Veiled Threats

by Deborah Donnelly

  A flicker of movement caught my eye from inside. In a single simultaneous motion, as if the intruder's movements governed mine, overruling conscious thought, I dropped softly to the deck and slipped over the edge into the slick black water of the lake. My jeans soaked through in an instant, my shirt filled and billowed around me. I hung suspended, holding the splintery wood above with the fingers of both hands, while the cold water gripped me like a ruthless fist, squeezing the breath out of me in a single, painful gasp. My purse floated away, invisible in the shadows under the deck. I had to follow it, to disappear as well, but I hated like hell to let go.

  Footsteps, vibrating through the wooden deck. I let go, sinking down and then bobbing up, desperate to keep the water out of my nose and mouth. I lunged forward and reached blindly into the darkness. My hand met something thin and hard, slimed over with algae. A wire cable, one of the many that secured the houseboat to the log floats beneath. It felt revolting, and smelled worse, but I clung to it like a child to its mother, trying to fight the vertigo. Trying not to imagine the murky depths beneath my dangling legs. Black depths of choking water, drawing me down, closing over my face … I forced myself to breathe, slowly and silently, through my mouth. There was barely enough fetid, dripping space for my head to lift clear of the surface, but that space was my only sanctuary. My hair drifted around me like seaweed. I held on, and waited.

  Footsteps again, huge and hollow on the planking just inches above my upturned face. One of the men had come out on the deck. Had he seen me, heard me? Did he notice the telltale ripples that were spreading away from my hiding place under his feet? Silence. He shifted his stance. Then another set of footsteps, and the second man's voice, half-whispering, furious.

  “Get rid of that, you asshole! She knows the smell.”

  No answer. But a tiny red-gold ember arced into the water and sputtered out, close enough for me to touch. And to smell. A spicy, acrid scent, the one I had recognized in my living room weeks ago, the one I had caught just before my fall near the Parrys’ rose garden. So there was an attacker that night, and a real, not imaginary, intruder in my home when I came back from Victoria. He was here again tonight, and he smoked clove cigarettes. The discarded butt drifted toward me on the water's surface, level with my chin and my chattering teeth.

  I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes against a greater vertigo. It wasn't the cigarette smell, and the revelation it brought, that held me paralyzed with shock. It was the sound of the second man's voice. A light tenor voice, which I'd heard so recently, murmuring words of consolation and love.

  Holt Walker's voice.

  IT WAS ANGER THAT SAVED ME. AT FIRST THE SHOCK OF BEtrayal almost loosened my hold on the cable, and forced Holt's name aloud from my throat. But he and his companion would have hauled me out of the water like a hooked fish, and then what? The other man had attacked me once already, that night in the garden. The smell of his cigarette brought it all back: the dark swaying trees, the chilly wind, Nickie's jacket around my shoulders …

  Nickie's jacket. Of course. I held tight to my stinking, slippery lifeline, and cursed myself silently for a fool. The man on the deck with Holt Walker had mistaken me for Douglas Parry's daughter there in the dark woods, and my supposed fall was really an attempt at kidnapping her. Nickie's abductor was standing directly over my head.

  Along with his boss. That much was all too clear from the next words Holt spoke. “Andreas, what are you doing out here? We've got work to do.”

  “Thought I heard something.” The reply was sullen, with a guttural German accent, inaudible to anyone farther than a few feet away. “Listen.”

  They listened, while I held my breath and made the ugly, mortifying connections, step by step. If this man Andreas had kidnapped Nickie, and if he took orders from Holt, then Holt had planned it all from the beginning. Had deceived us all from the beginning. Not just when he let poor Ray open that package in the moonlight. Not just when he feigned alarm and outrage at St. Anne's, comforting Grace and Douglas in their grief. But before that, when he took me back to his apartment the day I found Gus butchered among the roses. When he made love to me—

  That was when the adrenaline hit. You made love to me, you bastard! You listened to all my little theories and you nodded sympathetically and then you put it to me, right there on the carpet. And I let you! In fact I came back for more, and all the while you were laughing at me.

  Fury, sheer humiliated fury, gave me a lifeline then, as distasteful but as solid as the cable I clung to. Holt and his buddy weren't going to haul me out of the water, because they weren't going to know I was there. I'd wait them out if it took all night. Above me, their footsteps shifted, then moved back inside. I slid gingerly along my cable, flinching as a sliver of wire bit into my palm, and strained to hear them. What work was there to do in my house, and how was it connected with Nickie?

  I couldn't think. My feet had gone numb, and the long bones of my legs were throbbing with cold. The silence from above stretched out, minute by minute, and with each minute the prospect of holding out all night grew more remote. Surely if I paddled away now, they wouldn't notice the ripples on the dark lake?

  The floats beneath the houseboat swung and creaked. From inside, it had always been a familiar, homey sound, one that formed the background of my dreams each night. But from where I hung now in the water, helpless and sodden, it sounded ominous, almost alive, a beast moving in a watery cave. I'd have to swim under the floats at some point, to reach the dock itself and work my way along it to the parking lot and the street. If I lost my bearings under the houseboat, if I ran out of breath and tried to come up before I reached clear water, hit my head or tangled myself in the wires and ropes—

  Something nudged my shoulder and I whipped my dripping head around. A piece of unidentifiable garbage, caught in the backwater made by the floats. Just like my corpse would be, if I didn't get out of here soon. Don't think about it, just move. I continued hand over hand along the cable, away from the deck edge and further into the darkness, trying to get up my nerve to dive under the houseboat. Then I had a better idea. What if I swam across instead, to the end of the next dock? Once I got there, I'd have more cover from their searching eyes, and less chance of alerting them with the sound of my escape. But I also ran the risk that they would glance out the kitchen windows and see me as I crossed the gap between the two docks.

  “Vat about in here?”

  The German voice again, from the study window. I couldn't make out the words of Holt's reply, and I didn't wait to hear more. The study was a tiny room beyond the bedroom, the entire length of the houseboat away from the kitchen. If they were both in there now, I had at least a minute or two in which to cross the open water between the docks. I pried my aching hands from the cable and dog-paddled along the weedy log that rose up at my shoulder. Anyone can swim. Lily had tried to teach me once, at a hotel pool in Vancouver. The human body is naturally buoyant. Just relax. Stroke and kick.

  I stroked and floundered, one hand and then the other lifted to ward off the treacherous wires, straining to keep my head up, straining to move quickly but silently. The edge of the deck was in front of me, a low black line against a strip of paler black water. Once I passed that edge, I'd be visible. I could see a dinghy moored alongside the houseboat opposite. I knew that dinghy. In the daytime it was cornflower blue, a cheery detail in the view from my kitchen. Five yards away? A dozen? I'd never thought about it. Now it was a washed-out gray hull rising up from my eye level, and it seemed impossibly distant. My feet, still in sneakers, dropped lower in the water, and I wanted to let my whole heavy body follow them. I was too tired, it was too far.

  Another creak above me. Were they coming? I sucked in a lungful of air, squeezed my eyes shut, and dove down and across toward the dinghy. I barely kicked, afraid of splashing, but I pulled myself along with low sideways sweeps of my leaden arms, growing weaker with each stroke. My chest was burning, but I stayed under. Hold on, keep going, hold o
n.

  Finally instinct conquered will and I shot to the surface like a panicky cork, rearing my head up to gulp the air. Along with the air, I got a glancing crack on the back of the skull. I went under, sputtering, then came up grabbing for a handhold. My fingers jammed painfully into a rough metal ring, and I pulled myself to the surface and hung on with both hands as the water drained from my mouth and the stars cleared from my vision.

  The ring was one link of an iron chain, rough with rust, wrapping a log float. I had passed under the dinghy, and come up beneath my sleeping neighbors’ houseboat. Invisible at last to Holt and his henchman, and almost giddy with relief, I thought about shouting for help. But the ruckus would alert Holt before it woke the neighbors, and whether he fled or the police stopped him, where would that leave Nickie? No, I had to think this over. But first I had to get out of the water.

  Wearily, I made my way along the length of the float. My hands barely obeyed me, and my legs trailed uselessly behind, heavy and numb. A hissing noise grew louder as I reached the farther edge of the houseboat: rain, slanting needles of cold rain pocking the surface of the lake and masking my escape even further. I considered climbing up and using the walkway, but there was still a chance that I'd be seen. So I stayed in the water, paddling and scrabbling from handhold to handhold: a rope, a chain, a guywire, the edge of a canoe that rocked wildly when I grabbed it.

  I lost track of time. The rain stung my eyes and clattered on the water, blurring sight and hearing. The handholds seemed to grow farther apart, and the effort of abandoning the security of one to lunge for the next was almost overwhelming. By the time I reached a small wooden ladder, and hung gasping from it, I was too dazed to understand why the water ahead of me was lapping against concrete instead of logs. Then I realized: It was the landward end of the dock. I'd made it.

  Streaming with water and shivering from cold, I lifted myself up the slippery rungs to the top of the seawall. I sprawled flat, and the cessation of effort felt so good, the reprieve so welcome, that I nearly fell asleep on the spot. Then the wind picked up, drilling the rain even harder against my skin, and the shivering became a hypothermic shudder, uncontrollable and alarming.

  I thought about Lily, but she had bowed out of this whole tangle, and with good reason. It wouldn't be fair to drag her back in. There was Eddie, too, but with my cell phone in my purse at the bottom of the lake, I'd have to find a pay phone.

  And besides, why would Eddie even speak to me? No, I had to get inside somewhere, get warm, and very soon. My immediate neighbors on the dock were so close that Holt might hear my efforts to roust them out of bed. And there was no one I knew living in the apartments and condominiums within walking distance.

  Wait a minute. Yes, there was. I sat up, then stood up, my legs unsteady and my feet uncooperative, and looked around. The after-midnight, before-dawn darkness was broken up with streetlights here, and through the haze of cold and fatigue I knew just where I was. The parking lot was in front of me, the docks behind. That meant the Lakeshore Apartments, where Aaron Gold lived, were somewhere off to my right. Too exhausted to look for pursuers, or even to care, I started walking.

  “WHAT THE HELL?”

  A man in an intensely plaid bathrobe was staring at me from the open doorway of apartment thirteen. Lucky thirteen. Aaron Gold. The man in the robe was Aaron Gold, and he was going to help me. But help me with what? I had forgotten, somewhere back there in the rain, stumbling past the silent homes and the empty cars. Mind and body were both numb, my bleeding hands and banged-up skull so distant that they might as well belong to someone else, someone who had to reach apartment thirteen. Now that I had arrived, my purpose in being there eluded me, sinking from sight like a stone in deep water. In cold, black, bottomless water—

  “Don't cry! Carnegie, come in, don't cry. I didn't recognize you, that's all.”

  He put an arm around my waist, and at the touch of his hand I crumpled like a puppet with cut strings. There was a clumsy tangle of limbs, a lifting and lurching, and then I was slumped across a sofa. I could hear water dripping onto the floor. Maybe there was a leak in the roof. Or was it me? Must be me. Gold was talking, his irritating East Coast voice growing nearer and then fading out, but the words didn't make any particular sense. Not that I cared. I was drifting in a heavy, pleasant torpor. Even the shuddering didn't bother me anymore. If only that troublesome voice would go away. Then I could sleep, drift to sleep …

  “Your lips are blue! Here, let's get a blanket around you, you're like ice. And you're soaked. Is it raining that hard? Carnegie, wake up! Was it a car accident? Is anybody else hurt? Answer me, dammit!”

  “No!” My own voice was weak and whiny. I coughed and tried again. “Nobody else. Just me.”

  “Where's your car?”

  “There isn't any c-car,” I said petulantly. My teeth were going like castanets. “Why do you keep t-talking about cars?”

  “OK, never mind that. Do you need a doctor?”

  I shook my head, most of the motion lost in shuddering.

  “You sure? All right, wait a sec.”

  He disappeared, and I heard the rubbery squeak of a faucet and the gush of water drumming in a bathtub. Oh God, a hot bath. Clear, shallow, hot water. The thought roused me just enough to realize how cold I was, cold to the bone. It took a few minutes to marshal my strength, then I staggered to my feet. A fringed chenille bedspread fell from my shoulders and tangled around my knees, but I kicked it away with a sob and followed the gushing sound down a short hallway to a small, brightly lit bathroom. Aaron Gold reached out to me. I pushed past him and stepped into the half-filled tub.

  “Most people take their shoes off first,” he said mildly.

  I didn't reply. I was busy scootching down, as deep as I could manage, into the bath water. As the tub filled, the mud and scum from my clothes turned the water to greenish murk, but it was hot murk and that was all that mattered. Kneeling by the edge, Gold shoved back the sleeves of his robe and lifted my ankles, one at a time, to pull off my sneakers. They came free with a sucking sound. My feet were wrinkled and fish-belly white.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You didn't get this wet just in the rain. Were you in a boat accident? Or do they go in for midnight swims around here?”

  I was almost capable, now, of rational speech. “Give me some time, would you? There's … there's a lot to explain.”

  “No kidding. I'll get you some dry clothes. You want help getting out of those jeans?”

  “No!”

  He raised his hands, all innocence. “Just checking. Your womanly virtue is safe tonight. No offense, but you smell like low tide.”

  He left, pulling the door half shut behind him. I picked at the buttons of my shirt, but the sodden cloth resisted my numbed fingers, so I gave up and plunged my hands back into the filthy water. The heated current from the faucet swirled below the surface around my bare feet, and the steam drifted up, veiling the turquoise tiles around me. I ceased, for a time, to be conscious of anything except the painful pleasure of getting warm.

  I was warming up to rational thought as well, and as the feeling stole back into my fingers and toes, I thought about Holt Walker. Smooth, suave, professional Holt must be working for Keith Guthridge, or for the men behind him. How convenient to kidnap Douglas Parry's daughter, if you had Douglas Parry's closest friend on the payroll! But why had Holt broken into my houseboat tonight?

  Come to think of it, he hadn't broken in. He'd used a key. I could clearly recall the sound of it turning in the front door lock. But I hadn't given him my key, and no one else had an extra. No one except Eddie. I sat upright in the tub, the water sluicing off me in smelly rivulets. Surely not Eddie. That was crazy; I was crazy even to imagine it. Embezzlement was one thing, but conspiring in a kidnapping? It was unthinkable. Just as unthinkable as my smoldering, green-eyed Prince Charming chopping off Nickie's hair. Or had Andreas done that part? And what else had they done by now?

  “I don't have any
thing wedding-colored, Wedding Lady, so you have to make do with this stuff.” Gold poked his head around the door and dumped some clothes on the toilet lid. “Hey, your eyes are all the way open, that's good. You want some hot soup, hot coffee, hot something?”

  “Coffee,” I said absently.

  “Coming up.”

  I pulled the plug and stood up. Unbuttoning the shirt was impossible, so I peeled it over my head and dropped it on the floor, then struggled wearily out of my jeans. Something chinked when they hit the floor. My keys were still in the pocket, where I'd shoved them after Lily dropped me off. I smiled grimly. If Holt and his sullen friend had locked the door behind them, I could still let myself in. But what would I find when I did?

  I shook my head in angry confusion. A hot shower and a lot of soap; then maybe I'd be able to think straight. I didn't see any shampoo, so I used the soap on my hair, then rubbed myself briskly dry with a threadbare blue towel and got dressed. Of the heap Gold had left me, only the socks fit. The gray sweatpants stopped well short of my ankles, and the paint-spattered navy sweatshirt left my wrists bare. But it was all clean and dry, and so was I. I wrapped the towel tightly around my hair, binding every damp curl up and out of the way, and then I made the mistake of swiping away a clear spot in the steamed-over mirror.

  The face in the mirror was frightful. Thin, deadly pale, with huge bleak eyes and bloodless lips, and an open cut above one temple, from which a thread of blood was tracing its way over my cheekbone like a brilliant red scar. I cleaned off the blood with a tissue and unwrapped the towel, shaking my hair loose over my shoulders.