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“Nope.” He pulled her phone from his pants pocket—she recognized the pink case instantly—and typed the child a text, reading it aloud to Betsy as he typed with his thumbs:
Let’s do something fun after school today. I missed you last night.
Then he pressed Send.
“Is she the type of girl who checks her phone during class?” he asked.
“I doubt most teachers give their students that opportunity.”
“Well, let’s see. We’ll know soon enough.” He put the phone back in his pocket and said, “I had no idea your stepdad was a pervert. That kind of shit? Disgusting.”
“So is kicking a woman in the stomach or the ribs,” she said. “Or punching her in the face.”
“Kicking anyone, man or woman, in the ribs is a pretty shitty thing to do. But it’s not perverse.”
“Is that an apology?”
“God, no. Anyway, Frankie never told me about your stepfather.”
“I never told Frankie.”
Abruptly he pointed a finger straight up at the ceiling and said, “I feel a buzzing in my pants. That was fast.” Then he reached for the phone and showed her the text he had just received:
Cool. Shopping? Clothes?
“Seems like her teachers don’t give a rat’s ass if the kids check their phones,” he said.
She nodded. But she knew in her heart he was lying. There wasn’t a reason in the world to believe that Marisa herself had responded to her text.
* * *
Early afternoon, Damon and the goon who had stood guard at her apartment the night before—still in his Area 51 hoodie—returned to her apartment. He hadn’t said much last night and said little now with Damon and Rory present. He made a few innocuous observations about the Monday-night football game and who’d covered their bets and who hadn’t. She didn’t recognize the names of any of the gamblers.
“So, how long are you going to keep me imprisoned in my apartment?” she asked Damon. She was scared, but she was also hungry and sleep deprived, and her rage that they’d taken Marisa was dwarfing all else. If her ribs and her jaw weren’t a constant reminder of the black ice on which she was walking, she might once again have unleashed the hysteria coursing inside her like underground lava.
“No one has kidnapped anyone. Marisa is fine.”
“Rory says she’s at school. I don’t believe him.”
“The school would have called you if she weren’t there, right?”
“I don’t have my phone, Damon!”
Damon looked at Rory. Once more, Rory retrieved the phone with the pink case from his pants pocket and showed her a screen. It was the one that listed the calls that had come in, and there were none that morning. She also saw that there were none from her daughter last night.
“You could have erased the calls from the school,” she told him.
“I could have,” agreed Rory.
“And I don’t believe my daughter even has her phone anymore.”
“Ah, but this is interesting,” Rory said. “Your sister sent you a text. She says you can’t set her up for any nefarious shit you may have been up to with Oliver and Neri last night at Fort Knocks.”
“Oh, she’s very wrong,” said Damon. “There are pictures everywhere of Lady Di in that dress, and people will see them and they’ll be the proof positive that she was at Fort Knocks before going upstairs to diddle around with John Aldred.”
“Where’s Frankie?” she asked.
“Busy.”
