“Jeff,” she said.
His smile grew stiff as he realized how serious she was.
“Yes? What’s up, Doc? What’s with the face?”
Lynn sighed. Her feelings for him were so hard to deny. She had talked to her supervisor about it, and he had told her to monitor it closely and refer Jeff to another therapist if she wasn’t able to keep them at bay. It was all about the patient and making sure he got the help he needed. She was now wondering if she had let it go too far already.
She looked down at her notepad. “So…my mom called yesterday.”
He wrinkled his forehead. “Y-your mom?”
“Yes, my mother. And she had an interesting story to tell me.”
“Yeah?”
“She told me she had met one of my friends. That he came to her house and that he said we worked together.”
“A-and?” Jeff asked, his voice trembling.
“And her description of this person sounded a lot like you.”
Jeff’s eyes grew wide, and then he looked at the floor. A long silence followed.
“Jeff? Can you look at me, please?”
He didn’t. His eyes remained glued to the floor.
She sighed. “Jeff, you can’t do that. You can’t visit my mother.”
“I…I am sorry. I just…well…I just like you so much, and I…” He stopped, then shook his head. “No, I am not gonna say that.”
Lynn narrowed her eyes. “Now, you kind of have to, don’t you?”
He lifted his gaze, and his eyes met hers again. The look in them made her soften up and lean back with a compassionate sigh.
“I’m kind of obsessing over you,” he said, fiddling with his fingers. “I’ve been driving past your house and stalking you on Facebook. I don’t know why I do these things; it’s just…I think about you a lot.”
Lynn smiled. “It’s okay, Jeff. It’s normal. It’s called transference. It will pass. It has nothing to do with love, what you’re feeling for me. It’s some unresolved emotions from your past and possibly childhood that we might need to dig into. There could be some unresolved issues you might benefit from looking at more closely. That’s all it is. Just try and dial down on the craziness, okay? No going past my house; no going to any of my family members. No looking at my Facebook profile. It can’t happen again, or I’ll have to refer you to another therapist.”
He nodded while tears were springing to his eyes. He wiped them away with a swift movement.
“Do you feel it too?”
Lynn swallowed. She looked down at her notepad, taking a few deep breaths. “What I feel is irrelevant. This is about you.”
That made his face light up, and his lips curl into a smirk. “So, you do, huh?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said.
“You know your lower lip slightly vibrates when you’re lying, right? Just like it is right now.”
She lifted her eyes and looked into his. “Jeff. It can never happen. Do you understand that?”
His shoulders slumped, and he leaned back.
“Okay. I hear you. Forgive me, Doc.”
Chapter 24
I’m gonna die in here, aren’t I? This is it for me. I’m gonna rot away in this hellhole and never see sunlight again.
Sarah Abbey lifted her head in the darkness. The chains rattled behind her as she pulled them in an attempt to stretch her arms. She missed seeing sunlight; she missed feeling the fresh air on her face. She wondered how long she had been trapped in this place and realized she didn’t even know if it was day or night. She had completely lost track of time. All she could do was wait for her kidnapper to show up. It seemed like an eternity went by between the visits. Not that Sarah looked forward to them, since she was terrified of what her kidnapper wanted—if this person wanted to hurt her or maybe even kill her, but it was the only break in the everlasting darkness.
Sarah let her hands run across the floors, feeling her way around, trying to find the toilet bucket in the back corner. Her hands swept across the dirty tile floors, touching sand and dust and trying to avoid the dead roach she had accidentally touched the day before when looking for the bucket. She had tried to memorize where it was so that it wouldn’t happen again. As her fingers searched through the wilderness, the chains were clanking loudly behind her, and she suddenly felt something between her fingers, something that definitely wasn’t dirt or dust—or a roach. She grabbed it between her fingers and held it up, feeling it from the flat bottom to the pointy top.
A nail. Definitely a nail.
Sarah burst into laughter as she felt it again and again, just to make sure she wasn’t imagining things. Panting in excitement and forgetting all about her quest to make it to the toilet bucket, she returned to her spot. She tried to poke the pointy end of the nail into the chains, fiddling with it, feeling them, and hoping she could find some kind of opening, a keyhole maybe where the chains were locked together or something, anything. There had to be some way of opening them.
Right?
Desperately, she poked the nail into the chain, but she couldn’t find an opening. Sarah could hear her own loud breathing in her head and her pulse as it pounded in her ears. The hope she had made her suddenly frantic and caused her to sob uncontrollably when she didn’t succeed in her quest. She pulled the chains in anger and growled loudly in despair, then slumped to the floor, nail still clutched in her hand.
Then she cried. Salty tears rolled down her face as she felt how weak she was from the lack of enough food to feed her poor body and from being kept in the same position so long while not moving much. Her brain felt foggy, and it was hard to think clearly.
I’ll never get out of this place!
Sarah took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Panicking didn’t help anything. It only made her more confused and desperate, and then she couldn’t think straight.
Sarah sat back, head leaned against the wall, as she had done so many times before, but this time with the nail tightly clutched between her hands. She felt the tip of it with her thumb, poking the skin.
That’s when she heard footsteps on the other side of the door. Approaching footsteps that soon stopped outside it, and then there was the well-known fumbling behind it before it opened slowly, and the light once again blinded Sarah. As she regained her sight, she looked into the face of her kidnapper, who was smiling broadly and wearing the look of a madman.
Chapter 25
I fed Owen his bottle and put him down for his nap, then took a deep breath, realizing that I had succeeded in putting down both babies, and the house was completely quiet since all the rest of the children were in school.
A small piece of unexpected heaven.
I left the babies in their cribs, walking away as quietly as possible, then hurried down the stairs, poured myself a cup of coffee, and just took in the silence, enjoying it for as long as it would last. I couldn’t stop thinking about Amy and her parents. What had gone so wrong between them? Could it just be the embarrassment of her becoming pregnant at only fifteen? Was that enough to entirely cut your ties to your own daughter and grandson? Could anyone really be that cruel?
I shook my head and sipped my cup, praying under my breath for Amy and that she was somewhere safe. I had driven by the abandoned house she had been hiding in earlier, but she wasn’t there. Christine didn’t know where she was either, she said. In the beginning, I thought she knew but just wouldn’t tell me, so I had been angry with her for keeping it from me, but I knew now that she was telling the truth. It was like Amy had vanished. Matt and his colleagues had put out a search for her, but still with no luck. I had also written in the local Facebook group for people living in Cocoa Beach and told them to look out for her, but still no news.