Careful to stay well back where she couldn’t be seen, Rachel circled the yard, pushing through the tangled carpet of weeds and vines in the woods. The birds, she noticed, had fallen silent, and several squirrels chittered furiously from branches above her, probably reacting to Rachel’s intrusion. Nothing strange about that, but the longer she slogged through the woods, the creepier this situation felt. Unspeakable things had happened on this property. In these woods.
Rachel had driven out here the previous January, soon after Holly learned she would inherit her aunt’s fortune and house. They had planned to take a look inside the house, but when they arrived Holly refused to get out of the car. They’d left after a couple of minutes, with Holly declaring she would never live in that awful old place and wouldn’t care if it crumbled to the ground.
Why would anyone choose this as a meeting place? Because it was isolated, seldom visited, and couldn’t be seen from the road. That meant a clandestine meeting. Rachel was glad she hadn’t come upon another murder scene, but she was more curious than ever about Lindsay’s mysterious rendezvous.
The squirrels were going crazy, ratcheting up the volume of their raspy, scolding calls. Rachel stopped and peered into the tree branches above her, wondering if the squirrels were following her from tree to tree.
Something slammed into the back of her legs and knocked her to her knees. Oh god, what, who—
A brown mutt appeared, panting in her face. Startled, relieved, bewildered, Rachel whispered, “Where did you come from?”
The dog jumped her again, planted its feet on her shoulders and licked her face. Pushing the animal away, Rachel realized this was one of her patients. She hadn’t seen the dog often, but it was too unusual to forget, with floppy beagle ears and long setter legs. Grabbing its collar, she checked the name tag. She was right. This was Cam and Meredith Taylor’s dog.
“Cricket?”
A mistake. At the sound of her name, the dog began barking, a joyful, celebratory sound, loud enough to send the squirrels into a frenzy again. Loud enough to be heard at the house, if anyone was there to hear.
“Hush, hush. Be quiet.”
Cricket let out a string of happy yips and bounced around Rachel, inviting her to play.
“Shhh, hush,” Rachel whispered again, with no effect. Had someone found Cricket and asked Lindsay to come and pick her up? But why the McClure property? And why had Lindsay reacted to the call with such obvious shock?
“Cricket! Come back here!” A woman’s voice, calling from the yard around the house.
The dog barked in answer.
Rachel got to her feet and steered the dog toward the house. “Go! Go back.”
“Cricket!” the woman yelled.
Cricket moved a few feet toward the voice, then turned and, wagging her tail, barked at Rachel to invite her along.
The woman appeared at the edge of the woods, her face in shadow.
Get out of here, now. Lindsay was either around somewhere or soon would be, and Rachel wouldn’t be able to explain her own presence. “Stay!” Rachel ordered the dog. Then she took off, back the way she’d come.
The dog stayed right behind her, barking, enjoying the game of chase. And the woman was on their trail, shouting the dog’s name, gaining ground.
Rachel’s right foot caught in the tangled undergrowth and in the next instant she pitched forward. Her binoculars, strap and all, sailed free into the brush, along with her sunglasses. She landed hard, face-down. Thorns stabbed her cheek. Cricket stood over her, barking.
Rachel pushed herself up, tried to yank her foot loose, but a thorny vine bit into her ankle. Something tickled her skin and she spotted a daddy longlegs crawling up her arm. Shaking it off, she leaned down, desperate to rip the vine from her foot. Thorns pricked her fingertips.
It was too late. The woman had moved closer and stood thirty feet away among the trees. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
Rachel straightened, staring at the woman, seeing her clearly now.
Meredith Taylor.
She looked ill, her skin pasty and her eyes bloodshot, her blond hair tangled and her loose shirt and pants soiled, but this was Meredith Taylor, beyond doubt.
“You’re alive,” Rachel blurted.
Meredith’s face was blank, her body perfectly still, yet the air between them hummed with tension. “What are you doing here?” Meredith asked again.
“What happened to you?” Rachel asked. “Why are you—What’s going on?”
Meredith stepped closer, her eyes cold and flat. Rachel felt the first tremor of fear. She wanted to back away, but with her foot entangled she had no choice but to stand her ground. Sweat rolled down her spine, her cheek stung where thorns had pierced it. The dog sat at Rachel’s feet and watched with interest.
“Mom?” Lindsay called from the edge of the woods. “Did you find Cricket?”
The dog barked when she heard her name, and Rachel and Meredith both swung their heads around.
“Mom? Where are you?”
With a happy yelp, the dog loped off in Lindsay’s direction.
“Over here,” Meredith answered her daughter.
Rachel didn’t understand what was happening, but she wasn’t going to stand there and hope for answers. For a second Meredith took her eyes off Rachel to glance at Lindsay, and Rachel grabbed the chance to dig her cell phone from her shirt pocket. She pressed speed dial for 911.
“Stop that!” Meredith snatched the phone from Rachel’s hand. She pressed the button to turn it off, drew back her arm and flung the phone into the woods.
Rachel watched helplessly as it disappeared in the undergrowth.
“Mom!” Lindsay exclaimed, coming up beside her mother. “Why did you do that?”
Flicking her gaze between mother and daughter, still trying to wrap her mind around the reality of Meredith standing alive before her, Rachel fumbled for words. “Lindsay, what’s going on here? Everybody thinks—Your mother—”
“She was kidnapped,” Lindsay said. “Scotty Ragsdale’s been holding her prisoner here.”
“Was she the one who called you a while ago?” But if Meredith had a phone, how could she have been a prisoner?
“What the hell are you doing here anyway?” Lindsay said. “Did you follow me?”
“I thought there was another murder. I wanted to find out—”
“Let’s take her to the house,” Meredith said. She caught Rachel’s arm and shoved. “Go on.”
Rachel lurched and almost fell before she regained her balance. “I can’t. My foot’s caught.”
“Oh, shit.” Lindsay knelt and began tearing at the prickly vine.
Rachel stooped to help. “Lindsay,” she whispered, “what—”
“Be quiet.” Lindsay’s voice was barely audible. “She’s diabetic, her blood sugar’s screwed up, she’s not thinking straight. Just play along, and it’ll be okay.”
“What are you telling her?” Meredith yelled. “Stop talking to her. Let’s go!”
Rachel looked up and her breath strangled in her throat. Meredith held a pistol, pointed at Rachel.
Lindsay leapt to her feet. “Mom, you don’t need that. Everything’s going to be all right. We’ll tell Tom what Scotty did and everything will be fine. Give me the gun, okay?”
Lindsay held out a hand to her mother. Rachel rose slowly.
“No.” Meredith shook her head.
“Mom, come on now,” Lindsay coaxed. She stepped in front of Rachel as if to shield her.
She had a telephone and a gun? Rachel thought. How could she be a prisoner?
Meredith spoke to Lindsay in a tone of mild rebuke, as if she were explaining an obvious point to a stubborn child. “I can’t let her go. Not after she’s seen me.”
Fear squeezed Rachel’s chest and made each breath a painful struggle.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lindsay said. “It’s all over. Scotty can’t hurt you anymor
e. Give me the gun, Mom.”
“I can’t let her go!” Meredith raised the pistol, aiming beyond Lindsay at Rachel’s head. “She’ll tell everybody.”
Lindsay grabbed her mother’s arm just as Meredith squeezed the trigger. Rachel ducked. She heard the sharp crack of the shot, and the bullet slammed into a tree inches from her head.
Dizzy with relief, rigid with fear of what might happen next, Rachel kept her eyes on the pistol while Lindsay and Meredith scuffled and grunted. The dog jumped around, barking in her excitement.
Meredith stomped on Lindsay’s foot.
“Damn it!” Lindsay yelled and let go of her mother’s arms. Grimacing, she hopped on one foot.
Meredith still held the gun. “All right now, you’re going to mind me and do what I say. We’re all going in the house.”
Without another word, Lindsay crouched again and tore the vine away from Rachel’s foot. Rachel tried to catch Lindsay’s eye, to get some idea of what she was thinking and planning, but Lindsay didn’t look at her.
When Rachel tugged her foot free, Lindsay rose and walked away toward the house with the dog beside her.
“Don’t even think about running, Dr. Goddard,” Meredith said, sounding calm now. “Don’t test me.”
Knowing that anything she did might make Meredith pull the trigger, Rachel had no choice but to walk out of the woods with a gun at her back. Her thoughts fractured, images of herself lying dead mixing with a flood of questions. How could Lindsay’s mother still be alive? Who had died in the fire? Ben’s mother?
At the thought of Ben’s grief, tears welled up in Rachel’s eyes. She caught herself, realized how insane it was to let her mind wander. Her life was in danger, right here, right now. Focus.
Lindsay’s car was parked in the back yard next to a garden where daisies and daylilies bloomed in a forest of weeds. Rachel walked past the car and stopped at the back steps. Glancing up, she saw an open door and an empty, shadowy space beyond.
If she went into that house, Rachel knew, she would never come out alive.
“Go on, Rachel.” Lindsay’s voice was quiet, pleading.
Say something. Stall. Fear held Rachel’s throat in a vise and she had to force the words out. “Did you know your mother was alive all along?”
“No. I didn’t, I swear.”
“Shut up, both of you!” Meredith snapped. “Lindsay, stop talking to her.”
“That was her calling you at Joanna’s, wasn’t it?” Rachel asked. “You were surprised. Shocked.”
“I told you to shut up,” Meredith said.
Something hard jabbed Rachel’s lower spine and sent a streak of pain down one leg. The barrel of the pistol.
Meredith planted a hand on Rachel’s back and pushed.
“No!” Rachel spun and flailed at Meredith, kicked at her knees, grabbed for the gun, but Meredith evaded her like a wisp of smoke that couldn’t be captured.
“Stop it!” Meredith screamed. She drew back her arm and cracked the gun butt against Rachel’s cheek.
Stunned, Rachel dropped to her knees. Everything went dark for a second before she was able to focus again. Blood pooled in her mouth.
Through a haze of pain she heard Meredith say, “I’m the one with the gun, and I’m the one making the decisions. Lindsay, get her up.”
Lindsay grasped Rachel’s arm and dragged her to her feet. A wave of dizziness and nausea overwhelmed Rachel, and her knees folded under her. She sank onto the bottom step and hung her head. Blood dripped from her mouth and spotted her white athletic shoes.
“I said get her up.”
“Okay, Mom. All right.” Lindsay gripped Rachel’s arm again and pulled her upright.
Rachel pressed a hand to her throbbing cheek. Gagging on the taste of her own blood, she stumbled up the steps.
They entered the kitchen. Beyond the rectangle of light that spilled through the doorway, Rachel picked out a refrigerator and range in the shadows, and the outline of a boarded-up window over the sink. On a counter she saw what looked like food, a white jug, a loaf of bread. She saw nothing she could use as a weapon. But she had to find a way to free herself. She couldn’t wait for Lindsay to talk her mother back to sanity.
“I know exactly where to put her,” Meredith said, “while we decide what to do with her.”
“You don’t have to put her anywhere,” Lindsay said. “Come on, Mom, you need to eat some more. Have some juice and finish your sandwich, okay?”
Meredith didn’t seem to hear her daughter. She pressed the gun to Rachel’s temple and pulled her by the arm into a hallway, toward the stairs. Pointing to a small door under the stairs, she told Lindsay, “In there. Open it.”
“Mom, no. Please don’t do this.”
“Open it.”
“Okay, okay.” Lindsay flipped the latch and swung the door open on a small, black hole beneath the stairs.
“No!” Rachel cried, struggling to get free, blood spewing from her mouth. “No!”
Meredith rapped the gun against Rachel’s head and Rachel fell to her hands and knees, fighting to stay conscious. Meredith crammed her into the storage space. The door closed and the latch clicked into place.
Chapter Forty-four
“It all makes sense, it ties together.” Tom paced around the conference room table, and the sheriff and prosecutor swiveled their heads to follow him. Every minute he had to spend explaining the situation was wasted time. He wanted to get rolling, but everything had changed and he had to bring his boss and the prosecutor up to speed. “Meredith is alive and Scotty knows where she is. He’s been saying he has to get out of jail, he has somewhere to go, he has commitments. My bet is he’s taking care of her, supplying her with what she needs while she’s hiding.”
Sheriff Willingham ran a hand over his bristly gray hair. “Well, I admit it looks like it might be Karen Hernandez who died in the fire—”
“It was her,” Tom said. “She had a spinal fusion. Joanna McKendrick and Ben Hern both confirmed that. If it wasn’t her in the fire, it was a hell of a coincidence that some other woman who’d had a spinal fusion just happened to be in the Taylor house Friday morning—at the same time Karen Hernandez disappeared.”
“But that doesn’t mean Meredith’s alive,” Willingham said. “She could be dead and we just haven’t found the body yet.”
Tom leaned on the table between Willingham and the prosecutor, who faced each other. “Meredith’s wedding ring was on the corpse. Whoever put it there wanted everybody to believe Meredith was dead. Somebody went to the trouble to hide Karen Hernandez’s car. They didn’t do a very good job of it, but they managed to throw us off for a few days. Somebody also called the Taylor house with Karen’s phone after the house burned down, so it would look like she was still alive and we wouldn’t question the identity of the corpse. Who, besides Meredith herself, would want to fake her death?”
Sheriff Willingham wore a sour expression, as if he’d been asked to swallow something he couldn’t stomach, but he blew out a sigh and said, “Yeah, I guess it does make sense. You think Meredith killed all three of them—her husband and Karen Hernandez and Lloyd Wilson?”
“With Scotty’s help, yeah.”
“And you think she’s still around here somewhere, still in the county?”
“Seems that way to me, considering how Scotty’s been acting. If all this happened without premeditation, and I think it did, then she doesn’t have any money. She left all that expensive jewelry in her safe deposit box—if she’d been planning this, she could have sold the jewelry and had a stash of money to finance her own disappearance.”
Raymond Morton, the prosecutor, frowned and shook his head. “If Meredith really was responsible for Scotty’s sister dying, why would he help her do anything? Why would he be her friend, or lover, whatever he was?”
“He didn’t know the truth. I don’t believe anybody except Meredith and Cam knew why Denise Ragsdale didn’t make
it home that night. Karen might have suspected, but she didn’t have any proof. And if she’d never voiced her suspicion to anybody, never confronted Meredith or Cam about it, she probably didn’t realize Meredith was afraid of her. It looks to me as if Karen’s visit to Mason County to see her son was what set everything in motion.”
“Meredith felt threatened,” Morton said.
“Right. She’d lived with this secret a long time, and Karen was the only other person who suspected the truth and could have exposed her. The worst thing Karen could have done was turn up on Meredith’s doorstep, but Karen apparently didn’t know she was in any danger. That’s my theory. All we know for certain is that Karen went to see Meredith Friday morning and ended up dead.”
Morton nodded. “Now what? I assume you’re going to shove the truth in Ragsdale’s face and try to make him give up Meredith.”
“He’s not going to believe it,” Willingham put in. “He’s got too big of an emotional investment in his relationship with her. He won’t believe he’s been wrong about her all this time.”
Tom dragged a chair out from the table, its legs scraping across the tile floor, and sat down. “I’ll make him believe it. Sooner or later he’ll spill the whole story and tell us where she is.”
A cell phone buzzed in the pocket of Morton’s suit jacket. He pulled out the phone, answered, and listened without comment. When he ended the call, he told Tom, “You’d better try to make that sooner rather than later. His bail’s been posted.”
“Aw, Christ. How’d his parents come up with that much money?”
“They didn’t. They came up with 10 percent and went to a bondsman this time. They’re about to spring Scotty, so if you want to question him, you’d better go do it right now.”
“You know,” Tom said, “we could make this work to our advantage. Let’s hold up his release for an hour, blame it on paperwork, keep him in custody long enough for me to tell him what I’ve found out. If he doesn’t believe Meredith was responsible for his sister’s death, or he’s not sure and he needs proof, he’ll want to hear either a confession or a denial straight from her. He’ll lead us to her.”
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