“What will he say when he realizes it’s you?”
She didn’t answer me, but she paused in her movements. It was just a slight hesitation, a movement that wasn’t quite completed. But then she shoved the spoon toward my mouth again.
“Eat.”
“Not hungry.”
“Don’t care. Wouldn’t do if you’re not alive when he asks for proof that you are.”
“You must know how he feels about me. What do you think he’ll do when he realizes you’re the one who took me? Do you think he’ll forgive and forget just like that?”
She stood up and dropped the bowl on one of the shelves, splattering the bland oatmeal she’d been feeding me all over cans of tomato paste.
“You weren’t supposed to figure it out. We didn’t know about the camera in his office.”
“No one knew. I slipped it in there without telling anyone.”
“Yeah, well, that was your mistake. We were going to let you go. We were going to get what we wanted and just let you go. But you had to get nosy.”
“Nosy?”
She glanced at me. “If you hadn’t put that camera there…” She sighed. “We worked so hard to convince your father that Lucien was doing this to himself. You should have been gone. The case was over.”
“But I was still investigating.”
“You didn’t go away. He brought you to dinner after your father told you Lucien was the one who sent the emails. That’s when we realized he really liked you. And he would respond to you going missing.”
“You keep saying ‘we’. Who else is involved in this?”
She shook her head. “It’s none of your business.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
She spun around a second, staring at me like she thought she hadn’t heard me clearly. If I’d been able to see her face, I’m sure it would have been pale. But I couldn’t. She continued to insist on wearing that thin ski mask even though she knew I knew who she was.
“I wouldn’t…I couldn’t do something like that! I can’t even smash a fly!”
“But you kidnapped me.”
“I had help.”
“From who?”
She shook her head, turning away again. She picked up the bowl and wiped at the spilled oatmeal with a piece of her shirt. She gave up after a second and walked toward the door, her head down, as though she were a prisoner walking to the death chamber, not the prison warden.
“We never wanted to hurt anyone. We just wanted to help.”
“Did it ever occur to you to go to him and simply ask?”
She made a sound that was something like a snort. “We did ask. Over and over again. But he wouldn’t even consider it.”
“All of this just for a drug you don’t even know will work.”
She looked at me again, her eyes narrowing slightly as she studied me. “Drug? What are you talking about?”
“That’s what this is about, right? The Alzheimer’s drug?”
She stared at me for a long second. And then she began to laugh.
Chapter 31
Lucien
“What does it say?” Ruben demanded, moving around my desk as quickly as he could.
Jacob held up Adrienne’s phone, revealing the lit screen. I hadn’t even realized I’d left the phone with him. But there it was, more words scribbled across it. Words that would tell us what we had to do to get Adrienne back.
Ruben snatched the phone away before I could even get close to Jacob.
“Roses are red, violets are blue. You know where. Be there at ten.”
Ruben frowned as he stared at the words. But Jacob knew what it meant. I could see it written on his face. And so did I.
If I hadn’t seen the footage from Adrienne’s camera, I would know now who was behind all this.
“What does it mean?” Ruben asked.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
His eyes narrowed as he looked at me. “It must mean something to you. Or the kidnapper wouldn’t have sent it.”
“Maybe it’s just meant to confuse us,” Robert suggested. “Maybe they know we’re here.”
Ruben stared at me, his eyes narrowing so much that I could barely see his pupils.
“No. This one knows what this means.” He gestured to me with the phone. “And I’m guessing you know who’s behind all of this, too.”
I had a choice in that moment. I could lie to him and make a permanent enemy out of him. Or I could tell him the truth—or at least part of it—and hope that he’d trust me enough to allow me to do what I had to do to get Adrienne out of this mess.
I looked at Jacob. He was watching me, waiting for me to make a decision. I could see it in his eyes. I wondered what he would do if this was Lynn we were trying to save.
But, then again, if this was Lynn, it would be a whole different story.
“The poem refers to something my wife and I used to say to each other,” Jacob said, his eyes on me as he spoke. “The message wants us to meet at a bed and breakfast in Katy where Lynn and I used to spend long weekends.”