A forklift was crossing the runway, holding a wine barrel on its tongs. One man drove, the other rode along. Barry and the other bodyguard, coming with the corpse.
She had miscalculated. They were headed her way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Taylor didn’t have a lot of time.
She rattled the latch on the body locker; it was locked. She glanced around. Across from the door, a cabinet door hid the galley. She dropped low—she didn’t want them to spot her through the windows—and rushed over. She opened the cabinet. Liquor, food from the party, blankets …
She helped herself to a blanket and slid into the cockpit.
Here she was luckier. A man’s leather jacket hung over the back of one seat. A small pocket screwdriver was clipped to the pocket. He had a small notepad with a pen, too, but the screwdriver would do a better job. Stripping the oven mitt off her good hand, she confiscated it.
Outside, she heard the forklift drive up and stop.
The guys had to get Dash’s body out of the wine barrel and lug it up the stairs. She had time. Not a lot, but enough. It had to be enough.
She stayed low, crawled back to the locker, placed the oven mitt and the blanket atop the body locker. The pocket screwdriver had two metal bits; using her right hand, she inserted the flathead into the handle—and picked the lock.
She laughed in triumph.
Okay. She was way too relaxed, and probably in shock.
But thank God for the time she’d spent breaking into houses. Who knew she’d have to pick a lock so she could hide in a traveling coffin? Of course, if this didn’t work the way she was hoping, she could be trapped and murdered all the more easily. Especially since she could hear the two men outside the plane, grunting and cursing as they labored up the stairs.
Taking the mitt and blanket, she flung them into the storage locker and climbed in after them. She shut the lid, and in the dark, she groped for the lock. She jammed the flathead screwdriver into the mechanism, pushed up on the handle with the palm of her hand … and prayed. Prayed that the small metal screwdriver wouldn’t break when the guys tried to open it.
The metal in the box was thin—and why not? The corpse wasn’t going to try and open it. Through the metal she heard, “Fuck!” “Son of a bitch is heavy!” “Goddamn, jammed my finger!” “Turn him this way.” “No, this way.” “Get the lock.”
She held her breath.
A key scraped. The end slammed into the screwdriver’s flat head. It turned partway.
But the screwdriver held.
“What’s the matter with you? Open the fucking coffin!”
The lid jumped. “It won’t open.”
“Turn the key.”
“I did.”
“Do I have to do everything around here?” Something thumped on the floor.
Dash’s body.
Taylor closed her eyes and fought nausea.
The key slid free, then came back with a vengeance. It twisted hard, and she realized … if Barry broke the key off in the lock, she was trapped.
But he cursed, punched the lid, punched the lid again, and pulled the key out. “Fucking goddamn lock, fucking how the hell are we supposed to fucking get this body—” He slammed his body into the whole row of lockers.
She had a vision of him pulling a gun and shooting the lock off. That was what they did in the movies.
But no. He kicked the lockers again. “Dash will have to ride on the goddamn fucking floor, and fuck the pilots if it makes them sick. I don’t give a fuck. Make sure someone fixes the goddamn lock when the plane gets back.”
“Okay.”
And that was it.
The two men stomped off the plane, leaving Taylor in the box and the corpse on the floor.
She stayed there for about three minutes, listening as the forklift drove away and silence returned. She thought a lot of crazy things, mostly that this was a trap. But that really was crazy, and she knew it. Carefully she extracted the screwdriver from the lock—it took some work, because it was bent, and slowly lifted the lid an inch.
Except for her and … and Dash, the plane was empty.
She lowered the lid.
Taking the blanket, she wrestled it around to cover as much of herself as she could. She inserted the screwdriver into the lock again. And she dozed.
She came to when two pilots came aboard, male and female, speaking quietly and in civilized tones … right up until the time when they started their preflight inspection and found the body.
“What the hell?” The male pilot stood toward the front. “I told those goons I wasn’t going to fly with another body rolling around the floor. It’s a fucking safety hazard.”
Amazing how guys sounded alike when they were mad.
“Yeah, it is.” The female laughed. “But you just don’t like it.”
“Do you like it?”
“No, but Mark—it doesn’t creep me out like it creeps you out.”
“Ha. Ha. Great. You do the inspection back there.”
Footsteps.
Tense moments spent listening while the female pilot checked doors, windows, rattled the lid on the body locker. “It’s locked,” the female pilot said.
From the front of the plane, Mark called, “I don’t care if it is or not. I’m not lifting that body inside.”
“Me, neither. That’s where I draw the line.” A murmured, “Ick, there’s blood all over,” and the female pilot joined Mark at the front.
Blood all over? Yeah. Probably from what was left of Taylor’s finger.
As Taylor began to realize she had stowed away, that she was escaping Wildrose Valley at last, tears of relief, of pain, of sorrow, seeped from beneath her lids.
She stayed awake as they took off, and no matter how much she tried to sleep, to shake off the constant, grim, debilitating pain of her own amputation, she stayed awake until they landed, two hours after takeoff.
The two pilots deplaned, leaving the body behind.
Someone would come and get it. Someone she did not want to meet.
She wrestled her way out of the blanket, walked to the cockpit, picked up a clipboard and a baseball cap. She looked at the man’s worn leather bomber jacket tossed carelessly across the back of the pilot’s seat. She laughed, said, “Even a blind pig finds a truffle sometimes,” and pulled it on, inching her wounded hand through the sleeve and out the cuff. She zipped it up, and strode with feigned confidence off the plane into a bitter cold breeze.
As she stepped onto the asphalt, she caught a glimpse of tall pine trees. Then the runway lights went out.
The door opened on a small, dimly lit building. The pilots and two men exited, got into a car and drove away; at once, the forest swallowed their headlights.
She followed the car away from the airfield, down a narrow gravel road, hearing nothing but the low moan of the wind announcing an oncoming storm. But this storm was different from the ones that assaulted the Sawtooth Mountains. The air felt thick and damp, cold in a way that struck right to the bone.
She got to the highway, stood uncertainly, not knowing whether to go to the left or the right. As she hesitated, she heard a new sound—the splash of icy rain hitting the pavement.
Of course. The ordeal in Wildrose Valley was over.
Another had begun.
Taylor turned right, and walked.
PART THREE
NEW GIRL IN TOWN
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Virtue Falls, Washington
Kateri Kwinault woke early, and grumpy. She had taken a pain pill last night. Usually when she got desperate enough to do that, she slept eight hours and woke refreshed. But damn. It was six in the morning and here she was, staring into the dark and listening to ice hit the window.
Vile day. No one could blame her if she didn’t go down the cold, dark, empty street and open the Virtue Falls library … except the Norton kids would make the trek in no matter what the weather, and she hated for them to see darkened windows and retur
n to a cold, empty house to wait for their single mother to come home from work.
So Kateri would go in. But first, she’d go back to sleep for another hour.
Determinedly she closed her eyes. And found herself flexing her hands, her feet, turning her head. She felt pretty good, even with the weather, even after the accident. Her joints, both real and artificial, seemed to be working easily, and this morning she was not haunted by memories of that turbulent blue tsunami that had smashed her Coast Guard cutter and almost killed her …
Her eyes popped open.
For God’s sake. Might as well get up.
Moving like an elderly woman, which she was not, she sat up. She, who had always moved swiftly over the earth, who had studied and worked to exceed her beginnings … she had been reduced to using first a wheelchair, then a walker, and now her canes. Doctors called it a miracle; they had told her she would never walk again. She called them fools—although not to their faces. Never tell a medical professional who wields a needle and a scalpel that he, or she, doesn’t know what he, or she, is talking about.
Holding on to the bedrail, she stood and, as she always did, took a moment to relish the sensation of the floor beneath her feet. Groping for her canes, she began to get ready for work. She found herself dressing in a breathless rush, as if she were late to an important appointment. “What do you suppose is happening?” she asked Lacey.
Lacey was the dog equivalent of a prom queen, a girly blond cocker spaniel who pranced and twirled and was popular with everybody. For Kateri, Lacey was an ambassador of goodwill, for like any good prom queen, Lacey hid her intelligence and alpha bitchiness beneath an amiable and seemingly obedient disposition.
Now the dog danced up and down, her blond ears flopping madly, urging Kateri to hurry.
“I know. We’ll go.” Kateri wrapped up warmly and pulled on a waterproof poncho. She fitted another, small, pink waterproof and sequined felt coat around Lacey; one of Lacey’s dedicated fans, the trucker, John Rudda, had brought it to her from Las Vegas.
Kateri thought it looked silly.
Lacey adored the coat.
A glance out the window at the shiny streets made Kateri mutter, “I’ll take the walker.” She hooked her bag onto the bars and headed out.
Her apartment was new, built since the earthquake two and a half years earlier, and her unit had been tweaked to accommodate her handicaps. Once she returned her wheelchair to the veteran’s organization, she didn’t need the tweaks, but she did need that ground-floor access and proximity to her job.
The Virtue Falls library was housed in the old feed-and-seed store, a sturdy building that had withstood the earthquake and the aftershocks when the “new” library, built in the 1970s, had collapsed like a house of cards. The store was a temporary shelter for the books, or so the Virtue Falls City Council claimed. Actually, Kateri hadn’t seen any movement toward building a new library. Thus far, the city council had not deemed a new library to be necessary or vital to the community.
To the city council, Kateri had cited the number of children who arrived every day after school to listen to her read Harry Potter or Charlotte’s Web, and the preschool kids and their parents who arrived every day to examine her small menagerie of gerbils and fish while Kateri told the legends of her tribe about the earth, the sea, the gods, and the animals. She presented the statistics about the number of books, movies, and audios checked out every week, and spoke eloquently about the various reading groups that met at the library. In return, the city council raised her salary by one dollar an hour—she was now working for more than minimum wage—and increased the library buying budget by one hundred dollars a month to … one hundred dollars a month.
They were politicians. And they were idiots. But that was redundant.
What she couldn’t quantify, and would not try to, was how the library served as a community center. She always knew when a marriage was in trouble. The wife would avoid Kateri’s gaze while she checked out 20 Ways to Keep Your Marriage Healthy and How to Heal a Broken Relationship. When Irene Golobovitch won her gazillionth blue ribbon for quilting, Kateri invited the elderly woman to set up a frame in the corner, and on Thursday evenings, to teach anyone who wanted to learn how to assemble and stitch a community quilt.
Thursday evenings had turned into a huge success. Ostensibly, the women were performing the traditional female task of sewing. In truth, they were talking. Talking about their kids, their husbands, their families, their jobs. They complained. They laughed. And sometimes the conversations roved into deeper territory; abuse, hunger, loneliness, depression.
Kateri had been the commander of the local Coast Guard station. She didn’t have the training or the knowledge for this kind of femalebonding crap. Yet here she was, threading her needle, passing the box of Kleenex, making sympathetic noises while some woman she had known her whole life sobbed her guts out because the husband she’d married in high school was having an affair with a goat. Or something.
As the result of one massive earth movement, Kateri had found herself tossed out of the testosterone-laden world of the military and into the thick of Virtue Falls female bonding. As her mother had said on one of the few occasions when she was sober—Life ain’t fair. Kateri counted herself as the living testament to that.
Now it was December twelfth, close to the winter solstice, eight o’clock in the morning, and still dark as midnight. The town was shut down. Ice hit the streets, coating them with a slick glaze that shone blue in the streetlights. Kateri leaned heavily on the walker; she did not intend to fall and break anything. She’d had enough surgeries to last ten lifetimes … her face looked pretty good, but her body looked like a road map, the old-fashioned paper kind that had to be folded and refolded until the corners fell apart.
Lacey bounded ahead, skidded, got her feet under her again, and glanced reproachfully at Kateri as if she’d caused the problem, then bounded ahead again.
Despite the slicker, the gloves, and the boots, the icy rain managed to touch Kateri’s face, drip off her chin, slither down her neck. She almost turned back, but like Lacey, she desperately wanted to reach the library. The closer she got, the more her sense of urgency increased. She turned the corner and looked across the street toward the entrance.
By the light of street lamps, she could see that someone had left a pile of clothes on the concrete steps. People in town did that sometimes, figuring she would distribute them to the needy. And of course, she always did.
Yet Lacey barked and ran across the street, and she didn’t do that for a pile of old clothes.
So Kateri followed as fast as she could, squinting through the rain and darkness.
No. Definitely not clothes. Someone was huddled in a fetal position against the door.
God, the whole town was like a skating rink, and this person was out in it?
Lacey reached the pile of clothes and nosed at it, and the person, a woman, probably, turned her head and looked at the dog, then with difficulty extended a hand for the dog to sniff.
That was invitation enough for Lacey. She crawled into the person’s lap and stretched out, trying, Kateri thought, to warm her.
Kateri reached the steps, stood on the sidewalk, and said, “Excuse me? Are you all right?”
Stupid question, but this person should be dead.
The woman looked away from the dog she was petting and directly at Kateri. She was white, young, twenty-five, maybe, and her face was so pale Kateri thought she must be frozen. “I’m fine, thank you,” she said. Her voice was thready, and she enunciated carefully, as if she was having trouble moving her lips.
“I’m Kateri Kwinault, the librarian.” Kateri climbed the stairs. “Come in.”
“Thank you.” The woman really was polite. “This was as far as I could go, so I was hoping someone would come along.” She scooted aside to allow Kateri access.
“Of course. And this is far enough.” Kateri got the door open and switched on the lights. It was chilly insid
e, but nothing like the biting cold outside.
Lacey leaped from the woman’s lap and toward the library, inviting her in. When the woman was slow to respond, Lacey bounced back to her, bumped her, then spun around and dashed back into the library.
Kateri said, “I can’t assist you. Can you come in, or should I call someone?” She knew the woman could now clearly see her crumpled, crooked, broken body, but that was all right. Sooner or later, everyone heard the story about the tsunami ripping Kateri out of the cutter. The massive wave had crushed her, drowned her, taken her to the depths of the ocean. There she had met the god her people believed caused the earthquake. Kateri didn’t talk about the Frog God—everybody freaked out, Native Americans and whites and anybody else who heard—but she knew what she had seen. She knew the pain he had caused her, and the power he had granted her. She knew sooner or later she was going to have to figure out what the Frog God wanted from her. But not now.
The woman tried to stand. She collapsed, then half-crawled, half-rolled inside, as if her limbs could not quite comprehend the commands of her brain. She held one arm close to her chest.
As soon as she cleared the entrance, Kateri hurriedly shut the door and locked it. “I’m going to turn up the heat,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Summer. I’m … Summer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Kateri appreciated the irony of the name. “Well, Summer, it’s good to meet you. Can you get yourself out of those clothes?” Summer wore a uniform of some kind, all black with a black bow tie. “I’ve got blankets and throws. The kids come in wet and cold and when the old furnace breaks down…” It didn’t matter.
Summer stared fixedly at the dog as if Lacey’s enthusiasm fascinated her.
“I’ve got a floor cushion.” Kateri got towels out of the cupboard, the ones she used to wipe up. “Take off your hat,” she said.
Painfully, Summer pulled off her cap and dropped it beside her. Then she halted, as if more was beyond her.
Kateri sat on her walker seat and dried Summer’s short hair and face. She tossed the wet towel aside and covered Summer’s head with another dry one.