“Is Sam admitting he killed Malloy, and set the trap for Paris, and poisoned a bottle he’d been drinking from? He did all of it?”
“Am I sitting in on that conversation? No, because once again, I’m the freaking chauffeur.”
Cooley closed down the interview with a snap of her notes and led me out to the hallway and then to the front desk to sign for my keys. The others had gone from the lobby—but where? Now that Sam was behind those doors and would soon be behind bars, the rest of us might scatter. Paris, laid up. Malloy to the cold ground. Sam, to jail. The rest of them, wrested apart. Me? This was where I came in. Alone.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Driving away from the station and Mackinaw City toward the park, I had the worst feeling. I was leaving something behind that would never be recovered.
Cooley flicked on the radio. I braced myself for Warren’s voice, but she found a song she liked and started humming along.
I went through the checklist. My suitcase was in Cooley’s trunk. My purse sat in my lap, my phone and car keys inside. My camera bag, at my feet. I had unburdened myself of all I knew back in the interrogation room.
The feeling was akin to slipping out of town in the dark of night, though it was broad daylight. I would pick up my car from the guest house’s property, maybe take one parting glance at the lake, and bid it farewell until we saw each other again on the other side in Chicago.
I might have to make a hotel stop somewhere along the way home to wait out the night, but damned if I was going to stay in this town a minute more than I had already. The scenic, friendly town that had attracted so many, including the likes of a murderer.
I patted the fleece sweatshirt in my lap. If I passed the gate house to the park and saw that Warren’s Jeep was not in residence, I’d stop by and leave it with Erica Ruth. If the Jeep was there—
I hadn’t decided.
I had a plan for the fleece, that’s all. This was not creeping off, on the lam. I had not gotten away with a thing, and neither had Sam.
But someone had.
The revelation came unbidden. I felt it in my bones. Could no one else see it?
As we turned onto the road that led to the park’s entrance, something shiny in the woods caught my eye. The pinpoint of light was a flare of sunlight on the hood of a car left off the road, parked precariously angled into a drainage ditch, a couple of kayaks strapped to the top. Was that—? My curiosity was squashed as we turned into the park entrance and drove up to the gate house. No Jeep. Erica Ruth’s beater was missing, too. A Closed sign hung on the door. The park was a ghost town, a green sawhorse barricade across both entrance and exit.
“Dangit.” Cooley unbuckled her seat belt, got out and pivoted the barricade out of our path, got back in and drove us through. Then she parked again, got out, and moved the barrier back into place. She climbed back into the car and put it into gear, letting something in the dash ding at her for not fixing her seat belt. She heaved a sigh, ignored it.
The whole time I was stewing in my seat, gnawing at my thumbnail.
I had decided I didn’t care if Malloy’s murderer went unpunished, so why did I care if the wrong person took the blame?
I didn’t. Did I? I should be gleeful to be my own person again, relieved to be on the road. But the doubts had a taste, a back-of-the-throat taste of bile and burn. Sam was a liar, a thief many times over—
But none of it was murder. Sam’s punishment would not fit his crimes and someone would get away.
Someone would get away with murder.
“Cooley, someone—”
“Do you think—” Cooley started, pulling at her seat belt to stop the bing-bing of the alarm.
We were both distracted by the other, Cooley even more so by the seat belt, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw that silhouette of a figure at the side of the road, but then it wasn’t a silhouette at all but a real, moving person. Real and darting into the path of our car. My hand shot out and yanked the steering wheel. Right-hand turn into oblivion. The road curved left, but we weren’t on it. I’d turned the wheel too harshly, and yet not hard enough. We smacked something, the heft of it hard against the window on my side, both of us screaming but neither of us able to stop the car, as it careened off the road into the grass and hurtled down an incline and toward the trees at full speed.
It was all so quick. When the tree rose up into our path and stopped us, Cooley jerked out of her seat and toward the dash, cut to silence. The echoes of my screams rang in my ears until there was only the sound of ragged breath. Mine. No, Cooley’s. She lay against me, across the center panel and heavy. We breathed. We waited.
Someone would come.
Something in the undercarriage of the car ticked to silence.
Someone would find us.
And yet.
The green barricades across the road. DO NOT ENTER.
Where was Warren today? Where was the young woman . . . I couldn’t remember her name for a second. Erica. Ruth. Where had she gone?
No car at the entrance. No entrance. No people.
But there had been a person.
On the road.
I opened my eyes. Had the sun moved?
I’d heard something. Someone was speaking.
I opened my eyes again. Trees. Sunlight. When had I closed them? I opened them again. A cloud had passed overhead, and I was cold.
Someone would find us.
No, they wouldn’t. The barriers would stop them.
Someone, speaking. I raised my head. The voice seemed far and also close by. The radio? Was it Warren?
The police radio.
“Cooley,” I said. “The radio.”
I reached for a pain in my neck. The taut strap of my seat belt cut into my skin there. I plucked at it.
Seat belt. She hadn’t been wearing her— “Cooley,” I said. “Cooley, wake up.”
She was heavy against me, thrown from her seat. I reached under her and unsnapped the buckle on my seat belt. Once it retracted, I pushed Cooley up, scooted out of her way, and gently lay her back in the seat. Blood. She had blood trickling dark along her hairline.
“Cooley,” I said, only reassured by the sound of her breathing. But it was hoarse and reedy, struggling. I looked at the dashboard of the car for the radio. I had never used anything like it. I smashed a few buttons. “Hello? There’s been an accident,” I called into the handheld piece, pushing this button, then that one. It might have made sense to someone not stunned, not exhausted. “Hello?”
Nothing happened. I dropped the radio and tried instead the door behind me. The car was canted at an angle so that the door swung out heavily. I fell out backward into pine needles and dirt upturned by our tires.
I stood and leaned on the door until the world stopped spinning. Below me, Cooley wheezed. The windshield showed a web of broken glass. It bowed out, struck from the inside. Her head, oh, God. “Cooley, hang on, OK,” I said. I grabbed Warren’s fleece from the floor and tucked it around her. “I’ll go get help.”
I had my phone out of my pocket, climbing out of the woods for the road when I remembered the sound against the car, the weight of someone or something against my window.
“Oh, no.” I clawed up the incline onto the road to find the hunched form of a man, sitting on his heels, his head of dark hair lowered. “Oh, God, are you—”
It was Dev.
“Dev,” I said. “Oh no, oh no. Are you hurt?”
He grimaced, trying to stand. A red plastic gas canister lay at his feet. I rushed to him and helped him up. “What are you doing here? Should you be lying down? We hit you, right? The car—but what, what in the world, why are you here?”
One of the silhouettes hailed from the side of the road. If Dev hadn’t been running out from behind one of those cut-outs, maybe Cooley would have seen him.
If she’d been wearing her seat belt, maybe—
I looked at my phone. No service, of course. The trees? Because we stood up at the t
op of the world, at the land’s end?
“Try yours,” I said to Dev.
Dev, dazed, patted at his pockets and drew out a phone, the screen shattered. He tried to revive it, but the screen remained black and useless.
The gate house. But it was far, and closed, and my phone didn’t work there, anyway. A text might work. Could you text 911? Who could I text? The only number I had in my phone, thanks to Paris, was a dead man’s. I tried it. Maybe it would go off in the evidence locker, who knows? Send help dark sky, it read. Park. Officer hurt.
The little timeclock symbol churned and churned. Sending. Sending.
Not sending.
The beach. Hadn’t someone—Cooley, oh no, Cooley—someone had said the reception was better on the beach, away from the trees. We were closer to the guest house than we were to the road, anyway. Maybe one of the officers was still guarding the crime scene.
“OK, stay here and I’ll run for help.”
“No,” he said, holding himself on his left side. He reminded me of Bix, grinning over a broken arm, but not because of similarity—in contrast. Dev’s haunted eyes searched from side to side, then shifted down the incline to where Cooley’s cruiser was hidden among the trees. He had a lightning-strike streak of blood across his face. “Please don’t leave me alone.”
He sounded scared. I was scared, too. Cooley. Cooley needed help, fast, and Dev, too. And maybe me. My head swam, the edges of my peripheral vision shimmering with the promise of a blackout.
But Cooley, first. We had to get help. I blinked through the swoon.
“Can you walk?” I said.
He reached for the gas canister and gasped, quickly pulling his hand back and tucking it against himself and the pain.
“Just leave it. We can get it later.”
He shook his head, his eyes dragging across me to the tree line again.
OK, I said, and led him, haltingly, down the road toward the guest house and the shore.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Dev panted, shuffling and shifting the gas canister to his other hand.
“Let me carry it,” I said.
He shook his head, shifted it back.
“Why did you run into the road like that?”
“Was . . . in a . . . hurry.”
Broken ribs, probably. He couldn’t talk and walk well at the same time, so I let it go. We needed whatever speed I could urge into him. Cooley. Cooleycooleycooley and her dumb dog-smelling car, when she should have been wearing a God-danged seat belt. A damn seat belt. I could say it, even if she couldn’t.
“I saw your car out off the road. You ran out of gas?” I said. “Never mind. Save your breath.”
We shuffled a few feet. “Were you going to the hospital? Is Paris OK? Just nod or whatever.”
He frowned in my general direction but didn’t answer. His feet seemed to require his complete attention.
“I haven’t had a chance to say,” I started, trying to find an angle into the night in the motel. “The other night—”
“Stop,” he gasped. “Please.”
Which part of the night didn’t he want to talk about? How I had turned down his substantial charms? How I had supposedly poisoned a bottle from which I’d been drinking, too?
“I didn’t do anything.”
“We all did . . .” He took a shallow breath and tried again. “Our part.”
This seemed like an apology to me for a moment, and then a confession. And then an accusation. “I had no role in this.”
He frowned again, over my shoulder. “You do . . .” he breathed. “Whether . . . you like it . . .”
The end of the saying floated in the air.
“Or not,” I said, since this was how I felt. I had no part and wanted none.
Again he pointed a furrowed brow at something over my shoulder. I glanced back to see what had caught his attention and saw a sparkle through the trees. The lake. “We’re getting close,” I said. “Come on, hurry.”
We hurried as best as Dev could while I pulled him onward with my mind. Cooley. His wheeze provided a soundtrack to our slow pace. It was asthmatic, almost as though he was allergic to the—
“Oh, my God,” I said, stopping. “You weren’t poisoned. You drank from a cup Sam used for wine. Red wine.”
He didn’t say anything but hitched the gas canister up a bit.
“Why didn’t you just tell them? They’re trying to figure out how one person killed Malloy, fixed the staircase to give way, and poisoned you—and that’s not even how it went.”
I wish I’d heard what Sam had confessed to. How many crimes had he claimed, and how many were still unaccounted for?
“You were just being a dick, not telling them about the allergy,” I said. “You wanted them to think I’d poisoned you because it took the focus off all your friends.”
Dev shuffled ahead of me toward the guest house with a focus I wouldn’t have given him credit for. I followed.
When the sharp angles of the house came into view, I could have wept. I pulled out my phone and tried for reception. No. It had to be the beach. We had to get out of these trees and find some open space.
My car sat alone in front of the guest house. No police presence, then. I checked the sky. Time ticked on. Five hours home, at least, and if the sun set by 10:00 p.m., I had to leave by . . .
The urgency to leave scratched at me from the inside. But Cooley lay like a sack in her own cruiser. Nothing was yet settled. I brushed Dev off and ran for the corner of the house, around the picnic table, and rushed for the shore.
Nothing. My phone had never heard of reception.
“What? Come on.” I hurried out to the water, shoes in the surf, but still no bars appeared. I walked south along the curve of the water to that skinny peninsula that struck out into the lake. It was the furthest from the trees I could hope to get, this pirate’s ship plank, and if this didn’t work, what next? I glanced down the beach—no one. Only Dev lurching around the edge of the house. The kayaks were gone.
He was trying to yell something at me, but couldn’t get his breath.
“What?”
“How do I . . . get in?” he called.
“Why do you need in the house?”
He said something I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I said.
“We . . . forgot some things.”
“They can get you into the house later,” I said. “We need to worry about Cooley.” I turned my attention back to the phone. Nothing. What to do? There was no landline inside, no other houses or buildings on the park land. I turned my phone off so I could turn it on again, a fresh start the last option.
As the screen went black, I turned back to the house, where Dev still fussed at the back door.
“Sam took the wine out, if that’s what you’re looking for,” I called. “I don’t know where he put it.”
He waved me off. Stubborn. He sat the gas canister down heavily, the gas, a dark line inside the canister, sloshing. He hobbled around the side of the house, using the picnic table as a crutch as he turned the corner, out of sight.
The kayaks were gone.
I watched the logo of my phone company appear on the screen, thinking.
The kayaks. They’d come in on Malloy and Hillary’s car but now were strapped to Dev’s car back on the road where he’d stalled out. What did it matter?
It mattered to me, for some reason. It was a little bug in the nape of my neck, inside my throat, deep in my ears, an itch I couldn’t reach or quell.
Dev came back around the house, shaded his eyes, and peered up at the second-story window that looked out upon the lake. Malloy and Hillary’s room, from where I’d watched Sam stashing his pirate booty away.
The kayaks were gone. What was it about that fact that bothered me?
Dev was stripping the place for parts while his friends lay in the morgue and jail, his fiancée in the intensive care unit. But that was uncharitable. Seen from another angle, he was collecting the pieces t
hey’d left behind. He was rounding up the loose threads. He was moving his group of friends out of the building where one of them had been killed, another hurt seriously. He consolidated their belongings as well as their need to return to this place. I didn’t blame him for wanting to get out of here, once and for all.
A wind rose and fluttered my hair across my eyes. I peeled the strands back. In the shadow of the house, Dev approached the back door, fretted at the handle one last time and then at its hinges, his back hiding his work. His foot nudged the gas canister, the high dark line of liquid shifting as the gas slopped inside.
The kayaks were strapped to his car. He’d already been here, scavenging. And then had left and come back. He had carried the canister to this spot, but—
The gas container was heavy. It was full.
I heard a sound and realized it was from my own mouth. The start of a question, a clarification that had no words, no form.
Dev glanced back at me. In his hands, a screwdriver.
I darted toward the shore to get off the point’s dead end but stumbled on a rock, twisted an ankle, and fell knees first into a patch of gravel. When I stood, I was skinned and bloody, my jeans ripped at the knees, and Dev was hurrying to meet me.
“What did you say?” he snapped.
“Nothing. I—” The tool in his hand caught a glint of sunlight. The photo I would not take: Dev, shoulders wide, the screwdriver dangling from his hand, a jagged arc of dried blood streaked across his cheek. He saw me looking at the screwdriver.
“It’s not the same one,” he said.
“It wouldn’t have to be.”
He snorted. “If this is the worst thing you have to survive, you’ll be fine. This part doesn’t concern you.” He looked at me strangely as he caught his breath. “But you’re wrong if you think you had no part at all. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been here.”
“I had nothing to do with this.”
“Try again,” he spat, walking toward me. I backed up, stumbling on the turned ankle. “But I don’t give a shit about what happened to Malloy. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. I should thank you.”
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