Then she screamed her head off.
She screamed until her throat was raw and her voice hoarse. First she screamed for help, and when it didn’t come she called Gosnell every name in the book. A far-off groaning answered her. The breath froze in her lungs. There was another woman.
“Oh my God, Ray,” Josie whispered over her shoulder. “There’s someone else here. He’s got someone else.”
Not Isabelle Coleman. Who, then? Someone reported missing, perhaps, who remained missing because of the police department’s deliberately lackluster efforts to find these types of victims. Anger flared white-hot inside of her, and she began her onslaught anew.
She screamed and beat against the door until she could barely move, taking breaks only to check on Ray, whose pulse was becoming more and more difficult to find. As she slumped against the door, chest heaving, sleep hovered around the edges of her consciousness. She fought against it, not even realizing that she had lost the battle until she was startled awake by the noise of something scraping across the floor outside her cell. She lifted her head from the ground and pressed her ear to the door. Footsteps. What sounded like furniture moving.
“Ray,” she hissed over her shoulder. “Someone’s coming.”
Her hands flailed in the darkness until she found some part of Ray’s body. A knee. She followed it to his throat, her fingers sinking into the flesh, searching for a pulse. Where his skin had been fiery earlier now it was cold.
“Ray.”
She felt the other side of his throat. There was nothing. She found his parted lips, her cheek hovering over them, hoping to feel a soft exhalation of air. Nothing.
“No—Ray!”
She could not keep the hysteria out of her voice. Oxygen pressed out of her lungs, escaping faster than she could take it in again. Dizziness swept over her. This could not be happening. This was a nightmare. She would wake up any second and she’d be in her big, beautiful bedroom. Luke would be in her kitchen cooking scrambled eggs, and Ray would be leaving angry messages on her phone, telling her to leave Misty alone. She would return to work with the men she had known for five years, and they would all be good men. Honest men who knew nothing of Gosnell’s bunker.
Ray had hurt her. Wounded her deeply in that vulnerable place in her soul that she had never shared with anyone else—not even Luke, not really. But he was so much a part of her reality, it was hard to imagine living without him. He had always been there—only a phone call away. He was a liar, a cheater, a criminal and, she had to admit, a coward. But he had always been hers. He had been hers since they were kids. He was a part of her identity. Good or bad, she wasn’t ready for this.
“Ray,” she gasped, cupping his face in her hands and pressing a kiss to his unyielding mouth. “Please don’t leave me. Not like this.”
She laid her body over his, taking in his scent for the last time, willing him to wake up, wrap his arms around her one more time, tell her he would protect her, tell her he wouldn’t let Gosnell or anyone else hurt her. But she was alone in the dark. More alone than she had ever been in her life.
How was she back here again? Alone in the closet, paralyzed by her own fear, terrified of what waited for her on the other side of the door. With her mother—drunk, hateful, spiteful—she knew what to expect. But what about Gosnell? She knew he was violent, that he had no problem hurting women. He’d killed Ray. She held on to that because it made her angry, and she needed her anger for when that door finally opened. She imagined herself as a fire, starting out slow and growing until she lit up the whole room. When he opened the door she would burst—an explosion of grief, hate, and anger. Her hands held on to Ray’s lifeless body as her mind held tightly to her rage. Now, she had to wait.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
When the door to her cell finally scraped open Josie lifted her head from Ray’s corpse, disoriented and blinded by the soft, hazy light that crept in, and scrambled to her feet, swaying on unsteady legs. One hand covered her eyes. She squinted and then blinked rapidly, trying to bring Gosnell’s looming figure into focus. He was just a black, man-shaped shadow filling up the doorway. His voice boomed inside the tiny space, “He dead yet?”
She didn’t speak, trying to take in the room around her between the colored light spots that assaulted her eyes. The walls were cinderblock, as she had suspected, but painted red. The wooden fold-down slab was just as she had pictured it. The toilet was a grime-covered white. She purposely kept her gaze away from Ray’s prone form. She didn’t think she could bear it. If she saw him—what Gosnell had done to him—she would lose control and have nothing left to fight the man who stood before her.
His shadowy hand beckoned. “Come on, then,” he said.
“No.” Her voice sounded like a door creaking.
Gosnell’s black form moved closer. “What did you say to me, girl?”
She gathered what little saliva there was in her mouth, swallowed and said, “I said, NO.”
His laughter was like a foul smell filling up the tiny space. “Girls don’t say no to me, honey.”
He came at her then, faster and more agile than she anticipated. Or maybe she was just weaker and more dazed than she thought. She struck the soft flesh of his torso but it had no effect as he grabbed a handful of her hair and dragged her out of the cell. The wound at the back of her head threatened to pull open and tear her scalp apart. She screamed in spite of herself, her feet scrambling to keep up with him. Outside the tiny cell, he tossed her and she landed on something high and soft. A bed, she realized once she had a chance to take in her surroundings—a king-sized, four-poster bed.
The room was large and oblong, with the bed taking up one corner of the rectangle. From it, Josie could see the entire length of the room. It was windowless and decorated like a living room; couches lined one wall with at least three small end tables, and small lamps sat on each, casting a soft, golden glow over the room. The floor was covered in an old brown shag carpet. Along the same wall as the bed, to her left, was a door slightly ajar, revealing a toilet and what looked like a shower curtain. A bathroom. The wall across from the couches held four doors, each one wallpapered in an outdated floral purple and white print to look as though it was part of the wall. Only the seams and the lever handles on each one gave them away. Mortise locks atop reinforced steel panels were affixed beside each door handle. Above them were sliding deadbolts.
Four doors.
Her heart stopped, beat twice, skipped and then kicked into overdrive. Four doors. That meant there could be four women there at any given time, possibly more if they were sharing cells. How many women had Gosnell kept over the years? How many women were here right now?
She blinked, trying to get the soft blur of the room to come into sharper focus. Gosnell was on the other end of the room, leaning over a small refrigerator that she hadn’t noticed. Next to it was a heavy exterior panel door. That must be the exit. On the other side of the fridge was a white cabinet with glass doors holding what looked like vials of medication and unused needles. The sedatives.
He turned and sauntered back to her, a beer can in his hand. He opened it with a snap that sounded oddly muted. There was a strange absence of sound in the place. As if every noise was instantly absorbed by the walls and the earth beyond it. No wonder her screams had been useless. As he came closer, into the circle of light cast by the bedside lamp, she saw just how dark and ugly his black eye was. It looked even worse than when she’d seen it on television.