by Laurie Cass
“Or,” I said slowly, “any of these other trees.” Not that I was Nature Girl, by any stretch—the pileated woodpecker’s habits was pretty much my full knowledge of woodland creatures—but even I could tell the difference between the bark of deciduous trees and that of conifers. Given that we were surrounded by maples, birches, and beeches, why were we looking at a pine log? “And,” I said, “it’s been cut. You can see the saw marks.”
Kate squatted down to get a closer view. “Okay, I see them now.” She popped upright and looked at me.
I looked back.
The conclusion was obvious. Someone—read Courtney and her cohort—had created this path and hidden its entrance. The big question now was, where did the path lead?
I tucked my curiosity away and put on my Aunt hat. Two people had already been killed and I was not going to put my niece in danger. “We need to leave,” I said. “Now that we have something solid to tell Detective Inwood, he and Ash will follow up on this and—Kate, wait!”
Because she had bolted away from me faster than a runner out of starting blocks. She tore through the trees faster than her aunt could follow, which I was doing, of course, because I wasn’t about to let her go down that trail all alone, but she had youth and—yes, I can admit it—fitness on her side, and her lead on me grew longer and longer.
“Kate!” I called. “Stop!”
She didn’t.
I summoned the biggest, best Librarian Voice I could muster. Through my panting breaths, I yelled, “Katrina Abigail Hamilton! Stop right now!”
To my surprise and shock, she did. At least the noise of her crashing through the underbrush stopped, and I suddenly found that I could run a little harder and a little faster, and my thoughts ran along with me.
Please don’t let her be hurt. What happened up there? Please, please, don’t let her be hurt. I’ll never forgive myself. Please, please, please . . .
I rounded a bend in the path and saw my niece, sound and whole, standing next to a small building. It was a classic Up North structure: a patchwork siding of half metal and half plywood, with a complicated roof that from a distance looked like a bunch of rusty highway signs tossed up every which way. Bigger than an outhouse and smaller than most sheds, its solidly wood door might or might not have had ancient barn origins, but the chain and lock that fastened it shut were bright and shiny.
Hmm.
“Aunt Minnie?” Her voice was unrepentant. “You need to look at this.”
With relief, I slowed to a walk for the last few yards. “What I need to do,” I said firmly, “is get you out of here and back to the car. Let’s go. Now.”
“But look!” She pointed. “See?”
And since I was human, I felt compelled to look. What I saw was a small and dusty window, just high enough off the ground that I couldn’t see inside, even standing on my tiptoes.
She saw my difficulty and took a knee. “Here. You can get up on my leg.”
“Kate—”
“Just a quick look. Then we can go.”
Thinking things that would instantly disqualify me for the Aunt of the Year Award, I grabbed the edge of a piece of plywood and clambered on top of Kate’s leg. As the shed’s interior was illuminated only by the light that came in through that window, it took a moment for my eyes to identify what was on shelves.
And I suddenly understood everything.
Because on those shelves were hundreds of short plastic bottles.
Prescription medications.
“What’s in there?” Kate asked.
“Pills,” I said. “Lots of them.” I flashed back to that day at Ann Marie and Rupert Wiley’s house. Courtney’s over-the-top reaction when I’d walked into the room. How she wasn’t supposed to be handling medications at all.
“They’re stealing them, aren’t they?” Kate’s voice was high and excited. “Selling them on the black market.”
I slid off her leg and hit the ground with a bump. Nicole. She’d had back problems. Could she have been addicted to opioids? Had she been buying from Courtney?
Even though Up North lacked many Big Box types of shopping opportunities, there were avenues for selling stolen goods. It was my guess that Courtney’s stash had a high percentage of opioids and she was making a pretty penny on sales, enough money that she and her partner were willing to kill to keep the operation going.
Only . . . who was the partner?
A metallic click made me freeze, and a male voice said, “Hold it right there.”
Chapter 20
Kate and I stared at each other, then, as a single unit of Hamiltons, turned to face a twenty-something man, his thick blond arm hairs visible even in the mottled forest light.
Luke Cagan.
Though the very fact of his presence was disturbing, even more troubling was the handgun pointing directly at my niece’s midsection.
I stepped in front of her. “Hey, Luke,” I said as easily as I could. “It is Luke, right, from the hardware store? How are you doing? I’m pretty sure you can put that gun away. We were out here hiking, is all, came across this cool little shed. Do you happen to know who owns it?”
“Cut the crap.” He gestured with the gun. “I saw you looking inside. You know what’s in there.”
I put on an expression of innocence and shook my head. “Not really. It’s so dark in there I couldn’t make out a thing. All that reading I do, it messes up my night vision.” This wasn’t true—at least not yet—but I figured flat-out lies to get Kate away from a guy with a gun wouldn’t count against me in a final life tally. And even if they did, I didn’t care.
“So there’s no problem here, right?” I turned my hands palms up, smiling, being agreeable, being friendly, being accommodating. “We’ll move along and I’ll see you around, okay?” Nodding a cheerful good-bye, I took an angled step forward, intending to go around Luke, keeping my body between that nasty gun and my niece.
Luke stared at me and didn’t move. I watched carefully, ready to knock Kate aside the instant his finger started to tighten on the trigger, the instant his eyes started to focus.
We made it one step. Two steps. And just as I was wildly hoping that my pretense at innocence might actually work, footsteps pounded toward us and Courtney Drew appeared.
“What are you doing?” she called.
I wasn’t sure to whom she was talking, Luke, me, or Kate, but I jumped ahead of anything either one of them might say. “Hi, Courtney,” I said, smiling broadly, edging closer to the gun. “Remember me? It’s Minnie Hamilton. I drive the bookmobile. We met at Rupert and Anne Marie Wiley’s house a few weeks back. My niece and I were hiking, but now we really need to be getting back. Our friends are expecting us soon, and—”
“Stop talking, already,” Courtney said. “And you’re not going anywhere.”
“Um.” I stopped and reached backward. Kate grasped my hand and I gripped hers tight. If I’d been smart a long time ago, I would have learned Morse code and taught it to my nieces and nephew during holiday gatherings, thus providing a current means of communication. Sadly, all I knew were the letters for SOS, but even then I wasn’t completely certain I wouldn’t be spelling OSO, and neither sequence would help much, anyway.
Courtney stood next to her boyfriend. “You know who she is, right? That librarian. The one we almost took care of with the air conditioner.”
“That’s her?” Luke frowned down at me. “But she’s so short.”
I knew this wasn’t the time to mention that good things came in small packages. And from a lifetime of being underestimated due to my size, I also knew nothing I could say was going to change his point of view of my capabilities. What I could do was bide my time and hope an opportunity presented itself that would let me take advantage of his prejudice.
Behind me, I heard Kate suck in a breath. I squeezed her hand as hard as I could a
nd said, “There’s no information I have that the sheriff’s office doesn’t already know, so there’s no point in hurting my niece. She doesn’t know anything anyway.”
“Do, too!” Kate said. “I know that—”
My hand squeezed Kate’s so hard I heard her knuckles crack. “She doesn’t know anything,” I repeated. “So how about it? Let my niece head back to Chilson. Nothing will change if she leaves.”
Neither one glanced my way.
“This is a problem,” Courtney said, crossing her thin arms. “I wasn’t prepared for this.”
“We can put them in the shed.” Luke tipped his head in that direction. “That lock is pretty good.”
“You think?” Courtney rolled her eyes. “And five minutes after we leave, they kick a piece of siding off and wriggle their way out. She’s short, remember? And that girl is skinny. With a boost, I bet she could get out the window.”
Luke studied the shed. “Yeah, I guess.” He looked over at Courtney. “You want me to shoot them, right? Now or later?”
But Courtney was shaking her head before my brain freaked out. “We have a delivery to make, remember? And if these two really are meeting up with friends, they might have said where they were going.”
“We need time to hide their bodies, then.” Luke shifted the gun from one hand to the other. “Do you think we need to kill them somewhere else?”
Courtney frowned. “That’s a good question.”
I thought it was a horrible question, but I was fairly sure my opinion didn’t count, so I kept quiet. A better question would have been when had Rafe headed home? Or would anyone think to read the houseboat’s whiteboard? I’d written an itemized list—Brown’s Road, King’s raspberries, Lighthouse Park—but did anyone other than my mother know that’s where I wrote my whereabouts? I couldn’t think, couldn’t remember.
My mind whizzed at a million miles an hour. There had to be a way out of this. I had to think of something. I had to get Kate away from these two. I had to get her safe.
“Got an idea.” Courtney dusted off her hands as if she’d handled something dirty. “Keep them here a minute.”
“You going to put the delivery together?” Luke asked. “Because you’re right, we need to get moving. Last time we were late out there, he said if we did it again, he’d find another supplier.”
Courtney sighed. “I know. Well, I have one idea, but do you have any?”
“One idea is better than none, right, babe?” He grinned at her.
Thieves/killers/black marketeers who internally managed their enterprise through collaboration and cooperation? Who knew? But that meant my first instinct, to figure out a way to divide and conquer, wasn’t going to be easy. I needed another plan, and I needed one fast, because I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to care for any of Courtney’s ideas.
“Distract him,” Kate whispered.
I frowned, but before I could turn my head to whisper a puzzled reply, she’d slipped out of my grasp.
“Hey!” Luke yelled.
“Kate, no!” I called.
Instead of paying attention to her aunt or the guy with the gun, she launched herself at Courtney, arms out, fists flying.
Luke took one step, lifted a hand, and yanked her backward by the hair. “Stupid kid,” he said, disgustedly. “What did you think you were doing?”
“Trying to escape,” she said through gritted teeth. “What did it look like?”
Courtney glared. “Like you were trying to earn yourself a faster death. Luke, hang on to her. I’ll be right back.” She marched to the shed and pulled a key out of her shorts pocket. One click, and the padlock dropped open.
Kate shot me a look. “Why didn’t you—”
“Shut up.” Luke, who was holding my niece by the neck with one hand and pointing the gun at me with the other, rattled Kate hard enough to make my own teeth hurt. “I don’t want to hear a word out of you. Like ever.”
He smiled, and that’s when I was certain that Luke Cagan had shot and killed Rex Stuhler. Whether it was Luke or Courtney who’d killed Nicole Price, I didn’t know, but if Luke had killed once, what was there to stop him from killing again?
Well, nothing except a vertically efficient librarian and her contrary niece.
“A very determined librarian,” I murmured.
“You either,” Luke growled, pointing the gun between my eyes.
Having a gun aimed at me had happened once or twice before, but that familiarity did not decrease my heart rate. Or loosen my suddenly tight throat. Or stop my forehead from sweating.
I nodded and, as the gun dropped, started to breathe again.
“This will work.” Courtney came out of the shed and showed him a handful of twine. “Do the kid first, then her,” she said, nodding at me. Either she didn’t remember our names, or was already demoting us to non-name status. Neither possibility boded well.
Luke gave her the gun, which she handled with unfortunate familiarity. So much for my short-lived plan of shoving her to the ground while simultaneously grabbing the gun away from her. Anyone that at ease with a firearm would almost certainly have the impulse to hang on to the thing.
“How tight?” he asked, shoving Kate around and hauling her hands behind her back.
Courtney shrugged. “All I care about is they can’t get loose.”
“Works for me.” He wrapped the twine around Kate’s wrists, pulled it hard enough to make her gasp—and grinned.
Which was when I started to hate him. This was not a calm, detached hatred. No, this was more the Captain Ahab and the Great White Whale kind of hatred, the kind that could consume you.
“You will regret that,” I said quietly, making it less a vow and more a personal goal.
Courtney narrowed her eyes and used the gun to gesture at me. “Tie her hands next, I want to make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.” A pause. “And get it good and tight. She’s smart and I don’t trust her.”
I felt myself twirled around and did what I could to flex my hands, to make them bulgy and muscle-y, but I was pretty sure my efforts didn’t make any difference.
“Oh, hey, look at this,” Luke said as I felt my cell phone sliding out of my shorts pocket. “Forgot to look in their pockets.” He tossed the expensive rectangle on the ground and, with one heel, smashed it to tiny bits. “Check the kid.”
Courtney eyed Kate’s pockets. “She doesn’t have room in there for half a sheet of Kleenex.”
I didn’t know where Kate’s phone was, but having them look for it wouldn’t be good. “She doesn’t have one,” I said. “I took it away from her last week when she didn’t make curfew.”
Courtney snorted. “Curfew? I moved out of my mom’s house because she made me come home by midnight.”
“Now what?” Luke asked. “Tie them to a tree?”
“We’re going to use the shed,” Courtney said.
“But you said—”
“Yeah, I know what I said. We can take care of that, though. I’ll show you.”
The two of them walked over to the shed. Kate looked at me with wide eyes and a white face. “Aunt Minnie—”
“We’ll be fine,” I said. “Don’t worry. She’s not the only one with ideas.” This was true. I had lots of ideas. None of them useful at this particular point in time, but Kate didn’t need to know that.
“Let’s go.” Courtney returned and prodded me in the back. “Into the shed.”
“You realize,” I said conversationally, “that I’m friends with the entire sheriff’s department, including the sheriff. They won’t stop looking until they find me.”
“Much good it’ll do them.” Luke laughed.
“Shh,” Courtney hissed. “Don’t engage, okay? Inside,” she said, and gave me a shove.
I stumbled forward, losing my balance in the process and tumbling toward
the dirt floor. As I fell, I managed to rotate and hit the ground hip-first. This was surprisingly painful and I oofed a grunt of pain as I landed.
“Aunt Minnie, are you okay?” Kate awkwardly knelt next to me.
Luke kicked my legs to the side. “Shut up and lie down. No, you here and you here. Oh, for crying out loud . . .”
He dragged me to one side. Dragged Kate’s feet around. Rolled me over. Rolled Kate around.
The entire thing was an exercise in frustration and humiliation, and I could tell that my face was aflame with fury. At the end of it, Kate and I wound up tied together with more twine, my nose touching her knees and her nose up against my ankles.
“Done,” Courtney said, dusting her hands again, a mannerism I was finding very annoying. “This has taken way too long. We’re going to be late.”
Luke stepped over the top of the Minnie-Kate assemblage and, from the sounds of it, started grabbing pill bottles. “They’ve reopened that county highway already, so we don’t have to take the detour. We’ll be fine.”
Bottles went into whispery plastic bags. They crossed the shed and slammed the door, causing motes of dust to drift down through the small slats of sunlight. We heard the click of the padlock, and just before their footsteps faded away, we heard Luke ask, “When do you think we should come back to finish the job?”
“Good question,” Courtney said. “How about later on today?”
“Let’s do it after dark.”
“Ooo, romantic.” She laughed. “I like the way you think.”
And then they were gone.
Chapter 21
They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?” Kate asked.
I tried to moisten my dry lips. Didn’t accomplish the goal. “They want to. But it’s not going to happen.”
“No?”
The hope in her voice made me want to weep and comfort her at the same time.
She sighed. “Really? And how, exactly, are you going to keep that from happening?”
I found myself, of all things, smiling. This was the obstreperous Kate I knew and loved. “First, let’s work on your use of pronouns.”