Just as she reached the car, the gun went off again and dirt flew up when the bullet slammed into the ground beside her.
Heart pounding, Rachel flung the car door open and threw herself into the seat. She was trying to get the key into the ignition when Nelson fired again and a bullet pierced a rear window.
At last the key slid into place. She started the engine and shifted into drive without turning on the lights and making herself an easy target. The car lurched forward. But she had to turn around to get out. She couldn’t risk getting trapped in a dead end.
She pulled on the steering wheel and swung the car in a circle. A bullet crashed through the windshield and struck the passenger seat next to her. She floored the gas and took off.
The shooting stopped. Where was Nelson? Why wasn’t he running after her? Why wasn’t he trying to shoot the tires? In the rearview mirror, she saw nothing but the murk of shadows.
Rachel bounced in her seat as the car jolted into and out of deep holes in the road, and she had to slow to a crawl before she lost control of the car. She needed headlights to navigate this road. Surely it was safe now to turn them on.
She flipped the lever and the headlights blazed. A figure dashed from the trees to her left and into the light. Perry Nelson stopped in the middle of the road fifteen feet ahead, pointing his pistol at the car.
Rachel yelped and ducked. A shot cracked the windshield and bits of glass rained down on her like sand.
She lifted her head far enough to glimpse the road ahead. Nelson was walking toward the car, his gun raised. He seemed in no hurry. Did he think he had hit her with that last shot? Was he coming to make sure, to finish her off?
I am not going to sit here and let you kill me. In that moment, watching him move toward her at an almost casual pace, all the fear and rage she’d held inside for years boiled to the surface and exploded. She sat up straight, grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and found the gas pedal with her foot.
The instant the car started moving, Nelson fired again, but the shot went wide, striking the far edge of the windshield.
He didn’t get out of the way. He stood there and fired another shot at the windshield, this one coming within inches of Rachel.
She stomped on the gas and plowed into him. The impact shook the whole car, and Rachel felt the shock down to her bones. She saw the gun fly out of his hand, and he seemed to take flight too, his body lifting into the air for what seemed an eternity before it crumpled to the ground.
Gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, Rachel drove on and left Perry Nelson behind. She hoped to god he was dead.
Chapter Forty-four
“It looks good.” Rachel, on her knees in the kitchen, finished wrapping gauze around Michelle’s swollen lower leg and secured it with the strip of adhesive tape Michelle handed her. “You’ll have a scar, of course.”
Michelle, sitting in a chair at the table, sipped from her mug of tea as Rachel got to her feet. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“I was doing an internal check so I could give you an honest answer.” Rachel took a seat on the other side of the table. Frank, the cat, sat upright on a third chair, his one good ear angling back and forth between them as if he didn’t want to miss anything. “And I can honestly say I don’t feel any guilt over Perry Nelson. Maybe it’ll hit me in the middle of the night weeks from now, but I doubt it. He was trying to kill me. I defended myself.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, and I hope you won’t waste any time wishing it had ended differently. You’re rid of him now. He can’t threaten you anymore. And Jordan Gale and his girlfriend will go to prison, so you don’t have to worry about them either. But if you ever want to talk about it, remember you can call me anytime.”
“Sister to sister, right? Not patient to therapist.”
Michelle held out a hand across the table and Rachel took it without hesitation. “To tell you the truth,” Michelle said, “I wouldn’t even know where to begin to analyze you.”
They both laughed, and Rachel tried not to analyze the moment. She’d spent too many years doing that. She squeezed Michelle’s hand and asked, “Are things going to be okay between you and Kevin?”
“I think so. I hope so. We still have a lot to work out. We had reached a point where we were hardly communicating at all, and then when the stalking started, I was so stressed and scared, I was behaving so strangely, I can’t blame him for wondering if I’d gone off the deep end.”
“Now that he knows your whole story, our story, that’ll make a difference, won’t it?”
Michelle nodded. “It already has. I can’t get over how well he took it when we told him. But that look on his face at first was priceless, wasn’t it? I didn’t know whether he was going to faint or get up and run away. I was scared for a minute, but I should have had more faith in him.”
“My favorite moment,” Rachel said, “was when he looked at both of us and said, ‘This explains so much.’”
They laughed together again, as if it were something they did all the time.
“I was terrified of telling him,” Michelle said. “I couldn’t have done it without your help. And Tom’s. Thank you.”
“Kevin loves you. That’s going to take you a long way.”
Holding tightly to Rachel’s hand, Michelle searched her face as if looking for some elusive answer there, to a question not yet asked. “Kevin and I had a talk last night before we went to sleep. He asked me if I thought I would ever want to know our real mother.”
Our real mother. Rachel detected only a hint of the effort it cost Michelle to speak the words. “What did you say?”
“I told him I can’t imagine ever wanting to know her. But are we doing the right thing? Letting her believe we’re dead? Some people might think we owe it to her to let her know the truth, to give her closure. Detective Fagan seems to feel that way, from what you told me.”
“She had closure a long time ago,” Rachel said. “When I tracked her down and pretended I was a student doing research on missing children, I sat next to her and listened to her talk about accepting that we were dead, gone forever. We’re part of the past for her. She has another family now. And we have our own lives. If you ever decide you need to see her, I’ll back you up, but I’d rather leave it alone, go on the way we are.” Some wounds would never heal, and slashing them open again would only bring fresh pain. They had to hope that Fagan would keep quiet about what he knew, but he would always be a vague threat hovering in the background.
“I can’t even remember her,” Michelle murmured. “Sometimes I think I do, but the image is all mixed up with Mother—Judith, I mean.”
“I’m not surprised,” Rachel said. “There’s such a strong resemblance between them. I look like our biological mother, so I look like Judith too.” No one had ever questioned their kinship. No one except Rachel, whose dreams and buried memories had driven her to pry the lid off the truth during a brutally hot summer several years before.
“I guess Daddy had a thing for tall redheads,” Michelle said.
For a moment Rachel let the startling words float between them. Michelle had never willingly broached this subject before. Neither of them had ever met Judith’s husband, who had died in an auto accident with their small daughter months before Judith kidnapped Rachel and Michelle. Throughout their lives in her house, Michael Goddard was the blond man with movie star looks who smiled from a picture frame in Mother’s bedroom. They thought of him as Daddy but could never talk about him, never ask questions because Mother’s grief for him ran so deep. Yet when he’d betrayed Judith by having an affair with an employee in his law office and fathering her younger daughter, he had set in motion everything that happened to them, everything that led to this day, to Rachel and Michelle being together now in this farmhouse kitchen.
Rachel waited to see whether Michelle would say more about her biological father, but she seemed finished with the subject. She took a last sip of her tea and set
the cup on the table. Smiling, she reached over to scratch the cat’s head. “I guess this is goodbye, Frank. Be a good boy for Rachel.”
Tom appeared in the doorway. “There’s somebody here who wants to talk to the two of you for a minute. Don’t ask who. Just come.”
They followed Tom to the living room but halted before entering when they saw Detective Bernard Fagan standing there. Kevin stood nearby, arms folded, scowling and silent.
With a glance between them, Michelle and Rachel reached silent agreement. They joined hands as they walked into the living room. Tom and Kevin took their places beside the two women, and Rachel knew they wouldn’t hesitate to step in and toss Fagan out if necessary. Now that he’d been proved wrong, all Rachel wanted from the detective was an apology and a promise to stay out of their lives.
They all waited for Fagan to speak.
He cleared his throat and jammed his hands into his pockets. In a second the inevitable jingling of keys began. One day, Rachel thought, somebody who’d had enough would haul off and deck him for that habit.
“Captain Bridger and I have wrapped up all the loose ends on the Shelley Beecher case,” Fagan said, “and I’m about to start home. I wanted to stop by and see you for a minute before I leave. Look, Rachel—Dr. Goddard—I realize none of this would have happened if I’d done a better job when Nelson first started threatening you back in McLean. I’m sorry he got off after he shot you. I’m sorry for my part in it. I went easy on Nelson, I sat in the witness chair and made excuses for him, and that influenced the jury’s decision. I let something that happened in my own family distort my judgment. That’s never going to happen again.”
Rachel nodded. “It’s over now. I’d like to put it behind me. Thank you for what you’ve said. It helps.” It wasn’t everything she needed to hear, though.
An awkward silence developed. Fagan jangled his keys. Rachel considered decking him herself. Nobody helped him out by speaking.
At last he said, “About the other thing, what happened when you were kids, I want you to know that nobody will ever hear about it from me. That’s one cold case I have no interest in solving.”
Michelle’s hand tightened on Rachel’s. When Rachel glanced at her sister, she saw her own relief mirrored in Michelle’s face. She had to take a deep breath before she could speak. “That means a lot to us.”
“Yes,” Michelle whispered.
“Well, I’d better get going,” Fagan said, his voice suddenly crisp and impersonal. He nodded at Michelle and Kevin. “You two have a safe trip. Captain, Dr. Goddard, you have good day.”
The four of them moved aside so Fagan could leave. When she heard the door close behind him, Rachel let go of another part of her past.
She and Tom, accompanied by Billy Bob, said goodbye to Michelle and Kevin a few minutes later and stood on the porch, Tom’s arm around Rachel’s shoulders and her arm around his waist, watching them leave. In the car, Kevin leaned over and kissed Michelle before starting the engine. The car rolled down the driveway to the road, turned, and disappeared, taking them back to their life in Bethesda.
As her sister left, Rachel felt an old, familiar pang of loss, as if an empty space had opened inside her. She knew she would always feel that way when she and Michelle parted. Their bond was forged by experiences so extraordinary that no one else could ever fully understand their lives. Not even Judith Goddard’s malign influence could break that connection. It would survive the physical distance between them.
Rachel turned her eyes to the clear blue sky, then let her gaze drift over the wooded hillside across the road and the fields that stretched away from the house. For the first time since she’d moved into the farmhouse with Tom, she could look around her and think: I’m home.
A squirrel dashed across the yard directly in front of them, and Billy Bob took off, woofing and bouncing down the steps on his stubby bulldog legs.
Rachel laughed and leaned against Tom. She felt the wall she’d long ago built around herself crumbling and settling as quietly and gently as dust. A normal life, she thought, filled with love. That’s all I want. What a gift that would be.
“I’d like to invite them back in a couple of months,” she told Tom.
“Sure.” He squeezed her shoulders and kissed her forehead. “Maybe they can relax and enjoy it next time.”
“A vacation wasn’t exactly what I meant. I want my sister to be my matron of honor.”
“What?” He pulled back to look into her eyes, and a slow smile lit his face. “Seriously?”
“If I want to help you get elected sheriff,” Rachel said, grinning, “I’d better start by making an honest man of you.”
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Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 30