Blood and Sand Read online

  On the landing, surrounded by the five doors, Keith says, “Where do you want to start?”

  I point to a door. Not because it matters which one we start with—all the rooms are the same and we have to search all of them—but because we can’t afford to waste any time at all, not even seconds on indecision.

  “All the rooms up here are the same,” he says as he unlocks the door. “At least in terms of size and layout. Not in terms of theme and decoration.”

  We enter the Faye Dunaway room, which is part Bonnie and Clyde and part Chinatown, and begin to look around, though I can tell immediately that no living human beings are in this room.

  We check under the bed, in the closet, in the dresser drawers, and then, as he checks the bathroom, I step over to the window and look out.

  The Faye Dunaway is on the back of the house on the third floor. From it, I scan the area below.

  Looking straight down, I can see the small group keeping an eye on the back door. Looking back up to the left and right I realize that from this location I can’t really see into the backyards of the other houses from here.

  But what I can see are the woods directly behind the house where we were searching just a few hours ago and where Vic Frankford found the Toy Story pajamas.

  The night is dark and nearly moonless, cloud coverage obscuring any stars that might otherwise be visible.

  I can see one of the bright beams of the flashlights Anna and the two deputies are using. The light looks lonely in the dark, dense woods—like a lone car on a canyon road. In a few moments, the other flashlights join it and the pace and movement of all three increase and together look like rural children playing hide and seek in the safe little forest beside their home in a far more innocent time.

  Keith and I step back into the hall and repeat the same actions with the other rooms on the floor, which include Sidney Poitier, Zora Neale Hurston, Jim Morrison, and Butterfly McQueen, and find exactly what we did in the first one.

  As we enter each new room, I’m filled with dread at what we might find. Searching a huge house room by room for my little girl makes me feel more like John Ramsey than John Jordan, and I beg God not to find what he found.

  As I turn from the window in the last room on the floor, I notice Keith pulling on the mantel above the fireplace.

  “What’re you doing?” I ask.

  “Just making sure it’s locked,” he says. “When do you want to check the escape room and the secret passageways?”

  “This room has access to them too?” I ask. “I thought only the Zora Neal Hurston room up here did?”

  He shakes his head. “That’s just the one we showed you so you could see what they’re like,” he said. “All the rooms have fake fireplaces that are doors to the passageways behind the walls. We keep them locked. I’m just checking to make sure they all still are.”

  “All the rooms on the third floor or all the guest rooms?” I ask. “I thought y’all said just one on each floor did.”

  “All the rooms do.”

  “Including ours?” I ask, and head for our room. “So that’s how whoever took Taylor got into our room.”

  He follows me, matching my pace.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But it should be locked. We’re missing one of the key cards, so it could’ve been used. All whoever has it would have to do is reprogram it with the machine on the desk in the parlor when no one was looking.”

  “Should be locked?” I ask. “I didn’t even know our room had one.”

  “Sorry if we weren’t clear about that,” he says. “I thought you knew.”

  “We wouldn’t be staying in there if I had known,” I say. “I’d never knowingly expose Taylor to that kind of risk.”

  “I feel terrible,” he said. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t clear when we took you through it.”

  My focus and energy is directed toward getting to our room and checking the fireplace, but as he says that I wonder if he really is sorry or if the omission was intentional.

  31

  When we reach the second-floor landing, Roderick and Christopher are coming out of the room between ours and Hal Raphael’s.

  “Anything?” Roderick asks.

  I shake my head. “No. Y’all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Have y’all checked our room again yet?” I ask.

  “Was just about to.”

  I place my key card into the reader on the door handle.

  Keith says to Christopher, “You been checking the fireplaces?”

  When my key card won’t read, I glance back at the others and then try again.

  Christopher, who seems out of it, says, “No. Why?”

  “I have,” Roderick says. “They’ve all been clear.”

  “I meant to make sure they’re locked,” Keith says.

  “Locked?” Roderick asks.

  “They’re the doors to the secret passageway that runs from the escape room to the back of the house.”

  “All of them?” Roderick asks. “I thought—”

  “Yeah,” Keith says. “Only two are direct exits from the escape room, but they all access the passageway. The only working fireplace in the house is in the parlor. But they all lock from the inside of the room like connecting doors in hotel rooms.”

  “For some reason my key won’t work,” I say, then to Keith. “Will you try yours?”

  “That’s strange. Sure.”

  He steps up and tries his master key card and it works the first time.

  I rush into the room to find it just as we had left it. I run over to the fireplace and turn toward Keith. “How does it work?” I ask. “Will you see if it’s locked?”

  He steps over and runs his fingers along the underside of the right end of the wooden mantel. Finding the button, he presses it. Following the pop of a latch from inside, the left side of the fireplace slowly swivels open a few inches with a low creak.

  He shakes his head. “It wasn’t locked.”

  “We need to search the passageways and the escape room,” I say.

  “We’ll start from the escape room and come this way,” Roderick says.

  “I can’t do this again,” Christopher is saying.

  “You don’t have to,” Keith says. “Let Roderick into the escape room, show him an exit to access the passageways, and then go lie down on the couch in the parlor. I’ll be in to check on you as soon as I can.”

  Christopher mumbles something but I am too far into the passageway to make it out.

  Tapping on the flashlight on my phone, I scan the narrow, all-black passageway—first in one direction and then the other.

  The light from my phone doesn’t have much reach and I wonder what’s in the darkness beyond its illumination.

  In another moment Keith joins me, the light of his phone joining mine.

  “Are there any lights in here?” I ask.

  “No, sorry,” he says. “We could really use some strong flashlights. Want me to go get—”

  “I don’t want to wait another second to search back here.”

  “I understand,” he says. “Let’s do it.”

  “You lead the way,” I say. “Take us through the best, quickest way possible, but make sure we cover every inch.”

  “Will do.”

  32

  “We should check each second-floor room’s entry into the passageway while we’re here,” he says. “Each one is set back a little and feeds into this main hallway at different points, which is probably why you didn’t notice them when we were in here before. Well, that and the fact that it’s coal mine black in here. We also need to check the entryway and small room directly off of the landing.”

  We do as he says and check each of the entryways from the second-floor rooms and the landing. The quick search into each yields nothing.

  “Okay,” he says, “we’ll go down the main hallway now.”

  I follow him down the dark, narrow hallway that reminds me of a walk-through amusement park haunted house, un
able to see anything but the back of his shirt—and that only in flashes as my phone moves up and down with the movements of my hands.

  We bounce around, careening off one wall only to slam into the other—like mice in a too-small black box maze.

  The floor we are running on is just plywood subfloor that has been painted black. It gives and creaks and groans as we move over it, each of our footfalls sounding as if we are stomping as violently as we can. We’re making a lot of noise, but if someone wanted to pass through these passageways quietly it would certainly be possible.

  Eventually we reach the stairs in the back that lead down to the residence and up to the third floor. When he stops at them I run into him.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Should’ve warned you we were stopping.”

  I hold my light up and out to the side so I can see his face without shining the light directly into his eyes.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m the one who told you to go as fast as you could.”

  “We have three options,” he says. “We can go downstairs to the residence, upstairs to the third floor, or circle back to the escape room.”

  “Roderick will be coming from the escape room and should see everything between it and wherever we encounter him, so let’s go up and check the third floor first, then come back down and check the stairs down to the residence, then we can go toward the escape room.”

  “Sounds good,” he says, and turns and starts up the stairs.

  I follow—though not quite as closely this time, partly to keep from running into him, but mostly because the small, narrow stairway makes it impossible.

  We check the third-floor passageway and all the rooms’ entryways into it, as well as the small room and entryway off the landing, exactly what we did on the second floor.

  We then move back down the way we came—down the dark hallway, down the stairs, this time taking the stairs all the way to the first floor before heading back toward the escape room.

  About halfway to the escape room we meet up with Roderick. “Anything?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “You?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “Where the hell can she be? No one has left the house and we’ve searched everything, right?”

  “The only thing left is the residence,” I say. “And with the cameras disconnected, we don’t know that someone didn’t leave the house with her before we even knew she was gone.”

  “Yeah, I guess I meant since we’ve been aware of her being missing.”

  “How is Chris?” Keith asks him.

  “Not great,” he said. “He’s lying down on one of the couches in the parlor.”

  “Y’all mind if we go to the residence that way, so we can get him and take him with us? I’m worried about him.”

  “That’s fine,” I say. “Lead the way.”

  He does.

  33

  “If whoever abducted Taylor was in the passageway behind the fireplace and entered our room shortly after the last time I checked on her,” I say, “then he or she had about a fifteen- or twenty-minute head start.”

  We are back on the first floor in the main part of the house. Keith and Christopher are leading Roderick and me back to their residence.

  “Which was plenty of time to get her out of the house,” I continue. “But since we could all see the front door, they had to use the back door.”

  With everyone but the four of us outside searching for Taylor or watching the doors, the house seems even bigger and simultaneously quieter and creakier.

  “The fact that everyone from the night Magdalene was abducted was in the parlor and dining room with you when it happened bolsters the theory that it was someone from outside of the house who broke in,” Roderick says.

  “Not everyone from that night was with us,” I say. “Hal Raphael wasn’t. Neither was Rake Sabin for much of the time, who was supposed to be up there watching him.”

  “Oh, that’s right.”

  “And neither was Henrique Arango,” I say, “but he was with us in the parlor the entire time he was here and we saw him leave through the front door and we have a witness—Derinda Dacosta—who followed him out.”

  “Plus he’s a sick old man,” he says. “I know we can’t be 100 percent certain, but I think we got the roadblocks up before whoever has her would’ve been able to leave town with her.”

  “That’s why a thorough search, beginning in the house and moving outward is so critical,” I say.

  Keith unlocks the door leading to their residence and we walk down the short hallway, around a laundry basket of folded sheets, a cleaning cart, and a couple of boxes of Halloween decorations.

  When we arrive in the residence kitchen, Christopher, who still hasn’t uttered a word, collapses into one of the chairs at the table.

  Keith says, “Do you want me to lead you through or do you want us to sit here while you look around?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I say, “probably go quicker with you taking us through.”

  He shakes his head. “Of course not. Don’t mind at all. Want to do anything I can to help you find your daughter.” He looks down at Christopher. “You okay to sit here for a minute while I show them around?”

  He nods. “I’m fine. I’m just done. This just brings it all up again and I’m completely spent. Having nothing left.”

  “Just sit here and rest. We’ll be back in a minute. You want some water or anything?”

  “Just go. I’m okay.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back in just a few. Let me dim the lights in here for you. Lay your head down on the table and rest.”

  Keith turns on the small light under the oven hood and then turns off the harsh overhead light.

  “We can start with this supply closet,” he says, indicating the first door of the hallway leading back toward the bed and breakfast part of the house.

  He steps over and opens the door and turns on the light inside.

  “We mostly keep the B&B supplies in here, but there are a few of our own also.”

  Roderick and I step over and look inside.

  It’s a ten by ten closet with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with cleaning supplies, boxes of small hotel toiletries, pillows, blankets, sheets, wall art, and various other random guest services supplies.

  There is nowhere inside big enough for Taylor to be hidden.

  As we step back, Keith quickly grabs the boxes, laundry basket, and cleaning cart from the hallway and puts them inside the closet before closing the door.

  “What is that flickering?” Christopher says.

  We turn to see him sitting up and looking down the other end of the hallway at Magdalene’s bedroom door.

  “It’s . . .” He jumps up. “Look. See that. Flickering lights and shadows. Someone is in Magdalene’s room.”

  We follow his gaze to the light and movement coming from beneath the closed door of Magdalene’s room.

  He’s right. It appears as if someone is inside her room.

  I glance at Keith. “Did y’all leave any lights on in there?”

  His eyes are as wide as Christopher’s, his expression just as anxious and perplexed.

  “No,” he says. “Never. There’s no light like that in there anyway. That looks like— Is it a fire?”

  Roderick and I both withdraw our weapons and, holding them down at our sides, move over to the door.

  He puts his hand on the knob and looks at me.

  I nod.

  He turns the knob and pushes open the door.

  And we stare in shock and horror at the body of the little girl on the bed.

  34

  The light and movement we had seen beneath the door is from flickering candles surrounding the bed and the body on it.

  Heat from the half-burned candles wafts out of the room through the door, over us, and into the kitchen.

  There’s a disconnect between what I’m seeing and any thoughts my mind can form from it, a visual cognitive dissonance that is surreal and unsettling. />
  In the glow of the candlelight the room looks like a sanctuary, the bed an altar, the little girl in the white gown on it perhaps part of a pagan rite or funereal ritual.

  The body of the beautiful little girl laid out on the bed is clearly lifeless, unmoving, inanimate, the castoff remnants of a mortal coil.

  Flashes of Taylor streak the night sky of my mind like heat lightning on a hot summer night.

  But the body on the bed is not Taylor, but the little girl who the bed belongs to.

  Magdalene, as if frozen in time somehow, is back in her bed looking much as she did the night she vanished, only instead of sweet, cutesy Toy Story pajamas, she’s sheathed in an elegant white gown.

  Suddenly, jarringly, I become aware of Keith and Christopher screaming and yelling and trying to press past us as and Roderick and I block the doorway into the room that is a crime scene for a second time.

  “Oh, God,” Christopher screams. “Oh, God.”

  Roderick holsters his weapon, snatches the radio off his belt and calls for backup.

  “Let us in to check on her,” Keith is saying.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “We can’t.”

  “She’s gone, Keith,” Roderick says. “It’s obvious. I’m sorry. We’ve got to preserve the scene now so we can find out who did this to her.”

  “She’s just sleeping,” Christopher says.

  “You’ve got to let us check,” Keith says.

  “Keith,” I say, my voice calm but firm, “she wouldn’t still look like she did nearly a year ago.”

  “How . . .” he says, looking up at her again. “How . . . is that . . . possible?”

  “We’re gonna find out,” Roderick says.

  “Who would do this?” Keith says. “Who could do something like this? Wasn’t enough to take her from us, they have to . . . to . . . to bring her back to . . . to torture and taunt us like this.”

  “Oh God,” Christopher keeps saying between sobs and screams and yells. “Oh, God.”

  A deputy opens the hallway door and asks Roderick how he can help.