Perils of snooping

By Rayron D’Olier

Emily’s first, and rather absurd, thought when her captors left the room was, “Wow, I’m really tied up!” And so she was. But she found that she was not as frightened as she would have expected considering that she was completely helpless and totally at the mercy of others. They could come and go as they liked. Emily couldn’t even scratch her nose, much less move so much as an inch from the chair to which she was tied. And with a mouth full of knotted scarf, there was little hope of any coherent communication.

It was her fault in a way. She had decided to play the private eye with no qualifications whatsoever. As a new employee in the accounting department of a rather large shipping company, Emily had noticed certain unexplained irregularities. Her inquiries had been met with vague, dismissive answers and condescending reassurances, along with some not so subtle hints that perhaps the merchandise in the older, less accessible, area of the warehouse complex was, just perhaps, none of her affair. She was satisfied with this for a time, but after six months or so on the job, her curiosity had gotten the better of her and she had to know what was back there. Emily wanted to know simply to scratch an itch, but also, as an accountant, she didn’t want to be blamed if the books were found to be not quite exactly. And whatever was coming and going in and out of the old warehouse was not being accounted for in the proper manner. Emily was a little offended by that on basic principles in addition to her simple desire to know the whole story. She was, even she would admit, a rather obsessive, detail-oriented little person.

Yes, Emily was a bit of a straight arrow. She was also quite beautiful. Her face was a perfect oval with large eyes, a slightly hooked nose, pale skin and a mouth like a rosebud. Her hair was not quite black and was most frequently gathered in some sort of loose bun or ponytail. She was a small, but sturdy woman. At an even 100 pounds and around 5’ 3” one wouldn’t think that she would project much of a presence, but her beauty, her air of intelligent competence and her taut body, honed by relentless exercise, actually made for quite an impressive appearance. She walked with the natural grace of a dancer and people were always looking at her in a sort of startled way as if they didn’t quite expect her. She had many suitors and at the age of 29 had finally met one that she thought might do very nicely. She and Freddie had even discussed marriage.

Her clothing made little concession to fads of fashion. Her casual look would not have been out of place at a country club on Long Island in 1955 but neither did it seem anachronistic. Her business attire consisted of linen and silk blouses and more or less knee-length skirts. Sometimes the skirts were part of a suit and stockings were white or natural color. Emily really disliked high heels, but was very fond of dressy low-heel and flat pumps. Her shoes were the only part of fashion where Emily really expressed herself and her closet was full of low-cut, low-heel pumps with bows, straps, flowers and buckles, but all in rather conservative colors. She also wore glasses in preference to contact lenses, but these were plain black frames with little distinction. On her lovely face, though, they managed to be an enhancement.

Emily was dressed in a typical work outfit when she stole out to the old warehouse to “snoop around a little.” Dark gray pinstripe coat and skirt, white linen blouse, pearls, natural color pantyhose and low-cut flats with double maryjane straps right above the toes. This was not perhaps the best costume to go a-snooping in, but she had decided that working late would be the best excuse for being the last of the staff on the site and might also suffice if she were seen engaged in said snooping. After all, she could just say that as a relatively new employee, she found herself curious about the place and the part of it that she was most interested in exploring was very interesting in and of itself. One hundred years ago it had been a factory for the production of horse-drawn vehicles and was considered an architectural curiosity by everyone who worked there. It was surrounded by several generations of industrial and office buildings that had grown up around it. It might be quite understandable if Emily were to investigate the scary old building purely in the spirit of inquiry. Anyone would be able to understand that. It didn’t work out that way. It wasn’t even close.

Emily worked late on the day she had picked for her investigation and it was dark, about 9 p.m., when she locked her office in the new office building and decided to approach the old warehouse in a round-a-bout way, though a new warehouse and a dark alley that had once been the main driveway from the street when the old warehouse was the only building on the property. The alley and the warehouse were now both surrounded by other buildings except for one side where there was a loading dock and parking lot. She made her way stealthily to the old warehouse easily enough and without being spotted. At the old warehouse there was a decision to be made; how best to get in. There was a garage door that was open halfway and it was next to the entrance to the old foreman’s office, which was still the main entrance. The garage door seemed too exposed, so she tried the door to the foreman’s office and it was open. Why not? she thought. It’s as good a way in as any. The only light was from a few security lamps high up on electrical poles outside, but it was enough to see her way through the quiet, gloomy rooms that had once served as offices, but were now filled with boxes and stored furniture. There were glass windows on the inside walls that looked out into the warehouse space, but on the ground floor they were blocked by huge crates. As Emily made her way farther back into the office area it became darker as the windows were more shaded by surrounding buildings. After about fifteen or twenty minutes of aimless drifting in this apparently unproductive space, Emily came to an open alcove that seemed to be filled with a huge drill. On further investigation the “drill” proved to be an ancient cast-iron spiral staircase at the top of which was a third-floor dispatcher’s office.

As she entered this office, she found that it too had windows in the internal walls, but unlike the ground floor rooms, this one offered an unobstructed view of the entire warehouse floor. After her poking around, stair-climbing and admittedly apprehensive feelings about the oppressive silence, gloom and possible skullduggery that she might encounter, Emily found herself a little warm. She took off her jacket and surveyed her surroundings. The dispatcher’s office looked like an antique store. There was an old desk, office chair, leather couch with matching chair and several ancient wooden file cabinets. It looked as if this room had been locked one evening in about 1950 and never disturbed since except for one detail; there was a modern phone that matched those to be found throughout the rest of the company. Emily noted the extension number and then moved to the window overlooking the warehouse. There was very little light; the only light she had had since she entered the building had been that from the security lights outside that had managed to filter in through the filthy old windows, but she could see pretty well in the dark by now and there seemed to be no activity in the warehouse itself. There were crates everywhere and a few modern forklifts as well as one of the company trucks. Emily decided to be very still and just wait. “I’ve got a ringside seat,” she thought with a little smile of satisfaction and she reflected that she would probably see something to satisfy her curiosity if she observed long enough because she knew from several invoices she had seen that there was sometimes a lot of activity after hours at this building.

Emily sat on the old leather couch, which was backed up against the internal wall overlooking the warehouse, and waited. Time passed slowly and it had been at least an hour when she stood up to stretch. The next thing she knew she seemed to levitate and she felt something powerful around her waist and saw a large, beefy hand clap itself over her mouth. She struggled of course, but then her legs were grabbed by another man and she was lifted off the floor almost to the horizontal. A voice whispered in her ear, “Don’t move, don’t make a sound, listen to what you are told and we won’t hurt you, but if you cause us any trouble you’ll regret it extremely. Shake your head “yes” if you agree to behave.” Emily, having no choice in the matter, shook her head yes and waited for what was next. It was like a bad dream being tightly held off the floor in the gloomy old office and then there was silence except for the breathing of three people. Then she was aware of a fourth.

A woman came into her line of sight and flicked a light switch. The light seemed impossibly bright after so long in the dark, but after a few seconds she could see that the woman was her boss, Claudia! “Well, Emily, you just couldn’t leave it alone. You had to go and poke your cute little nose into other peoples’ affairs. Fellas, tie her to that office chair and do the job right. We’ll have to keep her quiet, too, while we take care of our rather urgent business. And then my dear, we will decide what to do with you.”

The “fellas” carried Emily to the office chair and sat her down. One of them pulled her arms behind her and she felt her wrists being wrapped together with what seemed to be a large quantity of rope. When Emily opened her mouth to say something lame like, “you’ll never get away with this,” or “what’s the meaning of this?” the other man stuffed a knotted scarf into her mouth and wound the remainder around her head and between her lips several times. She felt him knot it behind her head. She heard herself make a couple of ineffectual mmpphing sounds and then she kept quiet. Both men then proceeded to tie her very effectively indeed. One wrapped her upper body and arms over and over again and then cinched the rope between her arms, just above her elbows, and the back of the chair. She heard him tie the knot behind the chair below the level of her shoulder blades. The other man tied her legs together above her knees. When he bent to tie her ankles, Emily kicked at him, knocking him to the floor and losing a shoe in the process. Claudia picked up the shoe, laughed and said, “Getting comfortable, eh? You might as well because you are going to let us tie you and you are going to sit here until we come back. Be still for it or we will make you wish you had.” Emily nodded her head and the man tied her ankles tightly together and then she felt him sort of leash her ankles to the post that connected the chair to its rolling base, with what seemed to be a separate rope.

Claudia jerked her head toward the stairs and the men left. Claudia then stood back with her hands on her hips and looked at Emily with a sardonic little smile. Emily looked back at her with as little emotion as possible. She was a little afraid and a lot angry.

“So, Emily, there you are all bound and gagged and I dare say you still don’t have the slightest idea what goes on in here or why you find yourself in such a predicament. Well you don’t need to know now any more than you had the right to know when you first set foot in this building. I’ve tried to warn you. I tried to tell you not to worry about certain “irregularities” as you called them. I don’t know what we are going to do with you, but I don’t want to kill you or hurt you. I’ll have to think about it.”

Claudia went over to the leather chair and as she passed Emily she spun the office chair around so that they could still have their one-sided discussion face-to-face. Claudia sat down, crossed her legs and lit a cigarette.

“OK, Emily, here’s what’s going to happen next. I am going to leave you like this for a while because we have important business that can’t wait. I’m going to draw the shades on these windows so you can’t see or be seen and I’m going to lock the office door. Even if you manage to get out of those ropes, which I’m sure you cannot, you’ll still be our prisoner, so it would be best if you don’t try anything. As reluctant as I am to do anything extreme, we will protect our interests against any threat. It would be in your best interest to just sit there quietly and think of something to say in the way of begging and promising so that when we come back and take that gag out of your mouth you can convince us that you are not a threat. I might suggest that you join us in our illicit little venture. If you are a partner, you are implicated and could therefore not turn us in. This goes up to the highest levels of the company and I will have plenty of help if I decide that you need to be… um… eliminated. On the other hand, with your brains you could be quite useful to us and you could make ‘a heap of dough’ as one of my male colleagues likes to say. You’ve met him already. Ha ha, you even knocked him on his butt.”

Claudia got up from the chair. She had been holding Emily’s shoe in her hand the whole time and she twirled it around her finger as she walked past Emily to the desk and stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray on the desk. Claudia dropped Emily’s shoe and spun Emily’s chair around, put her face inches from Emily’s and almost spat, “I’ll be gone about four hours. That’s how long you’ve got to think about how to convince us you are our close personal friend. You think about it hard little lady.”

Claudia paused at the door and winked at Emily. Emily saw her disappear as the door shut and she heard two locks turn on the other side. It was at this moment that the absurdly obvious thought, “Wow, I’m really tied up!” entered Emily’s mind. An observer might have seen her smile slightly behind the gag and hear a little grunt that might have been a laugh. Yes, Emily was tightly bound, locked in and the worst might be yet to come. She had to think. She couldn’t panic. She must accept the situation and deal with it. So what was the immediate situation? She tested the ropes that tied her to the chair. She was surprised to find that she wasn’t in pain; surprising because her upper body was almost completely immobile. Her wrist ropes had no slack at all and yet they weren’t painfully tight. The same could be said of the ropes that went round her body and attached her to the back of the chair. She wriggled and found that she could go side to side a little and could bend forward a little less, but whoever had tied these ropes knew his business. Emily had never been tied up before and was surprised to find that she had always assumed that escape would be relatively easy unless the ropes were tied so tight that they caused a lot of pain. Both assumptions were basically wrong because she was certainly unable to move and yet felt no pain at all. A certain stiffness was becoming apparent, but the lack of pain would enable her to keep her head clear.

As her upper body appeared to be essentially immobile, Emily turned her attention to her legs and feet. She pulled against the ropes with first one leg and then the other, but they too had only a couple of inches of slack. The one place she could find any slack at all was in the rope that leashed her ankles to the chair post. There were several inches in that rope and that gave her some hope. By pushing her toes against the floor she could roll her chair across the floor. Certainly that could lead to something. At least she could travel around the room, but to what purpose? Claudia had left the ceiling light on and Emily could survey all corners of the grim, old office, which was about eight feet wide by about 20 feet long. She pushed with her toes to spin the chair around. She still had one shoe on, but it was getting in the way, as it tended to slip off her heel when she pushed against the floor. She kicked that shoe off as far from the chair as she could and even though her stocking feet were slippery on the hardwood floor, she could maneuver a little better. As she spun the chair around she saw the phone on the desk and her jacket lying on the leather couch. The desk also had six drawers.

“OK, I can’t escape from this chair by struggling so I will stop thinking about it. The desk has a phone on it, but can I lift my arms high enough reach it? Perhaps there’s something sharp in the desk drawers that I could cut the ropes with. My jacket has a cell phone in it, but can I find it and dial it with my hands tied behind me? Can I bend down far enough to dial it with my nose? But then who will I call and how can I talk to them with my mouth full of this goddamned scarf?”

Emily conducted a little test to see if she could be understood at all. She could certainly make enough noise to be heard on the telephone, but when she said, “I have been ambushed and tied up in the warehouse on Front Street” it came out “Eye ha em ahmuphh aa I uph iuh air owph om unph eeph.” Perhaps that would do and perhaps not, but Emily decided her best first bet was to check the drawers in the desk for something to cut the ropes with. If she could get free she could pick up the phone, dial it and talk. She thought it strange to be so helpless that she couldn’t do these simple things without immense effort. If she relaxed she could barely feel the ropes and her impulse was to simply get up and walk, but the instant she tried to move the ropes had very little give.

She began pushing herself across the floor toward the desk, backwards of course so that she had to look over her shoulder to see where she was going. This 10-foot journey across the floor was unexpectedly irritating. She could only move about six inches at a time because of the rope leashing her feet to the chair and then other problems cropped up. In turning her head in one direction and then the other she managed to shake two locks of hair out of the loose bun at the back of her head and these locks of hair not only obscured her vision, but also tickled her nose. Although she usually wore her hair up at work, it was slightly longer than shoulder-length and so was very difficult to shake out of the way once it was loose. Her glasses also began to slip down on her nose until they finally fell off into her lap. At one point the chair’s wheels jammed against one of her shoes so she had to make a detour around first one shoe and then the other. As she got around her shoes, she was amused to find herself checking one of them for damage from being run over. They were expensive, but she scolded herself for wasting time thinking about irrelevancies. “I would walk out of here naked if I could get untied, much less in my stocking feet.”

She finally got to the desk. She breathed for a moment and checked to see which drawers she could reach. By leaning as far over to the side away from the desk as she could she could just manage to open the top drawers with one hand. Her wrists were tied crossed and looking over her shoulder she could barely glimpse the fingers of one hand. She took note of this as proving that she would never be able to reach the phone on the desk. It was not only too high to reach, but was near the back of the desk. But first the drawers.

She went through the top drawers and and there was nothing in them at all that would be of any use to her. When she tried to reach the bottom drawers, her fingers couldn’t quite touch them. She pushed herself around and tried to open them with her toes and finally succeeded. In one of the drawers was a pair of scissors along with some other things. Her hands couldn’t reach them and when Emily tried to bring her feet high enough to put them in the drawer her footrope brought them up short.

She sat there thinking looking at the scissors not two feet away. She was working her legs back and forth against the ropes and writhing against her other bonds in the sheer frustration at having found what she was looking for but not able to touch it. Then she had the happy thought that perhaps the drawer could be bumped out of the desk with her feet and its contents dumped on the floor. What then? Her captors might come back and see evidence of an escape attempt. What would their reaction be? Then again, what good would a pair of scissors be to her on the floor? Emily decided that she would worry about that later. First things first. She got as close to the drawer as possible and succeeded in kicking it out of the desk. Then she turned it over. There lay the scissors on the floor. She had also managed to knock her glasses out of her lap and onto the floor near the things from the drawer.

Once again Emily paused and tried to think things out. She was a little sweaty and out of breath and she thought that she must present quite a sight. Her hair was obviously hanging in disarray, the top buttons of her blouse had come undone and she could look straight down at some of her bra and between her breasts. Her shirttail had come out on one side and her skirt was a little twisted and her stockings were wrinkled under the rope tied above her knees. She rested for a moment and looked around. She said to herself,

“My only hope is to turn this chair over so I can reach the scissors, but I should have a backup plan. Once the chair is turned over I won’t be able to get up again so I should get everything ready first.”

Emily thought. She scooted the chair to the end of the desk that was end-on to the leather couch and there she saw that the wire to the phone dropped off the desk and onto the floor. She reached as far as she could with her feet and just managed to grab the phone wire with her toes and pull it until the phone fell to the floor. Emily laboriously moved the phone toward the scissors while alternately rolling her chair several inches until the phone was near the scissors, but with enough room between them for her when she turned the chair over, with the thought that the phone should be dialed with her nose so that her mouth would already be at the mouthpiece while the scissors should be behind her. If she couldn’t cut the ropes, she would at least have the chance to call and just maybe make her situation understood. In falling to the floor the mouthpiece had of course fallen off so Emily carefully picked it up in her toes and set it on its cradle. “Now, is there anything else?”

Emily spun the chair around and decided that her cell phone must also be retrieved and set on the floor as further backup, but when she tried to move her feet to scoot the chair she found that this last time she had spun the chair the rope leashing her feet to the chair post had wrapped around the post and no matter which way she spun she couldn’t get it to unwrap. Instead of being able to put both feet flat on the floor, she could now just barely touch the floor with her toes and there was only an inch or two of slack for pushing the chair along. It was slow going this time as she made her way back to the couch to get the cell phone out of her jacket. The distance it would take her to travel in one second if she had been free took her at least ten minutes tied up like she was. She tried to think how lucky she was to have been given wheels. The slowness of her journey made her wonder how long she had been tied up in this room and how long before Claudia would return. Emily had been very busy since Claudia had left and when a person is busy, time can go very fast indeed.

Emily finally got to the jacket and grabbed it with one hand. She couldn’t see it, so it was hard to tell where she was grasping it. She worked it around so she could grab the jacket with both hands and then began groping it for the small hardness that would be the cell phone in one of the pockets. After engaging in this without result for what seemed an unreasonable amount of time, Emily heard a thud as the cell phone hit the floor. She dropped the jacket and spun around and in the process somehow unwrapped the rope leashing her feet to the chair. “It’s about time something got easier.” She grabbed the cell phone between the toes of both feet and pushed with her heels back to the desk phone and the scissors. This was still not an easy journey because as we noted before her stockings were slippery on the hardwood floor and her heels slipped more than if she was pushing with her toes. So it was hard work trying not to drop the cell phone grasped between her toes and trying to look backwards over her shoulders to see where she was going while at the same time trying to shake the stray hair out of her face. She still felt very little pain, but her shoulders were becoming stiff and she was aware of being very, very tired of all this.

With her feet she carefully positioned the cell phone next to the desk phone and moved the scissors so that they would be as close to her hands as possible when she turned her chair over and hopefully fell so that the phones would be next to her face and the scissors next to her hands. This called for careful judgment, a good aim and as slow and quiet a fall as possible. Emily positioned the chair in what she hoped was a good position and began rocking it from side to side. Except that it wouldn’t really rock, it would just roll a few inches in either direction. She positioned the chair again and leaned as far as she could toward the phones and the scissors. Then she moved her feet as far in the other direction as she could and began to push. It would have to be all or nothing. “One hard push and I’m over. Here goes.”

She pushed with as much strength as she possessed with her legs and feet while flinging her upper body against the ropes in the other direction and was rewarded with the chair tipping instantly over. It seemed to make as much noise as a dumpster being dropped off a building and Emily lay there on her side for a moment and listened. She heard nothing and she was positioned as well as could be expected. All she needed was a slight adjustment achieved by pushing her feet against the floor. As she did this she noticed a certain looseness that hadn’t existed before. What was it? Emily wriggled around a little and found that the rolling chair base had come loose from the seat and that the chair back had come loose from the metal post that attached it to the rest of the chair. She tested the potentialities for some additional freedom of movement and found that by lifting her elbows she was able to get the backrest of the chair to fall away from her entirely. This loosened the ropes holding her elbows to her upper body and gave her arms some movement. “My feet have been working too hard anyway,” she thought. Except for her feet still being attached to the chair post that descended from the seat she was free of the chair. She saw that the rope attaching her feet to the chair post was almost off of the post and was not tightly tied so after a moment or two of struggling she was able to slip it off the post and be free that damn chair at last.

So there she was, still securely bound but with more freedom than she had had in what seemed like an eternity. “Scissors first” she thought, “then the gag, then the phone.” She reached for the scissors and got them in her hand and tried to find an angle to cut her wrist ropes. This proved to be the hardest task yet. She couldn’t see what she was doing and she kept pricking herself a little. She couldn’t quite get one blade of the scissors under any of the many windings of rope for the longest time and when she finally did the fingers holding the scissors were backwards from the way one usually holds scissors, but she worked them as best she could until she was rewarded with the sound of the blades snipping together. While not letting go of the scissors she worked her wrists, but with little apparent effect. “There must be a lot of rope back there.” She found another rope and cut that and then another and then another until finally, finally she felt some really useful slack. She worked her wrists gently but regularly back and forth with the slack increasing at every effort. Her heart soared with victory as one hand almost slipped through and then at last came loose. She almost cried with joy. She pulled her hand as far around as the ropes around her body would allow and turned over to face the scissors. She took them and cut the rope around her body and then freed her legs and feet.

She stood up and fumbled with the knot holding the gag, but she had to cut that too. She was free. My god what a relief! For some odd reason the first thing she felt she had to do was slip her shoes back on, smooth her stockings and put on her glasses. Then she put the drawer back in the desk and returned its contents. She put the desk phone where it had been and in the process noticed that it was dead. “What a waste of time that was.” She put the chair back together too. She did all this so that if Claudia came back she wouldn’t know how Emily had gotten untied. She looked at her watch and found that only two hours had elapsed since Claudia had left her alone. That gave her two hours to either escape or bring help. Emily tried the door, but just as Claudia said it was locked. Emily decided not to call 911 just yet. She thought it best to call her boyfriend and tell him the situation in great detail and where she was. She thought it best to have someone she could trust on the outside to deal with the authorities; someone who knew where she worked, the layout of the buildings and who could expedite matters in a way that the notoriously slow emergency services might not. They might not even take her seriously, she thought. She made the call.

Her boyfriend, Freddie, answered the phone. She told him to listen and her tale came tumbling out. He was incredulous at first, but she made him understand. At any rate, he knew she was not one for fantastic tales or ridiculous jokes. He assured her that help was on the way and they hung up. Then she called 911 just to be safe and found that her cell phone was unable to connect. Emily put it back in her jacket pocket, folded the jacket neatly and draped it over the back of the chair and in exasperation she sat down in the old leather chair and collected her thoughts.

Two minutes later the locks on the door clicked and in waltzed Claudia with a smug little look on her face that immediately turned dark and angry. Claudia pulled a gun and almost growled, “I don’t know how you got loose, but if you move I will certainly kill you right here and now! You stay in that chair and don’t move a muscle.” Claudia leaned against the desk with the gun still pointed at Emily. Her face relaxed a little. Emily stared at the gun and for the first time her thoughts were so confused as to be incoherent. But she listened closely to what Claudia had to say. It was obvious Claudia meant business. The expression on her face made her look almost unrecognizable. Emily opened her mouth to speak, but Claudia said, “Shut up.” Claudia went on,

“I came up here to let you know we’d be a little longer than we thought. I also wanted to see what you had to say about joining us, but now I see you’ve been busy trying to escape instead of giving constructive thought to your rather limited options. I am going to tie you again and I’m going to do a much better job than my so-called colleagues. If you attempt to stop me, if you struggle at all I will simply shoot you. Don’t think I won’t. Now stand up, turn around and cross your wrists behind your back. Do it now.”

Emily did as she was told. She felt the rope wrap around her wrists, but this time they were crossed horizontally so that they rested in the small of her back instead of farther down. It was also now impossible to touch one hand with the other. More rope was wrapped around her body below her breasts and cinched between her elbows. It was a bit tighter this time than before. Then Claudia barked, “You had to cut the goddamn scarf! I’ll have to use tape. Open your mouth. Wide!” Emily opened her mouth and a large wad of the scarf was stuffed in. Then Claudia began wrapping wide white adhesive tape over Emily’s mouth and around her head.

“Go sit on the couch,” Claudia ordered. Emily sat on the couch and watched as Claudia crossed one ankle over the other and tied them together with a tight cinch between them. Claudia then shoved Emily over onto her side and turned her on her stomach. Emily felt rope being threaded and knotted around the bindings holding her elbows to her body, then around her bound wrists and then finally she felt Claudia grab her ankles and pull them straight up in the air and wrap the rope around them so that her ankles were now tied to her hands and body. Emily felt the rope tighten, pulling her legs a little closer to her hands, and then felt Claudia knot it. “There! All trussed up like a little piggy. Just be grateful I didn’t pull your feet all the way down to your wrists. I left you a little slack because I am a nice person. I want you to think about that while you lie here and decide where your best interests lie, because when I come back we’re going to have a little talk. At that point your life gets interesting and profitable or it ends. Got that? I said got that!?” Emily shook her head a little. “Now I know you didn’t call anyone because that phone isn’t connected anymore so you just realize that you are ours to do with what we will. We don’t want to kill you. I even regret having to leave you tied like this, but we will not be trifled with and we will not go to jail.”

With that Emily heard Claudia’s heels click across the floor, go out the door, lock it and head down the stairs.

Emily didn’t know what to think. This time there was help on the way, but she didn’t want to just wait for it if she could do anything to free herself. After all, there was nothing else to do. Why be idle? She tested her ropes a little and just as the last time there was little slack to be found. She looked over her shoulder and found that her feet were tied about 18 inches over her butt and there was a rope holding them there that was attached in some way to her hands and body. Is this what’s called being hogtied? She wondered. Emily began a sort of general writhing that involved her toes pointing alternately as they pulled against her ankle ropes and she felt first one shoe and then the other work loose from her heels, dangle on her toes and then fall off her feet. Each shoe bounced off her butt and fell to the floor in front of the couch. She tried talking through the gag, but this gag was twice as fierce as the previous one. She could barely make a humming noise and that at only minimum volume. Thank God she had described the layout of the building to Freddie, because she certainly couldn’t make enough noise to be heard on the warehouse floor from all the way up where she was on the third floor.

Once again Emily decided to prioritize. “First thing is to see if I can get off my stomach and sit up,” she thought. That proved as difficult to do as any of the tasks she had accomplished while tied to the chair. First she slowly tried to bend her body forward so that her knees and head were the only things touching the couch. This took several attempts, but finally she was balanced like this. This made all the ropes tighter, but she still had just enough slack to shift her weight so that she pivoted back; her head lifted from the couch cushion and she ended up sitting on the couch in a kneeling position. She sat back on her legs and was quite comfortable while she thought about what to do next, but then noticed the weight of her body was putting her legs to sleep so she carefully slipped her legs toward the edge of the couch so that she was sitting much as she did on her couch at home with her shoes kicked off and her legs curled up so that her feet were beside her butt. The only difference of course is that here her arms were tied tightly behind her and her feet were forced to be where they were. But now she was comfortable enough to think.

Her first thought was that she might get her feet on the floor and even with her knees bent perhaps hop over to the drawer where her old friend, the scissors, were. But on further investigation this proved untenable because her ankles had been tied so that her feet were crossed and no amount of effort would suffice to uncross them. At any rate, hopping would be very difficult while crouching. She saw herself falling over and reflected on the advantages of a soft couch over a hard floor. After considering dropping to the floor and somehow crawling, Emily decided that she had had enough exertions while being tied and gagged. She began to relax and stop worrying. “I must reconcile myself to being a damsel in distress who must be rescued. The appropriate heroes have all been notified. I will just sit here looking pretty (if a bit disheveled) and look forward to being rescued and being a witness against these criminals.”

But Emily began to think about something else to look forward to. She began to imagine Freddie finding her all helpless; bound hand and foot; gagged; unbuttoned. She reflected that he had even once said that he found the sight of her on the couch with her shoes off and her stocking feet curled around her a most attractive sight. She was that way now, if against her will. But if Freddie were in charge perhaps it would be quite a bit of fun to be tied up. Emily began to writhe against her bonds at the thought of being helplessly bound and gagged in the hands of Freddie. She felt a silent alarm go off between her thighs; a ringing alarm that grew into a gentle throbbing that her hands instinctively tried to reach around and touch. When her hands only wriggled around behind her, it surprised Emily and increased the feeling of urgency. She noticed to her further surprise that she was beginning to get a little slippery up between the top of her legs and she worked them together back and forth the very little bit that the ropes would allow. She began to strain against the ropes and it seemed so unfair that the ropes were the only thing preventing her from touching herself. The ropes were so thin and soft and the urge to touch so powerful. It was an exquisite, devastating feeling to be unable to scratch what was becoming an extremely powerful itch indeed. She watched her stocking feet as they pointed and pulled against the ropes. Her hands clenched and unclenched behind her back. Her fingers clawed at the leather couch. She closed her eyes and a sound like, “hmmmm hmmm” was audible behind the gag from time to time. Emily wanted to be touched now! She needed help. Help was on the way.

“By God,” Emily thought, “This is going to be a blast,” as she heard the shouting of police three floors below.