by David Bell
It lit up, ringing. Gina? She heard the accident. But I couldn’t reach it, not strapped in as I was.
“Shit,” I said.
I pushed the crumpled, deflating air bag out of my way and tried to make a move.
Whoever had smashed into me must have been calling the police. Unless they were worse off than me.
Or—
Unless they wanted to hurt me.
Fragments of the accident came back. The headlights filling the rearview, the car behind me not stopping at all.
How could that happen? It wasn’t a blown stop sign or a missed turn. They’d rammed me.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Bill Maberry. He’d followed Jade. He’d watched me.
Shit.
My hands shook as I unbuckled myself. My body slumped to the right when the harness was released, and I exerted enough pressure and will to hold myself in place and avoid flopping over to the increasingly soaked passenger side. I pushed against the driver’s-side door, working against the gravity of the tilted car to swing it open. It took two heaves, two big heaves I felt in my back and arms, before it swung far enough open that I could swing my feet around and plant them on the ground. I pushed myself to a standing position, my head brushing against the doorframe as I stood up.
The headlights of the other car glowed to my left. It sat on the berm safely away from the culvert, the engine still running and making a low humming sound in the night.
And just then a figure, just a shadow, a dark stain in the bright cone of the lights, came toward me.
A voice spoke.
“Mr. Hansen? Don’t leave. We have something to talk about.”
I froze. The glowing lights burned my eyes, but I heard the voice. It wasn’t what I expected, and my guard dropped for a moment.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Mr. Hansen, I think you know who I am and what I want.”
A woman’s voice. A little husky, but a woman. And the figure approaching me was that of a woman as well. Thin, dressed in black, wearing a cap pulled low on her forehead and sunglasses.
The same look as the driver who had tried to lure Andrew into the car.
She approached . . . thirty feet away, then twenty.
I looked to my right. No other cars. No help, no phone.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
My knee stung, my neck burned. A woman? Kendra Maberry?
She raised her hand in the darkness, leveling it before her body.
The shot she fired whizzed past my ear with a stinging crack.
I ran. Like a wounded animal fueled by fear and adrenaline, I ran.
* * *
I ran for my apartment complex. I hoped someone—a passing car, a friendly face—could offer help or shelter. But I saw no one.
And I couldn’t stop running.
I couldn’t let her catch up to me.
My feet pounded the pavement, my legs moving seemingly of their own free will, as though disconnected from my brain and fueled purely by fear for my life.
I huffed and puffed as I ran. My lungs burned.
Another shot came, and I tensed, lifting my arms over my head. But I felt nothing. No impact, no pain, not even the whistling sensation of it passing by.
Would it hurt to be shot? Would it hurt to die?
I turned into the complex. A car came toward me, its headlights filling my vision. I waved my arms, seeking help, but the car didn’t slow. It zipped past me, the face of the driver, an older woman, looking out at me like I was a madman. Which I was.
And I had a madwoman breathing down my neck.
I cut across the landscaped lawn at the center of the complex and headed for my building. I tried to look back but feared I’d fall, so I kept running. Running and running, until the building and my door came into sight. I pulled up when I made it there, hoping against hope that my pursuer would be gone, would have given up the chase.
Then it hit me. The keys. My keys were still in the car.
I needed to keep running but didn’t know if I could. I was out of breath. Way out of breath. My legs felt rubbery and loose. They could barely support my body.
The woman approached, a dark shadow in the night. She still held her hand out before her, getting a bead on me. I expected another shot. I expected to die on my stoop.
Marissa.
Andrew.
I wanted to sit down. To fall to the ground and let my body go limp. I bent over, my hands on my knees as the woman came closer and closer. She was a little shorter than me, slender like a runner. She breathed a little heavier than normal, but more like she’d just taken a quick run up a flight of stairs. She possessed the advantage. Completely.
Should I scream? Would I get shot?
She came closer, walking slowly, catlike, her shoes making no sound in the night. Her face was disguised by the sunglasses and the hat, but I saw the feminine shape of the mouth, the lipstick.
“Inside, Mr. Hansen,” she said in the husky voice.
“I can’t. No keys.”
“It’s unlocked. I was here earlier.”
“The police will be coming. The accident. My ex-wife was on the phone when it happened.”
“Inside.”
Her voice sounded cool and indifferent, like a winter wind. She spoke like someone who expected her orders to be followed, someone who knew her prey lacked options. I was trapped. Truly.
“What do you want from me?” I asked. I held my hands up, indicating I meant no harm. No tricks up my sleeve. No weapons or mischief.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Inside. We’ll talk.”
I turned and twisted the knob. The door was unlocked and gave. Nothing but darkness waited inside. Darkness and Riley.
“I have a dog,” I said. “He doesn’t bite.”
“I know. I met him.”
A cold pain clutched my heart. No. She didn’t do something to Riley, did she?
I stepped across the threshold and looked around. Riley didn’t appear. I didn’t call him either. If he was hiding or scared, then so be it. I wanted him out of the way. If he hadn’t already been harmed by this woman.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She followed me in, her presence looming at my back like an enormous dark shadow. She reached over and flicked on a lamp, filling the front of the apartment with light.
“Don’t you know who I am?” she asked.
“Kendra Maberry?”
“Good guess.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Sit on the couch. We’ll talk.”
For a smaller woman, she gave me a hard shove from behind, sending me stumbling toward the coffee table. I caught myself before I fell, and then regained my balance. I followed orders and sat on the couch, relieved to be off my feet after my wreck and my insane run. I lifted my hand to my face. The trickle of blood from my nose seemed to have slowed, as I found a smaller smear of red across the back of my hand. Feeling crept into the center of my face again, a jagged tingling as the nerves woke up, and I started to believe my nose hadn’t been broken.
Kendra Maberry stood over me, her feet set as wide apart as her shoulders. She looked coolly confident as she took off her hat and sunglasses, a woman without a care in the world. And that scared the hell out of me.
“She came here and told you the whole story, didn’t she?” she asked.
“She’s telling the police right now.”
For a moment, a ripple of uncertainty passed across her face. Then the composure returned, a solid mask of unfeeling.
“So she told you the whole thing?” she asked. “She must have.”
“She did. And let me say, I’m sorry about your son. I can’t imagine—”
“No, you can’t,” she
said.
“I can’t. Right. But why would you want to do that to someone else? Kill or kidnap their child?”
“You’re one of those people who wants everything to be simple, aren’t you? Have a problem, call the police. You get wronged, you get justice. Do you really think the world is going to work that way?”
“Most of the time it does.”
“You’re a fool if you think that.”
“Then I’m a fool,” I said. “Look, just go. Whatever you do to me, the police are already looking for you. Get out of here and run away.”
“Running away won’t change anything. That’s what your girlfriend tried to do all those years ago. Run away. Pretend that the accident never happened, that she never killed my baby boy.”
“She never forgot.”
“I did more than never forget. I lived and relived that moment every day for twenty years. Picking up his broken body in the street, having his blood on my hands. Burying him. And everything that came after.” In the glow of the lamp, her eyes shimmered brown, and I saw the pain there. “I couldn’t have another baby. My husband drifted away. We got divorced. I lost it all, everything from the life we once had. Do you know what that’s like?”
“I’ve had a taste.”
“I wish I could forget,” she said. For a moment, her face showed the emotion, the wear and tear of years of grinding grief. “I wish I could.”
“Your fight’s not with me. Or with the Minors, really. Take it to the courts, let the police sort it out.”
“I know there’s no fight with you,” she said, some sympathy creeping into her voice. “Not really. But like my son’s death taught me, sometimes there are innocent bystanders.”
“Like my stepson, Andrew. You tried to kidnap him.”
“You were getting too involved, nosing into too much of what was going on. I had to scare you, to brush you back a little. You were falling for their lies.”
“And terrify a young boy? And his mother?”
“He got away. It could have been worse.”
Her words carried a chilling logic. “Like it was for Emily Russell?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Who killed her?” I asked. “You or your husband?”
“My husband lost his taste for the fight many years ago,” she said. “Even when they found that car, the car that proved we were right all along, he didn’t have the stomach for it anymore. He’d gotten remarried. He moved on. He forgot.”
“But he knew about the car?” I asked. “He could have—”
“He told me about the car,” she said. “He told me.” She pursed her lips, and her chin quivered. “I was fine. Better. Off the booze. Off the pills. Working. And then Bill told me about that car. About the Minors’ car. He had spent years looking for answers, and he never found anything useful. Just dead ends. Until they found that car in the pond. And then he told me those girls, those Minor girls, were living their lives happily with their children. He said one of them was living in Wisconsin under another name . . . with her kids and her wonderful life.” The hurt showed in her eyes, twenty years of grief. “I lost it. I fell completely apart.”
“And you went after them? You went after the Minors because of what your husband told you? You could have gone to the police.”
“Bill told me not to. He told me . . . he convinced me the police wouldn’t listen, that after all those years they wouldn’t do anything. I felt like I had no choice, like I had to take matters into my own hands.”
“He wound you up like a top,” I said. “He turned you loose.”
“I tried to bury it, but I never forgot. Once I knew about the car and who was driving it, I couldn’t bury it anymore.”
“And he just handed it off to you, to let you do his dirty work.”
“It was my dirty work as well. And he had his new wife and his new life. He couldn’t risk that.”
I put my head in my hands. “I’m trying to understand this. You went all the way to Wisconsin, where Marissa lived? And then you went down to Lexington and back here to find Emily?”
Kendra looked confused. “I didn’t go to Wisconsin. I’ve never been there.”
“Did your husband go there?” I asked.
“Ex-husband.”
“Ex-husband,” I said. “Did he go there and see Emily visiting her aunt?”
I believed Kendra when she said, “I wouldn’t put it past him. More than likely he hired someone to do it. He has money. He gets people to do things for him by throwing that money around. He’s one of those people who doesn’t like to get his own hands dirty. He prefers that other people do it for him. All I know is he told me about the car being found. And then he told me that the one Minor girl had a daughter, and she was going to college in Lexington. He told me her name and where she lived. I tried to get to her down there but couldn’t. And shortly after that . . . Bill told me she was coming up here to Eastland, looking for you, I guess.” She paused. “He knew where she was . . . and he kept telling me where she was. I knew what he hoped I would do. Bill had always talked about revenge. He used to be obsessed with it. He got me obsessed with it. We used to fuel each other. He never said murder, but I knew he was thinking it. When they found that car, and he told me where to find that girl, I couldn’t stop myself. I wasn’t married to Bill anymore, but it felt like something we did together.”
“So you killed Emily in that hotel?” I asked. “Strangled her. And all because you thought she was Marissa’s daughter? And all because you couldn’t resist the sick impulses of your ex-husband?”
Kendra lifted her shoulder, a slight shrug. “Sometimes innocent people get hurt.”
“That girl, Emily, didn’t kill your son,” I said. “She had nothing to do with it.”
“But now that family has a tiny glimpse of what it’s been like to be me all these years.” She pulled her left hand out of her pocket and held it in the air, the thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “A tiny glimpse.”
“That girl was adopted,” I said. “That other family raised her, the Russells. You’ve put them through hell, and they have nothing to do with this.”
She blinked her eyes a few times, and I felt, just for a moment, that I may have gotten through. It was a foolish, vain wish, but it rose within me, some last vestige of hope for a human connection.
“It’s unfortunate for them,” she said, her voice flat. “What matters is those Minor brats getting a taste of it. That’s what counts for me.”
“All these years, you’ve harbored such hate for people you didn’t even know.”
“Not hate,” she said, her tone becoming lecturing. “Never hate. Love. I loved my son. I loved my husband. Still do, as a matter of fact, even though he hasn’t returned the feeling for a long time. That’s what I’ve nurtured all these years. Do you know what it’s like to have someone you love taken from you through no fault of your own? And to live with that for two decades?”
“I do know,” I said. “Not the same, of course, but I know. I lost someone very important to me, someone I love very much. Someone who was also involved in this situation.”
Kendra Maberry studied me for a moment, her head cocked to one side as though she had just discovered me sitting on the couch. Every nerve ending in my body felt tight. Stretched to the limit and sizzling with energy.
“The girl?” she said. “You were in love with one of those awful girls? Is that why you’re in this mess?”
“Marissa,” I said.
“Don’t say her name. It makes me sick.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s her.”
“Then you’re right,” she said. “It’s not the same. She’s alive . . . for now. And you can try to get her back.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“No, I know the difference. As long as someone is alive, there’s hope.”
She laughed a little. “It’s too late for that. For me.”
“No one’s forgotten what you’ve been through. You lost a child. It’s incomprehensible. I get it.”
“I doubt it. I really doubt it.”
The hand holding the gun rose.
At the same time, something moved to my right, something sleek and low to the ground.
Kendra heard it at the same time I did, and she spun as Riley leapt, throwing his old body against hers with as much force as he could muster. Kendra stumbled to the side, leaning over like a stack of falling blocks, and as she fell she swung her gun hand in the direction of Riley, making solid contact with Riley’s head, causing him to yelp.
But I was up by then, diving off the couch for Kendra. I ended up on top of her, as she grabbed me around the neck. I felt the surprising power in her grip, the same power that had choked the life out of Emily Russell. I tried to pull away but couldn’t. My air was cut off, my neck about to burst.
Then Riley was back. He snapped at Kendra’s arm, taking a quick bite above the wrist, just enough to loosen her grip for a moment. Kendra swung at Riley again, missing, but when her head was turned I swung my fist, once and then again against the side of her head. She turned back to me and reached for me, but I twisted out of the way.
The gun sat on the floor next to us. I picked it up. It felt heavy and awkward in my hand. I started to swing it at her head, but she dodged out of the way, and I ended up smashing the floor, feeling the shock of the contact all the way up my arm. Then Kendra backhanded the gun away from me, and it thudded against the carpet.
She managed to jerk her knee up in the confined space between our bodies, taking aim between my legs. I twisted my body to avoid the contact, and while she missed her target, the movement threw me off-balance, allowing her to break loose, and she scrambled across the floor.