Deep in the Heart (25 page)

“You’ve got to listen to me, Desiree. Donny had a drug problem. He missed two auditions, and when he finally showed up, he was too messed up for the reading. I had no choice. It was my job to get someone trustworthy for the part. Donny was a good actor, but he couldn’t remember his lines. He was always too strung out.”

Samantha took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. She had to convince this woman of her innocence or it would be too late. “Donny didn’t commit suicide, it was an accident. He overdosed. The coroner said so. It was in all the papers. Remember?”

Desiree staggered. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and for a moment Samantha thought she was going to have a seizure. She was poised on her toes for the chance to run, but it never came.

Desiree took a deep breath, straightened her shoulder, and screamed in Samantha’s face:
“You’re a liar! A filthy liar! Shut up! You just shut up!”

But Samantha continued as if the interruption had never happened. “It wasn’t the first time it had happened, was it, Desiree? But it was the last time, because this time he went too far and the doctors couldn’t fix it. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t yours. And I swear to God, Desiree, it wasn’t mine, either. Donny was sick and just couldn’t get well.”

“No! He’s dead and it’s all because of you!” Desiree screamed again.

Samantha didn’t even see it coming.

Desiree kicked. Her foot came up and then out and hit Samantha squarely in the center of her stomach. Light exploded behind her eyelids as the breath was forced out of her lungs. She staggered backward from the impact, and then heard a loud crack, felt the ground sinking beneath her feet, and knew that she was falling. Breathless from the kick, she couldn’t even scream.

Rotting boards that had been lying across the old well on the abandoned property gave way. As she fell, Samantha looked up and remembered thinking that Claudia/Desiree hadn’t lied about one thing. She probably
did
have a black belt in karate. That kick felt authentic.

Desiree danced in a little circle of delight, shaking from exertion as well as exhilaration. She’d done it! Samantha Carlyle was gone. And then suddenly she had to see for herself, know for certain that where Samantha had gone, she couldn’t get back.

Desiree leaned over and stared down into the dark, narrow shaft, then started to laugh. That smooth, pretty face was streaked with dirt and blood. The body that Sheriff Knight had so enjoyed lay crooked and crumpled in several inches of water.

As suddenly as it had appeared, Desiree’s hysteria disappeared. She straightened slowly and began to look around, taking one last glance to ascertain that they had not been observed. A dangerous glitter sparkled in her eyes as she gauged their surroundings. The isolated location was perfect.

The gun hung heavily from her limp fingers. She looked down at the weight, surprised by its presence, and blinked twice, as if coming out of a trance.

“If he could see you now, he wouldn’t be so quick to bed you,” Desiree said, her words coming out in short, jerky hisses, and waved the gun back down through the opening to punctuate her statement.

Then suddenly, without warning, she braced her legs and pointed the gun into the well. Her finger twitched on the trigger, and yet she didn’t squeeze. She realized that if Samantha died too fast she wouldn’t have suffered enough. Donny had suffered. She must suffer too.

“No,” Desiree said, in a conversational tone. “You don’t get off that easy, Miss Samantha Carlyle. It’s going to take you a long time to die. And while you’re down there in misery and pain, crying for your lover and begging for mercy that no one hears, you’ll remember what you did to my Donny. Then you’ll be sorry.”

She placed a couple of boards back across the hole, then turned and walked to her truck.

When she opened the door, she leaned inside and opened her purse, pulling out the note Samantha had intended for the sheriff. She wadded it up, tossed it down, then ground it into the dirt with the toe of her shoe. Satisfied that she was taking nothing of her enemy with her, she pulled a bag from behind the seat and quickly hid the gun between layers of clothing in it. Squinting her eyes against the glare of the overheard sun, she picked up the blond wig.

“Just one more time,” she reminded herself, using the outside mirror on the door of the truck to make sure that none of the red strands of her hair were visible.

Without looking back at the scene of her crime, she started the truck and drove away. Less than thirty minutes later she was at the bus stop outside Marylee’s Café waiting for the Greyhound bus bound for Dallas. From there she boarded a flight to L.A.

The blond curly wig and the gun in her bag found a final home in the women’s rest room at DFW Airport just before Claudia got on the plane. There was no one and no way to connect Desiree Adonis of California to Claudia Smith of Texas, except Samantha Carlyle.

And bones didn’t talk.

With consciousness came pain and thoughts of confusion. Why, Samantha wondered, did she feel wet and cold, and why was her bed suddenly so hard and lumpy? When she reached out, intent on pulling the covers back over her body, she groaned aloud as her hand bumped the side of the well instead. There was no way of stopping the chill that had invaded her bones.

“Johnny…I’m cold,” she mumbled. But no one came and covered her up. No one took away the pain. She couldn’t understand why her legs wouldn’t stretch, or why she couldn’t simply roll out of bed as she’d done this morning.

It was on the third aching breath that she remembered Desiree Adonis and jerked in reflex to the kick she hadn’t seen coming. But it was too late. The kick had already come and gone and she was still in the well.

“Oh my God,” she muttered. Reality surfaced as she became all too aware of her cramped and throbbing body when she tried to stand.

Movement made the ache in her back shoot straight up her spine, into the top of her head. The scream came without warning, bursting forth, echoing in an eerie refrain as it traveled against the narrow walls and then up and out of the opening above.

Tears flooded beneath her eyelids as she clapped a hand over her mouth in fear, terrified that Desiree might still be lurking somewhere above; afraid that her cry would alert the madwoman to the fact that she was still alive.

She had no way of knowing that Desiree Adonis was long gone. All she knew was that she was hurt and as alone as she’d ever been in her entire life.

“Oh God,” she whispered, while tears made paths across the blood and dirt on her face. “Don’t let me die. Not now. Not when I’ve just found Johnny.”

She looked down at the water in which she was sitting and suddenly realized there was a good possibility she wasn’t down here alone. Worrying about never being found or starving to death might be wasted if she’d fallen in the well with a cottonmouth. The water moccasin’s deadly venom would simply finish what Desiree had started.

She sat for long painful moments, listening for sounds in the water and sounds from above. When she’d convinced herself that she was alone in her watery grave, she sighed with relief. It was a small thing for which to be thankful.

She said a prayer, took a deep breath, and once again, began struggling to her feet—this time, much more slowly and carefully. Sweat mingled with tears as she tried to block out the shaft of pain that went up her leg.

“Oh God,” she groaned when the walls around her began to move. She lowered her head between her arms and leaned against the dirt face of the well, ignoring the fact that the hairlike tendrils of roots extending out into the hole felt like webs against her skin. “Think of Johnny. Think of Johnny.” Digging her fingers into the hard-packed walls of the old well, she took a slow, deep breath and thought about how to get out.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she could remember seeing a stunt man attempt to climb out of a crack inside a mountain. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the way that he’d inched himself up the opening.

“A chimney,” she muttered. “He called the shaft a chimney,” and she remembered that the climber had used his arms, back, and legs as braces against the narrow walls. She could almost hear his grunts as he’d push himself up with great effort, inches at a time.

“It has to work,” she groaned, remembering how far they’d come off the main highway and how isolated the abandoned homestead was. “I will not die in this well.”

She thought of the note she’d left for Johnny and a spurt of hope surfaced until she recalled Claudia gathering up the contents of her purse. She had a sudden horrible feeling that somehow, without her seeing it happen, Claudia had destroyed that note along with her life.

“God help me, because Johnny can’t,” she whispered, and put her back against the wall of the well.

At first, she thought it was going to work. Her legs were long, and a more than fair fit against the opposite side of the well. Her back was sore, but seemed able to support her weight as she began to move upward toward the sunlight taunting her from above.

Sweat popped out across her forehead, running down the middle of her spine and instantly soaking her shirt to her body. A short time into the climb, Samantha began to realize that it wasn’t heat that was forming perspiration, it was pain.

With each movement of her leg, she felt as if red-hot needles were being poked into her knee. She looked down, expecting to see shards from the wood through which she’d fallen protruding through her jeans. Nothing was there but the fire spreading in her leg.

She looked up again. This time the hole moved above her, and then as if in a nightmare, the well began to spin. She threw her arms out in a futile effort to stop the motion, and fell back into the water.

She screamed in agony as the pain in her leg traveled up past her spine, clawing for a toehold inside sanity. This time it caught and held. Everything around her began to spin faster and faster as she fell off the edge of reality into oblivion.

Minutes, hours, even days, could have passed by the time she came to again, and she would have been none the wiser. Daylight still made shadows on the edge of the well, but they were shorter, and she realized that however long she’d been down here, another day was about to end. Night was coming. And with it came fear. Unreasonable, impossible fear.

“Help!
Help!
” she screamed, shouting over and over until her throat went dry. “Someone, get me out! I’m down here!
I’m down here!
”

She looked up at the dwindling patch of daylight, holding her breath against the fear that Desiree might come back. When she could think with some reason, she came to the realization that Desiree Adonis was probably long gone from the scene of her crime. With the knowledge came fright. Samantha choked back a scream. There was no one left to tell the world what had happened to her.

Time passed.

Samantha shouted and screamed off and on for hours, standing when she did so in the odd belief that being that much closer to the opening above her head would make her voice easier to hear. But she knew in her heart it would take more than a miracle for that to happen.

Her aching knee suddenly gave way beneath her again, dropping her back into the cold, murky water with a rude plop. With nothing in her heart but a meager hope and a prayer, she leaned her forehead against her knees and finally gave way to more sobs of despair.

And night came.

The Cherokee County sheriff’s office was in turmoil. Law officers from two surrounding counties, as well as a couple of Texas Rangers, compliments of Wheeler Joe Turner, were busy reading maps and marking off places to search. The local city police, as well as most of the able citizens from Cotton and Rusk, also filled the small rooms and spilled out into the streets.

Because Samantha Carlyle’s disappearance was now officially being ruled a kidnapping, the FBI was en route, although John Thomas knew that no ransom note would come. He remembered the hate mail that Samantha had received in L.A. and knew that whatever the stalker wanted of Samantha, it wasn’t money.

The locals were ready for war. The California Stalker had come and gone and taken one of their own right out from under their noses and they didn’t like it. Search parties were being organized. Landowners had volunteered to guide the searchers over their properties in an effort to locate the missing woman. Road blocks had been put up at all the exits leading out of a three-county area surrounding Cherokee County. All efforts were being made to apprehend Claudia Smith in the hope that she would lead them to Samantha.

But none of the hubbub in the outer office made John Thomas one bit easier in his soul. He’d broken a promise to the only woman he’d ever loved when he’d failed to keep her safe.

His eyes narrowed as he leaned over his desk, staring uselessly at maps.
God help Claudia Smith if I ever get my hands on her.

Carol Ann shouted from the other room. “Sheriff, Peter Meuller on line one.”

John Thomas picked up the phone and mentally blocked out the noise beyond his office.

“This is Sheriff Knight.”

“Hey, John Thomas. You remember that stranded motorist from California? The one with the Jaguar? I thought you might like to know that he lit a shuck out of here just before noon.”

“Damn it. I warned him to let me know before he left. I guess that doesn’t surprise me,” John Thomas muttered. “He’s been ready to leave since he got here.”

“But you don’t understand. The car was ready and waiting for him the day before yesterday.”

“And he didn’t leave until today?” John Thomas was surprised.

That didn’t make sense. The man he and Monty had interrogated had seemed ready to leave Cotton since the day he’d been stranded. Why, when his car was fixed, had he suddenly chosen to wait? Did Claudia Smith have an accomplice? Had they read the situation all wrong?

“Thanks for the information, Pete. It might mean something after all.”

“Sure, pal,” Pete said, and hung up.

John Thomas yelled above the din. “Hey, Monty!”

Monty jumped up from his desk and waded through the lawmen and volunteers as he headed toward the sheriff’s office.