Page 15 of A Princess, Stolen
“Hm,” he muttered in agreement and turned on the meter.
“You’ll find money in your coat pocket.” The man I was speaking with on the phone was not the taxi driver. He was further away, somewhere out there, but that was not reassuring.
I got in and slammed the door.
“Where to exactly, miss?” The driver didn’t even turn around.
It was strange because when I was out with Dad, people showered me with attention and compliments. “I…”
“Brielle Avenue, corner of Babe Ruth Stadium,” the man on the phone said again.
I repeated it. Now the driver behind the wheel turned to me. “That’s a lonely place, miss. If anything, there are a lot of riffraff hanging around.”
“I…I’m meeting…a friend there,” I said hastily, surprised at how swiftly that popped out since I usually valued honesty so much.
The taxi drove off and I wanted nothing more than to hang up the miserable phone call, jump out of the car, and run back to Dad. The driver remained silent and turned the radio up. It was playing “Hello” by Adele, a song that Dad and I loved, but all I could do was stare at the elephant god, Ganesha, dangling from the rearview mirror.
On the other end of the line, I heard the man breathing. It sounded heavy and deep as if he was shaking off tension. “You did well, my heart.”
His calm, dark voice paralyzed me. I stared straight out, but there were only blurry, colorful points of light.
“Don’t call me that,” I replied quietly but firmly.
He laughed a strange laugh, staccato, cold, and superior. “The two of us have more in common than you can imagine, but you’ll find out all that. We’re only at the beginning of our journey.”
The wordjourneymade me think of Rosewood Manor and how I probably wouldn’t be there this summer, maybe never see it again. The fear of not making a mistake so as not to put Dad in danger gave way to something else: The sheer dread of what they were planning to do to me. But even in that fear, he wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Talk to me. Say something nice. Pretend I’m that friend you’re meeting and never, not once, mention the wordHampton.” He took another deep breath and my stomach clenched.
“I don’t want to talk.” I was completely dizzy. I still couldn’t think clearly.
“Then I’ll tell you something. You know little Sophie, right? Delilah Jordan’s niece?”
“What about her?” I asked, alarmed, recalling Delilah’s wide eyes.God, please make sure the little one isn’t hurt!
“Well, she helped us get your phone number. In the broadest sense, obviously. Delilah did the rest. Not with any bad intentions, of course.”
It was still a shock. “How?”
“Oh, it was simple. Miss Jordan comes and goes at the same time every day. We’ve been watching her. How does she spend her evenings? Who is important to her? Who does she visit regularly?”
“The home. You were at the home where her dad is staying.” Maybe that’s how they got Delilah’s cell phone number. “They went through his things.”
“Call me Isaac, little lady. It’s irritating when you speak so formally to me. I’m only twenty-seven.”
It sounded like it was the truth. But if it was, it wasn’t good that he was revealing so much about himself.
The driver took the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, and suddenly, I felt buried alive in the narrow space. “I don’t even know you,” I replied shakily.
He laughed again, that laugh as cold as permafrost. “No, of course not. But you’d better do what I ask of you, Willa Nevaeh Rae. And that’s going to be a lot soon.”
His words sickened me. He also knew my middle name, which hardly anyone knew. And he had said it so familiarly like we had some kind of relationship. An intimate relationship even.
“Who are you?” I whispered, looking out as if he was there in the tunnel, under the river, in the blinding lights of the cars coming toward us. But that was nonsense. Or was it? I stared out the rear window to see if he was following us, but I couldn’t see the driver of the car behind us. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have known if it was him.
Suddenly, I felt like I was running out of oxygen. The heat was building up under my raincoat and I could feel sweat trickling between my breasts.
“Do you know what it feels like to have to scrounge your food from a garbage dump?”
