Veiled Threats (26 page)

“Grace, please, she's your
daughter
. She loves you, you know. She—she admires you, she told me so. You have the money; just keep it and go. Yo u don't want this on your conscience, Grace, do you? Do you?” I tried to speak urgently but calmly, anything to slow her down, make her think. Or feel. And all the while I was wondering if she'd come close enough to the hatchway for me to grab at the gun, wondering if I'd have the guts to try.

Grace didn't come anywhere near the door. With slow, mechanical movements, she pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves and emptied the plastic bag onto the card table. A distinctive gold fountain pen rolled out, and I shut my eyes as I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising. It was my pen, a gift from Eddie that I hadn't been able to find recently … stolen by Andreas, of course. I looked again, to see Grace arranging the other things on the table. A Greek phrasebook that I'd bought once in a fit of optimism and then forgotten about, forgotten so thoroughly that I hadn't noticed it was missing from the houseboat. Some cash, a passport, and a narrow, colorful folder that could only be an airplane ticket. To Athens, no doubt, and in my name.

“This isn't going to work,” I told her, wishing I could believe it. “You can't just shoot all of us. The police will never believe it! They'll keep investigating, and sooner or later they'll get back to you, even if Holt doesn't tell them. Grace,
listen.
”

Not a flicker of response. Satisfied with the table, Grace picked up Aaron's windbreaker from where I'd dropped it and took it into the bedroom, planting yet more evidence against us. Then she came out and walked carefully around
the front room, double-checking the few objects Andreas had left behind. Finally, she went to the heater and turned it off. The wind outside seemed louder now, as the heater's shushing noise died away. Grace knelt on the floor by its base, where a length of jointed copper tubing came through the wall, feeding in propane from the tank outside. She was almost out of my line of vision. I pressed my left cheek hard against the edge of the hatchway and stood on tiptoe. Grace's shoulder and her shining hair hid the tool in her hands from my sight, but she was moving it somehow against the copper tube. Then she stood up. I thought I could hear, in the pauses between gusts of wind, the malicious little hiss of escaping gas.

Without a word, without even a glance at me, Grace Parry picked up a flashlight, turned out the lantern, and left the cabin. She couldn't lock the front door, which had been damaged in the fight, but she closed it firmly behind her, leaving me and her stepdaughter in the dark.

I’
M ASHAMED TO REMEMBER THE NEXT QUARTER
-
HOUR
. B
LIND
in the claustrophobic darkness, exhausted by everything I'd been through, and panicked by the specter of deadly, smothering gas, I broke down. I wept, I screamed for Aaron, I hammered on the door and pleaded with Grace to come back and let me out. Finally, like a child in a tantrum, I flung myself away from the hatch, tripping against the cot and falling heavily against Nickie.

She and I would die here, and the police would find a plausible tableau: two of the kidnappers shot to death in some kind of thieves’ quarrel, the third one asphyxiated by accident along with her victim. Grace would wait for the gas to do its work, then come back and arrange my body outside the bolted door of Nickie's cell, along with a pile of nicely fingerprinted evidence.

Or would she expect Andreas to do that part? No, she would find his vehicle, and maybe his body, when she drove back down toward the café. Unless he was only stunned when the Alfa knocked him flying, and he had come back up the road on foot to meet Grace. The two of them would search the woods for Aaron to make sure he was dead, but I would never know if they found him because I'd be dead too, gassed like a stray dog in a sealed chamber—

Nickie cried out in her drugged sleep and brought me to my senses. She was helpless, but I wasn't. Not yet. I slid to the floor by her side and felt my way down her lace-clad arm for her hand. It was chilled and clammy, so I held it in both of mine, rubbing warmth into her fingers and murmuring wordless reassurances. I closed my eyes, feeling somehow less blind that way, and took a long, steadying breath. I could smell the gas already, a thin rotten-egg odor stealing its way through the heavy atmosphere of the cabin. A utility man in Seattle had explained to me once that natural gas has no smell, that the stink of sulfur is an additive, put in on purpose to alert homeowners to dangerous leaks. They must do the same with propane.

Now
think
, I told myself fiercely. Is propane lighter than air, or heavier? That was simple enough to determine: when I put my face near the floor, the sulfurous smell was not strong, but it was distinct. Then I stood on the wobbling cot, my feet astride Nickie's legs, bracing myself against the wall and stretching my head up high. No sulfur smell at all. So propane was heavy, it would fill the cabin from the floor up. Would it make us cough and vomit first, or just displace our oxygen, pushing me inexorably into unconsciousness along with Nickie? Was it flammable? An irrelevant question, since Grace had extinguished the lantern, and if the heater had a pilot light she must have turned it off as well. But none of this mattered. The gas was coming; that was what mattered. It was creeping across the floorboards and lapping against our door like a slow invisible tide. And there was an inch-high gap along the lower edge of the door.

I sat down again in the darkness and ran my hands down the length of the cot. No sheet or blanket, just the bare canvas stitched to a metal frame that was bolted to the floor. I
pulled vainly against the stitching for a moment, then gave up and felt for the skirt of Nickie's gown instead. The fragile satin gave way easily along the waistband with a loud ripping noise, and I thought as I tugged at it that the wind had died down outside. Was Grace stalking Aaron in the hush beneath the trees? Was he dead, was he dying?

I shook off the thought and lifted Nickie up to a sitting position, with the vague idea of keeping her as high as possible. Then I packed the wadded satin into the crack beneath the door. That would buy us a little time, and time was what we needed, whether the cavalry rode to the rescue or not. If it came to the worst, I swore to myself, I'd wake Nickie somehow, just to let her hear a loving voice before she slipped away for good.

But there had to be something I could do before then. On hands and knees, and then on tiptoe, I explored every accessible inch of our lightless cell, letting my hands take the place of my eyes. No eating utensils to pry at the deadbolt, no furniture to break apart and use as a lever against the bars. Nothing but the empty bucket. I carried it to the door and rammed it, over and over, against the unyielding bars, till I drove myself half deaf with the clanging and cast it aside.

Nickie was stirring. She toppled sideways, and I propped her up again, but she wasn't entirely a deadweight this time, and her head no longer flopped over like a broken doll's.

“Ray?” she croaked. “Ray, I'm cold …”

“Nickie, it's Carnegie.” She began to struggle, like a child caught in a bad dream, so I slipped my arms around her and hugged her to me. It might have been kinder to let her sleep, after all, but it was too late now. “Nickie, you were kidnapped, remember? From the church. But I've found you, and we're, we're trying to get out of this room. Just rest quietly, all right?”

“Carnegie—” She broke off, coughing. I held her for a while longer, until she could sit up on her own, then I went back to the door. She was still groggy, barely awake, and she asked no questions. I was grateful for that.

I leaned my forehead against the bars, and stared toward the invisible front door until my eyes ached. Were those faint lines of moonlight at its edges, and the palest glimmer of reflection on the glass of the lantern, or were they just phantoms created by my blinded mind? Over in the corner the gas leak hissed, like a tiny deadly snake whose poison has almost overcome its prey. I could take off my own dress, and the rest of Nickie's, to stuff into the hatchway, but sealing ourselves into our own coffin would surely be a last resort. First I would try to reach that deadbolt.

I ran my palms along the door, but nothing protruded on this side. I thrust my right arm between one bar and the hatchway edge, glad for once to be long-limbed and skinny, but even with my shoulder jammed against the bars my outstretched fingers clawed at wood and nothing more. I needed a few more inches, and something to press down on one end, or pull up on the other, of the horizontal brass lever.

But which end? I pantomimed the gestures I had used to open the door from the outside, remembering Grace standing behind me, and the stiff resistance as the lever turned. Nickie coughed again, and began to cry and mumble. I ignored her, concentrating furiously. The lever had turned clockwise, in a half-circle, rotating toward the door edge as the bolt inside drew back. To duplicate that motion from the hatchway, I had to pull up on the right-hand end of the lever, or push down on the left. I needed a tool.

The wire handle of the bucket seemed promising at first,
and I found it without much fumbling, my sense of touch and direction heightened by the darkness. But I couldn't pry the heavy loops at either end away from the bucket's rim, and I gave up after wasting several precious minutes. The gas smell was growing stronger; my head was throbbing like a drum. What else was loose in the room or on our persons? My watch band was too short, I had no belt … shoes. Nickie was barefoot, but I still had my rubber-soled flats.

No good. Each of my shoes reached the top of the lock when I held it by the toe, but the soft sole of each bent uselessly when shoved downward on the lever, and I lost one and then the other as they dropped from my trembling fingertips. There was nothing else to push with, so I'd have to pull. I needed a loop, a strap … of course. I slipped off my dress, undid my bra, and then pulled the dress back on, smiling bleakly at my inane modesty. Light-headed, almost fainting, I sat next to Nickie and tried to tie my lingerie into a noose.

Sitting down was a mistake. I was weary, tired to death; I wanted to give up and sleep forever. Nickie nestled against my shoulder, and I whispered into her hair as the bra slipped from my fingers.

“I'm sorry, Nickie, I'm so sorry. We tried our best, we really did. Don't wake up, honey. Yo u just sleep, we'll both sleep. Sweet dreams, Nickie, we'll just—
shhh!
”

The front door of the cabin was creaking open.

Soft, powdery silver light spilled into our cell, brilliant to my dark-dilated eyes. Moonlight. The storm had gone, the moon had come back. Had Grace returned also, impatient to be done with us? Aching, half resentful that I would ever have to move again before my final rest, I slipped off the cot
and leaned dizzily along the door near the hatchway. I was bare minutes from passing out, but I had to know.

I looked through the bars, and I screamed. A huge figure staggered toward me in the shaft of moonlight, bloody and groaning, overturning the chair and table as he came, shattering the lantern and falling full length just short of our door with a crash that echoed through the cabin like thunder.

Theo. It was Theo, risen from the dead. As he fell I thought he was dead again, but his weight lifter's arms twitched and began to move, at random and then with purpose. He dragged his useless body inch by inch along the floorboards and I stared, transfixed, as he reached up for the doorknob. His face and hair were ghost-white in the moonbeams, his arms and clothing black with blood. Grotesque, terrifying, and our only hope, he pulled himself to his knees and rattled at the knob of our prison door.

“Theo?” I whispered. “Theo, turn the lever. Please. Oh, God, please, just turn it.”

He fumbled at the brass. I couldn't see his fingers on it, the angle from the hatchway was too steep, but I could hear the stiff metal of the lock sliding, resisting. Stopping. His hand fell away.

“Theo!” His head fell back, his pale eyes focused on mine. “Theo, try again, please. Nickie's with me, I'll get her out, I promise. Just keep trying.”

He reached up, he made a small, agonized sound, and the lever turned through its final arc to set us free. Theo slumped against the door, swinging it inward against the wall with a hollow thump. I grabbed Nickie under the arms and dragged her from the cot, yelling into her ears, slapping her cheeks to rouse her and get her moving. We stumbled over Theo's right
arm and kept going, Nickie crying and protesting, me grimly set on getting us both into the outside air.

There was a roaring in my head, and my vision was darkening and closing in to a long dim tunnel, but we made it out of the cabin. The trees. All I could think of, half crazed as I was, was getting out of that deadly clearing and into the safe, clean shadows of the trees. I cursed Nickie, I wrenched at her and hurt her more than Andreas ever had, but I got her across that clearing and behind the giant cedar trunk before I looked over my shoulder.

I would have gone back for Theo. At least I think I would have. But as I leaned hidden against the tree trunk, gasping for air, Grace Parry strode out from the woods behind the cabin, the yellow cone of a flashlight beam swinging before her like a broadsword, her dark clothes absorbing the moonlight and her cornsilk hair throwing it back with a golden spark. She must have been searching for Aaron in the woods, unwilling to take a chance that she had only wounded him, and then come running when she heard the commotion. I shrank into the shadows with Nickie silent at my feet. Grace went straight for the open door of the cabin, pistol in hand, raking the clearing as she went with her furious amber eyes.

I saw what happened in the next few seconds, by moonlight and flashlight and in the final flames. I wish I hadn't seen it, and I was glad that Nickie had fainted by then, and would hear only the softened version that I later told her father.

Grace stepped into the cabin. Theo, with one last effort of vengeful will and one last choking groan, reared up at her like a grizzly bear cornering the hunter who has tormented him to death. I saw him in her flashlight beam, and I heard
her cry out in horror as she aimed the pistol at his eyes. He fell upon her, the pistol sparked, and together in the same instant came the crack of the bullet and the vast crumpling sound of the explosion as the rooms full of propane blew and the cabin erupted into a torch that seemed to blossom upward and scorch the moon.