by R M Wild
“Sorry. I prefer not to crap where I eat.”
He smiled again and gathered up the papers and put them back into the briefcase. “I will go talk to my client and be back in a few hours.”
I set my face stern. “Make it quick.”
“I will,” he said. “In the meantime, don’t go anywhere. I’m watching you.”
41
As soon as Kendall left, I checked my phone. Five percent power left. I had drained it even further by trying to bait him into saying he wouldn’t allow me to leave, but I hadn’t managed to record anything useful.
I listened to his car engine start and then went to the French doors and pressed my face to the glass. The rain was coming down, lighter than before, but no mildly-ruined picnic, and the Mercedes’s headlights swept across the field, lighting the falling rain like pieces of silver.
On the lake, the fog had thickened and was sitting atop the agitated water like lumpy, gray pillows. I had to find out what was in that shack. If the devil-footed chair in my room was indeed the same type of chair as the one in the photo of Chrissy, I was deathly afraid of what I might find there.
Still, I had to know.
The French doors leaked at my feet. I leaned forward on my toes, the warping hardwood creaking.
Screw the cameras. It was time to make a move.
I yanked the doors open. The rain got loud, a sliding curtain of water right in front of my face. I had no idea how long Kendall would be gone and didn’t know if I had the strength to drag the canoe all the way down to the dock, so I was going to have to get wet.
I ran down the deck stairs and sprinted across the field, the grass wet and slippery, little splashes on my shins with every bounding step. My glasses smeared and I wiped them on my sleeve, but it was no use in the rain, my vision as cloudy as a second fog.
I ran down to the dock and pounded to the end, each step making the boards shudder and quake, the whole structure threatening to collapse. I could complain all I wanted about my dock, but at least it wasn’t as bad as this one.
At the end, not wanting to destroy another phone, I took it from my pocket and shoved it under the lounge chair, hoping it might stay dry enough to work when I returned.
Standing there at the end of the dock, toes on the edge, I took a deep, wet breath and looked out over the water. The rain hitting the surface with tiny explosions obscured everything.
I had no idea how deep the lake was and thought about those slimy things. What manner of snakes and frogs and other slippery critters were writhing in that darkness?
But I couldn’t let fear hold me back.
I jumped. The water was freezing. All at once, it stabbed every inch of my body. Arm over arm, clothing heavy, I swam into the fog. Slimy things brushed past my legs—seaweed and cattails or worse—and the exploding rain chafed the underside of my chin, but I kept swimming.
Soon, the grayness swallowed me whole, the fog so thick I could carve my epitaph into it. I couldn’t see more than five feet ahead of me, but I kept swimming.
After about fifteen minutes, I was exhausted and completely disoriented. The lake was larger than it seemed. I could have been in the middle, toward one of the banks, or maybe I hadn’t even passed the island at all, I couldn’t tell.
Or what if I had never even seen an island? What if the shack had been a reflection in my glasses? A trick of the mind? Or maybe just a glimpse of the far bank?
Keep swimming.
Dusk began its descent and the gray darkened. After another five minutes, my toes met a slippery resistance. Then they found something hard. A rock. A congregation of cattails and weeds broke through the fog. Land. It was either the farthest bank, or the island, I couldn’t tell which.
I crawled through the mud and climbed up onto the land, my soaked clothes so heavy I felt like I was still in the water. The ground was soft and fell away as I clawed my way out of the muck, but I kept moving. Freezing, shivering, I crawled farther into the fog.
Finally finding relatively firm ground, I stood and stepped left, but my foot squished into something deep and wet. I was indeed on an island, a small one, no bigger than a classroom.
Then something solid emerged from the gloom, the wood so old and gray it was blue.
The shack.
I stepped closer. Thin dark edges, darker than the wood, emerged.
A door.
There was no handle. I stuck out my foot and gave the bottom a tentative kick. The door swung open slowly, the ancient hinges, thoroughly corroded from constant moisture, creaking loudly.
The inside of the shack was a deep, black space. I stepped over the rotten threshold. The floor was bare and squeaked underfoot, but the walls, warped and smelling of mildew, held the fog at bay, enough for more shapes to emerge.
I lowered my glasses and wiped them on my sweater. It didn’t bring much clarity, but at least the room wasn’t muted by mist. Through the streaks on the lens, my brain took a moment to process the entirety of what I was looking at.
First, a set of cloven hooves.
Then above them, a wiggling, squirming figure.
A loud grunt.
I covered my mouth. “Oh my God.”
42
In the middle of the shack, chained to a support column, sitting in the same antique chair as the one in my room—except this one old and distressed—was a struggling man.
He was bound and gagged, his head thrashing from side to side. I recognized his terrible hair cut immediately, that ugly perpendicular mohawk like the plume from a Trojan helmet worn sideways.
Roman Caesar.
He grunted again. He was trying to say something, but his words were muffled by the rag in his mouth.
I hesitated to step any closer. This was the man who had killed Phyllis. Dimitri.
Matt Mettle.
Yet here he was, tied up in the same chair in which Chrissy had been bound.
Had Kendall caught him? Had those “painters” taken him here in the canoe?
Dare I let him speak?
I backed toward the door. Caesar thrashed harder, trying to tell me something. My best bet was to head back to the main cabin and try to dry off and get changed before Kendall returned. Maybe with a new car and a briefcase full of cash, I could try to get to the bottom of all this.
Yet, what if Caesar knew something about Chrissy? What if every second counted?
I stepped toward him, the floorboards groaning. The rain on the roof had quieted and I could hear his skin chafing as he squirmed and fought to speak.
I put up a hand. “Okay, okay, stop moving. I will remove the gag.”
He screamed into the rag.
“Shut up. I will only remove it if you keep quiet.”
He calmed down.
“Okay,” I said, my hands up, and stepped closer.
His body language protested, as if I were the enemy.
“Don’t even pretend you’re the victim here,” I said. “We both know what you did.”
He tried to yell something into the rag again.
“If I take that out of your mouth, you have to promise me you won’t yell.”
He nodded vigorously.
“Okay, now calm down. Don’t bite me.”
Cautiously, I reached around the back of his head and untied the rag, doing my best to avoid touching his scaly scalp. I had to dig my fingernails into the knot, but once it was loose, I jumped back so he couldn’t bite.
Caesar spat the taste of the rag off his tongue. “I turned my back on God.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I wanted to be a minister.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have hidden Molly in your hymnal.”
“I wanted to feel the Lord.”
I knew it. It was molly, not weed as Kendall had said. “You killed Matt Mettle.”
He squeezed his eyes at the memory as if he were in horrible pain.
“You were a nice kid in high school,” I said. “Weird, but nice. What ha
ppened to you?”
“When I said I turned my back on God, I didn’t mean the old man in the sky,” he said.
Before I could ask him to clarify, bars of faint, white light swept across the floor. Headlights. A car was back, its beams muted by the fog.
“Where is my sister?”
“I don’t know your sister.”
“Don’t lie. Every boy in high school new my sister.”
“Not me!”
I glanced at the beams of light. I had to get back to the cabin. If Kendall found me down here, he’d never let me go.
I raised the rag to put it back in his mouth.
“No, no. Do not leave me here!”
I didn’t say I was sorry, I just shoved the rag into his mouth and tied it behind his head. He thrashed and put all his body into breaking away from the support column and the hooved feet stomped on the floor, shaking the whole shack.
I backed away and then turned and ran for the door. I kicked it open and ran three steps through the dark mist and jumped into the water. My body had dried enough that the cold was a shock again, but I ignored it and swam as hard as I could for the headlights. They were getting larger, stronger, and Kendall was close to parking.
I kicked as hard as I could, the fog hiding my splashes. Ahead, the crooked edge of the dock jutted toward me in the mist. Up the hill, the headlights had stopped growing and moving and were still, firing off into the distance above my head.
I paused and treaded water. Then the headlights shut off and I could hear the faint sound of the car door opening and closing.
I was too late. A dark figure, hazy in the fog, crossed the driveway and entered the main cabin and the lights turned on. I couldn’t tell if it was Kendall or someone else.
I kept treading, not sure what to do or where to go. If that figure was indeed Kendall, it would only be a matter of minutes before he realized where I had gone.
But if it wasn’t Kendall…
Through the haze, I could see the lights in the various rooms turn on, one after another, as the motion sensors tracked the figure’s path.
Whoever it was, was looking for me.
I kept treading. Something brushed past my leg. Then another thing. I bobbed up and down and tried to breathe steadily, tried not to think about the slimy things gathering around my legs.
An idea. A single chance. While the figure was in the cabin looking for me, I could run for the basement, grab a drill and a screwdriver and get that car started.
It would take a miracle.
But right now, a miracle was my only bet.
I swam hard for the dock.
43
The underwater vegetation felt like demon claws reaching up from the underworld and grabbing ahold of my legs and trying to pull me down. I twirled and kicked, trying to get my legs loose. I twisted onto my back, gave a hard downward kick with my heel, and then squirmed free and swam for the dock.
I put a hand up on the slimy wood and was kicking to squirm myself up onto the dock when a beam of light blasted from the main cabin. It waved back and forth and cut through the fog.
A flashlight.
“Rosemary Casket! Where in the devil’s name are you?”
It was Kendall. The light cut a bouncing beam as he marched down the hill, straight for the dock.
The light pointed at me and I slid back down into the water, hiding beneath the edge of the dock.
“Rosemary!”
He stomped across the dock, the whole structure shuddering above my head. I held my breath and slipped underwater, the seaweed scratchy on my face, my feet touching the soft bottom and then sinking. The mud pulled me under, my feet stuck.
“I know you’re down there! I saw your fingers!”
I struggled. The bottom of the lake was like quicksand. There was nothing to push off, no rocks, no nothing. The harder I pushed, the deeper the muck sucked me down. I thrashed and flailed, the bubbles escaping my lips and boiling the surface.
Suddenly, he grabbed my wrists and pulled me up. He dragged me onto the dock and rolled me over.
“Didn’t I tell you!” he shouted, saliva flinging from his lips. “It’s dangerous down here! I told you to stay away!”
I shivered, my hair clinging to the side of my face, my jeans covered with slime. He pulled off my glasses, wiped them on his sleeve, and then put them back on my face.
“I thought we had a deal.”
“We did,” I managed.
“Then why were you trying to escape?”
“I wasn’t. I came down here for a walk.”
“In the rain?”
“I-I needed to clear my head. I came down, but the dock was slippery and I fell in.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing?”
“No. I want to sign the papers. Can we sign the papers and be done with this?”
He looked at me suspiciously and then helped me to my feet. “You’re shivering. Let’s get you back inside.”
Not caring if his expensive suit got covered in slime, he put an arm around me to keep me warm and helped me climb the hill back to the main cabin.
Once inside, he sat me down at the table.
“You look like a mess,” he said.
Two briefcases sat on the table. On the counter, was another bottle of Red Rum.
He poured two shot glasses. The rum was so thick and red it looked like tomato juice.
“This will help you warm up,” he said and set the glass in front of me. “Drink.”
It was false comfort. “Where’s the money?”
“Right here,” he said and patted the second briefcase. He opened it and showed me. It was full of stacks of money, all crisp. “I had to beg my client to get the money upfront. And I don’t like to beg. But it’s all over now. He agreed and it’s settled,” he said. He took a pen from his pocket and rolled it toward me. Then he opened the first briefcase, pulled out the papers, and spread them in front of me. “Now sign.”
“I’m all wet. These will get soaked.”
He reached over and turned on the video camera. “It’s no problem. If we can’t read it, we have it on video.”
I clicked the pen. I stared at the papers. My eyes were misty, all the words a jumble through my streaked glasses. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.
“Your new car is waiting outside. Once you leave, my client will send someone to pick me up.”
My mother, my real mother, had wanted me to have this inn. Robert and the lawyers had worked tirelessly to save it. Phyllis Martin had died trying to take it.
And Matt Mettle had died trying to help me.
If I signed, it was all for nothing.
I gripped the pen. Every step of the way, Kendall had outsmarted me. He had orchestrated the downfall of my business, he had trapped me, and he had made it impossible for me to go back to Dark Haven.
Without another thought, I signed so hastily, so sloppily, it was if I planned to contest its validity.
He smiled and gathered up the papers and put them in his briefcase. “That wasn’t so hard, now was it?” he said and lifted his shot glass in a toast. “To new beginnings.”
I stared at him. The little red tally lamp on the camera blinked, making his face pulse in red.
“Go on. Toast,” he urged.
I picked up the shot glass.
“That’s better,” he said and clinked his glass to mine. “Now drink.”
I raised the glass, hesitating. Maybe it was better to get drunk, to escape into mindlessness, to leave the pain of everything behind.
But then what would I become?
A homeless drunk.
“Drink it,” he said louder.
I touched the rim to my lips. Then, defeated, I thought screw it, and threw it back.
“Good girl,” he said. He lowered his glass. “But here’s the thing. I told you not to go snooping around that lake, didn’t I?”
The room got fuzzy. I blinked har
d.
He gazed into his glass, marveling at the red liquid. “This batch, you see, is a bit over the hill. Not fit for drinking,” he said. He grabbed the bottle and set it down in front of me and turned it around so I could see through the glass at the back of the label.
The blinking light from the camera filled the empty part with red.
“Can you read that?” he said.
I blinked harder, everything fuzzy. My brain felt like it was leaking out my ears. I tried to concentrate, but could see nothing more than the back of the label, the logo warped and backward through the glass. Red Rum.
muR deR.
“Murder, she drank,” he said.
Before I knew it, I was pitching forward, the edge of the table coming up fast.
I didn’t even feel my head hit the wood.
44
“You stink,” he said. “You smell like decay. Like pond scum.”
I blinked awake.
“But it’s nothing a good fire can’t remedy.”
We were in the shack. An electric lantern hung from a nail in the roof. It swung gently, casting moving shadows, the glowing coils faintly buzzing like flies. My wrists were scratchy. Rope. I struggled, but was tied to the chair, my wrists bound behind me.
Kendall was standing over me, his faint shadow oscillating behind him. In one hand, the half-empty bottle of Red Rum hung against his thigh. In the other, he held the video camera at shoulder level. The red light was still blinking.
“My client likes proof,” he said. “One hundred proof.”
Beside, him standing a few inches taller, was the unmistakeable hair of Roman Caesar. I had taken his place in the chair.
And ultimately, I feared, Chrissy’s.
I had no idea how long I had been unconscious. It was long enough, at least, for Kendall to drag me out here and tie me up. We must have taken the canoe.
I glared up at Caesar. I was still whoozy from whatever Kendall had spiked the rum with and my words dribbled down my chin.
“Caesar was a lure, wasn’t he?”
