The Temptress (Montgomery/Taggert 8)
The man holding her didn’t say a word, just shoved her up three flights of stairs to the fourth floor. Pilar’s captor grabbed a ring of keys off the wall, opened a door that looked to be constructed of several inches of solid oak and pushed the two women inside.
There wasn’t any light in the room, but Chris’s eyes adjusted to the darkness fairly soon after she heard the heavy door slam behind them. She began to make out the outlines of a large, soft bed in the middle of the floor.
With a gasp of disbelief and tears in her eyes, she stumbled forward, Pilar close behind her, and fell onto the bed. She was asleep instantly.
The sun was already low in the sky when Chris woke the next day, showing that it was afternoon. For a moment, she lay there, looking out one of the tiny windows, flexing each muscle, trying to ascertain what was sore and what seemed to be damaged beyond repair. Holding her arms up, she saw that they were scratched, some of the wounds scabbing, some covered with dried blood, and there were several fierce mosquito bites on them as well.
She moved her head and looked at Pilar who was still sleeping, on her stomach, and Chris wondered if she looked as bad. Pilar was dirty, there were deep dark circles beneath her eyes, and what could be seen of her body protruding from her filthy clothes was disgustingly scratched and raw-looking.
Pilar opened one eye. “Go away,” she muttered and turned over.
Chris lay still, waited and, a moment later, Pilar turned to face her again.
“It can’t be true,” she said. “I thought it was all a terrible dream.” Pilar tried to raise herself on her arms but groaned at the
pain and collapsed back on the bed. “Where are we? More important, why are we wherever we are? And do you think there’s a chamber pot around here?”
Chris sat up on her arms, then moved her head in a circle, trying to relieve the cramped muscles. “There’s a screen over there, maybe it’s behind that.”
“I guess this is something I have to do for myself,” she said, moving slowly to get out of bed.
Chris also got out, taking moments to steady herself enough to stand up. “I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.”
It was a round room, with three windows along the wall across from the bed, a door to the right, a screen to the left and no other furniture in the room.
Chris slowly made her way over to one of the windows. Outside, she saw nothing but thick forest, trees that had never been cut. Looking down, she could see that the room was at least four stories above the ground.
“I can tell this is going to be easy to escape,” Pilar said with a grimace, coming around the screen and looking at the treetops outside the windows. She stopped at the window next to Chris, then turned her head. “Do I look as bad as you?”
“Much worse,” Chris said quite seriously.
Pilar gave a sigh of resignation and went back to bed, pulling a pillow under her head. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
“None,” Chris called from behind the screen. “I was hoping you’d know something. Did anyone say anything when they took you?”
Pilar waited until Chris was back in the center of the room. “I think you know more than I do. Tynan had some reason for being Hamilton’s gardener and I was never told what it was.”
“Oh? You just moved in with him when he crooked his little finger?”
“I owed him a favor, several favors if it comes to that. Look, are we going to play cat games or are we going to work together on this? I’d like to figure out what’s going on but if you want to fight over a man, let me know so I can bow out.”
“I have no reason to fight over Mr. Tynan. He is dead to me. He’s yours.”
Chris ignored the way Pilar lifted one eyebrow and gazed at her archly. “I am a newspaper reporter and I write under the name of Nola Dallas. I went to—”
“The Nola Dallas? The one that gets herself in trouble just so she can write about it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Chris said.
Pilar put out her hand to shake. “I’m glad to meet you. Are we in one of your escapades and someone’s going to show up to rescue us at any minute?”
Chris gave her a weak smile. “I think I better tell you all of it.” She told Pilar everything, from finding Diana and Whitman Eskridge’s bodies to when Tynan said they were going to leave Hamilton’s house.
Pilar sat up, hugging her knees to her chest. “I think Ty found out something. He kept leaving the house in the middle of the night and one night he came back with a big book under his arm. He sat up all night reading it, but in the morning it was gone and I never saw it again.”
“What was it a book of?”
“Numbers. You know, like Red has.”