Authors: Robert W. Walker
"Sounds like rifle fire crackling in the distance." Like gunfire heard in Civil War reenactments, Lucas thought, except these shots were live rounds.
In the gloom of darkness, it was difficult to see what was happening on land at the house, and at the stables, but Lucas and Meredyth could make out the faint silhouette of the Farnsworth pickup truck up at the house, in the driveway alongside Kemper's truck. Following their eyes down the slope of the lawn, they saw the two bodies downed by gunfire, and in a moment, a glimmer of hope welled up, as each boy. Tommy and then Jeff, showed signs of life.
"The bitch somehow got hold of the Remington," Lucas said, "and shot them with their own gun. Damn her!"
"She sent them running toward the lake, toward us."
"Then opened fire."
Tommy and Jeff, both shot and bleeding, had begun to crawl for the cover of trees. Lucas and Meredyth watched, helpless to do anything as another shot rang out, killing Tommy. "Nooo!" Meredyth cried out.
Another shot hammered into Jeff's back. Both young men were dead. No one could survive two such rounds. Lucas had seen Jeff's body respond to the fourth shot, absorbing the powerful impact. "God damn the bitch!" he shouted.
"What're we going to do, Lucas? We're next!"
A fifth shot rang out, and Tommy Farns worth's head exploded. She was now using the bodies for target practice, telling Lucas and Meredyth that she could hit any target she wished from the upstairs window of the house, and given that it was hunting season, no one would think the shots unusual.
Lucas had already pulled Meredyth down below the gunwale of the rowboat, hoping to leave Lauralie with as small a target as possible. But bullets began to ping into the metal hull. "We've got to take our chances in the water!"
Lucas rocked the boat, calling for Meredyth to do the same. Another bullet whistled past, spitting up water. Suddenly, the boat gained momentum and flipped, sending them into the lake. Holding onto the upturned boat, Meredyth came up fearing that he had been hit, but he assured her otherwise. "Keep hold of the boat and kick like hell for shore!" he shouted as more rounds pinged into the water around them.
They guided their cover toward the opposite shore. "We've got to get out of range of the gun," Lucas told her.
Bullets continued to ping off the rowboat.
"She's stringing this out," gasped Lucas, spitting water. "She could have hit either one of us with that scope and range. Likely had both of us in her crosshairs."
"Else she's a lousy shot." Meredyth gulped lake water, continuing to kick for shore.
"A weapon like that... with the scope, a child could pick us off out here. No, she deliberately chose to wound those two Farnsworth boys, and she also chose to finish them off when they posed no threat at a moment when she could have put one through my head or yours, Mere."
"But she didn't, and we both know why."
"She wants to watch us sweat...doesn't want to end the game between us, not yet."
"She wants me to think about life without you, Lucas, before she takes you away from me."
CONTINUING TO USE the rowboat as cover, they paddled farther and farther from the sniper's scope, kicking for the Brody pier. Panting, Meredyth said, "Lauralie means to make me suffer for the rest of my life, Lucas, which means—"
"She never intended to kill you."
"Exactly. It's you, Lucas, she's after. She intends to destroy my life by killing you and anyone I love. She wants me to mourn all the people I love that she's taking from me. Thank God Mom and Dad aren't here."
They reached the Brody pier, but remained in the water, pulling themselves along beneath it as cover until they reached shore.
"She wants me to suffer the guilt of all these people dying around me, Lucas. Now those poor boys out there on my lawn brutally killed, my innocent gardener, for God's sake, Mira Lourdes, the old nun, Katherine Croombs, even Arthur Belkvin and his dogs...she wants me to feel responsible for it all. That I somehow caused all their deaths—and the culmination of it all? The death of the one I love most, you."
The gunfire had ceased as darkness had enveloped Lake Madera.
"The moon's gone under again," he said. "Now's the time! Make for the house. Gotta get to a phone."
As they ran, dripping wet and cold, toward the darkened house, the upturned rowboat floated off and into a weedy backwash. No shots came as they made it to the stairs, Meredyth slipping and falling. No shots came as they made it to the front door left ominously ajar. In the driveway, they'd seen the family RV, waiting like a patient dog for its master. They burst into the Brody home, Meredyth calling out each of the Brodys by name. "Myron! Lorene! Candice! It's Meredyth Sanger! Where are you?"
Meredyth called out over and over for them as Lucas tore open doors in search of the family. No answers, no finds.
"No lights," he ordered her as they searched the downstairs den for a phone. Grabbing it, Lucas heard the dead air of a disconnected line. "Bitch has cut the lines. No big surprise." He looked around for a weapon, but the man's glassed-in gun rack was smashed and all his weapons were missing. Lucas instantly realized on seeing this that they might well find a triple murder here, quite possibly mutilations on the same scale as they'd found with Byron Priestly and Arthur Belkvin. Lauralie seemed to take glee in slashing people open. "Stick close by me," he solemnly ordered Meredyth.
She took a tentative step up a flight of carpeted stairs, but he stopped her, pointing to a trickling trail of blood on the kitchen tiles. The blood looked burgundy in the absence of light. "She's left us another intentional trail to follow."
It led them through the expansive kitchen and to a basement door off the kitchen. Meredyth buried her head in his chest, and he held her. "My God, Lucas, she's killed them all."
Lucas had no words that might comfort her. He reached a hand out to the basement door, cautiously opening it, and staring into the black hole of the stairwell. "Stay here, Mere."
"Don't you dare leave me alone."
"I have to step inside and close the door before flicking on the light switch. I don't want that madwoman to know where we are. Understood?"
"I go with you."
He saw the adamant fire in her eyes that said no use arguing. "All right, but it could be a shock. Brace for it."
Once on the stairwell, he flicked on the light, and it instantly revealed blood on the interior door and on the panels of dry wall on both sides of the stairwell. They were, in effect, surrounded by a red rain that looked like paintbrush flecks and spurts, the kind of high-velocity blood residue that comes of gunshot wounds at close range, creating a crazy mosaic only a blood-spatter evidence expert could read. It said to Lucas, They were shot here at the top of the stairwell and the killer used their own weight to her benefit, simply allowing the bodies to fall atop one another. The flood of light revealed the heap of three bodies lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.
"That bitch knows we're here looking at what she's done," said Meredyth, trembling under his embrace. "Directed us across the lake and to the kitchen and here.
Lucas. She's orchestrated the whole damn thing...watching us tip over in the water, climb out at the pier, all of it."
"She can watch our every move through that scope," he agreed. "But she can't see through walls."
Lucas held Meredyth's head close to him, not wishing her to look down the stairwell again at the carnage that lay there, mother, father, and teen daughter. He ordered her to stay on the top stair as he went below. At the foot of the stairs, Lucas got to know the Brodys up close and personal.
Myron, Lorene, and their child, Candice, all with gags, blindfolds, and hands tied at their backs. They'd been summarily shot in the head on the top step. Lauralie had guided each to the basement stairs one at a time, fired into each cranium, and had simply let gravity do the rest.
Myron Brody was at the bottom of the heap, and it recalled Lucas's time in Viet Nam below such a death heap. He truly hated this Lauralie Blodgett now, and he wanted in the worst way to see her dead before this night was over.
Lucas now worked to separate the dead from one another in an effort to find keys for the RV and possibly a cell phone. He pried Myron Brody from the weight of his wife and child and fished into the pants pockets for keys. There were none. He tried Mrs. Brody's pockets. No keys. Finally, he tried the young girl's jeans. Nothing. Finally giving up, he located a tarp and covered the Brodys.
He hurried back upstairs to Meredyth where she sat quietly sobbing. He helped her to her feet, turned out the light, and guided her back into the kitchen. "No doubt she's emptied the place of any keys and cell phones along with any weapons." He indicated the empty chopping block.
"Not entirely," said Meredyth, upending the dining table.
"What're we doing?"
"Arming ourselves." She began unscrewing one of the table legs. In a moment, she had a baseball-bat-sized weapon with a two-inch screw protruding from the end.
Lucas removed a second table leg. "Makes a damn nice war club."
"Lucas, you see what I see?" Meredyth pointed to a clear cookie jar on the countertop, and inside were keys.
Lucas grabbed the jar and emptied out the set of Chevy keys. "I think it's the RV. Come on! We're out the back door and to the car."
Outside, they strapped in before Lucas learned that neither the correct key nor hot-wiring would do, as he could not get a spark from the ignition. Exiting the RV, he rounded to the front and lifted the hood, flashing a light found in the glove compartment now over the dead motor. She had gotten out, clutching her table leg and asking, "What is it?"
He pointed. "She's made off with the distributor cap. Biiiitch!" He ground out the word.
"She's got us right where she wants us, doesn't she?"
"How could she've known we were without our phones, my gun?" he lamented. "Hell...I even left my Texas toothpick in your bedroom, Mere."
"A bowie knife's hardly going to help us now."
"I think it'd beat nothing."
"We have our war clubs, remember?" She hefted her chair leg. His lay on the seat inside the RV. "Lucas, she's thought every detail through. She's been in this house for hours and hours, all damn day. And she's been watching us."
"From where? Exactly where to watch our every move, Mere?"
"Upstairs...Candice's room in the front. It overlooks the lake and she...she is a stargazer, owns a super telescope."
"How damn fortunate for Lauralie."
"She knew when we got up, when we ate, when we left for the stables and left on horseback. All of it."
"She saw the rifle when we passed it back and forth at the stable," he thoughtfully said. "Saw everything that happened across the lake."
"She saw when Howard arrived to do the lawn, and gauged how much time she had to row across and take his identity before we'd be back."
"But how'd she arrange for Kemper's body in the boat to bump into us out there on the lake?"
"She didn't, but she arranged it as a horrid, heinous crime designed for maximum effect whenever I should discover it," Meredyth said. "Didn't matter whether it was to-night, tomorrow, or the next day, because—"
"—because you'd be left alive to savor all the terror she wants to rub your face in."
"Exactly." Meredyth's knuckles had gone white with the grip she held on her table leg club.
"So...here we stand in the dark, and she could be anywhere out there, taking a bead on you at this moment, Lucas. She'd like nothing better than to leave me entirely alone, holding your bloodied body in my arms throughout this night of terror she has planned for me. So, if you please, can we take cover and decide what we do next?"
"What are our options?"
"We go back inside the house, huddle up in the dark in a center room without windows, and wait for daylight."
"Can we walk out of here?"
"Not another house or a road for several miles this side of the lake, and if she is watching, she'll stalk us and either kill us or turn us back."
"What about Jeff and Tommy's place, their mother's home?" he asked.
"God, I pray she hasn't been killed, and oh, God, if she is alive, how are we to tell her about her sons, Lucas? How do we explain their deaths?"
"As the senseless act of a madwoman, Mere. Their deaths are not your fault. You give into such guilt, and Lauralie wins. She puts you precisely where she wants you."
"Oh, you mean like now?" She threw up her hands, the flashlight in them sending up crazy circles of light into the leaves of overhanging trees. "Look where she has us! Drip-ping wet, freezing, trapped, and at her mercy!"
"Then we don't lay down for the bitch."
"What do you mean? Go after her?"
"Go after her, yes."
'Tonight?"
"Now."
"In the dark?"
"In the dark."
"With a lake between us and her?"
"Guide me to Candice's room and that telescope."
Meredyth took a deep breath and nodded. "Follow me."
"Douse the light first, will you?"
"Yeah, good idea." Meredyth's mind again filled with the image of Jeff and Tommy lying dead on her front lawn. This followed by the image of the dead in the Brody basement. This followed by the awful image of the worm-covered gardener at the bottom of the waterlogged rowboat.
She led Lucas back into the house through the rear door, both carrying their war clubs. He followed her inside, up the stairs, and to Candice's pitch-black room. Meredyth switched on the flash, but he grabbed it, covering it with his hand and shutting it off. "No lights! It'll tip Lauralie off to our plans!"
"Sorry...I knew that." The little light that guided him to the telescope came in the form of stars reflecting off its metal veneer where it poked through the open window. Balancing the table leg in his crotch, Lucas settled in at a chair before the telescope, realizing that he was in the exact position that Lauralie Blodgett had been in for most of the day. Had she planned this too? For them to be here in the dead girl's room eyeballing Meredyth's cabin on Lake Madera through the very telescope Lauralie had used?