by Rebecca Ryan
I'm just glad I don’t have to put another animal down.
Suddenly, there's pounding on the door and Ralph's bellow comes from the front. "Your horse is out again!"
Salty has escaped twice before. When I glance at the clock, the large hand is on the eight. I have twenty minutes to find Salty and be in the office. Not a good way to impress a New Yorker.
I come running from the hall, grabbing one of the spare leashes by the side door. "Thanks. Which way?"
Ralph's face is lit with excitement. Finally. All his spying is paying off. "Away from town. On the road though."
As I quickly step out, I'm careful not to let the door slam. If Salty is still close to the house, it would startle him. Glancing over to the asphalt, I make certain he's not headed toward traffic and then I swivel to the right and there he is, about four hundred yards away, standing. Staring at me warily, he shakes his coat, and now I'm close enough to see several flies rise and land again on his back. The sun is already hot.
Out the side of my mouth, I cluck to him, twice, and he starts to walk toward me. I can hear Ralph coming up behind me and I wave him to stop. I don't want Salty spooked and taking off down the road toward the cliffs or into the woods toward the Christmas tree lot. Salty dips his neck and nickers gently, stomps one foot, and then I turn and start walking slowly but purposefully back to the corral.
I hear him follow, his hooves pulling a little sand and dirt on the soft road. Once I’m close to the corral door, I stop and let him pull up next to me. As he watches, I clip the dog leash to the halter and lead him inside. This time, I make certain the gate is shut and secured and double-check the latch. Horses are smart and can learn to lift a latch with their very nimble lips. My dad used to joke they learned to use it like an opposable thumb. I find the Carrabin in the short, tufted grass, unsure how exactly he could have wrestled this off, but I make sure it's looped through the latch.
I check my watch. Nine fifty. I've got ten minutes and sometimes new patients are late. GPS doesn’t work well here, and it often leaves them in Molly's field staring at miniature horses.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
It’s Devon. She wants to talk. Again. Oh, and borrow some butter.
"It better not be for a cake," I say and then sigh. "Okay. I've got a procedure at ten. I'll need about forty minutes. Then come over and we can talk while," I glance at the card again, "Althea resurfaces."
I can hear the pause on the other end of the phone.
"When she comes out of anesthesia," I explain.
"I know what 'resurfaces' means," says Devon. "I just haven’t heard that in a long time."
And now I'm guilty. I used another of Dad's euphemisms and tore open a grief wound.
"So, what do you want to talk about?" Changing the subject with Devon is always easy because she usually wants it changed two beats before I do.
"It can wait," she says. "But I do need to talk to you before tomorrow."
Something catches my attention, some small thing I can’t quite put my finger on. Is it something in her voice, or concrete, in front of me?
I hear a car roll up. "My patient's here," I say. "Gotta go."
But the car passes by as I walk down the hall to the surgery. And that's when the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
Something's not right.
In a flash, I see the mask on the surgery table is missing, and the cone attachment for the dog is on the floor. My heart leaps into my throat. I move, fast, and turn.
But not fast enough.
Someone steps out from behind the door, grabs me from behind, and a mask is clamped over my mouth and nose.
I immediately, reflexively, hold my breath. Kick, flail, arch.
The hiss of Ketamine is all I hear as two strong arms pin mine to my body.
I am fighting, fighting to get free and tear off the mask, holding my breath the whole time, struggling, kicking, twisting, dropping to the floor, anything, but he's caught me by surprise and lifts me off the ground. So there's no leverage, just that mask, hard against my face.
My arm flies free and I claw at his hand, trying to find a finger to pull back and break, but now my lungs are starved, burning, and I have no choice. My heart hammers for air and I give in, sucking in the sweet of Ketamine, and it fills my lungs even as I pull at the mask.
Within half a second of the first gulp of Ketamine, my arms and legs feel like jelly. My hand clawing at the mask trembles, loses its grip, and slips to my side like dead weight. My body sags against Miller.
In seconds, I can barely stand. As he lowers me to the ground, all I can do is gasp like a runner for the poisoned air. I feel him shift as I slide limply down the surgical table while he holds my head from behind, still pressing that mask to my face.
He squats next to me, keeping pressure on the mask.
My eyelids flicker and he sees me watching him.
"Don't be scared, Claire." His voice sounds so sickly sweet or maybe that's the Ketamine.
"Oh, you might have a little convulsion," he whispers in my ear, still holding my head in a vise, and he's right.
My body suddenly spasms and buckles, shaking hard.
Still, he keeps the mask pressed to my face until it stops.
Within seconds, it’s passed, but I'm left quivering all over. Tipping me first to my side, then onto my back, he lays me out on the floor. The sound of the ventilator pushing the gas into my lungs is too loud for my rapid, shallow effort.
Take a breath. Release. Do it again.
The sweet poison, my only lifeline.
It's not just Ketamine. He's given me something else, laced it with something, so I stay awake but am immobile.
When I am completely immobile, the mask finally comes off—the pressure lifted—and I see Steven Miller smiling at me. My lungs feel like paper, and my breathing is rapid and shallow through my mouth. I can’t feel my face.
"We're just going to stay here awhile 'til you're not so doped up. It all worked great. You're the same weight as my dog, Althea, so you set yourself up." He scratches his neck. "Althea means 'truth.'" He grins. "So does Allison." He lets that sink in. "So, the truth is, there's going to be a small fire behind the grocery store in a few minutes. Then you and I are going out back to your little red boat."
I watch him as he lays a hand on my forehead and strokes my hair.
"Don’t worry. I've watched you. Not too handy with the boats. You might drown," he says.
Cory. Cory and Laurel and Devon. Fire.
"Don't worry. I'm not a baby killer." He pauses and then watches me. "Oh wait, I am. But not today. Cory will be fine."
I can feel the tips of my fingers now and my feet, but I still can’t move much.
I'm so scared for Devon. She’ll be here any second.
As if reading my thoughts, Miller leans in and says, "Oh. You got a text from your sister. She says it's okay. She can meet you at two this afternoon and hopes Althea gets better." He winces at me as if concerned. "There were complications."
He stands and moves out of my field of vision, which is terrifying. The ventilator stops its odd sucking sound. I need to know where he is, but I can’t move my head.
In a moment, he's returned with the syringe of succinylcholine in one hand, and he slides it in his jacket pocket. My heart tumbles in my chest either as the anesthesia wears off, or in terror—I can’t tell which.
"Oh. Listen to that. Someone's set off the alarm." As if from a great distance, I can hear sirens go off and he bends down. "Time to move," he says.
He hoists me up on a hip, throws a wiry arm around my waist, and we go out the back door around the corral on the far side, down the embankment.
Salty nickers, and Miller carries me like a rag doll. From a distance, we must look like a silly tourist couple racing to the boat doing a coupley, side-by-side, hilarious rom-com run. But what they can’t see is my feet hitting rocks, the line they leave as they drag in the sand.
I can smell smoke no
w and there's my little dinghy pulled right up on the pebbly shore. Being bizarrely careful, he props me in a bucket seat, pushes the boat off the beach, climbs in, and revs the engine. Then he sits next to me and wraps his arm around my shoulders while we head out to open water, his one hand on the rudder.
My head lolls onto his shoulder and he grips me hard.
He doesn’t want me going overboard too soon.
With a slow revelation, I know what he’s about to do.
The shock of realization must send adrenaline into my system like a broken faucet. I dip forward, trying to grab his leg, to get him off balance. I know he won't hurt me. He doesn't want any bruising. No signs of a struggle. My attempt is so feeble he just smiles, jerks me closer, and holds me tighter.
Succinylcholine shuts everything down in sixty seconds including respiration. It wears off fast, can't be traced in bloodwork, and that fifteen milligrams will last about four minutes which by then, I will have suffocated. At the last second, just as the drug wears off, he'll throw me overboard and I’ll reflexively suck in water.
I will be another accident.
If he killed me with a dose on land and threw my body over, I wouldn’t swallow water and it wouldn't look like a drowning.
He wants another tragic story. Another accident.
He cuts the engine.
I don’t know how far we are from shore when he stands and removes his belt. I hear the zip of leather against denim. Next, he sits down across from me on the bench seat and rolls up the sleeve of my shirt, slipping my left arm through the belt loop and cinching it tight. I've slouched down by now, still limp.
He waits a moment for a vein to bulge. "This is going to sting," he says, as the syringe reappears.
I try to pull my arm away, weakly, trying to stop him, but it's not even enough to make him lose his grip on my bicep. The needle slips in. I watch as his thumb depresses the plunger on the syringe, just halfway, and before I can look away, the drug hits.
Grabbing my shoulders, he pulls me up to a sitting position again and tilts me forward. I slump into his arms and he holds me as my body completely and utterly shuts down.
He begins counting backward from one hundred, while heat emanates from the puncture.
I am liquid. Boneless. My breath goes ragged and I cannot move at all.
I begin to suffocate. My chest burns. I’m so weak I can barely breathe—every breath is a struggle now and I just concentrate on taking a breath.
"You can do it," he says, pulling away slightly and smelling my hair. "Until you can't. In about four seconds."
"Like this," he says, and sucks in air right near my ear. Then he blows it out in my face.
I can't smell anything. I can’t breathe.
This is worse than Ketamine. There's no struggle. All I can do is stare at him, my mouth slack.
He sits me down in the belly of the boat and tilts my head toward the sky. I cannot move or blink or swallow, and slowly my tongue slides to the back of my throat. I can’t even close my eyes. But I’m wide awake.
"Oh, look," he says, and lightly touches my neck. "Your pulse is so fast right now."
My chest burns harder, my heart thrums for another second or two and then skips, trembles, searching frantically for oxygen.
Miller presses down on my carotid. "Good, it's slowing down. We're just about done here." He rises again, the smell of burning wood fading as that part of my brain shuts down.
My vision grows tunneled, warping.
Leaning over, he pushes on my chest twice, hard. A phst erupts as air escapes with each pump. He’s creating a vacuum, so the second the paralysis wears off, my diaphragm will work again, and I'll suck in water. And drown.
He scoops me up and now, my vision comes in flashes. Blue fingertips. Black smoke, billowing in the sky. A seagull floating by.
I can hear people shouting.
Miller cradles me above the water and then lowers me in and releases me to the sea.
I slip in and immediately sink.
I can’t move, even with the shock of freezing water. My hair fans out, the icy cold fingers of seawater curling around my scalp. I feel water fill my nose, my mouth. My eyes are still open.
Tide's in, so it's shallow water. Maybe just four feet. The bottom is sandy. It would be so easy to just stand up, but that's impossible.
My body starts to turn and then I'm looking up at the belly of the boat. My heart is starving—I feel it tug in my chest once more. My ears ring. And I feel a flutter against my sternum like a hurt bird's wing.
Then, in a dream, the surface breaks in a thousand tiny white bubbles.
Miller crashes into the water, a vein of red behind him trailing to the surface like a dark ribbon.
He's coming right for me.
Sparks fill my vision. Something grips me, hard, but it doesn’t matter. My mind slips away even as the drug wears off. I can’t hear my heart anymore. Breathing was something I used to do, in another lifetime.
Then, my index finger twitches. My eyes blink. The seal on the vacuum in my chest opens.
Poor Finn.
Finn.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Finn
My phone rings twice before the call from Nic. Each ring sends up a flare, so by the time his comes through, I am already doing seventy-five down Route 1. First, it was Laurel who wanted to talk birthday strategy and then she closed with something about Cory and a cherry Danish.
My heart skipped a beat. "What did you say?"
"I said Cory did great walking over by himself and now he'll always want to do it 'cause some lady gave him a cherry Danish."
Everything in that store is blueberry or black raspberry, and I said so. "Aren’t blueberries practically the state fruit?"
"They are the state fruit," she corrected me. "Cherries belong to Michigan."
Jesus. Of course. Miller and his twin brother were from Michigan. A warning bell went off. Loudly. Just then, another call had come in from Devon. She was up in Camden, trying to find seashell candles for the table.
"Hey. I just got a weird text from my sister."
I step on the gas. In two miles I'd hit a dead zone.
"Explain."
"What? Oh. Well, I was going to go over there in like half an hour and then she sends me this long text about how the surgery is complicated and she won’t be able to meet with me. That's how she put it, 'meet with you,' until two o'clock, but that's when she opens for the afternoon patients."
"Weird, how?" I edge toward eighty now, convinced something's very, very wrong.
"I don’t know. It’s just—"
I hear my own bark into the phone: "Look at the text again and tell me why it's not her."
There's silence on the line for a second and I can practically hear Devon shift gears. "Okay. Here it is." She pauses again, and I'm about to hit that dead zone. "She spells everything out. You know Y-O-U for you, not a U. This is all in Textlish. Text-talk. Shorthand."
The connection drops.
I turn off onto Main Street and see smoke pouring up into the sky and my mind goes into overdrive. All Miller's victims either drowned or crashed. All of them. A bathtub, a lake, a corn silo, a brook, and a pool.
My pool.
The fire is a diversion.
He has her.
I press nine-one-one over and over and get nothing. There's too much going on, overloading a system with little bandwidth. Then the radio crackles on the dash. It's the helicopter line.
As I pass Molly's place, rotary blades chop air and I can see the H155 from here settling in the middle of the road.
Bryce leaps from the 'copter while the blades slow. He's already cut the engine. I shoot gravel in the driveway.
"Nic's inside," he yells.
When I dive into the clinic, Nic's standing there taking in what I see as well.
"He drugged her," I say, looking at the mask.
Nic checks the tank. "It’s almost empty."
My heart slams ha
rd against my chest. "He's out on the water with her. On the Savvy-T."
"No. It’s dry docked for repairs in Portsmouth."
Dry docked. All that asshole would need is a good alibi and he was never here.
I glance out the window, but all I can see is the barn. And then just to the left, in that slip of a sea view between the barn and house, I see her red dinghy out on the water—with two people in it.
"Fuck." My mind is screaming something, and I look around. Something is here. Something is here that I need. The BVM. She might need it.
Bryce, an ex-medic, grabs it.
In seconds we've scrambled down to the pier. Nic's scored a black motorboat with keys dangling from the ignition. After he revs the motor, he tosses me binoculars, while expertly steering the boat toward the open water. Bryce is next to me, checking the cylinder of his handgun while trying to see what's going on.
I'm standing, braced, binoculars pressed to my face, my eyes finding them instantly.
Claire's in the bottom of the dinghy, eyes open, unmoving and he's touching her neck, talking to her. I want to fucking kill him. He's touching her hair, then he smells her and stands, picking her up. For whatever reason, with the combination of the direction of the breeze, the sound of the waves, his idling motor, and the heady assurance of arrogance, he doesn’t notice our approach.
No, no, no!
I scream inside as he holds her over the water. She's dead already, I'm sure of it.
No.
It can’t be.
Claire.
Nic's suit jacket flaps in the tight wind and in one fluid movement I reach over, grabbing the pistol from his shoulder holster as Bryce raises his own weapon. The boat suddenly slaps against a wave and lifts.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Bryce fires and misses, just as Miller lets Claire go and she slips under the waves.
With both hands on the handle, I site him, I site that fucker, wait for the next rise, compute the trajectory with my gut, lower my aim, and fire.