The second hardest was to sit there while her husband told her he slept with one of her best friends.
Yes, it happened years ago.
No, they weren’t married.
It could have been worse.
Still, it’s pretty bad.
They didn’t acknowledge it this morning before Garth left. They didn’t say much of anything at all.
The boys were smiling happily as Garth drove off with them. Left alone in the doorway, she was crying.
Her father and Sue think Garth is taking Brynn away for her birthday, and were happy to keep the boys for a few days.
If they had any idea about what’s really going on…
But, of course, they don’t.
Garth will turn around and drive right back to Cedar Crest, where he’ll keep a low profile as the day wears on. Quincy instructed him to go to police headquarters. If all goes as planned, Brynn will be reunited with her husband there…
Right after Fee and Tildy’s killer comes after her as well, and is apprehended.
Brynn is utterly overwhelmed every time she allows herself to think about what Garth told her. It’s been so distracting that she still can barely grasp the monumental day—and perhaps night—that lie ahead.
She tries not to think about it as she plods up the cabin’s wooden steps, but she can’t help feeling as though she’s walking the plank to certain doom.
The wind kicks up to rustle dry leaves and creak branches in the trees overhead. A crow lifts from its perch with a fluttering of wings and a haunting caw that echoes into the foreboding sky.
Brynn bends to lift a corner of the brown straw Welcome mat, looking for the key Fiona said is always here.
It isn’t.
She has a momentary flare of hope that they can call off this whole dangerous charade—
Oh. Here’s the key, on the far side of the mat.
And they can’t call it off. This is the only way to catch her.
Rachel.
Brynn still can’t reconcile the memory of her fun-loving old friend with the murderous fiend who slaughtered Fiona and Tildy. Maybe when she fell, her brain was damaged…
And she was transformed into a serial killer?
But how? Why?
Rage. Fury. That’s Quincy’s theory, and it makes sense.
Rachel was betrayed by her friends who abandoned her to die.
Now she wants revenge.
Ashley stares at the familiar two-story yellow-brick building from the passenger’s seat of Aunt Dee’s rental car.
She has to do this sooner or later, she knows. She just wishes it was later.
Then again, it’s late enough. School started two hours ago, but she was so reluctant to go that Aunt Dee took her out for breakfast—strawberry pancakes. They lingered over their meal, talking about everything imaginable.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” Aunt Dee asks now, resting a hand on her shoulder.
Ashley shakes her head. It will be hard enough to go in there alone, late, with everyone staring at her. She can just imagine how they would gape if she walked in with someone who looks like the ghost of her dead mother.
“Your dad said he’ll pick you up after school,” Aunt Dee tells her, and Ashley nods bleakly. She knows that; she talked to Daddy, too, when he called the inn first thing this morning.
“I miss you, baby girl,” he told Ashley. “Are you all right?”
She told him she was fine.
Then she put Aunt Dee back on the phone, and she figured Daddy must be asking her whether Ashley had had any nightmares, because Aunt Dee said, “No, not at all. She slept right through the night like a baby.”
“Just keep your chin up, Ashley,” Aunt Dee tells her now, softly, and squeezes her shoulder gently. “You’ll get through this day. You can get through anything, if you put your mind to it.”
Ashley jerks her head around sharply, half-expecting to see her mother sitting there.
No. It’s Aunt Dee, wearing a bright-colored patchwork poncho Mom would never wear, her long hair hanging loose down her back.
“What’s the matter, Ashley?”
“Nothing. You just…You sounded like her. And…It made me miss her. Kind of more than I even thought I would.”
Aunt Dee smiles sadly and touches her cheek.
Then, spine steeled and head held high, Ashley marches into school, thinking that her mother would be proud of her.
The cabin’s wooden, glass-paned door creaks loudly as Brynn pushes it open.
She hesitates on the threshold, trying not to think about it.
I walked into the house. I turned my head…
And I saw her.
Even now, after so many days have gone by and she’s had a chance to absorb the horror of that day, the intense, vivid memory catches her off guard.
Will that happen now, to me? Am I going to be slaughtered like that?
No.
Because the cabin isn’t empty. Last night, Quincy installed a third officer someplace inside, ready to rush to Brynn’s aid with the others, gun drawn.
She can feel his hidden presence as she reaches inside the door and flips on the light.
I don’t want to go in.
But she has to; her anxiety and pregnancy-stimulated bladder, if nothing else, demands that she move forward.
Stepping into the cabin at last, she looks around the deserted great room: rustic furniture, woven area rugs, stone fireplace.
Once, she thought it was welcoming. Today, as she forces herself to close and lock the door behind her, it feels like a tomb.
She sets her overnight bag on the floor.
Outside, in the distance, she hears a rumble of thunder.
Yes. It’s supposed to rain.
She listens for it but hears nothing.
Nothing at all.
But someone is here, in the cabin with her, waiting.
Not for the rain.
She can almost hear the steady breathing in time with her hollow-sounding footsteps across the timber floor.
Yes, someone is here—It’s the cop, she reminds herself. You’re perfectly safe.
She makes her way toward the second-floor bathroom, flipping on lamps as she goes, to banish the early-morning shadows. Nobody said she had to sit here in the dark, waiting for the attack.
She goes to the bathroom quickly, her uneasiness building, instinctively feeling driven to get back downstairs. Somehow, it seems safer there.
As she turns to flush the toilet, she sees a faint pink smear on the white paper in the bowl, and her heart stops.
Blood.
She’s spotting.
Oh, God. Oh, God, no.
Panic swells into her throat. She frantically unfurls another length of tissue, swipes it between her legs, and inspects it.
Yes. She’s bleeding.
Not much.
Not yet, anyway.
She has to get out of here. She has to get to a doctor.
As she hurries back down the hall toward the stairs, hearing the first droplets falling on the roof overhead, she breaks Quincy’s cardinal rule.
“Hello? Officer?” Her voice echoes through the house. “I need help. Please…”
The detective had repeatedly cautioned her not to acknowledge the protective presence. You never know whether the culprit is in earshot, Mrs. Saddler, and you don’t want to scare her off.
Her, Quincy said. As in Rachel.
Brynn promised she’d keep quiet.
But she didn’t know then that her unborn baby’s life would be in more immediate jeopardy than theirs together.
The hidden cop doesn’t respond.
“Please,” Brynn calls desperately, clinging to the railing as she heads down the steep flight back to the first floor. “Please, help me. I’m bleeding.”
At the foot of the stairs, she stops short, spotting something out of the corner of her eye.
Something she didn’t notice on her way up.
Somethin
g that sends ice flowing through her veins and drops her mouth open, poised to—
No.
Don’t scream.
She closes her mouth…
Why?
Because you’re afraid no one will hear?
Or because you’re afraid someone might?
Heart racing, she stares mutely at the floor just in front of the closet door beneath the stairs, where an ominous dark stain taints the pine plank floor.
Ashley looked so small and defenseless as she walked away alone, into the familiar yellow-brick school building. She was trying so hard to be brave, but her shoulders were shaking.
She has more guts than you ever gave her credit for.
Maybe more guts than you have yourself.
She brakes at the STOP sign a block from Saint Vincent’s, then resumes driving, careful to stay within the posted school zone limit. All she needs now is to be pulled over.
No, that can’t happen.
There’s something she has to do.
It came up incidentally, as she and Ashley ate their pancakes and chatted over breakfast at that diner.
Ashley caught a glimpse of her thick silver bracelet falling from beneath her sleeve, and mentioned that her mother always liked to wear gold jewelry.
“She only had one silver thing in her jewelry box,” Ashley said. “A really pretty bracelet that was like a link of rosebuds.”
“How do you know about that?”
“I saw it once when I was snooping around, trying on some of her stuff,” Ashley admitted with a guilty expression. “But then I heard my mother coming so I put it back and got out of there.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded. All girls try on their mom’s jewelry. Your mother and I always did, when we were young. My father used to buy her costume jewelry for every occasion, and she never wore any of it. She just let it pile up in her jewelry box.”
“Well, I think my father must have given the silver bracelet to her, and she never wore it, but she kept it. I used to think it meant she still loved him and they were going to get back together again, but now I don’t know.”
“Oh, Ash…” She shook her head. “Your father didn’t give it to her. That was her sorority bracelet.”
“No, I don’t think so, Aunt Dee. I’m pretty sure it was a Ralph Lauren bracelet, from my dad.”
“Why do you think that?”
Ashley told her.
And the ugly germ of an idea sparked in her brain.
It can’t be…
No. There’s no way.
Ashley must be mistaken.
But there’s only one way to know for sure.
Brynn’s heart is pounding as she stares at the dark splotch on the floor.
It almost looks as though something seeped under the door.
Something.
Blood.
No. You’re being ridiculous.
The spot is dry, soaked into the wood; she can see that without touching it. It’s probably just an exceptionally large knot in the pine.
Or perhaps whoever finished the floor splashed paint there, or dark-colored stain.
Or it’s blood.
“Officer,” Brynn calls again, taking a step back from the closet door, her voice tremulous. “Please…Where are you?”
But her invisible protector remains stubbornly silent; the only sound is the rain pattering on the porch roof, pinging into the metal gutters.
I can’t do this.
Brynn presses a trembling hand against her lower stomach.
She doesn’t care about Quincy’s trap, or the police catching the killer, or having to live with the consequences if they don’t.
At this moment, all she cares about is her baby.
The damned cop isn’t answering her pleas, and she can’t even use her cell phone to call for help.
I have to get out of here. I have to get to a doctor.
She abruptly turns to flee—and screams.
Unmistakably outlined in the door’s glass pane is the figure of someone looming on the porch, watching her.
Parked in the deserted lot of a bait-and-tackle shop that’s been boarded up for winter, Quincy stares at the crackling two-way radio in his hand and bites out a curse.
“Still no response up there. Something’s wrong,” he tells Connelly, standing just outside the car in the rain, training a pair of binoculars on the mountainside in a futile effort to see something.
“What do you want to do, then? Go up?”
“I don’t know.” Quincy’s stomach burns as this morning’s acrid coffee mingles with his growing uneasiness about Brynn Saddler.
For a long moment, Quincy stares through the windshield, gazing up at the forested incline now mostly obscured by low-hanging clouds and wisps of mist.
Somewhere up there, he believes, an unwitting Brynn Saddler is vulnerable and unprotected.
But if you and Connelly go barreling up there, and everything is fine, and it’s just a communications problem because of the terrain or the weather or whatever—
Then he’ll have tipped his hand.
And enable Rachel Lorent, if she’s lurking nearby, to escape.
But if you don’t get your ass up there right now and check things out…
Brynn trusted him. He can’t let anything happen to her.
Quincy jerks his head toward the mountain in a decisive nod. “Let’s go.”
“Who’s there?” a voice demands, as the key turns in the lock.
But it isn’t Rachel’s voice, Brynn realizes.
No, it’s a man’s.
A cop…It might be one of the cops. It must be. Because a stalking serial killer wouldn’t be asking who’s in here; he would know.
Nonetheless Brynn instinctively backs away in dread, both hands splayed against her abdomen as if to shield her unborn child.
“Brynn?”
The door opens…
And she recognizes his voice in the split second before she sees him.
Patrick Hagan.
Thank God.
Her knees sag in relief as they stare at each other.
Pat is wearing a red and black checked wool jacket, jeans, boots. His hair is sprinkled with droplets of rain. He blinks at her in confusion.
“I thought that was your car,” he says, shaking his head like a wet puppy and rubbing a hand through his damp hair. “What are you doing here?”
“Fee said I could use the cabin whenever I wanted,” is her lame reply.
She watches a frown begin to cross Pat’s face, only to be chased away by a flash of remembrance.
He forgot she was dead, Brynn realizes.
For a second there, Pat was obviously annoyed with his ex-wife’s open invitation to their shared property.
Now, however, he’s shrugging and offering a slightly sheepish grin.
“I’m glad you took her up on it, then,” he says graciously. “I’m the only one who ever comes up here—it’s kind of nice to have some company for a change. Hey, I brought donuts.”
She realizes he’s holding a white paper bag in one hand, a take-out cup of coffee in the other.
Brynn shakes her head, still trying to reconcile her relief at the ordinariness of Pat’s intrusion with the stark terror of the last few minutes.
“Are you sure? I’ve got glazed and—”
“Pat, listen, I need you to help me. This isn’t going to make any sense at all, but…”
“Are you okay, Brynn?”
“No.” Her voice breaks. “I’m not okay. I have to get out of here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m pregnant…and I’m bleeding.”
His jaw drops and he starts toward her. “Sit down. I’ll get you some—”
“No, Pat, I can’t stay here. We can’t stay here. There’s something…” She gestures helplessly at the floor in front of the closet door. “Do you see that stain? What is it? Paint or something? Has it always been there?”
She watches his gaze drop
to the floor, sees him frown. “No, I don’t know what that is.”
He strides toward the door, jerks it open, and stiffens.
“What is it?” Brynn asks, somehow knowing that her worst suspicion has just been confirmed.
It was blood.
Pat turns away and she sees his stunned expression.
With a muttered oath he grabs her arm, pulling her toward the door. “We have to get the hell out of here, Brynn. Come on.”
“Is it…Is someone…in there?” she manages to whimper as she allows Pat to propel her across the porch, down the steps through the rain to his Jeep.
“Hell, yes.” Pat is breathing hard, his hand clenched almost painfully on her upper arm. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here before—”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, opening the door and practically tossing her into the passenger’s seat, looking over his shoulder at the cabin as though someone is going to come after them.
Brynn follows his apprehensive gaze. The porch is empty.
Then she shifts her eyes toward the woods where, she now senses, Quincy’s men lie among the wet, fallen leaves like the discarded prey of a still-circling vulture.
Ashley forgot her backpack in Aunt Dee’s car.
She probably should have said something when they came out of the restaurant after breakfast and Aunt Dee casually tossed it from the floor of the front seat into the backseat.
Mom never would have done that. She would have known Ashley would forget it if she couldn’t see it.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Oh, well, she thinks, heading toward the cafeteria. Sister Mary Joseph gave her money so she’ll be able to buy lunch, and the other teachers told her not to worry about not having her folders, notes, or textbooks.
Everyone is being so nice to Ashley today.
They feel sorry for me, she knows, and wonders how long it’s going to last.
Will anyone ever treat her like a regular person again?
All this coddling kindness is making her miss her mother all the more.
What Ashley wouldn’t give to hear her say, “Pull your hair forward a little, Ash. And stand up straight.”
But, she keeps reminding herself, she’ll never hear Mom’s voice again.
Pat speeds away from the cabin as though they’re being chased, keeping one eye on the rearview mirror. The tires catapult gravel along the sides of the road; the wipers beat a steady rhythm on the windshield to keep the downpour at bay.
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