by Jessica Beck
It looked as though my gut feeling was being confirmed by Durant’s actions.
The only problem—well, not the only one, but a big one nonetheless—was that Jake didn’t have a prayer of getting to us in time, even if he had somehow managed to get my message immediately.
At least I’d been able to tell him that I loved him one last time, even if I hadn’t been able to hear him say it back.
Chapter 28
“Come on! We need to go!” I told Grace as softly and as urgently as I could as I tugged on her arm. Once we were out of the Jeep, she just stood there as though she were in shock.
There was no response to my command other than gentle weeping.
I finally had no choice. I slapped her hard across the face, hoping that it would somehow snap her out of it.
It always seemed to work in the movies, but it didn’t even make an impression on her.
Finally, I just grabbed her arm and pulled her along with me. At least she moved. The snow was coming down even harder now, and the temperature was dropping quickly. Could we use any of that to our advantage? I didn’t see how as we plunged ahead together deeper into the woods. Grace was starting to respond now, and I had to pull less and less to keep her moving.
But where were we going?
I wasn’t familiar with this area, and that might spell our doom. Was there a stream or something we could walk through so Durant couldn’t follow our trail quite so easily? Even if there had been, wouldn’t we be risking hypothermia wading in icy water? We weren’t Marines, after all. I wasn’t dressed for this kind of backwoods trek in the snow, but at least I had heavy denim blue jeans on, a thick sweater, and a decent coat on top of that. Grace was, per her norm, dressed more for style than for warmth.
I touched her hand again and could feel that she was freezing.
Without giving it a second thought, I pulled my jacket off and handed it to her. “Put this on, but keep moving as you do it,” I said.
For the first time, I finally got through to her. “Suzanne, you’ll freeze to death without your jacket.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve got this toasty sweater on that Momma gave me,” I said. “You need it more than I do. Now stop arguing and put it on.”
“Thanks,” she said as her teeth chattered a little. As Grace slipped the jacket on, she looked wildly behind us. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know, and that’s what worries me,” I said as we continued deeper and deeper into the thicket of trees. I looked back myself, but I couldn’t see anything in the blinding snow. I’d read about people being lost a few feet from their doorsteps in blizzards, and I’d never understood how that could happen.
I was starting to get it now.
The snow was like a looming curtain of white, and it was everywhere, obscuring nearly everything within my vision. I could see the tree right in front of my face, but beyond that, we were just stumbling around without any real direction in mind other than trying to get away.
I was just starting to realize that I was missing my jacket more than I could have imagined, too. Its material had shed the snow as it had hit, but my sweater seemed to absorb it. I was quickly being weighed down from the heft of it, and things weren’t going to get any better. This was going to have to be one of those times I suffered in silence, though. Grace had needed it more than I had, and that was the end of the discussion.
Had Durant given up on us? When I listened intently, I couldn’t hear him anywhere in the woods around us, and with the snow coming down so heavily, I certainly couldn’t see him.
Maybe we’d somehow managed to escape.
And that’s when I heard his voice, much, much too close to us.
“Why are you running away from me, girls? I’m here to help you,” he said. “What’s gotten into you? You need to be reasonable, Suzanne.”
I wanted to reply, to shout at him for doing this to us, but if I did that, I’d be giving our position away, and it was the only thing we had working in our favor at the moment. I touched Grace’s arm, got her attention, and then I held a lone finger to my lips.
She nodded that she understood, which was enough of a response for me.
“Do you think you know something that you don’t? Is that why you’re running? Why don’t we go someplace warm and safe where we can talk about it? It’s all just one big misunderstanding. We can clear it up in a second if you just give me a chance.”
I kept Grace moving, but it was difficult not to make any noises in the underbrush. The trees were starting to get closer and closer together, too. Would this copse become so thick that our forward progress was stopped altogether? We couldn’t go back now, and if we were forced to stop going forward as well, he’d have us. I couldn’t think about that at the moment, though.
All Grace and I could do was keep moving forward, living one moment at a time, and hoping for the best.
“This is just aggravating me,” he said, his voice closing nearer and nearer to us. “Trust me, you do not want to see me angry.” After a moment, Durant spoke again, his temper clearly getting the best of him. “You were too smart for your own good. I knew you spoke with Maisie, Shannon, Deke Marsh, and even the chief. I didn’t worry about any of them but Deke. He said something to you about me, didn’t he? I knew I couldn’t trust him. I’m going to have to take care of him after I deal with you two. Leaving him alive after he confirmed my alibi with you was a mistake; I can see that now. At least it’s not too late to correct it.”
Grace and I kept moving forward, but it was taking everything I had not to ask him the question that had been burning in my mind since I’d realized that he was the murderer.
Why had he killed his former partner?
Maybe if Grace and I could evade him long enough, he’d supply the answer himself.
As we moved forward, I suddenly realized that it hadn’t been my imagination.
The trees were definitely getting thicker now.
It wouldn’t be long before Grace and I would be blocked as surely as if there were a solid wall of stone in front of us.
In an instant, I could see a bit of a break to the left of us. At least that’s what I thought it looked like, but with the snow blinding me almost completely, it was hard to tell for sure.
Either way, we had nothing to lose by trying it.
I tapped Grace’s arm and pointed in the direction where I’d thought I’d seen the opening. She nodded, and we moved to our left, hoping that there might be a break in the trees somewhere ahead.
Durant’s voice returned, and it felt as though he was whispering in my ear he was so near. “I’m getting closer. I can feel it.” He had to know that he wasn’t going to get any responses from us, so why did he keep talking? Maybe he’d gone a little mad somewhere along the way. At least I hoped that he had. If he wasn’t thinking clearly, then Grace and I still might have a chance of getting out of this alive.
“Might” was a pretty big word, but it was the only sliver of hope we had, and I planned on hanging onto it until it was gone.
“I probably should shut up,” Durant said, “but what does it matter now? You’re probably wondering why I killed Alex, aren’t you? A part of me wants you to die not knowing, but who are you going to tell? After he busted Deke Marsh, he told me that his conscience was still bothering him. This from a man who had his hand out for bribes just as often as I did. What did he think he was going to accomplish wrecking both of our lives? I tried to talk sense into him, but he wouldn’t listen. The fool gave me twenty-four hours to turn myself in, and then he said that he was going to do it for me if I lacked the conviction. I told him that he could go first, but he said that he had to make sure that I’d do what I said I’d do before he told anyone about his own illegal actions. Our last conversation was the day that he died. I snuck away from work and drove to April Springs. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? As soon as I left him in the park, I started wandering around town, wondering what I was going to do. That’s when I stumbled acro
ss your little donut shop. I needed some coffee to help me think straight, but after one sip, I knew that it wasn’t going to be enough to do the trick. I had to get rid of Alex, and I had to do it before he had a chance to rat me out. Why poison, you might ask? That one’s easy. We took a refresher course on homicide techniques a few months back, and Alex had told me he’d rather be shot than poisoned. The idea of any kind of suffering freaked him out. Well, he didn’t suffer long my way, but I knew that if I wasted a bullet on him, chances were good that someone might start digging into the time we worked together.” After a moment’s pause, he said, “Anyway, he took the poisoned coffee from me quickly enough, and that was that. I hit the inside rim with it to make it quick, but it was anything but clean.” There was another moment of silence, and then he said in disgust, “This is getting old fast. If you both come out right now, I promise that I’ll make it quick, but if you keep messing with me like this, I’m going to make you both feel some real pain yourselves before I end you.” The threat was intensely real, and I knew that he meant every word of it.
And then things managed to get even worse.
The gaps ended completely, and Grace and I were solidly pinned against the trees. We could stand for a moment, but we couldn’t go forward another inch.
It appeared that we’d just lost our last chance of getting out of this alive.
Chapter 29
“What do we do now?” Grace whispered. At least she was back with me, in full control of her senses. That was something, anyway. If we were about to go out, we were going to do it with our heads held high.
“Grace, there’s nothing left for us to do. You don’t have anything on you that we could use to defend ourselves, do you?” I asked her softly.
“There’s some pepper spray in my purse, but that’s back in the Jeep.”
“That’s where I keep my tire iron, too. Why didn’t I dig that out before we took off?”
“You were too busy getting me out of there to worry about anything else. Suzanne, I’m so sorry that I lost it back there.”
“Grace, listen to me. You have nothing to apologize for. You’re the best friend I could have ever wanted. Thank you.”
“Thank you, too,” she said, the tears streaming silently down her cheeks again.
To my surprise, I touched my own face and felt tears there, as well.
“Let’s at least get down on the ground and see if we can make it tougher for him to find us,” I said quietly. There was a brush pile off to one side that might offer us some kind of refuge from the storm, if not from Durant. If we crouched down low enough behind it, he would have to be right up on us to see us. It wasn’t ideal, but given the circumstances, it was the best we could do.
“I’m willing to try anything you suggest,” she said as we lowered ourselves to the ground.
That’s when I saw something that I’d missed standing up just a moment before.
There was indeed a slight break in the trees just behind the brush pile; I simply hadn’t been able to see it before while I’d been standing up.
We wouldn’t be able to walk out of the forest, but we might just be able to crawl out.
I pointed to the constricted opening. “Do you want to lead, or would you rather follow?”
“You go first. I’ll be right behind you,” she said.
I started crawling forward, hoping that this narrow little passage might lead us somewhere, but my doubts were beginning to come back as I realized that this tunnel might soon disappear.
If that’s what happened, I decided that I could live with it. At least we’d both die trying to escape.
It might not be much, but it was all that we had.
Grace tapped my leg just as we came up against another dead end.
“Suzanne, could you use this?”
I looked back and saw that she had a broken tree limb in her hands about two inches thick and four feet long.
“How did you find this?” I asked as I took it from her.
“I accidently put my hand down on it in the snow,” she said. “Will it help?”
“Like the man said, it couldn’t hurt,” I offered, and then I smiled at her.
“You can keep going now,” Grace urged.
“That’s the thing. I can’t,” I said. I had a sudden thought. Maybe I could distract Durant long enough to give us a chance to fight back after all.
I took off my sweater and instantly felt the chill of cold air and wet snow shoot through me. This was going to be pretty unbearable, but I really didn’t have any choice. As I started to unravel the edges of my sweater, freeing the yarn into one loose strand, Grace asked me, “Suzanne, aren’t you going to get cold?”
“If we don’t do something soon, it’s not going to matter much one way or the other. I just hope I can get enough yarn out of this sweater to make my plan work. If we can lure Durant deeper back in here and hide in that brush pile we passed, we might be able to fight back.”
“At least take your jacket back,” Grace said as she started to unzip it.
I wanted to refuse, but if I was frozen solid, I wouldn’t be able to make this plan work. “How about this? We’ll take turns,” I said as I zipped it up, feeling the chill slowly start to dissipate.
I finally had all of the yarn that the sweater would yield in such a limited amount of time. I tied one end to a nearby tree branch shoulder-high, and then I carefully fed the material out as we started crawling backward out of the dead end.
It was our last hope, and it had to work, or Grace and I were dead.
“He’s never going to see that,” Grace said as she studied my rig.
“I know, but we can’t put a jacket on it. The branch isn’t strong enough, and in this snowfall, the movement is what we need more than the color.”
“Why can’t we have both?” she asked as she took her own thin coat off and tore at the lining. It was red with black swirls, something that should stand out in our current surroundings. “There, is that better?” Grace asked as she tied a piece of the sleeve’s lining onto the branch where my yarn was attached.
“Much,” I said. “That was a great idea, but we have to get out of here right now!” When she hesitated, I had to prod her a little. “Head back to the clearing, Grace.”
“But won’t we just be getting closer to him?” she asked me, the fear beginning to creep back into her voice.
I couldn’t have that.
“Grace, this is our best and only chance of making it out of here alive. You want to at least go down swinging, don’t you?”
“I’d rather not go down at all, but yeah, let’s at least try to fight back.”
We were finally back to the brush pile in the slight clearing, and I was relieved to see that I had just enough yarn left when I heard Durant again. The proximity of his voice made ice water run through my veins that had nothing to do with the cold that we were experiencing.
“Where did you two miserable witches go?” Durant shouted. I could swear that he was so close I could almost feel his breath on my neck.
It was time to pull the yarn and hope that it hadn’t snagged somewhere between where I’d tied it and where I was now.
I saw the branch—and more significantly, the lining of Grace’s jacket—move slightly with my tug, and then the yarn broke. Had Durant seen it, or had our ploy been in vain?
I could barely contain my glee when I heard him say, “Ah. There you are. Good-bye, ladies. I’ve got you now.”
Then he fired three shots that appeared to hit where we’d just been.
If we’d still been standing there as Durant had hoped, he would have killed us on the spot, but as it was, he’d just managed to kill a tree branch that hadn’t done anyone any harm.
I’d been right.
Durant had been closer than I’d realized.
Without hesitation, I swung the club out from my position as I crouched on my knees.
I’d hoped to break his leg with the attack, but the branch shattered as it
made impact with his legs.
He fell to the ground, though, and his gun went flying in the process.
The odds still weren’t in our favor, but at least we were in the fight for our lives now.
Chapter 30
I dove on top of him, and as I did, I felt some satisfaction that Grace was just a split second behind me. I used every dirty trick I’d ever thought about, clawing for his eyes, his throat, basically anything vulnerable that I could reach. I was proud that Grace fought equally hard.
Unfortunately, Durant was stronger than both of us combined.
The man threw us off as though we were rag dolls.
“You’re both dead now,” he snarled as he dove into the snow looking for his gun.
“Not if we find it first!” I shouted, and Grace and I scrambled for it as well.
Where had it gone? I was about to give up hope of ever finding it when my hand brushed against something, and I felt a moment of sheer joy.
It was quickly quashed when I realized that it was just another brittle, fallen limb.
When I looked up, I saw Officer Craig Durant standing over us, and worst of all, the gun was now back in his hand.
“I warned you. This is going to hurt,” he said.
And then I heard the shot.
Only it hadn’t been meant for me.
Or even for Grace.
As Officer Durant collapsed in the snow, a growing red stain spreading out from his chest, I heard Jake say, “Thank goodness we got to you in time.”
As my husband was lifting me up in his arms, I saw Chief Grant doing the same thing with Grace, and I let the fear, the dread, and all of the anguish I’d been experiencing slip away.
Against the most imposing odds, we were safe.
Chapter 31
“I guess you got my message,” I said as Jake took off his jacket and wrapped me up in it. We were all walking out of the woods together now that we had convinced the men that we were fine.