His work took on a more fevered pace.
***
Wood clattered to the floor as Jonathan, fingers outstretched behind him as far as they would go, felt along the pile for an axe. Hands and feet still bound, he’d managed to stand by backing against a wall and sliding up it. Then he’d hopped to the woodpile, driven by this new inspiration. There had to be an axe, didn’t there? You had to have an axe to chop wood. Unless Charlie Black brought his own axe with him, a favorite axe.
Jonathan’s arms ached with the strain, and he forced them to relax. He let himself sag against the woodpile. His breathing was labored, his clothes drenched with perspiration. He had to think. He couldn’t panic again. After he’d dropped the glass, and the smaller fragment had crushed between his fingers, he’d lost it completely. It was only by telling himself over and over that Drake Devlin wouldn’t overtake Katherine easily, she was a fighter, that he’d finally managed to calm himself. And her screams, however much they tore at his mind and soul, meant that she was still alive.
He listened to their footsteps overhead, and to the sounds of scuffling that seemed to go on and on until he thought he would go out of his mind. That last time he’d heard her scream, she’d been outside the house and not very far from him. But that was at least ten minutes ago.
There’d been nothing since. Battling the terror that threatened to bring him down, Jonathan thought for the hundredth time: there has to be something in this cellar, something I can cut these ropes with. But it was too dark too see. It came to him suddenly that when Devlin took Katherine away, he hadn’t barred the door after him. He could be wrong about that, of course. It wasn’t the most rational moment he’d ever known, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t heard the bar thud into place.
Would Devlin be so careless? Why not, if he didn’t expect him to regain consciousness. Guided by the meager light from the window, Jonathan hopped across the floor toward the door. Once there, he nudged it with his shoulder, nearly stumbling and falling headlong on the ground when it swung easily open.
Off to his right, a point of light quivered among the trees. He could see Drake’s dark shape. He could see the rise and fall of the shovel in his hand—and his heart lurched painfully. Hysteria gripped him and he nearly screamed at Devlin. Easy, Shea, he told himself. Easy.
Back in the cellar, he scanned the now faintly visible objects. In the corner by the window, a mop, with little left of it but the handle, stood uselessly. Beneath the mop were several cans of paint, a galvanized pail, a broken window frame. Further on, a folded lawn chair, its fabric torn and hanging, stood against the wall. Nothing of any use.
Frustration mounted, but he tried to ignore it, tried not to think of what was going on outside, as he continued to search for something sharp with which to cut himself free.
And then he found himself studying the sawhorse in front of him, remembering that it was where Devlin had set the lamp. He stared at the sawhorse and wondered why the thought was so long in coming, that if there was a sawhorse, maybe…He raised his eyes intuitively, almost afraid to hope.
But there it was. A partly rusted hand-saw hanging from a spike in the wall. Relief filled him, to be replaced in the very next instant by near despair. For the saw was far beyond his reach. And then the answer came to him. Alternating between a hop and a shuffle, Jonathan moved along the wall, past the window, toward the mop in the corner, not quite so useless now. Not useless at all.
***
Only her shoulders and head were free now; she could not feel her arms or legs. A few more lifts of the shovel and it would all be over. She remembered hearing somewhere that people buried alive took a long time to die, and when exhumed, were found in tortured positions, faces contorted in agony, dirt caked beneath fingernails, fingers bent into claws.
The thought broke through the calm her praying had brought, and she cried out – but heard no sound. Why did unconsciousness evade her now when she so begged for it? What great knowledge was to be gained that she must experience these final moments without some blessed anesthetic to ease the horror—the pain of a death by suffocation?
Her eyes shut instinctively against a sudden, glaring light.
“Katherine!”
Someone calling her name—an anguished sound. Jonathan? No, not Jonathan. The voice must be inside her head, a miracle she’d conjured up when all else had failed. She supposed she was quite mad by now, hoping where there was no hope, praying when there was no one to listen.
She felt gentle hands pushing the wet, filthy hair from her face. As if in a dream, she saw him.
“Jonathan,” she whispered. And then, as though his face was swept backward through a long, dark tunnel, it drifted from her, and there was only darkness.
When she came to, she was in Jonathan’s arms. Her confused gaze traveled to Drake who lay on the ground, his arms pinned beneath him. Blood trickled darkly from the corner of his mouth. His pale eyes locked with hers. She stiffened, whimpered like a child.
“It’s all right, honey,” Jonathan said, his own voice breaking in a sob. “It’s all right now. He can’t hurt you anymore. Where he’s going, he won’t be hurting anyone for a long, long time.”
But she barely heard his words of reassurance as she watched Drake’s lips curl into a slow, icy smile.
Chapter 28
After treating her for superficial wounds, bruises and a mild case of hypothermia, the hospital kept her under observation for twenty-four hours, then released her into Jonathan’s care. He’d put her directly to bed, dressing her in the now familiar pajamas, and she fell back to sleep at once, sleeping twelve hours straight.
With a little moan, she turned on her side. The sun coming through the window lay a bronze path across the polished wood floor.
“Damn, you look good, Katherine Summers.”
She turned to see Jonathan standing in the doorway, tall and lean and sexy in faded jeans and a white tee-shirt, and despite everything, felt a stirring of her blood. Some things are worth opening your eyes for, she thought lustily. Gratitude filled her for the life she had come so very close to losing.
When he came nearer, she could see the lines surrounding his eyes, the deep creases tracking his hollowed cheeks, evidence of the nightmare they’d both come through.
“Did you know,” he said, “that in a certain angle of sunlight, your hair is the color of spun gold?”
“Do I detect a bit of the old Irish blarney spillin’ from me darlin’s lips?” she teased. “And if I do, could I be hearin’ a dash more, just to get the old blood circulatin’?”
He grinned, the lines and creases seeming to vanish magically from his face. “My, you do have remarkable recuperative powers.”
“Like you said, it’s over. Besides, I’ve always thought of myself as fairly resilient.”
He lifted her hand from the blanket, kissed her palm. “Yes, you are that, to say the very least, and I thank God for it.” He sat down on the side of the bed. The mattress sagged a little with his weight. “And how does me darlin’ like her eggs?”
“In the refrigerator in their shells.”
“Cute.”
“But the coffee smells wonderful.”
“You’ve got it.”
How could she have been so taken in? she wondered. Drake had never attended university as he’d told her, nor did he work on his father’s farm. Oh, he’d worked on a farm, all right, but as a hired hand for a woman named Rose Nickerson over in Deacon’s Hill, about thirty miles or so outside of Belleville. Just as he’d lied to Katie about being a lawyer, he’d told Mrs. Nickerson he was a struggling writer.
When she’d begun to suspect some darker side of Drake she’d become uncomfortable and had asked him to leave.
She was, of course, still traumatized at finding her decapitated pet in the mailbox, but Katie couldn’t help thinking, as tragically horrible as that must have been for her, the woman was very lucky to have escaped with her own life.
“He was such a
good actor,” Katie said to Jonathan, who had returned with their coffee and was slipping into bed beside her, a pleasant ritual begun and one they hoped to enjoy for many years to come.
“Killers often are. Do you remember my telling you I saw something in Drake’s eyes that triggered an immediate negative response in me?”
“Yes. You said it was the reason you phoned Captain Peterson right after I fell asleep—with a little help from your specially brewed tea.”
He grinned, then his face grew serious again. “Well, now that I think about it, it was more a lack of something. Several years ago,” he said, “a young man was sent to me for analysis. A good looking kid, blond, blue eyes—he might have been a choir boy. He’d just murdered his entire family, including a three-year-old sister asleep upstairs in her crib. Just walked into the house one afternoon, and killed them all with a shotgun.”
“My God!”
Jonathan set his coffee on the bedside table, made a careful pyramid of his fingers. When he spoke again, his voice was very soft. “He was absolutely—normal looking. In every way save one. Nothing you could pin a name to, not merely cold or empty, nothing so obvious.
But deep down in those eyes, where you should glimpse a man’s humanity, something of his soul—there was a void.”
Katie saw again that slow, evil smile as Drake lay on the ground, and shivered inwardly. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?” she said, setting her cup with Jonathan’s on the table. She wanted him to hold her, to chase back the chill that had begun to creep back into her bones. The trees looked so beautiful outside the window, the sun so bright. Surely a good omen of the days ahead of them.
He held her tightly against him. Then he held her from him and cupped her chin in his hand. “You’re good for me. You know that?”
“Of course I do,” she said, eager to bring back the lightness she’d felt upon waking. “I’ll be so damned good you won’t be able to stand it.”
She was rewarded with a soft, sexy laugh. “I’ll try to bear up.”
Cuddled against him, she caressed the warm smooth planes of his back beneath the tee-shirt, once more reveling in the clean, male scent of him, the taste. She would never be able to get enough. They kissed, a long and tender kiss that gradually grew more demanding as her mouth moved hungrily under his.
He unbuttoned her pajama top, parting the fabric as though he was unveiling a precious painting. “Katherine, you’re beautiful,” he murmured, his head moving downward, his lips tracing the softness of her breasts. He whispered to her, sweet, maddening words as his fingers worked at the string of the pajama bottoms.
Then, she heard him mutter, “What kind of a damned knot did I put in these, anyway?”
And they both laughed like children.
Epilogue
Two hundred miles from Stoneybrook, inside the gray walls of Wellington Mental Institution, a man and a woman sat across from one another, a large, cluttered desk between them, speaking softly, faces solemn, thoughtful.
“Then you have absolutely no reservations at all, Laura, about setting the patient free?” The man who spoke was Dr. David Thurston, Chief of Psychiatry at the institution, a tall, bony man with thinning hair. He had intelligent blue eyes and a soft, almost hypnotic way of speaking. He tapped his long fingers lightly on the desktop.
“Absolutely none at all, David,” Dr. Laura Rankin said, laying a hand gently, almost protectively, on the thick file in front of her. The name on the file said DEVLIN, DRAKE EDWARD. She’d been his therapist since he’d arrived at Wellington.
Dr. Rankin was an attractive woman with silver-blond hair coiled around her head. She wore a pin-striped suit, and a simple white blouse. Her only adornment was an expensive sapphire ring on the third finger of her left hand.
She picked up the file. “If you’d studied this as carefully as I have, you’d see that Drake Devlin is really guilty of little more than harassment, about which he has no recollection. David, he passed every test we have. Yes, I do think he’s ready to make his way in the outside world.”
“What about the man who drowned?”
“Jason Belding. I see you read the file.”
“Yes,” he said with a hint of impatience. “I also read the papers.”
“I’m sorry.” Her eyes on him were respectful, without taking anything away from herself. “There was no concrete evidence Drake had anything to do with the drowning. He denies it adamantly, and I believe him.”
“An accident, then.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“What about his plot to murder Dr. Jonathan Shea and his fiancée? Have you forgotten about that, Laura? We can’t discount that,” he said calmly.
“No, and I don’t. But he’s been here five years now. Surely, his debt to society is paid.” She leaned forward in the chair. “He came back from the war under tremendous stress. He should have had treatment then. Drake Devlin is as much a victim as anyone.”
Dr. Thurston took the file from her hand, scanned the pages. He sighed. “He’s supposed to have shot one of his own men.”
“Guilt, David. He took the responsibility for his friend’s death upon his own shoulders. You know how common that sort of transference of blame is. Especially when you consider that Drake Devlin was the sole survivor of his company.”
Sun slanted through the long, narrow window behind Dr.
Thurston’s chair and lay a path across the wine-colored carpet.
Outside, Laura could see some of the patients walking about in the yard—shuffling, moving aimlessly, like zombies. Gray, bowed men.
She took a cigarette from her pack, lit it, and dragged deeply, her eyes narrowing against the curling ribbon of smoke. Drake Devlin didn’t belong here. He wasn’t one of the lost souls.
“Dr. Shea thinks there is no cure for Drake Devlin’s problem,” Dr. Thurston said. “He believes the man is evil.”
Laura suppressed a smile. “Well, I’m well aware of Dr. Shea’s reputation as a noted psychiatrist, of course, but surely, David, you can see that it quite unreasonable to expect him to be objective in this case.
As I said, I don’t deny that he and his wife were victimized by my patient, but Drake is better now. As sane as you or I. And evil, David?
Not a terribly scientific diagnosis, wouldn’t you agree?”
Dr. David Thurston stood up, his long frame seeming to unfold.
“Well, we’ll see. There’s a meeting of the board in…” He glanced at his watch. “… in five minutes.”
One hour later, the young woman behind the ticket counter of Wellington Bus Terminal looked up from the stubs she was sorting.
“May I help you?” she said to the sandy-haired man whose smattering of freckles seemed to leap out from the paleness of his skin.
Evelyn Rider fancied herself skilled at guessing other people’s jobs, and figured this one for a bookkeeper. He obviously spent a lot of time indoors. Not bad looking, though.
He fingered the tiny square of yellowing newspaper in his pocket. A daughter. They’d called her Joanna. He smiled. A slow smile that did not meet his eyes. “I’d like a ticket to Belleville, please,” he said.
The End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As well as penning Award-winning suspense novels including Chill Waters, Nowhere To Hide and Listen to the Shadows, Joan Hall Hovey's articles and short stories have appeared in such diverse publications as The Reader, Atlantic Advocate, The Toronto Star, Mystery Scene, True Confessions, Home Life magazine, Seek and various other magazines and newspapers. Her short story, “Dark Reunion” was selected for the Anthology, Investigating Women, published by Simon & Pierre.
Joan also tutors with Winghill Writing School and is a Voice Over pro, narrating books and scripts. She lives in New Brunswick, Canada with her husband Mel and dog, Scamp. She is currently working on her latest suspense novel.
NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Thank you for purchasing and reading this Books We Love eBook. We hope you
have enjoyed your reading experience. Books We Love and the author would very much appreciate you returning to the online retailer where you purchased this book and leaving a review for the author. Best Regards and Happy Reading, Jamie and Jude
Books We Love and Books We Love Spice
http://bookswelove.net
* * *
Top quality books loved by readers,
Romance, Mystery, Fantasy, Young Adult
Vampires, Werewolves, Cops, Lovers.
* * *
Looking for Something Spicier
for Sexy Spicy Selections
http://spicewelove.com
Listen to the Shadows Page 25
