“Take it, take it,” she coaxed until the small island gusts carried the information left by Lucia Applegate for the person coming to retrieve her child. Her best friend, Molly. Only she never made it and Lucia/Missy never survived long enough to know that. But Annie knew: if Lucia’s dying act was to protect the boy, then she couldn’t undermine her wish—even if it meant putting herself in danger.
The flashlight flickered and the bright white glow dimmed amber and then eventually went out.
“Shit,” she mumbled as the darkness consumed the rock. She was alone. Truly and abysmally alone. Annie backed herself against the cement walls of the lighthouse barracks and tried not to think of the crypt behind her as the wind whipped and wailed through the building.
As the time continued to tick by, she wondered if anyone had even noticed she was gone.
It was early in the morning by the way the moon was placed in the sky. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. She heard the pilot’s voice first and then Vincent’s and she scrambled upward, hoping to find a place to hide from the voices. There was nowhere but the crypt and they would find her in there eventually.
Annie made herself as flat as possible and tried to listen closely as the group moved down into the cement housing unit, long abandoned and covered in salt and silt. Flashlights scanned the empty room and Annie’s heart permanently attached itself to her throat, a scream lodging deep within her.
“Here,” the pilot said and pointed them into the barrack. If Annie had hoped to hide in the makeshift crypt she would’ve been so disappointed. They made a beeline toward her as Vincent stumbled into the barracks and saw Annie almost immediately. He stomped over and grabbed her by her soaking shirt, lifting her up off her feet. She kicked and tried to fight, but he was taller and stronger. Annie went limp.
“What did she do with the boy?” Vincent asked. “Who’s he with?”
“There was nothing here,” Annie tried. “You left me here for nothing.”
Vincent raised his hand and Annie flinched, but he did not slap her face like she was expecting. Instead, he lowered his outstretched palm and slowly leaned forward to pinch her cheeks.
“You have no right to hide this child from me,” the man said. “I’m not the enemy here.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Annie cooed, his hands still on her. She glared at the pilot. “You left me.” He let her cheeks go.
“We came back. I had orders.”
“To leave me?”
The pilot shifted and Vincent looked to the ground. Annie, full of fear and fury, looked at the men in front of her and let out a primal yell of frustration. She’d endured the burgeoning storm and the crypt and he wanted to pretend as if everything was okay, but she was damp and frightened. The man stared down at her with power and intimidation.
“There was nothing,” she cooed, slinking down to the floor. “There was nothing.”
She’d made up her mind long before.
No one was going to find that boy.
The storm rose around them and the pilot tugged on Vincent’s arm.
“We have to leave now if we’re getting off this rock.”
“Where did she hide him?” Vincent said, spittle flying from his mouth. “Where did she hide him?” Vincent grabbed Annie by the fleshy part of her arm and Annie worked to free herself from his grip.
“You’ll never find him,” Annie said and she tugged her arm free. There was only one direction to run. Her bare feet slapping, Annie rushed out of the darkened barracks and into the night. The moon was now gone—eclipsed by the clouds. And in the dark she could barely make out the shore. She was trapped and there was no place to go—the men descended upon her now, shouting and calling in the storm.
The rain began to pour and slap against the stone.
Annie pushed herself against the rock and moved her hair out of her face. The only sound was that of the rain and the wind.
She didn’t have answers, but she didn’t care.
Vincent and the pilot were on her heels. “Grab her,” one of them said.
“Stop!” Annie screamed and she pulled her phone from her pocket and held it above her head. “You’ll never find him. She didn’t want you to find him. She didn’t want you—”
“She didn’t know what she wanted,” Vincent tried. The storm ate his words and Annie struggled to hear him. “She could make a decision for her own life, but she had no choice to take the boy.”
She didn’t know why the boy was important—but Annie didn’t care.
Without hesitation, Annie stared at her cell for one long second before she wound up her arm and tossed the small device as far as she could launch it. Then she lifted up her empty hands and took a step back.
“It’s over,” she said. “You’ll never find him.”
Her phone and the only thing left with a path to the boy was gone.
The pilot took off toward the helicopter, but Vincent approached her.
“Bitch,” he said, seething, and he grabbed her head and gathered up her hair and in one quick motion hit her head into the rocks.
“I know,” she managed to slur before the pain took over, thumping in her head and traveling down her body with white-capped peaks. As she slipped into sleep, she could hear the thwap-thwap of helicopter blades fighting the downpour. Annie’s body melded with the concrete and the rain, and as the pain tightened in her head, there was only person she wished she could call.
Benson.
His name was on her tongue as sleep pressed down, her mind heavy with regret and anger. They’d accomplished nothing—they uncovered a mystery and had to immediately shield it again—they’d flitted through someone’s life and dredged the muck from the bottom where it lay only to wish it could settle back down.
What had they been thinking?
“I’m sorry,” played on her lips to no one as the storm raged on.
She was thirsty by the time the sun began to rise up over the forest and trees visible inland, coating the ocean with a pale white light of early dawn from the east. Thirstier than she had ever been. The dryness coated her throat and her mouth and tricked her brain into believing she’d never drink fresh water again. The salt water around her was a tease and the gulls played around her body, floating in and out, squawking her awake.
Then the darkness stormed again. Her thirst eased.
Annie felt the water on her lips and the hands on her body, tugging her to freedom, but she wasn’t entirely lucid as the helicopter took off and landed in Seaside at the hospital.
She was fine. A little dehydrated and that was all.
Not even a concussion—the hit to her temple left a bruise but no lasting damage. And when the police came, she bit her lips and wondered what was safe to say.
“It was my idea,” Annie said, worried about how it would appear in the papers—a public defender caught trespassing on a wildlife refuge and disturbing the dead.
Her father appeared. She turned from him, but the police went away and as he stood sentry outside her door, Annie knew that whatever happened on that rock was relegated to lore and gossip: her real life was just a slip of something bigger and she wasn’t invited to know what.
Jack didn’t take his daughter’s hand.
“You should’ve listened to me,” he said.
Annie screwed her eyes tight and tried to push the ill-timed reproach from her mind.
“I listened to my gut,” she answered. She bit down on the inside of her cheeks and tasted the metallic tinge of blood. “Someone came to us and wanted help—”
“Molly, a friend from her old life. Not her sister. And for what? What did you accomplish?” Jack asked.
Annie knew he was right. She’d torn up the letter from Lucia to her best friend. Molly—a name Vincent couldn’t recall, but Annie knew. Molly, the only person who knew Lucia went into witness protection. And she was the only person she contacted when she missed her mother and wanted her son to see her mom again before she passed.
Moll
y never made it to the mausoleum. Four months after Lucia died on the beach, exchanging verbal directions with Schubert for the care of her child should her ex-husband find her, the rock was closed.
No one was allowed to see Terrible Tilly up close any longer and the secrets of the child’s whereabouts remained stuck in the middle of the ocean. Robin and Linda, without knowledge of Lucia’s plans, kept him safe for her. And no one knew. No one ever suspected. Until they came along and tried to help Molly find that lost boy. Why she lied and said she was her sister? Annie didn’t know, but she also didn’t care. The lie was told to seek help. Her intentions were good—to continue to search for the boy she’d lost.
The boy she’d lost to a clandestine arrangement between two women—who knew his worth and his value and his right to live. At the heart of Linda and Robin’s extravagant deception was women helping women.
They created a bond of women stronger than hate and murder and loss. Kinda like the club.
And her father knew the whole time.
“You could’ve told me,” Annie said.
“You should’ve trusted me,” Jack replied.
Annie began to cry. “That doesn’t work out for me, Dad,” she said and the tears fell faster than she could wipe them away. To her surprise, her father handed her a Kleenex and blotted it against her cheek. It was a simple act of empathy and affection that meant more to her than he could’ve realized. As a child, when she cried, he’d bribe her to stop the tears or he’d leave the room and expect her mother to tend to her sadness—when his sons cried they were required to buck up, but her tears flowed and netted her prizes and outings and unique gifts. Her father, the fixer. He took every bump and bruise and hiccup and smoothed it out with money and ice cream and lies.
And yet—he couldn’t fix her. Not really. He could only delay the inevitable realization that she was angry. Annie Gerwitz was exactly as she had been created: a machine, an overachiever with a bleeding heart, and a dedicated daddy’s girl.
She would always plow ahead no matter what, no matter who stopped her or shouted consequences.
She would always have trouble accepting things at face value.
She would always fall in love with the wrong men.
On her twenty-first birthday, when her parents forced themselves upon her party and bought her table of friends a bottle of Grey Goose Gin to share, her mother drunkenly giggled that she’d hooked up with her father while she was still technically married. But that she never questioned the morality of it because Jack was The One. It only took her longer to figure it out.
And the same night, as her dad with rosy cheeks, a sparkle in his eye, put his arm around her and kissed her temple, he said, “I’m proud of you, Annabelle.”
She remembered the surprise—he was proud of her then? Buzzed for the first time in a public bar, her friends and her parents sloshing around and telling inappropriate stories, laughing too loudly, the music thumping a bit too loud inside her head. Wasn’t he proud of her for her grades in school or her LSAT scores? Wasn’t he proud that she was having her first drink, there with them, at twenty-one?
And she said, “Why?” with such incredulity that he appeared stunned. He softened.
“You’re the product of true love,” he said with a tear in his eye. “So, you’re the most beautiful thing in the world.”
Young and romantic, she thought it was amazing and beautiful and she wrote it down in her journal that night as a testament to her specialness inside the family. She didn’t include the infidelity and the quick sex behind law books. No. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear and those parts didn’t define her identity. No. She was the child made with love. Her father lost his wife and her mother didn’t know she could say no to the man thrust upon her, her brothers’ bio-dad.
Annie took a breath and closed her eyes, too weak and too sad to move. She didn’t know she could no, she paused, sighed, again. Shit. We’re always just making our parents mistakes over again.
“I think I love him,” Annie said.
Her dad didn’t need context.
“Are you looking for my opinion?”
She opened her eyes and searched out her father’s infamous, steely gaze. Instead, she found him weary and sad—she wondered if he was reflecting back her own face and state of mind.
“No,” Annie said and the muscles in both of their faces relaxed. “No. I’m not.”
She was leaving in only a few hours, but after her family left, Gloria refused to leave her side. She’d driven down to the coast with her children in the car; and then she’d let them loose in Seaside with her debit card and a strict policy against goofy pictures dressed like cowboys.
“They love that shit,” her friend said and made the sign of the cross across her chest.
Annie took a breath and looked at Gloria, squinting. “Lucia and Missy. Lucia.”
“Uh-huh,” the woman said, not wanting to push further.
“She didn’t want her kid to go to her family. But she died because she reached out to her family…”
“Are you able to hear the B-name?” Gloria asked and Annie shot her a look of annoyance. Gloria waved the look away. She leaned in close and whispered something about Benson and Linda Remington’s Colorado property.
“She has a child who lives there with her. Goes to school in town. A boy. He’s fifteen. Erin was able to track school records…”
“Leave them all alone,” Annie said quickly and with a fearful look around the room, nodding and sniffing. No, she’d learned her lesson. Leave them all alone. She smelled a bit like honey and then she realized it was just the jam and honey basket the hospital sent for breakfast. She pushed the plastic food boat away with her elbow.
“Benson,” she repeated and shook her head. “The asshole. Good for him.”
“He expressed apology,” Gloria conveyed, but Annie knew that nobody was going to push her into any of this. Not her dad. Not the club. With a heavy sigh, she shrugged and turned away.
“I’m tired. I think I’ll rest before they kick me out.”
Annie turned into the fresh sheets and began to weep.
Instantly, Gloria stepped forward and rubbed Annie’s back and did not shame her or ask her questions. Instead, she let her cry and sob uninhibited, the last few weeks pouring out of her.
“Leave them all alone,” she continued to say as the tears rolled down her cheeks. “That’s all I want. Just leave them all alone.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Peggy stared at him over the edge of her modern glasses, dark and thick and bigger than necessary. She held his statement and read it again and again, scanning over his labored words with a hint of disapproval.
“It’s gimmicky,” she complained.
“It’s the only response you’re getting to the column and you have me slated for two more…”
“I’ll publish it,” Peggy said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t publish it.”
“I could have you removed from your position for what you did,” Benson said, but there wasn’t a bite to his voice. He was broken, defeated, but he understood everyone’s decisions in isolation. He had no blame for Peggy that he could not immediately put on himself. He wrote those words and he pitched them as truth and they bit him in the ass. He was going to own it, but that was it—he didn’t need anything else from Peggy.
“Please,” Peggy replied, brushing off his bravado. “You want to go pound for pound on this?”
No. He didn’t.
He’d lasted a week before sleeping with the woman who was the subject of the piece he’d written after she asked to be off the record. He had no ground to complain and he knew it—it just wasn’t in his nature to roll over. He wasn’t going to lose his job over it and Front Street was a fan of navel-gazing and meta-journalism anyway so he’d lucked out with his mea culpa piece.
They gladly offered up a spot to explain and let readers peek behind the curtain: He’d been fired from Twoly. And there was a girl.
A
girl who didn’t want him.
A girl who spent more energy pushing him away than bringing him close. And yet, she was the girl for him.
Peggy took the rage in his eyes and rushed right on over it without letting him respond.
“Benson, it’s done,” she answered, her lips pursed. “This is where we’re at. Are we moving forward?” She looked at her phone. “You have a plane to catch. Two hours.”
“No, you’re right. It’s done,” Benson repeated. There was no use in going around and around about the minutia—they’d used each other and both come up short. His apology would run the next day and the only thing he could hope for, pray for, try to orchestrate, was that Annie would see it.
He’d written it to her.
The file folder was neatly organized and Benson had the research on his lap for the entire plane ride to Denver. He rented a car and pulled up on to the gated property. He had permission and was expected, but he couldn’t help but get nervous as he pushed the doorbell to Linda Remington’s guest cottage.
From inside he could hear tender footsteps and a small laugh of recognition. Benson looked up; there was a camera in the corner. He waved.
Robin Schubert answered the door with her hair tied up in a bandana.
“Come on,” she said with a sly and awkward smile. “I can’t believe you’re here, you sly one. Come on. Come meet Louis.”
Lucia Applegate joined witness protection to save her son.
Robin poured Benson a tea. The file folder remained on his knees, shut and unmentioned—but they all knew he had the bulk of their secrets printed and ready to share. Only, he wouldn’t share them.
He handed the folder to Robin who placed it in her lap, tapping it gently with a thoughtful finger.
“Your group is a powerful force,” Robin said.
Savage Distractions (The Love is Murder Social Club Book 3) Page 26
