by Jenna Ryan
Sadie gave her a nudge, then a push. “He’s coming fast, and he’s not slowing down.”
“That’s Brady’s truck, I’m sure of it.”
“Then Brady must be drunk.”
Sadie tried to gauge his wild approach so they wouldn’t actually have to jump into the ditch to avoid him. She was on the verge of diving in when he screeched to a halt ten feet ahead.
After several noisy attempts, the driver’s door crashed opened and Brady tumbled out. He leaned heavily against the side. “Don’t die! Please, don’t die!”
“Wasn’t planning to,” she murmured, then raised her voice. “Why are you here, Brady?”
“Monster.” His head snapped up. “Gonna kill you.”
Sadie swore. “Move,” she said to Orley.
“What? Where? Wait a minute, what am I saying? It’s Brady.”
“Who just said the monster’s going to kill me.” She dug out her phone. “Why do I know this thing’s not going to work?”
Bracing his hands on his thighs, Brady shouted, “Get away. You have to get away!”
“It must be drugs,” Orley whispered. “Mixed prescriptions maybe. He looks really zonked.”
Eyes widening, Sadie snapped the phone from her ear. “He’s got a gun!”
The hand holding it shook as Brady straightened. “Run, Sadie.” He looked straight at her. “Run from the monster!”
Orley eased behind her. “Please say your phone has a signal.”
Sadie shook her head, watched Brady’s trembling right hand. “We need to go. Now.”
“But there’s only the hollow. Nowhere else, only there.”
Weapon arm raised, Brady took aim.
“Run!” Sadie shoved her cousin toward the ravine. “Climb down or slide, it doesn’t matter which.”
Brady’s mouth stretched into a horrible grimace. “Gonna kill you, Sadie. Get away!”
Luckily, he caught his foot and stumbled sideways. The gun went off. Into the air, Sadie hoped as she followed Orley over the edge of the road and onto the treacherous slope that dropped more than a hundred feet into the hollow.
Stopping on a ledge halfway down, Orley muttered, “This is not happening.”
Sadie gestured with the flashlight. “Go right. It’s less of an obstacle course.” But she ran into two rocks and wound up skidding on her butt even so.
Didn’t matter. Brady was right behind them. She could hear him breaking small branches and dislodging stones as he mimicked their descent.
Momentum would have flung her into a tree at the bottom if she hadn’t slammed feet-first into a huge exposed root.
A short distance away, Orley groaned. “Are you alive? Am I?”
“I’m here.” Unwilling to use her flashlight, Sadie found her more by feel than sight. “We need to keep moving.”
Nodding, Orley climbed to her feet.
The fog in the hollow varied from thick and swirling to layers of gauze. In an odd moment of clarity, Sadie saw the moon raining thin beams of silver through the mist.
It wasn’t her nightmare, not exactly, but it felt close. Something evil chased her through the woods. Instead of a knife, however, all she had was her cell phone—and no signal!
“I’m not the monster!” Brady’s echoing shout reached them from several yards back.
“He’s sounding fuzzier by the minute,” Orley gasped from behind. “We could ambush him. Not hurt him, but—you know—quick bop on the head, send him under.”
Halting, Sadie drew in much-needed air. “Incapacitate Brady, incapacitate the monster.”
Orley cast an uncertain look around. “Right. How do we make that happen?”
“I’ll get his attention.” She steeled herself. “You’ll have to hit him.” As the thrashing came closer, she shone Orley’s flashlight on the ground. “We need a branch.”
They found one stuck in the mud and yanked it free.
“Ready?” Her cousin took up a stance, arms over her head and poised to strike.
Sadie had no chance to reply as Brady burst out of the fog.
He slowed when he saw her. His face crumpled. “I’m not the monster,” he promised. “I don’t think I ever—”
Darting into a wash of moonlight, Orley brought the branch down on his head.
Brady went rigid. He staggered a step, let the gun slip from his fingers. Then, just as Ezekiel had done in her nightmare, his eyes rolled back and he dropped to the ground at Sadie’s feet.
* * *
FOR THE FIRST time in his life, Eli knew what it would be like to live in slow motion. Every second was an agony. Only his mind raced, and the thoughts it spawned shot through so fast he couldn’t catch most of them.
He hauled Cal back to the Land Rover—no idea how or what kind of time that took—then headed for the Hollow, another underwater slog. More terrifying than anything, however, was the fact that he couldn’t get hold of Sadie, either at the Chronicle or on her cell phone. What he did discover was that Jerk hadn’t gone with her.
It felt as if hours passed before the lights of Main Street appeared. Reaching over, Eli braced Rooney for a squealing stop outside the police station. He only glanced briefly at Cal, who sat in mutinous silence in the backseat, cuffed to the door.
“Get Ty or one of the deputies,” he told his great-grandfather. “I’m going up to Brady’s apartment.”
His cousin’s truck was gone, he noted as he ran. No lights burned upstairs, the clinic was dark—and Sadie was driving to Ben Leamer’s farm in the fog. Alone.
He climbed the stairs two at a time and didn’t bother to knock, just booted the door open and led with his gun. Using his elbow on the light switch, he let his mind spin through the possibilities as his eyes searched the room.
Cal insisted he’d seen Brady coming out of the woods yesterday afternoon. But was that a true account provided by a witness or a desperate lie concocted by a murderer?
Eli crossed the floor with caution, because he knew, somehow knew, Cal hadn’t been lying.
A teapot sat on the dining table. A hard-backed chair lay on the floor. He spotted a single black mug, three-quarters full. The contents were warm but not hot.
Rescanning the room, he speed-dialed Sadie’s cell. And ground his teeth when the call failed. He tried Brady with the same result.
He was checking out the teapot when his phone vibrated. “Brady’s the stalker,” he said to Ty on the other end. “Sadie’s on her way to Ben Leamer’s farm. I called Ben and told him to send his hired hand to meet her on the Hollow Road.”
A confused “What?” was the best Ty could manage. “What?”
“I’m in Brady’s apartment. There’s powder residue on the lid of the teapot. Could be PCP.”
“What?” Ty demanded again. “You think Brady’s doing drugs? And that he wants Sadie dead?”
“You need to meet me on the Hollow Road.”
“I can’t. Not quickly. I’m miles from there, all the way out on Spirit Point. There was a call. Three-car collision. Except...”
“There was no collision.”
There was something, though. Eli could feel it. Some not-quite-right detail that held him in Brady’s apartment when he should have been breaknecking it for the hollow. Some twisted truth that needed to be unearthed.
A photo album covered with cartoon animals lay on the floor under the table. With Sadie’s face flashing in his head, he crouched to flip it open.
Some not-quite-right detail.... Something he needed to know before he went after Brady....
The pictures glared up at him. Hell, they all but sprouted fingers and grabbed him by the throat. Shot after shot, page after page, year after year, in a sick and steady progression that chronicled the life of Brady Blume.
And the
monster who wanted Sadie dead.
* * *
“DON’T GET TOO close to him, Orley.” On her knees, Sadie searched the ground for Brady’s gun.
“It’s here. I’ve got it.” Orley squatted near his head. “Don’t worry, he won’t be waking up any time soon. Between the whack I gave him and the cat tranqs, he’ll sleep for at least four or five hours.”
“Four or five...?” Something in her cousin’s tone sent a wintery chill through Sadie’s bloodstream. She flattened her palms on the ground and without looking up forced a calm “What cat tranqs, Orley?”
“I put them in his tea. I always put them in his tea or coffee when I need him to be good and sleep for me.”
Sadie’s heart began to thud. “Sleep,” she repeated carefully. “For you.”
The gun came into view first, followed by the hazy oval that was Orley’s face as she smiled over Brady’s prone body.
“Surprise.” She spoke softly and with no small amount of malice. “Aw... you thought Brady came here tonight so the monster inside him could do its nasty worst, didn’t you? Well, take heart, cousin, I daresay he thought the same thing. Although—hard to say, maybe not. Oh, there’s a monster, but it doesn’t live in Brady. It lives, Sadie dearest, in me.” Her smile widened. “It’s green and it’s mean and it’s sick to death of not getting what—or rather who—it wants. Who it’s wanted since before it made Laura a corpse and left her in the slime pool we call Raven’s Bog.”
Astonishment simply robbed Sadie of thought. “You’re not serious,” she managed. Yet even through a curtain of shock, Orley’s gleaming eyes told her she was. Serious and deadly. She’d murdered their cousin Laura twenty years ago.
And would, without qualm or hesitation, murder another of her cousins tonight.
Chapter Twenty-One
Waving the gun like a pennant, Orley forced Sadie to stand. “I can’t say I’m impressed. You’re supposed to be a crack journalist, someone who sees what others miss. How did you miss what’s inside me?”
It amazed Sadie that her temper would rise with her fear. “You weren’t a story to be dissected and probed. You were just my cousin with an attitude.”
“And a gun.”
Wisdom elbowed temper aside. “And that.” Although she couldn’t see it succeeding, she went with a rational approach. “Oh, come on, Orley, why would I think you had a monster inside you? We’re family. I’ve always seen you as one of the most stable people I know. I think of us as friendly rivals.”
“Excellent. Shot to the heart. Applause, applause. Won’t work, of course, but marks for effort. See, here’s the thing. While I do in fact like you much better than Laura, I don’t like you enough to let the man I’ve wanted—since I was five years old—” she enunciated the last six words “—destroy his life and my dreams, which I swear are going to come true as soon as you’re gone. Brady thinks he has an alter ego. He believes that alter ego is murderous. But like most of us, he doesn’t relish the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. So—self-preservation mode.”
Sadie heard her through an ever-increasing shriek of denial. Orley had killed Laura two decades ago when they were seventeen. Killed her because Brady had wanted her. Really? Seriously?
“This is sick, Orley. This is totally sick.”
“This is necessary.”
An incredulous laugh emerged. “You think making Brady believe he has a monster inside him is necessary? You think that’s love?”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me, Sadie. Brady’s the one who decided he had a slice of Hezekiah Blume in his soul, not me. I just went with it.”
“Why? Because it worked for you?”
“Yes. And the only thing I’ll say in my defense is that it’s not what I had in mind the first time I drugged him.”
She adjusted her grip on the gun she held—in her left hand! The irony of that observation struck a note of absurd humor and had Sadie closing her eyes for a moment.
“Ah, there. You see it now, don’t you? But give yourself a break, cousin. You weren’t looking for a left-handed woman. Surprise again.” Orley’s smile stretched wider. “I worried about the chop to Laura’s skull after I’d done it. Then it occurred to me. Given the phone calls she’d surely have mentioned to someone, and the obsessive notes that would undoubtedly turn up at some point, no one would be thinking ‘female killer.’ Plus, there was Cal. So I relaxed, played the sorrow game and kept a close eye on Brady.”
Impossible images swam in Sadie’s head. “You found out that Brady wanted Laura, so you murdered her. Simple as that.”
“Murdered her after she broke up with Cal.” Crouching, Orley set her fingers on the pulse point in Brady’s neck. “Until then, she was unattainable. I could deal with that. Dumping Cal was her fatal mistake. Brady started thinking he could have her, and—well, that wasn’t going to happen. So—desperate-measures time.”
“You worked at the veterinary clinic in high school.” Sadie forced herself not to look at the gun, not to appear to be looking at anything while her mind raced. “You had access to sedatives and anesthetic.”
“The doc at the time didn’t keep accurate supply records. Neither did his assistant. All brilliant me had to do was read and learn and come up with a dosage that would work on humans.”
“A dosage of what?”
“Ketamine. Street name, cat tranqs. It causes all sorts of nasty problems—hallucinations, confusion, agitation and, of course, unconsciousness. I slipped it to Brady from time to time, hoping I could scare Laura into leaving town. I tacked on a threat to a larger-than-life love note Brady gave her. Just intercepted it before she was aware and turned Brady’s love note into a monster’s portent of doom.”
“That’s why the writing changed,” Sadie murmured.
“That’s why. Didn’t have the desired effect, of course. Laura’s senior year loomed, and she had a brand-new family that she liked. All I had left was death.”
“Right. Death. With no second thoughts. No remorse. Nothing.”
Orley leaned in to stage-whisper, “We weren’t friends, Sadie, only unfortunate relations. I never liked her, or Molly—or people in general for that matter. In your case, all was well enough while you were engaged to Ty. Oh, Brady saw and Brady wanted, but lucky you, Ty got there first. A long courtship blossomed into an engagement. Then, uh-oh, wedding in Boston. Chance meeting with Eli. Next thing I knew, Ty was unengaged, and Brady’s hopes were soaring. Damn. Time to start plotting again. Here’s the kicker, though, cousin. Who should appear on the very day that Brady worked up the nerve to make an anonymous phone call to your office but Eli Blume?”
Sadie struggled to keep up. “Are you saying Brady sent me that animated e-card?”
“Yep. It was his way of testing the water. Far as I can tell, the dead raven on the doorstep was more of a gift gone wrong. He meant to leave a live raven in a gilded cage. But the raven got loose and flew up into the porch rafters. Brady tried to flush it out with a gunshot—and, well, I guess the bird wasn’t where he thought, and it plopped down dead at his feet.”
“Why did he leave it there?”
“I imagine killing it rattled him. Plus, he still had a message to write. So in he went, home you came and uh-oh, gotta run. If my deductions are correct, and I’m sure they are, he ‘borrowed’ one of Ben Leamer’s old trucks for the occasion. You know Ben. He’s got a barn full of the things. Talk about your perfect setup. FYI, the call Brady made to you that day was his last. I used the same freaky computer voice to do the rest.”
Sadie stared. “How do you know all this?”
“I get him to talk. After I drug him and before he goes under, I grill him. Sometimes he slips away before I get everything, but mostly I can eke out the details. I’m a very clever Bellam, Sadie. And Brady’s mind has always been wonderfully malleable
.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“You think he’s unbalanced, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what I think at this point. Maybe unbalanced. Or maybe confused—because he thinks he’s got a homicidal maniac living inside him!”
“Don’t take that tone with me,” Orley warned. “Remember who’s holding the gun here. Any imbalance in Brady’s personality is a result of him being totally repressed. Fortunately, I haven’t got a repressed bone in my body.”
“Okay, wait.” Hands raised, Sadie took a step back, both physically and mentally. “Backtracking here. You’re telling me that, being repressed, Brady had to resort to weird tricks to get my attention, whereas you, who aren’t the slightest bit repressed, have no problem approaching anyone.”
“I’m way ahead of you, Sadie. You’re wondering why I didn’t just let Brady know I wanted him instead of going all extreme killer.”
Anger seeped through terror. “It would have been a saner option. Not to mention kinder, and—brass tacks here—less of a risk to your own—” she almost said “stupid” but swallowed that and left it at “—life.”
Closing the gap between them, her cousin tapped Brady’s gun to Sadie’s chest. “You see, now, that’s why I like you so much better than Laura. You’re mere seconds away from death, and here you stand, totally pissed off at me for not telling Brady how I felt about him.”
“Thereby avoiding the ‘seconds away from death’ part,” Sadie said through her teeth.
Orley’s features hardened, and this time when the gun struck Sadie’s collarbone it stayed put. “I did tell him, in every way I could think of. I even lowered my career goals so I could be his assistant. I tried to seduce him at high school dances, went for it again at college and twice more after we came back to the Hollow. Every damn time I came on to him, he got awkward and flustered and insisted we were friends. Best friends but—and this part was strictly between the lines—friends without benefits.”
He hadn’t wanted her. A very small part of Sadie actually felt sorry for her.
Orley shook back her hair. “Didn’t matter what he said, what he felt then or what he thinks he feels now. He’ll be mine after tonight, I’ll make sure of it. Just know this. He wanted you more than he wanted Laura, and I still did everything I could not to kill you. For some reason, he refused to be deterred by Eli. Guess he got tired of backing down. He wanted you to be his and Eli to be gone.”
