One Cold Night

and how she felt herself getting sucked inside out when she time-traveled at first. She felt her body crackling apart, and was surprised when she came out whole on the other side. It was Lisa’s favorite book of all time and she’d read it through twice. It was about a girl, age fifteen, who wasn’t nice and had trouble concentrating in school, who lived with her mother and two brothers, and who was obsessed with finding the father who had left them two years before. She met some strange people and ended up on another planet, where her hotheaded obstinacy was the very thing that saved her and helped her find her father, who against his will had been held captive on the evil planet, and who had wanted nothing more than to see his family again. So Meg’s bad start was her happy ending. The end.
    “Help!” she tried again.
    And then she felt him decide something: The car swerved gradually to the right and began to slow down. The tires hummed a little as they took a curve — were they exiting the highway? — then gained some speed on another straight road. It wasn’t long before the car took another curve, a sharp one this time, then pulled to a stop.
    Lisa wondered if the loner guy planned on opening the trunk, now that they had stopped. Then she realized he wasn’t a loner anymore, technically, since he had her. He would need a new name, but she couldn’t think of one that could fit a person who would do such a thing. People named Orville or Lamont or Wendell always worked hard to be normal. This guy probably had an average name, a name he’d worn all his life like a mask over his gruesome nature, something like Bill or Bob or Dick. No one was named Dick anymore, so that would be it: Dick.
    Would Dick let her out right here, wherever they were? Lisa supposed he would, if they were alone, and suddenly she didn’t know if she should be more afraid of being taken out of the trunk or staying in it.
    “Do I need a key?” she barely heard a man’s voice asking.
    Someone answered something about a hook and a door. It was hard to make out exactly what they were saying from inside the trunk. She thought she heard some distant footsteps, and the sound of a door opening and closing, and the hum of a car driving off. She heard another car pull up.
    They were at a gas station.
    She punched her fist on the underside of the trunk, feeling the sting of metal on flesh each time she hit, hit, hit. The sound it made wasn’t loud enough, so she started to yell.
    “Hey! Someone! Get me outta here! In the red car! He locked me in the trunk! HELP! ”
    Her voice boomeranged inside the tight little space and she had to quiet down a minute to see if anyone had heard her. The lull was so complete, she thought someone was listening.
    “HELP ME. I’M INSIDE THE RED CAR. PLEASE DON’T LET HIM TAKE ME.”
    There were some more voices; then the red car shifted its weight and her whole body reverberated with the slamming of a door. The motor revved. The car swerved backward, paused, moved forward and began to pick up speed.

Chapter 14
    Wednesday, 11:20 a.m.
    Susan listened to Dave’s voice crackle on her cell phone, trying to make out his words through a tunnel of static that had suddenly engulfed the conversation. As she began to lose him, she saw — through the window of her chocolaterie — Officer Johnson help her mother and father out of a yellow cab. Glory, Audrey and Neil McInnis sat with her at one of the small front tables, drinking cocoa; Susan’s was untouched, with a brown film floating across the top.
    “Dave? Are you still there?”
    He had asked her about Peter Adkins and she had started to answer as calmly as she could, her mind fighting the suggestion that the boy she had known and loved might have turned into a kidnapper — or a killer. Susan could hardly believe the police were making such a wild leap. Yes, he had slapped her in anger, but just that one time. Peter Adkins had been a popular, fun-loving boy, the life of the party; they had loved each other; there was no way he could have taken Becky and now Lisa; there was no way PeterAdkins, Lisa’s biological father, was the groom. It had to be a coincidence that a similar-looking man had been spotted on Water Street the other day. How many blond thirty-one-year-old men must there have been walking the streets of New York City? Tens of thousands, Susan would have guessed.
    “Susan? I want—”
    Dave’s voice crumbled and then fell to silence as their