Free Level Five by Carla Cassidy Page B

his ex-wife one night. I looked a lot like her.  After I saw the picture I started thinking back over the weeks before he abducted me.  I’m fairly sure he stalked me for a while before he finally got me.  But I know he chose me specifically because I looked like her.”
    “Do you remember seeing him in the weeks before he took you?” 
    Colette shook her head.  “No, but I do remember several times I thought I was being watched.  You know that creepy crawly feeling you get when you’re out at the store or in a parking lot and the hairs on the nape of your neck tingle?  I felt that several times. Then there was one night I went out for a walk and thought I was being followed. By the time I got back into my apartment I dismissed it, told myself I was just being a silly willy.  In retrospect I certainly wished I would have paid more attention to those things.” 
    She set her fork down and pushed the last of the cake aside.  “That’s part of why I want to do this book, to tell women to listen to their instincts, to pay attention to what’s happening around them.  It’s okay to be a little paranoid.  Sometimes, somebody really is after you.”
    “You know it’s not your fault,” Edie said. 
    Colette flashed her one of her beautiful smiles.  “I know.  It took me a while to figure that out.  Until he showed me the picture of his ex-wife, I spent a lot of time wondering why me?  Seeing her photo answered that question for me.”
    “So, he wanted you as the wife who had left him.”
    Colette’s eyes darkened with the flash of demons left behind. “It was so bizarre.  On the nights he came to the cellar he brought dinner and we’d sit together at the table like a married couple.  He’d tell me about his day, although never with enough details for me to know exactly what he did or where he worked.  It took me a while to realize there was a script in his head that I was supposed to follow.  When I got something wrong, whether it was a comment I made or didn’t make or a glance misplaced, I was beaten.  In those first few months I was beaten a lot.”
    “Was it during one of those beatings that he cut your face?” Edie asked.
    Colette jumped out of her kitchen chair and carried her cake plate to the sink. Edie wondered if perhaps she’d pushed her too hard. 
    She sat silently while Colette scraped the last of her cake into the garbage disposal and then turned to look at Edie once again.  She reached up and touched the ropey scars that would forever mar the natural beauty she had once been.
    “He beat me black and blue over the three years that he held me captive.  He pulled my hair, broke my ribs, and twisted my fingers until I screamed, but he never touched my face.   That last night he loaded me up in the back of his van and drove me to that empty parking lot across from The Dollar Discount Store. He pulled me out of the back of his van, tied up like a turkey, and for a moment, just for a moment hope filled me as I realized he might let me go. He just might let me live.”
    Her voice rose slightly and her cheeks flushed with what appeared to be the first anger Edie had seen in her.  She grabbed a nearby hand towel and began to twist it around her hands. 
    “He left me on the pavement and got into his van and I thought he was just going to drive away. Somehow I’d be found and everything would be okay.  I’d made it.  I’d survived him and I couldn’t believe it.”  Her voice was thick with emotion.
    She’d twisted the towel so tightly around her hands her long slender fingers were turning white.  Edie got up from her chair and approached her.
    “And then he got back out of the van and came back to me. At first I thought he was slapping me over and over again.  Then I saw his bloody hand and the knife and I realized he was cutting me…slashing me. Then he leaned down and whispered that no man would ever want me again.  He got back in the van and drove off.”
    Edie