Steve guffawed. “First he couldn’t get the fire going …”
What did it matter what her grandfather came up with? Tomorrow was too late. She needed rescuing now.
“… then he dropped all the marshmallows in the dirt …”
Kaitlan fled to the restroom.
She barricaded herself in a stall, leaning her forehead against the door. Six and a half hours, that was all. Her whole life had changed in six and a half hours. It seemed like an eternity. She couldn’t do this.
“God,” she closed her eyes, “I know I’ve made some mistakes. But please—help me.”
She exited the stall. Standing next to a woman at the sink, she washed her hands. Kaitlan took her time until the woman left. Then she faced herself in the mirror, wondering how she’d gotten here, where she’d gone wrong. The day she’d walked out of jail she vowed to change her life. She joined a Twelve Step program and committed fully to getting clean. For a year she held two jobs, barely making it, saving every penny she could toward cosmetology school. Some days she wanted to get high so badly she nearly climbed the walls. That’s when prayer helped the most. A California license required six hundred hours of school—thirteen to fourteen months if she worked real hard. Not to mention tuition of around ten thousand dollars. She applied for federal grants. Most went to single moms, but amazingly she got one. God, she thought.
In cosmetology school over a third of her classmates dropped out after the first four months. It was way more demanding than many of them thought—herself included. At first she found it hard to concentrate, the drugs had so messed up her brain. But slowly her head cleared. She pressed on, determined. When her old car broke down, she took the bus. When she didn’t have money for the bus, she walked. No help from her mother in England, who couldn’t care less. And she was too afraid to ask her grandfather.
The day she earned her license was the happiest day of her life. Moving to Gayner, finding a place to work, meeting Craig—blessings beyond belief.
Now it was all about to be taken away.
The restroom door opened. Sheila and Leslie pushed in, chattering away.
“Hi.” Kaitlan forced a smile.
“Hey, Kaitlan!” They disappeared into stalls.
Straightening her shoulders, Kaitlan returned to the party and Craig.
An interminable half hour later as they prepared to leave the restaurant, Chief Barlow closed in. “Son.” He shook hands with Craig. “You say goodbye to your sister?”
Resentment flicked across Craig’s face. “Twice.”
“Then go say goodbye to Joe.”
Craig shoved his jaw forward, turned and left.
The chief leaned toward Kaitlan. “Keep yourself out of trouble now.”
She gave him a tight smile.
Craig returned and put his arm around her shoulder. “We’re leaving, Dad.” He spoke the words flatly—I can handle her.
The chief gave them a mock salute. “Good seeing you both.”
Craig ushered Kaitlan out the door.
As they crossed the parking lot he kept his head down, hands in his pockets. “Nice party.”
“Yeah.” Kaitlan hugged herself against the cold.
In the Mustang, Craig put the top up for the drive home.
Kaitlan focused out the window, watching familiar streets go by. They no longer looked friendly.
Somewhere out there lay a woman’s body. Kaitlan realized she hadn’t noticed if the woman wore a wedding ring. Was some husband going crazy with worry? Children?
Surely by now she’d been reported missing.
They reached Kaitlan’s apartment. Her heart pounded and her limbs felt brittle. If Craig touched her she’d break apart.
Please stay in the car.
He pulled up behind her Corolla and cut the engine. “I’ll see you inside.”
The words hit like stones. She opened her door and got out.
Crickets’ pulsing songs grated her ears. A chilling breeze lifted a strand of her hair, popping goose bumps down her arms.
The surrounding forest was so dark.
How had she ever felt safe here? The night seemed to have a thousand eyes.
Her footsteps sounded loud as she approached the door and unlocked it. Stepping inside her kitchen, she could feel Craig’s looming presence at her back.
This was insanity. She never should have listened to her grandfather.
“I won’t be staying,” Craig said as she placed her keys and purse on the table. “Tomorrow I’m on the 6:00 a.m. shift.”
Relief weakened her knees. She nodded.
“I’ll just check your place out. Make sure you’re safe.”
Kaitlan stood like granite as he walked through the living room, into the hall. She clutched the top of a chair, the fingers of her other hand curling into her palm. Get out, Craig, get out! she wanted to scream. The minute he drove away she would throw what she needed into a suitcase and drive like a madwoman to her grandfather’s —
“Kaitlan. Come here.” He called from the door to her bedroom.
Something cold and slimy unfolded in Kaitlan’s chest. For a wild moment she pictured herself tearing out the door and into the black forest.
Where she’d get maybe one hundred feet before Craig caught her. And he’d be furious.
“Hey! Come here.”
If he tried to hurt her, she’d fight. She’d tell him that others knew what he’d done, and if anything happened to her, they’d go to the police.
Yeah, right. The Gayner police.
Kaitlan did the only thing she could. She walked toward the bedroom.
twenty-seven
Silence echoed through the house. A silence that mocked as Margaret waited for the phone to ring.
She had become accustomed to small noises amid the quiet. The heater kicking on in winter. A newly made ice cube falling in the freezer. The creak of a wall for who knows why, except that the house was old and perched on a hilltop where the wind whirled between ocean and bay.
Tonight Margaret heard none of these. Only the ticking, aching silence.
Dear God, protect Kaitlan.
Shortly after eight Margaret had tiptoed across the hardwood floor to D.’s office and leaned an ear against the door. No sound from within. Holding her breath she eased open the door, tensing against his sure anger at her intrusion. But she found him in his chair at the computer, legs splayed, head lolled to one side and mouth open. Sleeping.
On his monitor—a randomly rolling ball against black void.
She leaned against the door, its knob in her hand as hard as the fist of a corpse.
Through dinner, while cleaning the kitchen and mopping its floor, she’d clung to the hope that the clear mind D. had displayed with Kaitlan would remain. That given this deadline of all deadlines, he would rise above his weaknesses—because he had to.
How foolish she’d been.
Repelled and angered by the futility of the room, she’d shut the office door and hurried away.
Now Margaret stood in the library, facing the bookcase containing the first editions of D.’s novels. She’d been driven to this place with the sense that something here could help their situation. But what?
She scanned the ninety-nine books, shelved in order of publication.
Margaret’s eyes landed on Fractions, D.’s first in his Ben Seitz mathematician-turned-detective series. It was followed by Division and Decimal Point. Margaret’s gaze skipped around then, from Tumult to Ransacked, Perilous Hope to Midnight Vision, In the Making, Out of Madness, Last Speck of Dawn, Black Over Water, Sky Bright, From the Mist. She knew them all. Many she had edited. Those written before she’d started working for D. she’d read on her own. Ninety-nine inciting incidents and story arcs and resolutions, spanning over forty years of work.
They say a writer’s worldview emerges through his stories. Over the years Margaret had seen an element repeat in D.’s books. After Gretchen died it appeared even more strongly. Through symbolis
m and subtext throbbed what Margaret had come to call his “vain empires” doctrine, the phrase taken from her favorite passage in Paradise Lost. Always D.’s main characters were in one way or another bent on the dark pursuit of some obsession in their lives—only to discover that their private little empires were all in vain and brought only emptiness.
A truth about Darell Brooke himself that he could not, would not see.
Out of the Blue. Lights Across the Water. River’s Edge.
Margaret stuck a hand in her hair. Why was she here?
On impulse she pulled out All But Dead, not remembering the story. She read the prologue. Oh, yes. Coal miner Ed Bramley and his nightmares, his epileptic daughter.
Margaret replaced the novel and opened a second—one of D.’s earlier works on the top shelf—and scanned the first two pages. This one she barely remembered.
Wind gusted at the windows. Margaret lifted her head to gaze into the night. The lights of Half Moon Bay dimmed, then disappeared. Fog was rolling in.
She checked the clock. Just past nine. Was Kaitlan still at the restaurant? Was she safe?
Margaret’s limbs fairly trembled with tension, anticipating the phone.
A clue.
Her eyebrows raised. Yes, that was it. She was looking for a clue in one of D.’s books. Some plot point that would ignite an idea of what they should do—one he had surely forgotten. His past novels were nothing now but a jumble in his head.
Had he ever written a story about a female protagonist trapped as Kaitlan was—one who couldn’t go to the police and had no evidence to present if she did …
Margaret slid out another novel and read the first chapter until the story surfaced in her memory.
No. Nothing here.
She lowered the book and focused out the window again, seeing only her dulled and anxious reflection. The fog now blocked out all view.
The wind had died down. The house was so very still.
Kaitlan.
This bookcase held thousands upon thousands of pages. Where to begin? It could take weeks to find what Margaret needed—if she found it at all.
She put the book back on the shelf and buffed her upper arms, chilled in the warm room of rich wood and leather.
Frustration balled in her throat. She should be moving, working, doing something. Tearing down the hill to the restaurant—did Margaret even know which one it was?—and rescuing Kaitlan. Just barge in and take her, who cared which people saw?
And what then, Margaret, after tipping your hand to Craig? What then?
She gazed at D.’s novels—the very reason Kaitlan had come to him for help in the first place. Somewhere in one of them must lay a crucial piece to this puzzle. A piece that had slipped into the milky waters below her and Darell’s consciousness.
Random reading wouldn’t do. She needed a systematic approach.
The oldest books first. These were the least familiar.
Margaret reached for D.’s first novel on the far left of the top shelf.
twenty-eight
Kaitlan’s legs felt rubbery as she walked through the kitchen. At each step her brain screamed there must be some way out of this nightmare. Something beyond this world, a rescue swooping out of the clouds …Craig stood in her bedroom doorway, simmering with impatience. “Where’s your vacuum cleaner?”
Vacuum cleaner? Kaitlan stared at him.
Craig gestured with his head toward the sliding glass door behind him. “Your carpet’s dirty.”
The footprint. Kaitlan’s eyes cut toward it.
“We need to clean it up.”
We
The word sank to the depths of her. We—a team. Hiding evidence that could be used against him.
She could go to jail for that.
He nudged her arm. “Go get it.”
Zombie-like, she turned and headed for the closet near her front door. There she pulled out her small portable vacuum. She returned to Craig.
He gave her a smug smile. “Thanks.”
A realization spun through her. He’d planned this moment of entrapment.
The thought sent her back to a scene in her childhood. At the age of eight she’d been playing with a neighborhood boy when he caught a moth. He stuck one of his mother’s sewing needles through the moth’s body and pinned it to cardboard. As it fluttered in a death dance she begged him to let it go. But he’d merely looked on, fascinated.
Now she was the moth.
Craig took the vacuum. “Go sit in the living room.”
Heart scudding, she obeyed.
We.
Kaitlan perched on her couch and waited.
The vacuum surged on. She listened to the rise and fall of its whine as it pushed across the carpet. She imagined the dirt particles it was picking up, the footprint pulled apart. Obliterated.
The noise cut off. Kaitlan heard the sound of a plug pulled from a socket, the whizzing grate of the automatic cord roll-up. Craig’s footsteps in the hall. A thunk of vacuum against floor. The closet door closing.
Kaitlan focused on a magazine upon her coffee table. Filling its cover—the perfect face of a laughing model. An article heading: “Six Secrets to Make Yourself Irresistible.”
Craig approached. She tensed. He laid both hands on her shoulders.
Kaitlan thought she would crack in two. Right down the middle, between those hands. Between those fingers that had strangled three women.
“Thanks for helping,” Craig said.
We.
“Get up, Kaitlan. Come with me into the bedroom.”
She stared at the magazine. A second article—“Budget Now for Christmas.”
A holiday she would never see.
Quiet despair uncoiled in her chest. The way he was doing this. Drawing it out, like he enjoyed every minute.
She stood and turned to face him, the couch as a barrier. “You going to kill me now too?”
His jaw flexed. “Just do as I say.”
Her eyes teared up. “Where did this come from, Craig? Why?”
Silence.
“Does your father know?”
Anger shrank his eyes. “Leave my father out of it.”
“He does, doesn’t he. That’s why he threatened me tonight.”
“I said leave him out of it!” He lunged for her over the couch.
Kaitlan reared out of his reach, hit the coffee table. Almost fell.
Craig cursed. He pulled back, face darkening, and strode toward the end of the sofa.
Kaitlan turned and ran. Around the coffee table, into the kitchen. She flung herself at the door.
Craig caught her left arm at the elbow and yanked her backward.
“No!” Kaitlan writhed from his grip. She pulled toward the door with all her might, her right hand reaching, flailing for the knob, fingers almost touching —
He grasped her right shoulder and whirled her around.
Kaitlan’s arms flew out, pummeled his chest. Sickly little sobs spilled from her lips. He spat curses, hands slicing the air, trying to catch her wrists.
“Stop!” Kaitlan aimed a knee at his groin.
He swiveled to one side, raked up a handful of her hair and wrenched her head toward the floor. Her body twisted in on itself. She fell forward into his waist. He gripped her shoulders hard, shoved her upright and back against the door. The knob hit her left kidney, knocking the wind clean out of her. Kaitlan gasped.
“Want to try that again, huh?” Craig pushed himself into her, breathing hard. Rage hardened his features into a face she couldn’t recognize.
Kaitlan slumped in his arms and cried.
“Now you listen to me.” Craig’s words flattened to steel. “We are going in the bedroom. You can walk or I can drag you. But we are going. Got it?”
Kaitlan’s world blurred. She looked down at his feet. The shoes that had left the footprint, now swept away.
Craig stepped back, still gripping her shoulders. “Go.” He pushed her.
She moved.
&n
bsp; At the angled entrance of the bedroom he shoved her forward until she could see the whole room. “Look around. Anything else that needs to be cleaned up?”
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