Sophie's Phone
Chapter 03 - Sophie's Phone
Sophie reached into her pocket, fingers closing around the phone she'd carried into the room, the one small advantage Marcus apparently hadn't anticipated when he'd slammed that door.
No signal. The storage room's concrete walls blocked every bar completely.
She tried anyway, holding the phone against the ceiling, the door, every corner of the small room, watching the signal indicator refuse to move beyond a single, flickering, useless half-bar.
"He cut the landline weeks ago," Eleanor said, watching her. "And this room is essentially a bunker. The original owners built it during the Cold War, concrete walls thick enough to block nearly everything."
"Someone will notice I'm missing," Sophie said. "I told my roommate I was coming here today."
"Did you tell her exactly where," Eleanor asked.
Sophie's stomach dropped. She'd told Jess she was driving to the old family property. She hadn't given an address, hadn't shared her location, had simply said she'd be back before dinner and would text when she was heading home.
"Not exactly," she admitted.
"Then we have time before anyone comes looking," Eleanor said. "And Marcus knows this property considerably better than anyone who might eventually search it."
Sophie forced herself to think practically, the same focused, problem-solving instinct she'd relied on throughout college and her first year of nursing school, refusing to let panic replace planning.
She inventoried the room carefully. Plastic storage boxes, an old metal shelving unit, the pipe Eleanor was tied to, a small ventilation grate near the ceiling considerably too small for either of them to fit through, and the locked door itself, heavy wood with a brass bolt on the outside.
"The pipe," Sophie said, examining the mounting where it connected to the wall. "It's old. The bracket holding it looks considerably weaker than the pipe itself."
She pulled experimentally, feeling the bracket shift slightly against aging concrete.
"He checks once a day," Eleanor said. "Usually around nine in the evening. If you're going to try something, you need to do it before then."
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Sophie checked her phone's clock. It was four thirty-seven in the afternoon.
She had approximately four and a half hours to figure out how to get both of them out of a locked room in an empty house, before a man who had already proven himself willing to hold a seventy-year-old woman captive for nineteen days came back to discover he now had two prisoners instead of one.
