Chapter 23
Shaking her head, my mother said, “It’s no wonder you felt faint, Darcy. You’ve lost quite a bit of blood. Maybe, just maybe, those men won’t see us here. At least, we’re out of the rain and wind. If we scrunch down as small as we can . . . .”
Drawing my knees up to my chest, I said, “It’s a risk, but we may not have a choice. What if they were to come in this direction while we’re out in plain sight, trying to find a way up the hill? It looks like we’ve painted ourselves into a corner.”
Mom nodded. “I think we’ve about gone as far as we can go,” she said.
Our trap was so efficient, it might have been designed by those diabolical killers who were chasing us. The rocky indentation where we sat was small and bottle-shaped, with the entrance being the neck of the bottle. It was no more than three feet high and four feet wide, barely room enough for two muddy, battered, and bloody women to crouch. Although it was tiny, cramped, musty, and dank, compared with what we had been through during this unbelievable day, it wasn’t bad. The old saying, “Between a rock and a hard place” came to mind, an apt description of our predicament.
“Please, God,” I whispered aloud, “don’t let this tiny closet of Yours become our tomb.”
Mom nodded. “I believe that God will get us out of this mess, Darcy. I don’t think He has brought us through everything just so we could end our lives out here in the woods.”
“If you believe that, I’ll try very hard to believe too,” I said. “Remember that plaque on Jackson Conner’s wall?”
Together, we repeated, “If God brought you to it, He will take you through it.”
Mom squeezed my hand.
I was freezing and my mother must have been just as miserable as I was. We were wet, tired, and, I realized, hungry. The time of day had no meaning. Was it still morning, or afternoon, or nearing night? This cloudy twilight had been with us since we left home this morning, and I felt like I had been running for a year. Already, my mother’s warm kitchen seemed light years in the past.
Rubbing my stomach, I said, “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of your hot, strong coffee.”
“Same here,” she answered.
The bone deep chill that caused my teeth to chatter seemed to come from inside. Perhaps this is how people felt when they were looking death in the face. True, we were in a physical trap but a snare had been tightening around us since we walked out of Jackson Conner’s office. The killer, or killers, had likely been watching us then, a surveillance that continued through the night.
For a few seconds, I wondered why those men, the ones who had three murders to their credit, had not broken into my mother’s house and attacked us while we slept, but then, I answered my own question. Yesterday we thought there was only one man after us. He must have decided he needed help and called in his buddy to finish the job. Who were they? Drake and Hammer? Drake and Clendon? Drake and an unknown person? Where had they gotten the heavy car that tried to force us off Deertrack Hill?
I voiced my thoughts aloud. “Those crooks planned to run us off the road and make it look like an accident. That’s why they had an armored car; they wanted to be sure to get the job done. I wonder where they found such a vehicle. Not in Levi.”
“Nobody would have questioned our deaths, Darcy. People would have said we were driving too fast on a rain-slick highway. That’s why they didn’t shoot us. They wanted our deaths to look like an accident,” Mom said.
A new thought surfaced in my foggy mind. “It almost looks like two killers with different methods. The two men and Skye might have been killed by someone who was angry—enraged because they wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to know. But, if our deaths were to look accidental, it would have taken some planning.”
“And that poison bomb, Darcy,” Mom said. “That took some knowledge of such things.
I bent forward, hugging my knees and trying to stop shaking. Why had Ben gotten us into this? Why was it so important to keep the hiding place of that gold a secret that he would risk my mother’s life by making her its protector?
One way or another, the killers were determined to get that gold, and it didn’t seem to make much difference which method they used. Did they really think my mother knew the location of the treasure? Did they want only the map? Was the map the reason those three people were killed? To my mind, that ancient map would not help anybody. The area had changed and the scribbled lines were dim, without any sort of recognizable landmark.
Turning my head to look at my mother, I asked, “If we offer those guys the map, do you think they’ll leave us alone?”
Mom patted my shoulder. “I don’t think so, Darcy.”
We had played right into the hands of the killers by being out alone early this morning. Why had I forgotten to leave a message for Grant telling him where we were going? Why had I been so arrogant as to get involved in this brutal case in the first place? At least Aunt Bet knew we were coming. She would surely alert the authorities when we didn’t show up. When Grant couldn’t find our bodies in my wrecked Passport, he would search for us, wouldn’t he?
Then I brought myself up short. Mom had insisted that nobody was going to drive her out of her home. She hadn’t changed her mind until after that bomb. Perhaps, a niggling voice in my head insisted, this was meant to be. The owl that flew up was a warning to us. Maybe our deaths were imminent and we could no more have avoided this situation than we could have avoided the rain-filled clouds that were steadily darkening the entrance to our little rabbit hole.
A drop of blood dripped from my nose and I flicked it away. I felt terrible and could not imagine how I looked. If our lifeless bodies were found, would anybody recognize us?
“I’m in no condition to die,” I told Mom. “Just look at my hair. If Minda Stilley could only see me now.” I tried to grin but my teeth must have cut my mouth. It hurt.
Mom scooted closer to me. “Don’t say that. I’m not wanting to go just yet.”
The front of my yellow knit shirt was soaked with blood, mud, and rain, and my jeans wore red splotches.
My mother wasn’t much better off than I was. The only difference was that she didn’t have a head wound that kept bleeding. She had sliced her knee on a sharp rock, and her once-pretty denim pants were ragged and soggy. Although the day was warm enough, rain-cooled but still it was a spring ran, we both shivered as if a frigid January wind blew against us. I felt dizzy and disoriented and Mom probably felt the same; she just wasn’t the complainer that I was.
“I wonder how long it’ll take for them to find us?” I muttered. Maybe fifteen minutes of going in the wrong direction, if they fell for my trick of putting bloody strips to mark a false trail, and then circling around until they found evidence of our flight. We had kept to the rocky creek bed, but sooner or later, they’d find a hair, or a broken limb, or a spot of blood. I had no idea how long we had been running. It felt like forever.
Once again, Mom was the one with coherent thoughts. “We’ve got to find something to stop your head from bleeding,” she said, looking around her.
“Good idea,” I mumbled. “What do you have in mind?”
She leaned back, wriggled out of her canvas shoe, and began peeling off her knee-high hose. “It’s not much,” she admitted, “but maybe it’ll help some. I should have done this a long time ago.”
“We didn’t have time to stop. But thanks, Mom.”
At least the hose soaked up the blood, keeping it from dripping into my eyes.
I looked around us. “Since we are pretty much trapped here, could we camouflage the opening in some way?”
“Let’s try,” Mom said, crawling back to the little entrance. “There are some sticks and dead leaves on the ground out here.”
I crawled out from under the ledge too, and grabbed some of the small limbs that had fallen off the trees last fall. The brown leaves should help to hide us. Scooting backward under the outcropping, we pulled the sticks and leaves in with us and arranged
them across our little hole. Hopefully, nobody would get close enough to peer in.
On a sunny day, anyone could detect our hiding place but the clouds were in our favor. Our hope lay in trying to blend in with the terrain.
“I feel sure we are on Ben’s land,” Mom said as we dusted off our hands and resumed our cramped positions. “Once we are able to leave this little nook, it can’t be too far to his house. Then, hallelujah, we can flag down a passing car, or at least find a better place to hide. We must be near that little hill behind Ben’s barn.”
Unfortunately for us, the threatening sky lightened at the same time I heard rocks rattling nearby. My blood seemed to turn to ice and my shaking resumed in full force. Rain would have helped to hide us. If the sun came out, our enemies could quite easily see where we crouched.
That familiar, guttural voice came closer, evidently displeased and grumbling. The second voice answered. From the snatches of conversation I could decipher, I gathered those two were displeased and arguing. Then the talking stopped and the sound of feet crunching through sticks and kicking loose rocks grew nearer.
Ray Drake’s partner spoke. “I used to tramp all over these woods. We’ll find those two if we have to check under every rock and behind every tree. They aren’t getting away. That much, I can promise.”
My heart thumping against my ribs, I scooted toward my mother. We put our arms around each other. If we were going to die, at least we would die together. Shrinking against the cold, hard wall of our prison, I felt the rock pressing into my back.
The Cemetery Club Page 23
