Along Came a Spider

All except Michael, who’s intensely self-absorbed.”
    “Tell me about the two of them, Maggie and Michael.”
    Katherine Rose smiled for the first time since we’d been talking. It was so strange, this smile that I had seen many times in movies. Now I was seeing it in person. I was mesmerized. I felt a little shy, and embarrassed that I was having that kind of reaction.
    “They’ve been best friends ever since we moved here. They’re the oddest couple, but inseparable,” she said. “We call them Felix and Oscar sometimes.”
    “How do you think Michael would react under these circumstances?” I asked.
    “Difficult to judge.” Thomas Dunne shook his head. He seemed to be a very impatient man. Probably used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it. “Michael always has to have a ’plan.’ His life’s very orderly, very structured.”
    “What about his physical problems?” Michael had been a “blue baby,” I knew. He still had a slight problem with a heart murmur.
    Katherine Rose shrugged her shoulders. Apparently it wasn’t much of an issue. “He tires sometimes. He’s a little small for his age. Maggie’s bigger than Michael.”
    “They all call him Shrimpie, which I think he likes. It makes him a little more of the gang,” said Tom Dunne. “Basically, he’s a whiz-kid type. Maggie calls him a brainiac. That’s fairly descriptive of Michael.”
    “Michael is definitely a brainiac.”
    “How is he when he gets tired?” I went back to something Katherine had said, maybe something important. “Is he ever short-tempered?”
    Katherine thought about my question before answering. “He just gets pooped. Occasionally, he’ll take a nap. One time — I remember the two of them asleep near the pool. This little odd couple sprawled out on the grass. Just two little kids.”
    She stared at me with those gray eyes of hers and she started to cry. She had been trying hard to control herself, but finally had to let go.
    However reluctant I may have been at first, I was becoming a flesh-and-blood part of the terrible case. I felt for the Dunnes and the Goldbergs. I’d made connections between Maggie Rose and my own kids. I was involved in a way that isn’t always useful. The anger I had felt about the killer in the projects was being transferred to the kidnapper of these two innocent kids.
    … Mr. Soneji… Mr. Chips.
    I wanted to reach out, to tell both of them everything would be okay, to convince myself everything would be okay. I wasn’t sure it would be.

CHAPTER 16

    MAGGIE ROSE still
believed
she was in her own grave. It was beyond being creepy and horrible. It was a million times worse than any nightmare she’d ever imagined. And Maggie knew her imagination was a good one. She could gross out or amaze her friends, pretty much at will.
    Was it nighttime now? Or was it daytime?
    “Michael?” she moaned weakly. Her whole mouth, her tongue especially, felt like a lot of cotton swabs. Her mouth was unbelievably dried out. She was so thirsty. Sometimes she would gag on her tongue. She kept imagining that she was swallowing her tongue. Nobody had ever been this thirsty before. Not even in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait.
    Maggie Rose kept drifting in and out of sleep. Dreams came to her constantly. Another one had just started.
    Someone was pounding on a heavy wooden door nearby.
    Whoever it was called out her name. “Maggie Rose… Maggie Rose,
talk
to me!”
    Then Maggie wasn’t sure that it was a dream at all.
    Someone was really there.
    Was someone breaking into her grave? Was it her mom and dad? Or the police, finally?
    Suddenly light from above blinded her
! Maggie Rose was sure it was really light.
    It was as if she were looking straight into a hundred flashbulbs, all of them going off at once.
    Her heart beat so fast and so hard that Maggie Rose knew she must be alive. In some terrible, terrible place. Someone had put her there.
    Maggie Rose whispered up into the light, “Who is it? Who’s there? Who’s up there right now?
I see a face
!”
    The light was so very bright that Maggie Rose couldn’t really see anything.
    For the second — or third — time, it had gone from pitch-black to blinding, blinding white.
    Then someone’s silhouette blocked out most of the light. Maggie still couldn’t see who was there. Light radiated behind the person.
    Maggie clamped shut her eyes, tightly. Then opened them. She did this over and over again.
    She couldn’t really see anything.