Under Abduction Read online

  McShane thought a moment and then started down the steps. Gold shouldn’t be too hard a name to locate in Parksville, he thought. The whole hamlet probably didn’t have a thousand people in it. That’s the nice thing about being a police detective in this area: There’s usually only a small group of the usual suspects to round up.

  At least, that’s the way it’s been until now, he thought, and moved deeper into what he believed was becoming an increasingly ominous situation.

  7

  Anna sat on the bed and gazed at the stark white wall. The absence of color, the events, and the shock put her into a daze. She had her arms wrapped around herself, her hands clutching her shoulders. The woolen light-blue nightie was at least two sizes too big and draped her body without any style or shape, not that she cared. It was just that it did little to counter her feeling of total exposure. Her nudity beneath made her feel even more vulnerable, helpless.

  Aside from what was now the muffled sound of that strange grinding noise from somewhere beyond the wall, it was relatively silent. Somewhere above her, the ceiling creaked. Occasionally she heard what sounded like water running through a pipe, and once she thought she heard a muffled voice, but the loudest noise by far was the sound of her own heavy breathing.

  Who knew she was here? Who had seen her be abducted? Who would look for her, or care? How would she be rescued?

  She looked at the chain that ran from her neck collar to the wall. It was far too heavy to break, and—the strangest thing—the door had no knob on the inside: The only way to open it was to insert a key and turn it in the lock. When she had run her hands over the walls, they felt like thick cement. She realized that this bedroom, this cell, had to have been specially constructed in the basement of the house. It was horrifying to think she was trapped in such small quarters.

  She had gotten used to her small apartment quickly after leaving home. After all, at home she had spent so much of her time alone in her room anyway. In any case, no matter how small her quarters had been before this, there were windows and the door wasn’t locked unless she locked it.

  Entrapped, chained, naked, she began to hallucinate. She was sure that since she had arrived and been incarcerated, the room had shrunk a foot on each side. Even the ceiling appeared to have dropped a few inches.

  She took deep breaths and swallowed back her tears. Crying, screaming, or pleading did nothing for her. Her kidnappers seemed without compassion, lunatic, on the verge of violent insanity. She had nothing to rely upon but her own innovation, her own thoughts, her own inner strength.

  Should she pray? she wondered. Was all this a punishment for what she had done: turned her back on an Orthodox life, turned her back on her father and tradition? Did God really take the time out to judge everyone’s actions, no matter how small?

  It was silly; this was silly, she told herself. Two crazy people had chosen her. It was just bad luck. Somehow, some way, she would use her creativity and intelligence to extricate herself from this horror. She simply had to get ahold of herself, stop feeling sorry for herself, and start acting like Harry Gold’s daughter.

  Funny, she thought with a short laugh, how she reverted to that—Harry Gold’s daughter—when she wanted to think of herself as strong. Her father was a man of great emotional strength. She knew no one who had his firmness and determination once his mind was made up. Look at how he had dealt with her leaving. He said Kaddish, tore his shirt, and even, according to Miriam, burned a memorial candle on the monthly anniversary of her exodus.

  The creaking she heard above became louder until she recognized the sound of footsteps on a stairway. She heard their voices and then, a moment later, heard the door lock being opened. The couple entered, the woman carrying a tray, the man carrying a bottle of water.

  “Dinner,” the woman sang, and placed the tray on the maple table. He put the bottle of water beside it. They both turned and smiled at her. “Come on, Anna. You have to eat while everything is still hot.”

  “I don’t want to eat,” she said. “I want to go home.” Her voice was raspy. Her throat ached from the screaming and crying.

  “‘Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in,’” the man recited. “Robert Frost. Anyway, this is your home. We had to take you in,” he said.

  “This is not my home,” Anna retorted, her jaw tight, her lips firm. “You two will be arrested and put in jail for a long time for this.”

  “Now, that’s not very nice,” the man said. The woman nodded.

  “No, it isn’t, Anna.”

  “What you’re doing to me isn’t very nice!” Anna shouted back at them. “You’re kidnappers!”

  The two of them stared at her, both blinking rapidly. Then the man sighed deeply.

  “We haven’t called you any names, Anna, although we should,” he said. “We have every right to treat you like the criminal you are.”

  “I am not a criminal. You two are the criminals!”

  “We had hoped you would cooperate and we could be nice to you,” the woman added.

  “Of course you’re a criminal, Anna,” he said. “You were nearly a murderer, you know. You were going to kill an unborn life.”

  “No I wasn’t,” Anna cried. “I had only gotten information in case I had to do that. The man who is the father of my child and who I love and who loves me is making plans for us. Now you’ve taken me away and he won’t be able to do what he has to do. He’ll think I left him. The baby will be without its father,” she said.

  “No it won’t. I’m the father.”

  “And I’m the mother,” the woman said. “It’s like the Immaculate Conception. No one put the seed in me but my baby’s coming.” She smiled.

  Anna tried to swallow, but her throat felt as if it were filled with cork. She closed her eyes and rocked herself.

  “We’d like you to eat your dinner,” the man said. “It’s filled with good things for the baby.”

  “Daddy’s right: You must stay healthy. Remember, you are feeding someone else as well now.”

  “I won’t eat,” Anna said defiantly. “I won’t drink.”

  “Hunger strike!” the man shouted.

  “Hunger strike!” the woman echoed, screaming it as she might scream fire.

  He ran out of the room and the woman charged at Anna, who cringed. The woman seized the chain about six inches from the metal collar and pulled back, choking and forcing Anna to lie back. She coughed, gasped, and pulled on the collar to keep it from her throat while the woman literally dragged her to the headboard, placing a link over a hook that was embedded in the cement wall just above the bed. The effect was to keep Anna back and down.

  The man reentered, pushing an IV stand with an IV bag attached. Anna’s eyes bulged in disbelief as the woman reached down under the bed and came up with a strap, which she then threw over Anna’s chest. The man received it on the other side and buckled it, pinning Anna’s arms down. They did the same with a strap at the base of the bed to keep her legs down. With the chain and collar hooked to the wall above her and the straps fastened, she was unable to move or resist.

  “Okay, Daddy, she’s prepared,” the woman said. He rolled the IV over to the bed. Then he took a cotton pad out of his pocket and a bottle of alcohol. He dabbed the cotton pad on the opened bottle and wiped Anna’s forearm.

  “Just relax,” he said. “I won’t have any trouble finding a vein. I do this for a living.”

  “Stop!” Anna screamed. “I’ll eat. I promise. I’ll eat,” she gasped.

  The two looked at each other.

  “Do you believe her, Mommy?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I swear I’ll eat. I promise,” Anna begged.

  “Maybe I believe her a little bit,” the woman relented. “What about you, Daddy?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He brought the needle to Anna’s arm and held it there. “She’s got good veins. This isn’t going to be hard, Mommy.”

  “I worked hard o
n the dinner, Daddy. If she promises to eat it…”

  “If you leave one crumb…” he said, holding the needle over her face.

  “I won’t. I promise,” Anna said.

  “It’s getting cold, Daddy,” the woman said.

  “Okay,” he decided. He pulled the IV bag back and went around the bed to unfasten the straps. The woman took the chain off the hook.

  Anna sat up slowly, rubbing her arms. The woman took the cover off the dish.

  “Meat loaf, potatoes, green beans, and orange Jell-O with real fruit in it for dessert. Of course, we want you to take your vitamin too. Don’t we, Daddy?”

  “Prenatal vitamins,” he said, nodding.

  “‘Baby has to be healthy; Baby has to be strong,’” the woman sang, as if it were a nursery rhyme.

  Anna got off the bed and went to the table. They stood behind her as she ate. The food nearly choked her, but she forced it down.

  “Eat slowly and chew every bite,” the woman said.

  “Looks good,” the man said. “Looks very good.”

  “We’re all going to get along just fine now, aren’t we, Daddy?”

  “I think we will.” He nodded and smiled at Anna. “I have a good feeling about this, Mommy.”

  Anna closed her eyes and chewed and swallowed. They stood there, watching her, until she finished everything and washed the vitamin down with a glass of water.

  “Now, don’t you feel better?” the woman asked.

  “I feel sick to my stomach,” Anna said.

  “Natural in your condition, right, Daddy?”

  “I’ve seen it a hundred times, probably two hundred. And you, Mommy, you’ve seen it twice as many.”

  “That’s for sure. That’s for damn sure.”

  Anna turned and looked at them. Did they work at the clinic? My God, right-to-lifers working in an abortion clinic?

  “Where do you two work?” she asked.

  “That’s not important. That’s not something you have to know,” he replied. “You should ask only questions that are important, questions about your pregnancy,” he told her, “so our baby is born beautiful and healthy.”

  “But how do I know you know what you’re talking about?” she said quickly.

  “Mommy, how will she know?”

  “You’ll have to have faith,” the woman said. “Do you have any faith? Do you believe in God? Do you pray?”

  “I pray,” Anna said, nodding at them, her eyes small.

  The woman smiled at her coldly.

  “If you think you can pray to God to hurt us and help you, you are praying to the Devil, not to God. God sent us to you. Don’t waste His time with silly, evil requests. Pray instead for a healthy baby.”

  “It’s time for her show, Mommy,” the man said. He went to the video deck and inserted a tape. Then he turned on the television set.

  The set lit up with the title: Abortion, The Slaughter of the Innocent.

  “You watch this,” the woman ordered. “You watch this from beginning to end. We’re going to give you a test on it later, and for every question you miss…”

  “Yes,” the man said, “for every question you miss, there’ll be some hell to pay.”

  “Enjoy,” the woman said picking up the tray. “Daddy?”

  He started to wheel the IV bag out. They both paused at the doorway.

  “You’re not watching,” the woman said, waving her forefinger. “You’re going to be very sorry if you don’t.”

  “No,” Anna whispered. “You’re going to be the ones who will be sorry.”

  Apparently they didn’t hear her. They left and closed the door.

  On the television screen, bloody, aborted fetuses were displayed.

  Anna cringed.

  Behind the gruesome pictures a sound track began.

  “Rock-a-bye baby in the treetop…”

  Anna closed her eyes. This was insane. This couldn’t be really happening.

  “Daddy,” she cried. “Daddy!” she screamed.

  Her voice echoed off the cement walls and died inside her own ears.

  8

  McShane followed the directions the dispatcher had given him for the only Gold with a residence in Parksville. It took him off Route 17, the highway residents referred to as the Quickway, to a side road called Highland Drive and ran him through some heavily wooded areas with houses far apart from each other until he found the address, a gray two-story Queen Anne–style home set a good five hundred yards in from the road.

  The lawn looked in desperate need of cutting. There was a narrow fieldstone walkway from the gravel driveway to the steps of the full-width porch. Weeds grew freely between the stones. To the right and below the porch was a single hardwood bench, the iron legs of which were blotched with patches of rust.

  Although the house looked like a fugitive from maintenance, it still appeared to be clean. There was no litter strewn about; there were no old broken lawn mowers, rusted, broken bikes, or discarded tires and auto parts, as there were in front of so many tired-looking, dilapidated houses in the economically degenerating area. People living in most of those homes existed on income a notch above the poverty level. Their pride was as bankrupt as their pocketbooks. To McShane, many of them were citizens of a different country: the welfare state. Indeed, they didn’t vote; they had little or nothing to do with the communities in which they found themselves subsisting; they sat with vacant eyes, waiting for some miraculous metamorphosis.

  It didn’t take much to see how the Catskills had changed. No longer the vacation mecca it had been, it was now the target of takeovers by religious groups who pounced on the bankrupt and near-bankrupt hotels, bungalow colonies, and rooming houses, turning them into meditational and Orthodox retreats without the concurrent benefit to area businesses. Like overripe fruits, the properties fell from the tax rolls, and the mad downward spiral continued, swallowing up homes in foreclosures, driving businesses into Chapter 11, drumming up the unemployment, and swelling the welfare rolls.

  There was a new Chevy station wagon parked in the Golds’ driveway. There was no garage. It was a little after five o’clock and the sunlight, weakened by the overcast sky, was nearly gone. McShane noticed very little illumination in the house and wondered if anyone was home, despite the presence of the station wagon. He pulled in behind it and got out slowly.

  Off to the right he could hear the constant liquid sound of car tires as the automobiles whizzed along the Quickway west toward Binghamton, Syracuse, and other northwestern New York locations. The highway turned so it was just beyond the woods to his right. Other than that, it was what he called “country quiet”: no horns beeping, no people shouting, no machinery going. There was the occasional call of a bird and the sound of the wind weaving its way through the maples, oaks, and hickory trees. Something might scurry along quickly over the fallen leaves, its small feet tapping and crunching the fallen, dried leaves, but other than that, it was so still that he felt as if he were entering a painting.

  McShane wasn’t from the Catskills. He had been born in Boston, but his family moved to New York City when his father got a good job with the New York Transit Authority. They lived in Queens, and in those days the only thing he knew about this part of the Catskills was that it was some sort of retreat for middle-class Jewish families who could afford to get their children out of New York during the hot summer months. Once, when he was in his late teens, he rode up here with some friends and they crashed the Concord Hotel, spending a few hours on the grounds, at the pool, and in the nightclub before they were discovered and escorted off by hotel security.

  Little did he suspect that, years later, when he left the Army and entered the police academy in New York, he would meet and fall in love with a girl whose family owned a poultry and egg farm in a place called Dairyland, just outside of a hamlet called Woodbourne, all of it barely as big in population as half a New York City block.

  Cookie was attending Hunter College then. She was going to become a tea
cher but evolved into a school psychologist instead, fortuitously just at the time the schools began to need them. She was hired to fill a position in the Fallsburg School District, the school district from which she herself had graduated, and he got a job with the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department and quickly became one of their detectives.

  His father-in-law and mother-in-law gave Cookie and him an acre of land and the down payment for the construction of a house as a wedding present. They built a modest three-bedroom ranch-style home and started to talk about having a family, but Cookie, whose real name was Gayle Barbara Lucci, wanted to establish her career and position first. McShane himself was still somewhat terrified of the idea of a baby, and put up little debate.

  “Whatever you want, honey,” he told her, as if she were talking about nothing more than choosing a new rug for the living room. It was his standard response to almost everything, and she soon began to hold him accountable for his lack of opinion. She said it revealed a deep disinterest in the things they should cherish together. On the other hand, he felt he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. He accused her of practicing pop psychology on him and their marriage. The strain in the fault line of their marriage began to intensify.

  Once he got his promotion to full detective, he became devoted to the position and enmeshed in the work. Missing each other for dinner became more and more the practice and not the exception. But it wasn’t just his job that caused him to forget birthdays and other holidays, nor could he blame his work for his often arriving late for family affairs: It seemed it didn’t take much to distract him. He would linger in front of a television set to watch a ball game, join some of his buddies for one more beer or a game of pool, and just lose track of time.

  His adolescent carefreeness became more and more of a thorn in Cookie’s back. She complained, called him Huck Finn, even began keeping a scorecard and pinning it on the kitchen wall.