The Girl Who Was Taken Read online

“Of course, but would your dad give you a little time off if I set up a phone interview?”

  “I guess I could ask.”

  “It’s no problem,” Mrs. McDonald said, loud enough for Claudia to hear.

  “Okay, Miss New York Times best-selling author!” Claudia said. “I’ll get a few of these set up, and we’ll touch base next week.”

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  “This is a big deal, Megan.”

  “I know,” Megan said, trying for conviction. “I’m psyched.”

  “We’ll talk next week.”

  Megan handed the phone back to her mother.

  “So?” her mother said with wide eyes.

  Megan let out a sigh of disbelief. “I don’t know. It’s crazy.”

  “So crazy. I’m very proud of you, Megan. You’re helping so many girls who have gone through a similar experience.”

  Megan shrugged. She doubted that if every abducted person in the country purchased a copy of her book the number would be large enough to launch it onto any bestseller list. The readers who were buying Missing were not in need of any insight the book might offer on recovering from abduction. The majority of readers lusted after an eerie story of survival and escape, and they were happily eating it up.

  “You can tell your father. He’s coming home today.”

  Megan’s mother quietly closed the door, twisting the handle so the spring mechanism didn’t pop when the door caught. The same way a nursery door would quietly be closed.

  Alone again, Megan reactively scrolled through her empty phone until she finally threw it onto the comforter next to her and lay down on her bed. She had badly miscalculated, figuring that after more than a year no one would still care about her story. Now the book she didn’t write but which carried her name and image was a best seller. She had originally agreed to the book on her mother’s urging. It would pay for college, her mother told her. And would help other girls of abduction. Megan’s father was indifferent about the idea, struggling in his own way with the circumstances of their new lives. But once the idea of helping other victims came about, everyone else jumped on board. From Claudia the agent to Diane the editor to Dale the publicist, and eventually to the sales force at the publishing house. No one could admit that Megan’s story offered an opportunity for profit. The same way Dante Campbell could not perform her interview without first establishing that Megan was healing, none of them could stick a dollar in their pocket from the sale of the book without first referencing all the “girls” it was helping and all the semesters it was financing.

  The book was born only because Megan needed something to give her parents that reminded them of their daughter. She needed something to work on that showed them the old Megan still existed. The Megan they loved and clung to. The smart Megan, ambitious and talented. The all-American girl filled with determination and bursting with potential. She had nothing else to offer her parents after the abduction, so Megan agreed to write the book with Dr. Jerome Mattingly, a noted psychiatrist who’d written a hundred other books, and on whose couch Megan lay twice a month. Whatever. It kept her busy, and kept her parents mostly out of her hair. Her mother so desperately longed for the girl Megan used to be that the desire practically oozed from her eyes whenever she saw Megan editing Dr. Mattingly’s work.

  There was no combination of words to explain the phenomenon Megan had undergone. She had yet to find a way to tell her parents that the daughter they remembered from before that summer was gone. Cynthia and Terry McDonald would need to come to this conclusion on their own. Until then, Megan played along. She allowed her mother to hope somewhere in the chapters of a morose autobiography that the child who once existed would be found, and that the old Megan would spill back to her from the pages. Megan owed her mother the courtesy of the illusion that the great Dr. Mattingly would tease the old Megan from the prickly vines of the new world she had returned to after her escape. Brush off the burrs and the dirt and the pain and the memories to deliver Cynthia McDonald’s daughter back to the world as though the last fourteen months had never happened. As if those two weeks in that cellar were nothing but a distant, transparent memory easily looked past.

  The problem was that Megan didn’t want the help. The only girl she wanted to save was long gone. Megan was sure no book, bestseller list, or fantasy about other girls being inspired by her story would be enough to erase the image she held of herself running to safety while Nicole Cutty sat alone in that dreary cellar waiting for the man to come at night. Waiting for the keys to rattle and the floorboards to squeak. So many noises announced his presence. The soft hum of the car’s engine. The thump of the door slamming. The keys jangling and the door scraping across the floor when he opened it. His steps—the gentle drumming of soft-soled shoes against the dusty, wooden stairs as he descended to the cellar.

  All these sounds came at night. It was his favorite time.

  * * *

  “Tell me about it,” Dr. Mattingly said. “Tell me about that sound.”

  Megan sat in a plush chair in Dr. Mattingly’s office. This was her twenty-eighth session, two each month since her escape, and she was finally starting to buy into the idea of hypnosis. Before she met Dr. Mattingly, the only time she’d seen someone “hypnotized” was during a school variety show where the hypnotist pulled student volunteers from the crowd and made them hop around stage like frogs. Hypnosis, Megan was learning, was a real thing. It was a state of consciousness that allowed thoughts to surface which might otherwise stay buried.

  It was immediately after one of Dr. Mattingly’s hypnosis sessions that Megan had remembered so clearly the sound of airplanes that flew overhead during her captivity. And there was something else along with those airplanes, some other noise that had settled into the deep alcoves of her mind. A noise she was trying to retrieve. So delicate and draining was the process—like stretching under the bed for an object just out of reach, she drummed her fingers to gain that extra fraction of an inch. And now, on Dr. Mattingly’s fat chair, Megan knew not to strain too hard. After twenty-eight sessions, she knew the process. To find success, she had to give herself to Dr. Mattingly’s voice. Go only where he suggested. When she resisted, when she pulled her thoughts to where she believed they should go, the effect of hypnosis was lost and her mind drifted and she woke to find Dr. Mattingly snapping his fingers and repeating the word no no no no. Over the past year Megan had learned that getting into the correct mindset took time and patience, and once in that state, resistance could ruin the effect in seconds. She had only one shot during each visit and she found herself letting go of her rebellious attitude for two hours each month when she saw Dr. Mattingly. She was making progress, even if it was for a different purpose than Dr. Mattingly understood. His goal was to explore every inch of her mind to remove any repressed thoughts about her captivity. Shine light on all of it and it will eventually stop hiding.

  Megan had a different goal entirely.

  “It’s the airplanes overhead,” Dr. Mattingly continued. “Tell me again about the sounds.”

  Megan didn’t want to talk about the airplanes again. This breakthrough had come last time. There was something else she wanted to reach for, something new, and she felt the proverbial fingertips of her mind stretch and strain for that other thing. The other sound she wanted so badly to identify. Something in her posture or her eyelids or her breathing betrayed her thoughts.

  “Stay with me,” Dr. Mattingly said in his calming voice. “Stay with what we can identify for certain. Just for now. We’ll go to that other sound soon. Concentrate on the airplanes for now. Tell me about that sound.”

  “They were high, but not spec-in-the-sky high. Medium high. They gave a low rumble like a far-off highway,” Megan said, still with her eyes closed.

  “And tell me the direction again.”

  Megan almost allowed the thought that she’d already been through this to pass through her mind. She resisted the temptation.

  “It came from
the back wall,” Megan said. “Far away at first, then louder as it moved overhead. Then . . .” Long pause. “It faded.”

  “How did it fade?”

  “From the windows. I could only hear the plane through the boarded-up windows in the back of the cellar. Once the plane was overhead, it faded away.”

  “Go to the other side of the room,” Dr. Mattingly said. “Tell me what you see there. Tell me about that room. The cellar.”

  Megan had spent so much time in the cellar during these sessions—all her time, actually—that it was no longer disturbing to be there. At first, she blocked those images from the spotlight. Ran from them. But through her visits with Dr. Mattingly, she eventually understood that running from something implanted in your memory was like trying to pass a mirror without seeing your reflection.

  It was not easy at first, but once she understood the possibilities of hypnosis, Megan gave herself fully to the process. So now, despite wanting to explore that other thought, the other sound that had just poked her subconscious, she instead put her trust in Dr. Mattingly to take her there in due time.

  “Concrete floor,” she said. “Gray floor. Cold at night, which felt good on my feet because it was so hot during the day.”

  “And the walls?”

  “Same. Bare concrete with grooves or ridges every so often. A bed in the back corner by the windows. No sheets, just a box spring, frame, and bare mattress.”

  “Now walk to the other side. Away from the windows. Follow the sound of the airplane. What is there?”

  “It’s a square cellar. My bed is there. Three windows boarded over. I can only walk for a short distance. I’m shackled to the wall by a strap on my ankle. I can go only as far as the chain will allow. There are stairs here, on the other side of the cellar.”

  “Can you see the stairs? Can you reach them?”

  “No. They are around the corner and my chain is not long enough. The shackle allows me only to reach the small table near the stairs. He leaves my meals here.”

  “Good. Megan, I want to go back toward the windows now. Back to where your bed is. I want you to sit on the bed. The shackle is loose and you can move freely now. Tell me what you see and hear when you sit on that bed.”

  “It’s dark. Always dark with no lights. The windows are boarded. Just a sliver of daylight spills through the tiny gap between the plywood and the edge of one of the windows. The bed squeaks when I sit on it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The springs compress under my weight and creak when I adjust my position.”

  “Now stay very still. Don’t move. Don’t shift. Tell me about the squeaking now.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “The springs are quiet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about the stairs.”

  “They are quiet, no sounds.”

  “Tell me about the airplanes.”

  “They are gone, faded away.”

  “But there is something.”

  Long pause.

  “Breathe in, slowly.”

  Megan did so.

  “Through your nose and into your core, not your lungs, Megan. Center yourself.”

  Megan inhaled, centered the breath in that area below her chest, the center of her body. Then she blew slowly from her mouth.

  “Again. This time, sitting on the bed in the dark cellar, listen to your breath. Listen as it enters your core.”

  Megan inhaled again.

  “And listen to it leave your body.”

  Long exhale.

  “Once more. Bring that air into your core and hold it there. Listen.”

  It was dead quiet in Megan’s mind as she sat in the dark cellar of her captivity. This was how it mostly was during her weeks in the cellar, eerily quiet unless she broke through the silence. But then there was something. It was what she wanted. The sound she had been searching for since the session began. The sound she could never have found by herself, so buried, as it were, in the redundant folds of the memory center of her brain. But suddenly, as she held the latest breath in her core, the sound was there in her ears. She listened to it and explored it and let it run through her thoughts like the memory of the ocean tide from a tropical vacation.

  “Tell me about it,” she thought she heard Dr. Mattingly whisper.

  “Soft. Far away. Really far. Just barely can I hear it. Like a long moan, but higher in pitch. A motorcycle without the rumble. No, this was smoother and fainter. A lawn mower, maybe. But on and off. Consistent. It starts and stops,” Megan mumbled. “It’s a long sound. Then it’s gone. Then it’s back again and it’s long again. There it is.” Megan was nodding. “There it is.”

  “Okay, Megan,” Dr. Mattingly said. “I’m going to count from three, two, one. And you’re here, Megan.”

  Her eyes blinked open and she sat up straight.

  “What did you find, Megan? What did you hear?”

  She looked at Dr. Mattingly. “A train. I heard the whistle on a train.”

  CHAPTER 12

  He had the night to himself. He was out at the fishing cabins in Tinder Valley and would hole up in one of them overnight and fish in the morning before going home. It was easy cover and a solid story that would hold up to scrutiny. Logical and timely, his trip to Tinder Valley could be corroborated should she decide to check his story. It was what he needed—a night to himself. Enough time to have his visit, stay a while afterward to be respectful. Maybe share some dinner. He could take his time tonight, not like some other visits when things were rushed and abrupt and forced. Those visits were never fun. They typically ended in fights and arguments and resentment, and he never felt good about himself when he left. But time was on his side tonight. Time allowed them both to work through the things that got overlooked during rushed visits. Time prevented fights and scuffles. Tonight he had all the time he needed.

  He pulled his car to the curb and turned off the headlights. It was dark here with no streetlights. Quiet, too. No highways. It would be a nice place to live, but that was not possible. For him, he could only visit this place. But what he found here he could find nowhere else. So empty was his life at home. There was no love there. There was no intimacy. He went through the motions when necessary. When she pressed him. But his thoughts were always here. He tolerated her touch because it was what he had to do to get by. He stomached her advances because he knew it was the only way to protect his secret.

  But here, with his love, he could play out his wildest fantasies. Here, he could service and please and pamper. Of course, it didn’t always work the way he imagined it. Some didn’t appreciate his efforts. Some even rejected his generosity. He was willing to allow rebellion initially, even put up with the early arguments and tantrums that came with new relationships. But ultimately, he expected this behavior to subside. Once his intentions were made clear, he wanted acceptance. He wanted gratitude. He wanted submission. More than anything, though, he wanted reciprocation. Sadly, for a few, this never transpired. And when his efforts were exhausted and he saw no hope on the horizon, he knew the end of the affair was near.

  There was guilt when things culminated this way. Sadness when a relationship ended. He felt genuine remorse when he could not make things work. Regret, because he understood the finality of failure. After an unsuccessful relationship he allowed himself to bathe in those emotions. He gave himself that much—the opportunity to grieve. But then, like spring tulips, someone else caught his eye and those feelings of want and desire budded inside him, eventually blossoming into something new and hopeful. A fresh relationship was out there and waiting. He just needed to find the right person.

  He stood from his car and adjusted himself. He walked inside with a frozen Stouffer’s dinner, locking the door behind him. He listened for a moment, to make sure nothing was out of order. Then he walked to the cellar door, slid the lock, and clicked on his flashlight. He opened the door, which scraped against the wooden floor, and stared at the bare wooden stairs as a feeling of ecstas
y burned in his loins. He started down the steps to his prize, who he knew would be waiting, shackled to her bed like a good and wanting servant. He had left a bucket and sponge for her to bathe, hoping tonight might be special.

  “I’m back, my Love,” he said as he took his first step down the rickety cellar stairs, his insides exploding with eagerness and lust. “I’m back.”

  SUMMER 2016

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  —Casey Delevan

  CHAPTER 13

  July 2016

  Four Weeks Before the Abduction

  Nicole Cutty pulled her car into the deserted parking lot behind a Walmart and turned off the engine. Across the street was a bar whose lot was still spotted with cars. She removed a joint from her purse and put the flame of her lighter to the end of it, listening as the tip crackled. Jessica and Rachel didn’t like to smoke, so Nicole felt obligated to sneak her pot sessions in late at night. She had tried once to get them to smoke out by Rachel’s pool one Friday afternoon, but Rachel threw a fit that her mom would smell it. Nicole loved her friends, but part of her couldn’t wait to get away next year.

  As people came and went from the tavern across the street, their headlights glared through Nicole’s windshield. She wanted to feel alone and isolated, so she took her joint, climbed from her car, and walked to the park half a block away. It was just past eleven p.m. and her parents had no idea she had snuck out of the house. The yellow halogen lights had died an hour earlier and the park slithered with shadows from the streetlights twenty yards away. Nicole walked deep enough into the park so that she was comfortably within the penumbra of a row of maples that separated the playground from the road. The swing provided a nice cadence as she rocked back and forth and enjoyed the effects of the marijuana. The night before, she was skinny-dipping at Matt’s party, and as she inhaled deeply now she relished that moment in her mind when all the guys stared at her and the other girls were invisible.