The President's Daughter - Mariah Stewart [111]
“Damn it!” Dina banged her heels again, the only outlet she had for her anger and frustration.
How did the TV action heroes escape from those dark nasty places where the villains had locked them, hands tied behind their backs?
Oh, they always had something in their pockets that they managed to work out. Or they found a way to spin straw into gold, then use the gold to send an SOS through the window with the aid of the one ray of light in the room.
“Got the straw, got the open window, but no way to spin the straw into gold.” Dina stared up through the broken window.
Broken window. Broken glass . . . Dina mentally slapped her forehead.
She began the tedious task of scootching herself along the floor carefully, mindful of how uncomfortable a bottom full of splinters could be, until she reached the opposite side of the small room. Turning herself around, she backed toward the wall, forcing her nearly numb fingers to search through the straw until they located a piece of glass.
“Too small,” she muttered as her fingers rejected a sharp, smooth shard. “Let’s see what else is in here. . . .
“Ow!” she exclaimed as a sliver poked into one side of her hand, forcing her to figure out a way to extract it before she could continue her search for a slice long enough to reach from her fingers to the rope that bound her wrists.
It took her well over an hour to find it.
“Thank you, thank you,” she murmured, even as the blood from her fingers made the glass too slippery to maneuver. She tugged at the back of her T-shirt, tried to wipe away the blood so that the glass wouldn’t slide from her hands.
Dina knew that, sooner or later, her captor would return. She wanted to be ready.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Before setting out for Georgetown, Simon paused to listen, one last time, to the message Dina had left on his answering machine while he was in the shower, just to hear the way she said his name. He’d tried to call her back but had to settle for her cell phone’s voice mail. While he wished she’d stay put for just a little longer, he’d have had to be deaf not to have caught the tinge of excitement in her voice at the prospect of a new project. Knowing how rough the past few weeks had been for her, he figured she was entitled to slip off for a few hours to do something she loved. And it wasn’t as if she were going into Henderson proper, where she was likely to be seen. As long as she was careful—and he was certain she would be—she should be fine.
The ride to Norton’s gave Simon time to go through his short list of suspects and motives. By the time he reached Norton’s house, he’d gone over all of the most likely scenarios and he’d had an epiphany.
“Neither Stinson nor Fritz was involved in Blythe’s murder or in the attempt to run down Dina,” Simon told Norton as the older man opened the door to admit him. “They both treated the story as if it was old news, as if they hadn’t given a thought to either Blythe or Graham in a very long time. But for someone this is very much a current event. I think that makes the motive to kill Blythe—and therefore Dina—personal, not political.”
Simon sat at the round table in Norton’s breakfast room, waiting for a reaction. It was a long time coming.
“Why come to me with this, Simon,” Norton finally broke his silence, “since you’ve made it clear that you don’t trust me?”
“Philip, I apologize for some of the things I said to you,” Simon told him, not above eating crow when he was wrong. “I guess my nose was out of joint because of the book thing.”
“Because you thought that I chose you for the project so that I could control what you wrote.”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that my only concern was to prevent knowledge of Dina’s existence from becoming public? That my goal was to protect her life, not her father’s reputation? And that I thought that I could trust you to understand that, to respect that concern for this young woman’s safety?”
“I do now. I’m sorry