Drawn Into Darkness(19)

“How’s your gut where he kicked you?” Justin whispered.

“Mmmm,” I grunted dismissively, although the truth was I hurt like hell. I shrugged, or tried to. It’s hard to shrug with your arms stretched above your head.

“You’re no wuss.” Justin got up and padded out of the room without explanation. After a short time he came back, took the ice off my mouth, and dropped pills into it, whispering, “Ibuprofen.”

I swallowed, with the help of some water from a glass he held to my bruised lips. And the kid was not just taking care of me out of the goodness of his heart, I sensed; I felt as if, for the moment at least, Justin was totally on my side against Stoat. So I said what I had not dared to say before.

“Justin, why not just call 911? Get us both out of here?”

“There’s no phone.”

I had kind of figured that, as I had never heard one ring. “There’s my cell phone, in my house on the kitchen table. Or else maybe in my handbag.”

“Stoat has the key to your house.”

“He’s asleep.”

Justin sighed, kneeling beside the bed and leaning against it as if to explain life to a kindergartner. “It’s not like he keeps it in his pants pocket. Maybe it’s under his pillow with his gun. Maybe hidden in the suspended ceiling somewhere. He hides things. He already has your purse and your cell phone, but I don’t know where he put them.”

“Oh.” I lay with hope leaching out of me.

“I would call 911 if I could, to get you out of here,” Justin murmured after a while, “but if I did, Uncle Steve would take me someplace else and beat me silly, maybe kill me.”

“No, he wouldn’t! He’d go to jail and the police would take you back to your parents.”

Justin said, very low, “I don’t want to go back to my parents.”

Aside from exhaustion, the reason I did not gasp in disbelief and protest was because Plato believed in timeless norms, but Heraclitus had said nothing was constant except change, and Descartes could only just manage “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, because philosophy had taught me no rules were absolute. If anybody believed all kidnapped children longed to go back to their parents, well, here was the kid to prove them wrong.

Trying to keep it light, I quipped, “I thought you said your parents didn’t beat you.”

“They didn’t! There’s nothing wrong with my parents.”

“Then why—”

“They don’t want me back! They just think they do.”

“But, Justin—”

“Listen, Miss Lee Anna, just go to sleep, okay?” He left me.

I didn’t think I could possibly sleep, yet I did. I awoke to see daylight at the windows. It had to be morning. Tuesday. I felt my face and ribs aching from having been beaten, I needed to go to the bathroom, and I truly with all my heart loathed that bed I was shackled onto.

The bastard had done the same thing to Justin for a month. A month. All alone, nobody to keep him company. How had the kid not gone crazy?

“Nothing wrong with my parents,” Justin had said. Did it follow, then, that he thought there was something wrong with him?

Day looked kind of dim, my two useless windows showed wet spangles, and I heard the sound of rain falling on the roof, a sound I usually found pleasant. But at this point I didn’t like it. You could have brought me lobster Newburg and I would not have liked it.

The door opened, and mentally I braced myself against the possibility of Stoat, but it was just Justin with a glass of milk in his hand. “Uncle Steve left for work already,” he said, obviously reassuring me although I thought I had hidden my fear.

On his knees at my bedside, he lifted my head with one hand and guided the glass to my mouth with the other. “All we have besides milk is Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew. Neither of those are good for you.”

I sipped obediently, then said as best I could through my swollen lips, “I bet you also have Jack Daniel’s.”

“Not me. Uncle Steve. I’m not allowed to touch it.” Justin did not seem to get that I was trying to joke.

“Well, it wouldn’t go so great with milk anyway.”

The kid remained utterly solemn but not blank, not expressionless; far from it. He looked completely human and nearly sick with concern.

Setting the milk aside and standing, he said, “You can’t chew on cereal with your mouth messed up like that. Peanut butter sandwich?”

“Applesauce?” I suggested.

“Sure.” Like an eager waiter at an upscale restaurant he strode off, and when he came back, he brought me an applesauce sandwich. Applesauce between two slices of insipid white bread.