Behind the Lie, page 27
Retracing her steps, she almost missed her phone, but saw it just as the young EMT stumbled out of a birch copse, the other boy draped over his shoulder.
She called 911 again and asked the dispatcher to tell the cops on the island what she’d just found out, then set out on foot, following the very obvious trail of churned mud the two boys (and Mona?) left behind them.
A heap of fallen trees camouflaged the tunnel, though from a certain angle, access to it was wide and clear. The soil leading up to it was tamped down and hard.
Laney, who still, four years out of the NYPD, carried a flashlight in her pocket and handcuffs in her glove compartment, shined a cone of light into the opening. The tunnel sloped down sharply, with rough steps half-carved into the descent and half nature made of roots and rocks. It looked dark, slippery, and generally like a good way to break a bone.
“Hey!” she called out.
Nothing.
She shouldn’t go in alone.
She glanced back at the birches and pines hiding her car from view.
Then she went in alone. Because what if there were other children in there, ones who hadn’t had the strength to climb out? Because she could help. Because she was a curious motherfucker, and because when had anyone ever helped or hurt her more than she had hurt herself? She’d be fine alone.
The tunnel was colder than she expected. Raw, with slippery stones for a floor, and an odor of animal waste. She imagined the lake’s full weight above her and almost hotfooted it out but pressed on at the thought of more sick kids ahead.
What the hell was wrong with people? Why did they have to torture and maim each other? She didn’t so much miss being a cop at that moment as miss the authority it used to give her to set things right.
She tripped and pitched chin first into a boulder, her jaw clacking shut so hard she saw stars. Her chin, already bruised from her earlier fall, now gushed blood, the pain like acid on her skin. A curse died on her lips as the flashlight skittered across the floor, glancing its light off a body huddled against the curved wall. Once the blinding pain in her face calmed to a throb, she felt for her light and stood, illuminating the girl.
It took all of Laney’s self-control to keep from yelping. She guessed the girl had been exposed to the same chemicals as the teenager found the other day near Sylvan. Her skin was blistered, peeling and meaty, her breathing labored, her eyes unfocused. She’d been lying on her side—half her clothes were soaked and rank—and it was her flung-out hand that had caused Laney’s fall. Now the girl struggled into a seated position, though that seemed to use all her remaining strength.
“Can you stand?” Laney asked.
The girl stared at her, mouth working. A dark bubble formed in the corner of her mouth.
“Shit.” Laney checked whether her phone had a charge (it did) and reception (nope), then put her flashlight into the girl’s hands. “You hold on, okay? I’ll be right back.” She knelt and touched the girl’s sticky hair. “What’s your name?”
Nothing again.
Laney looked up. Ahead was the house and cops, the option to summon help. Maybe more kids stuck in the tunnel. Behind was a long-ass climb, a rough trail, and eventually, help.
“You sit tight, yeah? I won’t be long.” She hoped.
Laney turned forward and began jogging toward the house, using her phone’s light to guide her way. Time fell away. Her sense of space fell away. It was just her breathing and this damp dark all around her, until it was only on three sides of her and she’d nearly walked right into a wall.
A dead end. She turned around. She hadn’t noticed any forks or splits in the tunnel. Forcing herself to slow down, she retraced her steps until the girl’s shape appeared again out of the shadows. She was lying on the floor, immobile.
Laney cursed and spun on her heels. This time she walked with one hand sliding along the wall and the other pointed at the opposite wall. Within a hundred feet she saw a door and put her ear to it.
She could, of course, simply open this door and walk into whatever waited on the other side. But she was trained better than that. She took a breath and knocked loudly, rapping her knuckles on the wood, then shouted, “Hello! Anybody there?”
Yet again, silence was her answer.
Laney braced herself, took a breath, and shoved her shoulder into the door, which gave, splintered, and swung open. A freshness wafted over her, air from above, not much, but enough so she knew it would lead her out. She stepped over the threshold and immediately had to navigate a tight turn, which opened onto a set of steps leading up.
The wooden staircase, though worn in parts, seemed to have been repaired recently and held her weight without complaint. As she ascended, she became aware of footsteps above her, and soon, voices, which told her she was directly underneath the lake house now. She picked up speed, eager to come out into light, when her foot hit something.
A body.
CHAPTER
47
Holly
HOLLY SAT ON a hard plastic chair next to Oliver in the emergency room. He lay on a gurney, his sopping-wet clothes dripping onto her knees and then the floor, an oxygen mask strapped to his face and his eyes closed. She held his hand. Once in a while, his fingers squeezed hers, and every time they did, she wept.
“Oh, baby, don’t cry!” A nurse who must have been (robustly) pushing eighty rubbed Holly’s back as if she really were a baby. “Your man is gonna be fine! He just had himself a fainting spell underwater.” She checked the monitors over the gurney. “I see it more often than you think.”
Holly started. “Excuse me?”
“Uh-huh. At least five or six every summer. There was a kid brought in just last week. Went swimming in a crowded lake and fainted. It’s a good thing someone was right next to him when it happened. Sometimes it’s a real tragedy. Happens a lot with teenagers.”
The nurse noted something on the computer and smiled at Holly. “He’ll be fine. You’re lucky.”
They were waiting for test results or a bed, Holly couldn’t remember which. The gurney had been pushed into a corner, Oliver strapped down with needles and wires. An orderly had come by some minutes ago, drawing curtains around their condensed square of space, and although this afforded a measure of privacy, it did nothing to block out sound.
Someone was raving in a curtained-off square next to them—unintelligible words that sounded like prayers sometimes and curses other times. It was both ceaseless and variable and therefore impossible to tune out.
She scooted closer to the gurney and leaned against it. She’d refused medical attention of any kind and was now feeling the rest of the poison leave her system. Bouts of shivering gripped her, stopping only for waves of nausea. Her head hurt.
“I guess we’re even now,” she said quietly, not looking at her husband.
As soon as the words left her mouth, the energy between them changed, as if a vacuum opened. He jerked the mask off his face and turned his head toward her.
“Look at me,” he said. His voice was low, thick, as hollow as if he were speaking from inside a cave. “I said, look at me. I only have one question for you, and you must answer with the truth.”
She nodded and swallowed back a sick, bitter taste.
“Do you want to stay married to me?”
It was not the question she expected. “Yes.”
“No, not like that. Think. I want to see that it’s the truth. It doesn’t sound like the truth. It sounds like you don’t want an argument.”
She opened her mouth, but illness shook her, and she had to jump, knocking her chair over, and run to the nearest bathroom (thankfully unoccupied), where she retched until she was empty, cold, and more tired than she’d ever been in her life. After washing her face with watery hospital soap and rinsing her mouth, she returned to their curtained space.
Before she even drew the chair up, she said, “I want to stay married to you.”
He’d been sunk into the pillows, and at her words he sagged even more, as if he were a defrosted lump of dough released from a mold. He nodded. “Okay, then.”
She sat down again. “Is it what you want?”
“I want you. Only you. Only ever you.”
“Not only ever.”
He looked at her with his sepia eyes. “Maybe not when you were a tween. That would have been weird. Don’t you think?”
“That would have been weird.”
“Holly.” He’d lowered his voice, and she had to lean close, prop her slight body on his shoulder, her ear near his mouth. “I don’t have a job anymore. I know they will sue us. It’s possible the FBI will be involved because of who … who …”
She didn’t think she could feel more horrible, but, amazingly, she did.
He continued, “In any case, I’m nearly certain they won’t be able to pin anything on you. Or on me. I did what I could.”
Sitting back, she covered her eyes with her hands.
“Listen,” he said.
The harshness in his tone startled her, and she lowered her arms, forced herself to meet his eyes.
“If you mean this. If you mean that you want to be with me, we will be okay. We can fight this, and we will be all right.”
“I mean it. Oliver. I never … I didn’t … I didn’t cheat on you.”
He looked away. “No.”
“But if we have to fight a court case, we will probably lose our house.”
“I never liked that house.”
“Did you know?”
“About the money? Not until last week.”
“And you still …”
“Love you? Holly, I know why you did it. Why you did all of it. I hate that you didn’t think you could talk to me. I hate that this is where we are because of it. I hate that you didn’t trust me or love me enough. But I can’t hate you. And I can’t not love you.” He closed his eyes. “Let’s stop for now. Okay?”
She nodded and scooted closer so she could place her head on the gurney again. She was too spent to think anymore, and her mind, though not fully lucid, was at least no longer bristling with panic.
A fitful dream state enveloped her, and she drifted, aware of the gurney’s stern metal against her chest, of the emergency room’s smells, the ranter behind the curtain. So, when the activity level around them increased, she noticed, but incorporated it into her reveries as a storm with rustling and breaking trees, thunder and lightning. Only when someone began to shout did she jerk awake and twitch the curtain aside.
The ER was crowded. Cops and paramedics, nurses, orderlies, doctors were moving, rushing, oscillating in a choreographed dance around a series of stretchers and gurneys, though Holly could see nothing of who was on them. Two were hurried along a hall, leaking dark blood, smearing it on the linoleum. One was moved to the side and a curtain drawn around it. The fourth was parked in the middle as nurses and doctors bent over it and consulted each other. When they stepped aside, she saw a small hand hanging off the edge, grimy with dried blood.
“Who is that?” she asked, doubting herself, recognizing the profile anyway.
“Shooting victim,” said a nurse. “We don’t get a lot of those here. Apparently, there was a shoot-out in some house in the woods.” She shuddered.
“Is she dead?”
The nurse glanced at Holly, as if only now realizing she was speaking to either a patient or a patient’s relative.
“I don’t know, honey,” the nurse said, though the lack of urgency around the gurney told Holly everything she needed.
CHAPTER
48
Laney
LANEY STUMBLED AND grabbed for the railing with one hand and flailed with her other, her phone skittering loose, then fell forward into a man’s shoulder.
The man screamed, and she scrambled off, had to descend to retrieve her phone, which was still shining a cone of white light into a wall. When she turned the light upward, Step Volkin’s tortured face glared at her.
He hunkered sideways on the stairs, one arm supporting his weight, one leg stretched out, and his skin ghastly white. His jeans were black from hip to knee, a damp, heavy darkness she understood was blood.
“Motherfucker,” said Laney. The word bubbled up through her fury at his (probable) attempt on her and her son’s life, through her disgust at what he’d done to so many people. And mixed in was a feeling of triumph. She’d found him. She had him. She was not letting him go.
More running and loud voices came from above, his body a barrier between her and the door directly behind him. She cursed herself for not grabbing her handcuffs out of her glove compartment. They’d been in her car for so long, never used, that she hardly thought of them. Well, at least she’d worn a belt today. Quickly, she unbuckled the canvas belt holding up her jeans and drew it out one-handed, the other hand still aiming the phone into his eyes.
“What are you going to do, whip me?” His mouth was bleeding.
“If I have to,” she said.
A gunshot cracked above them, sudden, loud, echoing.
He sat up straight, gasping as he did so, squaring against her. She turned off her phone’s light and slid it into her pocket. She’d need both hands now.
With a sharp intake of breath, she launched herself forward and up, hands out, knees bent. Her palms connected with his arms, and she used that to propel her head upward sharply, knocking her forehead into where she figured the middle of his face would be. She miscalculated, crashing into his jaw, but her weight drove him back and he yowled with pain even as his arms rose to shove her away. But she wasn’t letting go, kneed him in the chest, belly, anywhere she could reach while he struggled to get enough distance for a punch. He got in a solid blow to her cheek, but she’d been in fights before. She could handle the hurt. She now knew exactly where his nose was, and this time when she headbutted him, it crunched, the connection as gratifying as hitting a goal into the net. He made a strangled, suffocated noise, and his fingers clawed into her arms.
Which was fortunate, since that put his wrists within easy reach. She breathed in, and on the outward breath twisted sideways and threw the looped end of her belt over his left wrist, then wrenched in the other direction and coiled the rest of the belt around his right wrist and cinched. He jerked his arm to release it, but she kneed him in the hip with all her weight behind the move, and this time he screamed—a loud, agonized howl that reverberated in her guts, his distress palpable.
She drew the belt tighter, around and around, finishing with a knot; then felt along the rail until she found the top edge and jerked his weakened arms up, hooking the belt around the edge and yanking it down so he was pinned to the railing.
He wheezed, a distraught whining to his breath he tried to suppress. She shot to her feet and bolted over him before he got his wind back. Her hand reached for the door handle and she opened what she hoped was the last door in this infernal subterranean maze.
It wasn’t. She’d exited into a basement, cement floor, stone walls, damp and rot, but with small casement windows along the ceiling allowing a spill of daylight. On the opposite end stood a thick, metal door, and when Laney tried to pull or push it open, it didn’t budge. She knocked and yelled, her voice swallowed by the walls around her.
Her phone’s battery was at twenty percent, thank God, and she dialed 911 yet again, waiting impatiently as the call struggled to connect and then dropped. She knocked and screamed, tried her phone once more. In the house she heard running and loud voices, though the thick stone walls made it hard to decipher the words. She was standing against the doorframe, eyeing the casement windows, when the footsteps neared and suddenly the metal clanged, a lock snicked, and the door smashed inward.
Laney jumped back just as Vera Volkin rushed into the room and pushed the door closed, drawing the heavy bolt across the threshold and snapping shut the heavy padlock hanging through the bolt.
Vera stared at Laney with wide, blue eyes, her face blank with surprise.
Laney backed up and pressed her body against the tunnel entrance.
“Out,” said Vera.
“No.”
“Get the fuck out of my way.” Vera strode forward, and Laney noticed the wet stain under her rib. Blood.
Laney put her hand up, palm out. “No.”
On the other side of the steel door, running and a crash into the metal. It shuddered. The bolt held.
Vera ran at Laney, but Laney was ready. They grappled, and Laney tripped the other woman. They slammed to the floor, the fall’s force knocking air out of both of them.
More crashing on the other side, organized this time.
Laney gripped Vera’s wrists and pinned them against the floor as she writhed and kicked beneath her.
“Stop,” Laney said. “It’s over. Stop.”
But Vera turned her head and bit Laney’s forearm. Her surprisingly sharp teeth tore skin and penetrated, provoking a bellow from Laney, her arm a hot, burning flare of misery. She let go and Vera threw her off, clambering to her knees.
One more concerted boom rang out and the steel door burst from its hinges, the bolt lock unbroken and hanging off the rotted frame.
The four cops who had gone into the house over an hour ago barreled into the room, guns up, screaming for them to get to the ground.
Laney threw her hands up and dropped to her knees, just as Vera ran past her to the tunnel door. An officer beat her to it.
She made no sound as he knocked her facedown to the dirt and wrung her arms behind her back, the only sign of his emotion the fact that it took him three tries to handcuff her.
All four cops turned their eyes on Laney, recognition and suspicion twisting their mouths.
“There’s a tunnel,” Laney said. “Through that door. Step Volkin is on the stairs, and there’s a very hurt female in the tunnel itself. Teenage, looks like chemical burns to her skin. She’ll need help getting out.”
Two of the officers stared at her for a moment, then nodded and carefully opened the door, shining their torches into the dark void.
