Under Abduction Page 3

  His hand was on her shoulder now. It moved slowly, in tiny increments, under her coat, down her chest, and over her breast. He cupped it and moved his hand up and down as if to weigh it. She tried to slide away, but she was already near the end of the seat. His other hand cupped her other breast and he did the same thing. She tried to push him away.

  “Stop, Anna,” he ordered, and brought his face close to hers again, “or I’ll put my tongue in your ear.”

  She tried to swallow. It was getting harder and harder to breathe.

  “I know,” he suddenly said, pulling his lips away but keeping his hand on her breast. “I have a new song to sing.”

  “What new song?” the driver asked.

  He sang.

  “Oh, you gotta make milk, gallons and gallons of milk. When the chips are saying you’ll never feed, you’ve got to make milk.” He paused. “How’s that?”

  The driver laughed.

  “I like it. You know, breast-fed babies are the healthiest babies.”

  “It’s natural; it’s what should be,” he said. “Don’t you agree with us, Anna?”

  She was hyperventilating now. The sweat had broken out on her brow and her mouth was so dry, she could barely swallow, and only with great effort.

  Suddenly he wiped her forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Take it easy, Anna,” he said softly. “We want you to relax and we prefer not giving you any medications until it’s absolutely necessary, okay?”

  “I don’t have any money,” she said, her voice cracking as her throat tightened.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes,” the driver said. She shook her head.

  “It’s all right, Anna. We aren’t looking for any money. What we do is all for free,” he added.

  The driver laughed again.

  “We’re a nonprofit organization,” she said.

  “Supported by contributions,” he followed. She laughed again.

  “What is it you want? Please, tell me,” Anna pleaded. The blindfold absorbed her tears.

  “We want you to give birth to a happy, healthy baby,” he said. And then he added, “Our baby. He or she is our baby because you don’t want him or her, Anna. We can’t let you get rid of our baby, now, can we?”

  “I’m not getting rid of my baby,” she said.

  “Right. And the pope’s not Polish.”

  “Watch your tongue,” the driver snapped.

  “Sorry.”

  “Where are you taking me? Please,” Anna begged.

  “We’re taking you to the maternity wing,” he replied. “All you have to do is give birth to a healthy baby, Anna. That’s all we ask.”

  “But I’m barely two months pregnant,” she said.

  “Then we’ll be getting to know each other really well, won’t we, Anna? And you’ll see how nice we can be.”

  “We can be nice,” the driver interjected, “or…”

  “Or not,” he said. “Right, Mommy?”

  “Right, Daddy,” the driver replied.

  Mommy? Daddy? Anna cringed.

  His hand was on her shoulder again.

  “Sing,” he whispered. “Ninety-seven baby bottles of milk on the wall, ninety-seven baby bottles of milk. If one of the bottles should happen to fall…” He squeezed her arm. “Sing.”

  She started to sing.

  “Ninety-six baby bottles of milk on the wall.”

  “Right. Good.”

  The driver laughed.

  “That’s wonderful,” she called out.

  They were all singing.

  “Ninety-six baby bottles of milk on the wall…”

  They rode on.

  4

  McShane made a sharp right when he entered the supermarket parking lot. The Giants were down to two minutes and still behind four points. It put him in a particularly bad mood, and he wasn’t the sort of man who covered up his feelings well. Cookie always said he had a face a blind man could read.

  A small crowd of the curious was gathered near the late-model Honda and the cart of groceries. He pulled up beside them and stepped out of his vehicle into the darkening Catskill Mountain afternoon. Up until now it had been an unusual fall in the upstate New York mountains. Temperatures were closer to summer highs, but McShane could literally smell winter in the air: There were no flowery aromas, no scents of newly cut lawns. Instead he smelled the heavier odor of rotting leaves, and the insides of his nostrils already stung with the impending Arctic-like air.

  McShane removed his sunglasses. With his height and weight he was an impressive-looking man, trim and athletic, with piercing green eyes, dark brown hair, a firm mouth sliced across a powerfully full jaw, the bones of which became practically embossed in his skin when something made him tense.

  Everyone turned to him. A young blond man in his mid-twenties wearing a Van’s Supermarket apron moved forward first.

  “Are you the police?”

  “The whole division,” McShane replied. “You Harvey Nelson?”

  “No, I am,” a chubby, bald-headed man with a Groucho Marx mustache said. He wore a white shirt, black tie, and black slacks. “Did you find out anything else? Was she taken to the hospital?”

  “No.”

  McShane walked over to the cart. He gazed in it and saw the defrosting frozen foods, the two bottles of milk, and a container of cottage cheese. Obviously not the sort of foods someone would leave long. He turned. All eyes were still on him as if he would magically produce the woman or had the solution to the mystery at his fingertips.

  “You say you made announcements in the store?” he asked the manager.

  “Yes, about four times. We even checked the employee bathrooms.”

  McShane nodded and tried the driver’s door. It was locked. The passenger side door was locked as well.

  “Her keys are still in the trunk lock,” the supermarket clerk said. “I didn’t want to touch them.”

  McShane looked up and then sauntered back, self-conscious about the fact that he hadn’t noticed.

  He pulled them out quickly and then looked across the way at a small shopping mall.

  “Anyone check over there?”

  “She wouldn’t leave her groceries like this and go shopping for something else,” the blond clerk said.

  “People do weird things,” McShane replied. He hated know-it-alls at crime scenes.

  “Yeah, but she didn’t do that.”

  “How do you know that, Dick Tracy?”

  “Her pocketbook,” he reminded him. “It was there in the trunk when I looked. And she left all the frozen foods out here, and her milk.”

  McShane smirked. Everyone was a halfway-decent detective these days. It was because of all those television shows like Murder, She Wrote. All the mystery and glamour in his profession was gone. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thought he could be Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. That’s what Columbo did to the profession, he concluded sadly.

  “What happened to her?” a short, elderly lady asked, a clear note of hysteria in her voice. She clung to her own pocketbook, pressing it to her breasts. “And in the parking lot in broad daylight? You’re going to have to put a security guard out here,” she told the manager.

  “Easy,” McShane said. “We don’t know that anything bad has happened to her yet. Let’s not jump to conclusions and get everyone upset,” he warned the woman.

  “There’s still money in the pocketbook, so nobody robbed her,” the supermarket clerk added, to help calm things.

  McShane raised his amber eyebrows.

  “Where is the pocketbook now?”

  “Right here,” the manager said, and bent down to pick it up. He had placed it next to the vehicle. It was a black imitation-leather bag.

  “I didn’t take anything out of it,” the young man added quickly.

  “I’ll vouch for that,” Harvey Nelson said. “I was here the whole time.”

  “Good,” McShane said. “We always need reliable witnesses.” He looked at the clerk.
“What else did you touch?”

  “Nothing. I just looked in the car to see if she had fainted or something.”

  McShane dipped his hand into the purse and came up with the wallet. There was a little more than forty dollars in it. Also in the purse he found lipstick, another set of keys, a book of matches from The Underground Bar in Port Jervis, a compact of cake makeup with an embossed Jewish star on the outside, and a hairbrush. There was some small change as well.

  “Anyone see anything unusual?”

  “No one,” Harvey said. “We’ve already asked other customers. These people just arrived,” he added, indicating the small crowd.

  “Anyone here know the woman who owns this vehicle?” McShane asked. He looked at the license. “Anna Gold?” He held up the license so everyone could get a good look at the picture. People gaped, but all heads shook. “Okay. You might as well take the groceries back to the store,” he told Nelson. “I’ll see to the car,” he added.

  “What could have happened?” Harvey asked him.

  McShane thought a moment.

  “Aliens, maybe. It’s too soon to tell,” he said.

  He started toward his vehicle but paused to pick up a button. He twirled it between his thumb and forefinger and then turned to the clerk.

  “You waited on her?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “I just remember she was wearing a dark blue coat and seemed to be in a terrible hurry. When I had to have an item checked, she just said forget it.”

  “Uh-huh.” He held up the button. “Look like one of the buttons from that coat?” McShane asked. The clerk shrugged.

  “Could be. I don’t look at the customers that closely,” he added, more for the manager’s benefit than McShane’s.

  McShane nodded and put the button in his pocket. He continued to his car, threw the purse on the seat, and reached in for the radio phone. Before he could flick it on, the dispatcher came through to ask all available personnel to go to the Mountain Clinic on Route 55, just out of Monticello.

  “What’s up, Mark?”

  “A protest turned into a riot. State police have called for assistance. Looks like a doctor’s down too.”

  “Great. Look, I need a tow truck at Van’s lot. Looks like something suspicious. Late-model white Honda. Tell him to ask for the manager so he doesn’t tow the wrong car out of here. Tell him to try not to touch the car too much and bring it to our lot.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “The sheriff back yet?”

  “He’s on his way to the clinic.”

  “Okay, so am I.”

  McShane started the engine and pulled away quickly, leaving the supermarket manager, his stock boy, and the small crowd staring after him. When he reached the exit, he slapped on his bubble light and hit his siren. The screaming alarm trailed behind his vehicle like a streamer. Vehicles parted to clear a way for him at the traffic light.

  He was a little more than two weeks into a marital crisis, separated from his wife, with more scratching and clawing to come. Some of the clawing, maybe most of it, he would do to himself. He wasn’t feeling particularly wronged, and try as he could, he couldn’t find the blame to paint over Cookie and alleviate his own guilt. She methodically pointed out how he had mistreated her in small ways that accumulated into small mountains. She charged him with taking her for granted and ignoring and being insensitive to her needs—indeed, not just her needs but the needs of their marriage.

  No new expression of remorse would help. He had tried throwing himself on the mercy of her court, but she was fed up, disgusted, emotionally bankrupt. She said if she was going to cry over him anymore, she would have to go to the sorrow bank and borrow tears.

  “You were too young for any sort of real commitment, Jimmy, and I was too young to realize it,” she analyzed. She spoke with a tone of fatality that put a chunk of cement in his stomach.

  But all of this passed through his mind in a matter of seconds and was gone.

  He was being a detective now and he had no partner of lower rank to assign his responsibilities while he went off and cried in his beer. He was alone at home and alone at the job. No one took his side and no one had much sympathy for him, not even his own parents or his brother. He didn’t even have sympathy for himself, and right now he didn’t have time to dwell on what was happening.

  “Riot at the abortion clinic, doctor down, woman missing from her car in a supermarket parking lot, and the Giants were four points behind with seconds to play in the last quarter,” he muttered. It was enough to make someone forget his own name, to say nothing of his own problems.

  No wonder his soon-to-become-ex-wife of five years thought he was distracted from their marriage.

  5

  They seemed to be riding forever. She felt them make many turns and she heard the heavy traffic. Then, after a wide turn, she hardly heard any other cars. Their bizarre singing had also stopped, and the strange couple barely spoke to each other. The car bounced on what was clearly an old road, maybe even a dirt road.

  The driver turned on the radio and dialed to a news station. They heard the bulletin about the abortion clinic and the death of Dr. Carla Williams. The commentator said more than twenty-five people, all members of Shepherds for God, had been rounded up and taken to the county jail. News reporters were already converging on the semirural community. By the evening news it would be infamous.

  “Looks like we have something else to celebrate, don’t we, Mommy?”

  “Yes, we do, Daddy,” the driver replied.

  Dr. Williams was killed in a protest at about the same time she had been kidnapped, Anna thought. It looked like some grand conspiracy in which she had been caught. Despite her feeling, it couldn’t be any worse; the terror had just been turned up another notch. Her heart was beating so hard, she thought it would simply burst, and she had more trouble catching her breath. Every once in a while she felt her face drain of blood. She told herself she had to battle to stay conscious. She was afraid of what they might do to her if she passed out.

  Against the blackness of the blindfold, she could see her father’s face full of pain when she had ripped herself out of his life. Her older sister, Miriam, would continue to cook and keep the house as she had since the death of their mother, who had felt guilty for becoming too sick to be a good wife, blaming herself for her own passing. It was another thing for which Anna couldn’t forgive her father, even though he had never done anything or said anything to support her mother’s guilt. It was his fault simply for being an Old World man.

  Now she couldn’t help but moan for her daddy. This kidnapping had turned her into a little girl again.

  Anna felt them slow down and the car swing into a driveway. She heard the tires crackle over the gravel and felt them come to a stop.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “We’re home,” he said. “And at the maternity ward.” He opened the door. Then he came around and opened the door on her side. He reached in and seized her at the elbow. “Step out slowly, Anna. We don’t want you to fall. No more miscarriages at our birthing center, right, Mommy?”

  “No more miscarriages.”

  More? What did they mean by more?

  She felt the gravel under her feet as he led her over the driveway. There was some sort of monotonous grinding noise coming from somewhere on her right. She smelled the pungent aroma of damp earth and thought she heard the sound of a stream or brook. Then she heard a door being opened.

  “Should I take off her blindfold now, Mommy? It would make it easier.”

  “One more moment,” the woman replied. “Help her along, Daddy.”

  “Right. Anna, you’re stepping down a stairway. Careful. Slowly.”

  She didn’t want to move, but he was pulling her forward and she felt as if she were dangling. If she didn’t move, he would release her and she would fall forward blindly. His foot guided her foot, keeping her on the steps.

  “Tha
t’s it. One more. Good. One more. Good.”

  “Okay, Daddy. Take it off now,” the woman ordered.

  She felt the blindfold being untied, and when she opened her eyes she saw that she was descending a chipped cement stairway to a basement door made of thick, weathered oak. The foundation of the building was constructed of fieldstone.

  She tried to turn around to learn more about her surroundings, but he grabbed her head between his two hands and held it tightly, forcing her to face straight ahead.

  “Don’t look back,” he warned. “You’ll turn into a pillar of salt. Keep your eyes straight ahead. Go on. Continue walking,” he ordered. There were two more steps to go.

  “Why are you doing this? Please. I’ll get some money for you.”

  “Walk, Anna, or I’ll have Daddy carry you,” the woman threatened.

  She took the next step and then the next. The woman went ahead and inserted a key in the lock on the door. She pulled it open and entered ahead of them, turning on a light. A moment later Anna entered the basement and was greeted with a dank, musty odor. She was quickly brought to another door. Again a lock was undone, and she was led into a bedroom. There was a door on the far right through which she could see a bathroom. The basement bedroom had no windows. It had cement walls, painted bone white. The floor was carpeted with a tight light-brown rug. All the furniture in the room was eclectic: Nothing matched. There was a light maple four-drawer dresser to the right of a dark pine bed. On the left side of the room there was a dark maple desk. Just to the right of the door was an entertainment center with a nineteen-inch television set and a VCR beneath it.

  The bed had a blue-and-white comforter and matching blue-and-white pillows.

  “Isn’t this comfy-cozy?” the man said. “We’ll bring you books and magazines. There’s a remote on your nightstand next to the bed for the television set. No outside channels, I’m afraid: too much pornography. There’s a video deck under the television and we’ll bring you videos from time to time, and pamphlets. There are lots of things for you to know, now that you’re pregnant, aren’t there, Mommy?”

  “Lots,” the woman said.