You May Now Kill the Bride

by Deborah Donnelly

  There I go judging by appearances again, I chided myself. Donald looked and sounded like a fool, a nerd, an ineffectual man of no account. But when I recalled the nasty details of that e-mail he had forged, the sexual violence it spelled out, my mouth went dry and my foot slipped on the gas pedal.

  “Watch it! Drive right or I’ll kill her.”

  Slowly, carefully, I turned left onto Roche Harbor Road. That took us toward Friday Harbor, more cars and more people, and maybe more chances for escape. We passed the turnoff for Lavender and Lace, and I could read Lily’s thoughts as she watched it go by. Mike would be there soon, and so would her little boys. Would she ever see them again? Would I ever see Aaron?

  My knuckles went white on the steering wheel, and I made myself take a slow breath. Time to think, not feel. I was still buzzed from the champagne, but now the caffeine was kicking in—a potent combination. So use it. Think . . .

  Darwin would be showing up at the Owl’s Roost sometime soon to fetch Lily. He’d find us gone, but would he realize that my vehicle was absent as well? No, he’d never seen Scarlet. So what would he do? Try Lily’s cell phone, and mine, but both were lying useless inside 6C. He’d knock at the office, but Donald had locked that door when we left. Would Dar look inside and see Pamela’s body? I couldn’t recall if those windows were curtained—

  “Why’d ya go this way?” Donald, unfortunately, had also calmed down and begun to think. “I didn’t say to drive into town! Turn here. Turn!”

  I turned, onto something called Egg Lake Road. We went through some woods and then passed a little fishing dock, a sign for Amity Gardens, another sign for some kind of herb farm. Traffic was sparse along here, more bicycles than cars, and no one gave us a second glance.

  Eventually Lily and I would be late for the wedding, and Mike would get worried, but how could he possibly find us? How long would it be before he asked the county police to put out a bulletin for this car, and how long would Donald’s nerve last? Maybe quite a while, I told myself, trying to summon up some optimism. If we don’t provoke him, if we don’t do anything to—

  “Donald, please listen to me.” Lily used the composed and respectful tone she took with difficult library patrons. “The shooting was an accident. Carnegie and I were both witnesses, and we’ll both testify to that.”

  Oh, my God, I thought. She doesn’t know. Lily didn’t know that she was sitting next to Guy Price’s murderer. And even if she suspected, she hadn’t read that e-mail, she couldn’t guess at the poisonous rage that roiled and burned inside Donald Coe. I tried to catch her eye in the rearview mirror, but she was looking downward with a little frown, concentrating, moving from one phrase to the next like stepping-stones across a dangerous current.

  “If you take us back right now,” she said, “then you haven’t committed any kind of crime. Do you understand? The shooting was just—”

  “Shut up!” he squealed. “Just shut up and let me think!”

  He must have prodded her hard with the gun barrel, because Lily gave a startled moan.

  “Which way?” I said quickly. “There’s an intersection coming up. Donald, please tell me which way to go.”

  That distracted him, and just as I hoped, it seemed to give him more sense of control.

  “Take a right, and then a left on Boyce Road. That’s it . . . left here. We’ll stay on the back roads and then . . .”

  And then what? That was the crux of the matter. We couldn’t drive around the island forever. Sooner or later Donald would have to chance the ferry dock, but he must know how risky that would be. Or would he try to steal a boat?

  The possibilities ran through my brain as they must be running through his, while we rolled down one shady lane and then another, emerging into sunshine and then plunging into shade again, passing farms and shops and country inns, circling the interior of the island and then transversing it north and south until it felt like we’d been driving forever.

  Except for Donald’s clipped directions, none of us said a word. And eventually even the directions ceased. I watched him in the mirror as he chewed on his lower lip, lost in thought. Glad enough to have him quiet, I just kept driving.

  I watched Lily too, and as I watched a tear brimmed in each eye and ran silently down her cheeks. I knew, just as though I could read her mind, that she was thinking about Marcus and Ethan. Then she looked up and saw me. I made myself smile, and she gave me a brave smile back and blinked the tears away.

  Hang on, girl, I was telling her, and she was telling me the same thing. Hang on.

  By this time I’d completely lost track of our location. We were on Cattle Point Road, which sounded familiar though I wasn’t sure why. Trees went by, sunlight flickered, more trees, and then the road began to rise as we left the woods behind. We climbed onto a wide windy plateau of golden grassland, and I recognized the prairie landscape of American Camp.

  The road was empty, though, and the visitor center up ahead and the open fields around it looked deserted. Where were all the tourists? My heart sank as I remembered: closed for renovations. And this was Sunday. Not even construction crews would be out on a Sunday morning.

  “Whadja come here for?” said Donald, suddenly coming out of his funk. “Go back north. I don’t want—what’s that? What’s that noise?”

  The dashboard was dinging at me. I searched the indicators and almost laughed aloud, though it would have been a panicky laugh. India had been right about the SUV.

  “Donald, we’re running out of gas.”

  “What? Oh, damn. Oh, dammit!” He peered frantically around, paralyzed with indecision. “What . . . where . . .”

  “There’s a grove of trees ahead,” I said soothingly. “Why don’t I drive in there, so no one can see the car?”

  Concealing Scarlet was the last thing I wanted to do, but pulling Donald back from the brink of hysteria seemed more important. And who would search for us here anyway?

  Donald nodded eagerly. “Yeah, OK, drive in.”

  I eased the car off the road, bumping along on the tussocky ground, and crept into the dappled shade along the fringe of the grove. Then I carefully set the parking brake and willed my hand to be steady as I turned off the engine. This might be our only chance.

  “Donald, I have really got to pee, and I bet Lily does too. Would you please let us get out for a minute? Please.”

  “Well . . .” More lip-chewing. “Well, all right.”

  “Thank you.”

  I looked into the rearview mirror as I said it, but I keep my expression blank. Lily, returning my gaze, did the same. I gazed deep into her eyes, and it was as close to mental telepathy as I’ll ever get. We were ready.

  Moving slowly, keeping my hands in view, I climbed out of the driver’s seat and stood passively beside it, acting the compliant hostage as best I could. The morning was still, the leaves hanging motionless, and I could hear the dry grass rustling under my peach-colored slippers. Lily emerged from the backseat, also on the driver’s side, so that her door hung open between me and Donald as he scooted across to follow her.

  Lily tugged her purple ruffles clear of the car. . . . Donald put one foot on the ground and brought his gun hand into the open. . . . The muzzle wavered away from her just for an instant . . .

  “Go!” I screamed as I shoved at the door with all my strength, slamming it into Donald and briefly pinning his arm against Scarlet’s side. “Go!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  It almost worked. When the door hit him Donald yelled in surprise and pain, and dropped the pistol. I snatched it up triumphantly, the grip still sweaty from his hand. I didn’t know how to shoot it, exactly, but with Pamela’s fate in mind I did know enough to put a safe distance between me and Donald before I threatened him with it.

  My slippers crunched on the dry turf as I backed away. Donald grunted and freed himself from the car, nursing his arm but apparently uninjured. His eyes were fixed, just as mine had been back at the office, on the muzzle of the gun.


  “Just stay . . . right there. . . .” I panted, feeling cold and almost sick from the adrenaline rush.

  I gave a fast glance sideways, out of the grove toward the open field, where Lily had hiked up her skirts and gone sprinting for the safety of a little white farmhouse. It made quite a picture, that glorious purple satin rippling across the burnt gold of the meadow, with a white picket fence stretching out between her and the farmhouse.

  A picket fence and a flagpole. So intent had I been on driving, and on Donald, that I hadn’t realized we were so close to the officers’ quarters. And Lily had never been to American Camp, so she didn’t know she was fleeing to an empty building.

  “Never mind!” I shouted to her. “You can come back, I’ve got the g—aaagh!”

  My right foot plunged into a rabbit hole, my right arm windmilled, and somehow the gun went flying right back at Donald, to land in the weeds near his feet. He had it leveled at me before I even regained my balance.

  At first he was too angry to speak, his eyes bulging ominously and his mouth working without a sound. I brushed the grass stems off my silk backside and waited, afraid he would read my thoughts in my eyes.

  If he doesn’t know the house is empty, I thought, if Lily stays inside there and he thinks she found a phone, I could bluff him. . . .

  But Donald knew. He lived on the island, he probably sent his guests to this park all the time. He knew.

  “Go after her,” he said, and motioned with the pistol. “Stay in front of me with your hands stretched out sideways. Walk real slow, damn you.”

  Lily saw us coming from the porch of the house, saw that I was once again Donald’s prisoner, and for my sake she obeyed his next instructions and went inside.

  He wanted to tie us up this time, I could tell. But the interior, dim and musty and lit only by dazzling splinters of sunlight from the shuttered windows, offered him nothing to work with. No rope or twine, not even an electrical cord, just a long table with some antique-looking tools, a row of quaint uniforms hanging on hooks—for historic reenactments?—and a few incongruously up-to-date folding chairs.

  One of the tools was a coarse iron blade with wooden hand grips on either end, for making oxen yokes or barrel staves or whatever the hell they made in the 1850s. Donald saw me eyeing it and suddenly shoved me away from the table.

  “Take a chair over there and sit. You too,” he said to Lily, indicating a spot a few yards away. “Sit on your hands, both of you.”

  That shove was the first time Donald had touched me, and I desperately wanted it to be the last. An image formed in my mind of him picking up that tool himself, to use the blade on one of us, and I had to clench my teeth to keep from retching.

  Lily and I sat on our hands, in our beautiful new gowns, and Donald retreated to stand near the door and contemplate his hostages. We looked at him, at the space between him and our chairs, and then across at each other.

  The deep purple satin of Lily’s dress was swallowed by the darkness, but the whites of her eyes showed clear, as mine must have. Once again we exchanged thoughts without words. We could rush for the gun, but by the time we crossed that open space to the door one of us would die trying. Or maybe both. Probably both.

  So we sat, and went on sitting while Donald Coe tried to decide what to do next. After a time the wind came up, whining and growling in the rickety old timbers of the building. The sun was still bright, but a squall must be coming across the strait. I could hear it in the hissing of the high meadow grasses, and in the way the flag on its pole crumpled and cracked like the sail of a boat.

  The wind made Donald restless. He fidgeted and muttered and even paced a little, back and forth at his end of the room, as if he were the captive and not the captor. His pudgy features were mostly in shadow, but the random lines of sunlight from the gaps in the shutters sometimes glinted off his glasses or slipped along his pale legs in their ridiculous plaid shorts.

  After a while the muttering grew louder, though no more understandable, and between that and the noise of the wind I risked a whisper. I should have voiced some plan for escape, but I didn’t have one, and this was more important.

  “I love you, Lily.”

  “I love you, girl.” She swallowed hard and held her head high. “Mike will take care of the boys.”

  “You and Mike together. You’ll see.”

  She opened her lips to reply, then pressed them tight and turned her face away as Donald strode suddenly toward us. He raised the gun, its muzzle seeking first Lily as a target, and then me, and then Lily again, like the head of a snake uncertain where to strike.

  “All right!” he said, angry and indignant, as if we’d been arguing with him. “All right, I’m leaving the island. But not with both of you. I only need one.”

  Donald’s eyes slid back and forth from Lily’s face to mine. He’d stabbed Guy in the back, in the darkness, and he hadn’t meant to kill Pamela. But two innocent women, sitting helpless . . .

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, was it?” I said gently. “No one was supposed to die except Guy Price.”

  “He deserved it! Sneaking around, ruining everything. I’m telling ya, he had it coming!”

  “But we don’t.” I didn’t mention Pamela, for fear he’d kill us all in his despair. “We haven’t hurt you, Donald, and you don’t have to hurt us. We could help you get away and then—”

  A stronger gust of wind buffeted the side of the house, rattling the windows, and all three of us started.

  “You did too hurt me!” Donald stamped his foot like some grotesque overgrown child. “You hurt me with the car! You shouldn’t have done that. You’re too much trouble and I’m not taking both of you.”

  Slowly, hypnotically, the snake’s head swayed side to side in the air. Then it paused, to hover at a point in between us.

  “No!” said Donald, as if the word had been torn from his chest. “No, I won’t pick. You two pick. Which one of you is coming with me? You have to say.”

  “We won’t say.” Lily’s face was roused and fierce. “We’re not going to help you do this.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  She looked at me in furious disbelief. “Carnegie, you’re not—”

  “Take Lily with you, Donald.” I had to raise my voice to override her protest—and the drumbeat of my own heart. “She has two little boys. You can’t leave them without their mother. And there’s another reason. Her fiancé—”

  “Stop it!” Lily cried.

  “Her fiancé is a police officer. He’ll make sure that you get away, Donald, just to save her. But if you kill her, Mike will hunt you for the rest of your life. Quiet now, Lily. I mean it.”

  As I was speaking I began to stand up, moving gradually and deliberately. My mouth was like sand, but at least I wasn’t weeping. The drumbeat grew so loud that I was deafened, and the fear was so great that it flooded through me, pouring outward from my heart to push against every inch of my skin like air in an overfilled balloon.

  The drumbeat became a roar, an overpowering roar in my ears, growing louder and louder until I thought it would shake me to pieces. But then, I don’t know how or why, the fear vanished. It simply evaporated, leaving nothing behind but the resolve to stand tall and get this finished before Lily could stop me.

  I was on my feet now. Donald lifted the pistol and pointed it at my chest. I took a long step forward, then drew a tremulous breath and held it. I closed my eyes.

  And that’s when we heard the voice on the bullhorn.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Donald Coe! This is Detective Lieutenant Anthony Orozco of the Washington State Patrol. Let the women go so we can talk.”

  I thought Donald was going to pass out. Even in the dimness I could see his face go scarlet. Then the blood drained away, leaving him pale and queasy-looking, and he gnawed his lip so hard it made me queasy myself. The gusting and blustering of the wind must have masked the sound of engines, and now there was no telling how many po
lice cars were out there. Or how many guns.

  “The house is surrounded, Donald. Let the women go.”

  “Oh, no,” he muttered to himself. “Oh, no. No sirree.”

  “Listen to me, Donald. Your wife is still alive. She’s been taken to the hospital, but she’s going to be all right.”

  Donald’s head whipped toward the door, and his voice came out a whimper. “Pamela?”

  Behind me I could sense Lily standing up, but she didn’t make a sound.

  “Now let me see the women so that I know they’re alive. Let them come to the door.”

  Donald seemed to reach a decision, because the gnawing stopped. He moved to one side of the door, keeping the pistol leveled at us.

  “You, Lily,” he said. “You get out there.”

  She walked forward tentatively, and as she passed through a narrow plane of sunlight one amethyst earring danced and sparkled.

  “Can I talk to them?” she asked quietly.

  “Of course ya can!” snapped Donald. “I said get out. Go find your fiancé and tell him I didn’t lay a finger on you. Go on!”

  Lily turned pleading eyes to me. “But, Carnegie—”

  “Go,” I told her. “Just go.”

  She went, and Donald closed the door quickly behind her. He kept it open just a crack, though, and watched her while glancing back at me every few seconds, the gun still raised. I could tell by the way his shoulders dropped that Lily had reached Orozco, and I imagined Mike embracing her.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Her sons will—”

  “Never mind that. Come over here and do exactly what I tell you. Now listen . . .”

  The sunshine was blinding after the gloom inside. Donald, using me as a shield before him, moved the two us full into the open doorway and halted. He had yanked my arms behind me and slid his own left arm through my crooked elbows, leaving his right hand free to press the muzzle of the gun to the base of my skull. His hand was trembling, and so was I.