Healing Waters (53 page)

“So you call him up and tell him you got something wrong with you,” Dad said. “Tell him he's the only one who can take care of you.”

“I don't think so, Dad.”

“You don't know what it is to lose your identity and your selfrespect, Lucia. I do.” Dad rubbed viciously at his head. “A man like us will do anything to get that back—to feel like somebody needs him again. What did it take for me to risk having my butt kicked back out on the street when I came here?” His voice was raw. “Chip told me I could do something to help my daughter. I didn't care what it was. I wanted it so bad I would have thrown myself in front of a truck to get it.”

“You did, Dad,” Sonia said.

“Chip will too.” My father looked at me with a face carved in regret. “Let's face it, Lucia. You basically married me.”

Deidre drooped her eyes at me. “Pick a disease, Lucia.”

“I'm gon' put in my vote for high blood pressure,” Wesley said. “I don't even think that would be a lie right now.”

She was right. My head throbbed, and my blood pulled through my veins like barbed wire. I was probably pushing 180 about then.

“Can you help us with that?” Deidre said to Wesley.

Wesley made the list of symptoms I couldn't think clearly enough to come up with, and once again my community gathered around me while I poured a fabricated plea into the phone. Once again we waited, while I whispered, “Dear God, please.”

Only this time, the phone rang. Within thirty minutes Chip's number was on my screen. At the sound of my hello, he was saying, “Babe. Are you all right?” At the sound of his I was biting back a scream.

Deidre Schmacker sat next to me, head bent to the phone so that her hair mingled with mine. She motioned me forward with her hand.

“No,” I said. “I feel horrible. It's probably the stress.”

“I don't want you stroking out.”

The concern in his voice nearly choked me. Deidre squeezed my arm.

“I need to get away from here,” I said. “My head feels like it's splitting open. I can't take this anymore.”

Deidre pointed to the phone, and I gritted my teeth.

“I need you,” I said. “Please get me out of here.”

“I've got that worked out.”

I closed my eyes—squeezed the phone so I wouldn't scream,
What about Bethany? What have you done with her?

“Tell you what,” Chip said. His sandpaper voice had a confidence that grated across my fear. “The news media and the cops are probably all over the front lawn, am I right?”

“Right,” I said.

“So it's going to be easier for you to get out than for me to get in. Are you well enough to take a cab and meet me?”

My mouth went dry. “Yes. Meet you where?”

“Drakes Creek Marina, here in Hendersonville. Dock C. Slip 14. Are you writing this down?”

Deidre was.

“You're on a boat?” I said.

“It's all part of the plan, babe. It's going to be the new life I promised you.”

He paused, and for a moment I thought he'd hung up.

“Chip?” I said.

“Look, Lucia . . .”

His voice dropped, and so did my heart. Was he changing his mind?

“Just come and let me take care of you. Don't tell Sonia or anybody else where you're going.”

Deidre mouthed a
why.

“Why?” I said.
Because you want to kidnap me too? Try to kill me
too?
Fear rose like nausea.

“Because if we're going to start over, we have to do it without her. She'll wreck this life just like she did the last one.”

I motioned frantically at Deidre. What should I say?

Chip saved me the trouble. “I know you don't get that,” he said. “I'll tell you everything when we're away from here. And Lucia, just so you don't get caught up in guilt—Bethany is going to be all right.”

My heart seized. “What do you mean? How do you know that? Do you—”

Deidre waved her hands in front of my face. I sucked in my breath and my panic.

“I just know,” Chip said. “Trust me.”

Deidre scribbled a note for me. I fought back the dread and read it out loud.

“What should I bring?”

“Just yourself, babe,” Chip said. “All I want is you.”

I hung up and handed the phone to Deidre.

“And all we want is you, Dr. Coffey,” she said. “And our sweet Bethany.”

“Do you think he has her, Lucia?” Sonia said. “Could you tell?”

“He says she's going to be all right. What does that mean?”

Deidre put her arm around my shoulder. “It means he's still playing the game. And right now you're about to get the ball back into our court. You ready?”

“Dear God,” I whispered. “Dear God.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

I
stepped onto the dock at Slip 14 with a tiny microphone taped to the outside of my chest and a barbed-wire ball of anxiety clamped to the inside. The promised presence of an FBI unit on the water at the opening to the river and another in the parking lot kept my feet moving across the swim platform of a slim motorboat, like so many I'd seen skim past the house. The hope that Bethany waited for me there made me call out softly for Chip.

The cover was unzipped from the inside, and Chip put his arm out. When he pulled me in roughly through the mere slit he left me, I swallowed a scream. Was this going to be over before it started?

But he pulled me down onto a seat and folded me into his arms. I tried to breathe, slowly, evenly.

Pretend your fear is excitement at seeing him
, Deidre had told me.

Don't rush him for an explanation
, Ingram said.
If you can get him
to confess, great, but we're more interested in you getting him out in the
open.

We've got your back. We won't let anything happen to you.

Chip turned me around and hugged me from behind, arms across my chest.
Dear God, please don't let him feel the wire.

I searched the boat with my eyes—a tiny table, two white bench seats, two swivel chairs, one behind the steering wheel. No Bethany, and no place to hide her.

Don't ask for Bethany unless he tells you he has her.

“Whose boat is this?” I said.

“Ours. I traded Kent the Saab for it. And this is just our getaway boat, so to speak.”

He forced me to face him again, and I tried not to stiffen.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Someplace where they need doctors and aren't particular about their pasts.”

“Oh,” I said.
Don't push too hard.
“When are we leaving?”

Chip took my cheeks in his hands, bringing my fear right up to his face. I closed my eyes.

“Then you'll go with me?” he said.

I forced myself to nod.

“Look at me, Lucia. I want to see it in your eyes.”

Dear God, please.

I looked at him and tried a smile. “I told you I needed you. My blood pressure . . .”

“I'll get you some medication,” he said. “But I think getting away from that place is all the treatment you're going to need.”

I'll tell you everything when we're away from here,
he'd said.

It was a crack of light.

“You said on the phone that Sonia wrecked our life,” I said.

“You don't even know.” He looked at his watch. “We have to get started.”

“Please,” I said. I heard my own desperation.
Pretend your fear is
excitement
. “You were right—it's been horrible at her place.”

Chip arranged his face into a patient smile. “We have the rest of our lives to talk about this, babe. Once we get where we're going, you won't even want to think about it.”

“She thinks she can run everyone's lives—and she takes them and crushes them.” I sucked in a breath. “I found out what she did to you—to us. I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to kill her.”

His eyes narrowed, and I knew I'd made a mistake. My heart slammed into my chest—into the microphone.
Don't push too
hard—too fast.

Chip studied my face for so long I was sure he could read what I was doing as if it were printed on my forehead. Then he said, “What if I did? What if I did try to kill her? Would you still go with me?”

Go through the motions to get through this part.

That wasn't Deidre Schmacker. That was Sullivan Crisp. Whatever it was, I hung on to it.

“Yes,” I said. “I told you I need you. I want a new life.”

Chip moved to the seat across from me and grabbed my hands in the gap between us. “I wanted her dead, Lucia. Not just because she turned me in, but because she could never let me forget that I was a criminal. And I wasn't, Lucia.”

“No,” I whispered.

“I was a victim, like all the people I tried to help. We were victims of the insurance companies and the justice system, just people in pain trying to make it in this world.”

“You were,” I said. “Sonia could never see that.”

“She threw it up in my face every chance she got. Talked about it in front of her audiences. Used me for an example. I was her freakin' poster child for repentance and deliverance.” His eyes were in ugly slits. “You see it now, don't you? I didn't know if you could, but you see it.”

He pushed himself back on the seat and let his head fall forward. “She knew I was using, and she saw it as an opportunity. She turned me in, and then she waited for me to get out of prison, and then she brought me down here to use me to show the world that she was a miracle worker.”

“I see that,” I said.

What I truly saw was the frightening glitter in his eyes. I thought I'd witnessed insanity when Sonia smashed her own image in the foyer. But this. This was a twisted madness I was sure he would never come back from. If Bethany was here, I had to get her out. Were there compartments under these seats?

“So it was you,” I said.

“It was me.” He put his hands to his head. “Do you know what a relief it is to tell you—to know you get it?”

Chip stood up and went to the driver's seat, where he unzipped the cover. “I tried to poison her food. When that didn't work, I got in touch with a guy I knew in prison. Kent Mussen.”

He stuck the upper part of his body out through the opening in the cover, and I looked around frantically. There was one door that looked like it led to a compartment large enough to hold Bethany. If I could just get a look in there.

Chip pulled himself back in, holding a line. “Mussen got a bum rap too. He said if I ever needed anything when we got on the outside . . .” He shook his head as he reached across me to the other side of the cover.

I looked longingly at the compartment as he pulled up the zipper.

“Otto never drank his coffee until at least five thousand feet— but he must have taken a sip before takeoff.”

I got up from the seat. Chip caught my elbow.

“You're not in the way,” he said.

“I don't mind.”

He pushed open the flap and put his head through. I edged toward the compartment.

“If he'd waited, the explosives would have obliterated any evidence the crash itself didn't.”

I was there, against the door. With my hand behind me, I felt for the handle. Chip emerged with another line, and I froze.

“Sonia would have been dead,” he said with his back still to me as he lifted one of the seats and tucked the lines inside. I craned my neck—but the space was empty. “In a sense,” Chip went on, “it worked out better this way. Now she has to live with a wrecked life just like I did.”

The coldness in his voice was terrifying. I had to end this soon, because no amount of pretending could stanch my revulsion and fear much longer. I had to know if Bethany was in the compartment. My fingers hit on the handle, but they couldn't figure out how it worked. I was fumbling when Chip turned to face me. His eyes were like a pair of stones.

“It would have been easier for me to give you everything you wanted if she were completely out of the way,” he said. “But in a way there is more justice in this.”

He came to me and pulled my face into his chest. I had to let go of the handle—but my index finger caught in it.

“How do you figure that,” I said into the front of his shirt.

“Because now Sonia knows she's losing everything—and you're getting it all.”

I pushed myself back with my free hand. “What am I getting?”

Chip smiled down at me. “The child you always wanted.”

Bethany? Was he talking about Bethany? I wrenched away from him and twisted to the compartment. My fingers clawed at the handle.

“What are you doing, Lucia?”

Chip's voice shot me in the back, but I yanked the door open and stared into a vacant hole whose only occupant was a box of trash bags.

Chip nodded toward the opening he'd dragged me through. “Untie that line,” he said, “and I'll show you what I mean.”

I couldn't read his face. He had turned it hard, and I felt myself panic. He wanted
me
to go outside this zippered cabin, not him. If he didn't know they were waiting for him out there, he was at least not taking any chances.

He followed me to the opening and unzipped it. “It's right there on the starboard side. There. You'll learn the nautical terms in no time.”

I didn't care about starboard or port or anything else but Bethany. That kept me from running like the terrified rabbit I was as I crawled across the swim platform and untied the line with fumbling fingers. Chip already had the motor running when I came back inside. He pointed to the other swivel chair, and I dropped into it.

“Do you trust me, Lucia?” he said.

“Show me,” I said. I just couldn't lie anymore.

He eased the boat out of the slip and cruised faster than it felt safe to between the two rows of other vessels, setting them rocking indignantly. By the time we reached the mouth of the marina, he had the bow up on step. We flashed past the sign that said
5
MPH—NO WAKE
.
I didn't have time to look for the FBI's boat, and I was afraid to. I was afraid to do anything except hang on.