Chapter Eighteen
I KNEW I needed to contact my adoptive parents. Even if we hadn’t been close, even if I doubted they would care. So it was just a matter of finding a phone. Shelly had teased Philip about his aversion to technology, but he would put business first. If this was where he came when he needed to hide out from the cops—or worse—then he would have already had this place fully stocked.
The search took me through a tour of Philip that I wasn’t expecting.
In an otherwise empty kitchen drawer I found a glossy, corner-bent photograph of him and his sister. I had seen them in pictures before, austere half-smiles after one of her ballet performances.
This one showed them around a table, with Rose reaching over to smear something on Philip—cake maybe. Her smile lit up the picture, but Philip’s smile, a smaller version, more reserved even in the midst of revelry, was like a rare, precious jewel.
In the background I could see Colin, mouth open in the middle of some word. Probably encouraging Rose. The two younger siblings liked to team up against their older brother, but only for pretend. They worshipped him.
My heart twisted at both Philip’s happiness in the photograph and the strange reserve that had led him to stow this picture in a drawer instead of framing it on the wall. As if happiness was a weakness he couldn’t expose, even to the select few who visited this place—even to himself.
In a library I found wall-to-wall books. There were many on business, which I’d expected. The Art of War wasn’t a surprise. The many books on engineering, on physics, however, were a surprise. As were the array of tiny figures lined up on the shelves in front of books, a small army defending their country.
Not figures, I realized on touching one. Machines.
A little bird cage looked like it was made out of paper-clip wire. But when I tapped the bird that rested on the outside, its feet opened the door for the second birdlike bundle of wire perched inside. The legs of a man turned the wheels on a miniature bicycle—raised off the ground by wooden blocks so it didn’t move. A tiny lever drew an open-air metal bucket up and down the wire outline of a well.
And I knew without asking that he had made them. There were too many of them, some of them half-finished, others trying to be something else. None of them quite polished and pretty enough to be purchased from a store.
A Luddite, Shelly had called him once. Well, he might not prefer technology in the way most people did, with flashy tablets and apps, but he did enjoy technology. He enjoyed the mechanics of it, understanding how things worked. He enjoyed creating things.
So why then, did he earn his money destroying things?
He destroyed livelihoods. He destroyed lives.
He destroyed families.
God, he was destroying mine. So casually, too. My protests were just an annoyance, the flap of a sparrow’s wings against the great hurricane force of him.
Behind the well made of wire, I spied a section of books about Chicago. A biography of Frank Lloyd Wright—my second-grade class had taken a field trip to his house in Oak Park. There was a book on suspected haunted locations, with dog-eared pages and highlights for places in Chicago: an abandoned theater, a church.
As I moved to replace the books, the pages caught on something stiff and flush against the side of the shelf. Feeling around, I pulled out a thin stack of postcards.
Welcome to Chicago, the top one said in bold yellow writing.
Exactly the kind of postcard I had received. My heart twisted. I imagined him collecting these, storing them away. There was always a feeling of reluctance to them, the way more time would pass, then less, each one of them bare of any message—as if he’d rather not have sent them but couldn’t help himself. A magnet drawn north whether he liked it or not.
I found what I was looking for in the bottom drawer of an ornate desk against the window. There were passports and bundles of cash tumbled together, the way normal people might collect thumbtacks and pens for when they need them. And there were phones—all cheap and black, disposable. Burner phones. I had learned enough about the way they operated in my brief time with him and Shelly. Nothing traceable.
I picked one at random and dialed home.
At least that was how I thought of it. Home. The place where my adoptive family lived. The place I had spent most of my life. I tried not to think of how I’d always been the outsider in the spaces between rings.
“Hello?” My mother. Her voice was already strained, as if she was worried.
“Mom? It’s me.”
“Oh, thank God. We tried calling you and I couldn’t—” Her voice cut off, and I realized that they may have actually seen something on the news about gunfire at my dorm—or maybe even a hostage being taken. Maybe the police had actually worked quickly to notify them.
A sudden warmth filled me, because, God, I hadn’t wanted to admit this to myself, but I couldn’t be sure they would be upset to find me gone.
“I’m okay,” I told her, even though I wasn’t totally sure I was. An hour ago I’d had a gun pointed at my head, even if the safety had been on. Now I was in the house of the man who had held that gun. And he claimed I couldn’t go back.
It didn’t matter, though. She didn’t seem to hear me. She was talking, almost pleading. “They took him, Ella. They came last night and took him. Please. You have to help. Please.”
My blood turned cold. “Dad?”
He claimed to have quit gambling, but they never really quit, did they? If I had learned anything from my sociology classes, it was that—people didn’t change.
“Tyler,” she said, and my heart stopped completely. Not my brother. My brother that I in turn resented and adored, the brother that I never should have had, the brother I never deserved.
“No,” I whispered.
“They said we have to pay—more now that they have him. They didn’t say where or when, but—”
But we didn’t have the money, however much it was. My father must have been deep in the hole again. And if that was true, there wouldn’t be any money to pay for the dorm or college tuition. Not that I could even go back, if what Philip had said was true.
“Mom, I’m not—” My voice cracked. “I’m not on campus. Something happened.”
“What are you talking about?”
I should have told her. I needed to. But I just didn’t have the heart to explain about Philip or the armed men outside my window. Not when she was already scared to death. Some habits died hard, and I had never completely stopped trying to be a good daughter. “A friend needed my help.”
“Ella,” she whispered. “I don’t know when they’ll contact us. I’m trying to get some money together, but you know we don’t have… I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know who to…who to call…and I don’t… Oh God.”
She sounded like a mother in agony, and why shouldn’t she be? Her child was gone. Her only child. She hadn’t worried half as much when I was taken the same way.
“I’ll find him,” I told her, not knowing how I’d actually accomplish it. I was stuck here, and even if I could have left, where would I go? I didn’t have any resources, any connections to the dangerous men who could have taken him.
Except for Philip. He would at least know where to look.
She was crying now, and I couldn’t console her.
I tried anyway. I told her he was safe, that they wouldn’t hurt him—even though I couldn’t know that it was true. Even though they had hurt me when I’d been gone. I told her I’d find him, save him. That I’d bring him back, safe and sound. Because she was my mother—I loved her, even if she didn’t quite love me back. It broke my heart to hear her cry.
She was still crying when we hung up the phone.
I clutched the burner phone to my chest and stared unseeing at the row of mechanical trinkets on the shelf. Twenty minutes ago I would have said I needed to get away from Philip no matter the cost. I would have said I would never have sold my body for money, never become what they had tried to turn me into in that penthouse.
Now he was the only one who could help me. And I knew the cost would be high.
It was with a kind of knowing that I turned where I stood. There was no surprise as I saw him in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, his arms crossed over his chest.
There was no point in pretending. He’d heard everything.
“She said they haven’t contacted her,” I said. “Why would they take him if there isn’t going to be a ransom?” I thought of several things that could be done with a teenage boy. The same things they’d tried to do to me.
“There will be a ransom,” Philip said. “They’re just waiting to make you worry more.”
He must have showered. Showered and barely toweled dry when he got out. Most of the water had sunk into his thin, faded T-shirt, so that it clung to his muscles. The short bristles of his hair still glistened wet.
It felt surreal to see him there, fresh and composed when just last night he’d been unconscious at my door. At the time I had been relaxed, confident, focused on my sociology test. And now here I was, falling apart.
Not real. A dream.
“How do you know?” the dream version of me asked.
“Because that’s what I would do.”
It was a cold fist to the heart, the reminder that he could be as cruel and as dangerous as the men who’d taken Tyler. As the men who once took me. He was a criminal. A killer. He knew the best ways to hurt people, and one day, probably soon, the person who got hurt would be me.