Shackled Read online

  The girl hadn’t lifted her head since she and her dad walked in. Now, when I spoke to her directly, she did. Barely. Something about the way her thin shoulders sagged and cheeks sank in made my ribs ache.

  And when our eyes met, I felt all the breath in my lungs get vacuumed out like I’d been launched into outer space.

  Suffocating, I choked out one word:

  “Tara?”

  The girl’s dull blue eyes widened, ever so slightly, as if in shock. It couldn’t have been any less shock than I was experiencing. Shock, fear, goose bumps—

  I was looking at a ghost.

  I hadn’t seen Tara in six years.

  No one had.

  TWO

  The girl quickly dipped her head back down, letting her greasy hair fall across her face.

  “Beg pardon?” her dad said, moving to stand between the girl and the counter, blocking my view.

  Except it was not her dad.

  Tara’s father, Michael Jacobs, looked like a movie star, tall with a prominent chin and blazing brown eyes. This guy looked more like—like Santa Claus, if anyone.

  “Um . . . I’m . . . sorry,” I stuttered, almost spilling the hot cocoa all over myself. “I just—she looked really familiar . . .”

  “Well, her name’s Leslie,” the guy said, smiling. “You must’ve been mistaken, hmm?”

  I stared at the girl again, who stood with toes pointed in, arms forming a figure 4, gripping her left elbow with her right hand, shoulders hunched. I could only see her profile.

  I hurriedly poured his decaf, burning my hand with a spill. I shoved the cup across the counter toward him. My hands were starting to chill, my arms to tremble.

  Here we go. Here it comes.

  “That’s six, um, six-forty-one,” I babbled. I watched the girl as best I could, but the guy kept himself positioned between the counter and her so I couldn’t see her clearly.

  “You okay?” he asked me. “You look a little peaked. Should I call someone?”

  “Hmm-mm,” I said, shaking my head.

  “You don’t seem well,” the man said.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine. It’s fine.”

  He shrugged his eyebrows and handed over a ten-dollar bill. “Keep it,” he said, like the extra tip would help me regain my breath.

  I couldn’t take the bill. Couldn’t reach toward him. Come to think of it: couldn’t breathe, either. My heart screamed, Let me out, let me OUT!

  The old man, still studying me, dropped the ten on the counter and pushed it toward me with his fingers. Then he handed the cocoa to his daughter, took her free hand, and walked to the door.

  “Have a nice day,” he said. “Hope you feel better.”

  I watched them go, not responding. Wanting to scream. Stop, let her go, that’s Tara, don’t do it again—

  Tara looked back at me. Just once. Glanced sideways as the old man dragged her along behind.

  Her lips moved silently, like a fish out of water. Then she was gone, out the door and into the dirt parking lot of the Hole in the Wall.

  Help me?

  Is that what she said? Help me . . . ?

  I had to get out.

  Go, get out of this space, but not outside, can’t go outside, that’s where he is, oh God, I’m trapped . . .

  Tara. That was Tara. Pelly, go, do something! Don’t let it happen again!

  I pulled myself along the counter, dragging my cast-iron feet to the window. Literally, I could not lift my feet, only slide them along the brown concrete floor. Yanking back the curtains, I watched the guy open the passenger door of a shiny white sedan and escort the girl into the passenger seat. After shutting the door, he hitched his pants and came around the back end, went to the driver’s seat, and got in.

  I squinted to study the white car while my lungs shrank and my mouth dried.

  Not again, not again, he’s taking her again . . .

  Arizona plate. Blue bumper sticker, white design—something like the Olympics logo. Four doors. Tinted windows.

  The car drove out of the lot and turned onto McDowell, the major street beside the café, and headed east.

  David arrived as I shoved my way back behind the counter again and wrote down all the information I’d just memorized.

  “So, Pelly—” he started.

  “Shh!” I hissed at him. I began with the license plate: “J, F, A . . .”

  David fell silent, leaning against the counter again as I wrote. After I’d finished, I stared at the information. So paltry. Didn’t even get the make or model of the car.

  “So you’re doing what, exactly?” David asked when I’d stopped writing. The pencil fell out of my fingers and clattered on the concrete floor.

  “Not now, can’t, no, just, wait,” I said, picking up the café phone and dialing.

  “Pelly—”

  “Shh!” I said, and gripped the black phone with both hands. I felt if I let go, I’d fall to the floor.

  The line picked up. “911, what is your emergency?”

  “I need to, I need to report a, uh, a missing person,” I stuttered. “Um, I mean, a found person. A missing . . . um, I found someone who is missing?”

  “Ma’am, calm down,” the operator said. “Tell me what’s going on, are you in danger?”

  “No! No, I—”

  “Is someone there in danger?”

  “No, no, it’s not like that, please—”

  “I’m sending a unit to you now,” the operator cut in. “Tell me what is happening.”

  I shut my eyes and forced myself to take a breath. I wanted a smoke. Mostly I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see whatever expression David might have had. I must’ve sounded like a lunatic.

  Which was only fair since I was crazy. We could ask my psychiatrist. Oh, wait.

  I snapped my rubber band against my wrist. Snap! Stop intrusive thought. Snap! Stop intrusive thought.

  “I saw my best friend Tara Jacobs,” I said slowly into the phone as my tongue seemed to double in size. “She was kidnapped—I mean, she was believed to be kidnapped six years ago. I just saw her at my work.”

  It wasn’t easy to ignore the look of shock on David’s face when I said that. My eyes must’ve opened after all. Did I have any control over anything?

  “Six years ago?” the operator said. I heard doubt in her voice.

  “I know, I know how it must sound,” I said, rubbing my forehead. My palm left a cold, moldy handprint. “But really, I recognized her and she said ‘Help me.’ She was with this old guy—”

  “She asked for help?”

  “Yes! Well—sort of.”

  “Ma’am,” the operator said, sounding like an exasperated first-grade teacher, “is there an emergency at your location?”

  “Well, they got into this car and drove off. I have the license plate. They can’t be far away.”

  “You saw someone forced into a car.”

  This wasn’t going to work.

  “No,” I whispered. “No one was forced into a car.”

  “Ma’am, when the officer gets there, you can give him a statement.”

  “Okay,” I said as embarrassment threatened to suffocate me. Just what I needed for my next performance review with Eli: randomly summons police to store.

  I hung up the phone and leaned against the sink, folding my arms over my belly and refusing to look at David. I didn’t need to be looking at him to know he was staring at me.

  “Well,” David said after about a minute of silence, “that was fun.”

  I didn’t respond. My panic started to ease, only to be replaced by helplessness. Uselessness.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

  “Not especially.”

  “Cops are here,” David said a moment later.


  Great.

  THREE

  “We received a call about a missing person?” the patrolman said when he got to the counter. The tag on his shirt said “Collins.”

  “Yes, that was me,” I said while David pretended to clean the espresso machines. I hated having this conversation in front of him.

  “Tell me what happened,” Collins said.

  I took a breath. I felt in control, but the proximity of a uniformed cop completed the cycle spinning in my head. Tara, the mall, cops, her parents . . .

  “Six years ago, my best friend Tara and I were at Central Mall with her mom,” I said. “We were ten. She let us go off together to Macy’s, and we started chasing around, playing hide-and-seek. That kind of thing. Just being stupid. I mean, I know you don’t really play hide-and-seek when you’re ten, it wasn’t like that, we were just messing around—”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  I had told this story so many times six years ago, and I had relived it so often, it had become a soliloquy.

  “So, at one point, I was hiding near these sweaters. Argyle sweaters. And then . . .”

  Both Officer Collins and David stared at me, waiting for me to finish.

  “Then nothing,” I said. “She just never came looking for me. So I finally went looking for her mom, but she hadn’t seen Tara either. We looked everywhere. Then we really got worried, and got the mall security involved, and then finally the police, but by then it had been at least an hour since anyone had seen her. People were coming and going that whole time, so there weren’t really any witnesses. They checked the security tapes and found her going outside the store, waiting for a second, then jogging off into the parking lot. That’s all they had. That’s the last time anyone saw her.”

  David’s eyebrows wrinkled together. That sort of felt nice. Like he cared.

  “So today, this old guy showed up with this girl, and she just . . . it was her, it was Tara. I don’t know who the guy was, but it wasn’t her dad.”

  “How did you recognize her after six years?”

  I licked my lips. “A mole. She had—she has a mole on her neck. It was still there. Plus she said ‘Help me.’ As they were leaving. He was practically pulling her out of here, and she looked back at me and said ‘Help me.’ ”

  “You’re sure about that?” Collins said.

  “Pretty sure, yeah. I mean, she didn’t say it, say it. Just mouthed it. You know, so the guy wouldn’t hear her.”

  Officer Collins didn’t look impressed. And even David turned away for a second.

  “I’m not lying!” I shouted. “It was Tara.”

  “Did they order anything?” Collins asked me.

  “Yes! A decaf coffee and a hot chocolate.”

  “Did he use a credit card? Do you have the receipt?”

  “No . . . no, he paid cash.” I scanned the counter, trying to find the ten-dollar bill he’d passed to me. I didn’t see it anywhere.

  “He did, he paid with a ten. . . .” I started fishing through my own pockets.

  That’s where I found it. I must’ve shoved it in there when I grabbed the phone. I pulled the rumpled bill out of my hip pocket and showed it to the cop as if it were proof. As he eyeballed me, I realized what it must look like.

  Like I was making up the entire thing.

  “Listen,” I said. “I didn’t ring up the order right away, because I had to get the license plate. Look, here, see? I wrote it down. You can run the plates, can’t you? I watched them get into this car. A white car, and he practically shoved her inside.”

  “So she was struggling?” Collins asked.

  My chin tilted down. “No,” I whispered, because that was the truth. The guy had kept a hand on her the whole time, but had Tara actually struggled? Not really.

  Oh God, this was not looking good.

  “They can’t have gotten too far,” I said. “Can’t you put an APB out or something?” I wasn’t even sure what that meant exactly, other than “all persons bulletin” maybe, and it was something the cops always did on TV when they were looking for someone.

  Collins flipped his notebook shut and tucked his pen into his breast pocket. “I’ll call this in,” he said. “See what the sergeant wants to do about it. It’ll get sent to the detective in charge of the case.”

  “Larson,” I said. “Detective Larson. I remember him. Phoenix Police Department.”

  “So it’ll go to him, if he’s still working here,” Collins said. “And he’ll probably give you a call. All right?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I sounded like a nutjob.

  Collins turned to David. “Did you see anything?”

  David glanced at me. I read everything he wanted to say and couldn’t in that short moment: I wish I’d been here. I wish I could say yes, I saw the whole thing.

  “No,” David said. “No, I was in the back. It was all over by the time I got here.”

  Officer Collins nodded, then got my description of the car and the license plate, and took down all my contact information. He then walked outside talking into his radio. David slid over to me.

  “So, ah . . . you going to bring me up to speed?” he asked. “What happened in here?”

  “You heard me,” I grouched at him. “There’s nothing else to tell.”

  “Oh,” David said. “Okay. Well, cool. I’ll just tell Eli you made an emergency call and brought the police screaming down onto his business, and you can explain it all to him.”

  I tried to shoot David an evil glare, but evil glares weren’t in my repertoire. Plus I knew David well enough to know he’d never really tell our boss.

  I stared at the scrap of paper with the license plate and other info written on it. “That girl who came in,” I said. “She’s a friend of mine. It has to be her.”

  “She was kidnapped,” David said.

  “Yeah. I haven’t seen her in six years.”

  “So . . . what happened? I mean, back then. What went on? Was there an investigation and all that?”

  “Oh yeah. One minute she was there, outside the doors. Then someone must have lured her to his car, scooped her up . . . and that’s it.”

  “Wow,” David said again, searching my eyes with his. I’m not sure why.

  “It took a while to figure out that she was gone,” I said. “When I found her mom, she was only mad that Tara was hiding, at first. It must’ve been twenty or thirty minutes before we figured out something might be really wrong. So the search was just limited to the store, then the mall. I mean, by the time the cops were actually involved, it had been hours. They looked for years. The whole thing was even on one of those missing persons shows. Abducted. I don’t think it’s on anymore. . . .”

  I only kept talking because I didn’t like the way David’s expression had shifted. Like he wasn’t really listening.

  “It must have really hurt you,” he said.

  I guess he was listening after all. Except he was hearing things I wasn’t saying. I didn’t like it.

  “I’m over it,” I said.

  “Really,” David said, but it wasn’t a question.

  “Really,” I said, and turned back to start rewashing the sink. Just to have something to do other than look into his face.

  “So over it that when a girl comes into the shop and reminds you of her, you write down the license plate of the car she got into and call 911?”

  “It was her, goddammit, it was Tara, and I just stood here and didn’t—”

  I cut myself off. He wouldn’t understand.

  “Hey, Pelly?” David said.

  “What.”

  “I’m sorry. Seriously.”

  I ground my teeth for a few seconds, then finally grunted, “Thanks.”

  “So what are you going to—”

  “Customers,” I said, pointing to the door just
as a couple of business-exec types came walking in. “Slumming it,” as David liked to say, for a caffeine hit.

  David gave me a look like the conversation wasn’t over, but I knew it was. I knew it because I decided it. I didn’t want to go into it anymore. I just wanted to be better. Normal. Like it never happened.

  Except it did.

  And now the only places I ever went anymore were less than a mile from home. Now my only friends were psychos like me or anonymous Internet denizens. Or, sort of, David. But not really.

  I snapped my rubber band against my wrist.

  Stop intrusive thoughts. Stop intrusive thoughts.

  FOUR

  “Watch!” my little brother, Jeffrey, said as soon as I opened the front door. “Watch what I can do, Pelly!”

  I had picked up the nickname Pelly from Jeffrey. When he was littler, he couldn’t make all the right syllables of Penelope. Tara and I both thought it was endlessly cute.

  I didn’t know what I thought of it anymore.

  Jeffrey sat parked in front of our TV playing some game. I didn’t recognize it beyond it being on regular rotation during his school’s winter break. Since Jeffrey wasn’t insane, he got to go to regular school. He’d never understand how lucky he was to be able to go without a complete psychological meltdown.

  I’d love to go back. I’d love to go back and complain about homework or roll my eyes at dumb teachers or have cafeteria drama. It’s quite the messed-up little dynamic I’ve got: I don’t want to be there, with all those people, all the buildings, noise . . . but I want to want to. It’s partly the reason I stopped taking my meds and quit going to see Dr. Carpenter. Just wanted to be normal again. If I ever was.

  “That’s great, dude,” I said, not looking at whatever it was Jeffrey was trying to get me to watch.

  I walked into the hall and toward my room, catching Jeffrey frowning at me as I went. That hurt.

  When I got into my room, I plugged my phone in to recharge right away. I really needed to be better about doing that. What if there was some kind of emergency, and my stupid battery wasn’t charged? What if, say, someone tried to grab me?