It was Jenny, the girl from the tae kwon do gym. She was screaming, panting, her eyes wide and unfocused. The scarf in her mouth was wet with saliva and blood, and was tied so tightly, her lips were pulled back, exposing her teeth.

  I came around and knelt beside her, my body blocking Jim from her view. As if he understood that I didn’t want her to see a male, he eased away and moved to the window. “Jenny? Jenny, it’s okay. The cops are here. They’ve rescued you. Okay? Jenny?” I didn’t try to touch her now, just kept saying her name and telling her help had arrived.

  After long moments, she finally looked at me, finally saw me, and her panting terror became something else. With a twist of her hips, she threw herself at me. I caught her, holding her close, my nostrils full of the smell of old urine and fear and unwashed child—and the sweet stench of a diabetic crisis. I stroked her hair with my bandaged hands, murmuring softly, “It’s okay. You’re safe now. You’re safe.” She shivered with tremors and shock and almost unbearable relief.

  It took time, but eventually Jenny’s respiration slowed to forty. Her pulse, which I had estimated at 140, dropped to 120, and I figured she was calm enough to accept help. I eased her off my lap and back to a sitting position. “Jenny, I’m going to take off your gag, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “I have to use a knife. You have to be still, so I don’t hurt you.”

  She nodded again. My hands clumsy, I opened Jim’s pocket knife. It was sharp, but the scarf in her mouth was pressed into her skin, and it had been there long enough for the flesh to swell above and below it. Her lips were swollen, too, and I worried about damage to her mucous membranes and circulation.

  But she was alive. Everything else could be dealt with later. I sawed through the scarf, and at last it parted, falling away.

  Jim handed me an open bottle of water and I held it to Jenny’s mouth, but her lips were so swollen she could barely swallow. Most of the water dribbled down her shirt. But she looked at me and her eyes smiled. She nodded and I saw her swallow, so I knew she had gotten some down.

  “We need to get these ropes off you. Okay?”

  “Yeash,” she said. “Wheash.” Which I took to be “Yes. Please.”

  Jim was again nowhere near and so I began to saw through the ropes. I worked up a sweat, but I had success, freeing her hands, which were an alarming shade of purple. She had been tied far too long and I didn’t know if she would regain use of her hands, but I didn’t let any of that show on my face.

  “Wa-er,” she said, and I helped her to drink again before starting in on the knots holding her feet together. No grief knots here. Tight, double-tied square knots. I set the water bottle in Jenny’s lap and began to saw.

  “Eesh going to kill ee,” she said.

  I looked up from the rope. Jenny’s eyes were on the trench and I realized what I hadn’t in the surprise of finding her. The killer was digging a grave. For Jenny. And she had understood what he was doing.

  “Well, he wasted his time, didn’t he?” Jim said.

  Jenny looked up at him and laughed. I hoped that someday, she might laugh like a child again. But for now, it was the half-mad laugh of the survivor, a sound far too mature for her years. To keep her a bit more calm, I told her my name and who Jim and I were and how we had managed to find her, chattering to keep her attention focused and her mind settled. But I was worried about the sweet smell coming off her. I didn’t know what she had been eating or drinking or when, but her blood sugar had to be high.

  Soon after I had the last rope off, Jenny began to shiver, showing clear signs of going into shock. She needed hospital care desperately. Her pulse was thready and her respirations were increasing again. The flesh around her eyes was sunken, and she looked badly dehydrated. There was no telling what other injuries she had sustained. I said to Jim, “We need to get her out of here. Can you carry her?”

  He looked at his watch and said, “Yeah.” He pulled off the police T-shirt, ripped the Velcro straps loose, and handed the vest and the shotgun back to me. He knelt at Jenny’s side and said, “My name is Jim Ramsey. I’m a cop. Is it okay for me to carry you back to safety?”

  Jenny looked from me to Jim and lifted her arms. I was satisfied to see both the aching trust and the change in her hands. They were slightly less purple. Maybe we could save them.

  I carried the shotgun and Jim’s supplies down to the old truck; it had stopped steaming. Jim placed Jenny on the front seat and turned the key. The engine came to life. He glanced at me. “I found one last bottle of water and poured it into the radiator. Maybe we can make it back to the Texaco station.”

  I nodded and climbed in beside Jenny. Jim made a circle through the brush, back toward civilization, the truck wheezing and clattering and jerking as if it were having seizures. Though it was steaming and creaking, the old truck held up all the way back to the turnoff. There was a sheriff’s patrol car waiting in the parking area, the deputy sitting with his head back, taking in the afternoon sun. After that, it was short work getting Jenny to Dawkins County Hospital, lights and sirens running, Jenny and me sitting in the back of the patrol car because I didn’t want to wait for an ambulance. Jim stayed behind, calling in the FBI crew to the shack for a full forensic workup.

  The media converged at the small hospital, but it took them a full hour to get there, during which Jenny’s mom was ferried in by the highway patrol and followed closely by the feebs. Dr. Rhea-Rhea took care of Jenny, ordering tests, starting fluids and administering insulin. She pulled a chair up to Jenny’s bedside, entering notes into a portable computerized notation device, refusing to leave her side.

  Hospital administration showed up for a brief confab and disappeared to set up the conference room for police and the media. I stood back, taking in all the action but not part of it, watching from a corner, silent and pretty much useless.

  When the cops brought Jenny’s mother in, the dark haired woman raced into the trauma room, her face streaked with tears and worry, tremors gripping her body. Jenny, who had been flagging and pale, lit up like a party light, threw off the covers and seemed to fly through the air to her mother. The two fell across the gurney, tears running like twin fountains. There was hugging and squealing, Jenny shrieking, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” and her mother crying, much more brokenly, “Jenny. Oh, Jenny.”

  Emergency rooms seldom see happy events, being a place of injuries and despair rather than joyful reunions, and every tech and nurse made it a point to come by the doorway and glance in. Mother and daughter were the center of attention. Dr. Rhea-Rhea stood to the side. Her arms were folded tightly around herself and her face solemn, but her eyes danced. I saw it all through a thick sheen of tears.

  I managed to call Nana for a ride and sneak away without anyone being the wiser.

  By dusk, I was back home and was soaking in a tub of hot water when the doorbell rang. It was the mellow ding-dong that signified the back doorbell, the one only family and close friends used. I pulled myself from the tub. Wrapped in an oversize terry robe, my hair in a striped towel, I went to the door. The shotgun was still on the kitchen counter where I had laid it when I’d entered. As I passed, I slid the morning newspaper over it.

  At the door, I retied the robe and looked through the window, spotting Lynnie Bee. She was turned to the side, staring out over the barn. I opened the door and said, “Lynnie, come on in! I wasn’t expec—”

  She turned to me. And I saw the gun.

  29

  “L ynnie?”

  “Get inside,” she said, her voice sounding bruised and breathless and cold.

  I backed away and she followed. With the gun, she waved me to the table and said, “Sit.” I did, and she shoved the chair beside mine out, and eased down into it.

  She was filthy, her face smeared with grime and dried gore. She stank of sweat and old wounds. She was wearing jeans, a man’s button-down shirt and dirty sneakers, all crusted with blood. There was a bullet hole in her jeans’ right lower leg and in her shirt, upper chest, near the collarbone. Blood stained her clothes. Two GSWs. At least.

  It all fell into place.

  “It was you, today, wasn’t it?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I said, “You and Christopher?”

  She laughed, the sound half agony, half disbelieving. “I tried to get you to date him, but I fell for him myself.”

  “He was kidnapping little girls,” I said, stunned. “Little girls.”

  “Not like that,” she said, resting an elbow on the table so she could square the gun on me. The wound in her upper chest oozed blood, bright against the darker blood drying around it. “Not like you think. Not like a pedophile. He was just…just…”

  “A little crazy,” I whispered.

  “I loved him.” She looked at me, her eyes begging me to understand. “I didn’t know about them until Jenny. And this was the last one. He promised. He promised.” Her voice broke on the word. Whispering, she said, “This was the last one he was going to take. He knew it wasn’t working. He finally…” She shuddered with pain and closed her eyes tightly.

  I tensed to stand, ready to grab the shotgun from the counter, but her eyes opened, bright and laser-sharp on me. “He understood that she wasn’t coming back no matter what. He was accepting it, at last. He was…”

  She took a hard breath and grimaced with pain. “He knew she wasn’t coming back. That she was in a permanent vegetative state and that nothing was ever going to change that. But you had to get involved. You. My friend,” she said bitterly. “You shot him.” Tears slid down her face, washing clean streaks through the filth.

  She looked away, to the side, as if she couldn’t bear to see me. “Why couldn’t you just stay out of it?” she whispered. “Why? He’s dead and you…you killed him.” She wiped mucous from her nose. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You need help,” I said softly. “You need a hospital.”

  “I’ll go to jail. And I’ll be alone forever.”

  I had nothing to say to that one. The silence in the kitchen was brittle, harsh, no longer the silence of friendship. My mind focused on that thought. Lynnie was holding a gun on me. I struggled to accept that one simple concept. One of my best friends was holding a gun on me. Just as another best friend had slept with my husband…

  The image of Jenny, tied and squirming beside a grave, flashed into my mind. Would she shoot me? My…friend?

  My voice calm and soothing, I asked, “Lynnie? Today? The little girl?”

  She shook her head, oily hair sliding over her forehead. “I didn’t know what to do with her. She saw me. She could maybe describe me. To the police.

  “I just thought that if I got rid of her, I could go back to the way it was. And Paul had shown me the land. We were going to build a house on it. Near you. Near the Chadwicks. And I was going to live just like you. Like I always wanted to. But now it’s all ruined.” Her eyes raised to me, pleading, unfocused, staring at a reality only she saw.

  “I couldn’t steal any more insulin. Someone was going to notice soon. I had to get rid of her. I had to put her where no one would find her.” She met my eyes and her grief was ripped away by fury. “And then you showed up. With that cop.”

  “Lynnie, let me help you. Let me call an ambulance.”

  “No.”

  Voices sounded from outside. Nana and Aunt Mosetta, chatting. Getting closer. Coming here. Shock quivered through me like lightning. It was dusk. Time for an evening chat and a drink on the back porch. Lynnie swung the gun that way, panic on her face. And the door opened.

  I dove at the arm holding the gun, shoving it hard, following through with my whole body. Lynnie’s chair rocked with the momentum, back on two legs. It crashed to the floor. The world spun, tilting drunkenly. Our bodies hit, mine on top of Lynnie. She grunted with pain. The gun went flying. In a single blink, I saw it airborne. Heard it fall. It clattered across the floor.

  Suddenly Nana was there, her .38 pointed solidly at Lynnie Bee’s head.

  Aunt Mosetta took my arm and pulled me away. I scooted away with her, crying. My eyes were locked to Lynnie Bee’s as she curled in a fetal position on the floor. Tears crawled down her face. “I just wanted to be like you,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “Oh, Lynnie,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Moses, call the police,” Nana said.

  “Whatchyou think I’m doing?” Aunt Mosetta said as she dialed. “You think I’m stupid?”

  It took half an hour for Jim, three cop cars and an ambulance to get to the farm. Half an hour for Lynnie to bleed. The fall had opened the wound in her upper chest, tearing something inside. She went into shock, her pulse fluttery and fast, her skin pasty and wet with a slick sweat. I wrapped her in blankets, washed and packed her wounds with sterile gauze from my supplies and padded over them with kitchen towels. I taped them all down with clear body tape, supporting her legs with pillows from the rec room.

  She was still alive when the ambulance came, and I helped the EMTs to stabilize her, inserting IVs and opening up fluids, volume expanders in one arm. The pulse in the other was diminished, possibly due to the gunshot wound high in her chest.

  And it was over. Lynnie was on the way to the hospital, the crime-scene techs were finished taking pictures. Once again, my clothes had to be confiscated by the cops.

  Jim waited outside my door while I changed. If my family hadn’t been so close by, I was pretty sure he’d have been in the room with me. He couldn’t bear to be away from me. We talked through the door as I washed off the blood and dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

  “I knew it was Lynnie,” he said, his voice so tight it ground like glass on raw granite. “I ran the plates. We had put out an APB on her. I just didn’t expect her to come to you.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m fine. Really.” But I wasn’t. Lynnie was one of my very best friends. Just as Robyn had been. Lynnie had known when Christopher had kidnapped Jenny. She had known that he’d killed the other girls. And she had been willing to kill the last one. She had shot at Jim. Had held a gun on me. And now…

  Dressed, I opened the door and handed Jim my robe. It would go in as evidence, along with all the other clothes the cops had taken. After the last few days, I nearly needed a new wardrobe. He accepted the robe and took me in his arms, holding me close. “I’ve taken the rest of the week off,” he said against my hair. “You have time off. So I booked us a room at a bed-and-breakfast in Charleston. Let’s go for some R & R.”

  I laughed and the sound was shaky, muffled in his shirt. Was it only days ago that we had planned our trip? “Sure. Why not? I got nothing I’d rather do.”

  “And when we get back, I’m bringing my daughter to meet you and your family. You may well ruin the sweetness and gentleness that make up so much a part of her. But I can’t think of anyone better to teach her the value of family and self-protection.”

  I laughed against his chest. “We can turn her over to Nana.”

  Jim huffed a laugh that sounded oddly like a groan.

  Epilogue

  S tanding in front of the open window, I turned my face to the sun. The light was brighter here—near the ocean and the Battery—than at home. I could smell the salt of the ocean, the damp, slightly sour scent of the old harbor city, the faint scent of horse droppings mixed with car exhaust, and coffee and bacon—the mélange of morning smells in Charleston.

  It was breakfast time and guests of the bed-and-breakfast could eat in their rooms, or dine out on the front porch. Jim and I had chosen to eat on the porch. We had reserved the little corner table under the arch for eight-thirty; the same table we had shared the weekend we stayed here back in the spring. “Living in sin,” as Aunt Moses had said, when we got back. And Jim had agreed with her, dropping to a knee on her screened-in porch and proposing on the spot.

  Memories of the B&B, and this bed, and the little table waiting for us were all mixed together, part of the whirlwind our romance had become. Engaged and married in less than three months, it was almost a Chadwick record, and totally against Chadwick tradition, as was our ceremony. No huge wedding on the front lawn of Nana and Aunt Moses’s house with a hundred or so family members standing around to cheer. Just a few dozen Chadwicks, and the minister, and all the food.

  My stomach rumbled.

  I’d have to wake him soon or we would miss the scones and the muffins, and after the wedding night he had given me, I needed the calories. But for now, I wanted only to lean into the sunlight, and just…be. I couldn’t remember when I had felt so peaceful. So content.

  Sheets rustled, feet padded softly across the rugs, and Jim’s arms came around me, his skin warm and smooth. I leaned back against him, this husband of mine. He clasped his hands together in front of me, his chin on my head, looking out the window with me at the city. “Morning, sleepyhead.” I said.

  “Morning. Smells hungry out there.”

  Jim said the strangest things sometimes. “I could eat,” I agreed, my head nodding against his chin.

  “Then a walk around the Battery, lunch at some small café, and an afternoon…nap.”

  I smiled wider. “I could nap,” I said, knowing sleep was not likely.

  But my happiness faded. Today was the day Lynnie would be sentenced. She had elected against a jury trial, pleading guilty to a small host of charges in a plea bargain that got her five years and then probation. She had lost her nursing license, her home, everything. And we hadn’t spoken since she was arrested. She refused to see me when I visited. My mail came back unopened.

  As if Jim knew what I was thinking he said, “I forbid you to be sad today. It’s our honeymoon. So stop.”

  “Not married two days and you’re already being a man,” I teased, “ordering me around again.”

  “You didn’t mind me being a man last night.”

  I elbowed him gently in the abdomen and he gave out a mighty whoof as if I had poked him much harder. But his banter had the desired effect. The melancholy that had threatened was gone.