The Good Girl. Mary Kubica

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СКАЧАТЬ doesn’t say anything and then, after a minute or so, she shakes her head. It’s gone. She slouches back into her chair and her fingers let go of the pad, allowing it to rest on her lap.

      Grace snatches it from her. She opens the book and is greeted by an influx of Mia’s sketches. Eve told me once that Mia takes a sketch pad with her everywhere she goes, drawing anything from homeless men on the “L” to a car parked at the train station. It’s her way of keeping a journal: places she went, things she saw. Take this recycled sketch pad, for example: trees, and lots of them; a lake surrounded by trees; a homely little log cabin that, of course, we’ve all seen in the photos; a scrawny little tabby cat sleeping in a smattering of sun. None of this seems to surprise Grace, not until she comes to the illustration of Colin Thatcher that literally jumps off the page to greet her, snuck in the middle of the sketch pad amidst trees and the snow-covered cabin.

      His appearance is bedraggled, his curly hair in complete disarray. The facial hair and tattered jeans and hooded sweatshirt surpass grunge and go straight to dirty. Mia had drawn a man, sturdy and tall. She applied herself to the eyes, shadowing and layering and darkening the pencil around them until these deep, leering headlights nearly force Grace to look away from the page.

      “You drew this, you know,” she states, compelling Mia to have a look at the page. She thrusts it into her hands to see. He’s perched before a wood-burning stove, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back to the flame. Mia runs her hand over the page and smudges the pencil a tad. She peers down at her fingertips and sees the remnants of lead, rubbing it between a thumb and forefinger.

      “Does anything ring a bell?” I ask, sipping from my mug of coffee.

      “Is this—” Mia hesitates “—him?”

      “If by him you mean the creep who kidnapped you, then, yeah,” Grace says, “that’s him.”

      I sigh. “That’s Colin Thatcher.” I show her a photograph. Not a mug shot, like she’s used to seeing, but a nice photo of him in his Sunday best. Mia’s eyes go back and forth, making the connection. The curly hair. The hardy build. The dark eyes. The bristly beige skin. The way his arms are crossed before him, his face appearing to do anything to conceal a smile. “You’re quite an artist,” I offer.

      Mia asks, “And I drew this?”

      I nod. “They found the sketch pad at the cabin with your and Colin’s things. I assume it belongs to you.”

      “You brought it with you to Minnesota?” Grace asks.

      Mia shrugs. Her eyes are locked on the images of Colin Thatcher. Of course she doesn’t know. Grace knows she doesn’t know, but she asks anyway. She’s thinking the same thing as me: here this creep is whisking her off to some abandoned cabin in Minnesota and she has the wherewithal to bring her sketch pad, of all things?

      “What else did you bring?”

      “I don’t know,” she says, her voice on the verge of being inaudible.

      “Well, what else did you find?” Grace demands of me this time.

      I watch Mia, recording her nonverbal communication: the way her fingers keep reaching out to touch the images before her, the frustration that is slowly, silently taking over. Every time she tries to give up and push the images away, she goes back to them, as if begging of her mind: think, just think. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

      Grace gets mad. “What does that mean? Clothes, food, weapons—guns, bombs, knives—an artists’ easel and a watercolor set? You ask me,” she says, pilfering the sketch pad from Mia’s hands, “this is out of the ordinary. A kidnapper doesn’t normally allow his abductee to draw the evidence on a cheap, recycled sketch pad.” She turns to Mia and presents the obvious. “If he sat still this long, Mia, long enough for you to draw this, then why didn’t you run?”

      She stares at Grace with a stark expression on her face. Grace sighs, completely exasperated, and looks at Mia like she should be locked up in a loony ward. Like she has no grasp on reality, where she is or why she’s here. Like she wants to bang her over the head with a blunt object and knock some sense in her.

      I come to her defense and say, “Maybe she was scared. Maybe there was nowhere to run. The cabin was in the middle of a vast wilderness, and northern Minnesota in the winter verges on a ghost town. There would have been nowhere to go. He might have found her, caught her and then what? Then what would have happened?”

      Grace sulks into her chair and flips through the pages of the sketch pad, seeing the barren trees and the never-ending snow, this picturesque lake surrounded by dense woodland and...she nearly passes by it altogether and then flips back, ripping the page from its spiral binding, “Is that a Christmas tree?” she implores, gawking at the nostalgic image on the inner corner of a page. The tearing of the paper makes Mia leap from her seat.

      I watch Mia startle and then lay a hand briefly on hers to put her at ease. “Oh, yeah,” I laugh, though there’s no amusement in it. “Yeah, I guess that would be considered out of the ordinary, wouldn’t it? We found a Christmas tree. Charming really, if you ask me.”

      Colin

       Before

      She’s fighting the urge to fall asleep when the call comes in. She’s said about a thousand times that she needs to go. I’ve assured her that she doesn’t.

      It took every bit of self-control to pull away from her. To turn my back to her pleading eyes and force myself to forget it. There’s just something wrong with screwing the girl you’re about to snatch.

      But somehow or other I convinced her to stay. She thinks it’s for her own good. When she’s sober, I said, I’d walk her down for a cab. Apparently she bought it.

      The phone rings. She doesn’t jump. She looks at me with the implication that it must be a girl. Who else would call in the middle of the night? It’s approaching 2:00 a.m. and as I move into the kitchen to take the call, I see her rise from the couch. She tries to fight the lethargy that’s taken over.

      “Everything set?” Dalmar wants to know. I know nothing about Dalmar other than he just hopped off a boat and is blacker than anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve done jobs for Dalmar before: larceny and harassment. Never kidnapping.

      “Un-huh.” I peek out at the girl who’s standing awkwardly in the living room. She’s waiting for me to finish up the call. Then she’ll split. I move away. I get as far away as I can. I carefully slide a semiautomatic from the drawer.

      “Two-fifteen,” he says. I know where to meet: some dark corner of the underground where only homeless men wander at this time of night. I check my watch. I’m supposed to pull up behind a gray minivan. They grab the girl and leave the cash behind. That easy. I don’t even have to get out of the car.

      “Two-fifteen,” I say. The Dennett girl is all but a hundred and twenty pounds. She’s lost in the midst of insobriety and a splitting headache. This will be easy.

      She’s already saying that she’s gonna go when I come back into the living room. She’s headed to the front door. I stop her with a single arm around her waist. I draw her away from the door, my arm touching flesh. “You’re not going anywhere.”

      “No, really,” she says. “I have to work in the morning.”

      She СКАЧАТЬ