“I need his visitor log. From eighteen years ago.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Look, it’ll take some time,” Harrop said. “The computerization started in 2004. I think the old records are in storage in Albany. How important is this to you?”
“Hot-sweaty-sex important,” Kat said.
“On it.”
It was when she had hung up the phone that the YouAreJustMy Type instant message balloon had popped up. With a shaking hand, she clicked the question mark, said yes, and then, after a small delay, Jeff’s words appeared: Hey, Kat, I got your message. How are you?
Her heart stopped.
Kat read the instant message from Jeff two more times, maybe three. It was hard to know. She saw the beating heart next to his name—he was online, right now, waiting for her response. Her fingertips found the keyboard.
Hey, Jeff . . .
She stopped, trying to think what to add to that before she hit SEND. She decided to go with what was on her mind: Hey, Jeff. You didn’t recognize me, I guess.
Kat waited for his reply—an explanation that would probably be full of some sort of defensive baloney like “You’re even prettier now” or “The new haircut is so flattering,” something like that, whatever. Who cares anyway? It didn’t make a difference. Why did she even raise it? Stupid.
But his answer surprised her:
No, I recognized you right away.
The heart next to his profile picture kept beating. She wondered about that little icon or avatar or whatever the hell you called it. A beating red heart—the symbol of romance and love, and if Jeff left right now, if he decided to disconnect, the heart stops beating and then fades away. You, the customer and potential partner, don’t want that to happen.
Kat wrote: So why didn’t you say so?
More blinking heart: You know why.
She frowned, gave it a moment, mulled it over. Then she typed: Actually, I don’t. Then thinking even more about it, she added: Why didn’t you say anything about the “Missing You” video?
Heart. Blink. Heart. Blink.
It’s just that I’m a widower now.
Whoa. How to reply to that one? I saw that. I’m sorry.
She wanted to ask him a million questions—where he lived, what was his child like, when and how did his wife die, did he still think about Kat at all—but instead she sat there, nearly paralyzed, waiting for Jeff’s reply.
Him: Being on here is weird for me.
Her: For me too.
Him: It makes me more cautious and protective. Does that make sense?
Part of her wanted to answer: “Yes, of course. That makes perfect sense.” But a bigger part of her wanted to type: “Cautious? Protective? From me?”
Kat settled on: I guess.
The steady beating-heart icon was hypnotizing her. She could almost feel as though her own heart were keeping rhythm to the one next to Jeff’s profile picture. She waited. He took longer than she expected to reply.
Him: I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to talk anymore.
The words landed on her like a surprise wave at the beach.
Him: Going back feels like a mistake. I need a fresh start. Do you understand?
For a moment, she truly hated Stacy for butting in and buying her this stupid account. She tried to shake it off, tried to remember that this had been a ridiculous fantasy to begin with, that he had dumped her before, hurt her, had broken her heart, and she would be damned before she would let him do it again.
Her: Yeah, fine, I understand.
Him: Take care of yourself, Kat.
Blink. Heart. Blink. Heart.
A tear escaped her eye and ran down her cheek. Please don’t go, she thought, while typing: You too.
The heart on her screen stopped beating. It faded from red to gray to white before vanishing for good.
Chapter 10
Gerard Remington was losing his mind.
He could almost feel the brain tissue tearing off as though by some bizarre centrifugal force. Most of the time, he was in darkness and in pain and yet through the haze, a startling clarity had come to him. Perhaps clarity was the wrong word. Focus might be more apt.
The muscled man with the accent pointed to the path. “You know the way.”
He did. This would be Gerard’s fourth trip to the farmhouse. Titus would be waiting. Once again, Gerard considered making a run for it, but he knew he’d never get very far. They fed him just enough to keep him alive, no more. Even though he did nothing all day, locked away in that damn underground box, he was exhausted and weak. The trek on this path took all he had. There was nothing left.
Futile, he realized.
He still held out hope for some sort of miracle rescue. His body, yes, that had failed him. His brain, however, was another matter. He kept his eyes open and had started to piece together some basic information about his whereabouts.
Gerard was being held in rural Pennsylvania, a six-hour drive from Logan Airport, the place where they had kidnapped him.
How did he know?
The plain architecture of the farmhouse, the lack of electrical wires (Titus had his own generator), the old windmill, the buggy, the forest-green window shades—that all added up to his being on land owned by the Amish. Moreover, Gerard knew that certain color buggies are native to certain areas. Gray, for example, usually indicated Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, thus his conclusion as to his whereabouts.
It made no sense. Or perhaps it did.
The sun shone through the green of the trees. The sky was a blue only a deity could paint. Beauty always found refuge in the ugly. Truth be told, beauty couldn’t really exist without the ugly. How can there be light if there is no dark?
Gerard was just about to enter the clearing, when he heard the truck.
For a moment, he let himself believe that someone had come to his rescue. Police cars would follow. There would be sirens. Muscled Man would pull his weapon, but an officer would gun him down. He could almost see it all happening—Titus being arrested, the police starting to comb through the grounds, the whole horrible nightmare being exposed for the world to see, if not comprehend.
Because even Gerard could not fully comprehend it.
But the pickup truck wasn’t here to rescue anyone. Just the opposite.
From this distance, he could make out a woman in the back of the truck. She wore a bright yellow sundress. That much he could see. The sundress was so out of place among this horror that Gerard could actually feel a tear well up in his eye. He pictured Vanessa in a bright yellow sundress like that. He could see her slipping it on, turning toward him, smiling in a way that would thump-thump right into his chest. He could see Vanessa in that bright yellow sundress, and it made him think of everything else beautiful in the world. He thought about growing up in Vermont. He thought about how his father loved to take him ice fishing when he was little. He thought about how his father died when Gerard was only eight years old and how that really changed everything, but mostly how it destroyed his mom. He thought about her boyfriends, dirty horrible men, and how all of them dismissed Gerard as a weird kid or worse. He thought about how he had been bullied in school, the last kid picked for kickball, the laughs and the taunts and the abuse. He thought about how his attic bedroom had become the escape, how he would make it dark and just lie on the bed, how that box underground sometimes didn’t feel so much different, how, as he grew up, the science lab would start serving the same function. He thought about his mother growing older and losing her looks, and then the men were gone and so she came to live with him, cooking for him, doting on him, being such a large part of his life. He thought about how she died of cancer two years ago, leaving him completely alone, and how Vanessa had found him and brought beauty—color like in that bright yellow sundress—into his life and how very soon it would all be gone.
The truck did not stop. It vanished in a cloud of dust.
“Gerard?”