He let out a laugh. “You know what I realize right now? I did miss you. I missed this kitchen, too. Though, boy, it’s got some fancier touches since I was in it last. Barn doors on a pantry big enough to rate them. A big-ass shiny stove, and that faucet coming out of the wall. Clementine says it’s to fill the pots that go on it.”
“The grannies got Mom hooked on those home improvement shows. She all but drove Dad crazy until she talked him into redoing it.”
“There’s more I missed. I’d like to go by and see Nana and Miss Fancy.”
“They’d like that. You got all you need in the shack?”
“More than. It’s fancier, too, than it was back when Chase and I would sneak in there to plot our adventures.”
“And locked me out.” Still just a little bitter about that, she realized.
“Well, you were a female.”
She laughed at that, at his cleverly horrified tone. Maybe she’d missed him a little, too.
“I could ride as well as both of you.”
“You could. It annoyed the hell right out of me. Chase said you lost Wonder a couple winters back.”
Bodine had ridden, loved, and groomed the sweet-going mare since they’d both been two. “Just about broke my heart. Six months before I could pick another for mine.”
“You picked well. Your Leo’s got brains, and spirit. Want another glass of that wine?”
She considered. “Half.”
“What’s the point in half of anything?”
“It’s more than none.”
“Sounds like settling.” But he rose, got the bottle, set it on the table. “Looks like you’ve about cleared your plate, so I’ve done my duty by Clementine. I should get on.”
“You want that pie?”
“No. If I took it, it’d be sitting there, trying to seduce me into eating it, and I’d never get any sleep. It’s good seeing you, Bo.”
“You, too.”
When he left, she sat a moment, taking stock, absently rubbing the penknife she carried in her front pocket—always. The one he’d given her for her twelfth birthday.
Maybe, just maybe, she still felt a little of that crush. Just a light flicker of it.
Nothing she needed to worry about, nothing she wanted to act on. Just a little flicker at seeing the man he had become from the boy for whom she’d had teenage heart flutters.
It was good to know it, acknowledge it, and set it neatly aside.
She picked up the wine bottle, poured precisely half a glass.
It was more than none.
— 1991 —
He ordered her to call him Sir. Alice memorized every line of his face, the exact timbre of his voice. When she escaped, she’d tell the police he was about forty, white, around five-feet-nine, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. Sort of sinewy and very strong. He had brown eyes, brown hair.
He had a puckered scar on his left hip, about an inch long, and a splotchy brown birthmark on his right outer thigh.
He often smelled of leather, beer, and gun oil.
She’d work with a police artist.
She’d had more than a month to curse herself for not paying more attention to the pickup. Even the color didn’t stick in her memory, though she thought—mostly thought—faded, rusty blue.
She couldn’t give them his license plate, and maybe he’d stolen the truck anyway. But she could describe him from his cattleman’s hat right down to his scarred Durango boots.
If she didn’t manage to kill him first.
She dreamed about that, about somehow getting her hands on a knife or a gun or a rope, using it to kill him the next time she heard that cellar door open, the next time she heard those boots come heavy down the steps to her prison.
She had no idea where she was, whether she was still in Montana, or if he’d driven her to Idaho or Wyoming. He could have flown her to the moon for all she knew.
Her prison had a concrete floor, walls covered in cheap paneling. It had no window, and only the single door up a shaky flight of open steps.
She had a toilet, a wall-hung sink, a skinny shower with a handheld sprayer. Like the air in the room, the water in the shower never approached warm.
As if to provide her privacy, he’d tacked up a ratty curtain to separate the toilet area from the rest.
The rest was ten paces square—she knew because she’d paced it off countless times, straining against the shackle clamped to her right leg that prevented her from climbing more than the bottom two steps. It held a cot, a table bolted to the floor, a lamp bolted to the table. A bear climbing up a tree formed the base for her light and the forty-watt bulb.
Though he’d taken her backpack, he’d left her a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, and orders to use them, as cleanliness was next to godliness.