At first I couldn’t see anything through the swirling snow, but a second later I was able to pinpoint my surroundings. I was faced too far toward the lake. Jeez, I had grown up here and had still managed to get myself turned around. I tracked the light slowly toward the shelter, but before my beam landed on any canoes, it caught something in the snow.
“What do you see? What do you see?” Freddie asked, reading my mind.
“Um…”
“Um, what?”
“Footprints. I see footprints.”
I had forgotten to look for them too.
“Well, they’re probably hunter girl’s, right?”
“Right.” I swallowed hard as I swept the flashlight back in the other direction following the trail … but deep down I already knew where they led.
You see, there wasn’t much in the front clearing of the lodge. In the summer, there were a few picnic tables, a couple of half-barrel planters for flowers, sometimes a volleyball net … but this time of year, there was just the one thing.
A boulder.
Big enough that I would climb on top of it as a kid to gain a couple feet to see up over the trees to the lake …
… also big enough to hide behind if you wanted to watch the lodge hidden from view.
My heart thumped again against my ribcage. Not because of the size of the boulder. Although that was bad enough, given the whole hiding situation. But still, that wasn’t what had me worried.
It was how close it was.
I bit my lip.
Twenty feet? Thirty, if I was lucky.
Those footprints could be Ashley’s or Brody’s. But I knew better. I just knew. They had no real reason to hide.
“Erica?”
I edged my beam closer and closer to the rock, and just as I caught its edge …
… a figure rose up from behind.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I did what any sane person would do.
I screamed and fell backward into the snow.
My phone was screaming too. Maybe even louder than I was.
My flashlight dropped into a drift, causing me to lose sight of the head that had been rising up from behind the boulder. I scrambled backward, turning at the same time to get to my feet. There was no time to get my flashlight back, but I didn’t need it. I could see the lodge glowing maybe a hundred yards away. I just had to get there.
My feet pounded through the snow, slipping back with every step.
I wasn’t going to make it.
He was right behind me.
I shot one look over my shoulder and screamed again.
I could barely hear Freddie shouting, “What’s happening?”
“Assassin! Assassin!”
It was definitely him. I couldn’t make out anything but his size, but that was all I needed—unless there was another seven-foot man on the island. Any doubts I had about Rhonda’s story spun away with the whirling snow.
I pushed forward. Harder. Faster. My lungs burned with the cold as my mind screamed for me to keep running, but my legs were heavy and slow.
Come on, Erica. Don’t give up. Come on!
But just then, my right foot landed in a deep patch of snow, and when I pulled my foot back up, my boot was left behind.
Didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. I just needed to get away. Needed to get to the lodge. I couldn’t feel anything anyway … until the hand landed on my back.
The weight of it knocked me to the ground, taking my breath away. Snow pressed into my eyes and mouth. I flipped over again and scrambled backward in a crabwalk, phone still in my hand. I couldn’t get up this time though. Not with the man looming over me, covered in white, looking almost like a snowman. A seven-foot-tall murderous snowman with a crescent-shaped scar. Yup, I’d be seeing that in my dreams. If you had dreams when you’re dead.
I shuffled back some more. Every time my hand came out of the snow, I could hear Freddie yelling.
“Don’t you touch my fr—”
Dunk.
“I’ll hire twenty assassins! Fifty! If you so much—”
Dunk.
“Get ready for the dark web of Freddie, psycho! Population, y—”
Dunk.
I didn’t dare turn to run. I needed to see if the man looming over me was going to move to hit me again.
But he didn’t. He just kept walking forward with every move I made back.
What was he doing?
More important, what the hell was I going to do?
“The police know you’re here,” I shouted into the wind.
“Yeah!” I thought I heard my phone shout distantly.
“They’ll be here any second. Looking for you.”
“Any second!”
The man didn’t say anything.
“You’re a business man. It’s time to cut your losses.”
Nothing.
“Think about it. Are you even getting paid to kill me?”
Still nothing.
I crab-walked back another step, leading with my hands, snow burning my wrists.
This time he didn’t follow.
I moved back again.
He stayed in his spot.
I slowly got up to my feet, and took one step back. Then another.
I thought I heard, “Erica?” muffled through my snow covered phone.
The man didn’t move.
Didn’t have to tell me twice. I pivoted hard and ran for the lodge.
I didn’t hear him following, but I also didn’t dare look back either until I was up on the porch.
Nothing but darkness. Almost like he too had been whirled away in the snow.
“Freddie! I’m okay. I’m—” I grabbed the handle to the front door and pushed. Its lack of give nearly sent my face careening into the wood.
“Okay,” I shouted. “Who locked the door?”
Chapter Twenty-eight
“So let me get this straight,” Ronnie said, pointing at me with the Scotch bottle in her hand. “You think this dark webbed assassin—”
“Web!” Julie said for the fourth time. She was sitting back on the couch with Kenny. We decided it best to close all the curtains. “Web. Like the Internet?”
“Web,” Ronnie corrected, rolling her eyes. She was barely holding onto consciousness. “And he wants to kill us?”
“Guys, we don’t have time for this. There’s another cabin on the island. We’ll be safer there.” Maybe. “We need to go. Like now,” I said, hopping while trying to pull on one of my mom’s way-too-small boots. And yes, I was still trying to save these people even though they had temporarily locked me outside. They had claimed that it wasn’t really me they were locking out. They were just scared. It was hard to blame them. “We are fish in a barrel in here.” I had ended the call with Freddie pretty much as soon as I got inside. He was off to find help anyway.
“Wait. Wait. Wait,” Ronnie went on. “So there’s an assassin, and you think he’s going to kill us.”
“Yes!” We hadn’t told Ronnie about the screams we had heard earlier, but I was getting close. I couldn’t speak for anyone else, but it seemed cruel to tell her when we didn’t know for sure what we’d heard. Plus, there was no way Ronnie could go looking for her daughter herself, and I couldn’t do it for her. I looked over to Kyle. He was sitting in the corner of the room against the wall still dressed in winter clothes, a helmet, and hockey pads. He had gone very quiet and was doing a good job of staring at the floor. I think he was trying to block out everything at this point. The stuff going on in his head was probably more than he could take. “Now get ready. We’re going.”
“But he’s not trying to kill me, right?” Ronnie said, before taking another swig from the bottle. “Or Ashley? Because we probably won’t get a dime—”
“I think we have to assume we are all at risk,” I said again. “They’ll have to construct a crime scene that makes sense and that will be hard to do with witnesses. Right … Chuck?” I looked around the room. “Where’s Chuck?”
“He’s a…” Ronnie said, meshing the words together into a za sound, “Washroom! I saw him when I was done with the…” she waved her hand around her mouth in a puking motion. “Where’s Ashley? I need to talk to her. She said some mean, mean things to me.” Suddenly Ronnie looked like she might start drunk weeping. “Ashley?” she shouted, stumbling off toward the kitchen. “Baby?”
I closed my eyes, wondering if I could just knock Ronnie out and throw her over my shoulder.
“Why didn’t he kill you?”
I opened my eyes. They landed on Julie. “What?”
“Why didn’t he kill you when he had the chance?” Wow, she was not happy. Those two spots of color were back on her cheeks, and her eyes had an angry sparkle to them. I couldn’t blame her. Julie was smart, and she was worried about Kenny, worried about herself, and here I was adding an assassin to the mix. Then again, I couldn’t know anything for sure about Julie, could I?
I shook my head and looked down at my hands. “I don’t know.” It was the truth. Maybe what I had said about making sure he got paid had had an effect. But it still felt like I was missing something. “I don’t know.”
“Are you all right?” she asked me again.
I flicked my eyes back up to hers. She didn’t try to hide her expression one bit. She wasn’t asking out of concern. She was really asking me if I was going to be a problem. Yeah, right back at ya.
“I’m fine.” Okay, that may have been a little bit of a lie. I hugged my jacket closer to my body. I just could not get warm.
“And who do you keep texting?”
“Oh,” I said looking up. I hadn’t even realized I had pulled out my phone again. “I have lots of friends in the sheriff’s department. I’m just checking to see if we’re any closer to help arriving.”
She nodded, but didn’t look all that convinced.
“Are you coming?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I can’t leave Kenny.”
I ran a hand over my face.
“What can I say? I might even be … in love with the guy.” She looked down at him, and brushed some hair from his brow. “How ridiculous is that?”
A heavy tumble of emotions fell over me. Fake name or not, it was hard to imagine Julie being behind all of this. She was clearly in love with Kenny, and you could tell it was the kind of love that hoped for a future, a future that wouldn’t be risked for money. Then it again that was the kind of future I wanted with Grady, and I was messing that up all the time. I sighed. “It’s not ridiculous at all.”
She met my gaze again. I guess she saw something there because she nodded.
I turned away quickly, taking a step toward the back hallway. “How long has Chuck been in the bathroom?”
“I’ll go check on him,” Kyle said, jumping to his feet.
“No!” I shouted. “You stay here. We’re just about to leave.”
“I’ll be right back. I can’t just sit here anymore. Waiting.”
“Kyle,” I said, reaching out in his direction, right as Ronnie stumbled back in the room blocking my path. “So let me get this straight…”
“Oh God,” Julie moaned.
“So you think … you think it’s Brody who hired this assassin?” Ronnie suddenly gasped and flung her arms into the air, which sent her tumbling down into a dining chair like a clumsy praying mantis. “That’s why he left! He didn’t want to be here for the actual killing! He’s probably having hot chocolate somewhere … while we all get.” She made a horrible screeching noise, while cutting a sloppy finger across her throat. “Where’s Ashley?”
I frowned at her, worried she was circling her way closer to remembering that Ashley had gone after Brody. No telling what she’d do then. Just like Kyle, I kind of wished I could put her in a bubble too. A bubble that I could put in a box. With a lock. Maybe in a sealed basement until help arrived. “Again, I don’t know that Brody is the one who hired him. I—”
“I do,” Kyle suddenly said. He was standing by the table where Brody had been sitting, thumb scrolling over a phone.
“What?”
“It’s Brody’s,” he said looking up at me. “He had his banking app open.”
I took a step toward him. “And?”
“There’s a…” he looked down at the screen and blinked. “A pending transaction here for fifty thousand dollars.”
“Come on,” I said moving around Ronnie’s legs. “Let me see that.”
He offered the phone up to me like it might explode.
I speed read the little screen. Definitely a bank transfer. The money was being held, though. Something about a waiting period for large transactions. I scrolled down. But who was it to?
The words, “Oh crap,” came out before I could stop them.
“What?” Julie snapped. “Truth this time.”
“It is a banking transaction for fifty thousand dollars.”
Kyle scoffed. “Yeah, that’s kind of what I said.”
“Fifty thousand, smifty thousand,” Ronnie drawled.
“She’s right. That’s not a lot of money for this family,” Julie began. “He could have just—”
“Fifty thousand dollars to be transferred to a Swiss bank.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
“What should we do?” I asked, looking to Julie. She was the only other functioning adult in the room.
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, but my fingers seemed to have an idea.
“What are you…” Kyle began, panic filling his voice. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Nope.” My thumbs darted around the phone. When I was done, I dropped it on the table and took a step back.
Kyle leaned over to look at the screen before turning some very wide eyes back on me. “You cancelled the transaction.”
“Yep,” I said, pinching my lips together.
“You did what?” Julie shouted. “Why?”
“Not exactly sure,” I said with a shrug.
“What if … what if that just makes him mad?”
I nodded, but I was starting to see the logic in my thumbs. “But if he’s not getting paid, he has no reason to kill us.”
“But,” Kyle began, shaking his head in jerky motions, “now Brody will just come back looking for his phone and—”
“No problem,” Ronnie said, throwing herself across the table. “I got this.” She snatched up the phone, dropped it to floor then stomped on it with her heel.
“Um, okay,” I said, meeting her proud smile. “Good job.”
We all stared at the broken pieces on the floor.
“Now what?” Julie asked quietly.
I pushed my bangs back from my forehead with both hands. “Now we go.”
“We need a gun,” Ronnie said thickly. “Where’s your gun?”
“I don’t have one. I—”
“Erica?” Kyle interrupted.
I shot him a quick look. “Hang on a sec.”
“What about your mom?” Ronnie asked, pulling herself up. “We can go hunt this sucker down.” She had taken a few steps before she realized she was headed directly for Rayner. She tried to do a quick about-face, but smacked herself into the wall. “Right,” she said, patting the wood a few times. “Now, where’s your mom’s gun?”
“She doesn’t have a gun.” Even if she did, there was no way I was giving it to Ronnie in her condition. Or any condition.
“Erica?” Kyle said again.
I half-looked at him but held up a hand, “Did you check on Chuck? Where is he?”
“She doesn’t have a gun?” Ronnie yelled. She was working on a couple seconds delay. “What does she do when, like”—her hands flailed around the room—“the wildlife attack!”
“Erica?”
“Kyle, please, just get Chuck. We need to go.” I turned back to Ronnie before I thought to add, “And stay away from any windows.”
He huffed a breath, pushing himself away from the table toward the hallway
.
“There has to be a gun here somewhere,” Ronnie went on. “Stupid airport wouldn’t let me take mine.” She lifted a cushion off a chair as though she just might happen to find a weapon hiding there. “I’d have taken out that sucker by now and had the pic up on my fan page.”
Just then Kyle walked back in the room. “So I went to check on Chuck…”
“And?”
“He’s—”
Suddenly there was a loud bang outside. All eyes snapped around to the lodge’s front windows.
“Gone,” Kyle finished, taking a nervous step back in the direction of the hallway.
“It might just have been the wind,” I whispered, side-shuffling toward him. “Wait, Chuck’s gone?”
“Bathroom window’s open. Chuck’s gone.”
“Why? Why would he—”
Bang!
There was no mistaking that sound for the wind. That was definitely a person … this time banging on the door.
Ronnie crept forward a few steps. “Ashley?” she whispered in that really loud way drunk people do.
“Quiet,” Julie hissed.
I licked my lips. “Maybe it’s the police?”
“Wouldn’t they just say, ‘This is the police’?” Julie snapped, crouching back down to the floor, hand still on Kenny’s chest.
“I don’t know.”
The door handle rattled. This time I was really glad Kyle had decided to re-lock it.
The knock came again … but quieter this time.
I took a single step toward the door.
“Don’t!” Ronnie shouted, making a wild swing for me. “It’s not Ashley. I know it’s not Ashley. She’d be yelling by now. It’s the murderer. Normal people don’t knock that way.”
I stared at her. “You know how murderers knock?”
She nodded up and down in a big movement. “That first knock was all Bang Bitches! You’re all going to die! And when that didn’t work, the knock was all Little Pig. Little Pig. Let me come in.” She rolled a hand in the air. “But just like … in reverse.”
I stopped walking. It had sounded a little like that.
“Open the door!” a voice shouted, but it was almost a half-shout, like whoever had made it wanted us to hear but was hiding from someone else.
Snowed In with Murder Page 16
