by Laurie Cass
“You killed Henry,” I said, in as strong a voice as I could, which wasn’t very, but still. “You were up there that weekend with your girlfriend, and Henry saw her with you. You knew Henry well enough to know he’d never lie for you, so you figured a way to make Henry’s death look like an accident.”
Though the sun had dropped behind the tree line, the rising half-moon was sending out enough light that I could see shapes, if not colors.
“What of it?” Duvall toed Eddie’s box, sending it another inch toward the edge of the dock.
“And you saw Adam try to get Henry out from under the tree, didn’t you?”
Duvall chuckled. “Yeah, figured that guy was toast, the way he fell to the ground, grabbing at his chest. Pissed me off something royal when I found out he was still alive, let me tell you.”
“How did you know that Adam had seen your girlfriend?”
“Didn’t.” Duvall shrugged. “But I couldn’t take that chance. I hoped that heart thing would kill him off, but no, he got better and came home to a wife that hovered over him like a nutcase.” He snorted. “Took me a while to figure out a way to get at him.” He glared at me. “And you had to go and mess that up, too.”
“He’s my friend,” I said quietly. “I help my friends.”
“That’s great for them,” Duvall said, his voice hardening. “But who helps you when you need it? What happens then? Do they come running, lending a hand when you need it?”
Actually they did. And had done so that very day. It would have been hard to count all the friends who had gathered around when I called that morning when I was panicked for the book fair.
Trock had been a trouper, the library staff had hardly blinked an eye, Rafe had come through like a champ, Kristen had handed out the emergency fliers Pam printed up until her restaurant opened, my downtown friends had willingly helped direct people to the school, and there was Ash and my aunt Frances and her friend Otto and the marina folks and—
“Yeah, I thought so,” Duvall said. “You can’t count on anyone these days.” He stood, towering over me, his bulk blotting out the moonlight. “Just like I won’t be able to count on you.”
Of course he couldn’t. Why on earth would he think he should be able to? I barely knew him and didn’t care for what I did know. In addition to making no sense, the man was a jerk of the first order, and I wondered how he’d managed to fool Larabeth long enough to convince her to marry him.
Duvall’s foot slid to the side and I suddenly realized what he was about to do.
“No!” I shouted, and lunged forward, flinging myself onto the cardboard box, the flimsy, wouldn’t-hold-water box, the box that held my furry friend, my confidant, my pal.
My hands snatched the box out of Duvall’s reach just before the rest of my body hit the dock. I oofed out a painful grunt and twisted my body away, rolling as far as I could as fast as I could, trying to escape his powerful kick.
Still rolling, I scrabbled to open the box. It was taped shut, but I yanked away the sticky stuff and pulled open the flaps.
As soon as I did, Eddie, howling and scratching and hissing, launched himself out of his small prison. His paws barely hit the dock as he bounded away from me and onto the Duvall’s empty boat lift. He galloped along the narrow metal beams, clawed his way up the vertical padded posts, and leaped up onto the metal of the canopy’s framework.
I held my breath, because that framework was made of metal tubes and wasn’t anything any normal cat would typically be happy perching upon, but Eddie was no normal cat and this was definitely not a normal situation.
“What’s with him?” Duvall asked.
“He’s scared,” I said, and so was I. Because it was now obvious to me that Duvall had given up on having me clear things up for him with Larabeth. He’d passed the moment when I might have convinced him to work on his marriage. He might have passed it before I even arrived. And the moment I thought about that, I knew it was true.
Duvall had never intended to let me go. Even if I’d sworn to keep quiet, he would never have allowed me to go home, free to call Larabeth and tell her what her husband had just done to me. He’d brought me here to kill me and I’d walked right into his manipulative trap. Too Stupid To Live, they called this. TSTL.
“Stupid,” I whispered to myself. Because now what was I going to do? Duvall was far too big for me to fight and I hadn’t heard the least hint of police sirens.
I could try to run, but unless I got a huge head start, he’d catch up to me before I got off the dock. I could scream, but it was too early in the year for anyone to be around, and the only weapon I had was . . . well, nothing.
I studied the boat lift, thinking to emulate my cat, but I didn’t see how I could climb what Eddie had climbed. Besides, Duvall could just step onto the horizontal bits, reach up, and yank me down. In the end, he might leave Eddie alone.
Then again, I didn’t want to leave Eddie an orphan. Aunt Frances would take him, but Otto already had a cat and the one time we’d tried to encourage their friendship had not gone well. Kristen’s apartment was above the restaurant and she wouldn’t want that much cat hair floating about. Holly had a young dog, and Josh wasn’t a cat guy. I toyed with the idea of Rafe and Eddie, but wasn’t sure Rafe would remember to feed and water him on a regular basis. During the school year, sure, but what about during the summer when Rafe went for three months without a haircut because his secretary wasn’t there to remind him? So Rafe was out, and I didn’t know Ash well enough to say, not yet anyway.
The dock creaked. Duvall was moving closer to me. I cleared my mind of the panic-induced cobweb of thoughts it had drifted into and inched backward.
“What are you doing?” I asked loudly.
“Nothing,” he said. “Not just yet anyway.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” Brave Minnie, facing down her foe with courage and a fierce determination to battle her way free. If only her voice hadn’t sounded so squeaky.
“I’m not going to do anything.”
His voice was calm and pleasant, and now that he was close to me—far too close—I could see that he was smiling. The smile creeped me out more than anything else had yet and I whirled away, starting to run, wanting to run, trying my hardest to run, but not being able to because a huge meaty hand had clamped onto my upper arm, the weight behind it keeping me from going anywhere.
“No,” he said, “I’m not going to do a thing. But you, you’re going to have an accident. It’s going to be very sad. All your little bookmobile and library friends will boo-hoo when they hear.”
I tried to yank free of his grip. “No one will believe it. I’m not accident-prone.”
He snorted. “So what? You’ll be dead. Besides, no one will be able to tell. You’re going to drown, that’s all. Happens every year. Someone falls in the water, doesn’t realize how fast hypothermia works, and blub-blub-blub, down they go.” He chuckled, and that was when I really started to hate him. Killing me was one thing, but he didn’t have to be so jolly about it.
“I can swim, you know.” I gave my arm a quick twist, hoping to break his grip. Though it didn’t work, I kept trying. I thought about trying to hit him, to scratch at him, to kick him, but was wary of the danger that his other hand—his other fist—presented. One good hit and I’d be down and incapacitated.
“Of course you can,” he said, dragging me toward the end of the dock. “You’d have to be an idiot to live on a houseboat and not be able to swim.” He stopped. “Hang on. You know how to swim, so you’re not an idiot, but you have to be pretty stupid, coming out here all on your own. Kind of makes you wonder what the difference is between stupidity and idiocy, doesn’t it?”
He made a huh sort of noise, and we started moving again, me dragging my feet, him with his hand so tight around my upper arm that I knew I’d be bruised up something horrible the next day, assuming there was a next day. Close to despair, I glanced at the lake’s shoreline, but there was no sign of life, no sign of
anyone who might help me.
“Anyway,” he was saying, “this lake here? It’s deep and it’s cold. Did you know the last of the ice came off just two weeks ago? No, I didn’t think so. I checked the water temperature tonight and it’s only thirty-nine degrees. Brr!” He shivered. “That means you can be in the water about twenty minutes before you go unconscious. Now, twenty minutes may seem like plenty of time for you to find a way out of the water, but not if I give you a nice whack over the head before you go in.”
He pulled a rock from his pocket and held it high.
With sudden and absolute certainty, I knew that there was only one chance for me to get out of this, and that this was it.
I sagged down, forcing him to adjust his stance. He had to release me, at least a little, to rearrange his grip on my arm, and when he did, I took my chance.
With all my strength and all my weight and all my might, I shoved at him, pushing him toward the water. Though he grunted as he flailed his rock-laden arm, trying to keep his balance, he didn’t release me. But his grip did lessen.
I twisted hard and fast and, at the same time, stomped on his instep. I didn’t know if he let go or if I broke free and I didn’t care. His hand came off my arm and I did the only thing I could.
I dove off the end of the dock.
And the last thing I heard before the shockingly cold water closed over my head was “Mrr!”
Chapter 21
The water was more than cold. And it was more than water, it was a physical presence that wanted to crush me with its power. I couldn’t even think that I was wet, couldn’t remember to swim, could barely remember not to open my mouth.
But I wanted to. I wanted to shriek at the top of my lungs, announcing to anyone and everyone within a mile radius that I was in water that was too cold for human survival. How fish managed to live in this environment, I did not know, and I made a personal vow to brush up on my basic biology when I got back to the library.
If I ever did.
I tried to swim underwater, out and away from Duvall, but the fleece sweatshirt that had been keeping my upper half warm was now saturated and making every move of my arms sluggish. My legs, clad in jeans, weren’t doing much better, and my feet, which I assumed were still at the end of my legs, wore running shoes that weren’t doing anything to help my speed in the water.
I gave one last underwater stroke and let myself rise to the surface, hoping I was out of reach of Duvall and his rock. My head popped up into the air, and although I tried to stay quiet and hidden, my breaths were loud, panting, and full of a kind of pain that I’d never before experienced.
Cold. I was so cold. Twenty seconds ago, I’d been comfortably warm. Now I was so cold it felt as if the top of my head were about to blow off. There was no way this water was thirty-nine degrees. I was surprised it wasn’t still ice. Panting, I let my feet drift down, trying to see if I could touch bottom.
“How’s that water?” Duvall asked cheerfully. “By the way, it’s plenty deep out there. My boat has a deep draft, so the dock is extra long. Off where you just dove, it’s probably six feet deep. You’re what, not even five feet tall?” He chuckled. “Way over your head.”
I was, too, five feet tall. No more, but certainly no less, and I added the error, intentional or not, to Duvall’s growing list of crimes.
“Now, I might not have had time to give you a nice smack on the head with my rock,” Duvall said, “but you know what? All I have to do is wait. You can’t swim any faster than I can walk, so there’s no way you’ll be able to get to shore without me getting there first. And you’d never make it to the other side of the lake. It’s too far. So I can wait. Twenty minutes isn’t all that long.”
I heard a creak and knew he’d sat back down on the bench.
“Probably less than twenty, really,” he said. “You’re so small that the cold will get to you faster.” He laughed. “You shouldn’t have had so much coffee when you were a kid. Stunts your growth, you know.”
Making fun of short people was beyond the pale and this, too, went on his list.
I was treading water, a silent endeavor, but my short puffy breaths had to be giving away my location. My one chance, which had been diving away from Duvall before he could crack my head open, wasn’t turning out to be much of an opportunity. Not exactly out of the frying pan and into the fire—a fire would be welcome at this point—but the analogy was close.
There had to be a way out of this, but I couldn’t think what. My hands were already numb, so even if my cell phone was operable underwater, I doubted my fingers would be able to do anything more than point, quaking with cold, in the general direction of the screen.
I scanned the shoreline, looking for something, anything, that might help. Of course, since it was almost full dark, I couldn’t see what was ten feet away from me. Clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and what little light it had been giving out was now gone.
“Getting cold?” Duvall called out.
Come on in and find out, I muttered, but only in my head, because I was starting to get an idea in my cold-fuddled and shivering brain. Though it might not turn out to be a very good idea, I had to do something, and do it fast, because I could already feel the early effects of hypothermia slicking away my strength.
I sucked in a long, shallow breath and sank below the water’s surface. Once again, my head felt as if it were going to explode, but I told myself to quit being such a sissy and get on with it. Because if I was completely submerged, Duvall wouldn’t be able to see me and wouldn’t be able to hear me. All I had to do was swim far enough away that, when I got to shore, he wouldn’t notice when I inched out of the water.
My arms pulled, my legs kicked. The darkness was an almost palpable thing, threatening me, jeering at me, taunting me. I longed to open my eyes, but if I did I’d lose my contact lenses, and anyway, opening my eyes wouldn’t help me see.
Because it was dark.
The blackness of a northern night was something I hadn’t understood before moving here permanently. In cities, there is no real dark. Streetlights, the lights on buildings, lights on signs, lights on buildings, there is light all the time. Up here, though, there was nothing except nature. Even in summer, when the county’s population tripled, you could still see the wide dusty white of the Milky Way, strewing its stars in a path across the sky.
Arms pulled, legs kicked.
My lungs burned, yearning to breathe.
Pull. Kick. Pull. Kick.
Pull . . .
Then, when I couldn’t go any farther, I let myself rise to the surface. I wanted, oh how I wanted, to noisily gulp in air, but I forced myself to take it in slowly. Silently. I kept my mouth wide-open for fear of Duvall hearing my teeth chatter together, and felt for the lake’s floor with my feet.
“Where are you?” he asked sharply.
His voice was off to my right, closer than I’d hoped, but far enough away that I felt a little bit safer.
“Come on,” he said, “I know you’re out there. What game are you playing?”
Survival.
My stretching toes brushed the bottom of the lake, bumpy from the small rocks that had been deposited long ago by a passing glacier. So the water here was a little taller than I was. I sucked in a long, quiet breath, aimed myself, and went deep.
Kick. Pull. Kick. Pull.
I was taking a steep angle toward shore, trying to travel as far along the lake’s edge as I could while still getting into shallow water. If either my engineer father or engineer brother had been handy, he could easily have figured out my rate of travel and the maximum time I could swim between breaths, and plotted the best possible course for me to take.
Kick. Pull. Kick.
Of course, neither one was around, and to be honest, I would have preferred a law enforcement officer to either of my closest male relatives. I loved them dearly, but I wasn’t sure how either one would perform in this kind of situation.
Pull. Kick.
> Then again, who was I to talk? I wasn’t performing very well myself. My lungs were, again, burning with the urge for air, but I wanted to get farther away, way farther away.
Carefully, slowly, I rose, breaking the smooth surface so quietly that the only thing that made any noise was my hair, dripping water off its curly ends.
“Hey!” Duvall called.
I froze, and never had the phrase seemed so appropriate. Reaching down, I could tell that my fingers were brushing rocks, but there was no sensation of feeling. Same with my toes—though I could feel them smacking something, it was a feeling of numbing dullness.
How long had I been in the water now? Five minutes? Six?
“You’ve been in there ten minutes,” Duvall said. “Bet you’re losing feeling in your toes, huh? And your fingers, that’s probably long gone. Fingers are the first to go.”
And he’d know this how, exactly? Somehow I was sure he hadn’t researched the topic properly. At most he’d used the computer and the top return on his search engine. Certainly he hadn’t looked up any scientific journals. That was what a librarian would have done—librarians do it correctly.
With the useless appendages I used to call my toes, I pushed myself forward.
“Twelve minutes,” he called. “You know what I’m going to do when I get to twenty? I’m going to walk up to the cottage and make myself a hot toddy. Steaming hot. It’ll practically scald me when I take the first sip, but there’s nothing like a hot toddy when you take a chill.”
Since I didn’t care much for strong spirits, this particular taunt didn’t bother me a bit. Now, if he’d mentioned hot chocolate, that would have been different.
I was walking myself along the lake floor with my hands now. I could stand and be thigh-deep in water, but I’d make too much noise climbing out. I had to get as shallow as I could before attempting my final escape.
