“Gemma, I like Matt now. I really do. And I’m sorry for saying anything to them.”
“You didn’t mean for this to happen.”
Claire smiled. “Love you. I’m glad we’re sisters.”
She waved and then she was gone. Sisters. Never once had Claire treated her like anything but her real, true sister. For that matter, her parents had never treated her like anything but their real, true daughter. Why, then, did Gemma feel like the adoption was so often at the forefront of her own mind, factoring into her own thoughts?
Maybe it shouldn’t be. She didn’t know.
Gemma had mostly forgiven Matt. Really, she had. She’d forgiven him for kissing her back the time she’d initiated that incredible, beyond-words kiss. She’d forgiven him for convincing her they didn’t need to consider the practicality of a relationship between the two of them.
What she was struggling with was forgiving him for abandoning her. Last she knew, he was questioning how much they should see each other, and then he was just...gone. Not helping her with the case, not answering her calls this morning.
So today she was ending this. Not the investigation, although that would be nice, too—she was ending this standoff with Matt. If he’d decided they shouldn’t date...fine.
Even if it did make her feel like someone had tossed her heart to the alligators in some backwoods creek.
But to refuse to accept her help with the case? He needed her. She was about to show him that.
Gemma dialed his number one more time. He still didn’t answer. She grabbed her purse, hurried outside to the car. She hadn’t been able to sleep last night, so she’d spent her time thinking about the case. Nothing had turned up in St. Simons or Savannah, visiting places she’d frequented a decade ago. As much as Gemma hated the thought, maybe the head of the group of criminals really was from Treasure Point, hiding in plain sight somewhere.
The only way she knew to find him, the only hope she thought she had, was to make this meeting in the woods. The note had instructed her to meet him where she’d seen their group burying their stash all those years ago. Instead, Gemma planned to wait long enough that he should already be there, then sneak around in the woods just long enough to get a glimpse and figure out who they were after.
The more she thought about it, the more she was afraid it was going to be someone she knew. And the more she let herself accept that thought, the more she could almost recall who the voice had belonged to...
Her heartbeat stayed steady as she drove down the road to the Hamilton Estate. Up until she was three or four miles away.
Then a lump formed so large in her throat that for half a second, she thought she wouldn’t be able to breathe. Gemma pulled over. Breathed in and out. She couldn’t let fear control her. She had to do this—had to find out who was behind the threat to her life. This was the best chance she had.
Yet even after she calmed herself down, it seemed unwise.
This was a bad idea.
She wasn’t going to follow through. She wanted to. She wanted to have this be over, to have her life back, to show the town who she was.
But so much of her life had been defined by one night when she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That had been pure, awful coincidence. Today? She’d be putting herself into that situation.
And there was no reason for her to take this into her own hands. She’d turn around in the gravel driveway just before the Hamilton Estate. She wasn’t even going to set foot on that property today.
Gemma took a deep breath, rounded the last curve, saw that there was road construction. Chills crept their way down her arms, down her back. Was it legitimate, or was this like in the movies, where it was a setup?
She wasn’t waiting around to find out. She backed up, prepared for a three-point or four-point or however many points it took turn, but on her second try, she ran straight into the mailman. She let out a heavy sigh, prepared to get out of the truck and apologize to Phil.
But he was getting out of his truck. And coming toward her. He looked much, much angrier than a little fender bender like this merited.
Then his anger turned to a grin. One without a hint of friendliness, just all teeth and glaring.
And then he laughed. Low. Evil.
Gemma jammed the car out of Park, into Reverse, only to find that while she’d been watching Phil approach, one of the construction trucks had pulled in behind her. Blocking her in. Making a face-to-face confrontation the only chance she had to escape...or, more than likely, the last thing she’d ever do.
She threw the door open anyway, tried to run.
But ran straight into a construction worker. There was her answer about whether or not this was a setup.
Surrounded on all sides, nowhere to go, all she could think to do was pray. Help, God. And then she turned and faced the man who—while faceless—had haunted her sleeping and waking hours for the past ten years.
“Phil Winters.” She shook her head. “But you’re—”
“The mailman?” He laughed again. How was it possible that the sound seemed to grow more heavy with evil every time she heard it?
“No, that wasn’t what I was going to say. You’re nice, a good guy. You’ve talked to me before when I got the mail at my mailbox, from the time I was a little girl.”
“Sure. You weren’t an irritating kid and I had the time.” He shrugged. “Now you’re in the way of something I want. And you did something very, very bad.”
“What?”
“You spoke up when you should have kept your mouth shut. You came forward and told the truth—for what reason I’ll never know, because it’s not like it benefitted you to get a bunch of my men arrested. You had to talk about what you were told not to, and you’re the only one who has or will pay for it, Gemma Phillips. This is what you’ve chosen.”
Before she could open her mouth to argue, the man standing behind her had pulled a dark sack over her face and she was being shoved into a vehicle—she’d guess Phil’s.
Then they were driving. And she didn’t know where. Didn’t know where to tell Matt to find her. Didn’t know how to get in touch with him anyway.
By the time she figured any of that out, there was a good possibility it would be too late.
* * *
Ignoring Gemma’s calls was killing something inside him, but what else could he do? His job was gone because he’d gotten involved with the one woman in town who’d seen beyond his past and wanted a relationship with him. The only woman he’d ever wanted to spend all his time with, maybe think about growing old with.
And the only one who was 100 percent off-limits to him.
Matt ran the sander over the kayak’s edge, slipped a little and almost turned the whole thing into firewood. It was too late in the process to be making holes in his work. If he did, there would literally be no way to fix it. These kinds of boats, the started-from-a-solid-log kayaks, had to stay whole from the beginning, be shaped with care, or they were essentially doomed.
He worked more cautiously, mind moving to Gemma again. People weren’t like these kayaks. People could get holes and God could fix them, rebuild them so they were better than they’d been before.
Maybe that was what drew them together. A knowledge that they’d each been broken by things in their past, but were almost put back together now. And maybe if both of them would stop fighting it in their own ways they’d be fully healed. Whole. Better than new.
They both needed to let the past go.
He turned the sander off, just stood there staring at the wood while his mind tried to wrestle with the thoughts developing.
It was true. He wasn’t the same man he would have been if he’d had a nice childhood, had a dad who cared. But with God’s help, maybe he was a better man than he would have been otherwise. Maybe the job didn’t define him; maybe it didn’t matter what the chief or the town or anyone else thought.
Maybe he should just accept God’s grace in his own life and go out and li
ve.
This time he set the sander down, reached for his phone, which had sat neglected on the workshop counter, and checked his missed calls. Five from Gemma this morning. He shook his head. Stupid pride had kept him from answering, but losing his job hadn’t been her fault, and pulling away from her now wasn’t going to get his job back. Instead, he was just drilling a hole in their relationship that would have to be mended later.
Thankfully he knew God could mend that, too. That was the beauty of grace—nothing was too far gone. He slid the phone in his pocket, felt to make sure he still had his keys on the carabiner on his belt loop and headed for his car. He was going to do better than call her; he was going to go see her, apologize in person.
He drove to the historical society office at the Hamilton Estate, ignored the fact that there was a patrol car parked where he felt he should have been and got out of the car and walked toward the door.
“She’s not here,” Ryan Townsend, the construction crew foreman called from where he sat on top of the museum’s frame, hammering something. Matt liked how he wasn’t just a figurehead, giving instructions while his men worked—he got right in there, too.
“Gemma?” Matt clarified, not having realized the construction workers had been paying that much attention to how much time they spent together.
Townsend nodded. “I heard someone got in a wreck here this morning, though. You could check and see if it was her car. It’s already been towed, I guess. I just got here half an hour ago.”
Matt glanced at his watch. Not even eleven o’clock. Unless the wreck had happened sometime before nine, he highly doubted the damaged car would be cleared already. He happened to know that Levi Meyer, who ran the only towing company in town, was taking the morning off to stay with his wife and their new baby girl, who had been born the day before.
Unless an out-of-town company had been called. But something in his gut made him doubt that today. “You have any guys who were here this morning who might have seen what happened?”
“A couple. Some of my guys are missing this morning, mostly the new hires.”
“New hires?”
Ryan shrugged. “The historical society has got us on a pretty tight deadline, so there are guys I added to the crew just a little after the project began. So they’ve been here for a couple of weeks anyway, but they’re not on my usual crew.”
“And they’re the ones missing?” Matt started toward the construction site, lengthening his stride. “I need to talk to someone who was here this morning.”
There weren’t many men working today, something he hadn’t noticed when he’d pulled in. “Any of you guys here this morning?” Ryan called.
The men shook their heads.
“Then, who was it who told me about the wreck here?” Ryan continued. “How did you find that out?”
“I heard about it in town,” one of them spoke up. “Someone was talking about it down at the docks when I was finishing my morning coffee.”
“So everyone working this morning has disappeared?”
“I guess so.”
“And everyone working this morning was part of the new crew?”
Ryan scratched his head. “Come to think of it, yes. I would have been here with them, but my AC froze up at my house and I had to see about that before I could come.”
“I was supposed to be here, too,” someone else spoke up. “But I got a call this morning telling me that the materials I needed hadn’t been delivered and not to bother coming in until closer to lunch. I thought it was you.” He directed the last statement at Ryan. “But if it wasn’t...”
“If it wasn’t, then someone else engineered it so that only the new construction workers were here.” Matt clenched his fists.
“Jackson, you’re in charge,” Ryan yelled at one of the workman, then turned to Matt. “I can’t believe this. What can I do?”
Matt almost told him nothing. This wasn’t Ryan’s problem—he wasn’t an officer. But technically neither was Matt at the moment, and he wasn’t going to sit here and do nothing while Gemma was possibly in danger. Maybe he was overreacting, all of this was coincidence and Gemma was home eating a pint of ice cream over their breakup. But that wasn’t like Gemma. If anything, he’d guess that her breakup remedy meant focusing on work. If she wasn’t here, then that meant something was wrong, and he wasn’t going to rest until he’d found her.
The tightness in his chest led him to believe that that wouldn’t be an easy task. Because somehow he knew the truth. Her stalker had her.
What he would do now was anyone’s guess. Matt had to stop the killer before he hurt Gemma. Or worse.
SIXTEEN
The back of the mail truck smelled like hot cardboard, dust and metal. They’d snatched the sack off as soon as they’d tossed her into the truck, so apparently its only use had been to surprise her enough into inaction so they could tie her up and throw her in there.
Then they’d taken the sack off. Clearly they didn’t care that she could identify them. In fact, it seemed as if they wanted her to know they were planning to kill her. Otherwise why go to the trouble of removing the bag?
But Gemma kept her eyes closed for the moment as the truck bumped down a back road on its way to who knew where. Denial? Did she think that maybe if she didn’t open her eyes, they’d change their minds, let her go free?
Only there was no way that would happen. Not with Phil being determined enough to eliminate her from the picture in the first place.
“Why not just kill me now?” she yelled to Phil, pretty sure he could hear her since the truck wasn’t that big. “I know you’re going to.” Was she succeeding in making her voice sound brave? Strong? Gemma didn’t know. But even if she couldn’t control her circumstances, she could at least try to stay in control of herself.
Maybe that was all she had control over all along. Not over the situations she stumbled upon, the freakish incidents of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she did have a choice about how she reacted, how she viewed herself because of those things. Matt was right—it was easier to hold on to the past, to identify herself by it. But easy wasn’t always right. And it was time for her to move on. She needed to define herself in a new way now.
Except...wasn’t defining who she was on her own still missing the point?
How do You define me? She finally dared to ask God the question she’d always feared the answer to, here on the floor of a mail truck, smashed between boxes.
Bible verses scrolled through her head, like flipping through a three-by-five stack of memory verses she’d had in her growing-up years.
Loved. Safe. Known by name. His child. A woman who had gone through trials and come out stronger on the other side. Someone God was making brave. Someone who loved to find the best in others, find the best in ventures like the museum and show other people the positives of any situation.
By His grace Gemma was all of those things and whatever else He said she was. Not just “adopted,” not the witness to a crime, not Claire’s younger sister. To one degree or another, it was time to let those go.
Instead, she needed to see herself as Gemma Phillips. His.
The truck jerked to a stop. Gemma fought to keep control of her breathing.
At least she knew now. And with that knowledge...she wasn’t going to die without a fight. If she was God’s, if He saw her as the Gemma Phillips He’d made her to be, no matter what happened, then He might still have a purpose for her. And part of that purpose might even be her dreams: adding “wife”—Matt’s wife—and eventually “mom” to her identity.
Please let me live, she prayed, heart finding the familiar whisper of words to God something that still felt right and natural even after all this time of silence between them.
Then the door of the truck opened. Phil was there again, face looking older, rougher than it had not long before.
“I’m sure you’ve already realized that once the police knew someone was after you, it was pointless to make t
hings look like an accident. But I see no reason to make it too easy for them to find you. The more time and resources they devote to you, the less they’ll have to focus on identifying me.”
“So where are we?” The gravel road they’d been on had dead-ended into the woods. While the foliage was still familiar, and they hadn’t been driving for long enough to be far from Treasure Point, the area wasn’t familiar to her.
He raised his eyebrows, smiled slowly. “You don’t know? Oh, good, that makes this better.” He gave her a shove. “Walk this way.”
Gemma could see a narrow path through the dense trees, which was evidently what her captor wanted her to take. She glanced back at him, wondering what her chances of escaping were if she just ran.
He patted his side, where she now noticed a lump on his hip. “Forty-five auto,” he said, confirming that it was the outline of a gun that she saw.
So much for the thought of running.
She kept moving forward, deeper into the woods. Gemma still didn’t recognize where they were, but she kept going.
Until the path reached a clearing and she caught sight of several other paths connecting to it in the distance. Those paths she recognized.
She looked at Phil. He widened his smile, showed every one of his crooked teeth. “Now you’ve got it.” He nodded once, confirming her realization.
They were back where they had started ten years ago, deep in the woods where she’d heard his fight with Harris, where she’d managed to run away. Where Harris had died.
The eerie thought struck her as she looked down at the ground—if she could move the years of overgrowth and dirt, would there still be blood on this spot?
She shivered.
She wasn’t going to let it end like this.
Options flashed through her mind, one by one like slides in a presentation. Matt? She’d try to call again if she could but Phil would notice if she pulled out her phone. And anyway, he wasn’t talking to her, so she doubted he’d answer this time. Would he give their relationship another chance if she lived? Gemma hoped so. Thought he would.
Cold Case Witness Page 16
