"She never intended to kill you."
"Exactly. It's you, Lucas, she's after. She intends to destroy my life by killing you and anyone I love. She wants me to mourn all the people I love that she's taking from me. Thank God Mom and Dad aren't here."
They reached the Brody pier, but remained in the water, pulling themselves along beneath it as cover until they reached shore.
"She wants me to suffer the guilt of all these people dying around me, Lucas. Now those poor boys out there on my lawn brutally killed, my innocent gardener, for God's sake, Mira Lourdes, the old nun, Katherine Croombs, even Arthur Belkvin and his dogs…she wants me to feel responsible for it all. That I somehow caused all their deaths-and the culmination of it all? The death of the one I love most, you."
The gunfire had ceased as darkness had enveloped Lake Madera.
"The moon's gone under again," he said. "Now's the time! Make for the house. Gotta get to a phone."
As they ran, dripping wet and cold, toward the darkened house, the upturned rowboat floated off and into a weedy backwash. No shots came as they made it to the stairs, Meredyth slipping and falling. No shots came as they made it to the front door left ominously ajar. In the driveway, they'd seen the family RV, waiting like a patient dog for its master. They burst into the Brody home, Meredyth calling out each of the Brodys by name. "Myron! Lorene! Candice! It's Meredyth Sanger! Where are you?"
Meredyth called out over and over for them as Lucas tore open doors in search of the family. No answers, no finds.
"No lights," he ordered her as they searched the downstairs den for a phone. Grabbing it, Lucas heard the dead air of a disconnected line. "Bitch has cut the lines. No big surprise." He looked around for a weapon, but the man's glassed-in gun rack was smashed and all his weapons were missing. Lucas instantly realized on seeing this that they might well find a triple murder here, quite possibly mutilations on the same scale as they'd found with Byron Priestly and Arthur Belkvin. Lauralie seemed to take glee in slashing people open. "Stick close by me," he solemnly ordered Meredyth.
She took a tentative step up a flight of carpeted stairs, but he stopped her, pointing to a trickling trail of blood on the kitchen tiles. The blood looked burgundy in the absence of light. "She's left us another intentional trail to follow."
It led them through the expansive kitchen and to a basement door off the kitchen. Meredyth buried her head in his chest, and he held her. "My God, Lucas, she's killed them all."
Lucas had no words that might comfort her. He reached a hand out to the basement door, cautiously opening it, and staring into the black hole of the stairwell. "Stay here, Mere."
"Don't you dare leave me alone."
"I have to step inside and close the door before flicking on the light switch. I don't want that madwoman to know where we are. Understood?"
"I go with you."
He saw the adamant fire in her eyes that said no use arguing. "All right, but it could be a shock. Brace for it."
Once on the stairwell, he flicked on the light, and it instantly revealed blood on the interior door and on the panels of dry wall on both sides of the stairwell. They were, in effect, surrounded by a red rain that looked like paintbrush flecks and spurts, the kind of high-velocity blood residue that comes of gunshot wounds at close range, creating a crazy mosaic only a blood-spatter evidence expert could read. It said to Lucas, They were shot here at the top of the stairwell and the killer used their own weight to her benefit, simply allowing the bodies to fall atop one another. The flood of light revealed the heap of three bodies lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.
"That bitch knows we're here looking at what she's done," said Meredyth, trembling under his embrace. "Directed us across the lake and to the kitchen and here.
Lucas. She's orchestrated the whole damn thing…watching us tip over in the water, climb out at the pier, all of it."
"She can watch our every move through that scope," he agreed. "But she can't see through walls."
Lucas held Meredyth's head close to him, not wishing her to look down the stairwell again at the carnage that lay there, mother, father, and teen daughter. He ordered her to stay on the top stair as he went below. At the foot of the stairs, Lucas got to know the Brodys up close and personal.
Myron, Lorene, and their child, Candice, all with gags, blindfolds, and hands tied at their backs. They'd been summarily shot in the head on the top step. Lauralie had guided each to the basement stairs one at a time, fired into each cranium, and had simply let gravity do the rest.
Myron Brody was at the bottom of the heap, and it recalled Lucas's time in Viet Nam below such a death heap. He truly hated this Lauralie Blodgett now, and he wanted in the worst way to see her dead before this night was over.
Lucas now worked to separate the dead from one another in an effort to find keys for the RV and possibly a cell phone. He pried Myron Brody from the weight of his wife and child and fished into the pants pockets for keys. There were none. He tried Mrs. Brody's pockets. No keys. Finally, he tried the young girl's jeans. Nothing. Finally giving up, he located a tarp and covered the Brodys.
He hurried back upstairs to Meredyth where she sat quietly sobbing. He helped her to her feet, turned out the light, and guided her back into the kitchen. "No doubt she's emptied the place of any keys and cell phones along with any weapons." He indicated the empty chopping block.
"Not entirely," said Meredyth, upending the dining table.
"What're we doing?"
"Arming ourselves." She began unscrewing one of the table legs. In a moment, she had a baseball-bat-sized weapon with a two-inch screw protruding from the end.
Lucas removed a second table leg. "Makes a damn nice war club."
"Lucas, you see what I see?" Meredyth pointed to a clear cookie jar on the countertop, and inside were keys.
Lucas grabbed the jar and emptied out the set of Chevy keys. "I think it's the RV. Come on! We're out the back door and to the car."
Outside, they strapped in before Lucas learned that neither the correct key nor hot-wiring would do, as he could not get a spark from the ignition. Exiting the RV, he rounded to the front and lifted the hood, flashing a light found in the glove compartment now over the dead motor. She had gotten out, clutching her table leg and asking, "What is it?"
He pointed. "She's made off with the distributor cap. Biiiitch!" He ground out the word.
"She's got us right where she wants us, doesn't she?"
"How could she've known we were without our phones, my gun?" he lamented. "Hell…I even left my Texas toothpick in your bedroom, Mere."
"A bowie knife's hardly going to help us now."
"I think it'd beat nothing."
"We have our war clubs, remember?" She hefted her chair leg. His lay on the seat inside the RV. "Lucas, she's thought every detail through. She's been in this house for hours and hours, all damn day. And she's been watching us."
"From where? Exactly where to watch our every move, Mere?"
"Upstairs…Candice's room in the front. It overlooks the lake and she…she is a stargazer, owns a super telescope."
"How damn fortunate for Lauralie."
"She knew when we got up, when we ate, when we left for the stables and left on horseback. All of it."
"She saw the rifle when we passed it back and forth at the stable," he thoughtfully said. "Saw everything that happened across the lake."
"She saw when Howard arrived to do the lawn, and gauged how much time she had to row across and take his identity before we'd be back."
"But how'd she arrange for Kemper's body in the boat to bump into us out there on the lake?"
"She didn't, but she arranged it as a horrid, heinous crime designed for maximum effect whenever I should discover it," Meredyth said. "Didn't matter whether it was to-night, tomorrow, or the next day, because-"
"— because you'd be left alive to savor all the terror she wants to rub your face in."
"Exactly." Meredyth's knuc
kles had gone white with the grip she held on her table leg club.
"So…here we stand in the dark, and she could be anywhere out there, taking a bead on you at this moment, Lucas. She'd like nothing better than to leave me entirely alone, holding your bloodied body in my arms throughout this night of terror she has planned for me. So, if you please, can we take cover and decide what we do next?"
"What are our options?"
"We go back inside the house, huddle up in the dark in a center room without windows, and wait for daylight."
"Can we walk out of here?"
"Not another house or a road for several miles this side of the lake, and if she is watching, she'll stalk us and either kill us or turn us back."
"What about Jeff and Tommy's place, their mother's home?" he asked.
"God, I pray she hasn't been killed, and oh, God, if she is alive, how are we to tell her about her sons, Lucas? How do we explain their deaths?"
"As the senseless act of a madwoman, Mere. Their deaths are not your fault. You give into such guilt, and Lauralie wins. She puts you precisely where she wants you."
"Oh, you mean like now?" She threw up her hands, the flashlight in them sending up crazy circles of light into the leaves of overhanging trees. "Look where she has us! Drip-ping wet, freezing, trapped, and at her mercy!"
"Then we don't lay down for the bitch."
"What do you mean? Go after her?"
"Go after her, yes."
'Tonight?"
"Now."
"In the dark?"
"In the dark."
"With a lake between us and her?"
"Guide me to Candice's room and that telescope."
Meredyth took a deep breath and nodded. "Follow me."
"Douse the light first, will you?"
"Yeah, good idea." Meredyth's mind again filled with the image of Jeff and Tommy lying dead on her front lawn. This followed by the image of the dead in the Brody basement. This followed by the awful image of the worm-covered gardener at the bottom of the waterlogged rowboat.
She led Lucas back into the house through the rear door, both carrying their war clubs. He followed her inside, up the stairs, and to Candice's pitch-black room. Meredyth switched on the flash, but he grabbed it, covering it with his hand and shutting it off. "No lights! It'll tip Lauralie off to our plans!"
"Sorry…I knew that." The little light that guided him to the telescope came in the form of stars reflecting off its metal veneer where it poked through the open window. Balancing the table leg in his crotch, Lucas settled in at a chair before the telescope, realizing that he was in the exact position that Lauralie Blodgett had been in for most of the day. Had she planned this too? For them to be here in the dead girl's room eyeballing Meredyth's cabin on Lake Madera through the very telescope Lauralie had used?
How devious is this sick mind we 've locked horns with, he wondered, in this life-and-death competition?
From the condition of the Brody family bodies downstairs, he guessed the murders here had taken place as early as nine A.M., possibly earlier. He imagined that somewhere hidden in the surrounding woods they might find Arthur Belkvin's BMW, but stumbling about in the dark in search of the car would likely prove as futile as an attempt to walk out of here or around the enormous lake to Mrs. Famsworth's for a phone. The nearest contact opportunity remained the one he now stared at across the lake, his radio car, if she had not destroyed it.
He searched the grounds for any sign of Lauralie, imagining that by now she had shed the gardener's clothes for something out of Meredyth's closet. Behind him, he sensed Meredyth's growing trepidation.
"What do you see? Anyone on the water? Any movement up at the house?"
"No…nothing. She could be anywhere, like you said."
"Damn it, Lucas. What're we going to do?"
"The horses. If we could get to the horses, we could ride out of here."
"No, it's too risky."
"It'd be a piece of cake. We could upend the rowboat. It's still down by the pier, and we float quietly over to the boathouse. From there, we take that back path to the sta-bles."
"Don't you see, Lucas? She's planned it this way, every step of the way. She knows we'll go for the horses, because she's cut off every other alternative means of escape or communication with the outside."
"All right, say she is lying in wait at the stables. We at least know to expect it, and so we're tuned in."
"And she's tuned in at two hundred yards from the house with that damned gun of Jeff's. You don't stand a chance."
Frustrated, he swore and stood up, pushing the chair over and making her start and back up. When she did so, her back hit something solid in the dark-Lauralie Blodgett, her mind screamed even as she called out the name! And the dark figure swayed and returned to hit Meredyth a second blow, and she slipped and fell, her bare feet skidding as if still wet. On hands and knees, she was stung by an unmistakable odor of blood, bile, and decaying flesh as it filled her nostrils. She screamed again as Lucas pushed himself between her and the shadow in the darkness-the thing attacking her. He grunted with the power behind the blow he dealt Lauralie-defending Meredyth with the table leg, slamming it into the dark terror.
Meredyth, from the floor, flashed the beam on the assailant, hoping to help Lucas, expecting to blind Lauralie Blodgett, but instead, the light illuminated the dripping half-torso of Mira Lourdes. her legs and lower abdomen dangling in the blackness, each heel lashed to Candice Brody's white ceiling fan.
"Christ, my heart!" shouted Lucas.
"It's our final ration of fun with the Antichrist and her twisted miracles," Meredyth bitterly said. "Behold the beast cometh. Damn that ugly bitch child of evil wherever she is."
Lucas slipped now on the dank gruel below the half- corpse, and he instantly grabbed Meredyth up in his powerful arms, giving up any effort to regain his feet so he could lift her at the same time from the wet floor soiling their clothes.
"I'm going after her, Mere. You stay here, and I will track her in the night, comer her, and bring her pain and ours to an end."
"No, you can't leave me here alone, and you can't go after her alone, Lucas, no!"
"I can move faster and stealthier alone. Mere. Having you to worry about is more apt to get me killed, trust me. You remain here. I can revert to the old ways and blend in with the night. I can get close enough to break her neck before she sees me coming."
"She's got a high-powered rifle with a scope. I can at least help create a diversion."
"Doing so could get you killed."
"No, don't you see? She gets me in her scope, she won't pull the trigger. She wants me to survive and suffer your loss."
He took a deep breath and then began peeling off his clothing down to his black BVDs. 'Try to keep up," he told her, taking his table leg with him.
Even as she kept pace down the stairs, Meredyth peeled off her own clothes, beginning with her soiled pants, down to her Navy blue bra and panties. She'd not forgotten her war club, which thudded down the carpeted stairs with her. "Lake's going to be cold," she said, shivering at the thought.
"Cold is a state of mind. Hold on to that thought and you'll be all right."
Lucas turned on the flashlight and placed it on the chopping block so it would flash to the ceiling. It decoyed their whereabouts, as it would be seen clearly in the window in Lauralie's telescopic lens. They exited out the back, and belly-crawled to the water's edge down from the pier among the reeds where the. capsized boat had hung up. There they inched into the water and took hold of the waiting, upturned boat. They began to make their way across the lake, back toward Meredyth's home.
Once on the other side, they were masked by the boat- house, where they tied the roaming overturned boat to a mooring. They went into the boathouse by swimming under. Once inside, they caught a moment's rest. Meredyth was trembling and exhausted. He found a blanket and wrapped her in it. "My squaw," he said, smiling. Then, holding his table leg high, he asked, "Where is your war
club?"
"At the bottom of the lake by now. I couldn't hold onto it and the boat any longer."
"I want you to remain here until I get back with the horses," he ordered her. "No arguments."
"Just because I dropped my…my war club?"
"Come on. Mere, we both know your ethics alone prevent you from drawing blood. And like I said, I can move faster and safer on my own."
"Lucas, it's too dangerous. She's up there in one of those windows just waiting for one glimpse of you and-"
He put his finger to her lips. "It's not so easy hitting a moving target, especially a painted Cherokee with a war club."
'Tell that to Jeff and Tommy."
"Jeff and Tommy were forced to run ahead of her down a slope, their backs to the bitch. She won't know when I'm coming. She won't see me coming. When and if she fires, she'll miss. If you hear multiple shots, you'll know she missed. Just have faith and wait here for me, understood?"
"No, Lucas! No!"
But he'd already dived into the blue fluid floor, swimming underwater to the outside, going for the boggy, swampy area on the north side of the structure. "Damnit, Lucas!" she whispered, then dropped the blanket and dove in after him.
CHAPTER 20
Meredyth had watched Lucas disappear below the water and swim out of the boathouse to the hidden side where trees and bush covered his movements. She followed, bobbing in the water, watching him now as he caked himself with mud until he became a living shadow. Hearing her in the water and seeing that she'd disobeyed him and followed, he shot her a disapproving look. He waved for her to go back into the shelter. Then he disappeared into the cover of the path they had so leisurely taken down to the boathouse that afternoon. Lucas seemed to become part of the weave of the green-black cloth of the world around him, and once more she was reminded of just how wild and predatory he could be when circumstances warranted. In the past, she had been both excited by this side of him and afraid of it, but tonight Meredyth thanked God for Lucas's wild side; tonight, she realized she would always be safe in his care. She knew that Lucas was risking his life for her, and that he wanted this opportunity at blood vengeance-payback usually reserved for the death of a loved one. This situation, she decided, was close enough to satisfy his Cherokee blood.
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