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Chapter Nineteen
Ted’s phone rang as he put the last bite of his turkey sandwich in his mouth. Paula huffed and laid down, and Ted felt a bit bad that he hadn’t shared with the dog. He’d meant to, but his mind had been a maze the past few days.
The only thing anchoring him to the earth right now was his job. And Nate and Connor.
He looked at his phone, his heartbeat stuttering over itself. Emma’s name sat on the screen.
He knocked the phone off his leg in his haste to answer it, and he muttered under his breath as he picked it up and swiped the call on. “Emma?”
“…I just think you should try to see reason,” Emma said, her voice quite high-pitched. “Think about it, Robert. What are you going to do? Keep me locked up in your huge house? Until when? My friends will know I’m gone. They know I went to lunch with you today.”
Ted hadn’t known that, but he sprang to his feet and started toward the homestead. He needed another phone to call the police, because Emma was in trouble.
Emma was with Robert.
Robert was not happy, if the curt, blunt tone of his voice was any indication. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “But you don’t get to make decisions for me, Emma.”
Ted wasn’t sure what that meant, and he broke into a jog. “Get him to say where you are,” he said, hoping Emma could hear him but Robert couldn’t. “I need an address, Emma.”
“How long have you had this house?” she asked him. “It’s nice, out here in the hills.”
Out in the hills.
Huge house.
There couldn’t be that many of those, could there?
Ted had obviously forgotten he lived in Texas.
“Rockwood Estates,” Emma said. “These are new. How long have you lived here?”
“I don’t live here,” Robert said, his voice dark and cold. “I have fractional ownership in a cabin here. My son and I are staying here for a couple of days until he leaves on his senior trip with his mother.”
“Fractional ownership?’
“Yes, it means I can use the cabin for seventeen weeks out of the year. I just have to arrange it with the other owners.”
Ted didn’t know how to call for help on one phone and listen to the conversation on the other. But he picked up the landline in the Annex and dialed 911 anyway. “Hang on, Emma,” he mumbled, muting his end of the call. He could still hear her, but she couldn’t hear him.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?’
“Yes, hi,” Ted said, pacing in the kitchen. The run from the river to the Annex had taken something from him too. “My…this woman I know is being held against her will.”
“She is?” the operator asked. “Did she get abducted?”
“I don’t know,” he said. It was entirely possible that she’d gotten into Robert’s truck of her own volition.
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know,” Ted said, and he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. “She called me on my other phone, and she sounds afraid, and she said things like he’s going to lock her up in his huge house in the hills.”
“Wow, this place is nice,” Emma said while the emergency services operator asked Ted another question. But he couldn’t hear it, because he needed to listen to Emma.
“Fishing Run Cabin,” she said. “Did you name it that?”
“You really have forgotten everything about me,” Robert said. “I don’t fish, Emma.” He said it in a sarcastic, cruel voice, and Ted needed to get emergency help there quickly.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman said. “But if she hasn’t actually been abducted, I can’t send an officer out.”
