by Gayle Wilson
With the memory of what had been done to Sarah, Blythe struggled up again, only to be met once more with the butt of the gun Hoyt had taken from her. Because she’d been unable to get her arm up to deflect the blow, it struck her temple.
The air thinned and darkened around her head as she fell back. Although she never lost consciousness, she was unable to do anything other than watch as Hoyt tossed her grandfather’s gun to the side.
Then, finally, he raised the weapon he had carried in his right hand. With the slow deliberation of a marksman, he held it out in front of him, targeting the forehead of the screaming child.
Fighting her way through the lethargy of near unconsciousness, Blythe tried to force her unresponsive body upright once more. Her own screams were added to Maddie’s. “No. Don’t. Please, Hoyt, don’t.”
He never looked at her, not even when she made it to her knees and began to lurch toward him. His total concentration on the target before him, Blythe watched in horror as his finger began to move against the trigger.
She heard the shot, the sound mingling with Maddie’s terrified shrieks and her own drawn out “No.” And then, as the echoes of both the shot and her scream faded, there was only Maddie’s voice, her cries piercing in their mindlessness.
Maddie’s voice…
Blythe lifted her eyes from their focus on the barrel of the gun in time to see Hoyt’s body begin to tilt forward, his arms thrown out to his sides. The back of his head was covered with blood, too bright, too red, against the snow-white hair.
His forehead hit the edge of the refrigerator as his body struck the wood of the kitchen floor, throwing up a small cloud of soot. Maddie cowered in the corner Blythe had put her in, eyes tightly closed as she continued to shriek.
After a stunned moment, Blythe turned, looking toward the front of the house. Cade was kneeling on the dead grass of the yard, his own weapon held out in front of him, both hands wrapped around it. As she watched, the gun began to droop, as if it were too heavy to hold upright any longer. He put one hand flat on the ground, his head dipping as he tried to remain upright.
Somehow Blythe got to her feet. Her first move—instinctive—was to Maddie. She didn’t look down as she stepped over Hoyt Lee’s body.
She bent, picking Maddie up and settling her on her hip with the unthinking competence of long practice. Without attempting to comfort her daughter, she again stepped over the legs of the man who had brutalized another child so long ago. A man who would never terrorize anyone again.
When she reached the line of rubble that marked the front wall of the house, she stepped over it, too. Eventually, she set Maddie down in what had once been the center of their front yard. Then she knelt beside the man who had just saved both their lives.
Cade’s head was still down, and he was still propped on that straightened right arm. She put her hand under his chin, gently lifting it.
He opened his eyes, long, dark lashes coming up to reveal pupils wildly dilated. Using the thumb of her other hand, she brushed back the trickle of blood seeping out of his hairline.
As she did, she began to try to evaluate how badly he was hurt. His skin was ashen; his lips, colorless. And, she realized, as she bent to place her own over them, they were cold. So cold.
She had actually raised her eyes, again looking down the road for the paramedics Hoyt had called before she remembered that, whatever he had pretended to say into the walkie-talkie he’d carried, he hadn’t placed a call for help.
“Cell,” she said, leaning down to speak directly to Cade. She couldn’t be sure how much of what she was saying he understood.
In response, however, he began to fish the phone out of the pocket of his leather jacket, eventually holding it out to her. As she accepted it, their fingers made contact. His trembled, either from the effort of remaining upright or from pain and loss of blood.
She flipped open the cell, dialing 911 with her thumb. As she waited through the rings, she turned to look at Maddie. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, but she was no longer screaming.
Although the child’s eyes were fastened on Blythe’s face, she hadn’t moved from the spot where she’d been put down. Blythe motioned her forward, putting her arm around her and pulling her tightly against her side when she arrived.
“Davis County 911. What’s your emergency, please?”
“This is Blythe Wyndham. I’m at the old Wright house on Wheeler Road. We need an ambulance.”
“Can you tell me who’s hurt, Ms. Wyndham?”
“Sheriff Jackson. He’s been shot. I’m not sure…I’m not sure how bad it is, but…” She took a breath, forcing herself to go on, despite the fear crowding in her throat. “They need to hurry.”
“Yes, ma’am, they’re on their way. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. My daughter’s fine.” Only as she said those words did she realize what a miracle they represented.
They were alive. Alive and unharmed. Both of them.
“I’m so glad, ma’am. I’ll tell them. The unit’s been dispatched. You stay right where you are. They’ll be there before you know it. If you want to hold on, I’ll stay with you.”
“Thank you.” Blythe laid the cell on the ground beside her.
With Maddie clinging to her right side, she sat down on the grass next to Cade. She pulled him to her, too, putting her arm around his back. After a slight resistance, he gave in, leaning his head against her shoulder.
“Thank you,” she said.
The crisp dark hair was under her cheek. She turned her head to press a kiss against it.
“Thank God, she told me.”
Blythe replayed Cade’s words in her mind, trying to make sense of them. And when she couldn’t…
“Who told you?”
“Maddie.”
“But Maddie—” She stopped, thinking back through the sequence of events. Maybe Cade had heard the little girl’s screams. Maybe those were what had awakened him to the danger they were in.
“You heard her,” she attempted to clarify. “You heard her screaming.”
He shook his head, his hair again moving under her cheek. “Whispered.”
The word was faint, but unmistakable. Whispered? Maddie had done anything but.
“Maddie whispered?”
“She touched my face. Her hands were so cold. She touched my face, and then she told me…She told me I had to stop him. You don’t remember?”
The prickle had begun at the back of her neck, the hair lifting as the chill his words created moved down her spine.
Not Maddie. Maddie had been with her. Whoever had touched Cade, warning him of their danger, it hadn’t been her daughter.
Perhaps it had been another little girl who had, as Cade had once said, waited a very long time for justice.
And because of her connection to Maddie, finally, she had it.
Rest in peace, Sarah, Blythe prayed.
Then she turned her head, once more pressing a kiss against the midnight hair of the man she held. She asked no more questions, knowing that what had happened here today was as it was supposed to be.
She listened to the wind instead, holding the two people she loved most in this world, until finally in the distance she heard the sirens that had been promised.
When he opened his eyes, Cade wasn’t sure for a few seconds where he was. The ceiling above his head was unfamiliar. Not home. Not anywhere else he recognized.
“Hey.”
The softly spoken greeting, quintessentially Southern, drew his eyes to the woman sitting at his right. The metal railing that separated them helped to orient him.
Hospital.
With that realization, the memory of what had happened at the Wright place flooded back. “Maddie?”
“She’s fine. And I think…I really think she will be. I think it’s over, Cade. All of it.”
All of it.
All except the grief. The pain of betrayal. For him, that would probably never be over.
“That’s good.” His voice sounded hoarse, and it had hurt his throat to push those two words out.
He closed his eyes, trying to come to grips with what had happened. And with what it might mean.
“I know he was your friend,” Blythe began.
“He was a monster.” He didn’t open his eyes to watch the impact of that word on her face.
She had recognized the truth before he had. And if it hadn’t been for her realization…
“You weren’t the only one he fooled, Cade. Everybody in this town thought Hoyt was the soul of integrity.”
The word lay between them, the reality of who and what Hoyt Lee had been mocking everything Cade had believed was true and real in his life. If Hoyt had been capable of doing what had been done to Sarah Comstock…
“Why?” The word echoed the bitterness of his earlier one.
“I think she finally refused him. Maybe he asked her to do something…I don’t know. Something so horrible she couldn’t imagine obeying him, no matter what he threatened her with. Or maybe she’d reached the limits of her endurance that night. Maybe she said she was going to tell. Whatever it was…Hoyt wasn’t accustomed to people defying him.”
Cade knew Hoyt had had the reputation in the old days of being mean. The gossip was that many a drunk had gone home from a stay in Sheriff Lee’s jail covered with bruises. A couple with broken bones.
Of course, no one had ever filed suit because of those injuries. This wasn’t the kind of place where you took legal action against the authorities. Not if you ever wanted to be accepted in the community again.
Cade himself could attest to Hoyt’s hair-trigger temper. When he’d served as his deputy, he’d once pulled him off a man. That had been a domestic-abuse call. Hoyt had taken one look at the wife’s battered face and decided to teach the husband what it felt like to be beaten.
Although he’d been new and green, Cade had stepped in to stop what was happening because he had literally feared for the man’s life. Still…
“She was a little girl,” he said softly, vomit climbing into the back of his throat as he remembered that the man he’d considered both his mentor and his friend had abused and then murdered Sarah Comstock.
“Not to him, she wasn’t,” Blythe said quietly.
And that, too, was undoubtedly true. To Hoyt, Sarah had become something else. Someone else. Someone he believed he had the right to use as he wished. Until maybe, as Blythe had speculated, on that fatal night Sarah had refused him.
“I’m just glad I was the one who put an end to it.”
Despite everything, he was. Glad he had stopped the lies that bastard had told for a quarter of a century. Glad he’d finally given Sarah the justice she deserved.
“Do you remember what you told me out there?”
He shook his head, too tired to try and figure out what she was talking about. Whatever he’d said—
“You said Maddie told you to stop him.”
He searched his memory, but the order in which things had happened eluded him. The only clear remembrance he had was of trying to hold the Glock steady so he could pull the trigger. How he’d realized he had to do that had been lost in the haze of pain and shock.
He shook his head, setting off a pounding agony in his temples. “If I did…” He closed his eyes, trying to control the pain so he could finish the thought. “I don’t remember.”
“It doesn’t matter. I just thought you might like to know…I think Sarah chose you. I think she knew all along you were the one who was—I don’t know—good enough, capable enough maybe, of doing what had to be done in order to end it.”
“He could have changed all that in the woods that night. If he’d wanted to.”
He had wondered then if Abel had deliberately fired high. Except it hadn’t been Comstock who’d hit the trunk of the tree over his head. Either Hoyt had still viewed him like the son he’d always treated him as or, with his natural arrogance, the old man had dismissed the possibility that Cade posed a threat.
And he’d been right. The man Cade had loved would have been the last person on any list of suspects he’d composed.
“I don’t understand,” Blythe said.
He opened his eyes again to look at her. Despite the bruises on her face—another reason, if he needed one, that he was glad his had been the shot that had taken that murderous SOB out—she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. If what she’d told him last night in her grandmother’s kitchen was true…
“It doesn’t matter. Just some things I don’t want to think about.”
“Then don’t. Think about getting well.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“I don’t think anyone’s said, but they did say you got lucky. The bullet didn’t hit anything vital. You lost a lot of blood, and there’s extensive soft-tissue damage, but other than that…” She let the sentence trail.
“You gonna be around?”
“What?”
“Crenshaw. You gonna be around long enough for me to get back on my feet?”
As he waited for an answer, he wondered if she had any clue how much what she said right now would matter. She’d been so eager that day in the park to get out of here—not that he could blame her for that, considering what had been going on.
“Do you want me to?”
“Don’t play dumb. Nobody’s gonna buy that.”
Especially not me. Not after the way you figured out that Hoyt was lying.
“Is it dumb to want to hear you say it?”
“That I want you to be around?”
“Yes. For starters.”
“Okay, I want you to be around when I get back on my feet.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“I think I need you to say that, too.”
“You’re a damned demanding woman.”
“You’re the one making demands. I’m just asking to be told why.”
She deserved that. If it hadn’t been so hard to make that kind of commitment again, he would already have told her. As it was, he was lucky to get another chance.
“Because I want to finish what we started in your grandmother’s kitchen.”
Her lips parted, but she closed them again without saying anything. She shook her head slightly, causing a coldness in the pit of his stomach.
“You don’t want that?”
“Yes.”
“But?”
“I wish it didn’t have to be here.”
He nodded, remembering another woman who had chosen another place. Another man. One he couldn’t be.
“This is my home. It’s where I belong.”
It’s where you belong, too. You just haven’t figured that out yet.
She shook her head again, the movement slow.
“You’re not willing to give it some time?”
“It?”
“Crenshaw. Us. Coming home.”
“So far…this hasn’t been much of a homecoming.”
“Let me change that. At least let me try.”
Her eyes gleamed with tears she quickly controlled. Watching that effort, after all she’d been through today, made his burn in sympathy.
Damn whatever they’d doped him with. That was all he needed. To let her see how much this meant to him. She had a right to say no. A right to whatever life she wanted, wherever—
“When I was thirteen, just the thought of you saying something like that…” She stopped on a breath of laughter.
“Is that funny? My asking you to stay?”
“Not funny. Ironic, maybe. And strange how little seems to have changed after nearly twenty years.”
He examined the words, wondering if they could possibly mean what they sounded as if they did. “So…”
“If there were a prom, I’d make you take me. Just so I could show you off.”
There was only one way to interpret that. His heart rate accelerated and then steadied.
“I’ll think of somet
hing,” he promised.
He turned his head and closed his eyes before they could reveal too much. When she touched his hand, his fingers caught and then tightened around hers. He knew that next time he woke up, she’d be there.
For right now, that was really all that mattered.
ISBN: 1-55254-730-2
BOGEYMAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mona Gay Thomas.
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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same nameor names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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