She took breakfast back to the couch, went to the bookcase, grabbed the Riverside Shakespeare. She could always count on Bill Shakespeare for a tale of revenge, and a pound of Embower’s flesh sounded like the perfect inspiration. The table of contents remained intact on a wispy page preceding the missing block, but all of the comedies and the first three histories had fallen victim to the great removal. She double-checked the first page after the gap.

709.

She stared at the number with the eye that didn’t hurt. “Hold on.”

She looked back at the table of contents. Richard III started at 708. Yesterday, the first page she’d seen had footnotes for Henry VI, Part 3. Now, she looked at 709, the second page of Richard III.

Someone had ripped out page 707–708.

Someone had ripped it out last night.

But why would Embower do it? The page hadn’t showed any notes from Chapman.

Caitlin shut the book and looked around the room with fresh eyes. Two beanbag chairs sat near the door. Maybe in some twisted reality she and Embower were supposed to sit and read to each other. But why were there two laundry baskets?

She got up and checked the pair of plastic baskets near the shower. One wet towel on the left, three clean and dry on the right. She’d used one yesterday, so it could be her own, but even in this subterranean hell, it would have dried by now. She grabbed the terry cloth, felt enough water to wring out.

Two chairs, two laundry baskets, 708.

365 × 2 = 730 days

She couldn’t remember the exact date Chapman had disappeared, but the rough math worked.

She factored in a week or two of disorientation, guesstimated the difference between her arrival and Chapman’s last night, got slightly less than two years.

Embower hadn’t discovered and torn Chapman’s notes from the Riverside. Angela had found the biggest book she could and tore out one page a day to keep track of time.

“The police would never find my Angel in the Bro-duce farmland,” he’d said.

Caitlin had thought that meant he’d buried Chapman somewhere else.

He had—in a cell behind the playroom bookshelf—and she was still alive.

After two years, Angela Chapman is still freaking alive.

Caitlin’s heart wanted to explode, her mouth wanted to scream, but her brain wouldn’t allow either.

Stop … breathe . . . think.

Caitlin needed to get her a message.

There were no writing utensils in the playroom, but the two shelves held hundreds of thousands of words, and Caitlin knew the text in one of those books better than anyone on the planet.

She took Fallen Angels and the dictionary to the torture table and worked with her back to the camera.