I can’t say I did, either, but I knew an emergency when I saw one. I dropped down on the floor beside Claude and felt for a pulse and when I didn’t find one, I grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket. I guess I was so busy pressing the buttons on it and hoping for a cell signal that never materialized, I didn’t hear the door of the RV slam shut.

I didn’t realize Eve was gasping to find words to warn me, either. Not until I finally looked up, frustrated by my phone, and found her with one arm yanked behind her back and a knife to her throat.

I was on my feet in a flash, but I knew better than to make another move. Not when that blade was right up against Eve’s windpipe.

“Who… what?” I looked past Eve to the man who stood behind her. He was a little older than middle-aged, and bald. He looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t sort through my panic and fear to figure out why. I didn’t have to ask, either, but I was so taken aback and so terrified, I couldn’t keep my words to myself. “What on earth are you doing? What do you want?”

The man laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.

“I want what I’ve always wanted,” he said. “I want what’s mine. I thought I had to go to Norman to get it, but you ladies, you’re the answer to my prayers.”

“We don’t know anything.” That was Eve talking, and I had to give her credit, what with her being able to do that while there was a gleaming knife blade pressing into the delicate flesh of her throat. “We don’t know anything about Norman, or the money, or the bank robbery or-”

My grimace came too late for her to take back her words.

“Look…” I tried to sound calm. Big points for me since by this time, I was so afraid of what might happen to Eve, so worried about Claude, and so claustrophobic, I would have leaped out the window near the bunk beds-if there weren’t boxes piled high in front of it. “Look…” I tried again. “I think you’ve got us mixed up with someone else. Eve’s right. We really don’t know anything.”

“I don’t care if you do.” The man had a handkerchief in his pocket and when he pulled it out, a strong chemical odor filled the room. He pressed the cloth to Eve’s nose and mouth, and a second later her eyes closed and she sank to the floor. “Your turn.” He stepped over her and toward me, and because of the clutter, I had nowhere to go. Because of the knife, I couldn’t fight back.

He yanked the cell phone out of my hand and tossed it over his shoulder. I saw it land in an open packing box. Then I saw the handkerchief heading for my face.

“Finally, I’ve got what I need,” I heard the man say just as the handkerchief smothered my face. My head buzzed. My vision blurred. His voice came from a million miles away. “ Norman will listen now. He has to. You’re his friends. And now, you’re my hostages.”

I DREAMED I WAS WORKING AT TRÈS BONNE CUISINE, helping a man in a black and white golf shirt who was walking down the aisles, browsing. We stopped near the soup mixes and he adjusted his thick glasses on the bridge of his nose and smiled when he found what he was looking for on a nearby shelf.

“Finally,” he said, “I’ve got what I need,” and he handed me a bottle of chloroform.

Like an icy wave, the memory washed over me and I jerked awake and gasped for breath. My eyes flew open and in that one moment, I realized why the man who’d kidnapped us looked so familiar: He was a Très Bonne Cuisine customer I’d waited on just after Greg’s murder.

Which meant all those days ago, he was hot on Norman ’s trail. He’d been following me all along-and I’d led him straight to Norman in Atlantic City and, from there, straight here to the food show.

The enormity of the realization flashed through my bloodstream and for I don’t know how long, I lay on the built-in bench in what passed for the dining area of the RV, trying to make sense of it all. It might have been easier if my mouth wasn’t fuzzy and my head didn’t pound. It might have been a whole lot more comfortable if my wrists and my ankles weren’t duct-taped.

Carefully, I shifted my weight. Since my hands were behind my back, I wobbled a bit, but I managed to sit up so I could see to my right, into the driver’s area of the RV (it was empty) and to my left and back to the bedroom (from this angle, all I could see were boxes in the hallway and what looked to be the entire contents of the display we’d seen outside the RV; there were kitchen gadgets everywhere, as if our abductor had simply opened the door and shoveled them in). Eve was similarly bound and slumped on the bench across from me. I didn’t like the pallor of her skin.

“Eve!” I realized the moment I called out to her that I was alerting our kidnapper to the fact that I was awake and that it might have been smarter not to, but I was beyond caring. How could I when Eve looked so fragile and pale? “Eve, wake up. Answer me. Are you all right?”

When she shifted and groaned, her head rolled forward. I let go a sigh of relief.

“You’re OK?”

Her eyes fluttered open. “Annie? What… what happened?”

I didn’t bother to tell her that at this point, that wasn’t the question. The only question that mattered was, what were we going to do now?

From where I was sitting, I could see the big-as-a-picture-window windshield at the front of the RV. Beyond it, there were few lights left on in the exposition center and, as far as I could see, no people around, either.

“It must be late,” I said and by this time I’d pulled myself together enough to keep my voice down. “The show must be over. There’s nobody out in the hall.”

Eve had to look over her shoulder to see what I could see. When she did, tears filled her eyes. “What’s going to happen?” she asked. “What does he want? Is he going to hurt us?”

I thought about Claude and wondered if his body was still back in the bedroom where we’d last seen it. “If he wanted to hurt us, he would have done it by now,” I told her. She looked relieved to hear it so I guess in the great scheme of things, I could justify the little white lie. “I think he wants to use us to get at Norman, to get his money back.”

A single tear slipped down Eve’s cheek. Only she could make crying look attractive. If I let myself go (and believe me, I was close enough to panic that it just might happen), my nose would get red, my eyes would puff, and my skin would get blotchy. Eve cried like the heroine in a romantic blockbuster. She sniffed decorously, too. “What are we going to do, Annie?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t have a clue.

Maybe it was just as well. Before I could open my mouth, we heard the sounds of a key turning in the door. The next thing we knew, the man who must have been Matt O’Hara hoisted himself up into the RV.

“Well, lookee who’s awake.” He beamed a smile at us. It made my blood run cold. “Just in time, too. I was just about to make a call to your friend Norman.”

“We can’t help you.” My words scraped out of my parched mouth. “We don’t know where Norman is.”

He barely gave me a look. “Shut up. And don’t lie to me. It won’t do you any good. I know he was here doing a cooking demonstration today. I sat right there in the auditorium and watched it. Sorry you had to miss it, ladies. You would have loved the drama. Especially when a little kid in the audience popped a paper bag. I swear, Norman just about fainted, right there onstage. That’s how much of a scared little girl he is.”

I took offense at him making fun of Norman. I took more offense at him assuming that little girls are always scared. He might have noticed my scowl if he’d bothered to look.

Instead, O’Hara shifted his gaze to Eve, who wilted beneath it. “You said you knew about the bank robbery. What else do you two know?”

There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to fake our way through this so I simply told the truth. “We know that you and Howard Fish robbed a bank back in Nevada. He was holding the money for you, right? What, were you set to meet somewhere so you could split it? Is that when the cops caught up to you?”