Dying to Read (25 page)

Voice mail.

She had just escaped from a killer. She was stranded in a gas station restroom somewhere on the edge of the continent. And she gets voice mail?

The wonders of technology.

She left her name, number, and a request that Mitch call her as soon as possible. “I really need your help. It’s a, uh, matter of life and death,” she ended. Okay, that sounded a bit melodramatic, but right now her life felt like a bad episode of
CSI
.

She went into the convenience store attached to the gas station, bought a Pepsi, and gulped it down. She surveyed the town over the cans of motor oil piled below the window. Town might be an overstatement. This place was even smaller than Murphy Bay. One motel, a touristy gift shop, a little grocery store, a couple of cafés, Mick’s Kar Kare. A red Corvette decorated a wall of the building, but an actual work-in-progress was a battered pickup minus a wheel. She asked the clerk the name of the place.

“Benton’s View. Beats me why it’s called that.” The woman folded her arms and stared glumly out the window. “Do you see a view? I don’t.”

Apparently not an avid Chamber of Commerce supporter of the viewless sister city of Murphy Bay.

“Is there a police station?”

“Deputy from the county sheriff’s office patrols through here. Once in a while you see a state police car on the highway.” She eyed the reddish marks on Cate’s face. “You need someone?”

Did she? She didn’t want Coop to get away. But neither did she want to endanger Willow in some way. She kept remembering that mean-looking gun. Would he take Willow hostage if the authorities tried to chase him down? Catch her in an exchange of gunfire? She spotted a display of sweatshirts and headed for them as if that had been her intention all along. “This is what I need.”

She picked out the heaviest sweatshirt on the rack and paid for it. She wasn’t thrilled with the imprint on it, but she figured the fashion police weren’t patrolling this area. She was just slipping the sweatshirt over her head when her cell phone rang. She stepped outside to answer it.

“Cate, I got your message. Where are you? What’s wrong?”

“I-I’m here, in this little town on the coast—”

“You sound strange. Are you okay? What did you mean about a matter of life and death?”

Her bones hurt. Her muscles ached. Her face stung. Her nerves felt as raw as fresh hamburger. But she was alive. “I’m okay.”

“How did you get there? Is anyone with you?”

“I’m alone.”

She knew she owed him a detailed explanation. But there was so much to think about, so much to tell him, and she was suddenly so very tired, her brain a frazzle of loose wires. She slumped to the concrete walkway beside the building. “I don’t have a car. I was wondering if maybe you could come get me . . . ?”

“I’ll come.” No hesitation, no demand for explanation, no asking how far it was. “Just tell me where you are.”

“If you’re busy, I can wait.”

“Cate, I’m coming now. Just give me directions.”

All she could tell him was that she was at a wide spot in the road called Benton’s View. “I’m at the only gas station.”

“I’ve never heard of it, but I’ll be there. I’m on my way right now.”

She dropped the phone back in her purse. Just a matter of hanging on now.

Mitch was coming.

She’d just sit right here, rest, calm her nerves. Everything would be all right.

Mitch was coming!

Yet something niggled at the back of her mind.

A moment later the niggle exploded into possibility. She struggled to her feet.

Coop would find out soon enough that she was missing. He’d instantly know where she’d escaped.

And he’d come back for her.

 19 

Cate dashed around the side of the building and lunged into the restroom again. No lock on the outside door, so she barricaded herself in a stall. Mitch couldn’t get here for at least two or three hours. How long before Coop turned around and came back, with murder on his mind?

Would he ask inside if the clerk had seen her? And the clerk would say, Yeah, she was here. Acting kind of weird. I think she went around to the restroom.

Her muscles squeezed into rigid cords every time the outer door opened. Coop, barging his way in? No, a woman with perfume powerful enough to annihilate small life forms. A little girl, apparently unnoticed by the barefoot person with her, bending down to peer up at Cate from under the stall door. An older woman with matronly shoes and serious flatulence problems.

And even as she was so afraid, Cate couldn’t help pondering a certain absurdity in her predicament. She’d been bound, gagged, and hijacked. A murderer was out to get her, and she was stranded. But it was no high-drama situation on the edge of a cliff. She was in a gas station restroom. With rust stains in the sink and no towels in the dispenser. In a sweatshirt bearing a picture of a cranky crab complaining about a bad claw day.

With only one place to sit, she perched on the edge of the chipped seat and wondered how the door had acquired a dent in the shape of a horseshoe. Nothing to read but a strange philosophical pronouncement inked on the wall: I am. You are. But who is they?

More restroom traffic. Speculating about what the total person looked like when all she could see were feet and a few inches of leg.

Flip-flops with green toenails and rough-skinned heels. A teenager with incipient foot problems, or an older woman trying to be cool with teenage-colored polish?

Reeboks with thick socks. Athletic young beachcomber? Older person with circulation problems?

Daisy-decorated sandals and a butterfly tattoo on the ankle. Nice. Except for an ominous-looking bruise above the tattoo.

Once she risked leaving the stall and opened the outer door to peer at the gas pumps. The misty fog had lifted. Breezy sunshine now. But too early for Mitch, and she ventured no farther out. The minutes inched by. Fifteen. Forty-five. The curve of the hard seat imprinted her anatomy. The scent of dampish concrete and disinfectant congealed in her pores. At two hours from the time she’d called Mitch, she started peeking outside every five minutes, watching for him. Another fifteen minutes went by. Twenty-five. Thirty.

And there he was! The big SUV pulling around the gas pumps loomed like a haven of safety. Cate ran to it, flung the door open even before the vehicle stopped rolling, and hurled herself into the seat.

“Thank you for coming!”

Mitch studied her face, then reached over and rubbed a thumb across the still sensitive blotches left by the tape on her face. “What’s going on? Did you and Kyle have a fight and he dumped you over here?”

“Kyle?” she repeated. Kyle seemed so long ago and far away. Another life, another universe. “You thought this had something to do with
Kyle
?”

“Well, yeah, that’s what I figured when you sounded so upset. That he’d come down from Portland again and you came over here for the day and then . . . something happened.”

“And you came anyway?”

“I guess I’m a sucker for a distress call from a beautiful woman.”

The “beautiful” was stretching it, especially when the restroom mirror had told her she looked like something washed up on the beach. But she appreciated that he classified her call for help the way he did.

“Kyle and I decided not to have any big reunion.”

He scowled. “But if it didn’t have anything to do with Kyle, why are you here? Tracking down a killer again?”

“Not exactly. It’s a . . . long story.”

He gave her a sideways glance. “I have plenty of time.”

He wheeled the SUV around the gas pumps and back to the highway, and she gave him the long story. Going to see Willow. The overheard conversation between Willow and Coop. The cat food disaster. Her car-trunk trip to the coast. Willow helping her escape. Agreeing with Willow’s plea to delay contacting the police until she could escape too.

“She said she’d call me, but I haven’t heard from her.”

“What do you think that means?”

“Maybe she hasn’t been able to get away from him yet. Maybe her life is in danger.” Cate paused, swallowed, and faced an ugly possibility. “Or maybe it means she did want to save me, but she never intended to get away from him herself. And now she and Coop are headed for Mexico or somewhere together.” And laughing about the whole escapade.

“Cate, you have to go to the police, and the sooner the better. If what this guy says is true, he’s already killed one person, and he was planning to kill you! Your friend Willow may be his next victim.”

Mitch was right, of course. She couldn’t delay any longer. They went to the police station as soon as they reached Eugene. An officer took down everything, and another one questioned her further. She supplied make and license information about Willow’s car that Coop was driving. Reluctantly she added information about her own car but emphasized that, even though Willow was driving that car, she hadn’t really been part of the kidnapping, because she’d done it only to rescue Cate.

They seemed interested and said they’d check on the death of a farmer in California two years ago. But they obviously weren’t ready to mobilize an all-out attack force of police cars and helicopters to go after Coop.

The whole thing, Cate realized as they left the police station, wasn’t black-and-white plain. She was a little worse for wear, bruised, and bone-sore, but she had no proof she’d actually been kidnapped. She hadn’t notified police on the coast when Willow released her, and her statement that she hadn’t done so because Willow asked her not to now sounded both flimsy and peculiar. Her vague information about the old murder, and a maybe-murder of an apartment owner in the future, weren’t enough to justify an arrest warrant. Coop wasn’t driving a stolen car, so they couldn’t even get him on that charge.

Mitch’s assessment, once they were back in the SUV, agreed with hers. “I’m not sure they believed you.”

“They think I’m right up there with those people who claim they’ve been abducted by aliens.”

“Which doesn’t make Coop any less dangerous. He may come after you again.” After a moment, while they both considered that possibility, he asked a practical question. “I should have asked earlier, are you hungry?”

Hungry? Yes. Ravenous. Her yearning from the car trunk surfaced. “I want a Big Mac. And fries. Supersized. And a Coke.” She’d adventure into squid some other time.

After a stop at McDonald’s, they got back to the house about eight o’clock. That seemed strange, after all that had happened today, and it was only eight o’clock. At the door, Mitch said, “I could stay with you for a while.”

“I’m going to lock all the doors, take a shower and a couple aspirin, and head for bed.”

He studied her face for a moment, then leaned over and dropped a quick kiss on her cheek. Then he stepped back, a puzzled look on his face, as if he wasn’t sure why he’d done that. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Inside, a note from Rebecca said she’d gone to try to talk Joe out of a grumpy I’m-tired-of-this-place-and-I’m-getting-out-of-here mood. Octavia meowed complaint about not getting enough attention and tangled herself around Cate’s feet. Just a normal day. If you tuned out the middle part.

Cate locked the doors and gulped two aspirin. She stood in the shower and alternated between worry about Willow’s safety—had Coop found out Cate was gone before Willow could escape from him, and turned violent?—and a sour feeling that maybe she’d been had by another of Willow’s stories.

And the going-to-bed finale didn’t happen.

Her cell phone rang. The screen showed the number at Amelia’s house. Would Cheryl call her? Puzzled, she answered with a wary hello.

“Cate, you made it home okay! I’m so glad.” Willow sounded bright and cheerful, as if they’d inadvertently become separated on a shopping spree, and she didn’t ask how Cate had done it. “I’m really sorry about, you know, everything.”

“You’re home too?”

“I’m at Amelia’s house. I guess that’s home for the moment. I need to get your car back to you.”

“I’d appreciate that. Thank you. You got away from Coop okay?”

“Oh, sure. No problem.”

“Willow, what about Coop? I went to the police and told them everything. I mean, he
killed
someone. He kidnapped me. And he was going to push me off a cliff! They’re looking for him.” Cate wasn’t positive of that statement, but she hoped it was true. “Aren’t you worried he’ll come back here looking for you because of what you did today? For which I thank you, by the way.”

“We stopped to eat. He didn’t know then that you were gone. While he was in the restaurant I left a note in the car and told him our getting back together was never going to happen. He won’t come back here because he’ll know you’ve gone to the police by now.”

“You should go to them too.”

“Coop and I did some things we shouldn’t have. But I never knew about that old farmer. I really thought he fell. Knowing he didn’t made me . . . see Coop differently. And I will go to the police, but not tonight, okay? I’ll bring your car over to your place—”

“You don’t have to do that tonight. I can get it tomorrow.”

“I want all this to be done and over with. I’ll drive the car over and then you can bring me back here.”

Willow’s determination to return the car fortified Cate’s skimpy confidence in her. Willow had definite problems in the ethics department, but she seemed to be trying to do the right thing now. And she’d definitely done right when she helped Cate escape.

“You could stay here tonight,” Cate offered.

“Oh, thanks, Cate, that’s sweet of you. But I’m figuring on taking off for Grandma’s first thing in the morning. I have some packing to do tonight.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“But Coop’s bike is here. Under the circumstances, I figure it’s a fair trade. He’s got my car, I get his bike.”

“You can ride it?”

“Of course I can ride it!” Willow sounded indignant. “He taught me himself. And I know where he always hides the key in a little magnetic box under the footrest.”

Cate was still in her bathrobe when Willow arrived twenty minutes later, and Willow was still in the jeans and tank top she’d been wearing when she helped Cate escape. Willow gave her a big hug when Cate opened the door to let her in. Cate was surprised that instead of weariness, an air of suppressed excitement almost danced around Willow. She dropped the car keys into Cate’s hand, and Cate stuffed them into the pocket of her robe.

“Would you like something to eat? Rebecca left some macaroni and cheese in the fridge.”

“No, thanks anyway.” Willow glanced at Uncle Joe’s old grandfather clock on the far side of the room. “I’m in kind of a hurry. I’ll need to do a lot of sorting when I pack because I won’t be able to take much on the bike.”

Cate had made a decision even before Willow arrived. She appreciated, even admired Willow for having the courage to go against Coop and rescue her. It was also conscientious of Willow to be in such a hurry to return the car. But she still didn’t 100 percent trust her. Maybe the truth was something dangerously different from Willow’s story about escaping Coop. Maybe they’d gotten all cozy again, and Willow was sorry she’d let Cate go, and now she was leading her into a trap where Coop could take another try at killing her.

She’d call a cab to take Willow home. She started to tell Willow that, but Willow suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders. “This will probably be the last time we see each other, won’t it?”

“I guess so. But we can write.”

“I’m not much of a letter writer. Look, I want to tell you something before I leave.”

Uh-oh. Here comes trouble. But Cate managed to say only, “Oh?”

Willow’s hands let go of Cate’s shoulders, and her gaze turned away. “Beverly’s ring . . . you remember Beverly’s ring? I did take it.” Her eyes lifted to meet Cate’s again. “And I’m sorry, really, really sorry now. I’ll mail it back to her before I leave.”