Instead her eyes met floor-length blue drapes, matching the canopy on the four-poster bed in which she lay, and the scarecrow arm of a tree, black and leafless, tapping on an unfamiliar window pane. She sighed in despair, realizing that it hadn’t been a bad dream but had really happened. Driving Glenda’s car, being abducted by Maxwell Robert Bruce Ross, the most disturbing and dramatically handsome man she had ever met, meeting up with Angus and Andy, the boat ride to this remote island and eventually coming to this house—all were real. She remembered watching Angus handle the boat, carefully memorizing the sequence of the controls in case the boat provided her with the means of escape—and the realization that, in his turn, Maxwell must have been watching her in secret amusement, knowing as he did that Angus was merely dropping them off and taking the boat back to the mainland. That had been a severe disappointment, because she sensed that she had found a friend in Angus. She had gauged his age to be between forty-five and fifty, which would have given him enough time to have learned that things weren’t always as they appeared, and she had hoped that he would be more receptive to the truth than Maxwell was.
