Even before I opened my eyes, I knew I was well and truly bound now. Sure enough, my feet were cuffed, my hands were cuffed, and they were all connected by another set. I was already aching from the contortion.
"Fuck," I snarled. He came into my line of vision, looking down at me. Was I on a table?
"You're not giving me much choice, here," Morgan said dryly. He got me sitting upright; with my knees tucked under my chin, I could sit a little more comfortably. "More for nausea," he explained before sticking another pill into me. I rested my forehead on my knees. Tears of exhaustion were forming behind my eyes; I tried to force them back.
"Please, just let me go," I whispered. "I swear, I won't tell anyone."
"I can't take that chance."
"Are you going to kill me?"
He didn't answer.
Panic settled on me like a blanket. I fought it, squeezing my legs to my chest.
I spent a miserable night, terrified and aching on the table. He slept in the room with me, somewhere beyond my range of vision. I jumped awake as he undid the shackles around my ankles and hauled me to the bathroom, standing beside me the whole time. There was no way I could go with him there, even though I needed to. Humiliated and flushed, I was marched back to the table and shackled again. He put two bottles of water and some food—a sandwich and a banana—on the table with me, and left. I heard doors close, lock. I heard a garage door. I heard a car drive away.
I screamed more, to no avail. Where did he live? My father would certainly be looking for me by now.
No such escape opportunities were available now. I craned my neck, examining every inch my eyes could see, but there was no chance. The room I was in was almost empty, but I could make out the edge of a cot—where he must have slept. I was still in the basement, but in a different room. Morgan had left me blankets again; I was glad. It was cold in here when I couldn't move.
What would best convince him to let me go? I could try to seduce him, but that would just make me more vulnerable, not give me any power. He might not even unchain me to do it. Was he crazy? Could I reason with him? Even by best reason, though, he would be crazy to let me go. How much of a conscience did he have? He had killed my brother believing him to be a pedophile. Would he kill me because I merely posed a threat to him?
My escape stunt had scared him, I knew. It had demonstrated that he would not be able to trust me. Fuck. But how could he expect me to stay put willingly?
The day crept by. I hesitated to eat or drink anything that he had left, but I had to conclude that he wouldn't have poisoned anything. Clearly, he could face the person he was killing; my brother was evidence. They had found a knife wound clear through his heart. So I ate and drank.
There was no clock to track time by, and no window by which to judge the day. I slipped in and out of sleep, trying to come up with some way to convince him to let me go.
He returned alone, smelling clinical somehow; I guessed that was part of where he worked. I knew he was in the police department for analyzation, but I wasn't sure of the particulars. Morgan didn't say anything to me, didn't even look me in the eye, but unlocked everything but the cuffs on my wrists and led me to the bathroom again. Shyness did not stop me this time, though I still flushed with anger. He locked me up again, left, and came back with a folding chair and food. "Here," he said, setting a wrapped hamburger and drink on the table. Taking a seat, he started to eat his, watching me.
"How are you feeling?" he asked me.
"All right," I answered.
"No nausea? Headaches?"
"No." I shifted, though I had long since decided I was going to spend the rest of my days in discomfort.
"How are your hands?"
I looked down at them. My left wrist was still mangled from being chained in the bathroom, and both hands had dark bruises where the steel door had fallen on them. "Ok, I think."
He stood and opened my palms, examining them. My skin went clammy. "Nothing's broken."
I wondered if I purposefully broke my arm, he would feel bad enough about it to take me to the hospital. Then again, if that failed, I didn't fancy the thought of dying in agony of an infection or something.
Morgan sat back down, taking a drink as if he had ceased to exist down here at all. What preoccupied him so?
"Do you know what you're going to do with me?" I asked finally.
He shook his head. I couldn't bear this anymore; the agony of being trapped into stillness all day made me reckless.
"Well, I think you ought to consider letting me go," I declared, my voice sharp.
"That's not going to work."
"Why? You've already—" I cut off, hearing the frantic noise in my voice and knowing whatever came out next would not help me. I rocked.
"You don't deserve this. I know. But I can't let you go," he told me quietly.
"Why?" I whispered.
"Your father's dead as well."
I stared at him. "What?"
Morgan looked at me evenly. "Your father is dead. I killed him."
I couldn't think, couldn't speak. How much was this man going to take from me?
"And what did he do?" I demanded, sounding crazily ordinary. "Rape someone? WHAT?" My voice shattered. I pressed my face to my knees, completely uncaring about the violent sobs that made the room echo.
"When I was looking into Mal, I saw several cases your father had covered up," Morgan explained evenly. "He has a knack for covering up cases when it benefits him."
"You killed him because he's a bad cop?" I said incredulously, staring at him.
"No. I killed him because he kills witnesses that hurt his cases." He paused, watching me cry with emotionless eyes. "Maureen Hoffman. Jeb Seller. Robert Blount."
The names rang bells. I couldn't respond, couldn't take another assault to my trust in my family.
If I possibly could have, I would have attacked him, torn out his eyes, rammed his stomach. Forced into this helplessness, I cried.
"I'm sorry that I've hurt you." He left the room, shutting me in alone.
Another miserable night. Up in the morning to use the bathroom, then chained again. Neither of us spoke. He left me with food and water, departed for work.
I thought I might develop sores from this metal table. How odd it was, that the conditions of some poor souls I had learned about in history classes would actually recur in my life. Most of the time my life had spent itself on was faded, murky, but a few moments stood out to me like lumps in my mouth that I could never swallow away. I kept my voice at a low hum, the habit of my childhood self, tricking myself into believing that the noise could block off the bad thoughts. Perhaps Morgan knew that this was the worst he could do to me; maybe he knew that being trapped in my mind was the worst prison anyone could conceive. But I doubted he understood that I would never, ever stop fighting to get out.
My best chance was one of the bathroom visits. Could I steal something to get myself free with? From the sink, anything? If I pretended to be unconscious, would he unchain me to help me? It was worth a shot. Still with no means to measure time, I settled down a good while before I thought he would return, lying still on my side so that the chains wouldn't clank when he got back.
My heart started to pound when I heard the garage open. I lay very still, trying to force myself to calm. He didn't spend much time settling down upstairs; I heard his quiet footsteps coming down the stairs. I didn't even twitch when he unlocked and opened the door. I heard him pause, looking at me. Should I have waited for him to get less suspicious, let him get used to seeing me awake so that he would not be wary of me faking anything? Too late now.
He came over. I assumed he was looking at me, and I managed not to jump when he felt my wrist, looking for my pulse.
Shit. My pulse couldn't have been even. Then again, would that necessarily give me away? Would it be totally even if I was unconscious?
Sure enough, he took out his keys and began to unlock me. Should I spring into action, or wait for some better opportunity? I stayed limp as he undid the chains connecting my handcuffs with the shackles on my ankles and carried me up the stairs. Could he feel how quickly my heart was beating?
All of my relief at my success drained when he took me to the bathroom. Oh my god. He was going to kill me.
He placed me in the bathtub. I tensed to spring awake and away, still unsure what he was going to do and unwilling to open my eyes.
He turned on the shower faucet. Cold water hit me like a wall.
I gasped, my eyes flying open. I couldn't stop my heaving breaths, gripping the side of the bathtub. He held me in, watching me. I sputtered, ducking my head out of the blast of water.
"I know you're faking, but you needed a bath," he said. I lunged at him, but he held me easily; I was getting weak, and there was only so much I could hope to do with my hands anchored together.
"Phoebe!" He shouted, gripping my shoulders. I stilled, shivering. "Phoebe, I don't want to hurt you. You need to start believing me on that."
My words came out unevenly, tripping on my aching throat. "You don't want to hurt me, but you killed my family for reasons I still don't believe, you won't let me go, and you keep me chained to a metal table! What the fuck does it matter what I believe, Morgan?"
He grasped my handcuffs with one hand and shut off the spout with the other. Jerking me out of the bathtub, he hauled me, dripping, to a bedroom. I screamed; he clamped a hand over my mouth. "One more noise," he snarled into my ear. I heard something metal, and a knife flashed in front of my eyes. I shuddered and silenced. He moved me to the bed and sat me down, snatching up his laptop and opening it, keeping me between him and the computer. "Look," he said. He opened a program, typed in a password, opened the terminal, typed in something else, and opened a file. I tried to focus, rage and adrenaline warping my vision.
"Your father," Morgan said, "killed Maureen Hoffman because she knew that her rich boyfriend had killed her husband—and that boyfriend paid your father to keep it quiet. Here, see?" He opened a police report. "It says Avery Stanton, a salesman, killed Mrs. Hoffman. Stanton was guilty as sin, but not of this. He was too busy at his teenage girlfriend's house, but she was no alibi for him. Stanton blamed, Mrs. Hoffman dead, problem solved." Morgan opened another report. He opened up a video folder. "Your father had these hidden in your basement," he said. "Look."
They were the camera recordings from his police cruiser. I could hear her nervous greeting turn to horror, screaming. Gunshots.
There were two other cases that he opened and explained. Jeb Seller he had strangled; Robert Blount, shot.
"Do you remember the BMW your father bought?" Morgan asked. "Where do you think he got the money to do that? Do you have any idea how much debt he was in?" I didn't respond, staring at his screen. I didn't care if it was true. My god, what reality could he possibly hope to impress on me that would change the knife in my vision, the hopeless bars of flesh that held me from all freedom?
But then, the show-and-tell shifted to my brother. "These were in Mel's camera," Morgan said quietly. They were pictures of my brother. They must have been taken by Mel; I could see his arm extended. He had on gloves, a ski mask, and a condom, but I knew him—it was him. It was of the children, one at a time—still alive, terrified, doing what he was making them do. They went on and on, shot after shot. And I felt my will collapse.
"I can't look at this anymore," I whispered. Morgan shut the screen, his arms still caging me.
Am I going to cry? I wondered, detached. Sure enough, my lungs started to give great spasms, and I could hardly breathe through it all. I felt him hesitate, then hold me closer, pulling me gently against his chest, rocking me.
"I'm surrounded by murderers," I choked out. His chest contracted—had I made him laugh? But he didn't stop rocking.
Shit, no wonder my danger radar had always been screwed up. It was because it was already saturated at home. Maybe it wasn't screwed up after all, but my outward reasoning had done the damage.
These thoughts, how could I be thinking them? Were they logic? How could one part of me still function when I had torn from beginning to end?
I cried, and cried again, waves of it, choking and hot and drowning. How could this pain not kill me? If I was dead, why did my body bother to cry? It seemed not to belong to me any more. None of this, none of this was mine. The only thing that existed was the pressure of a truth that had sliced into my unwilling mind, and I bled with it.
It took me a long, long time to realize that Morgan still held me, his arms wrapped securely around me, cradling me to him. And by then, I could not bring myself to care.