was right, he thought, though he hated to admit it. His intentions hardly constituted a plan, and whatever action he took might fail completely. Not to mention the fact that it would take some time for him to actually get to Texas.
Stacy placed a gentle hand on his arm. “We have to turn them over to the police. You know we do.”