Locked Inside Read online

  KIDNAPPED!

  “Get out,” said Ms. Slaight.

  There was something in her voice. Worse than before. Worse than ever before.

  My fault, Marnie thought. My fault.

  Marnie got out. She would rather walk anyway.

  But Ms. Slaight got out, too. She grasped Marnie’s arm and forced her away from the car. She looked down into Marnie’s face, and her expression was like nothing Marnie had ever seen before. It hypnotized her. As if from a distance, she could hear Ms. Slaight speaking.

  “I didn’t want it to be this way between us, Marnie Skyedottir. But from the very first time I met you, I think I knew that it would have to be.” And she raised her other hand. There was something in her clenched fist.

  Marnie later remembered everything else, but not the actual feel of the sharp blow to her head.

  OTHER BOOKS BY NANCY WERLIN

  Are You Alone on Purpose?

  Black Mirror

  Double Helix

  Impossible

  The Killer’s Cousin

  The Rules of Survival

  LOCKED

  INSIDE

  NANCY WERLIN

  speak

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  For Maxwell Romotsky

  Everyone should be lucky enough

  to have an Uncle Max

  SPEAK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Delacorte Press, 2000

  Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Nancy Werlin, 2000

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Werlin, Nancy.

  Locked inside / Nancy Werlin.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After she is kidnapped from the exclusive boarding school

  she attends, heiress Marnie Skyedottir must rethink her idealized relationship

  with her mother, her own sense of who she is, and her relationships with others.

  EISBN: 9781101576960

  [1. Self-perception—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction.

  3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Kidnapping—Fiction.] 1. Title.

  PZ7.W4713Lo 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008024293

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that

  it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

  circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover

  other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume

  any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart!

  What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne,

  The House of the Seven Gables

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  CHAPTER

  1

  At sixteen years of age, Marnie Skyedottir had a personal net worth of $235.27 million. That she made do on $50 a week was the work of Marnie’s guardian, Max Tomlinson, and Marnie knew that one day—on her twenty-first birthday, to be exact—she could, if she chose, have revenge.

  “I’ll fire your sanctimonious butt, Max,” she told her computer screen, where a characteristically lengthy and courteous e-mail from Max lay open. (… As you know, the regulations for Halsett Academy for Girls clearly stipulate that students on academic probation should not have access to excess personal funds. …) Marnie could almost hear Max speaking the words in his Mississippi lawyer’s drawl that, for all its leisured pace, somehow never sounded any less than definite.

  “Your years managing my life will be over”—she jabbed at the keyboard with satisfaction and precision—“like that.”

  Max’s e-mail disappeared into the Trash. Marnie blinked and only then realized her eyes hurt. Burned. And her shoulders ached. She flexed them, and shut her eyelids tightly for a few seconds. Well, no wonder she was in pain. Before the reply from Max had arrived, she’d been online for a while, chasing that clever, thieving, infuriating Elf through the dark winding virtual alleys of Upper Paliopolis. She glanced down at the clock on her computer. 5:43 A.M. Max was up early in New York City, in that huge duplex apartment on Central Park West that Marnie was supposed to call home. Ha.

  Wait. 5:43 A.M.?

  “No!” Marnie moaned instinctively, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. Dorm walls weren’t very thick. But it couldn’t be. She couldn’t have been online for over ten hours! She directed a fierce glare at the clock, as if she could will it to spin backward to, say, 10 P.M. Early enough for her to go over her chem notes and then go to bed at midnight, like a good preppy Halsett girl—like Jenna Lowry or Tarasyn Pearce or someone like that.

  Instead the clock went forward. 5:44 A.M. And her computer beeped as words appeared in the Paliopolis chat window. A message from that pesky Elf glowed neon in the dark of Marnie’s room.

  Giving up? The sneer was implicit.

  Marnie hesitated. She disliked her chemistry class with its brooding, angry teacher, and she wasn’t doing well in it. There was no chance of sleep now, but if she at least spent an hour with the notes, maybe she could pass the test today.

  Thanks for the spellbook, Sorceress, the Elf gibed. You’ll be a lot more helpless without it. I
’m looking forward to watching your rating plummet. While mine soars! The message was accompanied by a belching raspberry noise; Paliopolis sound effects were crude but effective.

  Well, who needed sleep? The Elf had been on just as long as Marnie, and if he could keep going, so could she. Or rather, so could her alter ego, the Sorceress Llewellyne. It was not for nothing that Llewellyne had the highest player rating in all of Paliopolis.

  Marnie grinned and attacked the keyboard. Dream on, you drooling nitwit, she typed to the Elf.

  She had more than two hours before she had to be in class, anyway.

  The chemistry test was straight from the book; the kind that anyone who had read over her notes could have passed easily. Marnie amused herself by drawing nooses and happy faces wherever she didn’t have a clue. It only took a couple of minutes. Inspired, she then added two tiny mice in chains next to the final question regarding the nature of covalent bonds, and had difficulty suppressing a fit of exhausted giggles. A chuckle escaped anyway. Marnie didn’t need to look up to see the teacher’s sharp glance. She could feel it.

  “Something funny, Ms. Skyedottir?” At Marnie’s shoulder, Ms. Slaight carefully enunciated each absurd syllable of Marnie’s last name. Marnie could feel the sudden alert attention of the entire class. Ms. Slaight reached down and plucked up Marnie’s test to scan. “You’re not Picasso,” said Ms. Slaight finally. Not even a glimmer of amusement could be found on her face. “I assume you’re done?”

  “My artistic vision is exhausted,” said Marnie blithely. “Take it away.” Then she realized her left hand was embedded in her hair, twisting nervously. She pulled the hand down. She was not going to let Ms. Slaight, of all people, rattle her. She watched as the teacher took her red pen and marked a big F at the top of her test.

  “Back to work, people,” said Ms. Slaight. She was holding her thin shoulders tensely. “Ms. Skyedottir’s little display is over.” The class sank again into the test, and Marnie watched Ms. Slaight return to her own desk.

  The chemistry teacher was thirtyish; a term substitute who had taken over the class at the beginning of the semester when the regular teacher went on maternity leave. Marnie had heard this was her first actual teaching job. That might explain her defensive jitteriness in the classroom, and possibly also the pathetic, pieced-together wardrobe. Today, for example, she was wearing scuffed black pumps, a dull brown skirt, and a lime-green bow blouse.

  Discomfort with teaching might also explain the controlled, but very present, edge to Ms. Slaight’s voice whenever she spoke to Marnie. Not to mention the way Ms. Slaight always pronounced Marnie’s last name, so carefully, so distinctly. Okay, it was a ridiculous name; embarrassing even if, by some miracle, you had never heard of Marnie’s mother. Skye had been inspired by Icelandic naming conventions, and Marnie could only be relieved she hadn’t taken things further. Cirrus Skyedottir. Thunder Skyedottir. Asteroid Skyedottir. Oh, Marnie had a long mental list of first names she might have had, if Skye—who had been cheerfully capable of anything—hadn’t exercised rare restraint.

  Skye.

  Even on all the legal contracts that defined her small empire of recordings, books, and financial dealings, Marnie’s mother had been simply Skye. She had cut her birth name from her life so completely that none of the media types had ever been able to discover who she really was, or where she’d come from. Marnie often wondered about these same questions, even though she knew that Skye would have said grandly that it did not matter.

  The self you invent, Skye had written, the self you live by—that is the self who is important. You are who you choose, consciously or unconsciously, to be. It is better to be conscious. It is better to take control. That was from her first bestseller, Inventing Your Soul.

  In fact, to Marnie’s knowledge, Skye had never talked—either to Marnie or publicly—about her life before she got her first recording contract at twenty-one. Marnie knew absolutely nothing about Skye’s parents or her childhood. She didn’t know if Skye had had brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, grandparents. For all Marnie knew, Skye had magically appeared in the world at twenty-one, fully grown, singing solo in a church choir in … actually, Marnie didn’t even know exactly where it was that the record producer had first heard Skye. Georgia? Mississippi, where Max was originally from? Marnie knew that Max’s relationship with Skye—more than friends, less than lovers, far more complicated than employee with employer—went way back. It dated from before the time that Skye had hired Max to handle all her myriad legal affairs, from long before Marnie’s birth.

  Yes, Max certainly knew more about Skye than Marnie did. Three years ago she had asked him directly about Skye’s past. It had been in the middle of her birthday dinner with him and the housekeeper, so he couldn’t escape. He had looked intently at Marnie for several seconds, his face unreadable, and Marnie had dared to hope. But then he had said with uncharacteristic brevity, “One day,” and changed the subject. Marnie had ignored his and Mrs. Shapiro’s attempts to draw her into the conversation, had put down her fork and fumed.

  But from that day, her desire to know had warred with the opposite feeling. Marnie was no fool. Skye would not have concealed, not have run from, a happy past. And the lack of expression on Max’s face told its own tale.

  Perhaps it had been then—and not at Skye’s death—that she had begun to feel the deep fear.

  Now Marnie slumped in her chair and waited, unthinking, for the bell and release. She had the beginnings of a headache. It was lack of sleep. Only that.

  She blamed the Elf. Before he came online, she used to play for only two or three hours a night.

  Ms. Slaight worsened the headache immediately after class. “I have English,” Marnie said to her. “Can’t we do this later?” But she wasn’t surprised when the peculiar teacher merely pointed, silently, at the chair next to her desk. Marnie sat down sideways, on the edge. Then, as Ms. Slaight spoke, Marnie mouthed the words just a breath behind her. She’d heard it all recently, from other teachers. Ms. Slaight was not very original. And she spoke almost robotically, as if she’d memorized the little speech from a book on teaching methods.

  You’re not trying. You’re a smart girl, clearly able to do the work. I’m willing to hear about any personal problems. I would like to help. We can arrange a conference. …

  Marnie didn’t say anything, and Ms. Slaight got more and more angry, even offended. “Look at me!” she exclaimed finally. Marnie did so, with her best blank face. Ms. Slaight had gotten quite red. She was practically spitting. Marnie wondered, idly, if you could have a heart attack when you were only around thirty, or if you had to spend decades working yourself into fits first.

  “Marnie Skyedottir,” Ms. Slaight said. Again she leaned viciously on Marnie’s last name. “You really think you’re someone.”

  Marnie stilled. Then her tired mind replayed the exact way the chemistry teacher had pronounced Skyedottir just now, and a bitter taste filled her mouth. At once Ms. Slaight made sense. All this rage was somehow aimed at Skye. This was a person who had found Skye—her idiosyncratic belief system, her writings and speeches, her wealth and success, her oddities, her flaunted fatherless daughter—personally offensive. There were such people. Max had a whole file cabinet filled with old hate mail. Marnie had once overheard him speaking with Mrs. Shapiro about it.

  Marnie discovered her fists were clenched. She might criticize Skye herself sometimes, in the far reaches of her own head, but that anyone else should dare!

  “In this world,” Ms. Slaight had gone on, “you’ll find that princessy behavior will get you precisely nowhere. In this world, an attitude like yours—”

  Marnie stood up and, startled, Ms. Slaight stopped speaking. Marnie looked her right in the eye. In a heartbeat, several possible things to say flashed into her mind. What she, Marnie Skyedottir, thought of creepy skinny ugly chemistry teachers and their attitudes. The fact that she, Marnie Skyedottir, was rich (or would be) and Ms. Slaight wasn’t and tha
t was what the world cared about, not chemistry tests. That Ms. Slaight needed to get a life, quick, because the one she had right now was a pretty sorry excuse. In the opinion of Marnie Skyedottir.

  She did not say any of these things. Instead, she carefully turned her head to the side, presenting Ms. Slaight with a full view of her right cheek. Then, as carefully, and smiling, she turned her face the other way, showing the other cheek.

  Matthew 5:39.

  Ms. Slaight got it. She gasped. Marnie coolly brushed past her and walked out of the classroom. She even made it to English on time. That would have made her laugh if, underneath it all, she hadn’t been so angry.

  It wasn’t important, she tried to tell herself. People like Ms. Slaight were not important. Skye would say … well.

  Actually, Skye would not approve. Skye would say that Marnie had misapplied Matthew.

  But then, Skye had never been Skye’s daughter.

  Marnie took in a calming breath. She would not think about it. She would not.

  Tonight she would track down the Elf and get back her spellbook. He’d be online; he always was lately. In fact, he’d been teasing her, or rather, the Sorceress, very particularly for a few weeks now. It was time to crush him for his impertinence.

  Maybe in the tunnels below the city? Marnie knew Paliopolis better than anyone except its programmers and the Dungeon Master, and even without her spellbook, she had a trick or ten.

  As her English teacher drew a triangular diagram of a well-constructed essay on the white board, Marnie planned her evening, mentally mapping out the tunnels and sewers and traps and dangers of the cyberspace world of Paliopolis. The Elf had the overconfidence of a lucky newbie. And okay, he was a little smart, too. But that didn’t matter. If she didn’t get him in the next few days, she’d get him next week during spring break. She’d said no to Max about going home to New York, and so she’d be right here at school. She’d have long uninterrupted hours available to go online.

  The Elf had better watch out.

  CHAPTER