Deadly Obsession (A Brown and de Luca Novel Book 4) (14 page)

For once, we were both following the advice I spewed in my work. Not just following it, but clinging to it, literally holding on for dear life.

11

G
retchen watched. She watched all of it. The fire, the beautiful, fierce fire as it devoured the house. She’d poured especially large amounts of gasoline near the front and rear doors, so the kids wouldn’t be able to get out. The damn dog had escaped, though. Blind as a bat, that thing was, but it had found a hole somewhere that she must not have covered, and it had carried the irritating puppy out, too.

By then, the first fire trucks had been screaming to a halt on the road out front. She had to back farther into the wood lot across the way.

There had been no reason to make this one look like an accident. Not this time. In fact, this time she wanted it to be an obvious arson that didn’t appear related to her usual clever burns. This time the blame would be placed squarely and easily on Marie. After all, she was criminally insane. She’d killed before. And she’d escaped in the wee hours of today. Gretchen knew that because she’d made it possible.

The timing couldn’t have been better.

She saw Mason arrive and race toward the house with that bitch writer on his heels. Her plan was to wait until he was completely gutted, on his knees in anguish and all alone. Then she was going to slip away through the woods to get her car, which was parked, well hidden, not far away, and show up as if she didn’t know what had happened. She was going to run into his arms, share in his devastation and be his only comfort. She was going to be the one he turned to in this time of grief and loss.

Except her moment never came. Rachel stuck to him like a burdock, and he held on to her as if he would blow away in the next stiff breeze if he let go. Dammit. This was not the way it was supposed to work.

* * *

It must have been four o’clock in the morning, Jeremy thought, wishing for his cell phone for about the thousandth time, when his mother finally pulled the car to a stop at the end of a “seasonal use only” dirt track through solid pine forest. They were deep in the woods. Deep. He’d been paying attention, committing every turn to memory—road signs, too, where there were any. He thought he could get them home, or at least back to the nearest town, if they could just get away from her. Better yet, if they could get away from her with the car keys.

“Where are we?” Josh asked from the backseat.

“Your dad’s old hunting cabin.” His mother smiled when she said it; then the smile turned into a horrible grimace that contorted her whole face and forced tears out of her eyes. She turned away so Jere wouldn’t see. But he had. What was
that
about?

“Dad didn’t
have
a hunting cabin, Mom,” he said. He said it carefully. She was sick. She wasn’t evil. She’d never been evil. She was his mom. She wasn’t abusive, never hit them, yelled now and then, but who didn’t? She was just sick. And right now she was confused, because he would have known if his father had a hunting cabin.

She sniffed, got herself together, turned to him again with those wide, pretty, “I have no idea what’s going on here” eyes that Amy Poehler faked so well. Only on Mom the vacancy signs were for real. There was no one home in there. He didn’t know what had happened to his mother, but this wasn’t her.

“He
did
have a cabin.
This
cabin. He didn’t want anyone to know about it, so he put it in his mother’s name.”

“Why would Dad need a hunting cabin that nobody else knew about?” Jeremy asked.

The vacant eyes weren’t so vacant anymore. There was a spark of some kind of knowing, but she opened the car door and got out before he could figure out what. “A man needs his privacy, Jeremy. When you have a wife and kids of your own, you’ll understand.” She turned to face the log cabin, a darker shape in the night. Not a light on. Nothing. The place was creepy. A crypt would look cheerful beside it.

“There’s power, believe it or not. See the line? I don’t know how much he paid to get that strung all the way out here, but he managed it. We just have to throw the main switch. It’s in the shed over there, Jeremy, and there’s a flashlight just inside the door, to the right, about shoulder level. Go turn it on, will you?”

Jere nodded and turned to his brother. “You’re coming with me, squirt.”

“Okay, Jere.” Josh’s voice was shaky. He was scared.

Jeremy took his hand, gave it a squeeze and walked to the shed. Sticks and twigs snapped under their feet, and the grass was knee high. He walked carefully. Behind them, his mother was trying to get the cabin door open. She had a small light of some kind, and he saw her go inside with it, then he crouched down and grabbed Josh by the shoulders.

“We’re gonna be okay. You know that, right? Uncle Mason is already looking for us. Rachel, too, and you know she’s got that...NFP stuff.”

Josh had heard, though he shouldn’t have, of Rachel’s NFP, and he grinned, just like Jeremy had intended, at the mention of the naughty word in the middle.

“We just have to keep Mom calm, act like everything’s fine and not do anything to upset her. All right?” He thought about making a run for it right then but knew it would never work. She was too close, too watchful. He still thought he could talk her down. That would be the best way. The safest way.

“She went crazy before, Jere.” Josh’s eyes were huge in his freckled face. He looked so scared it made Jeremy’s heart ache. “They said she hurt people.”

She’d done a lot worse than hurt people. But that wasn’t her. That wasn’t the real her. Then again, neither was the lady in the cabin. “I’ll be keeping my eyes on things, little bro. If she starts acting crazy again, we’ll go to plan B.”

“What’s plan B?” Josh asked.

“We run for it.” He pointed. “That dirt road right there is about three miles long. That’s not far. Like forty-five minutes’ walk. Maybe longer, ’cause we’d walk just inside the edge of the woods, so no one could see us on the road. But we’d keep the road in sight, follow it, so we don’t get lost. Then at the end we turn right onto a paved road and do the same thing, stay in the woods but follow the road. Five more miles. Another hour and a half or so, then take a left. Then the first right, and then left at the Y. A mile past that, there’s a little town. The last one we passed. That’s where we’d go.”

“Yeah.” Josh nodded hard. “Yeah, that would work.”

“Straight, following the dirt road till it ends, then right for five miles, left at the Y, then right again. Go straight until you come to the town. Inside the woods, not on the roads. You got it?”

“Why do
I
have to get it?” His eyes were wide, and Jeremy turned away, looking for the electrical box. “Jere, I’m not going without you, am I?”

“Not unless you absolutely have to. But you might have to. You might be my only chance.”

Josh took a deep breath and nodded. “I sure hope Myrtle and Hugo are okay.”

Jeremy found the switch and threw it. Then he looked back toward the cabin and saw lights coming on. And his mother in the cabin’s doorway, looking out, watching his every move. “You never told me why you decided to name him Hugo. It was one of the names you found on the net, right?”

“No. I was looking, but nothing seemed right. And then I just decided.”

“What made you decide?”

“I don’t know. It just showed up in my head. It happens sometimes.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like Rachel. You sure you don’t have NFP, too?”

Their mother stepped out onto the porch. “Boys, c’mon now. Get the groceries out of the back of the car and bring them inside for me.”

In that moment she sounded perfectly normal. Like Mom again. It made Jeremy’s heart hurt. “Coming, Mom,” he said, pretending for a minute that they’d gone back in time. That Dad was still alive and Mom was still pregnant with their baby sister, and that life was still normal.

“They could’ve got outside,” Josh said as they started back toward the car. An outdoor light came on, making the journey a lot easier and giving Jeremy a wider view of their surroundings, and giving his mother, he realized, a better view of him. But this wasn’t the time to make a run for it. Not yet. They were safe with her. For now.

“
Who
could’ve got outside?” he asked.

“Myrtle and Hugo. I left the door into the back room open when I put my basketball away.”

The back room was a half-finished lean-to slash porch attached to the rear of the farmhouse, accessible via a door from the kitchen. The previous owner used to stack firewood out there. There was still half a pile of it left.

“I don’t think you need to worry about Myrtle,” Jeremy said. “What’s she gonna do, run away from home? She’s too lazy.”

“She might try to come after us,” Josh said.

Jeremy lifted his eyebrows as he opened the car’s rear hatch. “Yeah, she might. But she won’t get more than a hundred feet from the house. Uncle Mason and Rachel would find her on their way home. She’s okay. And so is Hugo.”

They took several bags of groceries out of the back of the car and carried them inside the rustic log cabin. It wasn’t much. But there were a couch and a couple of chairs, a sagging cot, a big potbellied wood-burning stove, and a kitchen off to the right with an ancient fridge, stove, a small table and two chairs.

Marie took the groceries from their hands. “Shut the door, Jeremy! Before they see!”

He frowned at her, but he closed the door. Then he took the bags back from her and carried them to the kitchen. Josh walked so close he was practically stepping on Jeremy’s heels, clutching the small bag he carried like a shield. Jeremy hated seeing his little brother so afraid.

He started unpacking the grocery bags.

His mother looked at him and smiled, her little outburst forgotten. “That’s a good boy. You’ve always been such a good boy.”

“You’ve been a good mom, too,” he told her. His throat got so tight that it practically cut off at the final word.

“Well, let’s get something to eat. I got everything you love. All your favorites.”

Jeremy looked at the items lining the counter. There were twenty-four cans of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, five loaves of bread, three jars of peanut butter, coffee, a three-pound bag of trail mix, some toilet paper and a bottle of shampoo. Great. This was going to be just great.

* * *

Mason’s mood was lighter, but only by comparison, because it had been so dark mere hours earlier. Knowing the boys were alive was about a million times better than thinking they’d burned to death. But knowing they were with their mother, that wasn’t all sweetness and light, and as the night wore on, that knowledge weighed on him more and more.

Their first stop was the gas station in Cortland, where he checked the restrooms and talked to the employees, but there was nothing to be found. The boys hadn’t scrawled a note on the bathroom mirror in soap.

The video surveillance footage was already being reviewed by the State Police, and the woman who’d phoned in the tip was being interviewed. He would soon know if there was anything new from either source.

After that they got back on I-81 and drove steadily north, and his mood headed south.

It was starting to rain. The drops hit the windshield in a fine misty drizzle. He snapped on the wipers. “This is pointless, isn’t it?”

He looked at Rachel. She was sleeping. Head back against the seat and tipped slightly to the right, eyes closed. Dammit, he knew she was exhausted, but how could she sleep?

“Pointless,” he muttered, and reached for the radio.

Her hand covered his, but when he looked her way, she hadn’t even opened her eyes. “Keep going,” she said.

“What do you mean, keep going? We’ve got nothing to go on. No further sightings.”

“There will be. Keep going. We’re going the right way.”

And that was when he realized she hadn’t been sleeping at all. She’d been...doing that thing she did that wasn’t ESP. His heart got to beating a little faster than before, fueled by hope. He didn’t doubt Rachel’s abilities. They were uncanny. They were sometimes even scary. But they were almost never wrong.

So he kept driving.

An hour later she abruptly said, “Stop.”

Mason didn’t even waste time asking why. He gave a quick glance in the rearview mirror and pulled onto the shoulder. They weren’t near an exit, and there was hardly any traffic this time of night, this far north. They were smack in between Syracuse and Watertown. There just wasn’t much there.

“We went too far,” she said, and twisted in her seat to look behind them.

“When?”

“I don’t know. Just...I think we should go back a little ways. Back to the last exit and get off there.”

“And
then
what?” he snapped, then wished he could suck the words back in.

She shot him a look. “What do I look like, Nostra-fuckin-damus? I don’t know what. I just know what I know, and what I know is that we were closer, and then were farther away, so we have to go back.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I know.” She put a hand on his cheek. “It’s okay, I’m feeling pretty bitchy, too.”

He pulled the car into motion again, making an illegal U-turn at the first break in the median that they came to, and heading back the other way. He saw the way Rachel relaxed in her seat, nodding to herself.

Hell, he didn’t know how she did it. She didn’t seem to have much control over it, or she certainly wouldn’t have let him leave the kids home alone tonight. She couldn’t predict the future, exactly. But she sure as hell was good at finding people. Like a bloodhound. She’d led them to Amy the same way when she’d been kidnapped last year.

They drove another five miles before he saw an exit sign for Parish. He glanced her way, and she nodded. So he took the exit ramp to the end, then sat at the stop sign.

“Don’t shoot me, but...which way?”

She pointed at the Dunkin’ Donuts sign in the window of what looked to be a gas station and convenience store. “I don’t know what else to do. I guess we get some coffee and park this thing somewhere for a few minutes. You can make some calls for updates, and I can...think. And
feel.
”

It was, he thought, as good a plan as any.

* * *

Jeremy had made them peanut butter sandwiches and mushroom soup for dinner, and then Marie, who hadn’t eaten a bite, had insisted it was bedtime and gone outside to shut off the power. He didn’t know why but presumed it was either part of the Looney Tunes show going on inside her head, or to make it more difficult for the two of them to slip away.