Dead, Bath, and Beyond

by Lorraine Bartlett

  In her effort to stand in the dark, her foot caught the corner of the bunk, and she fell back to the floor.

  Silly foot, she thought and gathered herself up to make another attempt to stand.

  Then . . . she didn’t.

  It wasn’t a silly foot at all. Because it had given her an idea.

  She drew her feet together, inserted the spring between her shoes, and held it tight. Holding her breath, she leaned forward and ran her wrists over the sharp end. The sawing noise wasn’t as loud, but it was there.

  This was going to work. It might take a lot longer to get her wrists free than it had her ankles, but this was going to work.

  Katie almost hummed with satisfaction as she worked, dragging her hands forward and backward, forward and backward, forward and backward. Though she couldn’t reach her fingers around to check on her progress, she could feel her bonds loosening. Slowly, horribly slowly, but loosening they were.

  Forward and backward.

  Over and over and over.

  The task was mind-numbingly boring. Katie had drifted into a sort of daze so deep that when she cut through the last layer of tape, she didn’t realize what she’d done until the sharpest part of the spindle scraped across her exposed skin.

  She yelped a little, then blinked in the dark. Her hands were loose. She was free!

  Saying a fast prayer to the heavens, she jumped to her feet. It was time to get on with the next part of her escape plan. Not that she’d come up with one yet, but it had been hard to plan that far ahead when her hands and feet had been taped together.

  Katie’s head swam with dizziness, and she grabbed at the doorway to steady herself.

  Careful, she told herself. You had a good crack on the skull.

  She raised a hand and felt her head, wincing when she found the tender spot. She had no idea whether or not she had a concussion, but since she didn’t have an emergency room handy, there wasn’t much point in wondering about it. That could wait until later.

  What she needed was a way off the boat. She had to get back to shore. She had to—

  The noise of the engine, which had been her sole companion ever since she’d woken up, suddenly subsided.

  Katie froze. If the boat had stopped, that had to mean something was going to happen, and it was a certainty that that something wasn’t going to be in her best interests.

  She soft-footed it to the bottom of the short flight of stairs and listened. No footsteps approached, which was good. Her only weapon was the toilet paper spindle, and while that sharp end could do some serious damage, to use it she would have to get closer to Noth than she wanted. And there was still the stomach-clenching question of his associates. Who were they? How many were there? Was it just one, or . . .

  Katie shook her head at herself and focused on listening.

  But there was nothing to hear, nothing but the slap of waves against the boat’s hull. Nothing but the sound of a low wind. Nothing but—

  “You ready?”

  Katie’s gaze flicked overhead. That had been Noth’s voice. He must have been the one at the wheel.

  “Give me a minute.”

  The second voice was farther away and hard to make out over the waves. Katie strained to hear.

  “. . . do you figure?”

  “An hour should do it,” Noth said.

  Katie, looking up, tracked his footsteps across the ceiling. She tensed. Was he going to come down into the cabin? If he did, she had to scramble up and out. Get outside and overboard; it was her only chance.

  She felt a shuddering bump against the boat. What the . . . ?

  When the second voice called, “Tie up the stern, will you?” she realized the bump had been a second boat coming up alongside.

  “Got it,” Noth said. Through the skylight, Katie saw a flashlight’s beam playing over the boat. “Let’s move, Luke. I don’t want to be out here any longer than I have to.”

  Katie’s brain tickled at the name. Luke? She’d met a Luke recently, but where?

  “Hang on. Got to get my dive light.”

  Dive light? Katie frowned. Why on earth would anyone be diving in the middle of the night?

  A loud splash at the boat’s stern shifted Katie’s attention, followed by more bumps. These bumps, however, were quieter and came from underneath her feet, underneath the boat.

  The smaller bumps traveled forward and then back again.

  “Got them,” Luke called.

  Noth grunted. “Good. Let’s get going.”

  The boat rocked a little, and Katie heard the unmistakable sound of a body climbing out of the water. Seconds later, the engine of the other boat turned over, gurgling a little as the propellers started churning the water.

  “Untie us,” Noth said.

  “Did you take the key?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Of course I took the key.”

  “How long before we get the money for this one?” Luke asked.

  Noth laughed. “Greedy little jackass, aren’t you?”

  “All I want is my fair share—”

  Then Noth must have slammed on the throttle, because the other boat’s engine roared to life and hurtled across the water, away from Katie and the boat she was on.

  As she stood there, two facts popped into her head at the same time. First was that the Luke in question was Luke Stafford, Erikka’s ex-boyfriend. But that fact was completely eclipsed by the knowledge that the boat in which she’d been imprisoned was about to sink.

  With her in it.

  Nineteen

  Katie’s panic, which she’d been successfully keeping at a low level, burst into full flower. “Come back!” she yelled. “You can’t leave me here!”

  But they had, in fact, left her alone on a sinking boat. And they knew they had. They were trying to kill her, and with her body contained inside the cabin, no one would ever know what had happened to her.

  “My car,” she said out loud. Her car would be found at the marina, and . . . But no. The keys were in her purse, which she’d undoubtedly left on the floor of that warehouse. Either Noth or Luke would drive the car to some secluded location and leave it.

  Maybe a hunter would find it during deer season, or maybe no one would find it until spring, or even later. She would vanish without a trace. People would be shocked, and Andy would run himself ragged trying to find her, but time would move on. The memory of Katie Bonner would fade, and Andy’s pain would eventually ease. He’d fall in love with someone else, someone thin and blond, and they’d marry, they’d have three lovely children, and none of the three pregnancies would ruin the blonde’s trim figure.

  “It isn’t fair,” Katie said to herself. Then, since no one was around to hear, she shouted at the top of her lungs. “It’s not fair!”

  The echo of her own words bounced back at her, and she felt a little childish, complaining about fairness at her age. Of course it wasn’t fair. Most things weren’t. But whining about it wasn’t going to help a thing, and if she let herself be distracted by the unfairness of life, her life would end up as short as Noth and Luke hoped.

  “Not if I can help it,” she said out loud, and this time her words made her feel better. Not a lot, but even a little was a step forward.

  What she needed was a plan. A realistic one that didn’t include kindly aliens noting her predicament and rescuing her with a beam that would transport her to dry land. Although that would have been nice, she had to assume she was on her own.

  And what she needed to do first was get off that boat. Because, if Noth’s estimate of one hour had been correct, that was how much time she had before enough water seeped in to send it to the bottom of the lake. She was one hundred percent certain that, on Luke’s short dive underneath the boat, he’d been unscrewing the plastic plugs that filled the boat’s drain holes, letting water pour inside the hull
.

  She needed to get outside, she needed to start the bilge pump, she needed to use the radio to call for help, she needed to see if there was a life jacket aboard, she needed to—

  “First things first,” she said, as firmly as she could. Before she could do anything else, she had to get out of the cabin. She climbed the few stairs and tried the door. It wasn’t locked, because what you wanted on a boat was to keep thieves from getting in, not to keep people from getting out, but they must have wedged the door or barricaded it, because she couldn’t move it more than an inch or two.

  She banged on the door with her fists, used her shoulder to whack at it, and thumped at it with her hips, but none of her efforts made it budge. The boat was quality construction, which made sense, because it had to be worth a hefty sum if Noth and Luke were killing people over the scam they’d set up, but it would have made things a lot easier for her if the door had been made of thinner wood.

  Rubbing her shoulder, she retreated down the stairs to think. She glanced up at the skylights. In a movie, the hero would jump up, grab the edges of the light, and pull himself up and through to escape. That wasn’t going to work in this case, because the opening was far smaller than she was, and even if it had been big enough, she lacked the upper-body strength to pull herself up like that.

  What she needed was a battering ram of sorts. For the thousandth time, she glanced around the small space. Everything was built-in. The kitchen cabinets were built-in, as were the bunks and their upper and lower cabinets. She’d already used the only thing in the bathroom that had been removable without tools, and the spindle wouldn’t make a very good battering ram.

  “There has to be something,” she murmured, crossing her arms and leaning against the table, thinking about the hours she’d spent on Seth’s boat. He’d had a fire extinguisher, which would have been ideal, but she hadn’t found one under the sink, and if there was another one, it would most likely be up in the cockpit.

  The boat gave a wallowing roll, and Katie put her hands behind her on the table to steady herself . . . Table.

  Katie flung herself to the floor. On Seth’s boat, he’d once shown her how the table could be lowered to be level with the seats. Add the cushions from the under-seat storage and you had extra sleeping accommodations.

  But she didn’t care about the accommodations; what she wanted to know was if the table, which went down, would also go up. And out.

  It was too dark under the table for her to see what she was doing, but it didn’t take long for Katie to figure out how to release the table. She gasped with surprise as the surface dropped down onto her shoulders, then pushed up against it, using her legs, using her back and shoulders and arms to push it up . . . up . . . up . . .

  The table slid out of its metal pedestals and crashed to the floor.

  Bam!

  Breathing deep from her efforts, Katie found the table was much heavier than she’d anticipated. “Stupid well-built boat,” she muttered, wondering if she had the strength to pick it up and use it to batter anything, let alone a door at the top of the stairs.

  She stood and picked up the tabletop. It slid out of her hands and hit the floor with a thud. No way was she going to be able to carry that up the stairs and whack the door with it. If she’d had someone with her, maybe, but not by herself.

  As she stood there, staring at the dim outline of the table, a growing despair settled in her chest, and her throat seemed to constrict.

  “No,” she whispered. “I will not give up.” Too many people were counting on her. And what would happen to her cats? Plus, she’d been so looking forward to working with a year’s worth of data for Artisans Alley.

  There had to be a way. All she had to do was find it. All she had to do was—

  “Got it!” she exclaimed, then told herself not to get so excited. Her new idea might work, but it might not.

  She picked up one end of the table and jockeyed it around to sit on the bottom stair. So far so good. With a grunting effort, she flipped it up vertically, wavering on her feet a little as she balanced the table on its thin edge.

  “This will work,” she said as confidently as she could.

  She pushed and pulled and slid the table up the stairs. At the top, she wedged the bottom corner of the table into the small gap she’d created. She pushed harder, wedging it in some more, then pushed a little bit more, putting as much of her weight into the shove as she could.

  Keeping the tabletop steady with both hands, she maneuvered down the stairs and to the table’s opposite end. Singing a pirate heave-ho, she threw her body against the tabletop, which was now a lever, hoping, praying, and begging anyone who was listening to let this work.

  Crack!

  The noise of wood screeching was sharp and loud, but the door didn’t fling itself open. Katie ran up the stairs. The door had opened another inch. Not much, but it was progress. And at that point, any progress was good.

  An elated Katie worked on wedging the tabletop deeper into the gap, then she returned to the opposite end and hurled her body against the table a second time.

  Crack!

  Katie and the tabletop tumbled to the floor in an untidy heap. She pushed it away, scrambled to her feet, and hurried up the stairs to see what had happened. But even before she’d reached the top, she felt so much fresh lake air on her face that she let out a cheer.

  Then she ran smack into the door.

  “What the . . . ?”

  Her plan, which had been to use the tabletop as a lever to push away whatever barricade blocked the door, hadn’t worked at all. What she and her lever had done instead was to break the door itself.

  “Close enough,” she said and jabbed at the broken bits with her fleece-covered elbow and her sneakered feet. The more she jabbed and kicked, the more light began to stream through, and soon she’d broken away enough pieces of door to squeeze her way through.

  “I’m out!” In the moonlight, she could see why she hadn’t been able to push away the barricade; it was the boat’s anchor, and he’d lashed it into place.

  She stuck out her tongue at the thing and moved on to the next task on her survival list. Finding a life jacket. A lifeboat. Anything, really, that might float long enough to get her to shore. Speaking of shore . . .

  Katie looked across the water and saw nothing but a dark, star-speckled sky merging into black waves. No shore in sight. She swallowed, knowing that if the shore couldn’t be seen, she was miles from land, much farther than she could swim, and far enough that, if she was in the water, she’d perish from hypothermia long before she reached safety.

  She turned, starting her search for a lifeboat, and saw a string of lights off in the distance. “I am so stupid,” she said and almost laughed. She’d been looking in the wrong direction for land, that was all. And though it was still a long way off, it was within sight, at least.

  Squinting, she tried to judge the distance, and also tried to calculate where she was.

  A mile off, probably. But she had no idea what part of Lake Ontario she was floating around upon. East of Rochester? West? She couldn’t tell. Heck, for all she knew, they could have been boating for some time before she woke and it was the Canadian shoreline she saw.

  She studied the sky. The wind was stiff, creating large gaps in the cloud cover, letting glimpses of the moon and the stars show clear. She didn’t know much about the constellations, but she did know enough to find the Big Dipper, and up the far edge of the dipper to the North Star.

  A cloud bank parted, and she saw what she needed. “Ahh,” she murmured. North was in the direction of the dark horizon. That line of lights was to the south.

  Now that she was directionally oriented and had some light to work with, she made a quick search of the boat—no key in the ignition, just as Noth had said—and found it as empty as the cabin area had been. No life jackets and no boat. Which,
she supposed, made sense, because if they were doing what she thought, scuttling boats, claiming the insurance, then raising the boats and selling them, they would want the boat to vanish without a single trace.

  A grim Katie headed for the cockpit. “Wonderful,” she said, as she viewed the dashboard. But it wasn’t really a surprise to her that the emergency radio had been stripped from the console. Why let it be ruined from immersion in lake water? When Noth and Stafford recovered the boat, they’d just put it back in and sell it as part of the whole package.

  So . . . now what?

  Katie had no clear idea how much time had passed since the other boat had left, but it had to have been at least thirty minutes, half the time that Noth had predicted it would take for the boat to sink. “T-minus thirty,” she said.

  Assuming Noth was right, she had half an hour to rescue herself. The boat would be sinking lower and lower into the water that entire time, wallowing deeper and deeper into the waves until it would finally drop all the way under.

  She smiled to think of the surprise Noth and his sidekick would feel when they went to salvage the boat and found no trace of her body. At least she had that satisfaction, knowing they’d always be wondering what happened to her, wondering how she’d escaped—

  Escaped the boat only to—

  “No,” she said loudly, startling herself. She was not going to drown out here. She. Was. Not. She’d come this far; she wouldn’t let herself give up now. There had to be something she could do. There had to be.

  Katie walked around the boat a second time, looking for something, anything, that would help. Since she didn’t find anything that time, she did a third round.

  Still nothing.

  Okay, she wasn’t going to get off the boat, not with any real chance of making it to shore alive, anyway. So if she couldn’t get off, the only alternative was to get someone to come rescue her.

  It was a brand-new idea, and one she didn’t particularly care for—she was used to doing for herself and had grown to prefer it that way—but there was a time and a place to ask for help, and this was it.