Strangers She Knows

by Christina Dodd

  Grief swelled in Kellen, followed swiftly by rage. She lifted her head off the carpet. “Really? You Tased someone who two years ago had a brain surgery? And it didn’t turn out well? I’m so sorry to hear that. What kind of idiot wouldn’t know that that would blow all my neurons to hell?”

  In a motion so swift Kellen’s dazed eyes could barely follow, Mara came to her feet, lifted and pointed the pistol. “I’m not an idiot!”

  Kellen had hit a nerve.

  “I’m not stupid. Say it. Say it!” Mara’s feet, clad in those hiking boots, stomped forward, aiming for Kellen’s right hand.

  Kellen may have imagined she had nothing to lose, but she’d protected, cherished, worked that hand for too long to have Mara break all the bones. She pulled it close to her body, rolled to her side and onto her feet—and one knee gave way. It hit the rug hard enough to bruise her, jar her spine. Her head spun and with her hand still tucked close, she leaned over the coffee table and retched.

  “Yuck!” Mara backed up. “Don’t barf!”

  Kellen fought for control of her stomach, her body, her mind. She practiced her breathing, in and out, and when she could, she pressed her good hand onto the table and used it to support her as she stood. She swayed and, head down, stared through her lashes at Mara. “You’re not stupid,” she acknowledged. “You were illiterate, yet still you ran the largest antiquities smuggling operation in this country, from Yearning Sands, and no one knew. No, not stupid. A psychopath. A serial killer. But never stupid.”

  That was good enough for Mara. “Good. You’re not stupid, either, so you understand what I’m doing here.”

  “No. I don’t. You were in prison.”

  “I got out.”

  “You escaped!”

  Mara smiled with patently false modesty. “Did you imagine I was going to stay there? In that cell? When all I needed was to persuade a few people I should be elsewhere?”

  Kellen lifted her right hand to gesture and—

  “Look at that. Look at your hand. You were getting better. Now you’re not.” Mara was irritated. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Kellen lifted her atrophied hand before her eyes and like an infant, stared as if seeing it for the first time. The Taser blast had fried her nerves. She tried to straighten her fingers, but they were white and cold, without feeling, curled into the tight, terrible C shape they had been after surgery.

  Why did Mara know Kellen’s hand had been getting better? Why did she know anything about Kellen’s hand at all?

  Because she’d been stalking them. Watching them. Worse—Kellen had lost the advantage of pretending to be disabled. She was disabled.

  Mara holstered the pistol—yes, she had lifted the holster off Kellen’s body and strapped it on her own—wandered to the desk, opened Ruby’s diary and fluttered through the pages.

  Kellen measured the distance between them, took stock of her own uncertain strength and saw the way Mara kept her hand close to the black-and-yellow Taser.

  Kellen wasn’t helpless. She used her words to give herself time to recover. She used her words to dig at Mara, undermine her, make her snap. “Why me? Why out of all the people in this world have you gone to such dramatic lengths to hunt me down?”

  “You know.”

  “I know? Why would I know?”

  “When we were at Yearning Sands Resort together, we were one mind. One heart. We ate together. We trained together. You pushed me hard so I could participate in the International Ninja contest. I could have won!” Mara held up one hand, as if grasping the trophy, and gave her best beauty pageant smile. Then the smile faded. “You stole the opportunity from me.”

  “How did I do that?”

  “By trying to kill me.”

  “To stop you! You killed people. A lot of people.” Kellen found herself wildly waving her hands. As if that was going to help. “You almost killed me!”

  “We were like sisters.” Mara crossed her fingers to show how entwined they had been. “We understood each other.”

  “I didn’t understand you.” How could Kellen find the words to explain madness to a madwoman? “You were pretending to be someone you weren’t.”

  “How could you say that? I was the Yearning Sands spa manager.”

  “And you were running an international antiquities smuggling operation!”

  Mara burbled on. “I finally figured out why you were so jealous. I was always the leader. What I said, we did. You resented that.”

  Four years ago, when Kellen had taken the job at Yearning Sands as assistant manager, she had been newly discharged from the Army. She had been a captain, in charge of transportation in a war zone, a leader who brought the friends she trusted to Yearning Sands to give them jobs. She was the kind of leader who never worried about looking back to see if people were following her. They just always were. There was no explaining that to Mara, though. For all that Mara comprehended, Kellen might as well be speaking Klingon. “You’re…delusional.”

  Mara didn’t react.

  Kellen realized Mara was trying to read her mind. No—she thought she was reading Kellen’s mind. That was the delusional part. But in a way, Mara was right. They had been friends…of a sort. Four years ago, at Yearning Sands, Kellen had had no suspicion of Mara’s criminal activity, and never had she suspected Mara happily murdered to maintain power.

  How had Kellen been so wrong about her? How had she failed to see the thin coil of insanity that wound through Mara’s character and strangled all the good in it? Enunciating every word, Kellen said, “I do not understand you. You’re a serial killer.”

  “I’m not, either!” Mara shoved the diary aside, and her eyes snapped with indignation. “I only kill people who deserve it.”

  “I don’t deserve to die, and you don’t deserve to mete out justice.”

  “I deserve every bit of power I can take.” Mara didn’t doubt herself.

  “You tried to kill my daughter. She was delirious. Then unconscious. Fighting for her life!”

  “If I had tried to kill her, she would be dead.” Mara took a breath that hitched in the middle. “I was going to finish her off. Because she is your daughter.”

  Kellen’s heart missed a beat.

  “But she…she came to warn me.”

  “Warn you about what?”

  “About Dylan. She told me he was dangerous. She warned me the storm was coming in. She said we had to evacuate, and invited me into your helicopter. She was nice to me.” Mara sounded as if such a thing had never happened before.

  Kellen supposed it hadn’t. So Rae had saved her own life by being Rae, kind and interested. “You had met Rae a few days before, and—” oh, she understood now “—you made her promise not to tell us. You didn’t threaten her, because she liked you.”

  “She did, didn’t she?” Mara sounded sloppily sentimental.

  Which made Kellen want to slap her. “After you gave her that drug, she rambled. She said she liked you. She said she was worried about you. So who did you tell her you were?”

  “The intern from UC San Diego.” As if bored, Mara wandered back to the overstuffed chair and reseated herself.

  “The biologist.”

  “Botanist. Multitasker. Whatever science was required. Don’t worry. I’ve been doing the work!” Mara assured her.

  “You’ve been doing the work,” Kellen repeated. “Like that matters!”

  “It does matter!” Mara’s eyes narrowed. “Was Jamie right? Don’t you care about the environment?”

  Kellen had fallen down the rabbit hole, and soon Mara would be shouting, Off with her head! “I deeply care about the environment—” not right now, but in general “—and so does Rae, so of course she admired you, and came to warn you. You gave her drugs—”

  “Only a half dose.”

  Kellen lost her temper and shouted
, “What difference does it make, half dose or full dose? If my husband and my child are lost at sea, it’s because you sent them out.”

  “They won’t be lost.” Mara was blithely certain, like a three-year-old who was playing with fire. “Two days ago, I watched them from the cliff edge, sailing away, laughing. They love to sail.”

  “In good weather.” Kellen flung her arm toward the window where the wind slid its sly fingers under the aged sill and rain slashed at the glass. “Have you even looked beyond the tip of your conceited little nose at what’s happening out there? This storm is the remnant of a typhoon. No intelligent person sails in this weather! What did you think, that you, the mighty Mara, could command the elements to let Max handle a tiny vessel in seventy-mile-an-hour winds? In seas so violent the boat disappeared three times beneath the surf and the last sight I had of them, Max was bailing? Not managing the boat, the motor, the rudder—but bailing?” Kellen closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, realized she was dizzy, ready to fall over. She opened her eyes, swayed, fought to stay on her feet—and noticed her rain gear was gone. Mara had stripped away her plastic poncho, and Kellen was damp. Damp all over, damp all the way down to her underwear.

  Damn Mara Philippi.

  Kellen plucked a hair off her long-sleeved T-shirt. And another. And another. And realized—all down the front of her clothes, she had a fine coating of red-and-blond dog hair.

  Luna. Since Olympia had left, no one vacuumed, and Luna’s hair was everywhere, on every floor, every surface. Now Kellen wore it… When Max and Kellen took Rae to the beach, they had locked the dog in the house.

  Where was Luna? Had Mara killed their dog?

  What did you do with her? The question hovered on the tip of Kellen’s tongue.

  At that moment, from the depths of the house, Luna barked.

  Kellen jumped.

  Mara jumped harder. She got to her feet, looked around fearfully. “Did you hear that?”

  Was she kidding? Acting? If she was, she was doing a good job of it—she was sweating.

  Mara’s questions gave Kellen time to think, to consider her accusation. Was Luna in hiding?

  The dog barked again.

  “You heard that, didn’t you?” Mara took a step closer to Kellen, not as a threat, but as if seeking protection.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Kellen said glibly.

  “It was a dog. There’s a dog in the house.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Kellen insisted. “Anyway, what difference does it make? You aren’t afraid of dogs, are you?”

  “The prison dogs…” Mara’s breathing deepened. “They were vicious. They didn’t care who I was. If I didn’t do what they wanted, they attacked.” She pressed her hand to her thigh as if remembering an old wound.

  “You couldn’t bribe them?”

  Mara’s head snapped around. “Are you laughing at me?”

  Kellen was, but she pretended not to understand. “Most dogs you can bribe with treats.”

  “You… You’re playing games, aren’t you? Are you thinking you can distract me with a fake dog barking? You could disarm me?” Mara’s eyes glowed with paranoia and the pistol steadied on Kellen’s face.

  Kellen shoved her right hand, with its cold, still fingers, between them. “How could I disarm you?”

  “You have two hands!”

  Kellen showed Mara her left hand. “This one is better. A little.”

  It was better. As in, better than ten minutes ago. Better than five minutes ago. The fingertips on both hands were tingling painfully, like nerves recovering from frostbite.

  The effects of the Taser were fading.

  “We’re off track.” Mara backed off a few steps. “I want to tell you the game.”

  Kellen braced herself. “What game?”

  “The game we’re going to play. It’s called, ‘Kill Kellen the Fun Way.’”

  39

  Kellen needed to buy herself time.

  Besides, she was hungry.

  She started for the kitchen. “Look, Queen of Hearts. Before you start announcing your freaky plot… I need something to eat.” She could play her own game, buy time her own way.

  “What?” Mara didn’t move. Then she did, running after Kellen. “What?”

  “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.” Since before she’d found Rae wandering through the grasses, crying and hallucinating. “You can talk while I prep.”

  “You…aren’t…” Mara adored being the object of fear; she didn’t react well to Kellen’s offhanded dismissal.

  “I’m not what? I’m not hungry? I assure you, I am.” The impulse, Kellen realized, that sent her to the kitchen was a good one. She really did need sustenance and hydration. Irritating Mara was a bonus. “I can’t do much cooking with this claw of a hand—” she twitched her fingers to demonstrate her disability “—but I can heat something up in the microwave.”

  Mara halted, pulled the pistol and took a shooting stance. “Stop. Right now. Or I’m going to shoot you!”

  Kellen faced her and opened her arms wide. “Go ahead. Make it easy on me. Shoot me.”

  Mara stood, still pointing.

  “In the leg, so you can watch me bleed out? Or through the heart, and end it all right now? Either way, you’re alone on an island in a storm in the middle of the Pacific, with no way to leave. Have you thought this through?” Having put that into Mara’s mind, Kellen turned back toward the kitchen, then faced Mara again. Pressing her hand to her aching ribs, she lifted her shirt and looked. Bruises laddered her skin. “What did you do to me? Kick me while I was unconscious?”

  Mara lowered the pistol. “I had to load you onto the golf cart, then drag you into the house. It wasn’t easy.”

  “You didn’t care if I hit every step on the way in.”

  “I thought you might be faking it, and figured you’d come awake if you were injured enough.” Mara seemed even now surprised. “You didn’t.”

  “No kidding I didn’t!” Kellen winced and touched her cheek. “Rug burn.”

  “Sorry! You were a dead weight.”

  With Mara’s half-assed apology, Kellen judged the immediate danger was over, and walked toward the kitchen again. Once there, she went to the refrigerator, removed the leftover pizza, and placed it on the counter. “Want a slice?”

  Mara wandered over, pistol held at ready. “Sure. But I’ll use the oven. The microwave makes the crust tough.”

  Such a domestic scene. Kellen wanted to laugh. Two mortal enemies discussing the best way to heat up a slice of pizza! But if she did laugh, she was pretty sure it would sound like hysteria.

  She found a cookie sheet, handed it to Mara, and let her deal with the oven and the pizza while Kellen poured milk and water into the glasses. More and more, her hands tingled, the tips of her fingers hurt; the pain was a promise of better times. She put a bowl of fresh apricots and a bowl of cherry tomatoes on the table, and set two places.

  All the time she was thinking—what could she do with a fork? Could she break a glass and slice Mara’s throat? Knock her out with a cast iron skillet? None of those would work. She needed skill and speed, and as sensation gradually returned to her fingers, they twitched uncontrollably.

  Mara leaned against the counter and smiled, and negligently pointed Max’s pistol at her. “I can see you casting around for a way out. There isn’t one.”

  “There isn’t one for you, either.”

  “When this is over and I’ve killed you, law enforcement will arrive and take me away. They’ll return me to prison and put me in solitary confinement. I’ll spend a couple of years learning something that will help me escape. Or I’ll escape the good old-fashioned way, using sex, intimidation and bribes. Once again, I’ll be out in the world, doing what I want. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars.”

  Kellen
seated herself at the table and took an apricot from the bowl. “If I’m dead, how are you going to collect?”

  “Oh. I didn’t think of that.” Mara frowned. The timer went off. She removed the pizza, used a long, sharp knife to cut slices, and put them on a platter in the middle of the table. “Are you a fan of Lewis Carroll?”

  Pausing in the act of sliding pizza onto her plate, Kellen asked, “What?”

  “You called me the Queen of Hearts. Have you read Alice in Wonderland? ‘Off with her head!’” Mara snapped the napkin loose and placed it in her lap. “As a child, Alice in Wonderland was one of my favorites.”

  “That figures.” Kellen took a bite, chewed, swallowed and put down her pizza. “Wait. You couldn’t read.”

  “Before I started school, my father read to me.”

  “You had a father who read to you? Sounds like a nice guy.” Which made Mara’s idiosyncrasies all the more bizarre.

  “My father taught English composition at an elite school, Heatherwood Academy outside of Leeds, England. To him, the only thing that mattered was literature.” Mara rolled out the word like a royal red carpet over castle steps. “He taught me the importance of proper behavior, of making the right friends, and to appreciate the grandeur of the English language.”

  “But not to read.” That didn’t add up.

  “Shut up.”

  Mara’s voice was so vicious, Kellen took another bite of the pizza, chewed carefully and changed the subject. “You drugged Dylan.”

  Mara shrugged.

  “You sent him to kill Jamie.”

  “Someone needed to. That woman was annoying.”

  “So are you. No one’s managed to off you yet, although God knows you deserve it.” Kellen ladled out justice, and waited to see how Mara would respond.

  “I deserve nothing except what I work for. You, too. You know that.”

  That was fair. “Where’s her body?”

  Mara seemed genuinely confused. “Whose?”

  “Jamie’s!”

  “Why would I know? I didn’t help Dylan kill her. I didn’t watch to see what he did with her. I merely set events in motion.”