Deadly Illusions(67)
EMMA didn’t know what to do. Technically, the man wasn’t doing anything to her. He was just watching her. Staring. Staring rather intently, in fact. Sure, he’d put his hand on hers to stop her from opening the door, but that couldn’t be regarded as overtly hostile.
Maybe he was in some sort of trouble? Maybe he needed help?
“Is something wrong?” Emma asked, purposely putting some distance between herself and the stranger.
The man just stood there mutely.
“Do you need help? Do you need me to make a call or something? If so, I have a phone inside.”
Still nothing.
Emma was moving beyond worried and passing straight into terror. Something wasn’t right here. “I, um, need to go inside. My boyfriend is waiting for me.”
The man finally spoke. “Your boyfriend?”
Emma nodded. “Yeah. He’s right in there.”
The man wrinkled his nose, disgust washing over his features. “You have no idea who I am, do you?”
Emma faltered. Now that he mentioned it, there was something familiar about his face. “I’m sorry, I … did I meet you at a show?”
Silence again.
“Was it at Detcon? I met a lot of people there,” Emma said, wringing her hands nervously. “Most of them were in makeup, so they’re not so easy to remember.”
If two years of modeling had taught Emma anything, it was that strangers at events always expected you to remember them. It never occurred to them that theirs was merely one of a thousand faces she saw each day. In their minds, they always thought they were special.
“What’s Detcon?” The man asked, furrowing his brow.
“It’s the Detroit ComicCon,” Emma replied, furrowing her brow. “I guess that’s not where I met you.”
“No.”
Emma searched her memory. “Were you at the ice festival last weekend?”
“No.”
“Were you at the boat show?”
The man shifted slightly, the look on his face making Emma’s blood turn to ice.
“Oh … .”
“Yeah, oh,” the man sneered.
Emma considered screaming for Finn. The man would be on her before she finished yelling, but maybe Finn would be quick enough to pull him off of her before he did any real damage. She didn’t make a sound, though. Instead, she waited.
The man just kept staring at her, making her skin crawl. That’s when she knew.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“One of whom?”
“One of my father’s … one of the people my father hurt.”
“Yeah, I’m one of them.”
Emma searched the man’s face. She’d sat through her father’s entire trial – listening to the depraved things he’d done every chance he got. After a certain amount of time, the faces became a blur. The stories, though, they were etched in her mind. She woke up screaming from the stories at least once a week.
Emma was resigned. “Which one?”
“You don’t know?”
“I know your names,” Emma said. “Not your faces.”
“Why don’t you know our faces?”
Emma decided to be honest. “Because your faces all melded together in my mind,” Emma said. “It was your stories that made an impact.”
The man tilted his head to the side, considering. “In a weird way, I guess that makes sense.”
“So, what’s your name?”
“Andrew … .”
“Andrew Wayne,” Emma finished for him, her face draining of color when his story pushed forward. The things her father had done to Andrew – some of which hadn’t even come out in court – were horrific.
“So, you do know my name,” he mused.
“I try to know all of your names.”
“What else do you know?”
“I know what he did to you,” Emma said. “I know all of it.”
“You don’t know all of it,” he argued. “You can’t know all of it.”
“I know what came out in court,” Emma clarified. “I also know what didn’t come out in court. There was some stuff … there was some stuff that only made it into the police reports.”
Andrew watched her expectantly. “And what are the things that you think you know?”
“I know about the piano wire,” Emma said. “I know that he … tied you to the bench.”
“That was public record,” Andrew shot back. “Everyone got to know about that.”
“I know about the basement, too,” Emma said.
Andrew stiffened. “You know about the basement?”
“I know about the basement,” Emma said. “I know that he tied you up down there with your hands above your head, and your feet about three inches off the ground. I know that he let you hang there for so long you thought your arms were going to fall off. I know he stripped you, and he degraded you, and that was before he got the belt out.”