Perfect Victim by Carla Norton, Christine McGuire Read Free Book Online Page B

finally stopped asking.
    Eventually, Colleen managed a small victory: She learned her captor’s name. She thought she’d heard the woman calling him Cameron, and now she had it absolutely confirmed. One evening when she was out of the box, spying out the tiny slice of light at the bottom of her blindfold, he’d turned his back to her at just such an angle that she could see “Cameron” engraved on the back of his belt. So, he had a name. And when she heard him call his wife Jan, so did she.
    learning the names of her captors was the first news she’d had in months. Locked in that double-walled wooden box, she lay suspended in an informational vacuum. It shut out all light and deadened all sound so that Colleen’s world was perpetually dark and silent — as if she’d been struck blind and deaf.
    Just as she hadn’t known that Janice had left, Colleen didn’t know that after a few lonely months of commuting home on weekends, of missing the husband she believed she loved, and of getting over the shock of having a captive in the basement, Janice had had enough of that long, hot drive up Interstate 5, and had moved back home.
    By now the seasons were changing, and this was news Colleen could discern even from within the box. The amber hills around Red Bluff, which the summer had parched to within a spark of spontaneous combustion, were dampened by the first rains of autumn. And as the temperatures fell outside, Colleen, still naked and chained within the box, felt the change. When the mornings turned cold she finally had to ask for something to wear, and Cameron gave her the Pendleton shirt that she’d had with her when she was kidnapped.
    The weather wasn’t all that was changing. In November, six months into her captivity, Colleen was about to be put to work.
    Cameron Hooker’s first experiment with making his captive useful required some elaborate rigging on his part. The head box Colleen had been kidnapped with was actually one of two head boxes Hooker had built. The other was larger and so heavy that it would be difficult for Colleen to wear while standing.
    But now Hooker wanted her to wear this second, heavier contraption, and he wanted her to wear it while she was doing a job for him. So, with a system of ropes and pulleys rigged to the ceiling, Hooker managed to counterweight the box with a gallon jug of water so that it was usable. With the jug swinging in the air, he placed the cumbersome box on Colleen’s head. Her instructions were to sand a redwood burl that Hooker had brought downstairs. Sightless, the weight of the bulky box only partially offset by the jug of water, she did the work clumsily, by touch.
    After such a long Period of inactivity the work was physically exhausting, but over several days she managed to complete the job.
    Now Hooker busied himself with a new project, more construction within a basement already crowded with his strange assemblages. He designed it to fit beneath the staircase, and so it was triangular in shape and small. It had a door, a ceiling, and even a light-similar to an oddly shaped closet. He gave it a concrete floor to add stability and carpeted the walls for soundproofing. He dubbed this new little room “the workshop.”
    Hooker got Colleen out of the box and put her inside it, unshackled but still blindfolded. He left a large sack of walnuts at her feet, and once the door was bolted shut, instructed her to remove the blindfold and shell the nuts.
    For the first time since the kidnap — six full months — the blindfold came off and Colleen could see. Something so simple.
    Yet after half a year of near-blindness, simply looking about with unobscured vision was surely close to phenomenal. Everything was so bright.
    The workshop wasn’t much bigger than the box, but at least it was vertical. And not only could she see, she had some freedom of movement. There was even a chair!
    She examined this place — what had he called it? — and realized she was completely