by P J Parrish
A hard yank on her hair and she was out of the bubble.
She’s not breathing! Do something, Ben!
Pain. A hard pain, like someone pushing on her chest.
The warm press of a mouth against hers like a kiss but not a kiss.
Coughing. Coughing.
She’s back. Thank God, she’s back.
And she could see Ben’s face above hers, dripping wet, scared but grinning.
Amelia opened her eyes.
She tried to hang on to it, but Ben’s image faded, replaced by the endless roll of gray-green water and the misty horizon. She was back in the moment, back in this life. And for the first time in this awful week, she was sure of what she needed to do.
She needed to go backward.
She needed to go back to Fort Lauderdale to find out what had happened. She needed to find out what had happened that night in the Everglades, to find out why she feared the man she had married, what had happened to the woman she had once been. The Bird had said her Mellie wasn’t afraid of anything. So she wouldn’t be afraid now. She needed to go back to find out where she had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It hadn’t been hard finding The Bird.
Buchanan’s first step was to go through his notes from his first interview with Alex to retrieve the name of Amelia’s grandmother. A quick search at PeopleFinders found Avis Martin was not dead at all but very much alive and living in an assisted-care facility called Edge of Heaven in Okoboji, Iowa.
Edge of Heaven.
Buchanan drew in a breath. Edge of hell was more like it.
He swung his Toyota into the parking lot of the nursing home. He had driven thirteen hours straight through from Nashville. Not because he had any hard evidence that Amelia would show up here. It was something else, something born of his experience chasing runners and what he knew people did when they were scared or needed to hide.
It was like birds. Or any animal, really. They would always seek out a secluded place if they felt sick or threatened. Woodpeckers climbed into tree holes, pigeons crawled into pipes, and ospreys returned to their old nests.
Avis Martin was all Amelia had. And right now, his hope that Amelia had come here was all he had.
Buchanan did a quick tour of the lot—only three cars, all with Iowa plates—and swung his car into a far corner. What was his next move? He had to know if she had been here, but he couldn’t let anyone see him so they could identify him later. Things were different now. He was off the grid. He couldn’t use his personal cell to talk to McCall, couldn’t use his credit cards, or risk leaving any kind of trail for someone to follow. He wasn’t a skip tracer any more. He was a hired killer.
He pulled out his burner phone and dialed the number on the sign out by the entrance.
“Edge of Heaven, this is Jill. How can I help you?”
“Yes, this is Delta Airlines. We’re trying to reach Mrs. Amelia Tobias. We’ve located her lost bag.”
“Oh, you just missed her. She left just a little while ago.”
Sometimes you just get lucky. Fuck that, he was way past luck now.
“Well, this is the only local number she gave us and we’d like to deliver her bag to her tonight. Do you have any idea where she’s staying?”
“No, she didn’t say.”
Buchanan rubbed his gritty eyes.
“But she did mention that she was going to stop off at Arnolds Park. There are two motels right near there.”
Arnolds Park . . . the place on the old postcard.
Buchanan thanked her and hung up. He glanced at his watch. Four thirty and it was starting to snow lightly. He slapped open the map on the passenger seat. The park was only about a twenty-minute drive south on Highway 71. He shoved the car in gear and sped out of the lot.
As Buchanan drove under the white arch, he glanced up at the lettering—ARNOLDS PARK AN IOWA CLASSIC. He was surprised the park wasn’t gated or that the entrance wasn’t at least chained off for the winter but then he saw a sign that said BOAT RAMP and realized maybe locals had access to the lake all year round.
He drove down a straight two-lane asphalt road. Far ahead, maybe the length of a football field, he could see where the road dead-ended at the shoreline of Lake Okoboji. He drove slowly, scanning for cops or guards but saw no one. To his left was a shuttered ticket house and a pavilion, and to his right was a vast empty parking lot. Up ahead, he could see an old wooden roller coaster and beyond that, other carnival rides covered with tarps. But the place was deserted—no people, no cars, no sign that anyone had been here since summer.
No sign that Amelia was here either. It was snowing, but the wind was so brisk that nothing was accumulating on the asphalt to leave tire tracks.
Buchanan stopped the car about halfway down the road and put it in park. He leaned back in the seat, fatigue washing over him. He turned up the heat and considered his next move.
Most likely, Amelia would get a room here in town for the night, maybe go back to see her grandmother again. He would stake out the nursing home tomorrow.
He let out a tired sigh. Shit, how in the hell had Amelia Tobias even gotten this far? He had checked all the bus lines and nothing came anywhere near this place. Had she found someone to drive her? Had she bought a car? Alex had found out that her diamond ring was missing from the hospital, so it was likely she had pawned it and was moving around on the cash she had gotten for it.
But money was never enough. He knew that from years of chasing runners all over the world. The best ones had that special kind of intelligence along with animal survival instincts. And they were all good liars. And Amelia had lied about a lot of things in her life.
Still, it was more than that. Despite what her husband thought, this woman was smart, animal-smart. She was as smart as . . .
A fucking crow.
His father had taught him all about crows. That they were second only to humans in intelligence, even smarter than apes, and could learn fast.
A half-forgotten memory came to Buchanan: lying on his stomach by the side of a road with his dad watching a crow try to crack open a hickory nut. It took the bird only five minutes to figure out that if he dropped the nut in the middle of the road, the cars would run over it and split it open. The damn crow even figured out that if he waited for the traffic light to turn red, he could walk right out there and pick up his nut.
Buchanan sat up in the seat and glanced at his watch. He had to find a motel, get some rest, and regroup.
The windshield was snowed over, and he switched on the wipers. He started to put the car in gear and then stopped.
A sliver of motion far down the road. He leaned forward, squinting into the dusk.
Someone was walking along the shoreline of the lake.
Then the person—just a gray blur in the flurries—disappeared.
Buchanan put the car into drive and eased slowly down the road. He was about twenty yards from the dead end when he spotted the rear end of a red car. It was parked off the main road between two buildings. He pulled in next to it and killed his engine.
He got out and walked a slow circle around the old Impala. He felt the hood—still warm. Arkansas license plate, trunk held closed with a coat hanger. Nothing inside that he could see except a crumpled bag from Wendy’s and an empty Coke can. He looked up, toward the lake. Whoever he had seen was gone now. But from his angle, he didn’t have a clear view of the entire shoreline.
He pulled up the collar of his coat, put on his gloves and started down the road.
There was a line of trees that offered some cover, but he wasn’t that worried about being spotted. If it was Amelia he had seen, it was unlikely that she suspected someone had followed her here, and she had no way of knowing who he was. This place was deserted; it was almost dark. He could leave her body in the lake, and it might look like she drowned, a vic
tim of a random attacker, suicide maybe. It was the perfect place to . . .
He was sweating. It was freezing, and he was sweating and his heart was beating too hard and fast.
He rounded the corner of a building and froze.
She was about thirty feet away, standing at the edge of the water with her back to him so he couldn’t see her face. He edged closer, his arms rigid at his sides, his gloved hands clenching and unclenching.
I need to see her face. I need to be sure. I need to see her face. I need . . .
She was just six feet away from him now.
“Amelia.”
She turned at the sound of his voice.
Her eyes, dark and questioning behind big purple glasses. Her mouth, dropping open to form an O. Her body, a swath of gray in the gloom, bending away like a tree in the wind. She was clutching a brown leather bag to her chest, as if it offered some protection.
“What?” she said. “Who are you?”
Don’t think. Just do it.
He lunged at her, and she spun away. He got a handful of her sweater, but she jerked out of his grasp and stumbled away from him, running down the snowy shoreline. He went after her, tackling her just before she reached a rock jetty. She dropped the brown duffel, and they rolled on the snowy sand and into the lake.
Buchanan gasped as he plunged into the searing cold water. He could feel Amelia kicking and flailing against him, and he tightened his grip on her arm.
They both emerged coughing and panting.
She was strong, but he was stronger. He got on top of her in the shallow water, straddling her waist and holding her neck. Her hands came up to grasp his wrists.
His fingers tightened around her neck. He thrust her down into the cold water. She fought hard, her fingers digging into his hands.
Gurgling, awful gurgling sounds.
Her face was there just below him. He could see it, even under the water. He could see . . . Her eyes staring up at him. Dark, dark, dark with terror.
Eyes that had been blue before.
Eyes that had been just a picture before.
Eyes that had not belonged to a real woman before.
Oh Bucky, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t . . .
He let go.
He stumbled backward. A second of blackness. A thrashing of water that made him lose his balance and fall back into the icy lake. Then, when he stood and looked up, he heard her and he saw her.
Mel. Melia. Amelia.
She was screaming and scrambling away, up the shoreline, away from him. She was crawling onto the snowy sand, and she was grabbing the brown duffel. She was pulling something out and she was standing up and . . .
A hard pop sound and a searing burn in his shoulder that spun him around and down back into the water. A second pop-zing into the water near his ear.
Gun? She has a gun?
Instincts kicked in, and Buchanan tried to crawl away. But the water was too cold and the wound was too hot, and even as he tried to stand up, he couldn’t do anything more than get to his knees in the shallow water.
He squinted hard into the blur of swirling snow, feeling his chest grow tight and cold because as he watched Amelia grow dimmer and dimmer he couldn’t tell if she was moving away or if he was.
Bucky?
His eyes were heavy. He had to close them.
I’m here, Bucky.
Yes, but where am I? The edge of heaven or the edge of . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Was he dead?
She wiped a hand across her glasses and stared at him, breath held, frozen hands gripping the gun.
Amelia inched closer. The man lay face up, his legs in the shallow water from his knees down. His face was turned toward her on the snowy sand and his eyes were closed. She could see a stain of red on the snow under his left arm.
Run!
She looked around frantically in the gathering darkness and finally spotted her duffel. She snatched it up and started to run. The snowy sand grabbed at her feet and she stumbled, her eyes searching for the road she had driven in on. Everything went by in a dark blur.
You shot a man!
She ran down the road, her mind racing, her lungs burning. Where the hell had she parked?
Then she saw a flash of red sticking out from behind a building. She fumbled with the duffel, dropped the gun inside and groped for her keys, terrified she had lost them in the struggle. But then her fingers touched the cold ring of metal.
She skidded to a stop. Not far from her Impala sat a second car—gray and dusted with snow.
It must belong to the man. Don’t worry about it. Get out of here.
She yanked open the door to the Impala and threw the duffel inside. But her eyes swung back to the other car, and hand on her door, she hesitated.
Wait. Check the car. Find out something about the man who just tried to kill you.
Her eyes shot back to the beach. She couldn’t see the man, couldn’t see if he was still lying there or had gotten up, couldn’t see anyone in the whirl of snow and darkness.
She hurried to the gray car, trying to take in everything she could in one sweep of her eyes.
Tennessee plates.
What the hell?
Look inside. Get a name.
She pulled on the passenger door. It didn’t open and at first she thought it was locked, then suddenly it gave way, almost knocking her over. The dome light felt as bright as a search beacon in the gloom, and she looked back toward the shore again, but there was no one coming.
Hands shaking, she ducked inside the car, opened the glove box, and pulled everything out. Sunglasses, a pint of whiskey, receipts, manuals, and maps scattered across the passenger seat. She frantically sifted through them, finally finding a black leather folder. She opened it, found the car registration, and stuffed it in her sweater pocket. She was backing out of the car holding the leather folder when she spotted something else—a black phone wedged between the seats.
She decided to take it, too, so he couldn’t call anyone when he got back here. If he got back here. If he wasn’t dead.
What if he’s dead?
She looked back toward the lake. Get to a phone and call the police? They would help her. They would help him. But did she want him to be helped? He had tried to strangle her.
No, she couldn’t call the police. She had to make herself safe first so she could think this through.
She grabbed the phone and ran back to the Impala. It took her three tries to get the keys in the ignition, but when she turned over the engine, the car gave a dying groan.
Come on!
She wiggled the key and tried again. The Impala engine roared, and she jammed the car into drive. With one last look toward the beach, she wheeled the car around and raced down the road, under the big white arch and onto the highway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Black and ice. Nothing but deepest black and coldest ice. His body was so stiff he couldn’t even move a finger. Was he dead? Was this what it felt like? Not warmth and light but this awful piercing cold and darkness?
But then he began to shiver, so hard that his teeth hurt, and he knew he was still alive. Water was lapping under his legs and he could taste something gritty on his lips, like sand, and then it all came back—the pop of the gun going off and the burn in his shoulder.
And his head . . . it was throbbing, hard and steady. Buchanan struggled up to his elbows and looked around. It was pitch black, not a star in the sky overhead, but he could make out pinpricks of lights across the lake. He sat up further, fighting a wave of nausea, and touched his left shoulder. He couldn’t see it in the dark, but he could feel it and smell it—blood, sticky on his fingers and metallic in his nose. He reached up and felt the back of his head. More blood in his hair and a large knotty bump.
With a groa
n, he slowly turned over onto his hands and knees. His stomach heaved, and he let it all come up, the bile almost choking him. He had to wait for the wave of nausea to subside before he could push himself to his feet. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and squinted into the darkness of the shoreline but couldn’t see anything.
Then the clouds parted, and a sliver of moon gave him just enough light to see the rippling of black water on the shore, the glint of snow, and beyond that the outlines of the amusement park rides and buildings.
He looked right to the rock jetty. It was coming back to him now in detail, Amelia raising the gun with two hands, the first shot hitting his left shoulder, the second missing his head by inches; then he had fallen backward against the jetty, hitting his head on the rocks.
He looked down at the rock jetty. Jesus, if he had fallen to the right instead of the left he would have landed in the water and drowned.
How long had he been out? And how badly hurt was he? He felt dizzy and sick, and he was freezing. And he could feel the wound in his shoulder pumping out fresh blood.
The snowy sand dragged at his feet as he trudged down the shoreline and back to the road. He staggered to the building where he had left his car. The Impala was gone. He stopped abruptly, staring at his car.
The passenger’s side door was open, the dome light on.
Clutching his arm, he went to the car and peered in. He hadn’t left anything of value inside, his duffel and laptop bag were locked in the trunk. But the glove box was hanging open. On the floor was the Toyota’s manual, maps, a bottle. He slid into the seat and thrust a hand into the glove box.
It was gone—the folder where he kept his car repair receipts, insurance card, and registration—was gone.
She had his name.
He leaned back into the seat, letting out a long slow breath that caught like a dull knife in the back of his lungs. Slowly, he brought his wrist up to his face and peered at his watch. Almost seven.
She knew who he was, and she had a two-hour head start.
