“Don’t linger,” I huffed as we neared the top. “Straight across.”
Again, my warning was unnecessary, but isn’t nagging the parental thing to do? To stand upright on the railroad berm would be to make ourselves clear and stark targets.
My hands and knees sunk through the snow and grated on the rough cinders and railroad ties tacky with creosote even in the below-freezing temperature. On the other side we rolled again—it was the fastest way to get down to the rugged shoreline.
Tuppence was becoming a nuisance—and she’d be a liability if she continued trailing us.
“Scram!” I flung out my arm, trying to urge her away, my voice firm and hoarse, and far too loud in my own ears.
But she didn’t believe me. I never raise my voice to her; it had never been necessary. So she just stood still on stiff legs and cocked her head at me expectantly, her tail slowing in its exuberant arc but not stopping completely.
She is, after all, a dog, and completely failed to see what isn’t fun about a nighttime dash through the snow and undergrowth.
I knelt and grabbed her head in my sticky hands. “Go home,” I rasped. “Find Pete. Go!” And I gave her an encouraging whump on the hindquarters.
Whether she understood me or not, she wheeled and dug into the steep snowy side of the berm, gamboling up it in great bounding leaps that flung sprays of ice particles.
Burke was tugging on my hand again, and we turned toward the rugged barrenness of the riverbank. Rocks bigger than cars piled in a mishmash, looming silent and foreboding in the eerie glow. I had no idea where the light was coming from, but it seemed trapped in an endless, reverberating reflection from the low underbellies of the pewter clouds to the snow-swept crust of the earth and back again.
We slipped into the nearest crevice and slid carefully, feeling the rough, ancient volcanic jags with our fingertips and toes, seeking sure footing. There were gaps big enough to lose a leg in, not to mention rib-cracking landing pads should we fall, and the near guarantee that we would wrench ankles or break wrists if we stumbled.
It was a twisty-turny maze with tight spots that snagged at my coat as I inched myself along. Burke was faring better, being smaller. As soon as we could hear the water lapping and gurgling around the rock we were standing on, we angled right—west, downriver.
The Surely was docked not too far away—if you’re counting in miles, at highway speed—at the Port of Platts Landing. It would be a long and arduous trek the way we were doing it, primarily with our scraped hands, knees, elbows and clinging with tenuous toeholds, but she was there at the end of the line and we might possibly be able to seek shelter in her narrow galley.
“Wait, wait.” Burke groped for my arm in the dark. “Listen.”
Water tinkled and plunked and blurbled cheerily underneath us with a lightness that made me think ice was accumulating up in the sheltered spaces between the rocks. Luckily, we hadn’t slipped on any ice patches yet.
“There,” Burke breathed. “Hear it?”
Indeed, I did. It sounded like my name. My very own name, being shouted in duet. No, trio. Quartet? A couple female and a couple male voices.
But one voice made my heart flutter, on top of the pounding it was already doing. The voice was Pete’s. And he was hollering my entire name. Meredith Marie Morehouse Sills. So that I would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was him. I don’t trust my middle name to just anybody, as I’m sure you can understand. I’d learned that lesson by the second grade when I was called 3M in taunting, sing-song voices by enough treacherous schoolmates to last me a lifetime.
The other thing that struck me—so deeply that I keeled, panting, against the nearest boulder from the mental impact—is that they were calling only my name, not Burke’s. Which meant they suspected the murderers were still within earshot.
“Hold on.” I grabbed the back of Burke’s coat before he could turn and give away our hiding spot.
Our approaching rescuers were making a lot of noise. On purpose. Piercing whistles. More shouts. And finally, Tuppence, adding her mournful, yipping howl to the mix.
I released Burke when we spotted the first bobbing flashlight beams. “You can move now, slowly toward the berm. But don’t speak. I’ll answer them.”
I wished I knew how to whistle, but I don’t. So my hoarse voice would have to do. “Okay!” I shouted. “I’m okay!” Singular. Just in case.
“Stay where you are!” came the answering command. In Sheriff Marge’s deep, no-nonsense bellow, the one she uses to tell criminals to get on the ground, spread-eagle. You don’t argue with a voice like that.
So Burke and I eased ourselves down to sitting positions against the comforting bosom of a massive boulder, making sure we were below the sightline from the berm to the river.
“Talk to me, Meredith,” Sheriff Marge shouted. She was getting closer now, trotting along the top of the berm, judging by the short jerking progress of the closest flashlight beam. Apparently she wasn’t worried about presenting herself as a target.
Another flashlight beam was rapidly gaining on Sheriff Marge’s. “Babe!” he shouted.
My man. My insides just about melted with crushing happiness, and I whimpered. My eyes were suddenly swimming, blurring the sharp edges of the boulders around us.
Burke wedged his arm through mine and tipped his head against my shoulder. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’re gonna be okay. They won’t get to you the way they hurt that other lady.” He was stroking my arm, petting me, clinging to me, and his little voice was thick with emotion. “You won’t die. Not like that.”
A gut-wrenching sickness of understanding washed over me. Flooded my soul until I couldn’t breathe. Because now I knew why. Why he’d been so insistent, so fierce, so determined to get me out of the house. He was protecting me.
To make up for the last time, when he hadn’t been able to save Cassidy.
A burden unfathomable.
CHAPTER 22
Pete didn’t like it—letting Burke and me out of his sight—but he drove the pickup, with Tuppence riding shotgun, and hugged Sheriff Marge’s bumper, at speed, all the way to the hospital in Lupine.
Because I hadn’t been able to laugh off the appearance of my lip and hands or the splatters and smears of blood I’d left behind on the snow. Apparently, other people get touchy about these things.
Tuppence, also, had a couple shallow knife wounds—one on her flank and another into her left shoulder—which we’d discovered most belatedly because she hadn’t let on one bit, instead prancing around like her normal, eager self. Perhaps even more animatedly than usual when she showed us her treasures—a fleece-lined man’s glove and a woolen knit hat. In the dark, it’d been difficult—with her black and white spotted fur—to see that she was bleeding too.
Sheriff Marge had promptly bundled the articles of clothing into padded evidence bags—snapping on latex gloves of her own before she did so—and bundled Burke and me into her white and green Ford Interceptor sport utility vehicle with the county logo on the sides. In the back, behind the wire mesh. But that way Burke and I could stay together. He’d become positively clingy in the aftermath of our flight, and so had I.
Hester Maxwell drove the third vehicle in our little convoy. She’d been the first to raise the alarm and had a deeply vested interest in the outcome. Sheriff Marge warned her the coming proceedings might take all night, and she hadn’t batted an eye, instead climbing into her old, battered Honda Civic and revving the engine. She had studded tires on the front-wheel-drive car, and she was having no difficulty in keeping up with Sheriff Marge’s edge-of-the-seat-gripping pace.
“I see they released you,” I said through gritted teeth from behind the security bars.
“Passed that sucker,” Sheriff Marge agreed from the front seat. “Size of a small pea. You should’ve seen it.”
Actually, I’d take a pass on that sort of voyeurism, but didn’t say so out loud. Instead, I said, “Shouldn’t you be t
aking it easy?”
Which earned me a hard glare from steel-gray eyes in the rearview mirror just as she navigated a sharp curve. Burke and I were slung across the seat—just our upper halves since we were cinched at the hips with seat belts—and enjoyed a double-whammy smash against the far door as first I hit and then Burke hit me.
“You’re bleeding all over the place, and you have the gall to ask me that?” Sheriff Marge fired over her shoulder as we whipped around another, mirrored, curve in the serpentine scenic highway. This time I landed on Burke.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to talk back to Sheriff Marge when she was pushing triple digits on the speedometer and her siren was blaring.
She squealed to a whiplash stop in the pull-through entrance to the hospital’s emergency room and popped the locks on our doors with a secret switch she had in the front.
Burke tumbled out of the vehicle behind me and nearly face-planted on the pavement. “Wow,” he breathed as I helped him regain his footing on solid, unmoving ground.
“And you thought the cardboard-flyer ride was the highlight of our evening,” I muttered.
Burke just shook his head and patted the gleaming side of the Interceptor. “I’ve gotta get me one of these,” he said with an impish grin.
I might’ve made a ticklish jab at him through his puffy coat—all in good fun, of course. “Not until you’re sixteen, at least,” I said in a gruff tone while failing to keep my own grin off my face. Just fulfilling my end of the nagging-parent bargain. “Forty-six would be better,” I added.
“Try fifty-eight,” Sheriff Marge said, bustling around from the driver’s side. “That’s how old I was when I took the driving course at the Washington State Patrol’s training facility.” She hesitated for a fraction of a second mid-stride, and glared at me. “What are you standing here for? You’re not so beat up that you need a gurney. Get yourself in gear.” And she marched on toward the automatic sliding glass door.
“I think they put something extra in her IV,” I murmured to Burke.
“I heard that!” But she didn’t stop to lecture me further, and Burke and I had no choice but to follow behind.
Once inside, Sheriff Marge continued her stiff power walk straight to the women’s restroom while Burke and I were immediately surrounded by people in scrubs.
And by one nurse who eschewed the comfort of elastic-waist pants and still ascribed to the old-school starched white blouse and skirt. “Fluids,” Gemma explained as she gripped my arm and led me to a semi-reclined lounge chair covered with a narrow strip of sanitary paper.
Just like the comforts of home—not. The paper crinkled and tore and stuck to me as I scooted my fanny onboard.
“She’s under strict orders,” Gemma continued while pinching back one of my eyelids and peering into the deep recesses of my eyeball with her luminous, pale green eyes. The strength of the correction in her burgundy-framed cat’s-eye glasses magnified her eyes to near-alien size and gave her an omniscient aura that was more than a little disconcerting. “To prevent future kidney stones, Sheriff Marge has to hydrate extensively,” she said matter-of-factly, and then she swabbed the crook of my elbow with a cold alcohol wipe.
Well, that explained quite a lot.
oOo
It was a night of special circumstances in the emergency room. Our presiding doctor, a young—but apparently very game—man who had “Dr. Lipscomb” stitched above the pocket of his lab coat, decided there was no need to roust the veterinarian, Doc Corn, from his Monday night poker game, and that since Tuppence’s wounds were fairly superficial, he could do the stitching himself—once he’d finished with me.
“I don’t suppose you have Cheez Whiz?” I mumbled dubiously, thinking of Doc Corn’s magic trick of squirting a long line of the creamy cheese-like substance on his stainless-steel exam table to keep my greedy canine otherwise occupied while he engaged in the more unpleasant aspects of a check-up. My mouth felt like cotton, and my lips weren’t functioning properly, swollen as they were, with a small, discrete bandage taped across the lower one where I’d punctured it.
Tuppence seemed absolutely oblivious to the fact that she’d been injured, and instead was giddy with delight at all the people paying attention to her in this new place full of interesting smells. But I was worried her attitude might change as soon as a stranger started poking her with a needle.
Gemma held up a finger. “I have one better.” She sailed off, the starched skirt of her uniform snapping in her self-created breeze.
She returned with her lunch—or perhaps more accurately defined as her midnight snack, given the shift she was working—a peanut butter sandwich.
I started to object, but she fluttered a dismissive hand. “It’s for a good cause,” she asserted, and there was no arguing with her, either.
Sheriff Marge was filling the gap in the privacy curtains, her arms akimbo, glaring tolerantly at the melee, kind of like a bouncer at a bar—a nice bar where they hand out painkillers and ice chips and antiseptic creams. I might’ve been a little loopy, but it was also at that moment that I realized I was far outnumbered by highly experienced, bossy women, and all attempts at asserting my own will would be thwarted.
Hester, one of the guardian trio, had taken position in the hard plastic chair placed squarely between my paper-protected lounge chair and Burke’s. She was knitting furiously, stabbing at the fuzzy blue wad in her lap with both needles.
Pete was perched on the edge of a hard chair on my other side, tenderly balancing one of my bandaged hands between his own, not saying anything. But there was a seriousness to those sapphire-blue eyes and creases at the corners of his mouth that meant he was thinking, analyzing—and not about pleasant things.
My mind needed to go there, too, but I wasn’t sure I was quite ready for that harsh of a reality check. So, I turned to Hester. “Can we take a mulligan on the interview?”
“No need,” she huffed indignantly. “Believe it or not, I had a good look around your house and your accommodations meet all the criteria. I was a little early, and your back door was wide open, so I let myself in,” she added, unapologetically. “But I knew something was dreadfully wrong when I spotted the bottle of Windex sitting in the middle of the living room floor.”
“I’d been cleaning,” I explained meekly.
“Everyone does,” she replied curtly, “when they know I’m coming. My very presence is anathema to grime in this county.” She said this with a tinge of perverse satisfaction and a tight smile. Her eyes were backlit with a sort of sarcastic glee that had me responding with a grin of my own.
A grin that hurt. I winced, and reapplied the ice pack.
And caught Burke watching me. He had scrapes and bruises, but no injury that required more than washing with hydrogen peroxide and a couple Band-Aids. He’d been plied early and often with hot cocoa, and while he gave the impression of contentedly slurping from the current Styrofoam cup, the eyes behind his tangled fringe of hair held a grim, indecipherable expression. They were almost mirror images of Pete’s in their seriousness—just in a different color.
I gave him a lopsided smile, no longer caring how much it hurt. When could he go back to being a regular kid? I yearned for that—for him, with a sudden, rushing palpitation in my chest. I had to crack open my mouth to breathe.
“Then I realized your front door had been jimmied open.” Hester was still talking, stabbing the wool in her lap with renewed venom. “Why they didn’t sidle around to the back, I have no idea. It was prudent to assume, then and there, that they were trying to sneak up on you. Sheriff Marge had given me a bit of the backstory, you see. Coming through the front door would, indeed, take most Sockeye County families by surprise,” she added, more to herself than to me.
Sheriff Marge had eased closer, her notebook out, her pen poised, overtly eavesdropping, with an agenda.
Hester didn’t seem fully aware that her audience had expanded as she sighed and flipped her knitting around to purl back. “I’m
quite sure I passed by their car on the way in. A gray—or maybe black—Acura. It was parked in the last camping spot, closest to your house, but not really visible from the house in the dark. Black on black, as it were.”
I’d gasped at the mention of the car, and cringed involuntarily the moment it slipped out—because I should’ve known better. Should’ve paid attention. Now all eyes had swiveled to me.
“I realize there are a lot of gray Acuras out there, but I saw one too—on Sunday night, behind the museum. No one was inside,” I offered in feeble defense.
Sheriff Marge was glowering and scribbling furiously, but she didn’t berate me for my lapse. “License plate?”
I shook my head. “From Washington, but I didn’t get the number. I figured it was left by a guest from the wedding reception. Maybe mechanical problems, or…” I shrugged.
Sheriff Marge turned those gray spotlights onto Hester, but the social worker also had to shake her head. “I didn’t get the number either. The car was no longer in the camping spot when we left, so that strengthens my opinion that the two men fled in it.”
Sheriff Marge was already on her cell phone, holding a stunted, monosyllabic conversation with the person on the other end of the line, and ferociously contemplating a spot on the wall above my head. She wasn’t liking the answers she was hearing.
She heaved a frustrated gust when she clicked off the call and shoved the phone back into one of her many pockets. “Dale and Owen already found the tracks and footprints in that spot. Said it was G-39.”
She pitched her brows at me, and I nodded. G-39 was, indeed, one of the spots closest to the house in a full hookup loop. It was usually one of the last spots to get reserved in the summer, though, because it didn’t have an unobstructed view of the river. Instead, it was nearly ringed by upstart pin oaks and scraggly huckleberry bushes, affording privacy in lieu of expansive scenery.
“The snow won’t hold the prints,” Pete contributed quietly, almost startling me. Other than the warm strength of his hands around mine, I’d forgotten he was sitting there, stewing.
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