by Raven Snow
She was back in Jeff’s cabin. The voices she was hearing were those of Jeff, Vernon and Emily. They were standing on the other end of the room bickering with one another.
“I’m leaving. Whatever you guys wanna do is up to you, but I suggest you do the same,” said Jeff. There was a brown, leather bag at his feet. It seemed he was packed to go already.
“It’s not that simple for us,” said Emily, her hands on her hips.
“It is that easy.” Jeff reached to pick up his bag, but Emily slapped his hand away from it.
“And, what? You’ll just hide from the cops indefinitely?”
Jeff shrugged. “I’ve gone off the grid before. I can do it again. Heck, I love the outdoors. It’s about time I went back to my roots. Maybe this whole thing wasn’t meant to be.”
“Meant to be?” Vernon repeated, his voice cracking a little. “This is… this is…”
“Stop!” Emily held up a hand, silencing her husband. “I don’t want to hear anything from you. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t even be in this mess.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” urged Vernon.
“And what do we do about those two?” asked Emily, ignoring her husband and pointing to Rowen and Eric. Everyone looked in their direction.
“Rowen’s awake,” said Jeff. He said it softly, like he wasn’t happy about that. He went to her, followed by Vernon and Emily. He reached out and undid her gag. Emily began to object but didn’t get the words out before the deed was done. Jeff tossed the gag aside. “I’m really sorry about this. I truly am.”
“Then let us go.” Rowen didn’t think appealing to his better nature would work, but it seemed worth a try. “We can all go to the cops together. It’s not like you can hide this. Not now.”
“You said you hadn’t gone to the cops yet,” Emily reminded her.
“That doesn’t mean she didn’t tell anyone. She’s got family who might know,” said Jeff.
Emily shrugged. “Then we find them too.”
Jeff and Vernon both shot Emily troubled looks, not necessarily for the same reasons.
“Her family is huge,” Jeff pointed out. “They have connections all over Lainswich. It’ll be impossible to tell who knows what. We can’t keep people quiet if we don’t know who they are.”
“Did you tell anyone?” asked Emily, leaning forward, placing her hands over Rowen’s arms, where they were bound. She put her weight on them. It was uncomfortable, and that was probably her goal. She was getting up into Rowen’s face, doing her very best to intimidate her. It was kind of working, but Rowen would never admit that.
“I’m not sure which answer you would rather hear,” Rowen said with false bravado. “Either I give you a list of people who know or I say I didn’t tell anyone— which seems kind of unlikely, so you’ll just be wondering if I told the truth or not. Look, you know as well as I do that the best thing for you to do now is turn yourself in. Maybe they won’t come down on you as hard that way.”
Emily slapped Rowen, getting an immediate muffled reaction from Eric. It stung Rowen’s cheek and effectively distracted her long enough for her gag to be replaced. She watched as Emily stomped away, closely followed by Jeff. They began arguing again.
Vernon remained standing in front of Rowen and Eric. He was shifting all his weight from one foot to the other, looking terribly uncomfortable. His eyes kept darting over to where his wife and Jeff stood. “I didn’t kill anyone,” he said, his voice low. He was looking from Eric to Rowen, like he wanted to confess but didn’t want them to think poorly of him. “I’m not a killer… She just… It was an accident. She was drinking and we did… we were just partying here together, you know? Doing what people do. I didn’t know she was just eighteen. I didn’t know she was such a lightweight. We were having sex one minute and the next she’s running to the bathroom like she has to puke. I heard a crash and… She cracked her head open. It was a freak accident. I tried to help her. I really did.”
Rowen stared at Vernon. So that was what had happened to poor Andrea. Drugs and alcohol hadn’t mixed. She wasn’t used to either. She had thought she was, but that clearly wasn’t the case, poor thing. Rowen could imagine her passing out in the master bathroom and landing wrong, cracking her head on the edge of the counter on the way down. At least she had been intoxicated. At least it probably hadn’t hurt much. Jeff must have walked in on quite the scene. Vernon had probably been a frazzled mess. Seeing him now, he definitely didn’t have the spine for handling this sort of thing on his own.
Vernon’s gaze met Rowen’s. “I didn’t kill your stepfather,” he said, firmly. “That was all Jeff. We were getting rid of the body and this guy was out there taking a leak and—I don’t think he even saw us, but before I could tell Jeff that-”
“Hey!” Jeff yelled from across the room, probably picking up on his name. “What the heck are you doing? Come back over here.”
Like a kicked dog, Vernon trudged back over to Jeff and his wife. Rowen looked to her husband to find he was already looking at her. This was quite the mess they were in. She wondered if he had been caught before or after she had. Not that it mattered. She couldn’t imagine he had called for backup. He wouldn’t have taken his eyes off Jeff for that long. If he saw Rowen being carted inside, he would have gone in after her—even if retreating far enough away to get reception and call for help would have been the smart thing to do. Rowen bet it was the former. She loved her stupidly heroic husband even if he had doomed them both. She would say as much if she wasn’t gagged. The way he was looking at her, she thought he got the message anyway.
Wait. Was he looking at her? He had been, but it didn’t look like it now. Rowen turned her head to follow his gaze. Immediately, she saw what it was he was really watching. There were a couple of cops standing out on the back porch, next to the Jacuzzi. They were both looking in. Both had their weapons drawn. One had a walkie up to his ear.
Everything happened so quickly, it was difficult to process. The front door burst open. “Police!” someone shouted. “Everyone freeze! Hands up, now!”
Emily and Vernon were both completely alien to the concept of being arrested it seemed. They both launched into excuses, each one getting louder to talk over the other. Emily began crying for help. “They dragged me here! Help me! Please, help me!” she sobbed.
“Help!” Vernon echoed, apparently deciding on the fly that his wife had the right idea.
The police paused, useless and confused. Jeff, meanwhile, had time to make a run for it—or try to, anyway. He headed for the back door only to find cops stationed there as well. He stopped short and snatched something from inside his jacket, a pocket knife. The blade snapped out and was against Eric’s throat in moments. “Weapons down!” Jeff shouted, “Just back off!”
Rowen could feel her heart pounding in her chest, thoughts of the Greensmith family curse the only thing on her mind. She struggled against her binds but couldn’t break free. Beneath the blade, she could see blood beading. Jeff was like a cornered animal, and the cops weren’t budging an inch.
“I’m warning you!” Jeff shouted. He pressed harder, harder than he probably meant to. One wrong move and that would be it.
The knife dropped. It took Rowen a moment to realize what had just happened and, even when she did, she wasn’t sure how it had happened. The police noticed too. They rushed in, securing Jeff.
“Natalie?” Rowen ventured, her voice still muffled by the gag.
No, said Natalie. Rory, actually. That took a lot of energy though, so he can’t come to the phone right now.
Even if Rory couldn’t talk right now, he could still hear her. He was undoubtedly nearby. She silently thanked him and urged him to go pay a visit to Tiffany when next he got the chance. She misses you, she thought. Heck, I hardly knew you and I kind of miss you.
***
Rose and Ben were waiting out at the road. Ben was sitting in Rose’s car, the door wide open. He was barking orders at his men, even though he was in plai
n clothes. Rose was standing beside him looking mildly annoyed. She glanced up when she realized Rowen and Eric had emerged from the woods. She went sprinting toward them, only stopping when she had her arms around Rowen. “You’re both idiots.”
Rowen hugged her cousin back. “To be fair, I didn’t plan on getting kidnapped inside city hall.” There was that parking lot behind this building. She should have reasoned there would also be a back way out.
“You’re just lucky Margo was too lazy to keep quiet about what you’d found out for very long. Her caffeine high wore off. She told Willow to help if you called for backup while she went home to take a nap. You know how good Willow is at keeping secrets.” Rose took a step back, shaking her head. “Idiots,” she said again.
Having thoroughly reprimanded Rowen and Eric, Rose returned to her husband. Ben was making a concerted effort to get out of the car and go oversee proceedings as they forced Jeff, Vernon, and Emily into the back of cop cars. Emily had become dead weight and was screaming that she wanted her lawyer as they tried to negotiate her limp body through the door.
Rowen turned to her husband. The sun was going down, but out near all the flashing lights of the cop cars Rowen could see the cut on Eric’s throat. “We should see if someone has a first aid kit.”
Eric shook his head. “I’m fine,” he assured her, running a finger over it to brush away the blood and prove as much. It did indeed appear to be shallow. “Are you all right?”
“As long as you are.” Rowen stood up on her tiptoes and kissed her husband.
“You know,” Eric began, his tone suddenly thoughtful. “You never did tell me what you wanted for Valentine’s Day.”
That actually got a laugh from Rowen. After all of this, Valentine’s Day was the last thing on her mind. “How about a day at home? We just watch movies and have pizza delivered and don’t do anything. Absolutely no one gets kidnapped. We just relax.”
Eric laughed too and kissed her again. “That sounds doable.”
*The End*
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