Heartbroken

by Lisa Unger

  “You always were dumb as dirt, Dean. You never should have told me where the marina was. I never would have found you.”

  “Brad.” Dean lifted his free hand. “You should have kept your hands off my girl.”

  “You told him about this place?” she asked. It wasn’t possible. “When?”

  “Shut up,” he hissed at her.

  The guilty, angry look on his face told her everything she needed to know. They were coming here all along, she realized. It was all part of his plan with Brad. She hated herself in that moment for loving a liar, for betraying Carol, for allowing an innocent boy to lose his life. She’d made the mistake of sharing her dreams about this place with him. And, now, after he’d taken everything else, he was taking that, too. And it was right, because she deserved to lose it all.

  “Where’s the money?” said Brad. “I just want my cut.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Dean. “You fucked it all up, man. It wasn’t part of the plan for those people to get hurt.”

  “Just give him the money,” Emily whispered. “What difference does it make now?”

  “It’s all we have.” It was true. Five thousand dollars was all they had. They were bankrupt in every other possible way.

  Brad was fast, too fast for Dean. When Brad rushed him, Dean fumbled for the gun, and it fell on the dock, nearly sliding into the black water. Brad dove for it and Dean for him, with Emily screaming again.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” She looked up into the rain. “Help!” she wailed. “Help us!”

  Why did no one come? Why was there just the black shadow of the mountains around them and the rain? Why was the rain so loud that it swallowed her voice?

  As the two men struggled, Emily thought about running from them, leaving them to kill each other. She could do that. It was another of those moments, and this time she chose right, she did the right thing. She was going to run and run until she found someplace to turn herself in. She began to back away from them. And when she felt firm land beneath her feet, she started to sprint.

  It was the shot ringing out in the night that stopped her in her tracks. It was so loud that the sound seemed to stop the rain. She hid behind a car in the lot, a red Toyota. She sat on the wet gravel, and all she could hear was her labored breathing. Then approaching footsteps.

  “Emily.” His voice was sickly sweet, a terrible singsong. “Oh, Emily!”

  From where she crouched, she could see that Brad had the gun and was holding it to Dean’s head. “My old friend Dean tells me that your family is rich, rich, rich. That your daddy has lots of money.”

  She felt a sob rush up from her chest into her throat. She clamped a hand over her mouth.

  “He says there’s money on the island, and jewelry.”

  She found herself standing, even though she knew she should hide and try to run again when she had a chance. “That’s not true,” she said. “It’s just not.”

  It wasn’t true, as far as she knew. She didn’t know anything about that and had never said anything that might have made Dean think that. She’d said that Heart Island was a place that was full of treasures. She meant butterflies and beautiful sunsets, golden memories and wildflowers. That was what she meant. Had he misunderstood her? Was he so empty inside that he’d mistaken her meaning?

  Brad was walking toward her, holding Dean with an arm around his neck and the gun to his head. Dean was clawing at Brad’s arm but couldn’t speak. He was kicking out and kicking back toward Brad and missing every time.

  “Dean’s been researching Heart Island for a while now, ever since you told him about it. Just like he was casing the restaurant where you worked. He knows more about it than you do.”

  Dean wanted to take everything from her, didn’t he? He wanted to destroy everything. She didn’t bother trying to stop the tears.

  “Why would they keep any money or jewelry on that island?” she said. God, they were both idiots—mean, murderous fools without a thought in their heads. “They’re only there in summer. It’s locked up most of the year.”

  Brad seemed to consider this. Dean was making a strangled grunt, still trying to break free.

  “Who knows where rich people keep all their money?” Brad said a little defensively.

  “They keep it in a bank,” she said. She practically spat the word. “So that maniacs like you can’t get their filthy hands on it.”

  “There’s a safe in the bunkhouse,” said Dean, who’d finally found his voice. “I read it in a book: Great Adirondack Island Homes or something like that.”

  “Shut up, Dean,” said Emily. He was a fool. What book? There was no “bunkhouse” on the island—whatever that was. He didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Brad laughed an ugly little laugh, as if he’d caught her in a lie. But he looked a little less sure of himself. “I like you, Emily. I don’t want to kill your boyfriend and anyone I find on that island. But I think you know I will.”

  The man Dean had killed had said that the Burkes were on Heart Island. Was it true? Was her father there, a boat ride away?

  “And in case you think I don’t know how to get there, I do. We’ve been planning this a good long time, haven’t we, Dean?”

  “The storm,” she said weakly. “It’s too rough.”

  “Dean and I grew up on boats,” he said. “You know that. Or maybe Dean didn’t tell you how far back we go. Trust me, you haven’t seen a storm until you’ve seen a storm in Florida.”

  She floated above herself to see the three of them standing, a sick triangle of bad intentions and ugly mistakes. She tried to run through her choices, the right ones, the wrong ones, what she could do, what she wanted to do. But she found that her mind had gone blank. There was no path except the one that she found herself on. There was no way to go but forward. She couldn’t run and leave Heart Island to those two, especially Brad. No, she had to go with them. She had to salvage what she could of this place she cherished. And maybe, somewhere deep inside, there was a little girl who thought that it might be—as dark and twisting and fraught with peril as it was—the road home.

  “The girl didn’t present like a hostage,” said Jones Cooper.

  “We have footage,” said Special Agent Eliza Griffin. She was young—very young, too young, surely, to be on the job. When Jones first walked in, he thought it was Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Since when did they let kids join the FBI? “They carried her screaming out of that place.”

  “Well, between then and now,” Jones Cooper said, “something’s changed.”

  He was mad about his SUV, first of all. It was a nice car, paid for, and in good condition. Second, he was feeling like he could have done more than let those two drive off.

  Fact was, as soon as he saw the girl in the road, he knew who she was. He’d been following the story since yesterday, monitoring the police scanner. He’d had a hunch they were headed north and figured it was possible that their flight would take them right by The Hollows. And third, adding insult to injury, he was answering questions from a federal agent who was about half his age but appeared to think she was about twice as smart as she actually was. She had that look about her, that cocky, overeducated, self-righteous look that could only get her into trouble. All the young ones had it. Even he’d had it once, to a lesser degree. But that was a long, long time ago.

  “He had the gun, right?” She was staring at her notepad.

  “Right.”

  “And you said that her face was bruised, as though she’d been hit.” The agent had a habit of grabbing at her thick dark ponytail and bringing it over her shoulder and twisting it hard around her finger.

  Jones gave an affirming nod. He would have liked to believe that the girl was a hostage, a sweet-looking young person like that. She might have been acting under some threat that was unclear to him at the time. But he didn’t think so. She was desperate, that was his read. Her life had spun out of control, and she was flying blind.

  “So she was under duress
.” The agent pushed up her dark-framed glasses. Most young women wore contacts these days or had Lasik surgery. Jones found himself wondering why she had chosen otherwise. The frames dominated her face; when you looked at her, they were what you saw. Maybe she wanted it that way.

  “Well,” he said, “maybe in some sense. I doubt she was the architect of this mess. But she’s along for the ride now. She loves him. She thinks she can save him.”

  The girl looked at him with raw skepticism. “And you know this how?”

  He gave a shrug. “Experience, instinct. It’s an old story.”

  She smiled in a way that she might have thought was polite but was really just condescending. “An associate of Dean Freeman says that Freeman had been planning this robbery for a while and that he called a friend, Brad Campbell, to come up from Florida and help him pull it off.”

  That didn’t ring true for Jones. He knew the Dean Freeman type, bad news but weak and not that smart. He wasn’t masterminding a robbery or anything else. It might have been his idea, but without someone else calling the shots, he never would have had the guts or the drive to do it alone.

  “He didn’t seem like the sharpest tool in the shed,” said Jones. “He was skittish, panicky. I can’t be sure, but he might have been on something.”

  “The restaurant security cameras show two men entering through the back, then exiting again, carrying the girl. But you say it was just the two of them?”

  “That’s right,” said Jones.

  “They were spotted at a motel south of The Hollows,” said Agent Griffin. “According to witnesses, Emily Burke and Dean Freeman left alone. By the time we got there, there was evidence of some kind of struggle—furniture knocked over, blood on the rug and the wall. But all three of them were gone.”

  Jones wasn’t sure why she was telling him this. Was she asking for his opinion without wanting to ask for it? “A fight over the money, probably,” he said. “Someone always thinks he deserves more.”

  The young agent regarded him as though she found him amusing. “That’s what I was thinking. Or the girl. A fight over the girl.”

  “Could be,” he admitted. Emily Burke was a very pretty girl.

  “What were your impressions of her?” she asked.

  “She was sober. Fairly coolheaded. Like I said, not a hostage, to my thinking. She seemed more in control than he did. He’s about five minutes from losing it completely.”

  The agent sat up a little straighter, glanced down at the file on the table between them. Jones followed her eyes to the mug shots of Freeman.

  “This is the worst thing he’s done,” she said. “He had a robbery charge as a juvenile in Florida, but no one got hurt, and he wasn’t the gunman. Then there was a possession with intent to distribute a few years back in New Jersey. This is a new level for him.”

  Jones kept thinking about the girl. Why was she involved with a man like that? If he’d had more time, if that bozo hadn’t been waving the gun around, he could have talked her in. She wanted a way out of the mess; he could see that in her. His wife, Maggie, would laugh at him. Another damsel in distress? You never can resist one, even when she steals your car.

  “And they gave no indication where they were going?”

  She’d already asked him this—twice. “No,” he said. “But my guess is they’ll keep going north.”

  “We’ll know soon enough,” said Chuck Ferrigno. He was the lead detective at the Hollows Police Department, a post he’d taken when Jones retired almost two years earlier. He’d been sitting in the corner of the room, tapping away on his BlackBerry. “LoJack says they’ll activate the device and get back to us with a location within the hour.”

  “It’s been four hours since they took the vehicle. They may have ditched it by now,” said Jones.

  It was the main reason he hadn’t put up a fight for the Explorer. He’d had the device installed when he got his private detective license last year, figured it might come in handy. Of course, that was part of his fantasy about what private detective work would be. He hadn’t taken a case in over six months, except for the occasional consulting work he did for the understaffed police department. In the last year, he’d investigated two cold cases.

  “Even so,” said Agent Griffin, “we’ll be closer to them than we have been in two days.” She got up from her seat and stuck out her hand. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Cooper. And thanks for keeping a cool head yourself.”

  He stood and took her hand. Her grip was strong, but her fingers felt small and delicate. “I think you’ll be able to talk them in,” he said. “Especially if you appeal to the girl.”

  “Mr. Cooper,” she said, as if taking him to school, “these people have committed an armed robbery that left one man dead and a woman in a coma. We’ll bring them in by whatever means necessary.”

  She was puffed up with her own sense of self-righteousness. It wouldn’t take much to deflate her. But he didn’t have the heart.

  “Of course,” said Jones. He lifted a deferential palm.

  “Please give the people at LoJack my telephone number and have them call me, Detective Ferrigno,” she said. She gathered up her files and hugged them to her chest. “I’ll be waiting in the parking lot with the federal team for their location.”

  “Will do,” said Chuck easily. “Should be anytime now.”

  She left the room with a slam of the door.

  “Christ, were we ever that young and stupid?” asked Chuck after she’d left.

  “No,” said Jones. “We were always the geniuses we are today.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Chuck rubbed his forehead. Every time Jones saw the guy, he had less hair and looked a bit bigger around the middle. The job was not good for anyone’s health.

  “Can I get a lift home?” asked Jones.

  Chuck lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to wait this out?”

  The truth was there was nothing to go home to at the moment. Maggie was taking their son, Ricky, back to school. So Jones sat back down. He’d spent a lot of hours in the interrogation room over the years, although this was the first time he’d been the one answering the questions.

  “Sure,” he said. He felt that old tingle of excitement. “Why not?”

  “I wonder about the other guy,” said Chuck. He tapped his pen against the table.

  “Brad Campbell,” said Jones.

  “He’s a real bad dude. You saw that record?”

  “I did.” Armed robbery, assault, attempted rape, grand theft auto—a list of charges that seemed to go on and on. That he was walking around free was a living indictment of the penal system. A man like Brad Campbell either ended up killing someone, getting himself killed, or serving out the rest of his life in prison. It was that simple.

  “The kid’s knuckles were split wide open,” said Jones. “There was probably a fight, like Agent Griffin said.”

  “Tell you what,” said Chuck. “Let’s hope they went their separate ways amicably. Otherwise, I bet he’s after them. Especially if they have the money.”

  chapter twenty-two

  The island, the island, the island. As long as Lulu could remember, Chelsea had been talking about it. In Lulu’s imagination, it had taken on mythic proportions, like some kind of fairy-tale place where only Chelsea could go. It was perfect and beautiful—and exclusive—somewhere Lulu was never invited. She had a sense that Chelsea hadn’t wanted her there, that there was something on Heart Island Chelsea wanted to keep for herself. Secretly, though there was no way she would ever admit it, Lulu had always been jealous. She acted like she thought it was the lamest thing, this yearly family trip that Chelsea had to take. But every year Lulu hoped for an invitation that never came.

  Now that she was finally here, she was mystified. The place was a rock in the middle of a cold gray lake. Sure, there were lots of pretty trees and clean air. But it had a strange vibe, a lonely, isolated feel. There was no television or cell service. The Internet service they got through Ch
elsea’s rocket stick was so slow that it almost wasn’t worth having. It was a tease. And worst of all, there was no Conner Lange.

  The truth was that Lulu had invited herself along only to spite him. He’d gotten pissy with her when their plan to get Chelsea to sneak out had flopped. That night he’d wanted Lulu to dump Chaz and come out anyway. There was a party with alcohol that older kids from another school were having. She’d badly wanted to go, to be with Conner, to have a good time and lose herself for a while. But she wouldn’t go without Chelsea.

  I don’t dump Chelsea, she’d written. Learn that now.

  Fine. See you whenever, he’d written back.

  That was when Chelsea’s mom had come in and Lulu had invited herself to the island. She would show Conner how little she cared. It had worked. He’d left about a hundred messages. But now she was in exile. And that little sophomore slut Bella was making flirty eyes at Conner, according to him.

  Meanwhile, Chelsea’s grandmother was a total bitch. And the whole place was an obstacle course of rules. Five-minute showers (as if Lulu could wash and condition her hair in five minutes). Don’t flush the toilet every time you pee (so gross). Don’t run the water while you brush your teeth. Be careful on the rocks; don’t yell too loud even if you’re having fun. It was too cold to swim. And then she and Chelsea had to make dinner? What kind of vacation was this?

  Chelsea’s mom had made a fire in the guesthouse. Now Lulu and Chelsea were huddled in front of it while Kate tried to call Sean. Chelsea kept reaching in with the fire poker to stoke the flames, as if by keeping them warm, she could erase their deep sense of unease. It wasn’t working.

  There had been a brief window of connectivity when Lulu had talked to Conner.

  “I love you,” he said. “Come back.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m stuck here.”