Dee chuckled and shook his head. “It’s what they call a ‘red herring’, girl. All bogus stuff. If I throw out some fake clues, you’ll chew on them so long that you wouldn’t know which direction to go. It served its purpose. You were so puzzled that you didn’t think about all I was doing,” he said proudly. “I had been doing research on you, finding out the best time to kidnap you, seeing the places where you hung out, when your dad and mom weren’t around, things like that. I learned a lot about you, my lady. We realized that you were so scatterbrained with amnesia that we could keep throwing false info at you for weeks before we had to come up with a new plan.”

“But the pictures of me in the youth group—”

“Now those were real, Laura. You really were a rotten kid,” Dee said with a laugh. “The little, er, ‘homework’ that I did showed me that you may have called yourself a Christian, but your actions were almost the exact opposite. You played the people in that youth group like you were playing a violin, and the weird thing is, they put up with it. Man, they were a longsuffering group. I bet the group is almost glad you were kidnapped. Now they have a chance to enjoy life for a spell.”

“I know,” Laura said, wiping her face with her hand, feeling dizzy. “Believe it or not, that part of my memory is fairly strong. It’s been coming back, little by little. I can remember enough to realize that I hurt people.”

Dee cocked his head to one side. “How so?”

Laura looked at the floor. “Not so much by injury or insult but by negligence. I—I really didn’t care about pushing anyone around, as long as they didn’t get in my way. If one thing stands out in my mind, it was my obsession to remain in the spotlight. To me, that was the best thing about the youth group. My own custom-made stage show.”

She clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. “I recall the name of a girl. Debbie, I think. I purposely left her out of a party we had to let her know that she hadn’t ‘arrived’ yet into our social scene. Other kids told me how she cried the night we had the party, but it never bothered me a bit.”

Laura looked up with a miserable gaze.

“There was a time I refused to give a girl a ride home from church because she didn’t fit my description of stylish. And then there was the time I refused to sing the worship songs because I was mad at the youth pastor. I got a group of teens to go along with me and stage a walkout. I could go on. What a creep I’ve been.” She started to walk across the room.

Dee moved toward the doorway, blocking it from her escape. She knew she couldn’t put up the least bit of resistance. She was dizzy, and her arm was extremely weak from the glass injury. “So what will you do with me?”

“Your dad, who will remain nameless at this time, is more than adequately rich. He’s got plenty of money to go around. I worked under him in his company for three years, and I watched for any way that I could gain an advantage, learn about how he made money. You know, learn business secrets. Well,” Dee laughed, leaning against the doorpost, “all that time I tried to learn the business, I was overlooking the easiest way to get quick money and right from your dad’s pocket, no less!”

He pointed at Laura.

“It was you. He’d pay me enough money that I’d never need to work again.”

Laura sat down and crossed her arms, staring at the floor. “Are you going to kill me? Would you take that step if you have to?”

For the first time, Dee looked into her eyes. “No. I cannot do that, Laura. In fact, I have some troubling news.”

Laura looked up skeptically.

Dee cleared his throat. “My intent, when I first thought of this scheme, was to keep you for ransom, that’s true enough. Your daddy had enough money to compete with King Solomon in all his glory. We knew your parents were going out of town and that you were pretty sick. You were going in and out of bouts of amnesia. Nobody knew why, so they stuck you in a hospital. You made so many enemies that hardly anyone visited you in the hospital, so it was easy to take you away, right out of the room, in front of the nurses. Cindy and I saw our way out of a sorry lifestyle, and this looked like the meal ticket. The idea was to keep you hidden out in the open, so to speak. We registered you under a false last name at the camp. The police were so busy looking in abandoned buildings and warehouses, who would have thought that we would enroll you as a camper in a public facility? Everything looked like it was going well, except for one small thing that was too big to ignore.”

Laura tilted her head. “What’s that?”

“Your little diary,” he said, looking away. “Those little lines of thought that you scrawled on the yellow pad. When you woke up in the car, you set off on a whole new mission in your life. At first I thought you were trying to buy our favor, but I soon saw that you really were obsessed with getting things right with Christ. You were hurting, wanting to restore a relationship with those you hurt—including Jesus, more than anyone else. I can hardly believe I’m doing this, but when I saw how serious you were about your walk with God, I realized that I was playing with fire that I couldn’t handle. You are serious, missy, and I respect that more than you’ll ever know. The deal’s off. I’m taking you back. I just can’t go through with it.”

Laura shook her head. “I’m not sure I heard you right. You’re not going to kidnap me? It’s over? What’s troubling about that?”

“Troubling for me, girl. I was ready to make a mint off of you. Now it’s back to poverty as my chosen lifestyle, and believe it or not, I really don’t mind it after what I saw you do. You see—”

Dee was about to say something else but then jerked violently. His eyes widened, and he grunted thickly without making any clear words. Laura watched in wonder as Dee’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped toward the ground. He had been struck from behind.

Laura backed against the wall and saw a man walk through the room carrying a gun.