Chapter 8

Love Cuts Deep

It must be maybe three or four in the morning when, after what seems like an eternity of walking the dark streets, I reach 779 Sterling Place.

It's so dark that I go right by the empty lot at first. But when I turn around and spot the iron gate, now almost totally covered by the tree's overgrown, sagging branches, I know I'm there.

My heart pounds so hard that I can feel the blood gushing through by chest.

I ease the gate open as quietly as possible, prying it free from the wet branches. Warm rainwater spills from the leaves onto my shoulders and drips down my cheek.

Beneath the canopy of the tree, it's even darker than on the streets. I feel my way forward, trying not to trip over any of the garbage bags and piles of soggy leaves under my feet.

My outstretched hand reaches something hard and wet.

It's a car, I realize, probably the same one I'd seen in the most recent Google street view, now covered in rotten leaves and concealing the hole the in the wall.

I take a deep breath. I try to slow my pulsing heart.

I feel my way around the car. I kneel where I think the hole in the wall must be. It's still completely dark; no light at all is coming from the hole—if the hole is even still there at all, and not bricked up by now.

I steady myself against the wall and reach out my hand where I remember the hole being. I reach farther and farther into the darkness; the hole is still there.

Finally my hand reaches something. It feels like cloth.

Someone must have hung a sheet—or, by the cloth's texture, an old rough blanket—over the hole from the inside. And that someone must have been the guy the who had lured me here and had taken my sister captive. The guy whose finger, now, is snaking through the sewer pipes.

For a moment I'm frozen with terror.

In an effort not to panic, I try to tell myself that the guy and my sister both must be long gone. The basement room, by now, must be empty. As terrified as I am, though, the prospect of finding an empty basement is suddenly deeply depressing. I want more than anything in the world to find my sister still here, still alive somehow, even after all this time, against all the odds.

With this hope, I move the blanket aside, only a little, just enough to peer inside through the hole.