Deadly Stakes

28

Ali awakened in the dark. She was cold and lying on her side in a moving vehicle. She could feel rough carpeting under her cheek and against her nose. She was crammed into a space that was far too small for her five-ten frame. One arm was locked under her body; her legs were drawn up into a fetal position. When she tried to straighten them, she couldn’t. There was no room to stretch out or even move from her side to a more comfortable position. Something behind her-luggage or boxes or both-made it impossible for her to move so much as an inch, even though her whole body was screaming for relief.

Ali had no idea how she had come to be there. She tried to remember where she had been and what she had been doing. She could assemble only a few broken pieces of memory. It played in an endless loop like an old newsreel, jagged and jerky. She made one futile effort to yell for help, but that came to nothing. The roar of passing freeway traffic, mostly trucks, drowned out everything. Knowing no one could have heard her, she didn’t bother expending the energy to shout again.

She shut her eyes to close out the artificial darkness, hoping that would help focus her mind and take her back to what had happened before she landed in this trunk. Someone in a trunk. Those words lodged in her brain; it seemed as though they were important and should mean something to her. Had this happened to her before, or had it happened to someone else? No matter how she tried, soon everything but the crammed trunk and the feel of scratchy carpet on her face was shrouded in a wad of thick, cottony mental fog.

She lay there for a long time, drifting between waking and sleeping and trying to put the odd fragments of memory into some kind of reasonable order. She remembered a house-a big house with wooden floors. She remembered seeing a huge fireplace with a painting over it. The woman in the picture had been wearing a bright blue evening dress-an old-fashioned evening dress, something from the fifties or maybe the sixties. Who was she? Where was she? Was she someone Ali knew? Did she have something to do with a woman in a trunk?

The more Ali tried to force order out of chaos, the more the images slipped away from her. It was like grasping at straws.

Straws. That word caught in her head and spun there like a piece of dried grass whirling in an eddy in a rocky mountain stream. What kind of straw was it? One of those that folded over, like in a hospital room? A tall thick one, like from a DQ milk shake? A tiny thin one that might show up in a cocktail from a bar? Or was it maybe the other kind of straw, like in The Three Little Pigs: I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!

Then, as suddenly as the word had landed in her brain, the whole idea of straw drifted away into nothingness. A little later, she realized dimly that the car had stopped. It occurred to her that perhaps she should try to do something about that-pound on the trunk lid or scream her head off-but she couldn’t bring herself to do either one. Lulled by a strange listlessness that was more hopelessness than anything, she fell back into a sleep that offered some blessed relief from the waking nightmare of being locked in a trunk.