Hatch, page 10
She gasped at that, her eyes huge, as she digested what he said. “You think they’ll try something like that?”
“We don’t know,” he admitted, “because we don’t necessarily understand why they came after you in the first place. So, until we have more information, we don’t know whether you’re safe or not. We also don’t know if your escape was by design or if it was something that they weren’t planning on happening.”
She nodded, as memories filtered back. “I wondered that at the time.” She shivered. “Any chance of a shower?”
“Absolutely. It’s nine in the morning, by the way.” He walked over and pulled out two towels and a washcloth. “Here you go.”
She smiled as she accepted them. “Thank God. I’m really safe.” She rubbed her face with her hands. She heard another voice from the other room. “Who is that?” She turned, staring at Hatch suspiciously.
At that, Corbin poked his head around the corner. “Hi. It’s nice to officially meet you. I’m Corbin. I was with Hatch last night, when we found you.”
Some memory retention slid back into focus, but she didn’t know this other man, and his arrival had surprised her. She nodded mutely.
Hatch looked at her, smiled. “I’m Hatch. So go have a shower. You’ll feel better.”
And, with that, he walked out of the bedroom, leaving her all alone. Not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, she locked the door and quickly stepped into the bathroom, locking that door as well. She wondered if she would ever get to the point where she didn’t feel like she had to lock all the doors behind her.
But this wasn’t the time to worry about it. She had a shower, scrubbing her head free of what seemed like weeks’ worth of dust, dirt, and grime, but it had probably only been a few days. She had to admit that she didn’t even have a clear time frame of her ordeal. She remembered telling Hatch several things the previous night.
Right now, it was all a big jumbled mess. She didn’t know how clear or even how cognizant she had been last night—really it had been earlier in the morning. Regardless, definitely not her finest hour, but she bolstered herself with the reminder that she had gotten away, and that was what counted.
After her shower, she looked down at her discarded clothes and winced. She walked into her bedroom, toward the door, poked her head out, still wrapped up in two towels, and called out, “I don’t suppose either of you have any spare clothes, do you?”
Corbin replied, “I’ll go get you something. Sorry, we should have thought of that before.” And, with that, he quickly walked out of the hotel suite. “We need to get your belongings brought over.”
She looked at his retreating back. Hatch got up, walked over. “Don’t worry. In the meantime, Corbin will find you something.” Hatch went to his bag and pulled out a T-shirt and handed it to her. “For the moment though, you can wear this.”
While the shirt may have been huge, as she looked at the man in front of her, she realized that he was huge as well. “This looks like it’s big enough for two or possibly three of me.”
He smiled. “Good, it’ll cover you to your knees then. At least the shops are open now. Corbin shouldn’t be too long.”
“Okay, thank you.” She hesitated, looking about the suite. “Did you say there was coffee?”
He nodded.
“Let me put this on first and wrap up my hair to make sure it’ll dry. Then I’ll come out for coffee.”
“Take your time.”
She nodded and stepped back into the bathroom and yanked the towel off her head, so she could pull on the T-shirt. Then picking up the smaller towel again, she rubbed her hair to dry it off more. That was the best she could do right now, so she headed for the food and the coffee. And Hatch.
“Well, it’s not exactly big enough for two of me after all.” She gestured at the T-shirt. “You’re no small guy either.”
“Nope, I’m not,” he agreed, “and neither is Corbin.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry about earlier. His arrival just … startled me.”
“That’s fine.” Hatch nodded. “I suspect for the next little while, a lot of things will startle you.”
She winced. “And here I was hoping I would get over this stage faster than that.”
“Don’t expect too much from yourself, Millie,” he noted quietly. “None of this is easy.”
“No, I agree,” she admitted. “I just hadn’t expected it to be this hard.” She sat down at the kitchenette table, wishing she had pants on, but the thought of putting on her sand-crusted pants or her underwear that she had worn for at least three days straight was enough to make her revolt.
He just nodded and handed her a cup of coffee.
She sipped it and held it close to her chest. “I shouldn’t be such a coffee hog,” she murmured, “but something is just so comforting about it, so normal. It reminds me of home.”
He looked at her. “Copy that. Here things are very different. And yet places in the city sell an Americanized version.”
“I know, but that wasn’t my father’s thing.”
“Tell me about your father. What was he like?”
“Before my mother died or after?” she asked for clarification.
“Either. Preferably both,” he replied.
“Before my mother died, my father was a man full of laughter and joy. He was the father everybody would want to have. Always ready with the hugs, always with an adventure to tell. He wanted to go places, and his motto was to live life to the fullest,” she noted, with a gentle smile. “He was always on a dig, sometimes with my mother, … sometimes with me. He was rarely at home, so he was absent from my life a lot. He was this big, larger-than-life image, who would come blustering through the door, full of gifts and laughter, and it would completely change everything in my world. I think that’s why I fell in love with his job because I thought that was how it would always be.”
She shook her head. “And, as I grew older, while I worked with him during summer vacations and school holidays and such, it was,” she murmured, “so soothing, calming, and good. But it didn’t stay that way.”
“No, of course not,” Hatch agreed. “Reality sets in fast, doesn’t it?”
“Reality, or whatever passes for reality.” She shook her head. “I’m still not even sure what reality even is out here. In a way I didn’t see the harsh reality of a lot of the stuff we did. I didn’t handle the books. I didn’t handle the staffing. He had people he’d worked with for years, so those details weren’t part of my life. I just got to come to the digs and bury myself happily in the artifacts.”
“Did you have anything to do with the shipping?”
“No, before my mother died, that was her thing, … and afterward he hired a company to deal with it.”
“Do you know the name of that company?”
She frowned, as she thought about it. “I’m not exactly sure. It was some import-export company. I didn’t really have anything to do with them.”
“How long have you worked with your father?”
“Off and on for years,” she replied, “but I’ve only been here on this particular dig with him for a few months. He wanted me to come, and I didn’t really want to.” She shrugged. “But, well, I came.”
“Did you get the sense that he thought maybe his time with you was maybe his last time? Was there any inkling of that?”
She frowned, as she looked at him. “I don’t want to think that because that would make me feel like he had some premonition about what was coming, and I don’t really believe that. I think he just realized that the passage of time was happening faster than he expected and that I was already an adult and all grown up.”
“Yet you didn’t want to work with him?”
“Well, as it came to be, beginning after my mother’s death, he wasn’t the same happy-go-lucky father I’d had before,” she murmured. “I don’t know …” She stopped, then thought about the things that needed to be said and swallowed hard. She took a couple sips of coffee and then continued. “We had words a couple times. He was a much more difficult, a much angrier man. In fact, it was hard to be around him sometimes, and, the longer I was with him, the more I realized how much he had changed, and those changes weren’t good ones. He was difficult, and certain things about him I didn’t really want to accept. It had become much easier to just not be around him.”
She stopped and looked at her coffee, now getting cold in her hand. “Did he miss me? Maybe.” She shrugged. “I think he missed my mother terribly. I missed her too, of course, but I also lost the father I’d had before. And neither one of us could get what we wanted. Now that I think about it, it was all about Mother. She was the glue that bonded us all together.”
“Your parents were really close?”
“Yes,” she said, “although … you have to understand that I spent a lot of time in boarding schools. I spent a lot of time on holidays with them, and then I was gone again. So my time with them may not have been as realistic as I assumed it was at the time. Looking back, it was likely not at all indicative of what it was like all the time.”
“Right. So, in your opinion, would you say they had a good marriage?”
She nodded. “I would have said that, yes. However, I also wouldn’t have thought that my father would lie to me about her death.”
“Was it just too hard for him to speak of, you think? Would it just bring up so many painful memories that he thought this would be easier for him?”
She stared at Hatch. “My father wasn’t emotional. He wasn’t what anyone would consider as an easygoing guy,” she explained cautiously. “So I’m not really sure how to take that question. Now, if what you’re getting to is asking me if he had anything to do with my mom’s death, I would say absolutely not, no way. In many ways, they suited each other very well. Yet, when she had enough of his ways or his demands—because he was not easy to work with—I think she would choose another dig, then go away and work on that for a while. She had connections all over the world, and I know that better than anything. Sometimes she would just tell me that she was taking a break, and she would head down to South America.”
“Is that why you went to South America?”
She winced. “You could say that.” She nodded. “I wanted to be closer to my mother somehow. I never got a chance to say goodbye. I never had a chance to even understand that we were close to losing her. And it changes you. A sudden death like that? It’s hard to recover from because you don’t realize you even need to recover at first. And, even now, after all these years”—she sighed—“I thought I’d dealt with it, until I was in that room, talking to my kidnapper, or the one who had arranged the kidnapping.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“He said something about my mother’s death but spoke in a tone of voice or with a dynamic I didn’t understand. He was quite surprised that I hadn’t known my mother was murdered. I think he realized what a shock it was to me.”
“I would imagine so,” he murmured, “and, from his perspective, there was no reason for you not to have known.”
“Maybe,” she murmured, “but obviously my father didn’t want me to have that information.”
“Was that because he didn’t want you to have that information or that he couldn’t share it?”
She looked at Hatch, cocking her head.
“I guess I’m going back to the issue of emotions,” Hatch added. “Is there any chance that he cared so much that he just couldn’t speak about it?”
“I mean, it’s possible,” she replied cautiously. “All I can tell you is, … well, I got only the bare minimum of details. She was buried immediately, a graveside service for the two of us only, and that was it. It was all over and done with in a matter of days. He moved on, and I was supposed to move on too. And I felt a bitterness regarding that …” She struggled completing her sentence, and then she sighed again. “Well, as you can tell, I didn’t do a very good job of dealing with it.”
“When a girl loses her mother, and they are very close, … it’s hard to move on,” he noted gently. “Sounds like you need to spend a little bit of time and let yourself grieve her loss.”
“When do I do that?” she asked, staring at him. “Because it’s not just my mother now, you know? It’s my father too.”
“And it wouldn’t be surprising if you also felt some residual anger there too,” he murmured.
She stared at him. “I don’t think there’s some anger,” she noted, her voice getting stronger. “I think there’s a lot of anger. Because now? … Now I’m wondering what else he may have kept from me. I’m wondering if something he was up to resulted in my mother’s death. I’m wondering if there was, … well, I can’t help but wonder how much he knew about and how much he was involved in the events that brought about my mother’s death.”
“And this man, the kidnapper, he admitted to having a hand in your mother’s death?”
“He plain and simply told me so. He said that a man who worked for him killed her. I’m not sure that the death was planned as much as maybe a case of somebody going overboard. He mentioned it himself,” she murmured, thinking about it. “I don’t remember his exact words, but that was the gist of it.”
“Let’s put your account into writing,” he suggested. “Some of the other details will come to you over time.”
She snorted. “And what about not allowing those details to come back because I’d be totally okay to not remember those anymore.”
“That you don’t want them right now is understandable,” he noted, “but you will want them later, when you’ve got some time and distance from all this.”
“Maybe,” she murmured, “but it sure doesn’t feel like it right now.” She held out her cup. “Any chance of a second cup of coffee?”
He immediately bounded to his feet. “Absolutely. I have food for you too.” He quickly loaded up a plate for her.
She stared at it. “When you’re caught up in a situation like that, you’re afraid you’ll never get food again. Even now, I want to just move this food closer to me, in case you might want to take it away from me.”
“Did they do things like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like withhold food?”
She shook her head. “No, not really. I mean, I don’t want to say that they were good kidnappers because that just sounds so wrong,” she murmured. “Honestly they had an agenda. Whether they’re the ones who let me out or not, they didn’t treat me terribly while I was there. They let me have water, when I asked for it, and they took me out for bathroom breaks, when I needed it.” She paused. “Yet, when I wanted help for my father, … there was absolutely no help coming.”
“No, but then their beef was obviously with your father,” Hatch pointed out.
She nodded. “Yeah, and frankly, as far I’m concerned, my beef was with him too. I don’t have him around to give me any answers anymore, and that,” she noted, “is breaking my heart.”
Hatch tried to keep her calm and to feed her, then gave her another cup of coffee. He was waiting for Corbin to return. Hatch needed to ask her more questions about her ordeal. He wanted to make sure they understood it all a bit better. He also needed to confirm that she wasn’t holding back any information. She had been kept under lock and key, and that had to make things muddy. So far, watching her eat and getting her some time to unwind seemed like a necessary step. When she finally took a break from the food, he asked, “Is that better?”
She smiled at him. “Yes, thank you. So I presume the US government sent you.”
He nodded. “Yes, and, as I told you, I’m part of a special division.”
She nodded. “So I presume that my father managed to get the word out.”
“Well, somebody did. That is information I don’t have.” He shrugged. “We get orders, and we act on them.”
“Of course,” she replied, “and it doesn’t really matter. It was just in the back of my mind, wondering how any of this came to be.”
“More to the point,” he continued, “let’s figure out how the kidnappers knew where you were and how they decided that this was a good idea. I’d like to figure out what it was that they really wanted from your father.”
“I’m not even so much concerned about that,” she admitted. “All I want is to make sure that they don’t think that they can come back after me again because that is definitely not what I want to deal with.”
“Good point,” he murmured. “So it sounds like they were looking for information on a dig.”
“Right.” She nodded. “And I didn’t know anything about it,” she immediately clarified.
“Got it. Nobody here is accusing you.”
She reached up, scrubbed her face. “You’re not accusing me. I get that. But I feel like I’m responsible for something here, and I don’t even know what that could be.”
“You’re not responsible for anything,” he declared. “Keep that in mind. This has been a shit show from the beginning, and you were caught up in somebody else’s anger and somebody else’s machinations. Let’s just make sure that we get as much information as we can, so we can solve it.”
“And I don’t even know what it means to solve it now,” she replied. “I just want to go home.”
“What about the dig?”
“I don’t even know what happened there either, but, according to the Egyptian government, I’m not allowed to continue, with or without my father,” she murmured. “And, now that he’s gone, I doubt I’ll be allowed to continue at all.”
“You were only here for a few months though, right?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“What can you tell me about your father’s foreman?” he asked.
“I don’t know him. My knowledge is next to nothing.”
“Did you ever see him there with the kidnappers?”
She shook her head, thinking for a minute. “No, I didn’t.”
“You never heard his name mentioned?”
She shook her head again. “No, why would I? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“Well, he’s dead,” Hatch answered quietly. “We were thinking he was killed by your same kidnappers.”
“We don’t know,” he admitted, “because we don’t necessarily understand why they came after you in the first place. So, until we have more information, we don’t know whether you’re safe or not. We also don’t know if your escape was by design or if it was something that they weren’t planning on happening.”
She nodded, as memories filtered back. “I wondered that at the time.” She shivered. “Any chance of a shower?”
“Absolutely. It’s nine in the morning, by the way.” He walked over and pulled out two towels and a washcloth. “Here you go.”
She smiled as she accepted them. “Thank God. I’m really safe.” She rubbed her face with her hands. She heard another voice from the other room. “Who is that?” She turned, staring at Hatch suspiciously.
At that, Corbin poked his head around the corner. “Hi. It’s nice to officially meet you. I’m Corbin. I was with Hatch last night, when we found you.”
Some memory retention slid back into focus, but she didn’t know this other man, and his arrival had surprised her. She nodded mutely.
Hatch looked at her, smiled. “I’m Hatch. So go have a shower. You’ll feel better.”
And, with that, he walked out of the bedroom, leaving her all alone. Not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, she locked the door and quickly stepped into the bathroom, locking that door as well. She wondered if she would ever get to the point where she didn’t feel like she had to lock all the doors behind her.
But this wasn’t the time to worry about it. She had a shower, scrubbing her head free of what seemed like weeks’ worth of dust, dirt, and grime, but it had probably only been a few days. She had to admit that she didn’t even have a clear time frame of her ordeal. She remembered telling Hatch several things the previous night.
Right now, it was all a big jumbled mess. She didn’t know how clear or even how cognizant she had been last night—really it had been earlier in the morning. Regardless, definitely not her finest hour, but she bolstered herself with the reminder that she had gotten away, and that was what counted.
After her shower, she looked down at her discarded clothes and winced. She walked into her bedroom, toward the door, poked her head out, still wrapped up in two towels, and called out, “I don’t suppose either of you have any spare clothes, do you?”
Corbin replied, “I’ll go get you something. Sorry, we should have thought of that before.” And, with that, he quickly walked out of the hotel suite. “We need to get your belongings brought over.”
She looked at his retreating back. Hatch got up, walked over. “Don’t worry. In the meantime, Corbin will find you something.” Hatch went to his bag and pulled out a T-shirt and handed it to her. “For the moment though, you can wear this.”
While the shirt may have been huge, as she looked at the man in front of her, she realized that he was huge as well. “This looks like it’s big enough for two or possibly three of me.”
He smiled. “Good, it’ll cover you to your knees then. At least the shops are open now. Corbin shouldn’t be too long.”
“Okay, thank you.” She hesitated, looking about the suite. “Did you say there was coffee?”
He nodded.
“Let me put this on first and wrap up my hair to make sure it’ll dry. Then I’ll come out for coffee.”
“Take your time.”
She nodded and stepped back into the bathroom and yanked the towel off her head, so she could pull on the T-shirt. Then picking up the smaller towel again, she rubbed her hair to dry it off more. That was the best she could do right now, so she headed for the food and the coffee. And Hatch.
“Well, it’s not exactly big enough for two of me after all.” She gestured at the T-shirt. “You’re no small guy either.”
“Nope, I’m not,” he agreed, “and neither is Corbin.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry about earlier. His arrival just … startled me.”
“That’s fine.” Hatch nodded. “I suspect for the next little while, a lot of things will startle you.”
She winced. “And here I was hoping I would get over this stage faster than that.”
“Don’t expect too much from yourself, Millie,” he noted quietly. “None of this is easy.”
“No, I agree,” she admitted. “I just hadn’t expected it to be this hard.” She sat down at the kitchenette table, wishing she had pants on, but the thought of putting on her sand-crusted pants or her underwear that she had worn for at least three days straight was enough to make her revolt.
He just nodded and handed her a cup of coffee.
She sipped it and held it close to her chest. “I shouldn’t be such a coffee hog,” she murmured, “but something is just so comforting about it, so normal. It reminds me of home.”
He looked at her. “Copy that. Here things are very different. And yet places in the city sell an Americanized version.”
“I know, but that wasn’t my father’s thing.”
“Tell me about your father. What was he like?”
“Before my mother died or after?” she asked for clarification.
“Either. Preferably both,” he replied.
“Before my mother died, my father was a man full of laughter and joy. He was the father everybody would want to have. Always ready with the hugs, always with an adventure to tell. He wanted to go places, and his motto was to live life to the fullest,” she noted, with a gentle smile. “He was always on a dig, sometimes with my mother, … sometimes with me. He was rarely at home, so he was absent from my life a lot. He was this big, larger-than-life image, who would come blustering through the door, full of gifts and laughter, and it would completely change everything in my world. I think that’s why I fell in love with his job because I thought that was how it would always be.”
She shook her head. “And, as I grew older, while I worked with him during summer vacations and school holidays and such, it was,” she murmured, “so soothing, calming, and good. But it didn’t stay that way.”
“No, of course not,” Hatch agreed. “Reality sets in fast, doesn’t it?”
“Reality, or whatever passes for reality.” She shook her head. “I’m still not even sure what reality even is out here. In a way I didn’t see the harsh reality of a lot of the stuff we did. I didn’t handle the books. I didn’t handle the staffing. He had people he’d worked with for years, so those details weren’t part of my life. I just got to come to the digs and bury myself happily in the artifacts.”
“Did you have anything to do with the shipping?”
“No, before my mother died, that was her thing, … and afterward he hired a company to deal with it.”
“Do you know the name of that company?”
She frowned, as she thought about it. “I’m not exactly sure. It was some import-export company. I didn’t really have anything to do with them.”
“How long have you worked with your father?”
“Off and on for years,” she replied, “but I’ve only been here on this particular dig with him for a few months. He wanted me to come, and I didn’t really want to.” She shrugged. “But, well, I came.”
“Did you get the sense that he thought maybe his time with you was maybe his last time? Was there any inkling of that?”
She frowned, as she looked at him. “I don’t want to think that because that would make me feel like he had some premonition about what was coming, and I don’t really believe that. I think he just realized that the passage of time was happening faster than he expected and that I was already an adult and all grown up.”
“Yet you didn’t want to work with him?”
“Well, as it came to be, beginning after my mother’s death, he wasn’t the same happy-go-lucky father I’d had before,” she murmured. “I don’t know …” She stopped, then thought about the things that needed to be said and swallowed hard. She took a couple sips of coffee and then continued. “We had words a couple times. He was a much more difficult, a much angrier man. In fact, it was hard to be around him sometimes, and, the longer I was with him, the more I realized how much he had changed, and those changes weren’t good ones. He was difficult, and certain things about him I didn’t really want to accept. It had become much easier to just not be around him.”
She stopped and looked at her coffee, now getting cold in her hand. “Did he miss me? Maybe.” She shrugged. “I think he missed my mother terribly. I missed her too, of course, but I also lost the father I’d had before. And neither one of us could get what we wanted. Now that I think about it, it was all about Mother. She was the glue that bonded us all together.”
“Your parents were really close?”
“Yes,” she said, “although … you have to understand that I spent a lot of time in boarding schools. I spent a lot of time on holidays with them, and then I was gone again. So my time with them may not have been as realistic as I assumed it was at the time. Looking back, it was likely not at all indicative of what it was like all the time.”
“Right. So, in your opinion, would you say they had a good marriage?”
She nodded. “I would have said that, yes. However, I also wouldn’t have thought that my father would lie to me about her death.”
“Was it just too hard for him to speak of, you think? Would it just bring up so many painful memories that he thought this would be easier for him?”
She stared at Hatch. “My father wasn’t emotional. He wasn’t what anyone would consider as an easygoing guy,” she explained cautiously. “So I’m not really sure how to take that question. Now, if what you’re getting to is asking me if he had anything to do with my mom’s death, I would say absolutely not, no way. In many ways, they suited each other very well. Yet, when she had enough of his ways or his demands—because he was not easy to work with—I think she would choose another dig, then go away and work on that for a while. She had connections all over the world, and I know that better than anything. Sometimes she would just tell me that she was taking a break, and she would head down to South America.”
“Is that why you went to South America?”
She winced. “You could say that.” She nodded. “I wanted to be closer to my mother somehow. I never got a chance to say goodbye. I never had a chance to even understand that we were close to losing her. And it changes you. A sudden death like that? It’s hard to recover from because you don’t realize you even need to recover at first. And, even now, after all these years”—she sighed—“I thought I’d dealt with it, until I was in that room, talking to my kidnapper, or the one who had arranged the kidnapping.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“He said something about my mother’s death but spoke in a tone of voice or with a dynamic I didn’t understand. He was quite surprised that I hadn’t known my mother was murdered. I think he realized what a shock it was to me.”
“I would imagine so,” he murmured, “and, from his perspective, there was no reason for you not to have known.”
“Maybe,” she murmured, “but obviously my father didn’t want me to have that information.”
“Was that because he didn’t want you to have that information or that he couldn’t share it?”
She looked at Hatch, cocking her head.
“I guess I’m going back to the issue of emotions,” Hatch added. “Is there any chance that he cared so much that he just couldn’t speak about it?”
“I mean, it’s possible,” she replied cautiously. “All I can tell you is, … well, I got only the bare minimum of details. She was buried immediately, a graveside service for the two of us only, and that was it. It was all over and done with in a matter of days. He moved on, and I was supposed to move on too. And I felt a bitterness regarding that …” She struggled completing her sentence, and then she sighed again. “Well, as you can tell, I didn’t do a very good job of dealing with it.”
“When a girl loses her mother, and they are very close, … it’s hard to move on,” he noted gently. “Sounds like you need to spend a little bit of time and let yourself grieve her loss.”
“When do I do that?” she asked, staring at him. “Because it’s not just my mother now, you know? It’s my father too.”
“And it wouldn’t be surprising if you also felt some residual anger there too,” he murmured.
She stared at him. “I don’t think there’s some anger,” she noted, her voice getting stronger. “I think there’s a lot of anger. Because now? … Now I’m wondering what else he may have kept from me. I’m wondering if something he was up to resulted in my mother’s death. I’m wondering if there was, … well, I can’t help but wonder how much he knew about and how much he was involved in the events that brought about my mother’s death.”
“And this man, the kidnapper, he admitted to having a hand in your mother’s death?”
“He plain and simply told me so. He said that a man who worked for him killed her. I’m not sure that the death was planned as much as maybe a case of somebody going overboard. He mentioned it himself,” she murmured, thinking about it. “I don’t remember his exact words, but that was the gist of it.”
“Let’s put your account into writing,” he suggested. “Some of the other details will come to you over time.”
She snorted. “And what about not allowing those details to come back because I’d be totally okay to not remember those anymore.”
“That you don’t want them right now is understandable,” he noted, “but you will want them later, when you’ve got some time and distance from all this.”
“Maybe,” she murmured, “but it sure doesn’t feel like it right now.” She held out her cup. “Any chance of a second cup of coffee?”
He immediately bounded to his feet. “Absolutely. I have food for you too.” He quickly loaded up a plate for her.
She stared at it. “When you’re caught up in a situation like that, you’re afraid you’ll never get food again. Even now, I want to just move this food closer to me, in case you might want to take it away from me.”
“Did they do things like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like withhold food?”
She shook her head. “No, not really. I mean, I don’t want to say that they were good kidnappers because that just sounds so wrong,” she murmured. “Honestly they had an agenda. Whether they’re the ones who let me out or not, they didn’t treat me terribly while I was there. They let me have water, when I asked for it, and they took me out for bathroom breaks, when I needed it.” She paused. “Yet, when I wanted help for my father, … there was absolutely no help coming.”
“No, but then their beef was obviously with your father,” Hatch pointed out.
She nodded. “Yeah, and frankly, as far I’m concerned, my beef was with him too. I don’t have him around to give me any answers anymore, and that,” she noted, “is breaking my heart.”
Hatch tried to keep her calm and to feed her, then gave her another cup of coffee. He was waiting for Corbin to return. Hatch needed to ask her more questions about her ordeal. He wanted to make sure they understood it all a bit better. He also needed to confirm that she wasn’t holding back any information. She had been kept under lock and key, and that had to make things muddy. So far, watching her eat and getting her some time to unwind seemed like a necessary step. When she finally took a break from the food, he asked, “Is that better?”
She smiled at him. “Yes, thank you. So I presume the US government sent you.”
He nodded. “Yes, and, as I told you, I’m part of a special division.”
She nodded. “So I presume that my father managed to get the word out.”
“Well, somebody did. That is information I don’t have.” He shrugged. “We get orders, and we act on them.”
“Of course,” she replied, “and it doesn’t really matter. It was just in the back of my mind, wondering how any of this came to be.”
“More to the point,” he continued, “let’s figure out how the kidnappers knew where you were and how they decided that this was a good idea. I’d like to figure out what it was that they really wanted from your father.”
“I’m not even so much concerned about that,” she admitted. “All I want is to make sure that they don’t think that they can come back after me again because that is definitely not what I want to deal with.”
“Good point,” he murmured. “So it sounds like they were looking for information on a dig.”
“Right.” She nodded. “And I didn’t know anything about it,” she immediately clarified.
“Got it. Nobody here is accusing you.”
She reached up, scrubbed her face. “You’re not accusing me. I get that. But I feel like I’m responsible for something here, and I don’t even know what that could be.”
“You’re not responsible for anything,” he declared. “Keep that in mind. This has been a shit show from the beginning, and you were caught up in somebody else’s anger and somebody else’s machinations. Let’s just make sure that we get as much information as we can, so we can solve it.”
“And I don’t even know what it means to solve it now,” she replied. “I just want to go home.”
“What about the dig?”
“I don’t even know what happened there either, but, according to the Egyptian government, I’m not allowed to continue, with or without my father,” she murmured. “And, now that he’s gone, I doubt I’ll be allowed to continue at all.”
“You were only here for a few months though, right?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“What can you tell me about your father’s foreman?” he asked.
“I don’t know him. My knowledge is next to nothing.”
“Did you ever see him there with the kidnappers?”
She shook her head, thinking for a minute. “No, I didn’t.”
“You never heard his name mentioned?”
She shook her head again. “No, why would I? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“Well, he’s dead,” Hatch answered quietly. “We were thinking he was killed by your same kidnappers.”
