The Eleventh Victim

by Nancy Grace

  She eased her beat-up gray Jeep onto the dirt lane, then glanced into the rearview mirror.

  Good. Nobody behind her. Nobody ahead of her.

  She slowed to a full stop and took her time staring down the road as far as she could, until it took a rounded curve.

  Just beyond her view were the most beautiful beaches on the Island, where the Atlantic first kissed the Georgia sand good morning each day.

  On Saturdays, children played pirates and Civil War heroes and Indians there, hiding from parents back at home, closeted behind screen doors keeping out the onslaught of summer bugs, their curtains drawn shut against the heat.

  It was to these same quiet, wind blown dunes that those very children, as high-schoolers, stole away to make love for the first time, each thinking they were the first to discover the once-in-a-lifetime spot under the Island sky.

  And then even later, they would return to the familiar stretch of sea and sand as life crept up on them, the years suddenly grown too many. They came back to drink in the water and sand, and remember youth.

  Then, at the end, there were last requests to see the south dunes and the ocean one more time. When Virginia’s time came, she wouldn’t mind if it happened right there, too; if her own last look at this earth was the Island dunes and ocean.

  With a sigh, she turned off the engine, crunched down on the emergency brake, and got out of the Jeep.

  She couldn’t help but look up and name the constellations in her mind, an old habit. She always imagined that somewhere in the world, the people she loved both dead and alive were looking at those same stars.

  Suddenly remembering why she was creeping around a dirt road at midnight, she crawled under a thick metal chain draped across the road.

  She took off into the dark, keeping an eye out for wildlife off the dunes, confident that, between her and the animals, if anyone were about to be caught off-guard and take off running, it would be them, not her.

  No sooner than three or four minutes in, she turned the curve in the road and stopped cold.

  In the distance, she saw something altogether foreign. Erected in the dead center of the road was some sort of small structure, painted stark white to thwart the heat of the sun.

  Some sort of guardhouse. To guard what?

  She continued walking, but slowly now, taking it all in.

  Beyond the new guardhouse, she could make out the outlines of cement trucks and construction materials stacked in assorted piles. They went on and on, no lack of building materials here.

  A gust of breeze confirmed her worst fears.

  When it blew across her face, lifting her hair from her cheek, she sniffed not only the usual salt air, but the unmistakable odor of cement mix. That, and pine timber without the protection of its hard outer bark, sliced and laid open to the elements in long, thin boards.

  There was a light in the tiny booth, and she could just make out the back of a man’s head.

  Virginia knew she should stop, but she didn’t.

  Instead of passing the booth on the road and in the open, she dipped into thick trees on the side of the dirt road and continued forward, using them as cover. About twenty yards in, she edged closer to the clearing to take a look.

  Larry was right.

  Huge sections of land leading to the beachfront had been cleared. In the milky white moonlight, the ground looked naked without the pine-scrub covering. The gentle dips and curves of dune had been flattened like a big, square pancake and cordoned off in neat, precise rectangles with construction string, waiting to be shored up with pine timbers, then filled in with thick concrete.

  Her only witness a solitary Island owl, Virginia made her way back to the Jeep, stepping surely and silently through the trees, touching them gently, lovingly, with her fingertips as she went.

  The night was black and the roads were dark, even with her brights on, as she drove back, the wind whipping in through the Jeep’s open windows, wet with sea salt.

  The Island was no longer hers. It had grown suddenly into a strange, unfamiliar beast.

  Everything seemed different now. Surreal. The curves on the back roads she had walked as a child and driven since she was fifteen jumped out at her as if she had never driven them before.

  The worst she had imagined was that the beach-replenishing project was under way, started by the County Commission without her knowledge so as to avoid the predictable protests and sabotage that came with any proposed Island development.

  What she had stumbled upon was much worse. This was no Magic Market, no two-pump gas station.

  The development of condos on the Island’s south end meant the end of the beaches…the end of Island life as she knew it.

  It meant the end if something wild and beautiful and the beginning of something common and predictable.

  High-rises mean people, throngs of them. High-rises mean paved roads, boiling hot asphalt poured over machine-flattened dunes. There would be traffic lights and crosswalks and grocery stores and water slides, possibly even…a mall.

  The delicate balance between marsh, beach, dune, and salt water would be strangled dead.

  Virginia couldn’t let that happen.

  She released the steering wheel with her right hand, reached into the glove compartment, and pulled out a cell phone and a knit cap she always wore to protect her brain from dangerous cell waves.

  She veered off the soft shoulder while trying to turn on the cell, and then instinctively yanked the Jeep back onto the highway and jammed the cap on.

  It was late, but she dialed the bungalow shared by her two most trusted guerrillas, Renee and Dottie.

  Renee picked up on the second ring with a protective “Hello,” knowing calls at this hour could only mean a death in the immediate family or eminent nervous breakdown on the part of the caller.

  “Did I wake you up?” Virginia asked.

  “No…it’s okay, Dottie and I had just turned off The Tonight Show. Lily Tomlin was on. What’s up?”

  “Code Orange!”

  “Orange? What do you mean? What happened? Did they hold the Commission meeting behind our backs? What…they approved the replenishing? Are you hurt? What?”

  Virginia’s throat caught. “No. It’s worse than that. High-rises are going up on the south beach. The foundation’s about to be poured.”

  “But that’s impossible. Who told you?”

  “Nobody told me, I saw it for myself, ten minutes ago. A guardhouse is protecting it so they must expect trouble. I’ve never seen a guardhouse on this Island in my life.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Call everybody.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now!”

  Virginia had a feeling in her heart that if she could just do something right now, she could single-handedly turn back time and change what had happened right under their noses, on their own Island. But she had to act now.

  “I’m sure that would wake them up.”

  “So wake them up. Just start the Chain.”

  The Chain consisted of one guerrilla calling the next in a prearranged manner to which they all agreed in case of an emergency.

  “What do I tell them all?”

  “To come to my place. Hurry, Renee. Okay?”

  “Okay. We’re on our way.”

  “Just start the Chain.”

  “Will do.”

  She tried to thank Renee, but her voice broke. She hung up, tossed the phone and the cap into the backseat, and kept on driving.

  Off the sides of the road, black silhouettes of pines and oaks and palmettos blew back and forth in the wind off the ocean with such a force that they blended to look like figures dancing wildly, savagely.

  She continued to speed, taking crazy turns as they came one after the next, the road jumping out from behind the oaks as if it were alive, trying to leap out and scare her.

  And she was scared. For the first time in her life, Virginia Gunn was afraid.

  29

  New York Cit
y

  “I’M GLAD YOU AGREED TO HAVE DINNER WITH ME, HAILEY.”

  “I’m glad, too,” she told Adam Springhurst across the white tablecloth, and surprisingly, she meant it.

  Earlier, when he’d come upstairs just as she was packing up, she’d been almost dismayed to see him. It had been a long day, and her last patient was Melissa.

  Skittish as she was, Melissa clammed up altogether when her session was interrupted by the arrival of a plumber the super sent up. Hailey shut her office door so Melissa could go on talking about her fifth birthday—the last “happy” one, before her stepfather had shattered her life. But she was distracted by the sound of a wrench clanging against pipes, and finally asked if they could end the session early.

  “The plumber found the leak and fixed it,” Hailey told Adam when he showed up, “so you shouldn’t have any more problems downstairs.”

  “Good. Want some dinner to celebrate?”

  Her gut instinct said no, but on second thought, dinner out would really be nice. Three hours later, they were having coffee and cannoli at a little Italian restaurant a few blocks away from the office. The conversation was easy, Adam was well-educated and well-traveled, full of funny stories. He asked all about her…her life in Atlanta, her apartment, her hours, even the funny story about switching office suites. He seemed keenly interested in every detail.

  And he came out of nowhere. No conversation in the preceding months, no hellos over the mailboxes, no bumping into each other in the neighborhood. Nothing. Just hello, need to check your plumbing, let’s go to dinner.

  “So if you weren’t here with me,” Adam said, breaking off a piece of pastry, “what would you be doing tonight?”

  “I’d have gone to the gym, or for a run. Then home. Pretty simple.”

  He smiled. “You answered that without having to think. Sounds like you’ve got a routine down.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Same here. Before the divorce, when I was living up in Westchester, I’d get off the train just in time to tuck the kids in, grab something to eat, and fall into bed. I thought that was a rut. Now…it’s pretty much the same thing. Without the commuter train or the kids.”

  “You said you have two daughters?”

  He nodded. “Cammy’s thirteen, Alexis is twelve. I miss them like crazy.”

  Hailey sipped her coffee and wondered why he hadn’t stayed near them, in the suburbs, after his divorce.

  As if he’d read her mind, he said, “They’re both away at boarding school in Massachusetts. My ex-wife insisted. It was her alma mater, and it’s a great school, the girls love it, so…” He shrugged. “No reason for me to stay in Westchester without them. How about you?”

  She hesitated. Hailey couldn’t imagine sending children away to a boarding school. “Do you mean have I ever lived in Westchester?”

  He smiled. “No, I mean, do you have children?”

  Taken aback by the question, she shook her head quickly. “No.”

  Maybe she’d answered it too quickly, because his smile faded just a little and he said, “You’re not into kids, huh?”

  “No, that’s not it. I mean, I love children.” And she’d always thought she’d have them. It hadn’t turned out that way. It was still an open wound.

  What was she doing here? It was all wrong.

  Suddenly, all she wanted was to go home.

  Hailey looked at her watch. “It’s getting late.”

  “I guess it is.” Adam looked around for the waiter.

  Five minutes later, they were outside. Adam raised his arm to flag a cab. “You said you live uptown, too, right?”

  “I do, but I’ve got to go back over to the office and pick up some files I forgot.”

  “We can swing by and I’ll wait,” he said, as a taxi pulled up to where they stood in the street.

  “Oh, that’s okay. I need the walk, after all that food.”

  “Right. Well…thanks for having dinner with me, Hailey.”

  “Thanks for asking.”

  He got into the cab with a wave and a “Talk to you soon.”

  She started walking slowly toward the office, wondering whether he realized she hadn’t wanted to share a cab uptown with him.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t enjoyed his company.

  For the first time in years, Hailey found herself wondering whether there might not be someone out there for her after all. Someone other than Will.

  She didn’t like even thinking of it. She couldn’t wait to get out of the restaurant and felt like running the whole way back to her apartment. That was why she’d cut the evening short. The thought of dinners and dates and movies and theater with another man was just too much like…cheating. Cheating on Will. She knew it didn’t make sense, but the dinner with Adam was just…wrong.

  But walking toward the avenue to look for a cab of her own, she decided Adam Springhurst wasn’t so terrible and could be a nice friend. She’d end it there. There was nothing wrong with Adam…he was absolutely fine, she told herself. Young, handsome, single, educated…he had a great résumé. Right? He looked great on paper. But Adam wasn’t the problem…maybe she was. She was sure of it. She couldn’t put her finger on why she suddenly had to get away…from him.

  30

  North Georgia

  THE BUS WAS IN THE COUNTRY NOW, NO SIDEWALKS, NO streetlights…only the gradual incline of the foothills of the Piedmont, the beginnings of the Appalachians. The bus struggled and shifted to make the gentle upward slant.

  The two-lane was a curvy old thing, built decades before during Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration.

  Now it was whisking Cruise farther and farther north, neatly separating objects in the night…people, cars, motels, sturdy telephone lines split evenly on either side of the Greyhound.

  Outside the bus, the night was magnetic.

  Through tinted glass he could make out shapes of things his consciousness had forgotten during his years in maximum-security lockdown. Deep down in his bones, though, in the roots of his hair, in his very skin, he remembered it all.

  Cruise peered out his window at trees, trailer parks, RV camps. Tired-looking cornfields and farmhouses were flying by in the night. Split-second images of countless grassroots churches spirited past the window of Cruise’s back-row seat. His eyes could barely focus on makeshift white crosses propped on the pointed centers of their roofs…roofs topping structures that had once passed for single-family homes, now converted to house sweaty Bible-thumpers every Sunday. It was all zooming by like a movie in fast-forward.

  His right shoulder was pressed tight, hunched against the bus’s rectangular thermal-glass pane. For hours on end, rarely glancing away from the old two-lane, keeping his gaze reined in as tight as his posture. He wasn’t used to having unlimited freedom of motion yet. He intentionally positioned himself in the very back of the bus, last row.

  He was drawn to the view out the window like a wolf to the moon.

  His mouth was dry with the painful realization of all he had been denied during those years in a piss-stank Atlanta jail, followed by maximum at Reidsville Penitentiary. His neck tightened and his pulse quickened in the darkened corner there in the rear of the bus. His stomach churned. His hands clenched as he realized what that prosecutor-bitch had cost him.

  The ride was getting long and they ground to a stop over and over in every bump in the road that had a stop sign. He was pissed and he couldn’t believe how these morons were slowing him down, actually boarding and unboarding at stops nobody else had ever seen or heard of…the middle of nothing and nowhere.

  Cruise glared whenever new passengers—skittish women, sullen-looking teenaged boys—hopped onto the bus. He only noticed them to the extent they disturbed him…slowing his flight north.

  The bus lurched again, then heaved to a halt, pushing the passengers forward in their seats.

  Cruise peered out to see the pickup point here, a gas station with a single outside-lamp bulb hanging from a cha
in to light a wooden bench situated near the pumps.

  “Blue Ridge, Georgia,” the driver called out in the dark of the bus.

  Wouldn’t the good people of Blue Ridge just love it if tonight, Clint Burrell Cruise stepped down off the bus and decided to make this his new home?

  Think they’d show up with a welcome basket tomorrow morning and invite him to Monday’s Rotary Club luncheon, packed with all the town’s do-gooders and held in the conference room of the local bank?

  Maybe…until they found out about a little Murder One conviction on his résumé.

  He knew better than to even think about it anyway. The more miles between him and Reidsville, the better for everybody.

  Plus, there was a little business matter for him to take care of in the Big Apple.

  He’d never actually been to the city before; had only seen it in the movies.

  But already, he knew where to look up some of his old friends who were there, living just north of Harlem. Or at least, they had been.

  A name change, a new ID, and he’d be just fine in New York. Plus, he didn’t plan to stay too long…just long enough.

  He watched a new passenger, a spongy-looking girl, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, lumbering up the aisle toward him.

  She came all the way to the back of the bus, dragging two purple canvas bags with her, covered in sewn-on stickers and Magic Marker scrawls.

  She disgusted him.

  She was too fleshy, wearing low-cut hip-hugger jeans. Her sandals revealed stubby toes in need of washing and still bearing the remnants of a bluish-tinted nail polish. A silver toe ring topped it all off. Repulsive.

  She turned, and he spotted a large tattoo on the small of her back…some Chinese-looking characters, an unreadable word permanently burned into her flesh in thick greenish-black ink.

  The tattoo made him madder.

  What the hell was that Chinese-looking word supposed to mean? Who the hell did she think she was, stupid pig with a Chinese word on her back? It probably said just that: “Pig.”