Bloodlines

47

I OPENED MY EYES IN UTTER DARKNESS. FOR A PANICKED MOMENT I WAS convinced I had been blinded. My cheek lay against a cold surface-hard and smooth. Concrete or marble, I thought. I could smell dried blood on my clothing. I remembered Max then. I tried to move and found that my wrists were taped together, as were my feet.

“Who’s there?” a voice called from nearby.

“Max? It’s Irene.”

“Irene? Oh God…”

“How’s your head? You were bleeding…”

“Never mind me-did they hurt you?”

“Not really. They used some kind of drug on me-chloroform or ether- I don’t remember anything after that.”

“Are you all right?”

“A little woozy, that’s all. Max, it’s you I’m worried about. Your head was bleeding so much. And you sound-I don’t know, you just don’t sound like yourself. Worse off than I am, anyway. Are you still tied up?”

“Yes. I’m-I’m okay. I don’t think I’m still bleeding, but I’m tied up. You are, too, I take it?”

“Yes. Your head must be killing you.”

“They hit me pretty hard, I guess.”

“Your cousins?”

“I can’t be certain, but I think so. Whoever it was hit me from behind.”

I had no idea how long I had been knocked out, and began to wonder how late it was. My father-I had to get out of here. He would worry…

No use thinking of that right now, I told myself. I felt groggy, but the chill air was helping to clear my head.

“Any idea where we are?”

“No.”

“Somewhere in the house?”

“It has a big basement,” he said. “Maybe that’s where we are. No-wait. The basement floor has linoleum on it.”

We decided to try calling for help. We shouted a few times. It made my head ache worse than before.

“We could be anywhere,” Max said. His voice sounded odd, with a drowsy quality to it.

“I’m going to try to scoot over to you.”

I moved slowly and not in a very controlled way. I was now sure the surface below me was concrete; too rough to be marble. It felt like a cold, damp sidewalk.

I lost track of Max’s location in the dark. “Talk again,” I said.

“What?”

“Are you falling asleep?”

“I guess I kind of drifted off.”

It was enough to help me find him. Sort of. I found his shoes with my face. It startled him as much as it did me.

“Okay, I’m going to work my way up to your hands. You’re lying on your right side?”

It seemed to stump him for a moment, then he answered, “Yes.”

I remembered that his hands had been bound behind him with duct tape, as mine were now. It took me a while, but eventually I positioned myself so that we were lying back to back. He must have passed out again or fallen asleep by the time I reached his hands. A horrible third alternative occurred to me, and I called his name.

“What? Huh? Oh…Irene?”

“Try to stay awake, Max. I think you have a concussion. Talk to me while I try to get the tape off your hands.”

So he talked while I fumbled with his hands and tried to find an edge or end of the tape. His wrists had been bound much tighter than mine. I noticed his wristwatch was missing, and only then realized that my own was gone, too. While I worked at freeing him, he told me about Estelle, his adoptive mother. He told me about the military school, and about befriending the son of one of the instructors, a boy who was also a student at the school, of that boy’s family virtually adopting him into their own. His voice kept that sleepy quality. As I gradually started to work the tape off-a process that was not as easy as it looks on television-I urged him to keep talking. Every now and then I’d hear him start to drift off, and I’d yank a little harder, and he’d keep going. I began to wonder if he would pass out just as I got his hands free and be unable to help me.

But when that moment came, he was awake and fairly focused. I heard him let out a breath in the darkness. “Thank you,” he said. It took a little while for the circulation to return to his fingers. Both that and his head injury must have been painful, but he didn’t complain. He rolled toward me and, as soon as the numbness left his hands, tried to free mine.

It took him less time to return the favor, but undoubtedly longer than it would have if he hadn’t been injured. I spent a moment savoring the easing of the tension in my shoulders and back, then went to work on the tape around my ankles and helped Max to do the same.

We moved to our knees on the hard floor, staying close to each other, at first holding on to each other’s shoulders just to steady ourselves. Without speaking, we embraced in the darkness, held fast to each other in sheer relief. He felt strong and warm and good, and I could not help but think of how much worse it would have been if I had been there alone.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I nodded against his shoulder. “Yes, and you?”

“I’m doing okay.”

“Dizzy?”

“A little. Weird in the dark.”

“I don’t think they took us far. I can still smell the ocean.”

“Yes, I can, too. Maybe we’re in the basement, just some part of it I haven’t explored yet. There was a laundry room and another storage area that I didn’t look into.”

“I guess we’d better try to find a way out of here before they come back to finish what they started.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe we should crawl along on all fours, shoulder to shoulder. Trying to walk might cause us to trip over objects we can’t see, or run into things, or fall into a pit or something.”

He agreed with this plan. It wasn’t the fastest or most comfortable way to move, and was especially hard on the palms and knees, but it seemed the safest.

Before long, we realized that the space we were in was long and relatively narrow, and its walls as well as its floor seemed to be made of concrete. The utter darkness made it hard to be sure of much, though. We decided to stay along one of the walls, thinking we’d eventually come to some kind of opening or stairway. I took the position along the wall, since Max seemed to be having difficulty keeping his balance.

We came to a turning and moved to our right.

A glimmer of light came from some distant source, and we could hear the sea. The dampness increased, but the air was fresher. I felt wisps of my hair brushing against my face with a breeze. I could hear sounds of surf and wind.

This cheered me immeasurably. It also relieved some of the disorientation I had been feeling in the pitch darkness of before. And where light could get in, maybe we could get out.

It suddenly occurred to me where we were. “The bootlegger’s tunnel.”

“What?”

I told him what O’Connor had told me about the passageways.

“Then this leads to the house or the beach, right?” he asked.

“My guess is, we’re nearer the beach right now. Let’s try to stand.”

We traded places so that he could lean his right hand against the wall. We took careful, shuffling steps forward. Eventually, I felt a change in the surface under my shoes. We were still walking on concrete, but there was something gritty on it-sand. The air continued to grow cooler and fresher.

We reached the end of the passageway. The light turned out to be moonlight, coming in through chinks in an opening sealed with a thick, iron-plated double-door. On our side, a wide iron bar secured with heavy padlocks held the doors shut. The other side of the doors seemed to be covered with a thick lacing of bougainvillea vines. The wind caused the bougainvillea’s sharp, needle-like thorns to scrape against the metal doors as if it wanted to come in out of the weather. We tried dislodging the bar, to no avail. We pushed against each of the doors. They didn’t budge. We called out again, but I could tell that no one was nearby.

Max sat down, leaning his back against one of the walls.

“Let me rest a little,” he said. “Then I’ll try to think of something.”

I felt around the hinges, which were on our side of the doors, but they seemed rusted in place. Next I looked at the bottom edge.

To my delight, the concrete floor came to an end five inches or so before it met the doors. I began to claw at the sand with my hands.

“What are you doing?” Max asked, coming closer to see. “We can’t fit between the doors and the concrete.”

“No, but I think I could get an arm out, and maybe wave something to attract attention. Plus, it might give us more light and air.”

“Or a better chance to be heard,” he said. “Let me help.”

He lasted five minutes before he passed out cold again.