Wondering why in the world Bodine would still be there more than an hour after she’d left, she wandered down, glanced in the car. Bodine’s briefcase sat on the passenger seat.
Unsure, uneasy, she went to Chelsea’s door, knocked. “Bo?”
Maybe she got caught up in the samples, she thought, but she couldn’t see a single light reflecting in a window.
She lifted a corner of the mat, saw the key.
Shoving aside innate courtesy, Jessica picked it up, unlocked the door. “Bodine?”
She reached for the light switch, flipped it, but the dark remained. When she took another step, her foot hit something. Bending down, she picked up Bodine’s hat.
*
The fact she made him wait didn’t trouble Callen. She wouldn’t be the woman he loved if she’d been biddable. Added to it, he liked knowing he’d knocked her off her stride some. The woman had damn good balance.
So he’d wait. A man could do worse than sit out on a pretty spring night, under that big red moon, waiting for his woman. He considered wandering back inside, getting a beer, maybe a book to while the time away.
Chase flew out of the house, and Callen surged to his feet. His heart had bounded straight into his throat before Chase said a word.
“Somebody’s got Bo.”
*
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Everything blurred, everything muffled. Her vision, her mind, her hearing. She wanted to call out, but couldn’t form any words.
She felt no pain, felt no fear. Felt nothing.
Gradually she became aware of light, like a lamp with a dirty shade. And sound, an indistinct clicking. No color, no color, but shapes behind the dirty light. She couldn’t think of names to go with the shapes. As she struggled to find them, the pain awoke with a vicious pounding in her head.
She felt the moan move in her throat as much as heard it. One of the shapes moved closer.
Man. Man. The shape was a man.
“You’re not the one! That’s not your house! It’s your own fault. It’s not my fault.”
He moved away again, and through the ugly pounding in her head, the too-rapid beat of her heart, she began to make out other shapes, the names for them.
Walls, sink, hot plate, floor, door. Locks. God, God.
She tried to move, to push up, and the world rocked.
“… for horses,” she heard him say. “I didn’t use too much. Just to keep you quiet, to get you here. But not you, wasn’t supposed to be you.”
Chelsea’s apartment. Key under the mat. Dark inside.
She concentrated on moving her fingers, then her hands, then her feet. Something weighed on her left foot—left foot—and when she heard the rattle of a chain, she knew.
The trembling started deep inside, shuddered its way out.
Alice. Like Alice.
“Gotta make the best of it.” He came back, sat on the cot beside her. “That’s what we gotta do. You’re young, and you’re pretty.”
She turned her head away when he rubbed her cheek.
“You got plenty of years of childbearing in you. We’ll make lots of sons. I know how to make you feel good while we’re making them.”
She pushed at him, still weak, when he trailed a hand over her breast.
“You don’t want to be that way. You’re my wife now, and you gotta please me.”
“No, can’t be your wife.”
“A man chooses, and makes it so. Once I get you planted, you’ll see. You’ll see how it is.”
“Can’t.” She pushed at his hands as he unbuttoned her jeans. “Sick. Water. Please. Can I have water?”
His hand stilled. On a heavy sigh he rose, went to the sink. “It’s the horse sedative, I expect, but it’ll pass. Either way, we’re getting this started tonight. I’ve been waiting long enough.”
She bore down, forced herself to think, think clearly through the fear and the pounding that made her sick, roiled in her belly, but she understood.
He had to lift her up so she could drink, and his touch revolted. But she drank, slowly.
“I can’t be your wife.”
He slapped her. “That’s back talk, and I won’t have it.”
The sting only helped clear the rest of the muddle from her brain. “I can’t be your wife because we’re cousins.” She used all she had to stay sitting up, to inch away from him. “Your mother and my mother are sisters. That makes us cousins, Easy.”
“I don’t want to hit you again, but I will if you keep lying and back talking.”
“I’m not lying. Your mother is Alice Bodine, my aunt.”
“My ma died giving me life. It’s Eve’s curse.”
“Is that what your father told you? You heard about Alice Bodine, how she came home after all those years. Years she spent right in this room.”
“It’s a house!”
“Right here, locked in, chained up just like you’ve got me. But you couldn’t have done it. You’re too young.”
But not too young to have killed two women, she thought. Not too young to kill her if she set him off the wrong way.
“She named you Rory, and she talks about you a lot. How she sang to you and rocked you to sleep. How she loved you.”
His eyes—hazel, she noted, just a hint of Bodine green in them—bore into hers.
“My ma’s dead, been dead since my first breath.”
“Your ma lived here for years after you were born. She told me all about this place. I know that foam on the walls is new. I know behind it, the walls are drywall, spackled, but not finished. And on the other side of that sheet hanging there is a toilet, a little shower. How would I know that if your ma hadn’t told me?”
He scratched his head. “You’re trying to confuse me.”
“You met her. I think something in her recognized you. She started crying when she rode off with me after she met you. Crying and talking about you, and her other children. Babies your father took away from her. You must have seen her sometimes, around here. Working the garden. She said he chained her outside to work the garden. Did you ever see her?”
“That wasn’t my ma. That wasn’t that woman at the BAC neither.”
“It was both. You weren’t allowed to go out when she was out, were you? You weren’t allowed to talk to her.”
“Shut up.”
“We’re blood kin, Easy.”
He slapped her again, harder, hard enough she tasted blood. But tears stood in his eyes. “He told you her name was Esther, but it’s Alice. You know I’m not lying. He lied. He lied to you, and took you away from her.”
“You just shut up!”
He shoved off the bed, began to pace.
“There was a dog, a mean dog, and a horse—swaybacked. A milk cow and some chickens. There’s a cabin. He kept her there first, in the cellar. You were born in that cellar, lived there with her for about a year until he took you from her.”
“He said she’s dead, like the others.”
Though her gut twisted at the others, Bodine fought her voice steady. “He lied, you know he lied. He made your life so hard, didn’t he?”
“I took off when I was fifteen.”
Sympathy now, she thought. Understanding now. “No wonder.”