He sat back, nodding and smiling as if I had not only agreed but agreed excitedly. He leaned forward again, slapping his hands together.
“So. I have three different kinds of cheese in the fridge, turkey slices, mayo, mustard, whatever, and a fresh loaf of honey wheat bread. There are sodas and juices and lots of fresh fruit, too. Make your lunch when you’re hungry.”
I almost spoke to ask how I would know what time it was. There was no clock in here, and he had taken my watch, but I didn’t want to utter a word. Stick to the plan, I thought. Stay mute. Haylee hated it when I did that to her. I’d make silence work for me. Eventually, it had to work. He’d grow tired of talking, even though right now he ignored my silence, pretending I was speaking.
“I was thinking of eggplant parmesan for dinner with some angel hair pasta. Sound good? Yeah,” he said after a sufficient pause. “I thought you said you liked that. You probably wonder how I became such a good cook. When you’re on your own for so long, you either become a good cook or you starve. I never told anyone, but I took some lessons from a chef I know.
“We’ll have a fresh salad, of course. I’ll stop at the supermarket on the way home. Anything special you’d like to eat this week? You told me about pizza, and I promise we’ll have pizza at least once a week. I can pick up some on the way home during the week, or we can make it a special Saturday night thing. Any ideas for dessert tonight? You told me you like anything chocolate.”
He paused as though he was listening to me speak.
“So that’s it,” he said. “Leave it up to me. Surprises are fun.”
I closed my eyes and pushed the plate away. Despite my need for energy and strength, I couldn’t eat much after all. When I opened my eyes, he stared at me, sipping his coffee. Then he continued to eat.
“You told me this was one of your favorites for breakfast,” he said, his tone of voice strained with annoyance. “I hope you didn’t make up stuff about food, too, Kaylee.”
He was still calling me Kaylee. Why?
A terrible, dark, and very frightening realization was dawning on me. When Haylee had started her forbidden Internet romance, maybe she had used my name instead of her own. I first thought that she had mentioned me and he had simply confused our names because they were so similar, but now I was thinking that during their Internet courtship, Haylee had never told him that she was an identical twin. I didn’t think she had even mentioned having a sister. Perhaps he wasn’t lying about that after all.
When I had gone to meet him on her behalf when she had become sick at the movie theater, he’d accused me of making up a story, playing a joke on him by telling him I wasn’t the one he’d met over the Internet. I told him that my sister was the one with whom he had developed an Internet relationship. Why did he think I would be joking about that, especially then? Why didn’t he take me seriously?
All I could think was that she had made up things when she talked with him on the Internet and then admitted she was joking so often that he was used to that. But why had she never revealed that she was an identical twin? Why wouldn’t she have anticipated that he wouldn’t believe me when I told him I wasn’t her, that I wasn’t the one who had started this Internet romance? Why wouldn’t she expect that he would think it was just another one of her jokes, the whole thing, including pretending her sister was sick in a movie theater? Why didn’t she warn me that this might happen? Why did she send me to that dark, deserted meeting place without telling me he thought her name was Kaylee? Was she too ashamed?
All of this had come from her plan to deceive Mother. I knew that I should have risked Haylee hating me months ago and told Mother that she was carrying on this Internet relationship with a man much older than us. Now that I saw him in person, I didn’t think Haylee knew how much older he was, because the picture of him she showed me on her computer was obviously a picture from when he was much younger.
When I met him and insisted that I wasn’t the one on the Internet, he simply laughed, and then he grew angry. Of course, there was always the possibility that he did know but didn’t want to believe it, or maybe he thought I had told him a story about an identical twin because I had changed my mind about being with him. The reason didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to change his mind now. As far as he was concerned, he had met the girl he had seen and spoken to for so long on the computer, the girl he had planned to capture and keep.
I had tried to run away and get back to the movie theater, but he’d rendered me unconscious with something electrical and then whisked me off in his van on a street so dark and deserted I had no hope that anyone had witnessed it and gone to the police. I could have gone up in smoke for all it mattered. I awoke in this basement apartment, wearing a nightgown over my naked body and an ankle bracelet with a chain embedded in the wall. There was enough length to permit me to get to every part of the apartment and a little way up the stairway outside the door, but I was like someone’s pet kept from wandering off. He was probably afraid that if I could get into the house above, I could use a phone or break out and run for help.
He wiped his lips with his napkin, gulped down the remainder of his coffee, and stood up.
“Got to go,” he said. “Believe me, I hate to leave you so soon. We’ve got so much real acquainting to do, huh? In days we’ll know more about each other than we ever could with that computer talk. I betcha in a week it’ll be like we knew each other for our entire lives, huh?”
It was then that he told me how to feed and care for Mr. Moccasin. He said he would change his litter box when necessary. He approached me and stood staring down at me. I tried not to look at him, but he stood there so long without speaking that I had to glance up at him. He smiled.
“I think it would b
e nice if you kissed me good-bye every morning when I leave for work, Kaylee. My mother always kissed my father and wished him a good day. It’s important to have someone at home waiting for you, thinking about you, someone you can think about, too, huh? And just think . . . you’ll have something to look forward to, my arrival. I’ll bring you a surprise every day. I promise. You told me how much you love surprises. So whatcha say? A sweet good-bye to carry me through the day? And then, when I come home from work, you can run to the door and greet me with a kiss, too. It’s like putting a frame around a beautiful picture of us.”
He held out his arms. I cringed. He shook his head.
“You’re a lot shier than you made out with all that flirtatious talk,” he said, and leaned down to kiss my cheek. “Okay. I’m off to see the Wizard.” He laughed and knelt to pet Mr. Moccasin. “You take care of her while I’m gone, Mr. Moccasin.”
He looked around.
“Be sure you do a good cleanup,” he said sharply.
I realized his eyes could click and his whole demeanor would change from friendly and loving to harsh and mean instantly. He turned and started out, pausing at the door to look back at me, smiling.
“I hafta keep telling myself you’re really here. It’s a dream come true, a dream I’ve been having all these weeks, and a dream I know you’ve been having, too. Like you said, you’ll be free to be yourself now.”
He blew me a kiss and walked out. I heard him go up the stairs and out an upstairs door.
The silence fell like a cold, hard rain. I actually began to shiver and got up to wrap myself in the comforter. As bizarre as it was, everything really was clean and fresh, scented perhaps to make it all seem like it had been in the fresh air and sunshine, or that we were.
During the first hour or so, I simply sat on the bed and waited, praying that Mother and the police would soon come. After that, I got up a few times and went to the window to listen. Once I went out the door, and this time I made sure Mr. Moccasin didn’t follow me, because when I had done it the night before, I had left the cat out on the short stairway and Anthony knew I was trying to escape. He wasn’t going to sleep beside me the first night, but then, after he had realized what I had done, he had decided to do so.