In Harm's Way

Now she heard her ringtone from within the cottage. She took two steps in that direction but stopped, picturing someone hiding in there waiting for her. The phone’s dull ringing continued through three more cycles and went silent. The phone… The gun… The flashlight, no longer seen.

No way she was going in there.

She looked up. Maybe the safest place was in the tree house, standing on the trapdoor to keep it from opening, but not if it was the killer’s lair, not if she had to hole up with a dead body. Hadn’t Walt once said the best place to hide was out in the open? She spotted the stack of split firewood, and beyond, another stack of the unsplit rounds. A trail led up into the woods from just beyond the pond. Where would she feel safer: wandering an empty house the size of a hotel, or tucked away in the woods with her back against a tree? The flashlight had to be Walt. He couldn’t be more than ten minutes away.

She left her camera bag at the foot of the ladder and hurried to the stack of logs, jumpy and agitated and feeling like someone was constantly a few feet behind her. Glancing over her shoulder nervously. Scared of her own shadow.

She reached the stack of rounds and there was a baseball bat stacked among the logs. Kira’s missing baseball bat, probably placed there by one of the gardeners. Or maybe it was the bat from outside her own cottage. She wrapped her hand around it and squeezed tightly.

It felt right.

52

Walt followed Beatrice down the hill at a jog, their routine familiar to both: she would go out ahead of him, locked on the scent, then return to within a few yards of him to make sure he was still with her. As he broke out onto a defined path, Walt switched off the flashlight and fitted it back into its loop on his gun belt. It was dark in the woods, but the path revealed itself as a pale ribbon and Walt followed it effortlessly, slowing only occasionally as it turned or twisted around a rock outcropping or became darkened with a tangle of exposed roots.

As much as he appreciated being on the scent, as much as he understood a killer’s bizarre need to return to the crime scene, he took little comfort. Fiona was not answering her phone. This fact alone drove him toward the Engleton place at a dangerous pace, nearly keeping up with Beatrice, and by doing so, encouraging the dog ahead at a full run. He pushed her faster; she pulled him along. But he was no match for her. She took his pursuit of her as some kind of game and quickly outpaced him.

Two minutes passed, Walt charging down the descending path. Five. Beatrice’s absence-her failure to return to him-began to weigh on him. Had the sense of game won out over her obligation to follow the scent? Had he confused her with his ru

Beatrice yipped. It was a cry. A painful cry, and it set into him a sense of panic and dread as if one of his daughters had called out. Beware when the hunter becomes the hunted. His first and only conclusion was that the killer had somehow known the dog was trailing him, that Walt, by challenging the dog, had driven her headlong into a trap-that that yip had been Beatrice’s final moment, one last desperate attempt to warn Walt.

His response visceral and immediate, his foot speed increased exponentially, ru

Her yip rang in his ears. Burned. A baby’s cry in the night. A call for help. His eyes blurred, watery from the run, or from tears, or from both. He wiped them away but all was a blurry, darkened landscape, the path’s lighter shade swirling and shifting, suddenly a river beneath his feet.

A geometric shape among it all: the Engleton roof.

And then the pain.

It ripped through both legs at the shins. He hadn’t seen a log across the path, but he went down face-first, losing the gun as he reached out to break the fall, his head flirting with unconsciousness in an effort to escape the pain. It seared from his broken shins, up through his knees, his groin, his stomach and exploded into his head as he cried out a sickening, agonized shriek.

Blackness loomed at the edges of his consciousness as he rolled over and drew his knees into his chest, writhing and gasping for air. Breathe through it! he told himself, as impossible as it was. He could ill afford to pass out. From somewhere through the fog of pain, Fiona appeared on her knees, a baseball bat in hand. Even with the evidence so blatant, it took Walt several seconds to co

Then, from behind her, came the mountain man like a specter. He emerged through the darkness, drawn by Walt’s shriek or out of some sixth sense that made him aware of Fiona’s presence. Whether a lunatic or a calculating murderer who understood the value of a hostage, he moved straight for Fiona, who was herself too absorbed in her own mishap to have any awareness of him. But it wasn’t Fiona he wanted.

She screamed and rolled away, releasing the bat as the man seized hold of it. It hung at his side like the bat of a hitter stepping up to home plate staring down the pitcher-Walt.

Whether traumatized or demonized, vengeful, or drugged and demented, both men knew what the mountain man intended to do with the bat as he took another step closer. Fiona, who had scooted away on her back, thrusting herself along the forest floor by digging in her heels, who had moved a good five yards away, also saw the future-where the next ten seconds were headed. Whether to protect him, or herself-Walt couldn’t fathom such thoughts, still gripped in his pain-she rolled to her knees and began sweeping her arms through the pine straw, in what at first appeared such a lame and odd behavior. The gun, he realized in a flash of lucidity. She was going for his gun.

Movement caught the edges of Walt’s wavering peripheral vision. Beatrice limped onto the path holding her right front paw aloft, her expression-did he imagine it or actually see it clearly in the dark?-one of remorse and grave concern as her master lay writhing in the dirt, a camouflaged giant glowering over him.

Walt, who couldn’t hear anything beyond the rush of his own blood past his ears, who sensed Fiona clambering in the underbrush, raking left and right in search of his handgun, who saw Martel Gale’s and Gilly Menquez’s killer turn toward the woman, clearly sensing she presented the greatest threat, managed a single word to rise up through the pain.

“Defend!”

Beatrice squealed again as she lighted onto her injured paw, bounding some four feet through air like a projected missile-a dozen bared and flashing white teeth.