بخش 03 - فصل 44

44

Linda comes to staring at the ceiling. She knows where she is, Tom’s office, but not what has happened to her. The right side of her head is on fire, and when she raises a hand to her face, it comes away wet with blood. The last thing she can remember is Peggy Moran telling her that Tina had gotten sick at school.

Go get her and take her home, Peggy had said. I’ll cover this.

No, she remembers something else. Something about the mystery money.

I was going to talk to Pete about it, she thinks. Get some answers. I was playing solitaire on Tom’s computer, just killing time while I waited for him to come home, and then—

Then, black.

Now, this terrible pain in her head, like a constantly slamming door. It’s even worse than the migraines she sometimes gets. Worse even than childbirth. She tries to raise her head and manages to do it, but the world starts going in and out with her heartbeat, first sucking, then blooming, each oscillation accompanied by such godawful agony …

She looks down and sees the front of her gray dress has changed to a muddy purple. She thinks, Oh God, that’s a lot of blood. Have I had a stroke? Some kind of brain hemorrhage?

Surely not, surely those only bleed on the inside, but whatever it is, she needs help. She needs an ambulance, but she can’t make her hand go to the phone. It lifts, trembles, and drops back to the floor.

She hears a yelp of pain from somewhere close, then crying she’d recognize anywhere, even while dying (which, she suspects, she may be). It’s Tina.

She manages to prop herself up on one bloody hand, enough to look out the window. She sees a man hustling Tina down the back steps into the yard. Tina’s hands are tied behind her.

Linda forgets about her pain, forgets about needing an ambulance. A man has broken in, and he’s now abducting her daughter. She needs to stop him. She needs the police. She tries to get into the swivel chair behind the desk, but at first she can only paw at the seat. She does a lunging sit-up and for a moment the pain is so intense the world turns white, but she holds onto consciousness and grabs the arms of the chair. When her vision clears, she sees the man opening the back gate and shoving Tina through. Herding her, like an animal on its way to the slaughterhouse.

Bring her back! Linda screams. Don’t you hurt my baby!

But only in her head. When she tries to get up, the chair turns and she loses her grip on the arms. The world darkens. She hears a terrible gagging sound before she blacks out, and has time to think, Can that be me?