Huddled in the passenger’s seat, still reeling, still clutching her stomach, Brynn realizes she left her purse behind. And no way is she going back for it.
“Do you have a phone?” she asks Pat, who shakes his head.
Dammit. Hers was in her purse.
“We have to stop somewhere and call Quincy.”
“Who?”
“The police,” she clarifies. “That person…the one in the closet…He was a cop.”
“What?” Pat shakes his head. “No, he wasn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“He wasn’t wearing a uniform.”
“He wouldn’t have been. He was undercover, there to protect me.” She shifts her weight in the seat and wonders if she’s still spotting.
“What are you talking about, Brynn?” Pat takes a hard curve too quickly; the tires make a high-pitched squealing sound on the wet pavement as, cursing, he swerves to avoid an oncoming car.
“That guy is flying,” he mutters, shaking his head. “What were you saying, Brynn?”
“I’ll explain everything later. Just drive,” she murmurs, still trembling, and not just from the close call on the curve. “Don’t stop anywhere; we’ll call when we get to town.”
Nodding grimly, Pat presses the gas pedal a little harder, putting more and more distance between them and the cabin.
Sinking onto the cabin’s steps, Quincy buries his head in his hands as Connelly tersely radios for backup.
The young cop lying face down on the closet floor had his throat slit so forcefully he was almost decapitated.
The same thing happened to the two who were concealed in the woods. Large footprints in the mud showed that somebody crept up on each of them and attacked from behind before they knew what hit them; no sign of a struggle. Their necks were probably sliced open before they could make a sound.
The security detail he promised Brynn Saddler was wiped out just like that: one, two, three. Gone.
And so is Brynn herself.
Quincy was certain they would find her body. Her car is parked right here; her purse is in the cabin. But there is no Brynn, mutilated and wearing a pink party hat. No cake, no party decorations, no gift box.
Thank God.
Still…
Quincy is certain she’s not safe and sound. No, she wouldn’t wander off without her purse—without her car. She must be here somewhere.
With Rachel.
Or…
Suddenly, he remembers the Jeep that came barreling recklessly around that curve before, on the way up here. Somebody was hell-bent to get down the mountain.
Back to Cedar Crest.
And those footprints in the woods…
They were made by boots—not necessarily a man’s, but still too big for a woman affectionately described by her brother as “a tiny little thing.”
Quincy stares unseeingly at the oppressive forest surrounding the cabin, his stomach burning as he realizes that, for the first time in a long career, his gut instinct might have been wrong.
“Wait, where are you going?” Brynn asks Pat as he turns down Tamarack Lane.
“I’m taking you home.” He glances at her, touching the brakes to slow the Jeep. “No?”
She shakes her head. “I need to get to a doctor, or the hospital.”
“I thought you wanted to call the police.”
“I do. All right,” she decides swiftly, “We’ll stop at my house, I’ll call them, I’ll call my doctor, and…”
And I have to call Garth. What happened last night doesn’t matter anymore.
I need him to know about the baby…
Before I lose it.
I need him with me. No matter what he did ten years ago. He’s right. It doesn’t matter.
And he forgave me, so I can forgive—
Pat reaches out and pats her clenched hand. “It’s going to be okay. Hang in there, all right?”
She nods, wondering what she would have done if he hadn’t come along.
You would have gotten out of there anyway. You were on your way…
Or would someone have emerged to stop her?
Was the killer there, concealed, ready to strike?
Probably.
And Pat’s unexpected presence saved her life…
For now.
We gave Rachel a chance to get away. Now I’ll always wonder where she is…and when she’s coming back for me.
But she can’t think about that now. She hugs her midsection as Pat pulls into the driveway, parks the car, and hurries around through the rain to open her door for her.
He helps her down with a steadying grip on her arm and escorts her toward the door, still glancing over either shoulder. She looks, too, and is reassured to see that they weren’t followed.
“Come on, Brynn.”
They splash through the rain to the front door. Glad she had her keys in her back pocket, rather than left in her purse back at the cabin, Brynn opens the dead bolts and steps into the familiar dry warmth of home.
Pat closes the door behind them.
“Lock it,” Brynn commands, “the dead bolts, too.”
“We’re not even sticking around,” he protests. Then, seeing the look on her face, he obliges.
“I’ll call the police,” she says, and starts for the phone in the kitchen.
In the doorway, she stops short.
And screams.
Using Ashley’s keys from her backpack, and trying one key after another, she manages to unlock the door on the third try.
She steps swiftly and silently over the threshold into the dim interior, all but certain the place is deserted.
But if it isn’t…
Then I’m dead.
This time, for real.
Or maybe not. He’ll hurt her only if her growing suspicion about him proves to be correct.
If she’s wrong, and he’s harmless…
Then I’m safe for now.
And so is Brynn.
She moves quickly through the room to the end table beside the couch, and pulls open the drawer, remembering what Ashley told her earlier.
“I was looking for a pencil and when I opened the drawer, I saw it.”
The silver rose sorority bracelet.
It was in a white box, on a square of cotton. Ashley confessed guiltily that she opened it and snuck a quick peek; her father was in the shower.
“I figured he must have bought my mom another one because she liked the first one so much, since she kept it.”
No, Ashley. He didn’t buy the first one for your mother.
He didn’t buy the second one, either—for her, or anyone else.
And it isn’t Ralph Lauren.
Ashley thought it was, she said, because of the silver letter charms hanging from it: R.L.
Rachel Lorent.
That bracelet was on Rachel’s wrist the night she disappeared.
So what is it doing in Pat’s apartment?
It isn’t, she realizes, staring into a drawer that’s empty, aside from a couple of pencils and an old issue of TV Guide.
It isn’t here at all.
Ashley must have been imagining things.
She slowly closes the drawer and walks back to the door, before thinking better of it.
No.
God, no, please…
For an endless moment, Brynn is rooted to the floor, staring at the shocking sight that lies before her.
Even in the dim light, she can see that her kitchen has been transformed as if for a child’s birthday party: crepe paper, balloons, paper place settings.
Just as Fiona’s dining room was.
In the center of the table is a cake, spiked with unlit candles. It reads Happy Birthday in expertly scrolled pink icing, and, in darker lettering, DEAR BRYNN.
Just like Fiona’s cake.
She’s here.
The realization doesn’t strike Brynn like a lightning bolt; no, it painstakingly makes its way into her consciousness, seeping slowly lik
e a pool of blood from beneath a closet door.
She’s here, and she’s going to kill Pat…
Then she’s going to kill me.
My baby. Her arms cross over her stomach. No.
And Caleb, and Jeremy, and Garth…
They’re going to be left alone…
Just like we were, when Mommy died.
History is destined to repeat itself. Brynn’s children will grow up as she did, longing for maternal love snatched away far too soon. They’re younger, far younger, than Brynn was when she lost her mother.
I can’t let it happen.
I have to get away.
She begins to spin on her heel—then freezes at the telltale sound of a match being struck, and a flickering, eerie light permeates the room.
It’s not as bad as Ashley feared…being back at school.
Not even on a gloomy day like this.
In fact, she almost welcomes the familiar glare of overhead light banishing the gray behind the tall windows, the hiss of steam heat, the smell of wet wool, and, here in the crowded cafeteria, of hot dogs.
She can almost pretend that her life beyond the walls of Saint Vincent’s School is the same as it always was. She can almost imagine that her mother is at work in her office a few blocks away.
“Where do you want to sit?” Meg asks as they hesitate with their plastic lunch trays, surveying the rows of tables.
Ashley can feel people looking up to stare at her, nudging each other, whispering.
Look, there she is. The girl whose mother was killed.
“I don’t care,” she tells Meg under her breath, “let’s just find a spot, fast.”
They carry their trays to the vacant end of a table by the window and sit down.
“So my mom said you’re going to live with your dad for good now,” Meg says.
“How does your mom know?”
“She talks to him a lot, I think.”
“Really?” Ashley dully recalls how Daddy called Meg’s mom “Cyn” that day at the movies.
“Maybe they’ll fall in love and get married after all,” Meg says.
Ashley contemplates that for a moment. That prospect doesn’t hold the same allure it once did. She doesn’t want a stepmother. Or a new mother.
She only wants her own mother back.
She swallows hard over a lump in her throat and blinks away tears as she unwraps her straw.
“Your dad told my mom he wants to move into a better place, though.”
Ashley nods, jabbing her straw into her carton of chocolate milk.
Daddy told her that, too.
“He wants to go someplace where you can have your own room—a real room. And maybe even a pet.”
“Really?” Ashley looks up. That might be kind of cool.
Then she remembers something, and shakes her head.
“What’s wrong?” Meg asks.
“I don’t want a pet.”
“Why not?”
“Because I would be really upset if it ran away or something.”
“It won’t,” says Meg, who has two dogs and a cat.
“It might.”
Ashley can’t help but think about poor Mrs. Josephson, who lives upstairs from Daddy. Her cat ran away a few weeks ago, and she’s still looking for her. She sounds so sad whenever Ashley hears her standing at the door, calling for her lost cat.
“Here, kitty kitty…Come here, Agatha…”
“What are you doing?” Brynn asks in dread as Pat’s hand—the one that isn’t holding a lit match—once again closes around her arm. Hard.
But this time, she doesn’t mistake the iron grip as protective. This time, she sees it for what it is: a vise from which now there is no escape.
Pat.
Pat is the one.
Not Rachel.
“But…why?” she chokes out.
Ignoring the question, he drags her across the floor to the table. There, he holds the lit match to each of the three candles as it burns perilously close to his fingers.
“One for every decade,” he says calmly, impervious to the fire singing his skin. Sickened, she can smell it burning.
“Why are you doing this?” Brynn whispers.
“I think you know by now.” He waves the match to extinguish it.
She shakes her head mutely, struggling in his grasp, knowing it’s futile to attempt escape.
Her only hope is to keep him talking. “But I don’t know, Pat,” she says desperately. Truthfully. “I don’t know why.”
For the first time, she spots the gift-wrapped box on the table. The pink paper matches the one on the box she glimpsed that day in Fiona’s dining room, gripped in a pair of waxen, lifeless hands.
“Please…I just want to have my baby. Please don’t do this.”
Pat goes absolutely still for a moment, as if something just unexpectedly permeated his consciousness.
Has he suddenly come to his senses?
She dares to look at him, and sees that his dark eyes are unmistakably glittering with madness and hate.
Hearing Kylah’s key turn in the lock, Isaac hurriedly lifts Smoochy off his lap and sets the purring cat gently on the floor.
“Now you decide to like me,” he mutters, shaking his head as the cat rubs against his ankles. Brushing cat hair from his jeans, he turns toward the door as Kylah steps inside.
“Hey,” she says, looking surprised to see him. Pleasantly surprised. “You’re here.”
“I promised I would be when you got back.”
“I know. I just…”
She didn’t think he’d keep his promise.
Wearily, she sets her purse on the floor, closes the door, and looks around. “Your stuff is gone.”
It didn’t take her long to figure that out.
Surprising, since there wasn’t much around here that belonged to him. He never fully moved in, so it didn’t take him long to fully move out. Just his papers, and some books and CDs, computer equipment, and clothes.
Now it’s all back in his apartment fifteen blocks away.
“You’re leaving,” she says heavily, not moving, just looking at him. “I thought you’d be gone before I got here, actually. I didn’t expect you to stick around and say good-bye.”
Expect?
Does that mean she thought this would happen—him leaving? That she’s considered how it was likely to happen?
An unexpected swell of contrition laps at his soul.
“I wouldn’t just run out on you, Kylah. Is that what you thought?”
She looks him in the eye and nods.
“My stuff is gone. I’m not. Not really.”
What are you doing? You were going. You were outta here.
“Just because I don’t want to live together right now doesn’t mean it’s over,” he hears himself say. “I just need some space.”
Her blue eyes roll toward the ceiling and she sighs.
“I know it’s a cliché. But I don’t want this to be over; I just—I should never have moved in so soon. But I still do want us to be together, I want to work on—”
“I don’t,” Kylah reaches back abruptly and jerks the door open again.
“You want me to leave? For good?”
Her resolute nod slams him hard.
That’s what you had in mind, remember? You didn’t want to work on your relationship with her, you wanted it to be over, so you could focus on…
Rachel.
It always comes down to that.
No other relationship in his life can replace the one he had with her…
Because it never ended.
It only ebbed, like the tide, and he’s been waiting for it to sweep in again.
“I’d tell you to come back when and if you ever find Rachel,” Kylah says, arms folded, “but you know what? I’m not so sure she’s even what you’re looking for.”
A search of Pat’s small apartment doesn’t yield the silver sorority bracelet, or much of anything else…
Unti
l she gets to the locked file cabinet.
It’s a cheap metal one, the kind you can buy in an office-supply warehouse store. The kind whose flimsy lock can be easily picked with a bobby pin, a trick she learned back in her days at Saint Vincent’s. It was the only way to keep track of what the nuns were writing in your files—and, on occasion, to change certain details you don’t necessarily want on your permanent record.
She’s reaching up to pluck a bobby pin from her hair before she remembers there isn’t one.
Dee doesn’t wear her hair in a chignon like her twin sister, Fiona. No, Dee’s hair is long and loose…
And it’s driving me absolutely crazy.
Not as crazy, though, as having given up smoking cold turkey. But maybe it won’t be much longer.
In the kitchenette, she rummages around, looking for something to use. In the process, she comes across a prescription bottle of sleeping capsules tucked in the back of a drawer. An unfamiliar name, Esther Josephson, is on the label. Did he steal them? And why would he need sleeping pills? That lazy S.O.B. never had any trouble sleeping.
She pockets the bottle and continues her search until she’s assembled a corn cob holder, a paper clip, a metal skewer, and assorted other potential picks.
The corn cob holder doesn’t work; the prongs are too short.
The paper clip does, though.
The drawer slides open.
She begins rifling through the files inside, not quite sure what she’s looking for…
Until she finds it.
“I wanted my baby, too, Brynn.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks Pat, trying to keep her voice from giving way to shrill hysteria. “You have your baby. Ashley is—”
“No! My other baby.”
“I don’t know what you—”
He cuts in impatiently, “With Rachel.”
Rachel?
Rachel was…pregnant?
That was her secret, Brynn realizes. That was why she was so distraught. And no wonder.
“You were there that night,” she breathes, remembering the snapping twig in the forest, the sensation of being watched. “Why?”
“To talk to Rachel.”
Keep him distracted, Brynn tells herself, and asks, “What did you have to talk to her about?”
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