Mind prey

CHAPTER 7

The rape had done something to her, beyond the obvious. Had damaged her.

When Mail had finished with her, she was panicked, injured, in pain-but generally coherent. When Mail had taken Genevieve, she'd argued with him, pleaded.

An hour after that, she began to drift.

She curled on the mattress, stopped talking to Grace, closed her eyes, trembled, shuddered, tightened into a ball. She lost the most elemental sense of what was going on-how much time was passing, where sounds came from, who was in the cell with her.

Grace came to her several times, gave her strawberry soda, tried to get her to eat, took off her own coat and gave it to her mother. This last, the coat, Andi found useful; she huddled under it, away from the naked lightbulb, the Porta-Potti, the stark gray walls. With the coat over her bead, she could almost believe she was at home, dreaming…

She seemed to wake a few times and she spoke with both Grace and Genevieve, and once with George. Sometimes she felt her mind drifting above herself, like a cloud: she watched her body huddled on the mattress, and wondered, why?

But sometimes she felt needle-sharp: she opened her eyes and looked at her knees, pulled up tight to her chin, and felt herself clever not to come out from under the coat.

Beneath it all, she knew her mind simply wasn't functioning correctly. This, she thought during a passing moment of rationality, was insanity. She'd been outside of it for years: this was the first time she'd been inside.

Once she had a dream, or a vision: several men, friendly but hurried, wearing technicians' or scientists' coats, lowered her into a steel cylinder with an interior the size of a phone booth. When she was inside, a steel cap with interlocking flanges was lowered on top of the cylinder, to seal it off. One of the technicians, an intelligent, soft-spoken man with blond hair, glasses, and an easy German accent, said, "You'll only have to last through the heat. If you make it through the heat, you'll be all right…"

Some kind of protection dream, she thought, during one of the lucid moments. The blond man, she thought, she'd seen in a Mercedes-Benz commercial, or a BMW ad. But the man wasn't the thing. The cylinder was: nobody, nothing could get at her in the cylinder.

After a very long time of wandering in and out of consciousness, she closed in on herself. Found a ray of rationality, followed it to a kind of spark, and sat up. Grace was sitting on the concrete floor, facing the computer monitor. The screen was blank.

"Grace, are you all right?"

Andi was whispering. Grace reflexively looked up at the ceiling, as though the whisper might have come from the outside, from God. Then she looked over her shoulder at Andi: "Mom?"

"Yes." Andi rolled up to a sitting position.

"Mom, are you…"

"I'm getting better," Andi said, shaking.

Grace crawled toward her. Her slender daughter looked even thinner, like a winter-hungry fox: "Jeez, Mom, you were arguing with Daddv for a while…"

"John Mail beat me up; he raped me," Andi said. She simply let the word out. Grace had to know what was happening, had to help.

"I know." Grace looked away, tears trickling down her cheek. "But you're better?"

"I think so." Andi pushed herself up to her knees, then stepped off the mattress, shakily, one hand on the wall. Her legs felt like cheese, thick, soft, unreliable, until the blood began to flow again. She pulled her skirt up, pulled her blouse together. He'd taken her bra: she remembered that. The assault was coming back.

She turned her back to her daughter, pulled up her skirt, pulled down her underpants, looked inside: just a spot of blood. She wasn't badly torn.

"Are you okay?" Grace whispered.

"I think so."

"What are we going to do?" Grace asked. "What about Genevieve?"

"Genevieve?" My God. Genevieve. "We've got to think," Andi said, turning around to look at her daughter again. She knelt on the mattress, pulled Grace's head close to her lips and whispered, "The first thing we've got to do is find out if he's listening to us, or if we can talk. We have to keep talking, but I want you to get on my shoulders, and I'm going to try to stand up. Then I want you to look at the ceiling, see if there is anything that might be, you know, a microphone. It probably won't be very sophisticated-he'd just stick a tape recorder microphone in one of the airholes, or something."

Grace nodded, and Andi said, out loud, "I don't think I'm too hurt, but I need some sleep."

"So just lie down for a while," Grace said. Andi squatted, and Grace stepped over her shoulders. She probably weighed eighty pounds, Andi thought. She had to push herself up with help from the wall, but she got straight, and they walked back and forth through the room, Grace's head almost at the ceiling, the girl dragging her fingers across the dark wooden boards, probing into corners, poking her fingers into the airholes in the concrete walls. Finally she whispered, "Okay," and Andi squatted again and Grace got off, shook her head. She'd found nothing.

Andi put her lips close to Grace's ear again. "I'm going to say some things about John Mail. We want to see if he refers to what I say, when he comes down next time. Ask me a question about him. Ask me why he's doing this."

Grace nodded. "Mom, why is Mr. Mail doing this? Why is he hurting you?" The question sounded phony, artificial, but maybe on a crude tape it'd be okay.

Andi counted out a long, thoughtful pause. "I believe he's compensating for sexual problems he had when he was a child. His parents made it worse-he had a stepfather who'd beat him with a club…"

"You mean, he's a sex pervert."

Andi shook her in a warning: don't push it too far…

"There's always the possibility that he has a straight-forward medical problem, a hormone imbalance that we simply don't understand. We did tests, and he seemed normal enough, but we didn't have the tools back then that we do now."

Grace nodded and said, "I hope he doesn't hurt us any more."

Andi said, "So do I. Now try to sleep."

They felt him coming, a sense of impact, a heavy body moving around. Then they heard him on the cellar steps, the footfalls muffled and far away. Grace huddled into her, and Andi felt her mind beginning to slip. No. She had to hold on.

Then the door opened, the scraping of the slide lock, the screak of the hinge. Grace said, "Don't let him take me alone, like Genevieve."

Mail's eye appeared at the crack of the door, took them in. Then he closed the door again, and she heard another rattle. A chain. She hadn't heard that before, hadn't seen that when she was outside: he had two locks, so they couldn't rush the door.

"Don't move," he said. He was wearing jeans and an olive-colored shirt with a collar, the first time they'd seen him in anything but a t-shirt. He had two microwave meals on plastic plates, with plastic spoons. He left them on the floor and backed away.

"Where's Genevieve?" Andi asked, pushing herself up. She gripped her blouse button-line with her left hand. She did it unthinkingly and only noticed when she saw Mail pick it up.

"Dropped her at the Hudson Mall," Mail said. "Told her to find a cop."

"I don't believe you," Andi said.

"Well, I did," Mail said, but his eyes shifted and a black dread grew in Andi's heart. Then: "They've got Davenport looking for us."

"Davenport?"

"He's a big cop in Minneapolis," Mail said. He seemed impressed. "He writes games."

"Games?" She was confused.

"Yeah, you know. War games and role-playing games, and some computer games. He's like this rich dude now. And he's a cop."

"Oh." She put her finger tips to her lips. "I have heard of him… Do you know him?"

"I called him," Mail said. "I talked to him."

"You mean… today?"

"About two hours ago." He was proud of himself.

"Did you tell him about Genevieve?"

Again he looked away: "Nah. I called him from this Wal-Mart right after I dropped her off. He probably didn't know about her yet."

Andi hadn't fully recovered from the attack and felt less than completely sharp, but she pushed herself to understand the man, what he was saying. And she thought she saw fear or, possibly, uncertainty.

"This Davenport… are you afraid of him?"

"Fuck no. I'll kick his ass," Mail said. "He's not gonna find us."

"Isn't he supposed to be mean? Wasn't he fired for brutality or something? Beating up a suspect?"

"Pimp," Mail said. "He beat up a pimp because the guy cut one of his stoolies."

"Doesn't sound like somebody you'd want to challenge," Andi suggested. "I wouldn't think you'd want to play with him-if that's what you're doing."

"That's sorta what I'm doing," Mail said. He laughed, seemed lifted by the thought. Then, "I'll see you later. Eat the food, it's good."

And he was gone.

After a moment, Grace crawled over to one of the plates, poked the food, tasted it. "It's not very warm."

Andi said, "But we need it. We'll eat it all."

"What if he poisoned it?"

"He doesn't have to poison it" Andi said, coolly.

Grace looked at her, then nodded. They carried the plates back to the mattress, and in a second, they were gobbling it down. Grace stopped long enough to get two cans of strawberry soda, passed one to her mother, glanced at the Porta-Potti. "God, I'm gonna hate… going."

Andi stopped eating, looked at the pot, then at her daughter. A daughter of privilege: she'd had a private bathroom since she was old enough to sleep in her own room. "Grace," she said, "we are in a desperately bad situation. We're trying to stay alive until the police find us. So we eat his food and we aren't embarrassed by each other. We just try to hang on the best we can."

"Right," Grace said. "But I wish Genevieve was here…"

Andi choked, forced herself to hold it down. Genevieve, she thought, might be dead. But Grace couldn't be told that. She had to protect Grace: "Listen, honey…"

"She could be dead," Grace said, her eyes wide, like an owl's. "God, I hope she's not…" She put down her spoon and began to cry and Andi started to comfort her, but then dropped her plate and she began to cry as well. A few seconds later, Grace crawled next to her and they huddled together, weeping; and Audi's mind flashed back to the night when they'd all sprawled on the upstairs rug, laughing, after Genevieve's "God, that guy was really hung…"

Much later, Grace said, "He didn't say anything about being a sex pervert…"

"He's not listening," Andi said. "He hadn't heard it."

"So what are we going to do?"

"We have to judge him," Andi said. "If we think he's going to kill us, we have to attack him. We have to think about the best ways to do that."

"He's too strong."

"But we have to try… and maybe… I don't know. Listen: John Mail is a very smart boy. But maybe we can manipulate him."

"How?"

"I've been thinking about that. If he's talking to this Davenport person, maybe we can send a message."

"How?"

Andi sighed. "I don't know. Not yet."

John Mail came back an hour later. Again they felt him coming before they heard him, the vibration of a body on the stairs. He opened the door as he had before, carefully. Andi and Grace were on the mattress. He looked at them both, his gaze lingering on Grace until she looked away, and then he said to Andi, "Come out."