And so, with my courage screwed to the sticking place, I went to work on the locked door with the tire iron. I tried to be quiet and leave the fewest possible marks, but I was a little better controlling the noise than the damage to the wooden doorframe, and by the time I had the door pried open it looked like it had been attacked by rabid beavers. Still, the door was open, and I went through it.
As far as carefully hidden secrets went, the room would have been a major disappointment to anyone but an accountant. It was clearly the club’s office, with a large wooden desk, a computer, and a four-drawer filing cabinet. The computer had been left on, and I sat at the desk and quickly scanned the hard drive. There were some Quicken files showing that the club was making a nice profit, some Word documents, standard letters to club members and prospective members. There was a rather large file named Coven.wpd that was password-encrypted with a security program so old I could have broken it in two minutes. But I didn’t have two minutes, so I merely admired their naïveté and moved on.
There was nothing else remotely interesting, no file labeled Samantha.jpg or anything similar that might have told me where she was. I went quickly through the drawers of the desk and the filing cabinet, and again found nothing.
All right—I had trashed the doorframe for no reason. I did not feel any real guilt about that, which was a relief, but I had wasted quite a lot of time, and I had to start thinking about finishing my mission and getting out
of here; there could well be a cleaning crew coming in, or Kukarov returning to admire his office doorframe.
I left the office and pushed the door closed, and then I headed for the stairs. I was reasonably sure that I didn’t need to look through the main public areas of the club. It was just plain impossible that everybody who came in was in on the cannibalism—there was no way that hundreds of people could keep a secret like that. So if Samantha really was here somewhere, it would be in an area that most people didn’t see.
And so I went down the stairs and across the dance floor without pausing to look around. At the back, behind the raised area that Bobby had stood on with his goblet, there was a short hallway, and I went down it. It led to the kitchen area and the back door I had admired from the outside. It was not an elaborate kitchen, just a small stove, microwave, sink, with a metallic hanging rack holding pots and several very nice-looking knives. At the far side of the room was a large metal door that looked like it led to a walk-in refrigerator. Nothing else, not even a locked pantry.
Out of a compulsion to be thorough more than anything else I went over to the refrigerator. There was a small window at eye level, made of thick plate glass, and to my surprise, it revealed that there was a light on inside the walk-in. Since I had always believed that the light goes out when you close the door, I stuck my nose to the glass and peeked in.
The refrigerator was about six feet wide and stretched back a good eight feet. There were rows of shelves on each side, most of them loaded with a series of large, gallon-size jars, and stuck up against the back wall was something you don’t usually see in a refrigerator: an old folding cot.
And stranger than that, the cot was occupied. Sitting there quietly, huddled up inside a blanket, was a bundle that appeared to be a young human female. Her head was down and she was not moving, but as I watched she raised her head slowly, as if she was exhausted or drugged, and her eyes met mine.
It was Samantha Aldovar.
Without a moment’s thought I grabbed for the handle of the door and pulled. It was not locked from the outside, although I could see that it could not be opened from the inside. “Samantha,” I called to her. “Are you all right?”
She gave me a weary smile. “Really great,” she said. “Is it time?”
I had no idea what that meant, so I just shook it off. “I’m here to rescue you,” I said. “Take you home to your parents.”
“Why?” she said, and I decided that she was indeed doped. It made sense; drugs would keep her calm and reduce the amount of work it took to watch her. But it also meant I would have to carry her out of here.
“All right,” I said. “Just a second.” I looked around me for something to prop the door open, and settled on a large five-gallon cooking pot that hung from the rack above the stove. I grabbed it, stuck it between the refrigerator door and the frame, and went into the refrigerator.
I got just two steps in when I realized what was in all the jars that filled the shelves in the big refrigerator.
Blood.
Jar after jar, gallon after gallon, they were filled with blood, and for a very long moment I looked at the blood and it looked back and I could not move. But I took a deep breath, let it out, and reality slid back into focus. It was just a fluid, nicely locked away where it couldn’t hurt anybody, and the important thing was to get Samantha and get out of here. So I took the last few steps to the cot and looked down at her.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re going home.”
“Don’t want to,” she said.
“I know,” I said soothingly, thinking that this was a clear example of Stockholm syndrome. “Let’s go.” I put an arm around her and lifted her off the cot and she came up without resistance. I slung her arm around my shoulder and walked her toward the door and freedom.
“Wait a sec,” she said, and the words were a little slurred. “Need my purse. On the bed,” she said, nodding toward the cot, and she took her arm off me and held on to the shelf.
“Okay,” I said, and I returned to the cot and looked down. I didn’t see a purse—but I did hear a clatter, and I turned around to see that Samantha had kicked the five-gallon pot out of the way and, as I watched, was pulling the refrigerator door closed.
“Stop!” I said, which felt even stupider than it sounds, and I guess Samantha thought so, too, because she didn’t stop, and before I could get to her she had slammed the door shut and turned to look at me with an expression of half-glazed triumph on her face.
“Told you,” she said. “I don’t want to go home.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
IT WAS COLD INSIDE THE REFRIGERATOR. YOU MIGHT THINK that would be obvious, but obviousness doesn’t provide any warmth, and I had been shivering since the shock of Samantha’s betrayal wore off. It was cold, and the small room was filled with jars of blood, and there was no way out, not even with the help of my tire iron. I had tried to shatter the small glass window in the refrigerator’s door, which shows how low I had descended into panicked unreason. The glass was an inch thick and reinforced with wire, and even if I had managed to break it, the opening was barely big enough for one of my legs.
Naturally enough, I had tried to call Deborah on my cell phone, and of course, more naturally, there was no reception at all inside an insulated box with thick metal walls. I knew they were thick, because after I gave up trying to break the window and then bent the tire iron trying to pry open the door, I had hammered on the walls for a few minutes, which was almost as effective as twiddling my thumbs would have been. The tire iron bent a little more, the rows and rows of blood seemed to close in on me, and I started to breathe hard—and Samantha just sat and smiled.
And Samantha herself—why did she sit there with that Mona Lisa smile of perfect contentment? She had to know that at some point in the not-too-distant future, she would become an entrée. And yet when I had arrived on my white horse in perfectly serviceable armor, she had kicked the door shut and trapped us both. Was it the drugs they had obviously fed her? Or was she so delusional that she believed they wouldn’t really do to her what they had already done to her best friend, Tyler Spanos?