Janelle Taylor (23 page)

“Do you think he would do that?”

She forced a shrug, clinging tightly to the terrified little boy in her arms. “I have no idea. Did he?”

He greeted her question with one of his own. “Do you know how easy it is to trace a license plate, Ms. Curry?”

So that was it. He had seen Beau’s SUV parked at the curb in front of her town house and traced the plate.

“The plate led me to a lease in the name of an architectural firm in Washington. Your friend should be more careful who he tells about his plans. One phone call to his business partner was all it took for me to find out where Mr. Somerville had gone off to.”

Jordan searched for something to say—
anything.
She had to keep the conversation going, knowing that when it died,
they
would die.

“Beau’s partner just came right out and told you where he was?” she asked.

The man nodded, looking pleased with himself. “He thought I was a potential client. I said I would only speak to Mr. Somerville himself… and here I am. But unfortunately for both of us, he isn’t here, is he?”

“No. He isn’t here.”

“I didn’t see the car.” But he looked as though he didn’t quite believe her. Almost as though he half-expected Beau to leap from a hiding place any second now and wrestle him to the ground.

Oh, Lord, if only that could happen.

“He isn’t here,” she repeated, hearing an edge creeping into her voice, and forcing it back.

She perceived the slightest movement of this hand holding the gun. Panic welled within her. How much time did they have? Was he just going to shoot them here and now? Would Beau come in and find their bloody bodies?

She knew what that would do to him.

The man had already lost his wife and child.

She and Spencer weren’t his wife and child—not anything close to that—but Beau felt responsible for them.

He was already riddled with guilt over the accident that had stolen his loved ones. If he came back here and found an innocent child murdered, he would be destroyed. He cared deeply about Spencer.

And what about you, Jordan?

Does he care deeply about you as well?

She shoved the thought from her mind. Now was not the time to ponder what she might mean to Beau.

The wind gusted and the French doors banged against the walls again, punctuating the tense silence.

“How did you get up to that deck?” she asked the intruder.

“I climbed. With a rope. You didn’t know how vulnerable you were, did you?”

I did know,
she thought fiercely.
I knew, and there was nothing I could do about it. We were trapped here.

“What about the storm?” she asked, fighting against her growing panic.

“What about it?”

“How will you get back to
the
mainland? You’re trapped here, just as we are.”

“That’s my problem, isn’t it?” he said, sounding impatient now. His one glittering ebony eye seemed to probe into her soul, seeing the stark trepidation that was rapidly overtaking her.

She looked away.

Her gaze fell on the coffee table.

On the flickering, dying flame of the candle.

And the pile of nautically themed books beside it.

And the sculpture.

The seagull sculpture that Beau had said weighed a ton.

Jordan shifted her weight on the couch, so imperceptibly that the intruder couldn’t possibly notice. She
slowly slipped her right arm out from beneath Spencer’s weight, holding it poised.

Just in case.

Just in case there was the slightest chance that she could act.

“Get up,” the pirate ordered suddenly. “Both of you. Get over there against the wall.”

He gestured with the hand that was holding the gun.

This was it.

It was now or never.

As she stood, Jordan calculated the distance between her and the pirate, and how long it would take her to cover it.

“Go!” he barked.

Spencer whimpered as she set him on his feet. “What’s he going to do?”

Jordan didn’t answer.

Instead, she shouted out in surprise, as though she had glimpsed something shocking behind the pirate.

He instinctively whirled around to see what it was.

In one swift movement, she swooped over the statue, knowing before her hands closed on it that this might be her fatal mistake. Beau had said that it was heavy. She had no idea how heavy, or whether she could even budge it.

Fueled by adrenalin and sheer desperation, she hoisted the sculpture off the table.

“Spencer, run! Run! Downstairs, outside! Run!” she shrieked as she swung the massive hunk of stone toward her target.

It all happened at once.

The little boy obeyed, barreling toward the stairway.

The pirate cocked his gun and fired after him.

The bullet ricocheted off the railing.

Spencer disappeared from view, his feet pounding down the stairs as Jordan’s makeshift weapon made contact with the stranger’s skull.

It wasn’t water.

It wasn’t water!

It was a farmer’s field, heavily planted with a low, leafy, green crop.

It was rough, but it wasn’t even a crash landing. The plane remained intact.

Beau maintained control until the wheels touched down on the marshy surface. Even then, even as the plane careened across the field, it was nothing like what he’d expected. It was almost as though an invisible hand had reached out of the sky and guided him in.

He was alive.

Alive!

He hadn’t even lost consciousness.

Exhilaration swiftly gave way to pain and urgency.

Wincing, he extracted himself from the cockpit. Suddenly, he ached all over. Weariness seeped into him, but he couldn’t afford to give in to it. Couldn’t even acknowledge it.

He had to get to Jordan and Spencer. There was no time to waste.

He began hiking across the field toward a distant house, barely conscious of the steady wind-driven rain that soaked him. He had to bend his head against the tremendous gusts, trudging through the mud that soon caked him from head to toe.

As he slipped and went down with a splash amid the muck, he realized he was still wearing his suit and his polished dress shoes.

The thought of being dressed like this in a place like this was so ludicrous that he would have laughed aloud if there were anything remotely funny about the situation. But he was consumed by worry.

He tried to calm his fears. Tried to tell himself that Spencer and Jordan were fine. That she would have known enough to call the police to evacuate them from the house.

But what if she didn’t realize the mandatory evacuation was in effect?

Or that their portion of the Outer Banks was only fifteen feet above sea level—low enough to be completely underwater with the storm surge if the hurricane made landfall at high tide.

He had to get to her.

He could only take comfort in the knowledge that if he was having this much difficulty in locating her and Spencer, Gisonni’s hit man wouldn’t get there easily, either.

At last he reached a house, an unremarkable clapboard structure. Behind it was a small orchard of laden fruit trees and an old pickup truck beside a leaning barn. The windows of the house were dark, but he could see the eerie beam of a flashlight moving through a room. They must have lost power in the storm.

He knocked several times on the back screen door.

The howling wind seemed to drown out the sound.

Finally, he pushed the door open—it was unlocked—and poked his head inside. “Hello? Anybody home?”

He took several steps into a small kitchen with worn linoleum, laminate countertops, and ancient appliances.

“Stop right there,” a voice said.

Across the shadowy room, an old man in a white
sleeveless T-shirt aimed a shotgun squarely at him. Beside him, and old woman in a short floral housecoat and curlers trained the flashlight’s beam directly on Beau, momentarily blinding him.

He lifted his arms to shield himself—whether from the light or from a potential shotgun blast, he wasn’t sure.

“Wait!” he called out. “I need help.”

“You one of them looters they been talkin’ about on TV?” the old man asked, eying him suspiciously.

“Looters?” Confused, Beau searched his mind for meaning. “You mean, people are looting because of the storm? Listen, I’m not a looter. I promise you.”

“Then who are you? What’re you doin’ prowlin’ around here at night in weather like this?”

“I just crashed my plane in your bean field.”

“I don’t have a bean field. I have tobacco.”

Beau clenched his jaw. “Tobacco field, then. I just crashed my plane in it. And I’m going to pay you for the damage. But I need to use your phone to call for help.”

He braced himself for the inevitable news that they didn’t have a phone—or for them to toss him right back out the door again.

“Phone’s over there on the wall,” the old man said, lowering the gun and peering at him.

“Jake!” the old lady said fearfully.

“Shut up, Emmie. He’s not lyin’. Those lights we saw and that sound we heard musta’ been his plane landin’ over in the field. I told you it wasn’t one of them UFOs.”

Again, Beau thought that if the circumstances had been different, he might be moved to laugh. But all he did was cross purposefully to the phone on the wall.

“You get hurt in that crash?” Jake’s wife asked him.

“No, I’m fine.” He lifted the receiver, praying for a dial tone.

There was one.

“Thank you,” he added breathlessly, deliriously grateful for the dial tone and for Jake’s wife’s concern.

“Who ya calling?” the old man asked.

He paused. The truth was, he had no idea whom to call.

“Nine-one-one,” he decided, and began dialing.

Jordan stared in horrified relief at the man whose body lay crumpled at her feet.

Blood trickled from a jagged split in his forehead, oozing down over his brow and soaking the black eye patch.

The sculpture had been flung from her grasp when she hit him, and it had shattered into a zillion pieces that scattered wildly on the tile floor.

For a moment, she could only take in the scene.

Then, hearing a door banging on the first floor, she realized what had happened and burst into action.

“Spencer!” she called, rushing toward the stairway. “Spencer! Come back!”

She started down the steps, knowing that she had to stop him.

She couldn’t let him go out into the stormy darkness alone. The scenario that had seemed like Spencer’s only salvation moments earlier filled her with sick dread now that she had taken care of the more imminent threat.

As Jordan hit the second step, her foot caught on something—a chunk of the sculpture. She struggled to keep her balance, grasping for the railing.

Her arms flailed helplessly, windmilling at her sides before she pitched forward.

She was falling …

Falling …

She landed in a heap at the landing several steps down, her body exploding in pain as her right foot twisted at an impossible angle beneath her.

Fighting back the tears of frustration and anguish, she pulled herself to her feet, grasping the rail.

“Spencer!” she bellowed again.

She had to get downstairs.

It was pure agony to put her weight on her right foot. She hobbled slowly, clutching the railing, screaming the child’s name.

It took far too long for her to reach the second floor, cross the hallway, and start down the next flight of stairs.

“Spencer!” she screamed, knowing it was futile. He couldn’t possibly hear her from outside.

Hot tears streamed unchecked down her cheeks.

Oh, Lord, what had she done?

On the first floor at last, she hopped to the door and flung it open. She was greeted by buckets of rain and a wind gust so violent it nearly ripped the door from its hinges.

“Spencer!” she shrieked into the night.

“Spencer! You can come back now! It’s safe! It’s okay! Spencer!”

The only reply was the fierce howling of the hurricane gale.

Wearing a bright orange life vest, Beau clung to the seat beneath him as the Coast Guard search-and-rescue cutter lurched wildly on the black, roiling waters of the Currituck Sound. The channel between the mainland and the Outer Banks was just a few miles wide at this point, and famously shallow. Somehow, that knowledge did little to dispel the sensation of being tossed on a violent, open sea.

Landing the small plane in a farmer’s tobacco field was like an amusement-park ride compared to this, Beau thought, as a towering, foaming wave crested and broke inches from where he sat, spraying him with icy water.

He had literally been soaked to the bone for hours now. Yet he paid little heed to the chill and discomfort. What mattered now was getting to Jordan.

There was no phone service. He had tried calling her, to no avail.

According to the local police, most of the northern Outer Banks region was already flooded and without power or telephone service. Those who hadn’t been evacuated when the governor’s orders came through earlier were now being taken out on Coast Guard boats and helicopters, since the Wright Memorial Bridge, Currituck Sound’s lone crossing, had long since become impassable.

Beau had fought long and hard to be allowed to accompany this boat on its run to locate Jordan and Spencer. He’d claimed that it was his family stranded out there. Just saying the words “wife and son” had been heart-wrenching enough to bring real tears to his eyes. Seeing them, the boat’s captain relented.

“All right. You can come aboard,” he had said. “I have a wife and son myself, and if they were stranded out there, you can bet I’d want to be the one to get them out. Besides, you know exactly where we can find them.”

Now Beau watched the seasoned sailor fighting to control the small boat in the angry sea, much as he himself had wrestled with the plane earlier. When this was all over, he knew there would be hell to pay for that wreck, between the charter company whose plane he had destroyed and the farmer whose crop he had damaged. It seemed the old man would probably have been happier if Beau had been a looter he could heroically hand over to the county sheriff’s department, but that was because he didn’t recognize the Somerville name or the extent of the money behind it. Beau figured that when and if the crash made the local papers and the farmer figured out who he was, he’d be looking at a hastily filed lawsuit.

It had taken longer than he’d expected for the police
to pick him up after he called 911. Plane crash or not, they had more on their hands than they could handle tonight. The roads away from the coast were clogged with evacuees, there were widespread power outages and accidents galore, and businesses really were being looted in urban areas.

They wanted to bring Beau to the local hospital to be checked out, but he insisted he was fine and that it was his “family” that he was worried about. In no time, he was delivered to the water’s edge, where the Coast Guard rescue operations were underway.

And here he was.

It was hard to believe that this wasn’t even the brunt of
the
storm, but only the leading edge. He had been through many a hurricane growing up on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, but always from the warm, dry safety of home—or a comfortable hotel on the few occasions they had been evacuated away from the coast

Never had he faced the raw elements or witnessed nature’s fury as he had tonight.

Looking up, blinking against the spray and the wind, he saw that
the
cutter had almost reached land—or what was left of it.

Even from here, Beau could see buildings rising from the stormy sea, seemingly floating in it.

He told himself that even if the first floor—or more—had flooded in his rental house, Jordan and Spencer would be safe. He reminded himself that his architect’s eye had discerned that the place was sturdily built. Surely it must have withstood other storms of this intensity.

But the truth was, he didn’t know that for certain.

As renewed fear and self-doubt filled him, he decided that for all he knew, the house was newly built and flimsy as a cardboard box.

The cutter reached the bay and headed north, hugging the partially submerged shore. He saw the captain scanning the houses for landmarks.

Beau had pointed out the location of the house on a map for the captain before leaving shore. The house faced the ocean side of the peninsula, but it was less than half a mile wide in that spot. The plan was that the boat would pull in on the Sound side and they would reach the house on foot from there.

“This is as far as we can go with the boat,” one of the men shouted to him as the engines idled. “The house should be right in there. Stay here with the Captain and we’ll go in for them.”

“I’m coming too!” Beau shouted, standing. He nearly toppled over as the boat pitched beneath him, but managed to keep his balance.

They looked at each other, and then dubiously at the angry sea.

“I’m coming,” Beau repeated, tightening the straps on his life vest and joining them at the rail.

Hang in there, Jordan. Be brave, Spencer. I’m on my way.

Huddled on the stairway above the rapidly flooding first floor, Jordan prayed as she had never prayed before.

She prayed for Spencer, out there in the storm.

She prayed for Beau, wherever he was.

She prayed that the monster upstairs wouldn’t suddenly regain consciousness and come after her like Glenn Close rising from the bathtub at the end of
Fatal Attraction.
If he did, she could at least rest assured that he couldn’t shoot her. She had crawled back up the stairs and taken his gun.

She had no idea whether she could actually use it,
but she had seen enough movies to have a basic understanding of how it worked. She had even practiced cocking the weapon, but was afraid to try firing it.

She would only use it if she had to. In self-defense.

“Oh, Spencer, come back,” she pleaded softly, her voice hoarse from screaming his name above the wind.

If it weren’t for her ankle, she would be out there despite the rising water, looking for Spencer. But she had tried—several times now—and couldn’t get far hopping. Her foot was enormously swollen and so tender that she was convinced it was broken.

She had even tried dragging herself through the water on her hands and knees, succeeding only in getting soaked and filthy before retreating to the house, where despair washed over her.

She had cried so many tears that her eyes were hot and raw, and her cheeks stung from wiping at them with the soaked sleeve of her T-shirt.

She had never felt so miserable and alone in her life.

What now?

Was this how she was going to die? Would the water keep coming in, forcing her to climb higher and higher on the stairway until it swept her away?

Would she drown?

The mere thought of that sent a violent trembling through her.

She thought about Beau’s wife and son. They had drowned.

He had to live with that—live with knowing what their last moments must have been like as the plane went down and the bayou closed in and they struggled for air, finding nothing but water.

No. Don’t think about that. You can’t. It isn’t helping
anything,
she warned herself, brushing away a fresh flood of hot tears.

Suddenly, she thought she heard something.

Voices.

She thought she heard voices.

Oh, Lord. She must be hallucinating. Was she that far gone?

“Jordan!”

There it was: her name, carried to her on the screaming wind.

The voice was achingly familiar.

You’re only hearing it because you want to hear it,
she told herself.
He’s not really out there. He’s not
—

“Jordan? Spencer?”

The door burst open directly below her.

Beau’s face peered inside, framed by a bright orange life jacket.

At first he didn’t see her.

Not until she choked his name on a sob.

His face lit up when he spotted her there on the stairs.

“My God! Jordan! Are you all right?”

He looks like hell,
she thought incredulously. He was caked in mud, filthy, his clothing tattered. Yet no sight had ever been more heavenly than seeing him there.

He took the stairs two at a time as two other men, wearing Coast Guard uniforms, appeared below.

“Jordan,” he said, pulling her into his arms, holding her tightly against him, “where’s Spenc—”

Beau’s voice faded abruptly as he saw the gun clenched in her hand.

His eyes met hers.

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“Where’s Spencer, Jordan?” Beau asked in a low voice laced with apprehension. “Where is he?”

“Beau,” she choked out, “he’s lost out there somewhere.”

“Lost?” He looked bewildered. Again, he glanced at the gun. “Lost, but not… ?”

“He found us, Beau. The pirate …”

“No…”

“Yes. He’s here.”

“Here?” he echoed in shock, looking around wildly. “But—”

The story spilled out of her then. All of it. She spoke in a rush, aware of the Coast Guard men listening in wary confusion, their gazes fixed on the gun she still held in her trembling hands.

“Give that to me,” Beau said gently when she had finished.

She did, and he immediately turned it over to the young officers. “I’ll explain what this is about in more detail,” he promised them, already headed down the stairs for the door again. “But first we have to find a little boy who’s wandering out there alone.”

Jordan sagged against the step in relief. Beau was here. Beau would help. He would take care of everything.

“I knew you’d come back,” she said softly, gratefully. “I knew you would.”

Beau stopped, his foot on the bottom step. For a moment, her words had struck him motionless. Then he turned to look up at her.

“I’ll find him, Jordan,” he promised, determination in his eyes.

“Spencer! Spencer!”

Beau knew his voice had as much chance of being heard as a whisper in a packed stadium, yet he kept calling the little boy’s name. Kept praying that he might hear an answering shout.

So far, he hadn’t.

But he refused to give up hope.

The sea was a maelstrom of foaming whitecaps now, the storm surge at its height. Beau waded through waist-deep water on what had once been a road, surveying structures that had once been majestic beachfront homes.

They would be again, he supposed, if they remained standing.

But for now, rising eerily from the flooded landscape, they were like big, deserted ships bobbing on a remote stretch of ocean. It was impossible to believe that only two days ago, this place had been a serene seaside resort.

Beau kept the other Coast Guard officer, Mike, in sight. He was easy to spot in his orange life vest. They were combing the submerged houses, one by one, for the missing child.

Beau had felt sick inside when Jordan told him Spencer was out in the storm. He didn’t even know if the little guy had learned to swim.

He had scoured every hopelessly soggy house within a reasonable range, and there had been no sign of Spencer. He had checked decks, ledges, cars—everything short of actually breaking into the houses.

“What do you think?” Mike called above the wind.

“We’ve got to keep looking,” Beau called back. “He’s got to be somewhere.”

Yes.

Assuming that the worst hadn’t happened—and Beau refused the even consider that notion—then yes, Spencer had to be somewhere.

Somewhere nearby.

Somewhere dry.

Somewhere …

“I think I know where he might be!” Beau suddenly shouted.

Jordan lay on the couch, her foot wrapped and elevated.

Rhett, the Coast Guard officer who had stayed behind with her, still stood guard over the pirate, whose inert body lay where it had fallen earlier. He was alive, but out cold. The officer had radioed for help, then settled in to wait with Jordan.

“Do you want more ice for your foot?” he asked.

Jordan shook her head, mute.

Every bit of energy she possessed was focused on the search. It had been a long time since Beau disappeared out into the night again. Too long.

The storm seemed to be picking up in intensity.

Spencer was out there somewhere.

So was Beau.

Jordan’s foot throbbed and her head ached and she felt weak, almost dizzy from lack of food and sleep.

But none of that mattered.

Beau would find Spencer, she told herself.

After all, he had promised.

A glimmer of doubt pressed into her consciousness, despite her effort to concentrate on positive thoughts only.

Beau shouldn’t go around making promises he can’t keep,
she thought, irrational anger welling within her.

But it wasn’t Beau’s fault that Spencer was out there.

It was hers.

No. You were trying to save Spencer, not doom him. You only did what you thought was best, Jordan.

If only she hadn’t fallen on the stairs.

If only she had been able to catch up with the fleeing little boy before he vanished into the tempestuous night.

“Are you okay?” Rhett asked her.

She nodded, afraid that if she tried to speak, her voice would break. Yet she was all cried out. She couldn’t believe that there were any more tears left inside her.

So she closed her eyes and went back to praying.

Praying to Phoebe, wherever she was.

You’ve got to watch over him, Phoebe,
she thought fervently.
You’ve got to keep him safe until Beau can find him and bring him back to me. And then I swear
—
I
swear—
I’ll never let anything happen to him again.

She cried out and jerked her head around at a sudden crashing sound behind her.

To her horror, she saw that the Coast Guard officer lay slumped on the floor.

Standing over him was the pirate, his face caked with dried blood, a gleam of hatred in his lone eye—and his menacing half-gaze fixed on Jordan.

Scrambling to the top of the dune, Beau said a silent prayer that this nightmare was about to end.