Either they hadn’t gone out this way or…her abductor had a key.
Karl?
It didn’t seem possible, but Karl would know about the cameras, and how best to disable them. He would certainly have keys.
Crap.
He slammed the door open. The alarm whooped and chattered, announcing to the world that he was coming. So much for sneaking up on anybody.
The silvery light of a half moon glimmered off the snow outside. Ty’s breath puffed in front of him in the cold night air. He didn’t see anyone and was stymied on where to go next when he looked down. Footprints!
He followed the trail to the northeast corner of the building. The wind was blowing, and his cheeks stung in the cold. But his blood ran hot in his veins.
One set of footprints was clear. The other distorted, as if someone was being half dragged, half pulled.
Mia. She’d been pretty heavily sedated, he’d bet. She might not even understand what was happening to her, that she was in danger.
A taillight flashed from the little alcove where the Dumpsters sat. Ty pasted his back to the side of the building and tiptoed toward it. Someone had shut off the alarm and he could hear the engine now, puttering softly. He looked around for a weapon—a board or a pipe or a brick—but found nothing.
Resolutely, he crept forward and peeked around the corner.
What the hell?
It was a sheriff’s office car. He’d told Renee to call the cops, but they couldn’t have gotten here already. Besides, the light bar on top of the car was dark and silent. Deadly silent.
He squinted, and in the backseat could just make out a slumped form.
Mia!
As he lifted his foot to step forward, pain exploded in the back of his skull. The silvery light of the moon wavered, then winked out, and Ty fell face-first unconscious into the snow.
Chapter 18
Mia tried to focus on the blurry shape outside the car without success. “Citria?”
No answer.
Whoever it was seemed to be dragging or carrying something heavy.
Todd? Her heart accelerated. What was wrong with him?
She scooted across the seat when the car door opened. Citria leaned in, pushing and grunting, thrusting something—someone—into her arms.
Not Todd. Too big.
She willed her drugged eyes to focus. It was Ty.
She turned back to Citria. “Wh-what’s happening?”
He was warm and his chest rose and fell slowly with each soughed breath, but he wouldn’t wake up when she shook him. She felt something warm and sticky where his head lay on her thigh. Blood. “What happened to Ty? What’s wrong with him?”
Nothing about this made sense. Citria climbed in the front of the car and put it in gear.
“Where are we going?” The sense that something was terribly wrong blew a few of the cobwebs out of her head. She was in a police car. The backseat. A steel barrier separated her from her sister-in-law in front. Why was Citria driving a police car?
“I told you. I’m taking you to Todd.”
“Where? Where is he?”
“The old riding stable. That’s where Nana’s been hiding him.”
Mia remembered the old stable. Sam had told her many times about the jumping lessons he’d taken there. The shows he’d competed in and the ribbons he’d won. One of her favorite pictures in her house in California was of a teenage Sam, grin spread ear to ear, on a gleaming black horse sailing over a brush wall as if on the wings of angels.
She’d taken Todd to the stables a couple of months ago and been sad to see the weathered sign out front faded and hanging lopsided on one chain, the rusted gate locked shut. It had gone out of business long ago—just one more piece of Sam she’d lost.
Ty moaned in her lap. She felt the wound on the back of his head and pressed the hem of her shirt against the crease to stanch the flow of blood. His eyelids fluttered and his lips moved soundlessly, but consciousness still eluded him.
Mia wished he would wake up. She wished he would help her sort out what was happening.
“Why are you taking me?” Mia asked. “Where are the police?”
“Just shut up with the questions already, would you?” The eyes that met Mia’s in the rearview mirror gleamed darkly. Insanely. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Ty first became aware of the world beyond the pounding in his head when a blast of cold air slapped him in the face. He opened his eyes to find himself lying across the backseat of a police car. Squinting, he could make out Mia’s worried features leaning over him.
And her sister-in-law holding a gun on them through the open car door.
“W’as going on?” he slurred. His tongue didn’t quite seem connected to his brain. He tried to sit but gave up when a fresh round of explosions rocked his skull.
Mia answered, never taking her eyes off Citria’s gun. “I don’t know.”
“Get out, both of you.” Citria waved the barrel of the gun toward the barn door a few feet away.
Ty wasn’t sure who was less coordinated as they scrambled out of the car and onto their feet, him or Mia. She wobbled, and he caught her elbow. He stumbled and she held his shirt. At least she didn’t seem to be hurt. Still feeling the effects of the sedatives, he guessed.
“What is this place?” he asked Mia.
“She says Todd is here. She says Nana took him.”
Ty frowned, trying to think between drumbeats in his head. If Nana took Todd, how come Citria was the one holding the gun on them?
The old barn door creaked as Citria pushed it and it lumbered aside on its rails. She motioned Mia and Ty inside. The scents of musty hay, stale oats and manure still permeated the barn.
“Todd?” Mia called, looking around hopefully.
“It’s no use. He’s locked up tight and sound asleep in the tack room. He won’t be waking up anytime soon. I made sure of that.”
Ty could guess how she did that. Damn, he hoped she knew how to dose drugs for a child. Otherwise, Todd could be comatose or worse. “What did you give him?”
Citria threw him a snooty look that said she didn’t deign to answer. She pushed him toward an open stall down the barn’s center aisle.
Inside, Nana Serrat sat on the dirt floor, her wrists and ankles bound. Her eyes were wide and filled with terror above the duct tape that covered her mouth.
“Damn it,” Ty said, outrage bringing the strength back to his limbs. He strode across the stall and eased the tape off Nana’s mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she thanked him silently with her look. Mia knelt beside them and started unwinding the tape from her wrists.
“Leave her,” Citria said, and cocked the hammer on the revolver.
“Sweetheart,” Nana said, the use of the endearment sounding out of place. “Why are you doing this?”
“You know why, Mom.” She circled the threesome crouched on the floor, keeping the gun leveled in their direction. “I’ve waited for years for it to be my turn. For me to matter.”
Nana’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t understand.”
“Nearly all my life it was all about Sam. He was the one who mattered. He was the golden boy who got good grades. He was the captain of the soccer team. He started his own business and made millions.” She bit her lip. “I was the one who flunked out of nursing school.”
“Darling, I loved you both. I’ve always loved you bo—”
“And you.” She swung the gun toward Mia. Ty instinctively pulled her closer to him. “You had the perfect life, living in a big mansion in California. You had the perfect husband, the perfect child. You had everything I wanted.”
“You were married once,” Mia said quietly.
Citria sniffed. “For a year and a half. And during that time I had two miscarriages. Then the jerk dumped me.”
Ty wished he’d known all this sooner. He might have put the pieces together. Sibling rivalry becomes a persecution syndrome. Multiple miscarriages create a feeling of inadequacy. H
e should have dug deeper. He should have believed Mia. Believed there was another answer.
“Then Sam was killed in that accident, and a few months later you went nuts and I thought finally…finally it was going to be my turn. Then Todd came to live with us, and at first I thought it was going to be like having Sam around to take the limelight all over again, but he was just a little boy, and he was hurting, and I did my best—I really did—to help him. To be a mother to him.”
“He has a mother, Citria,” Mia said.
Citria’s hands shook on the handle of the revolver. “No. No. You don’t deserve him.”
Mia opened her mouth, a protest on her lips, Ty was sure. He squeezed her arm, hoping she understood to back off, slow down. Not to press too hard. Citria was on the verge of going completely off the deep end, and since she was the one holding the gun, he’d rather not be here when that happened.
Mia closed her mouth and took a deep breath before she opened it again. Message received, Ty thought.
“Maybe I don’t, Citria,” she said. “But this is not the way. What are you going to do? Kill us all?”
Citria grinned wickedly. “No, you are. At least that’s what the cops will think. Your lover here sprung you from the loony bin. You brought him here, where you’d stashed Todd, but Nana figured it out. She found you somehow. Everything went horribly wrong and you killed them all, then popped yourself. It’ll be a textbook murder-suicide. Case closed.”
“Please, Citria, don’t,” Nana begged. “Don’t do this.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Grandma Nana. The precious golden boy will be fine. I am sorry about you, though. I hadn’t planned to include you in this, but once you found me here with Todd, I really had no choice, did I? Besides, it will be better this way. Uncle Karl may have control of Todd’s inheritance, but Nana here is no pauper, either. And I am the beneficiary in her will.” She cocked her head and laughed, a crazy twitter like a tiny bird with a worm. “Maybe we’ll move to France, just the two of us. I’ll raise him like my own, I promise.” She aimed the promise at Mia.
“Citria,” Ty jumped in. “You need to take a step back. Think about how you’ll look back on this in a few—”
“Oh, please. Don’t try the therapy routine, Dr. Hansen. I’ve had enough of that from Uncle Karl over the years.”
“Okay, then think about this. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail if you kill any of us. Your story is full of holes. It won’t take the cops ten minutes to figure out what really happened. And then your life is over.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What holes?”
“Like the fact that the only car here is a police car. How did Mia and I supposedly get here? How did Nana get here? And where is Chuck, by the way?”
Ty didn’t like the fact there was no sign of the deputy here.
“The cop?” Citria asked nonchalantly. “Oh, he’s in the trunk.”
Citria giggled again. God, Ty wanted to ask if his friend was alive or dead, but he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know yet. If Chuck was dead, then it might be too late to save any of them. Citria had already committed a death penalty offense. There was no turning back for her now.
He preferred to think he still had a chance. That they all still had a chance.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about holes,” Citria suggested, then shrugged. “Except the ones you’re going to be sporting in a few minutes. Nana’s car is still parked in the outbuilding behind the barn, and as for you two…I guess you hitchhiked.”
“What about the deputy?”
“He’s going to have a terrible accident tonight. His car is going right off the bridge and into the river. These snowy roads get so slippery. It’s dangerous out there.”
Ty let out the breath he’d been holding. So Chuck was still alive. For now.
“Enough,” Citria said. “It’s been a long night, and I still have to take care of the deputy and get to a pay phone to make the 911 call saying someone heard shots over by the old stable. I want this over with as soon as possible. Who’s first?” The gun swung from Nana to Mia to Ty and back. “Sorry, Mom.”
“No!” Ty lurched across Mia toward her mother-in-law as the gun’s retort cracked in his ears. The breath whooshed out of him when he hit the ground. At first he thought the breath had just been knocked out of him. It wasn’t until he rolled over and saw the bloom of red across the side of his ribs that he realized he’d been hit.
The pain caught up with him a half second later.
Mia screamed and scrambled toward him. “Ty!”
The barrel of the gun tracked her movement. Citria’s finger tightened on the trigger and he yanked Mia toward him. Down.
Another figure flew through the doorway into the horse stall, knocking Citria down. The gun slid aside and Karl Serrat grabbed it, slid it into the waistband of his pants and then straddled Citria, holding her wrists down while she bucked and fought him with all her might. She tried to bite him, and he flipped her over, crossing her arms over her chest in a straitjacket hold.
Sirens blared in the distance.
“Mia, get the duct tape. It’s right outside the door.”
Karl’s order was like a wake-up call to both Ty and Mia. He loosened his grip on her, finally realizing they were both still alive, and she crawled across the floor to the aisle.
Citria looked dazedly up at her uncle, her body suddenly going slack. “It’s okay, Uncle Karl. I’m going now.”
Mia had reached his side with the tape.
“Going where?” Karl asked, frowning. Gently he turned his limp niece to bring her hands around front. With one quick motion, she jerked her right hand free. Mia realized what she was doing before anyone else and grabbed for Citria’s hand, but missed.
Citria pulled the gun from Karl’s waistband and placed the barrel under her chin. “To France,” she said dreamily, and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 19
Ty was resting comfortably in his bed at the Eternal Emergency Care Clinic when the Kaiser walked in—as comfortably as a man can when he has a concussion and two cracked ribs. At least the bullet that grazed his side hadn’t punctured his lung.
He tried to sit up straighter as Karl Serrat approached.
“Don’t,” the Kaiser waved. “Don’t.”
Ty slumped against his pillow.
“How are you?” Karl asked.
“I’m fine,” he lied. “How’s Nana?” He wasn’t ready for the harder questions yet.
“She’s…sad.”
“And you?”
“I’m sad, too, I guess.”
He ducked his chin to his chest. He couldn’t hold back any longer. “What about Mia?” He hadn’t heard anything about her since he’d been admitted.
“She’s gone, son,” the Kaiser said, his voice uncharacteristically kind.
“Gone? Gone, as in—”
Karl dismissed his panic with a wave. “Gone as in back to California. She booked a flight for herself and Todd as soon as the police were done with her.”
Ty frowned. “You let her go?”
“I don’t think I could have stopped her.” He smiled briefly. “She’ll be okay, though. She’s a strong girl.”
“Yeah, that she is.”
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Ty asked, “How did you find us?” Between the surgery and sedation, he hadn’t caught up on the full story.
“Your friend Deputy Campbell is the one who figured out Citria was behind Todd’s disappearance.”
“Chuck?”
Karl nodded. “He’d found a few entries in Mia’s diary. She wrote that she was concerned about Citria, that she saw some of the signs of depression that she’d seen in herself two years ago. She tried to get Citria to get help, but said Citria was jealous of her, and of Sam and Todd. She said Citria was paranoid, and had accused her of trying to get rid of her so she could be Nana’s only family. Mia was really worried about Citria. She had decided to talk to Nana, and to me, about her just b
efore this whole mess started with the fall from Shilling’s Bluff.”
“She’s good.”
“Mmm, yes. Maybe she should consider going into psychiatry.”
Ty smiled at that. He doubted Mia wanted to be within spitting distance of a mental-health facility ever again.
“The deputy woke me up to talk to me about Citria. I realized his theory could be correct, but I didn’t know where to find her. I couldn’t sleep after the deputy left, so eventually I went back to the hospital and pulled some old records from when Citria was treated for depression during her teenage years. She mentioned the riding stable a lot. It was her safe place. So I got in the car and drove.”
“And called the cops, I assume, since the cavalry arrived right after you did.”
“Yes.”
It was amazing they had all survived. Todd had slept like a babe through the whole ordeal, and snored softly against his mother’s chest after being freed from the locked tack room. Chuck had been freed from the trunk of his patrol car with only minor injury to his pride and a little frostbite. It seemed Citria had gotten the drop on him when he went to question her, much as she’d gotten the drop on Ty at the hospital, and stolen his car and his gun.
The uncomfortable silence stretched between them again. Karl finally broke it. “I owe you an apology, son.”
Ty pressed his lips together and shook his head. “I was way out of line with Mia.”
Karl smiled. “That’s a debate for another day. But that’s not what I’m apologizing for.”
Ty raised his gaze and his eyebrows.
“I’ve been riding you hard ever since you got here. I didn’t recognize your name on the residency application. It wasn’t until I saw you—” he nodded down at the scars on Ty’s bare arm “—and saw those that it clicked.”
“Clicked?”
Karl stood and put his hands in his pockets, paced to the window. “I knew your mother years ago. She was a patient of mine when I first started at MHMH.”
“You treated her?”
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