Veiled Threats (19 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
,
AND FOR MANY NIGHTS AFTERWARDS
,
THE FACELESS
men came again. But this time their groping nightmare hands were reaching for me. Over and over again I ran from them, calling out to Holt. But he couldn't find me in the darkness, and when the alarm went off I was more exhausted than ever. By Friday, the day of my trip to Ellensburg, I was dead on my feet.

Fortunately, Lily volunteered to do the driving, so that I could review my paperwork on Fay's wedding. Not that I could concentrate on anything but Nickie. I hadn't seen Holt since Monday night, when he dropped me at my van before driving Ray and that horrible package over to Medina. Both of them were spending most of their time at the Parrys’ estate now, to provide moral support and wait for the kidnappers’ next message.

So I spent the two-hour drive over Snoqualmie Pass staring at checklists and contracts without really seeing them, while Lily hummed along to the van's radio. Once in Ellensburg, we checked into a motel and parted ways until dinner. Lily went off to see her friends and I spent the day taking care of business and restraining myself from calling Holt until seven
P
.
M
., our prearranged time. The hours crept by, and finally I was back in the motel, hunched over the phone, listening to it ringing at the Parry estate.

Holt grabbed it on the second ring. “Carnegie?”

“Yes. Any news?”

“They finally made the ransom demand.” He paused. “They want two million dollars, and a promise from Douglas that he won't testify against Keith Guthridge.”

“So it
was
Guthridge!” I said. “Will Douglas go to the police now?”

“He doesn't dare. He told them he won't pay unless he hears directly from Nickie that she's all right, but he's already getting the money together. It's the business about the testimony that will really be hard on him. He'll have to keep silent, though. He'll never be able to let Nickie out of his sight again if he doesn't.”

“I wish there was something I could
do.
”

“We all wish that,” Holt said ruefully. “But all we can do is keep up the appearance of normal behavior. The kidnappers knew that Lieutenant Borden had come to the house—that's why they cut her hair—so we know they're watching.”

“So I should still go down to Mount Rainier tomorrow?”

“Absolutely. In fact, I'll still go with you. I'm beginning to think I'm doing more harm than good around here, because Douglas is embarrassed about being seen when he's so upset. I'm going back to my place tonight.”

I cradled the phone with both hands, wanting to hold him. “I can't wait to see you. It's so crazy, trying to act as if nothing's wrong. I miss you terribly, Holt.”

“I miss you, love. I'll be at the houseboat at one o'clock tomorrow afternoon, OK?”

“One o'clock.” Just a few hours, really. But how many hours would it be until Nickie came home?

I met Lily at a steakhouse recommended by her friends. Ellensburg is a ranch town, and this was a restaurant where
cowboy boots were footwear, not a fashion statement. We ordered steaks and a pitcher, and I nodded and smiled while Lily chattered. Nickie had been held hostage, a piece of merchandise with a price tag on her, for six days. I wondered if she was getting enough to eat, and when my steak came I couldn't touch it.

So I had another beer instead, and then another, while Lily switched to coffee. The country music began to throb inside my skull, and the laughter of the men at the pool table seemed cold and malicious. Damn them all, damn everything. Lily said something to me about checking in with her babysitter in Seattle, but her face was lopsided and her voice was far away. Another burst of laughter, and someone lit a cigar that smelled like Eddie's. What if I never, ever saw Eddie again? My wonderful, darling Eddie … I drained my glass and stumbled to the ladies’ room.

Lily found me leaning by the sink with a wad of wet paper towels pressed to my forehead. “Carnegie, I've got to go back to Seattle. Ethan's got a fever and—Hello? You're drunk, aren't you?”

“Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Stupid thing to do, stupid to be here. I shouldn't have come….”

“Well, you had to come, Carnegie, but your brain is sure somewhere else. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” I made the mistake of shaking my head, and the room whirled around me. “No, I'm sorry, it's just … maybe another time. Wait, you said Ethan's sick?” Ethan was her four-year-old cherub.

“Yeah.” Lily smiled mechanically, but even in my beery fog I could see the strain in her eyes. “No big deal. I'm sure it's only the flu. I just want to be with him.”

“Of course. Let's get going.”

“What about your appointments tomorrow morning?”

“I'll come back over next week. It'll be fine. Let's go home.”

I paid for dinner, we checked out of the motel, and within half an hour we were driving into the darkness with Lily at the wheel, back over the mountains on Interstate 90, westward toward Seattle. Sagebrush ridges rose steep and black against the starry sky, pine trees marching across their crests in silhouette, like soldiers to some ghostly battle. I fell asleep just before the summit of the pass, and didn't wake again until Lily roused me.

“Carnegie, we're here. Do you need help getting inside? Have you got your house keys?”

“In my purse,” I mumbled, sitting up. I could hear familiar sounds, water lapping against pilings, the houseboats swinging and bumping gently at their moorings in the darkness. I rolled the window down and the night air swept in, damp and chilly after the dusty sunshine of Ellensburg. My neck was stiff, and my tongue tasted like a bar towel. “But wait, I have to drive you home.”

“No way,” she said. “I'll bring Vanna back in the morning. Do you need your tote bag from the back?”

“No.” I just needed more sleep, preferably horizontal. “Lily, I'm sorry you had to drive—”

“Hey, look, we all have our crazy times. You get some rest.”

“OK. Love to Ethan.”

I unfolded myself from the passenger seat. Lily handed me my purse, and I tottered down the dock as she drove away. The van burped and backfired, then all was quiet. I was queasy and shivering, grateful to duck inside my dark, familiar home. I left the lights off, in deference to the headache
building up behind my eyes, and went straight to the answering machine. No blinking light, no messages. No word about Nickie.

Well, what had I expected? That my sudden return to town would miraculously bring her freedom? I slumped, defeated, onto the couch, and waited for the energy to take a shower and go to bed. Up and at 'em. But even hunting up some aspirin seemed too great a task, and the longer I sat the farther away the bathroom became. Beer, fatigue, and disappointment chopped away at my resolve like axes at a tree trunk. I swayed, and I fell.
Timberrr.
Tomorrow morning, I promised myself. Tomorrow morning I will get up and go straight to bed. Meanwhile I nestled into the cushions, hung my too-long legs off the too-short couch, and slept.

The key turning in my front door lock was a delicate sound, fitting neatly into a dream of my mother's house in Boise. In my dream the sun was shining, lighting up the gay pinwheel blooms of the dahlias that crowded her backyard. It all disappeared as I opened my eyes in the darkness. A creaking door, and footsteps. I yanked myself upright, my heart banging like a loose shutter in a windstorm.

Two men. I could hear them muttering to each other in the hallway off the kitchen, as if they had the house to themselves. Of course. I wasn't supposed to be here. There was no van outside; I was supposed to be out of town. That's why they could stand muttering inside my front door. Oh, Jesus, the door. The only door out, my only line of escape, and they were standing there in the shadows blocking it. Faceless men, men with hands that groped at me in nightmares, the men who took Nickie, who slashed off her hair.

I should have shouted, I suppose, screamed for the neighbors or called the police or something rational like that. But I
wasn't rational. I was groggy with alcohol and half asleep and strained to the snapping point with the tensions of the last several days. I had one thought, and one only:
They don't know I'm here.
And if they didn't know, if I could hide and listen, maybe I could find out what had happened to Nickie, and whether Theo was involved.

But could I hide? What if they searched, what if they cornered me in a closet with knives in their hands? They were moving into the kitchen. I could hear their heavy steps; they'd be in the room with me in another moment. I could slip into the bedroom and out the window to the dock, but would that window open wide enough? Windows, doors … of course! There were doors just behind me, the always-open door to the sunporch and the sliding glass door from the porch to the deck outside.

I rose with the thought, crossed the room in a split second, then glanced back and saw my purse. It was lying on the coffee table, screamingly visible even in the faint illumination that fell across the room from the urban night outside. Advertising my early return, and my presence on the premises. I bit my lip and took another endless second to cross back and snatch it up, the patterned leather slipping in my trembling hands.
They don't know I'm here, don't let them know, hurry, hurry, hurry.

Onto the porch; slide open the glass door; thank God it ran smooth and quiet in its metal track. Out to the rough old planks of the deck. I pulled the door closed behind me and gulped the cool air, but I was no safer, not yet. As soon as they stepped into the living room they would see me through this glass wall, silhouetted against the lights across the lake just as clearly as those pine trees against the stars. Which way to run? To the right, past the uncurtained kitchen windows and around to the dock? Or—

A flicker of movement caught my eye from inside. In a single simultaneous motion, as if the intruder's movements governed mine, overruling conscious thought, I dropped softly to the deck and slipped over the edge into the slick black water of the lake. My jeans soaked through in an instant, my shirt filled and billowed around me. I hung suspended, holding the splintery wood above with the fingers of both hands, while the cold water gripped me like a ruthless fist, squeezing the breath out of me in a single, painful gasp. My purse floated away, invisible in the shadows under the deck. I had to follow it, to disappear as well, but I hated like hell to let go.

Footsteps, vibrating through the wooden deck. I let go, sinking down and then bobbing up, desperate to keep the water out of my nose and mouth. I lunged forward and reached blindly into the darkness. My hand met something thin and hard, slimed over with algae. A wire cable, one of the many that secured the houseboat to the log floats beneath. It felt revolting, and smelled worse, but I clung to it like a child to its mother, trying to fight the vertigo. Trying not to imagine the murky depths beneath my dangling legs. Black depths of choking water, drawing me down, closing over my face … I forced myself to breathe, slowly and silently, through my mouth. There was barely enough fetid, dripping space for my head to lift clear of the surface, but that space was my only sanctuary. My hair drifted around me like seaweed. I held on, and waited.

Footsteps again, huge and hollow on the planking just inches above my upturned face. One of the men had come out on the deck. Had he seen me, heard me? Did he notice the telltale ripples that were spreading away from my hiding place under his feet? Silence. He shifted his stance. Then another set of footsteps, and the second man's voice, half-whispering, furious.

“Get rid of that, you asshole! She knows the smell.”

No answer. But a tiny red-gold ember arced into the water and sputtered out, close enough for me to touch. And to smell. A spicy, acrid scent, the one I had recognized in my living room weeks ago, the one I had caught just before my fall near the Parrys’ rose garden. So there
was
an attacker that night, and a real, not imaginary, intruder in my home when I came back from Victoria. He was here again tonight, and he smoked clove cigarettes. The discarded butt drifted toward me on the water's surface, level with my chin and my chattering teeth.

I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes against a greater vertigo. It wasn't the cigarette smell, and the revelation it brought, that held me paralyzed with shock. It was the sound of the second man's voice. A light tenor voice, which I'd heard so recently, murmuring words of consolation and love.

Holt Walker's voice.

I
T WAS ANGER THAT SAVED ME
. A
T FIRST THE SHOCK OF BE
trayal almost loosened my hold on the cable, and forced Holt's name aloud from my throat. But he and his companion would have hauled me out of the water like a hooked fish, and then what? The other man had attacked me once already, that night in the garden. The smell of his cigarette brought it all back: the dark swaying trees, the chilly wind, Nickie's jacket around my shoulders …

Nickie's jacket. Of course. I held tight to my stinking, slippery lifeline, and cursed myself silently for a fool. The man on the deck with Holt Walker had mistaken me for Douglas Parry's daughter there in the dark woods, and my supposed fall was really an attempt at kidnapping her. Nickie's abductor was standing directly over my head.

Along with his boss. That much was all too clear from the next words Holt spoke. “Andreas, what are you doing out here? We've got work to do.”

“Thought I heard something.” The reply was sullen, with a guttural German accent, inaudible to anyone farther than a few feet away. “Listen.”

They listened, while I held my breath and made the ugly, mortifying connections, step by step. If this man Andreas had kidnapped Nickie, and if he took orders from Holt, then
Holt had planned it all from the beginning. Had deceived us all from the beginning. Not just when he let poor Ray open that package in the moonlight. Not just when he feigned alarm and outrage at St. Anne's, comforting Grace and Douglas in their grief. But before that, when he took me back to his apartment the day I found Gus butchered among the roses. When he made love to me—

That was when the adrenaline hit.
You made love to me, you bastard! You listened to all my little theories and you nodded sympathetically and then you put it to me, right there on the carpet. And I let you! In fact I came back for more, and all the while you were laughing at me.

Fury, sheer humiliated fury, gave me a lifeline then, as distasteful but as solid as the cable I clung to. Holt and his buddy weren't going to haul me out of the water, because they weren't going to know I was there. I'd wait them out if it took all night. Above me, their footsteps shifted, then moved back inside. I slid gingerly along my cable, flinching as a sliver of wire bit into my palm, and strained to hear them. What work was there to do in my house, and how was it connected with Nickie?

I couldn't think. My feet had gone numb, and the long bones of my legs were throbbing with cold. The silence from above stretched out, minute by minute, and with each minute the prospect of holding out all night grew more remote. Surely if I paddled away now, they wouldn't notice the ripples on the dark lake?

The floats beneath the houseboat swung and creaked. From inside, it had always been a familiar, homey sound, one that formed the background of my dreams each night. But from where I hung now in the water, helpless and sodden, it sounded ominous, almost alive, a beast moving in a watery
cave. I'd have to swim
under
the floats at some point, to reach the dock itself and work my way along it to the parking lot and the street. If I lost my bearings under the houseboat, if I ran out of breath and tried to come up before I reached clear water, hit my head or tangled myself in the wires and ropes—

Something nudged my shoulder and I whipped my dripping head around. A piece of unidentifiable garbage, caught in the backwater made by the floats. Just like my corpse would be, if I didn't get out of here soon.
Don't think about it, just move.
I continued hand over hand along the cable, away from the deck edge and further into the darkness, trying to get up my nerve to dive under the houseboat. Then I had a better idea. What if I swam
across
instead, to the end of the next dock? Once I got there, I'd have more cover from their searching eyes, and less chance of alerting them with the sound of my escape. But I also ran the risk that they would glance out the kitchen windows and see me as I crossed the gap between the two docks.

“Vat about in here?”

The German voice again, from the study window. I couldn't make out the words of Holt's reply, and I didn't wait to hear more. The study was a tiny room beyond the bedroom, the entire length of the houseboat away from the kitchen. If they were both in there now, I had at least a minute or two in which to cross the open water between the docks. I pried my aching hands from the cable and dog-paddled along the weedy log that rose up at my shoulder.
Anyone can swim.
Lily had tried to teach me once, at a hotel pool in Vancouver.
The human body is naturally buoyant. Just relax. Stroke and kick.

I stroked and floundered, one hand and then the other lifted to ward off the treacherous wires, straining to keep my
head up, straining to move quickly but silently. The edge of the deck was in front of me, a low black line against a strip of paler black water. Once I passed that edge, I'd be visible. I could see a dinghy moored alongside the houseboat opposite. I knew that dinghy. In the daytime it was cornflower blue, a cheery detail in the view from my kitchen. Five yards away? A dozen? I'd never thought about it. Now it was a washed-out gray hull rising up from my eye level, and it seemed impossibly distant. My feet, still in sneakers, dropped lower in the water, and I wanted to let my whole heavy body follow them. I was too tired, it was too far.

Another creak above me. Were they coming? I sucked in a lungful of air, squeezed my eyes shut, and dove down and across toward the dinghy. I barely kicked, afraid of splashing, but I pulled myself along with low sideways sweeps of my leaden arms, growing weaker with each stroke. My chest was burning, but I stayed under. Hold on, keep going, hold on.

Finally instinct conquered will and I shot to the surface like a panicky cork, rearing my head up to gulp the air. Along with the air, I got a glancing crack on the back of the skull. I went under, sputtering, then came up grabbing for a handhold. My fingers jammed painfully into a rough metal ring, and I pulled myself to the surface and hung on with both hands as the water drained from my mouth and the stars cleared from my vision.

The ring was one link of an iron chain, rough with rust, wrapping a log float. I had passed under the dinghy, and come up beneath my sleeping neighbors’ houseboat. Invisible at last to Holt and his henchman, and almost giddy with relief, I thought about shouting for help. But the ruckus would alert Holt before it woke the neighbors, and whether he fled or the police stopped him, where would that leave
Nickie? No, I had to think this over. But first I had to get out of the water.

Wearily, I made my way along the length of the float. My hands barely obeyed me, and my legs trailed uselessly behind, heavy and numb. A hissing noise grew louder as I reached the farther edge of the houseboat: rain, slanting needles of cold rain pocking the surface of the lake and masking my escape even further. I considered climbing up and using the walkway, but there was still a chance that I'd be seen. So I stayed in the water, paddling and scrabbling from handhold to handhold: a rope, a chain, a guywire, the edge of a canoe that rocked wildly when I grabbed it.

I lost track of time. The rain stung my eyes and clattered on the water, blurring sight and hearing. The handholds seemed to grow farther apart, and the effort of abandoning the security of one to lunge for the next was almost overwhelming. By the time I reached a small wooden ladder, and hung gasping from it, I was too dazed to understand why the water ahead of me was lapping against concrete instead of logs. Then I realized: It was the landward end of the dock. I'd made it.

Streaming with water and shivering from cold, I lifted myself up the slippery rungs to the top of the seawall. I sprawled flat, and the cessation of effort felt so good, the reprieve so welcome, that I nearly fell asleep on the spot. Then the wind picked up, drilling the rain even harder against my skin, and the shivering became a hypothermic shudder, uncontrollable and alarming.

I thought about Lily, but she had bowed out of this whole tangle, and with good reason. It wouldn't be fair to drag her back in. There was Eddie, too, but with my cell phone in my purse at the bottom of the lake, I'd have to find a pay phone.

And besides, why would Eddie even speak to me? No, I had to get inside somewhere, get warm, and very soon. My immediate neighbors on the dock were so close that Holt might hear my efforts to roust them out of bed. And there was no one I knew living in the apartments and condominiums within walking distance.

Wait a minute. Yes, there was. I sat up, then stood up, my legs unsteady and my feet uncooperative, and looked around. The after-midnight, before-dawn darkness was broken up with streetlights here, and through the haze of cold and fatigue I knew just where I was. The parking lot was in front of me, the docks behind. That meant the Lakeshore Apartments, where Aaron Gold lived, were somewhere off to my right. Too exhausted to look for pursuers, or even to care, I started walking.