by B. T. Lord
“Why?”
“Because no one but an outsider with an eye to detail would have locked Eli’s front and back doors. Paltrow never struck me as a man with an eye to detail.”
Audella cocked her head. “Well, what do you know about that? Mmmmm. Will definitely have to be more observant next time.”
“Then of course there’s Jace’s necklace. I found it between your front seats.”
She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Lehane never would listen to me. I told him specifically to get rid of that necklace. He shoved it in his pocket when it came off your boy toy’s neck along with his shirt.” She shook her head. “Men. What will we ever do with them?”
“There’s just one last piece that doesn’t quite fit. Why did you take that picture of Eli and myself from the mantel piece along with the Night Hawks trophy? And why would you send him threatening notes as soon as he got back to town? Was that part of your plan to throw me off?”
“Actually, those would have been terrific ways to confuse you. But alas, Sheriff, I have no clue what you’re talking about. The last thing I would ever want or need is a hockey trophy. And I can live without looking at a picture of Eli with anyone, much less with you.”
Audella cruised to a stop. She climbed out of the car, walked around and opened the hatch. She pointed her revolver at Cammie. “Time to get out.”
“It will be tough with my hands tied.”
“I’m sure you’ll manage.”
“And if I don’t move?”
Audella lifted her shoulders. “I’ll just shoot you here. It’s a rental. Makes no difference to me.”
Cammie looked into her face and knew she meant every word. She had no choice but to struggle out of the car. When she got clear of the vehicle, she noticed two things. The snow and winds were picking up. And Audella couldn’t have picked a better spot to kill her. They were on a back road that had been shut down in the fall for repairs when heavy rains washed out part of the lane. Early snows prevented the crews from completing their work, leaving the road closed until spring. In every direction was dense forest and complete desolation. Rick would never find her out here. Shit, not even God would find her out here.
“I found this spot when I was driving around one day. I thought to myself I’d hate to be stuck out here.” She laughed as she closed the hatch. She then pointed the gun towards the woods.
“Start walking, girlfriend.”
“Audella, think about what you’re doing.”
“I have thought about it. I don’t believe in loose ends, and unfortunately, Sheriff, you’re a major loose end.”
“You’ll be tracked down, Audella. You won’t escape.”
Audella fixed her blue eyes on Cammie and gave her a chilling smile. “It isn’t me who should be worrying about not escaping. Now get moving.”
The road disappeared behind them as the two women moved into the forest. The snow was up to Cammie’s thighs. With her hands tied behind her back, struggling not to fall into the deep drifts was taking a tremendous toll on her strength. It didn’t help that the winds were increasing, as was the snowfall. The edge of the blizzard was here.
Her mind worked furiously, trying to come up with ways to save herself. Unfortunately, she kept drawing a terrifying blank. She had no choice but to move deeper into the woods, trying to stay optimistic, but knowing if she didn’t come up with an idea soon, she was a dead woman.
She scanned the ground, trying to find a spot where she could get some leverage. To her left was an area beneath a particularly large tree where the snow didn’t look that deep. She headed that way. Just before she reached the spot, she deliberately tripped and fell.
“Get up,” Audella ordered behind her.
“I can’t. I just don’t have the strength.”
“I said, get up!”
Cammie feigned struggling to get to her feet. Just as she’d hoped, Audella, frustrated at the delay, bent down to grab her. As she did so, Cammie suddenly rammed her forehead into Audella’s chin. The blonde woman shrieked as she fell backwards. Cammie swallowed a groan as another burst of pain exploded in her temples.
Jumping to her feet, she ran towards Audella, determined to kick the gun out of the woman’s hand. Despite the blood running from the corner of her mouth where she’d bitten her lip, Audella quickly brought her gun up. And fired.
Cammie screamed as the bullet rammed into her shoulder. She went down on her knees in agony.
“You bitch!” Audella seethed.
She stomped through the snow and put the barrel of the gun against Cammie’s forehead. She cocked the trigger. Cammie closed her eyes. This was it. She’d failed. She was going to die. She held her breath.
Nothing happened. Instead, Audella kicked out and caught Cammie in the shoulder where she’d been shot. Cammie screamed out a second time as she went down, her face and cheeks colliding with the cold snow.
“No, I’m not going to make this easy for you. As much as I’d like to shoot your damned head off, I’m not going to do it. Instead, Sheriff Farnsworth, I’m going to leave you out here to freeze as you bleed to death. We’re far enough in the woods that no one will find you. And if, by some miracle, you make it out to the road, you’ll still freeze or bleed out. The road is closed for repairs. Won’t be opened again until spring. Maybe by that time, someone will find your body. If, that is, the animals leave anything to be found. Too-da-loo, Sheriff. It’s been real.”
She swung her leg and planted one more kick in the small of Cammie’s back. A third scream of pain echoed in the woods, followed by the sound of raucous laughter.
Soon Cammie was alone. She felt a wetness in her gloved hands and knew it was the blood seeping from her wound and saturating her parka sleeve. This wasn’t good. Blood was going to attract animals. And with her hands tied behind her back and her strength ebbing away, she was in no position to put up much of a fight.
Trees wavered in and out of the corners of her eyes. The coldness of the snow bit into her cheeks, its iciness helping to keep her from slipping into unconsciousness. She struggled to sit up. After many stops and starts, she finally sat up on her knees, only to have her head spin so badly, she thought she’d throw up. Her limbs were shaking badly and she knew she was going into shock. She tried to stand, but couldn’t. She kneeled in the snow and against the driving pain in her temples, shook her head in an effort to clear it.
“You can do this,” she said aloud. “You’ve got to do this.”
She dug deep inside and, using the tree as leverage, managed to find enough strength to climb to her feet. Disoriented and dizzy she started to walk, not realizing she was heading deeper into the forest.
Minutes felt like hours as she forced herself to keep going. She didn’t want to face it, but somewhere deep inside, she knew it was a losing battle.
She fell again.
The winds were howling now, threatening to bury her where she fell.
She struggled to stand, wanting so much to simply close her eyes and let the storm take her. She was close enough already. A few more moments and she’d cross the line into the other side and be done with it all.
She was frozen through, her gloves sodden, her face and lips numb with cold, her parka’s dark color hidden beneath a shroud of frost. The icy temperatures had faded the pain in her shoulder to a soft throbbing. The cold, however, could not stop the blood from the gunshot wound desecrating the pure whiteness of the fallen snow.
She gritted her teeth, willing her legs to lift her. Damn it, she wasn’t ready to die. Not just yet. Not until she caught the person who’d done this to her. After that, she didn’t care.
The fierce urge for revenge filled her with enough strength to lift her exhausted body and shuffle through the ever-deepening snow. First her right foot, then her left.
Keep going. Keep moving. Think about the gun you’ll hold in your hand. Think about pulling the trigger and the exquisite moment when you see the bullet open a huge, beautifully gaping hole between thos
e fucking blue eyes. Hold that thought. That’s what’s going to save you.
It doesn’t matter that you’re so disoriented, you have no clue where you are. Just keep moving. You move, you live. You stop, you die.
Simple as that.
She sang this mantra under her frigid breath. It kept her going for another five minutes.
Then she lost her footing for a third time, sliding down a small hill buried beneath a blanket of white desolation. She cried out in pain, her mouth and nostrils filling with snow as she fell on her wounded shoulder.
Frustrated tears froze on her cheeks. She had nothing left to lift herself with. Her strength was gone.
Crap, she really was going to die out here.
She rolled onto her back and watched the cascade of snow fall down all around her. She’d survived gang warfare, serial killers, sadists and rapists. She’d packed one hundred years into thirty-four. How ironic that her fate would be to die, quietly and alone, in the middle of a forest that she’d loved, then hated, then grown to love again.
Her bitter laughter joined with the raging winds and snow that blew down and slowly obliterated her existence.
Her last conscious thought was of Jace. Of what they’d had. Of what she’d lost.
“I love you, Jace,” she whispered as the wind ripped the words from her lips and hurled them into the violent blizzard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
A low humming broke through the blackness in Cammie’s mind as she slowly regained consciousness. Does God sing, she thought absently to herself as she struggled upwards through the darkness. A moment later she wondered, does God know he’s off key? It took an additional five minutes to realize she wasn’t dead. Or at least she didn’t think so. At first, she couldn’t quite remember what had happened, yet as pain flared up at the edges of her consciousness, it came flooding back. She’d been cold-bloodedly shot. And left to die in the wilderness. By Audella Tyler. Who was turning into a serial killer of ice cold proportions.
But where was she? And who was humming?
She opened her eyes. The last thing she remembered seeing was the blanket of snowflakes clinging to her face and body. Now she was looking at a ceiling. In bad need of a paint job. Glancing down, she saw she was tucked into a warm, twin size bed. She lifted the threadbare blanket and immediately noticed she was wearing a man’s shirt. It was loose and floppy and lay pooled around her waist. Under the rough fabric, she felt the pull of a bandage on her shoulder where Audella had shot her.
She quickly scanned the small square room. Panic bubbled up when her eyes rested on the wall opposite where she lay. In neat rows from floor to ceiling, old yellowed photographs of herself and Eli when they played for the Night Hawks adorned every inch of plaster. Her heart hammered in her ears as she took in images of her younger self staring back at her.
Dear God, where am I? Did I somehow land in the Twilight Zone?
Swiveling her head, she saw a closet next to the bed. The door was open and jammed inside haphazardly were dozens of birdfeeders.
It took a moment for the sight of the birdfeeders to sink in. When it did, she shot up in bed and groaned aloud as a wave of pain hit her. Oh no! Somehow she’d landed in the house of the Birdman!
She didn’t know how or why, but one thing was certain. She had to get the hell out of there. She started to scramble out of bed, but the abruptness of her movements brought on nausea. And a flare of fiercely painful throbbing in her head and wounded shoulder.
She breathed in deeply, forcing herself to keep calm. When the nausea passed, she managed to get to her feet. The room immediately spun in dizzying circles. Determined not to fall, she reached out and grabbed the edge of an old beat up dresser. Once again she shook her head back and forth in an effort to clear it.
After a few moments, she felt the dizziness fall away. She moved her hand and heard a crash as something fell. She looked and saw she’d brushed up against a picture frame on the dresser that had fallen over. Without thinking, she picked it up. Looked at it. And gasped as panic once more threatened to overwhelm her.
The picture of her and Eli that had once adorned Eli’s mantelpiece stared back at her. Next to it was an all-too-familiar shoebox. With trembling fingers, she removed the lid of the box and glanced inside. She felt her knees go weak.
It was the shoebox Eli had stashed the threatening notes in. They were still there, organized in a way similar to the way she’d placed them before they fell to the floor in what felt like a million years ago.
She was in a nightmare she couldn’t escape from.
Her despair was cut short when she heard the humming grow louder. Someone was approaching. She looked around for a weapon, finally settling on one of the bird houses. It wasn’t much, but it was better than standing there empty handed.
The door opened and a man stepped inside. In his shaking hands, he held a bowl of soup. He saw her standing with the bird house in her hand and smiled.
Cammie audibly gasped as the bird feeder fell from her fingers and clattered to the floor.
“It can’t be,” she croaked.
“Ah, I see you’re awake. That’s good. I brought you some much needed nourishment.”
She watched incredulous as Dancing Harry sat on the edge of the bed with a bowl of chicken soup shaking in his palsied hands.
“It’s a good thing I was tramping through the woods when I was. Now I know what you’re thinking. Why would anyone be walking in the woods during a blizzard? I’m not ashamed to admit that I love ‘em. I love walking in ‘em, I love experiencing their fury. Just think, if there hadn’t been a blizzard, I never would have been out there. And if I hadn’t been out there, I never would have heard the gunshot. And if I hadn’t heard the gunshot, I never would have investigated and found you. It was providence, my dear Camilla. Sheer providence. And I may add, it was also providence that you love packing yourself in several layers of sweaters. All that heavy wool kept the bullet from doing too much damage to your shoulder.”
There was something about the way he said her name that jogged an old, forgotten memory. She stared at him, fighting to get it back. It was the first time he’d spoken to her without rhyme, without poetry. In his normal voice, a familiarity grabbed at her, shaking her, begging her to remember. Her eyes darted to the photos on the walls, drawn to one in particular. She squinted her eyes to get a better look at it. She looked at the photo, then to the old man’s face, then back to the yellowed picture. When the realization finally dawned, it hit her hard. She caught her breath as she slipped down onto the bed.
“It can’t be,” she repeated in a whisper. “It’s impossible. You’re dead.”
“I am?”
“Maybe you’re not. Maybe I am. Maybe I’ve lost my mind and this is all a crazy dream.” He leaned over and pinched the back of her hand. “Ow! What the hell--” she yelped.
“If you feel that, you’re not dead and you’re not dreaming.”
“But I must be. You’re not – you can’t possibly be--”
The man looked at her and grinned. Cammie’s eyes unexpectedly welled up.
“You are, aren’t you?” she whispered past the growing lump in her throat. “You’re—you’re Coach McIntyre,” she whispered.
“I was once. Now I’m just Dancing Harry.”
“But how? Why? What happened to you? You just -- disappeared.” She almost said, you’ve shrunk, you’ve changed so completely you look nothing like the man in that picture. She bit back the words at the last moment. However she knew he knew what she’d meant to say. A sadness flashed in his eyes before falling back behind his curtain of eccentric madness.
“Nothing can we call our own but death, as the Bard once said.” He glanced at her and sighed. “It’s a long, familiar story involving alcohol and other unpleasantries that does no good to remember or to recount. Suffice to say that you’re right. Coach McIntyre is dead. He died the night he sat out his best player because the lure of fame and money was much more import
ant to him than integrity. He’s better off dead. Although I am but a shadow, it is a shadow that has left its demons behind. Now eat this. Don’t want the soup to get cold.”
It was too surreal. She stared at him, trying to find remnants of the man she’d once known. But except for an inflection in his voice when he’d said her name, his face was so changed, so beaten down, it was a miracle she’d recognized him at all.
As if in a daze, Cammie took the soup and automatically began to eat. It was surprisingly good and exactly what she needed. Warmth flooded her limbs and she felt a little stronger when they were done.
“How long have I been here?”
“About two hours. You’re lucky the bullet went right through your arm. I bandaged it as best I could, but I’d go see Doc when the storm blows over.”
“I don’t have time. I have to catch a murderer.”
“So it wasn’t Jace after all.”
“No, it wasn’t.” She managed to get out of bed, leaning back against the mattress as another bout of dizziness threatened to overtake her.
“Maybe you should lie back down and have your deputy go after – who it is, by the way?”
“Audella Tyler.” She looked at Harry, her eyes glinting with hatred. “She and I have a score to settle.”
“You’ll be lucky she doesn’t finish the job with the shape you’re in.”
Unwilling to argue with him, she swiftly changed the subject. She shook off the dizziness and pointed to the closet.
“Why did you do that?”
Harry shrugged. “Had nothing else better to do.”
“Put them all back after the storm blows over and we’ll forget it ever happened. Can you do that?”
“For you, anything.”
“Why did you put the trophy in my truck?”
“I always felt you deserved it more than Eli.”
“Did you also send Eli the notes?”
Dancing Harry nodded.
“Why would you do something like that?”
“He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.”
