by JoAnn Ross
“The day Roxanne got that call from LaDonna?”
“That’s it. While you were driving around, filming the local color, was there any one place that she seemed attracted to?”
Cash watched the light of recognition brighten Dorothy’s eyes. “Her daddy had a fishing cabin on the Tallatch River.”
The river was only a few miles from Raintree, part of the Lower Coastal Plain. It wasn’t much, Cash thought. But it was a start. He exchanged a look with the sheriff which told him they were thinking the same thing.
“Do you remember her saying where it was?”
“I may be able to do better than that,” Dorothy said. “I believe I can show you.”
“You’ve been there?”
“She wanted to see it. I was irritated because I’d probably be late getting home to fix Mama’s dinner. But Jo was so insistent, and Roxanne had instructed me to do whatever it took to make Jo’s and Chelsea’s stay with us more enjoyable. So I drove her there to look at it. We didn’t stay long.”
She shivered. “There was an old alligator sunning himself next to the rickety old front porch. We couldn’t get out of the car. Which didn’t disturb me in the least, since it wasn’t a very nice-looking place.”
Cash picked Dorothy up off her feet and planted a big kiss right on her mouth. “Dorothy, darlin’,” he said, when he’d put her back on the ground, “I love you.”
Even knowing that he didn’t mean it, not in the way she would have liked, Dorothy still blushed.
“I’ll call and have them get a chopper ready for us,” the sheriff said. “It’ll be faster. Do you think you can spot the cabin from the air, Miz Palmer?”
“I think so. So long as you follow the road so I can get my bearings.”
Ten minutes later, the trio, accompanied by two members of the Sheriff’s Department SWAT team were taking off from the county airport.
They were going to get to Chelsea in time, Cash assured himself. They had to. Because the alternative was unthinkable.
It seemed she’d been writing for hours. Chelsea’s hand was getting cramped. But every time she stopped to massage her aching fingers, Jo would stop dictating long enough to scream at her to keep writing.
Chelsea was reluctantly impressed at how much information the filmmaker had been able to compile. She knew an amazing amount about Roxanne’s—Cora Mae’s—life. It was only too bad she hadn’t known about the earlier abortion. Then George Waggoner might still be alive. Although if she were to be perfectly honest, Chelsea certainly wasn’t going to mourn the man.
All the time she was dictating, Jo paced. And filmed the process for her documentary. The dark circles beneath her eyes looked like bruises, making Chelsea wonder how long she’d been in this manic state, and how long she could keep going. She seemed to be operating on adrenaline. And madness.
Every so often, she’d get to a gap in what she knew. That was when she’d turn to Roxanne and hurl the questions at the stricken woman hard and fast. Whenever Roxanne didn’t immediately sob out an answer, Jo would hit her. Hard. Then begin to pace again.
As the hours wore on, what had begun as a remarkably detailed accounting of one woman’s life became the disjointed paranoid ramblings of a mind that was rapidly unraveling. As Jo grew more and more delusional, Chelsea realized she was also more and more dangerous. One could not reason with madness.
On the other hand, she considered, there was the chance that the crazed young woman might wear down completely. And that was what Chelsea decided to count on.
She began asking Jo to repeat things, which only confused the matter more. Sometimes Jo looked as if she were about to burst into tears. At other times, she appeared to be infuriated by her confusion. It was then Chelsea switched gears, soothing, calming, assuring her that they were in this together. Relieved to have found an ally, Jo would resume pacing. And talking.
Chelsea was not surprised to discover that Jo had burned Belle Terre. But there was one piece of the puzzle she couldn’t make fit.
“May I ask a question?”
“Depends on what it is,” Jo snapped, looking irritated at being interrupted.
“Did you have anything to do with me falling off the staircase at Belle Terre?”
“Why would I want to do that?” Jo countered. “When I needed you to write this book. Think about it a minute, Chelsea. Who do you think could have felt threatened by you finding out the truth?”
Chelsea immediately turned toward Roxanne, who didn’t respond to her probing gaze. But the guilty look in her eyes spoke volumes.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Roxanne said finally, as the silence hovered over the room. “Really,” she insisted when Jo laughed. “But I overheard you asking Jo about my background.”
“Fictional background,” Jo put in.
“I had my reasons for that,” Roxanne snapped, showing a bit of her own spunk. “I kept telling myself that you weren’t an investigative reporter like your father, that you’d let it drop. But then you went to the courthouse to look up the old records, and well, I just wanted you to go back to New York. After all, you had enough to finish the book. And if you’d only gone,” she said pointing out what Chelsea had already thought of, “you wouldn’t be in this predicament now.”
“That’s enough chitchat,” Jo decided. “It’s time to get back to work.”
Having lost her watch somewhere after being drugged, Chelsea had no idea what time it was. The cabin door was shut and barred, the hurricane shutters closed. The only light was from that single forty-watt bulb hanging overhead.
“I’m so tired,” she complained. “And my head is aching. Can’t I take a break? I need some sleep. And some aspirin.”
“It’s not night, yet,” Jo snarled. “You don’t need to go to sleep.”
“What about the aspirin?” Chelsea put on her most conciliatory expression. “You’re an artist, surely you understand how difficult it is to be creative when you’re in pain. I truly want this to be a wonderful book, Jo.” She rubbed her forehead. “But with this splitting headache, I’m having trouble thinking straight.”
“There are some aspirin in the glove compartment of the car,” Roxanne offered carefully. “If that will help.”
Jo spun around. “Why are you trying to help me? What are you up to?”
“Nothing! I’m your mother. As you pointed out, I inadvertently did a terrible thing to you. The least I can do is help Chelsea write you a wonderful book.”
Jo looked hesitantly from Roxanne to Jo and back again. She reminded Chelsea of a wounded, trapped animal. “I’m not going to leave you alone in here.”
“Where could we go?” Chelsea asked. “We don’t even know where we are. Speaking of which,” she said, “if I’m not back at Rebel’s Ridge soon, Cash will worry. If he comes looking for me and I’m not at the house, he may call the sheriff.”
“Let him. By the time they find you, you’ll both be dead anyway.”
That was exactly what Chelsea had feared. The stakes had just been raised considerably. “I don’t think you’d kill me, Jo,” she said. “Because I’m on your side. And what good is a dead writer?”
“You don’t think Truman Capote still sells?” Jo countered. “Hell, I’ll bet his numbers are higher than when he was alive.”
Good point. Chelsea tried again. “But if I’m dead, I won’t be able to promote the book. Do you have any idea how many people watched my interview with Charles Gibson on “Good Morning America”? All those people are potential readers, Jo.
“If we play our cards right, all of them—millions of viewers—will run out and buy our book and realize how badly you’ve been mistreated by Roxanne. None of them will ever buy any of her books again. Or her dishes, or her flatware, or her towels. She won’t even be a footnote in history. She’ll disappear. It’ll be as if she never existed. But you need me to help you.”
“I’ll get the aspirin,” Jo decided. “And you can come use the phone in the car to call your bo
yfriend. But you’d better not try anything funny.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” Chelsea promised.
As she left the cabin and walked out to the car parked on a strip of bright white sand, the sun was setting, bathing the landscape in a molten copper glow. The rain had stopped, but rather than cooling things down, the steamy air was pregnant with lingering moisture. They seemed to be somewhere similar to the swamp where she’d gone fishing with Cash and Jamie, but the water, rather than black, was a bright tea color. A pair of alligators dozed on the far bank.
“Where are we?”
“That’s none of your business.” Jo opened the car door. “Make your damn phone call. Then we can get back to work.”
Chelsea called, relieved and worried when she got Cash’s answering machine. That could mean he had already begun looking for her. Or perhaps he’d been arrested for George’s murder.
She left a message, wishing she could have said something clever that would have tipped him off to her whereabouts. Which, of course, would have been impossible, even if she had been able to speak with him, because she had no earthly idea where she was.
She vaguely remembered Cash telling her that the rivers on the Coastal Plain were called backwater rivers. And that their clear water was stained tea-colored by decaying organic matter in adjacent swamps. The salt dunes, she recalled, were on the eastern side of these streams and thought to be wind deposits from the nearby sea laid down some two million years ago.
Terrific. So now she knew she was somewhere on Georgia’s coastal plain. Which was only hundreds of miles square. No problem finding her way home, she thought with a sinking heart.
But then again, if she didn’t try to escape, her fate was sealed. Because although she might be able to temporarily confuse Jo, she did not believe for a moment that she’d be allowed to walk away from this alive.
Jo frowned as she watched Chelsea hang up. “You know, I never thought of this, but you could have used the phone to call 911.”
“But I didn’t.”
“No. Not this time. Let’s make sure you don’t.” She lifted the revolver and slammed it down onto the console, shattering the phone’s plastic casing. “There. That’s better,” she said with overt satisfaction. “Now let’s get back to work.”
They were almost to the cabin door when Chelsea stumbled and fell to her knees.
“Dammit,” Jo, clearly shaken by this unexpected event, shouted. “I told you not to try anything.”
“I fell,” Chelsea said on the closest thing to a whine that had ever, in all her twenty-eight years, come out of her mouth. “I told you, Jo, I’m exhausted. I need some sleep.”
“You can sleep when the book is done.” Something struck Jo as funny about that. “In fact, I promise you, Chelsea, you’ll be sleeping for a very long time.” She was laughing as they entered the cabin.
“All right.” She went over to where she’d left the video camera on the cot. As she bent down to pick it up, Chelsea lifted the rock she’d picked up when she pretended to fall and brought it down on her captor’s head.
Chelsea quickly bent down and tried to untie Roxanne. But the cords were too tight, forcing her to resort to sawing through them as Jo had with her. Unfortunately, she wasn’t left with enough cord to tie up her captor.
“We’re going to have to get the hell out of here now. I don’t suppose you have an extra car key hidden under the floor mat?”
“Of course not.”
“Terrific.” She dumped Jo’s bag onto the cot, rifling through the contents until she found the set of car keys with their gold Mercedes symbol. “Okay, let’s get this show on the road.”
“Do you know where you’re going?” Roxanne asked as she followed Chelsea out to the car.
“Sure,” Chelsea answered with exaggerated bravado. “Away from here.”
“That’s not a very good answer.”
“Sorry. It’s the best I can do.” Chelsea claimed the driver’s seat without asking permission, stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. The quiet, unmistakable click was almost deafening. She tried again. Nothing.
“I can’t believe this!” She pounded on the leather steering wheel. “This is a sixty thousand dollar car! And the battery goes dead?”
“It can happen,” Roxanne replied defensively.
“Shit.” Chelsea lowered her forehead to the wheel, closed her eyes and tried to think. They could go back into the cabin and try to hold Jo at gunpoint. But she was honestly exhausted and Jo’s insane mania seemed to give her super endurance.
And although Roxanne was calculating and intelligent—she’d certainly caught on fast when Chelsea had complained of a headache—she didn’t want to put her life in this woman’s hands, either. Because, if push came to shove, Chelsea knew that Roxanne would save Roxanne. And let her fend for herself.
She glared down at the broken phone. “We’re going to have to walk out of here.”
“I’m not going to spend the night in some goddamn swamp with alligators and water moccasins and mosquitoes!”
“Fine. Then you stay here and take your chances with your precious baby daughter. I’m getting out while I still can. Besides, there’s supposed to be a full moon tonight. That should help.”
“There’s a toolbox in the trunk,” Roxanne said. “It should have a flashlight in it.”
Chelsea felt a renewed surge of hope. “That’s better than nothing.”
The flashlight was a little aluminum Mini Maglite, small, but bright. She was relieved to find at least these batteries were working.
“Why don’t you tie her up,” Roxanne suggested, still seeking a way to remain safely at the cabin.
“With what?”
“How should I know? A vine, perhaps?”
Chelsea glanced around. “You see any vines around here?”
“There must be some kudzu,” Roxanne insisted. “The damn stuff is practically overrunning the entire state.”
Before Chelsea could decide whether to risk taking time to look for the seeming ubiquitous vine, the door to the cabin flung open.
“Shit.” The opportunity for tying up Roxanne’s mad daughter had obviously passed. “I forgot to pick up the gun.” A shot rang out, whizzing past her ear, shattering the back windshield.
“Come on, dammit,” Chelsea shouted at Roxanne, who seemed frozen from fright.
Jo fired again, this time hitting the open trunk, jolting Roxanne into action as she followed Chelsea deeper into the swamp.
The sun had set in a blaze of fire over the swamp. As they headed out in the opposite direction, Chelsea prayed that the night would stay clear. The idea of being out here in the pitch-black dark was definitely less than appealing.
A bloodcurdling scream suddenly echoed across the black water.
“What was that?” Roxanne screamed in response.
“An animal,” Chelsea guessed.
“It sounded human.”
“It was a screech owl,” Chelsea, who’d spent most of her life in Manhattan, where the wildlife tended to have two legs, insisted. “I remember reading they can sound remarkably human. Like peacocks.”
“I’ve never heard that,” Roxanne argued.
“It’s true.” Although her tone carried absolute conviction, Chelsea wondered who she was trying to fool. Roxanne, or herself?
For the first time since the nightmare began, she felt like breaking down and bawling her head off. But then the memory of her father suddenly flooded into her head. Her brave, cocky, hero father. If Dylan Cassidy could trudge through the jungles of Vietnam and emerge without a scratch, she could survive this.
Feeling as if she were literally following in her father’s footsteps, Chelsea kept walking.
The night air was thick with the dank, cloying odor of rotting vegetation. Fireflies glowed, the marsh grass rustled as small unseen animals moved through it. There was the nerve-racking sound of crickets all around them, the deep croaking of frogs, the occasional hoot of an owl. Th
e wings of night birds moving from tree to tree whispered overhead.
In the beginning, Roxanne whimpered continually. Then, as if realizing she was only wasting emotional energy, she fell silent, trudging behind Chelsea, seeming more than willing to surrender the power that had once seemed to be so important to her.
Chelsea heard a sound like a log rolling into the water. She turned the flashlight toward the noise and jumped as she viewed the gleaming yellow eyes of an alligator gliding toward them across the water, his back broad and black as he passed by. Relieved that she wasn’t a dinner target, Chelsea then gasped in horror as she watched him catch up to a swimming nutria and open his huge mouth. The sound of the furry animal’s spine breaking was like a gunshot over the incessant chirp of crickets.
Chelsea glanced back over her shoulder to see if Roxanne had seen the wildlife drama. She had. Her eyes were wide and filled with the shock Chelsea herself was feeling. The two women exchanged a look and, having no choice, continued on.
“Where they hell are they?” Cash demanded, his frustration level rising with every minute the search continued.
“I’m sorry.” Dorothy, who’d yet to locate the cabin, was in tears now. Cash knew it was his gentlemanly duty to try and soothe her but right now he didn’t feel much like a gentleman.
“It’s a big swamp,” Joe Burke said unnecessarily. He reached over with his large hand and patted her knee. The comforting gesture only caused a renewed flood of tears.
Great, Cash thought grimly. This was just fucking great.
The full moon spread an unearthly white light over the land, a glow more eerie than comforting as it cast the trees in deep shadows that seemed even darker by contrast. It had begun to rain again, fat wet drops that soaked through her clothing and ran down her face. Chelsea was considering stopping and trying to find their way out in the morning.
“This is ridiculous,” Roxanne complained as she stumbled over yet another root. “Why can’t we just rest until morning?”
Before Chelsea could answer, her flashlight focused on yet another alligator sitting on the opposite bank. While she watched, he lifted his head, arched his tail and bellowed. It was not a loud sound, but it shook her to the bones.