The Taking

future, both pressing hard and insistently upon her, constraining her breath, denying her mobility, pinching her voice in her throat.
        "I've spent twenty years under lock and key. Internal darkness, deprivation. At least you owe me a friendly ear for a moment. Just one little story, and then I'll go."
        Twenty years earlier, when he destroyed his last hope of winning legal custody of Molly, Michael Render resorted to the instrument of persuasion that he now claimed to find unsatisfactory: the gun. He had come to her elementary school to take her from her classroom. Having asked to see his daughter on some pretense that the principal had found unconvincing, Render realized that he'd aroused suspicion, whereupon he pulled a pistol and shot the principal dead.
        "After five years of treatment," he told her now, "I was sent to a facility with lower security standards. They had large, lovely grounds. The best-behaved patients who had made the most progress in their therapy, who were judged to have reached a point of remorse on a journey to contrition, were encouraged to work in the various gardens if they wished."
        With the principal dead, Render had gone in search of Molly's third-grade classroom, killing one member of the faculty en route and wounding two others. He found her room and grievously wounded her teacher, Mrs. Pasternak, and would have abducted Molly if the police had not then arrived.
        "In the gardens, we wore an electronic shackle around one ankle, which would trigger an alarm in the security office if we ventured farther than allowed. I made no attempt to escape. There was a fence, after all, and a world outside that knew my face too well. I became something of a horticulturist, specializing in roses."
        With the arrival of the police, he had taken Molly and twenty-two other children hostage. He wasn't a stupid man-in fact he had earned two university degrees-and therefore knew that having killed two and wounded three, he could not hope to negotiate freedom for himself. By then, however, his ever-simmering anger, which was the essence of his personality, had grown into a fiery rage, and he determined that if he could not have the control of the daughter that he had for so long pursued, then he would deny other parents the pleasure of their children's company.
        "One day, as I worked alone in the rose garden, what should appear before me but a nine-year-old boy with a disposable camera."
        Render had killed five of the twenty-two children before Molly shot him. He'd brought two pistols and spare magazines of ammunition. After reloading both guns, he'd reacted with such fury to something he heard from a police bullhorn outside that in his rage he left one weapon lying on the teacher's desk, and turned his back on it.
        His voice these twenty years later, colored by something darker than his usual anger, mesmerized her: "On a dare, to prove his courage to his pals, the boy had cut a hole in a far corner of the fence, distant from the actual sanitarium buildings, and had crept across the grounds, hoping to photograph one of the infamous patients as evidence of his nerve."
        Although only eight years old and unfamiliar with firearms, Molly had picked up the second pistol from the teacher's desk. Gripping it with both hands, she squeezed off three shots. Rocked and terrified by the recoil, she still managed to hit Render twice-first in the back, then in the right thigh-and fortunately harmed no one with the third shot, which lodged in a wall.
        "The infamous patient the boy chanced to come across was me," said Render. "He was skittish, but I charmed him, mugged for the camera, and let him take eight photographs there among the roses."
        When Render, having been shot twice, crashed to the schoolroom floor, the seventeen surviving children fled. In their wake, a SWAT team entered to find Molly weeping at the side of her badly wounded teacher, who would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
        "By the end of our little photo shoot, the boy had let down his guard. I hit him very hard in the face, and hit him again, and then strangled him there among the roses. The experience would have been even more satisfying if he'd been a young girl, but you have to work with what you're given."
        Later on that bloody day, twenty years before this current encounter, Molly had wondered how she could have wounded him twice