Until Dark (26 page)

“There. That’s better.” He relaxed a bit, resting his arms on the table. “And what’s doing with my coffee? Boy, some hostess you are.” He chuckled as if sharing a joke.

Kendra opened the cupboard and took out a mug.

“You’ll have some, too.”

She took down a second mug and placed it next to the first on the counter.

“I take sugar, no cream.”

She reached for the sugar bowl and placed it on the table.

“Aw, you’re mad at me now, aren’t you?” His slender fingers toyed with the pack of matches. “I didn’t mean to make you mad, Kenny. Don’t you have things you don’t want to talk about sometimes?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I don’t know who you are, I swear I don’t,” she told him.

“She has eyes, but does not see,” he mused.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“I’ll have that coffee now.” His smile faded and his mouth straightened into a hard line. “And so will you.”

She grabbed a mug in each hand. The heat bled through the sides of the mugs into her fingers, and at that second, she knew she might not get a better chance. Reacting before she’d fully thought it through, with a quick twist of her wrists, she tossed the scalding coffee into his eyes.

His scream was angry, surprised, confused. And lethal.

“You bitch!” he roared, coming at her blindly.

No time to search for car keys, she shoved past him and raced down the back steps for the barn and the canoe that rested against the outer wall. As quickly as she could, she dragged the canoe into the water and pushed off, half running alongside the vessel to get as far from the house as possible. Paddling furiously, Kendra made her way toward the lake, her heart pounding painfully in her chest, sobs ripping from her throat. Once she made it to the other side, she could reach the emergency phone in the parking lot where the day-trippers left their cars while they explored the Pines.

But first she would have to make it through the narrow waterways in the dark. Though well acquainted with the creeks, Kendra had never navigated these passages at night. She paddled swiftly, and several times the paddle threatened to slip from her shaking hands. She could not slow down, but she could, she told herself, calm down. She should have paid more attention when she first started out, but the panic was so fresh and the fear so great that she’d paddled mindlessly, escape her only goal. Now that that had been accomplished, she needed to be rational, calculated, if she was to find her way in the dark.

The canoe glided through the shallow channels, but to what destination she was no longer certain. She rested the paddle across the canoe and drifted just slightly, enough to know she was headed downstream. But which stream? And in which direction?

The cedar grew thick here, the trees standing tall right down to the water’s edge. Gnarled roots reached like twisted fingers into the stream from either side, and the treetops met thirty feet over her head in a dense web of branches. She could be in one of two or three places. Without light, it simply wasn’t possible to tell. She began to paddle again, thinking that perhaps this might not have been such a great idea after all. But what options had she had? Her car keys were in the foyer, which would have required her to pass the chair the man—she could not bring herself to think of him as Ian—was sitting in. Without access to a weapon that could not be turned against her, the hot liquid had seemed her only choice. But she knew that scalding his face could only be counted on to disable him for the briefest of time, time that had allowed her to escape from the house and from the man.

“Not many choices,” she muttered softly as she searched in the dark for something that appeared familiar.

She paddled straight ahead until she emerged from the overhead canopy. Clouds that had drifted past the moon now eased aside, and the faintest bit of moonlight spread through the trees, here where the tall cedars were replaced by pigmy and pitch pines and a lone catalpa tree, last year’s long pods still hanging here and there from its branches. Kendra relaxed. She knew the tree—some of the older locals used to call it Webb’s Pub, for the still buried nearby where years ago a man named Jonathan Webb made moonshine out of wild blueberries. It wasn’t where she wanted to be by over a mile, but at least she knew where she was now. Through the night she heard the familiar cry of the whippoorwills, and the sound soothed her.

The channel at this point being too narrow and the current being strong, Kendra got out of the canoe and manually turned it around. She’d have to backtrack half a mile or so, then bear to the left to get to the lake. But it was okay now. She let out a deep breath that she’d been holding forever, but could not allow herself to relax. He could be anywhere, she reminded herself. Surely he would have attempted to follow her. How successful he’d be at finding her would depend on how well he’d come to know these waterways.

A chill ran up her spine and she hunched down just a bit, and paddled just a little faster. The short scraggly trees cast dense shadows across the water, and she thought of a movie she’d seen when she was younger, where the trees moved. Several times she thought she saw movement beyond the pines that grew along the water’s edge.

“Shit, I am spooking myself,” she said aloud.

She paddled on to the place where a pin oak, struck by lightning the summer before, had cracked in half, and she let out a sigh of relief. The lake was three-quarters of a mile to the left. She could make it. She
would
make it.

As she made her way into the turn, her nose caught a whiff of something.

“Smoke,” she whispered, looking into the night on every side to see where the smoke was coming from, but as yet there was no sign of flames.

Fires were so common here, but there’d been no storm tonight to set one off. There could be campers, but they were unusual in the middle of the week, this time of the year. She sat stock-still, her eyes combing the darkness for light where there should be no light, and movement where all should be still. There was nothing.

She heard him only a split second before he leapt at her from the right, from the bank of the stream and the stand of thick laurel where he’d waited while she puzzled over the scent of smoke.

“You bitch,” he cursed as the canoe tipped from side to side. “You think I’d let you get away with that?”

He’d landed slightly behind her, and straddled the side of the canoe. Kendra tried to turn quickly to swing at him with the paddle, but he grabbed hold of it and wrestled with her a long minute for its control. She slid from the canoe as it was forced on its side and slapped her head as she fell. Dazed, she sought purchase on the sandy bottom of the stream. She felt his hands, strong and angry, grab the back of her head and force it underwater. Turning her head slightly, she bit into the only part of him she could reach, the soft skin at his ankle.

Howling, he let go of her, and she rose from beneath the surface long enough to gasp a breath before being dunked back under again. She fought and sputtered, her flailing arms trying to reach him, but her struggle only served to deplete her strength.

She felt as if they’d been fighting forever, but eventually her will begin to wane, her energy flowing from her like blood from a deep wound. Inside her head she heard a horrific buzz, and saw great bursts of pearlescent light. The fight forgotten, she turned to it, was drawn into it, her hands floating weightlessly in the tea-colored water.

Chapter
Twenty-two

It was dark and still and the air smelled of rotting wood. Coughing and tossing up water, Kendra lay facedown on the ground, desperate to take that first breath. Her back hunched as her lungs spasmed. She couldn’t see five inches from her face. She hadn’t been really certain whether she was waking in this world or the next until something crawled across her arm and she flinched.

The night, deep and quiet, pressed around her and she shivered, cold and alone, in an unknown place. The first fingers of fear began to wrap around her as pain, raw and silent, rippled across the back of her head. Brain fuzzy and limbs numb, she struggled to focus, to orient herself to time and location, to remember where she had been before the world had crashed down upon her.

Hadn’t she been on her way to another place, a place of light?

Whatever had brought her back, into the dark, she was not, at that moment, particularly happy about it.

“Well, I’d say we were just about even now,” a voice said, and she opened her eyes, trying to focus.

Not so alone, after all.

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

“Because I’m not done with you yet.”

He sat six feet away from her, his back leaning against the side of the burned-out shell of a barn that had been lost to fire sixty years ago.

“McMillan’s,” she rasped, her throat sore and raw, though she could not remember quite why. That she had recognized the locale, however, gave her a tinge of satisfaction.

“What?”

“McMillan’s barn.”

“Oh, right, McMillan’s barn,” he said sarcastically. “As if it matters.”

“What do you want from me?” She shivered in the cool air of dawn. Her clothes and hair, she realized, were wet and damp, her jeans clinging to her legs like soggy plastic wrap.

“Nothing, not anymore. All that talk about how much you care about family, it was just bullshit. The first chance you got, you tried to hurt me.” His voice was indignant. “You
did
hurt me. My eyes still burn. My face is burned. That wasn’t nice, Kendra.” He got down on one knee and growled into her face. “That . . . was . . . not . . . nice.”

She turned her head, and with his hand, he turned it back again.

“Do not look away from me when I am speaking to you.”

She looked up and blinked, still trying to focus. There were two of him, she was pretty sure. Both had angry red blotches where the coffee had scalded his skin.

Good. She hoped it hurt like hell.

She blinked again, and there was only one.

She tried to sit up a little more, but the pain shot through her head and she leaned back upon the ground again.

“Have a little headache, do we?” he asked.

“I’m cold,” she said, ignoring the question.

“Tough. This little outing was your idea.”

“Where’s the smoke coming from?” she asked weakly.

“It’s your house, stupid.” He laughed and for a moment, pleasure lit up his eyes. “You left the burner on under the frying pan. Careless of you.”

“Oh, my God . . .” She tried to sit up and he shoved her back with one hand. “We’ve got to—”

“No, we don’t. Besides, it’s only what you deserve,” he hissed at her. “It’s what you get for hurting me. I wasn’t going to hurt you, Kendra. I only wanted what was mine.”

“What do you mean, what was yours?”

“You owed it to me, all of you did.”

“What are you talking about?” Her teeth were beginning to chatter as the cold continued to seep through her wet clothes and spread like thin ribbons throughout her body.

“Half of everything should be mine.”

“You mean Dad’s estate?” Her cheeks too numb to smile, she tried unsuccessfully to force a laugh. “Well, that might take some doing. Mom had you declared dead after seven years.”

“It figures, doesn’t it? Bitch.” He stood up and started to pace, his hands moving restlessly. “Well, then, I’ll just have to have myself declared alive again.”

“How will you do that?” She struggled to sit and wrapped her arms around her chest in an effort to warm herself. “You can’t just walk into the police station and announce that you’re not dead after all.”

“I can tell them . . .” His fingers slid through his hair, front to back, in one smooth motion. “I’ll tell them that I had amnesia. Yeah. People get amnesia. I read about it.”

“You’ll still need to prove somehow that you are Ian. You’ll have to take some tests.”

“No. No, I don’t. I don’t need any DNA tests. I can prove I’m Ian. I have proof right here.” His hands slid into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet. “See. I have the picture.”

He held it up and she squinted to see it in the growing light of dawn. It was Ian’s seventh-grade photograph.

“You kept that wallet all these years?” she asked, puzzled. “Why?”

“So I could prove I was Ian.” He looked at her as if she were stupid. “Why do you think?”

His voice had taken on the tone of a man younger than the one who stood before her.

“That’s not going to prove it to the police.”

“It’s always proved it. I showed it to everyone. Everyone knew I was Ian Smith.”

“Who’s everyone?” The sun was starting to come up, but she was getting colder by the minute and she began to fear hypothermia. She could no longer feel her fingers or her toes. From somewhere sirens shrieked through the stillness.

“Everyone in San Francisco. Everyone on the street. They all knew I was Ian. The police will know, too, when I show them the picture.”

“I’m freezing. You have to take me back to the house. I have to get warm.”

“I can’t take you there now. Didn’t you hear the sirens? I’ll bet they’re there already, to fight the fire. What? You thought I was kidding about that?” He laughed at her. “Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire . . .”

“I’m really cold,” she told him, the status of her beloved home suddenly secondary to the immediate matter of her lack of body heat.

“There are blankets there behind you. You can use one of those.” He sat cross-legged on the ground in front of where she sat but made no move to assist her. “I brought them when I used to come to watch you through the windows. Sometimes I watched even after the lights went out.”

“You came inside, too. You were in my room,” she said, remembering the feeling of someone watching her while she slept.

“Just a few times. The house always smelled funny. Like a pipe or something. I hate that smell.”

She stopped and turned to look at him. “You don’t know what that smell was?”

“Tobacco, I guess. I didn’t know that you smoked. I never saw you smoke.” He pointed toward the small pile of blankets and said, “Don’t take the blue one. That’s mine. Give it to me. I’m a little chilly now, too.”

“Which one?” She stopped abruptly and turned to stare at him.

“The blue one.”

“This one?” She lifted the corner of a green plaid quilt.

“No, the blue one. The other one. What’s the matter with you, are you color blind?”

She tossed him the blanket.

“No, I’m not.” She gathered the quilt around her and shivered into it, wondering how long it would take for her to warm. “But Ian was.”

Adam drove over the crushed stone drive behind Father Tim’s Mission of Hope and turned off the engine. He’d been calling every fifteen minutes on his drive from the airport and was more than a little concerned that he’d gotten no answer at Selena’s house, but he’d been unable to get past Father Tim’s answering machine and the recorded message that cheerfully announced that the Mission closed at nine
P.M.
but would reopen at eight in the morning. Emergency calls could be made to a different number, which Adam had tried several times without success. He glanced around as he got out of the car, looking for Kendra’s old Subaru, but it wasn’t in the lot. Maybe she’d come with her friend Selena, he thought, recalling the cars that were parked out on the street.

The back-porch lights were on, Adam noticed as he walked toward the house, and inside several lights were on. He tried the back door, then tried the knob when his knock was unanswered. It opened without hesitation.

“Kendra wasn’t kidding about people around here leaving their doors unlocked at night,” he muttered, frowning, as he stepped inside.

A shadow passed through the hall.

“Father Tim?” Adam called out to the figure.

“Father Tim isn’t here.” An elderly man who appeared to be missing several of his front teeth stepped from the darkness. “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of Kendra Smith’s,” Adam explained. “I thought she might be here.”

“Kendra’s friend, eh?” The old man turned on the kitchen light. “If you’re her friend, how come you’re not over there fighting the fire with Father Tim and everyone else?”

“What fire? Over where?”

“Fire down the road. Father Tim and the others went down about an hour ago, right after we got the call. Thought it could be the Smith place. Hey, we’re all volunteer firemen, you know, Father Tim insists on it. Way to do a little for the community, you know, while we live here. Though these days I mostly man the fort. But I drove many a pumper when I was younger, fought many a fire back here in the Pines.”

Adam took off through the back door while the old man was still talking.

Given all he’d learned that day, Adam could not get there quickly enough. He hoped he’d remember the way, and he prayed he wouldn’t be too late.

“What happened to my brother, Zach?” Kendra asked.

He stared at her thoughtfully. Finally, he said, “That gave me away? The blanket thing?”

She nodded.

“But up until then, I had you convinced, didn’t I?”

“I admit I was wavering.”

“Then I’m pretty good, huh? Of course, I’ve been Ian for ten years now.” He nodded, a touch of pride in his voice. “I’ve got it down pat.”

“You’ve
been
Ian?”

“Yup. You ask anyone on the streets in San Francisco. They all know Ian Smith.” He laughed and added, “Hell, I’ve been Ian almost as long as
Ian
was Ian.”

“What happened to him, Zach?” Shielded from the cold by the quilt, she rubbed her hands together hoping to regain lost circulation.

“That little shit.” The smile curled into a snarl. “And he was a little shit, Kendra, make no mistake about it. Your precious little brother was a first-class prick.” He leaned forward, close to her, and she drew back instinctively.

“Look, Ian could be an annoying little kid sometimes, and yes, he could be a pain in the ass, but—”

He grabbed her arm. “I hated him. Hated every one of you. Self-righteous, sanctimonious, better-than-everybody-else bastards.”

Kendra stared, wide-eyed and dumb. She hadn’t known that a body could contain that much hatred without exploding. It whipped around her like a blinding wind and pounded at her with its fury.

“All of you, patronizing me. Oh, our poor little cousin Zachary. Let’s bring him out for a few weeks in the summer so he can see how the real Smiths live. Stupid little Zach.” He looked at her with eyes now filled with the remembered pain of the child he’d been. “I wasn’t stupid. I just never got to go to school.”

“Zach, it was never like that. Nobody thought you were stupid.” She sought to quell the storm she saw building within him, knowing if it was released, there would be no chance to survive its fury.

“Do you know that the great state of Arizona didn’t even know I existed until they thought I’d
died
? They never knew I was there until my mother called them in when I didn’t come home for days.” He snorted. “And even then, she told them I’d been home-schooled.
Home-schooled
,” he repeated for emphasis. “Want to know what I learned in my home school?”

His voice quivered with hot anger.

“I learned how to cultivate weed and how to sober up a drunk. I learned how to avoid the advances of my mother’s girlfriends—and sometimes her boyfriends, too. I learned that if I didn’t get away, I was going to die there long before I ever got to live.”

He tossed his cigarette on the ground and crushed it under his heel.

“I could have been just like you. Just as good as you.
She
had inherited just as much money as your father had. I used to see the checks. But it all went to drugs and liquor and supporting that flophouse she called a ranch. Everything she had went into the ranch, into having fun with her friends.”

Tears formed in the corners of his eyes and began to slide down his cheeks.

“And then I’d come East every year for two weeks, and see what it was like to be a Smith. A big, beautiful house that was always clean, always smelled good. I remember everything about that house. Everything.” He closed his eyes for just a second. “There was always good food. We went places. Places I’d never even heard of. Museums. Amusement parks. We watched television. We did things. For those two weeks I was just like you. Only not as good. Never as good.”

Zach felt in his chest pocket for his cigarettes. The bitter, brittle words came ever more quickly, and his hands were beginning to tremble. How long before the rage boiled over?

“I had to watch you to see how to act, listen to how you spoke, so that I’d know how to speak right. But Ian knew. And Ian never missed an opportunity to remind me. Made fun of me because I didn’t talk as good as he did. Because I didn’t know about all the things he knew.”

“For God’s sake, Zach, why didn’t you say something?”

“Say what? Hey, Aunt Elisa, did you know my mom’s a junkie who’s putting all that Smith money up her nose?”

“Yes.” She looked him directly in the eye. “Yes, that’s exactly what you should have said. Ian should have told us if you couldn’t. I don’t understand why he always painted such an idyllic picture of the ranch.”

“Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? Ian loved that little walk on the wild side he got to take for two weeks every year. And he loved that he was younger than me, but that he knew so much more. That he was so much smarter.” He looked up at Kendra smugly. “I guess, in the end, he wasn’t so smart after all, was he?”

“What did you do to him?”

“You really want to know?” He smirked.