Murder on Mustang Beach, page 26
“Why come here to Mustang Beach and plant Addison’s bow tie?” I asked. “A distraction? A red herring?”
“Something like that,” she said. “I’d read about the footpath. It was one of the places Dominick and I had intended to bring Cadence and Unicorn. But we just didn’t get around to it.”
“How fortunate that you were able to squeeze in a visit here during your vacation,” I said.
Cooper got out the packets he’d pocketed. He tore them open and dumped the contents into Ivy’s palm.
Dramamine. For me.
We’d reached water’s edge. A warm wave crashed around my ankles. I could tell by the extreme tug as it receded—a rip current was sucking it out.
I struggled against the bungee cord but only succeeded in making it slice my wrists. “This is your grand master plan? Bungee me up and force me into a rip?”
She held out a handful of the round white pills. I lunged, chopping my hands, trying to make her spill. He hooked an arm around me and pulled me away.
“You’re monsters,” I yelled.
“I’m not a monster,” she replied. “I’ve done monstrous things, yes. But at the end of the day, first and foremost, I’m a mother. A really good one.”
“All along, you’ve been acting like nothing hideous has been going on. Playing it completely cool.”
“What else could I do?”
“Neither of you could skip town,” I said.
“Not even after the police said we could,” she said. “Because no one else from the wedding had gone home. They all stuck around—”
“Which meant you had to too,” I said. “Otherwise, that would have drawn suspicion.” Maybe it was even a clever chess move on Fusco’s and Jurecki’s parts—telling the guests they were free to leave, then waiting to see who was first to hightail it to the ferry. “She is the real bully here, Cooper,” I said, twisting out of his grasp. “Can’t you see that? She’s getting you to do things you don’t really want to do.” He lifted an eyebrow. I had his attention. “Don’t make the same mistake again, Cooper. Don’t let Ivy control you like this. Be a man. Be your own man. Be an MMA man—”
“This all got wicked out of control,” he said. “I’m just so sorry for everyone involved. One mistake. One moment of underestimating my high level of skill, and my extreme strength, and it led to this . . . this absolute mess.”
“You didn’t mean to kill Seth. And I don’t believe either of you really want to kill Addison Battle. Or me.”
“We don’t,” she said. “But we’re out of options.”
“What excuse did you give Dominick Sunday morning?” I asked.
“Told him I was out to breakfast with old friends. Other wedding guests. People who’d traveled to Cattail for Naomi and Seth. Dominick didn’t question it. At the time, the things Cooper and I did made sense to us. Now, of course, it all seems totally harebrained. But we got away with it. And we’re going to get away with it again.” She extended the pills toward me. “Bottoms up.”
Cooper popped the cap off the jug.
The water was for me. Something to wash down the Dramamine. How considerate.
I reeled backward, toward the footpath. “You’re not going to get away with this. Going to jail for killing one person is bad enough. You really want to make it three?”
“I didn’t kill anybody!” she cried.
“Exactly. You didn’t kill anyone. Why make a bad situation worse? Why make it harder on yourself than it already is? You can still choose wisely here, Ivy. Do it for your family. Do it for Cadence. A man is dead. Naomi—your friend—lost her husband—”
“And Cattail is going to lose a bookseller,” she said. “And its barber. That’s just the way it has to be.”
“Try to see it from our point of view,” he said. “With you and Addison gone, we get away with everything.”
“We can go on living our lives. Cooper will go back to Massachusetts and I’ll never see his big dumb face ever again. I’ll go back to Ohio. With my husband and my sweet little girl—”
“Happily ever after,” I said. To them, I was not a person. Not really. All I represented was one more task. Taking away my and Addison’s ability to accuse was all that separated them from freedom. “This isn’t you, Ivy.” I couldn’t keep the quake out of my voice. “This isn’t either of you—”
“You don’t know us.” She aimed the flare gun at my face. “You’re going into that rip with your hands tied, one way or the other. It’s your choice whether you want to be awake or asleep.”
Sniveling, Cooper swiped his wet cheeks. “Just take the pills. You’ll go right to sleep—”
“If you think I’m taking any of those, you can forget about it.” I glanced past Ivy, past the gun, at the ocean. A vast blanket, glistening under moonlight. My knees quivered. My mouth became drier than Mustang Beach sand.
Here I was again, smack dab in the very scenario I’d vowed to avoid: drowning. Only, this time, there were twice as many people trying to kill me—and no one racing to my rescue.
I’d put forth my very best. My most valiant efforts. I was sure Addison had too. As much as he could, in his diminished state.
But it was time to face reality. Ivy and Cooper had beaten us. They’d won.
I held out my trembling hands. She dumped a few pills into them. I hesitated. Should I? Wouldn’t it be more heroic to face the rip current stone-cold sober? But when I looked out over the seething sea, and the black channel that had formed, rushing out . . .
I placed the pills on my tongue.
“Wash them down.” He held the jug to my mouth. I squirmed—an automatic reaction—but he steadied my head. “Drink.”
The water tasted like plastic, but it was cool, a gift after all that walking through the thick night air. I gulped it down.
She transferred another pile of pills into my hand. They tapped my skin, feeling so small and inconsequential—I gasped. What was I doing? Giving in? Giving up? This wasn’t me. I’d let fear take me over. But fear and courage went hand in hand. Flip sides of the same coin. To defeat fear, immense courage was needed.
“Take them,” she said. “Hurry up.”
I tossed the pills in her face. Her eyes flashed with fury, then became resolute. Composed. “Suit yourself.” She clutched my arm, and he clutched the other, and together they dragged me toward the churning ocean.
Toby and I had not rehearsed what to do in this situation. How to fend off two attackers. While my hands were bound. While fog clouded my peripheral vision. The fog wasn’t real. It was the Dramamine. I’d swallowed four or five pills—enough to make things wacky.
Then came a spotlight, piercing the fog. Not an actual spotlight, but an intense inner knowing that, drugged or not, Callie Padget does not go down without a fight.
“Wait,” I said, as a wave receded. “Can you give me a moment? Please. Just one moment. I’ll be fast. I promise. I just need to—say goodbye.”
He released his grip. She did too. I knelt, bowing my head like I was offering up a final prayer.
And I was praying—for my idea to work. For once in my life, let my aim be true.
I sank both hands into the wet sand and filled them with as many grains as I could grab. Spinning upward, I flung one fistful into Ivy’s face and hit Cooper’s ugly mug with the second.
My captors sputtered and swore.
I bolted.
* * *
• • •
My tied hands made my balance wonky. The Dramamine made my feet feel like they were moving through wet cement. I was halfway up the dune when big arms seized me. Lifted me. My legs bicycled. I inhaled huge and slammed my head back with all my might and—whiffed. Nothing but air. Cooper had a losing record, but enough fighting experience to know when a reverse headbutt was coming his way.
“Nice move,” he said. And then he dropped me. “That stings!” he howled. “What is that?”
A half dozen sandspurs were sticking out of his ankle. He’d barreled through a whole tangle of them. When he brushed them off, they transferred to his hand, the tips biting deep. “Get these off me!”
I took off, stumbled, kept on climbing. Behind me, Cooper tumbled down the dune in a slurry of sand and hyena-pitched curse words.
I scrambled to the top. The nearest tree had bumpy bark, rough like alligator hide. I had only a few seconds to get this bungee cord off, and that tree could be my savior. It looked like it could hold up to some serious friction. I ran for it—but then I heard a pop and a whistle, and a hot slice ripped my calf. Gasping, I crashed into the ground. A mouthful of dirt. A nose full of sulfur. I touched my leg. My fingers came away bloody.
She’d shot me. A graze, but enough to shred my skin. Enough to make me think a burning-hot poker had impaled my leg.
I got up and reeled, hands outstretched, for the tree.
Another pop. Another whistle.
Just a few feet in front of me, the tree exploded into a crackling column of fire.
72
Within minutes, the trees all around would be blazing.
Footsteps sounded behind me. Someone—Cooper? Ivy?—crested the dune.
I veered left. Charged into the woods. Ran, slipped, crawled, got back up and ran. The movement was likely speeding up the Dramamine, pumping it through my bloodstream at a faster rate, making my limbs into two-by-fours, making my brain feel like it was being ground through a sieve. What I really needed to do was bring up the drug. Stop and jam my fingers down my throat. But there wasn’t any time. The footsteps were right behind me.
I chanced a glance over my shoulder. Ivy.
I ducked my head and pushed my legs with all my might, but they didn’t move any faster. Behind me came a leafy crash, followed by a thud and a string of profanity. When I turned around, Ivy was splayed on the ground in front of a gaping hole.
A watering hole, dug by a thirsty mustang.
Cursing, she got to her feet.
I kept running. Time became blobby; since the second flare had struck the tree, I didn’t know whether five minutes or five hours had passed. The woods thickened into a soupy wall of leaves. Branches scratched my cheeks. Roots snatched my feet. Multiple trails crisscrossed these woods, I knew—but I couldn’t seem to pick up a single one.
Just when the trees seemed darkest, someone clutched my arm. I spun around, my elbow flying up. I caught something hard. Heard a grunt. “Callie?” a female voice said. “What on God’s green earth—”
“Get away—”
“Callie, it’s Geri-Lynn. Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“Geri-Lynn?” My eyes blurred on the face. The straw-bale hair. Her hand held over one eye, where my elbow had made contact.
“What in the—hold still, girlfriend.” She untied my wrists. As the cords eased their bite, relief in the form of crazy laughter streamed out of me. “What’s going on with you?” Geri-Lynn asked, brushing the hair from my face.
She didn’t have any way of knowing there was a good amount of antihistamine gushing through me. And I didn’t have any way of telling her, because my tongue felt about as useful as a spoiled oyster. “Murderers. I swallowed—”
“Okay, okay.”
Then and there, as Geri-Lynn held back my hair, I expelled the Dramamine—with little effort on my own behalf, thanks to all the water I had chugged. “Geri-Lynn’s here, don’t you worry,” she said when it was over. She guided me over the pine-needle-softened ground, eased me to the earth, and propped me against something hard. A tree or a rock. “What did you go and get yourself into?”
“We need to hide. Now—”
“Hush, hush. We are hiding. Don’t you recognize where we are? You stumbled right into it.”
73
Before us, moonlight shined down on two side-by-side loblolly pines, and the branches of a live oak, squatter but just as mighty, embracing them.
The Hugging Trees.
We were on the other side of them, in a clearing. A secret oasis.
“Don’t talk,” Geri-Lynn said. “What happened? Don’t answer that. Hell’s bells, are you bleeding? Don’t say anything. You just rest.”
The tearing of fabric.
Pressure on my calf, where the flare cartridge had blazed.
She spoke in soothing tones. I couldn’t focus on her words. I wanted to scream, The people who murdered Seth and kidnapped Addison tried to murder me. They’re after me. The woods are about to burn down. Us with it . . .
My ears began ringing. Faintly at first, like the tinkle when you enter a Queen Street shop. Then deafening, like I was high in a belfry next to a few hundred-pound bells gonging away. Either I hadn’t gotten all the poison out of me, or my body was rebelling against it having been ingested in the first place.
“I don’t know what to do here,” Geri-Lynn was saying, alarm fraying her voice. Her arm encircled me. My head rested on her shoulder. She stroked my forehead. “Obviously I need to get you help. But I can’t get a signal, and you can’t walk, and—” She held her breath.
What’s wrong? I tried to ask. It came out as a whimper.
Rustling. Footfalls. Had Cooper arrived? Had Ivy tracked us? Was it the fire, coming to consume us?
“Shh,” Geri-Lynn whispered. “Look who’s here.” She lifted my head, straightened it.
A strange odor hit my nose. Earthy and warm, like the scents of tall grass and animal breath. My vision was blurry, but I could make out, on the opposite side of the clearing, two pairs of wide-set eyes gleaming in the darkness.
* * *
• • •
Two mustangs approached. A little wobbly one, followed by a bigger, darker one, scar zigzagging between her eyes. Mama scratched her neck against a tree trunk, while baby scratched her neck against mama.
I outstretched a hand, even though I knew I couldn’t touch them, and even if I could, they were too far away. As a kid, I’d spent hours gazing down on the mustangs from my tree house. Now I was on the ground, gazing up.
“Callie, can you hear me?” Geri-Lynn whispered. “Are you in there? Stay with me. I think the foal’s only a half day old, but she’s already got her legs underneath her. Tigress has been hanging around this spot, for a bit of privacy, just like you said. It makes sense. If humans could stumble upon this hiding place, then why couldn’t horses? We’re not all that different, in the end. Would you get a load of little baby Beacon?”
“Beacon?” I was laughing again, quietly, so as not to disturb the four-leggeds that had joined the periphery of our hiding spot. Joy broke open inside my chest. Tigress had just needed to get away from it all. She was okay.
So was her baby.
If only Ivy had taken a page from Tigress’s book. When the mama horse had tired of her herd mates’ antics, she sought solace. That solace had brought forth the opposite of destruction. It had brought forth Beacon. What if Ivy’d had the presence of mind to do something similar? Put some physical distance between her and Seth, until her emotions blew over? The result wouldn’t have been his death. The result would have been the kindness she believed in choosing. Cadence’s big feelings? She’d come by them honestly. Inherited them from her mother—whose purest intentions had gone horribly awry.
“It took me all afternoon to track them,” Geri-Lynn said. “Tigress is one smart, determined mom.”
Across the clearing, the mustangs nickered. Beacon swished her short tail, and Tigress rubbed her nose against her baby’s.
And then, I became aware of yet another problem. Needles.
They were striking the backs of my hands. Silver pinpricks streaked down my wrists, leaving trails in the dirt stains. The needles tapped my cheeks. My chest. The top of my head.
My eyelids sagged. I couldn’t keep them open.
This was it. I was sliding away. Forever this time. Under a downpour of needles.
The last thing I remembered is sticking out my tongue.
Splat, splat, splat.
And realizing—just before my world whirred into silence—they weren’t needles.
They were sweet little drops of rain.
74
I came to as Geri-Lynn was pulling me to my feet. “You need to get your legs underneath you,” she said. We began a long stumble out of the woods. The rain became a full-on downpour, driving as if shot out of nail guns, pelting us. I drifted in and out of deliriousness. My head felt heavier than a medicine ball, my ears were screeching, and my legs were rubber. But I was upright, putting one foot in front of the other. Geri-Lynn hauled me along, talking all the while about how much she appreciated me taking care of her when she was in a bad way, and Mother Tigress and Baby Beacon seeming entirely healthy, and Dr. Heather would soon examine them both, her first official duty as herd vet. Geri-Lynn said the footpath wasn’t far, and from there, it was only a couple hundred yards to civilization, and she knew I would make it. She knew I was strong enough. “Take heart,” she said at one point. “Isn’t that what Rosie told her horse, Roger? Take heart?”
“We can’t leave them,” I said. “Tigress and Beacon—”
“We have to. They’ll be fine. They’re wild, and they’re survivors. And so are we.”
At some point, through the trees, sirens wailed and red and blue lights strobed. Cruisers and fire trucks sped past. By the time Geri-Lynn and I tumbled into the parking lot, we were drenched. A squad car had just arrived. Chief Jurecki barreled over and gathered us under the biggest umbrella I’d ever seen. He guided us into the back seat.
“Cooper Payne,” I said, my head plunking against Geri-Lynn’s shoulder as the squad car ripped out of the lot. “Cooper Payne and Ivy O’Neill. They—”
“We nabbed them both,” Jurecki said from behind the wheel. “Mr. Payne called 911 from Mustang Beach. That sick creep was bawling so hard, dispatch could hardly make out a word he said. But you must have talked some sense into him, Callie, because he turned himself in. Told us where we could find Addison Battle, safe and sound. Mr. Payne gave up Ms. O’Neill too, but he needn’t have, because Fusco was already on the case. She had been following up on a lead—your lead—and stopped by the O’Neills’ rental cottage, to find your car, but not you, and Mr. O’Neill and his daughter wondering just where in tarnation their wife and mother had run off to. Fusco put out an APB for the family Nissan, and we found out, right about the same time Mr. Payne’s call came in, that Ms. O’Neill had been seen speeding here, to Mustang Beach. Unbelievable, Callie. Unbelievable.”
