Safe Haven

by Hannah Alexander

“Well, the guy, Harv, got really hot, you know? And he pulled a gun out and shot at me, but Bruce told me to duck, and then the scum turned and shot Bruce while I was getting away.” Her voice wavered, and she took a deep breath. “Bruce died saving my life.” Tears spilled from her eyes.

  Karah Lee pulled some facial tissues from a box on the counter and handed them to Fawn.

  “Thanks.” She dabbed at her face and wiped her nose with the tissues. “And Harv shot that poor bellman out in the hallway, who wasn’t even involved in anything but pushing a cart with food on it. I mean, it’s like the guy didn’t even matter!”

  “What happened after that?” Taylor asked.

  Fawn wiped at more tears. “I ran down the stairs to the lobby, and I was going to tell the security guard, but Harv reached the guards before I could, and then the police came, and I didn’t know what to do, so I ran. I mean, they were after me, with guns and everything.”

  Karah Lee handed Fawn more tissues and took the damp ones from her. “Where did you go?” she asked gently.

  “I just ran through the dark until I reached another hotel, where I changed my clothes and hid. Then I accidentally set off a fire alarm when I was trying to see my way around with some matches because my flashlight went out on me and—”

  “Fawn.” Taylor leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Could you identify Harv if you saw him again?”

  She nodded as she soaked yet another set of tissues. “I saw him today. I won’t ever forget—”

  “What do you mean, you saw him today?” Karah Lee asked.

  “I don’t remember a lot about it. I mean, I was so sick then, I even thought I might’ve been seeing things, you know? He was on the big paddleboat out in the lake.”

  “Did he see you?” Taylor asked.

  “Yeah, but I don’t really look like me right now, and when he tried to get a better look with his binoculars, I turned away so he wouldn’t see my face.”

  “Describe him,” Taylor said.

  “Ugly.”

  Taylor exchanged glances with Karah Lee.

  “Okay, okay, I know what you want,” Fawn said. She closed her eyes as if to focus better on the memory. “He had a long, droopy-looking face with lines down the sides like a basset hound’s. Black hair, and mean-looking lips—you know, thin, without any color. No beard or mustache, but with a shadow, like he hadn’t shaved in a day or so.”

  “Withnell,” Karah Lee said. She glanced at Taylor.

  He nodded. “That’s what he was after when he saw us at the cemetery. I’m calling for backup.”

  “No!” Fawn cried.

  “We need to get you out of Hideaway.”

  “Why? If Harv really recognized me, I’d be dead now. He wouldn’t’ve finished his little cruise.”

  “You’re right,” Karah Lee said. “But the fact is, he came to Hideaway to find you, and he’s obviously still looking. He was curious enough after seeing you from the boat that he drove past us at the cemetery a couple of times, looking a little ticked.”

  “I’ll get an ambulance,” Taylor said.

  “Oh, sure,” Fawn said. “Call an ambulance to come shrieking into town and draw attention. That way, if he doesn’t know where I am, he will soon.”

  “You watch too much television,” Karah Lee said. “Ambulances don’t use lights and sirens for a simple transfer. Go ahead and make the call, Taylor. I’ll ride with her when they get here.”

  Taylor excused himself. After he called for the ambulance, he would phone Tom and Greg. The deputy was already itching for news about Beaufont. He could do some snooping.

  Fawn watched Karah Lee adjust the bag and tubes. “You’ll really go with me?”

  Karah Lee sat back down in the chair next to the bed. “I don’t think you want to be left alone with strangers right now, do you?”

  Fawn shook her head.

  “Why did you come to Hideaway?” Karah Lee asked.

  “Because I thought I could find out what the problem was and warn somebody, and because they were looking for me in Branson.” She looked down at her tissues. “And because the clerk working the counter was waving my picture around. I couldn’t risk facing her, so I had to steal a ticket from poor Casey Timble.”

  “Fawn.” Karah Lee touched Fawn’s cheek, and her touch was so gentle. “Honey, how old are you, really?”

  Fawn closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “Okay,” Karah Lee said. “Let’s put it another way. Would Bruce have been in trouble with the law for statutory rape?”

  “Nope.”

  “So you really are eighteen, like you told me the other day?” Karah Lee asked.

  “He wouldn’t have been accused of statutory rape if nobody testified, and no way would I have testified. I mean it, Bruce treated me right.”

  “Sixteen,” Karah Lee guessed.

  Fawn opened her eyes then, and stared up into that golden-brown gaze for a long moment. “I’ll be seventeen in September. I’m an emancipated minor.”

  “But your family must be frantic—”

  “My mother’s husband raped me last year, okay?”

  Karah Lee obviously tried hard to keep the startled expression from her face, but she wasn’t the best actress in the world. She leaned back, as if struggling to recover from a blow. “Okay,” she said at last. “Have you pressed charges?”

  Fawn shook her head. “I just told my mother, and she wouldn’t listen. The police wouldn’t listen to me even if I did tell them.”

  “Yes, they would.”

  “I tried to tell my mother he was trying things even a couple of years before he did it, but she didn’t want to hear. They’ve got a whole other family, and they don’t need me, anyway.” She felt the tears burn her eyes again, and closed them, turning away. Why had she suddenly become a whiny little dweeb?

  Karah Lee squeezed her arm. “You’ve been through a lot lately.”

  Fawn nodded, still not opening her eyes.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  What she wanted to do was forget this last year had ever happened. But she knew she was going to have to talk about it to a lot of people. They’d never leave her alone, even if they did find the real killer and let her off the hook.

  She opened her eyes to find Karah Lee watching her, waiting. “Short version, and then I’m done, okay?”

  Karah Lee nodded.

  “And you don’t tell anyone about it.”

  “Doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  “Yeah, but this is illegal stuff, and you’d have to report it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to get you to report it, instead.”

  “I told you, I already tried.”

  “I mean to the right people. When did your stepfather rape you?”

  “It happened on my sixteenth birthday last September.” What was it about this woman that made her want to spill her life story like this? “I tried telling my mother, like I said, and she freaked, got all in my face, calling me a liar, and so when I asked if I could move into an apartment with some older girls, so I could stay away from him, she was glad to shove me out the door.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “Muskogee, Oklahoma.”

  “That isn’t too far from here.”

  “Too close for me, okay? A couple of weeks after I moved out, my mother’s husband caught me at the apartment alone and almost got me again, but I fought him off. One of my roommates loaned me some money to get out of town, and I took a bus to Vegas.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Karah Lee suddenly looked sick.

  “I figured if I was going to be abused, I might as well be paid for it,” Fawn said at last.

  Karah Lee closed her eyes. “Oh, Fawn.”

  “I couldn’t force myself to do it for long. I got a fake ID and did other stuff, and then I met Bruce this spring at a party.” She looked at the ring he’d given her, with the hot-pink rubies, and force
d herself not to cry again. “So,” she said, swallowing and forcing a smile, “can we talk about something else? Like, do you and Taylor have a thing going on?”

  Blaze whistled suddenly, startling Taylor as he hung up the phone. “You want to see what Fawn’s been carrying around in her pocket?”

  Taylor leaned over and looked at the screen, and for a moment he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was a map. “Caves.”

  “Big ones.”

  “But that’s here, below Hideaway.” Taylor studied the screen more closely. There was a labyrinth of connected caves, and the only opening into the system was now far below the lake.

  “Those things would be filled with water now,” Blaze said, scrolling down the screen.

  Another map came up.

  “They’re directly beneath the Beaufont property,” Taylor said.

  “Yeah, but those caves extend past that property. Look at this—it’s the houses across the street, and City Hall.”

  “All the blasting they did into the rock for the foundation would have weakened the structure of the caves.”

  All the pieces fell into place, and the result frightened Taylor. First, they’d dozed down Karah Lee’s rental, and then there had been several injuries at one time on the construction site. He also remembered what the sandaled hikers had said about divers Sunday afternoon—maybe checking out the cave to see if they could find a way to reinforce the foundation from below? Ethylene’s accident this morning had also been caused by an unexpected depression in her front yard. And she lived near the site.

  Taylor caught his breath and straightened. “The earthquake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  That monstrosity of a building could be a danger to everyone around it, and Tom had just tonight mentioned the earthquake south of the state line.

  He yanked up the phone again. They needed to evacuate some homes.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Karah Lee checked Fawn’s vitals one more time. Her temperature was back to normal and her color was better, her eyes clear and focused.

  “So what do you think?” Fawn asked.

  “You’re looking stronger by the minute. How do you feel?”

  “Like I don’t need an ambulance. Can’t I just stay here? I don’t need to be in a hospital or anything.” Fawn gave her a wide-eyed, pleading look that made Karah Lee wonder how anyone had ever mistaken this young lady for anything but a sixteen-year-old girl, in spite of the elastic bandage the other day, and in spite of the gray granny hair now.

  “Thanks for that observation, Dr. Morrison,” Karah Lee said, “but there’s a room reserved for you at Cox South in Springfield. There’ll be a guard at the door and everything.”

  “And handcuffs on my hands?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll be there?”

  “That’s right. So sit still for a few minutes. I’ve got to make a telephone call, and don’t forget what I told you about the needle.”

  Fawn scowled, and Karah Lee winked and walked out the door to find Taylor coming at her.

  “We’ve got trouble,” he said. “Tom just called from the eastern end of the Beaufont property, and there’s been a collapse around the foundation of the building. We’ve got to secure the perimeter. Greg’s on his way in, and Blaze is going with me. We’ve tried to evacuate the affected homes, but not everyone is answering their phone. This needs follow-up right now.”

  “Do you want me to man the phones, make some calls?”

  “No, we’ve got that covered. The ambulance won’t be here for at least another fifteen minutes, so just sit tight.”

  “The town square isn’t in danger?”

  “According to the maps, the threat doesn’t extend past City Hall, but when I came in here, people were still lingering out on the streets. We need to comb the area and clear them out before there’s another accident. I’ve called out the volunteer fire department and there’s backup coming from Kimberling City. Lock the door behind us when we leave.”

  She gave a brief thought to the man who’d called himself Detective Withnell. “I will. But Fawn’s probably right. If Harv had recognized her, he would have—”

  “Just lock the door.”

  Taylor stepped out the front door with Blaze and waited until Karah Lee slid the dead bolt home and waved at him through the window.

  “Which way do we go?” Blaze asked, rushing eagerly toward the Jeep.

  “First, I want to check on Ethylene.” Stubbornly, she had refused to go home with her niece this morning, and so was alone in her house. Taylor wasn’t sure her neighbors would think to check on her, particularly since she didn’t have the most pleasant personality.

  He glanced back toward the clinic as he pulled away. Maybe he was just being paranoid, but he felt uncomfortable about leaving Karah Lee and Fawn alone.

  Blaze opened the glove compartment. “You got another flashlight in here?”

  “I have three in the back. Let’s do this as quickly as possible and get back to the clinic.”

  Karah Lee dialed Senator Kemper MacDonald’s home number, using the cordless phone as she paced from Fawn’s exam room to the reception office and back again, glad to be able to walk off some nervous energy.

  He actually answered the telephone after the second ring, instead of letting the answering machine do it.

  “Hi, Dad. It’s Karah Lee.”

  “Okay, what have I done now?”

  She winced at the tired tone in his voice. “Nothing, believe it or not.” She closed and locked the door between the clinic proper and the waiting room, then turned to pace down the hallway again. “In the first place, I’m sorry I was so hard on you the other day.” She thought about Fawn’s experience with her stepfather, and realized she truly meant what she said. “I know you were doing what you felt you needed to do for me at the time, and I never thanked you for that.”

  Silence.

  “Dad?”

  There was a soft sound of a throat clearing. “Yes.”

  “I’m thanking you now.”

  More silence.

  “And I need to ask you to help me again.”

  There was a heavy exhalation on the line, as if someone had just given him a playful punch in the stomach. “You’re serious?”

  “Very.”

  “Then this must be bad. What’s going on? You didn’t get fired because—”

  “No, this is a special-interest case for a senator with some clout, and that would be you, Mr. Senator. We’re having trouble here in Hideaway.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “We have a corporation that needs to be investigated as soon as possible. Tonight, even, if it can be done, because there’s a disaster happening as we speak.” As briefly as possible, she explained about Beaufont, then added, “Also, there’s a connection between this and the murders in Branson a couple of weeks ago, and we have a very ill sixteen-year-old who is innocent of the crimes and who needs protection, and she can’t go back home.”

  There was a long pause, then a low whistle. “You can’t be talking about Fawn Morrison.”

  “You know about that all the way up in Jefferson City?”

  “You’ve got an alleged murderer there with you now? Karah Lee MacDonald, are you crazy?”

  Karah Lee didn’t correct the last name. Why pick at old wounds? “It’s a long story, Dad. Would you please just help us with this? I promise to explain it all later.”

  “I’ll call some friends of mine about the building problem. There had to be studies done on that land before construction began. Surveyors should have caught any problems. How they could even begin to get away with something like that—”

  “Well, there’s apparently been quite a cover-up by someone with a lot of clout. That’s why I called.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I figured if anyone had more clout than Beaufont, it was you.”

  There was another long silence. “I don’t think I’ve heard you
say anything like that about me since you were ten years old.”

  That stung. “I’m sorry.” She swallowed hard and turned to pace back down the hallway. “And Fawn. She needs protection.”

  “That’ll be a little trickier.”

  “The murderer still hasn’t been apprehended, and she didn’t do it.”

  “You have at least contacted the authorities about her, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s sixteen?” he asked. “What about her parents?”

  “Family abuse situation. She’s an emancipated minor. I’d like her to stay with me after everything’s cleared up, if that’s possible.”

  Several seconds of airtime passed. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “Please. She needs shelter.”

  Another heavy sigh, then, “I’ll do what I can.”

  “How much is that?”

  “There are a lot of hoops to jump through, lots of legal ramifications, but at that age we can get Family Services involved—although I’ll have to check my facts about the emancipated minor thing. I know some good people who can help.”

  “Thanks.”

  “One condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You meet Shona and me for dinner someday soon.”

  Karah Lee’s hand tightened on the receiver, and for some reason her vision grew blurry. How long had it been since she and her dad had been on the same side of any problem? “Just the three of us?”

  “We are a family, you know, as much as we’ve all tried to sweep that fact under the rug these past few years.”

  A dysfunctional family. But she didn’t say it. “Sure, Dad. Soon. I’ll be talking to you.”

  He cleared his throat. “We need to clear up an apparent misunderstanding about the Sebring Scholarship.”

  “You mean the one you obtained for me?”

  “I think you jumped to the wrong conclusion about that. It’s a natural tendency of yours, I suppose, to suspect me of the most corrupt behavior.”

  Karah Lee stepped into the reception office and glanced toward the front door through the window. She thought she saw a shadow of someone walk past on the sidewalk through the narrow section of the outer door she could see from this angle. “Now, Dad, I didn’t—”