In Too Deep (20 page)

He brought the radio to his face again and said, “I'm telling you, she's not here.” He listened a moment, then said, “You've got to be kidding. She's not an outdoorsy kind of person. If she went to her sister's house, she took the road.” Another silence. “Okay, I'll go there. But if her car is still
in town, I'm betting she's here somewhere.” He listened an instant longer. “If you say so… I'll meet you here.”

Meet who? Quinn? She wanted to ask Will, but she still couldn't decide if she trusted him or not.

She watched as Will climbed onto the ATV and turned the ignition. The vehicle roared to life and he zoomed down the driveway.

“What now, Mom?” Annmarie asked.

“I'm going to go call Quinn,” she said, just then deciding. She caught Annmarie by the shoulders. “I want you to wait right here for me, okay?”

“And be real quiet,” Annmarie added. “In case that bad man comes back.”

The statement gave Lily one more glimpse into what her daughter had gone through last spring when Ian had brought her to Rosie for safekeeping. Lily took her daughter by the shoulder. “Promise me.”

“I promise, Mom.”

Swiftly, Lily crossed the yard, paused only a second when she reached the edge of the trees, then ran the remaining distance to the house. In the kitchen she dialed the number to the research center. When the phone was finally answered, it wasn't Quinn, instead his voice asking to leave a message. If Will had been talking to Quinn, wouldn't he still be there?

“It's me, Quinn, at about nine. Call Hilda. Right away,” Lily said, opting for careful and deciding that she really didn't want to be here when Will came back.

Then she dialed Hilda's number. It, too, rang without being answered. When Lily looked at the clock on the wall, she saw it was about the time for the evac plane from Juneau to arrive. That might also explain where Quinn was.

Lily hung up, then dialed the law enforcement number that she knew would send Hilda a voice page. At the beep, Lily said, “It's me.” She glanced at her watch, then added, “It's about nine and I bet that you're busy with Patrick. Will Baker—you remember him. He's the lab helper who came to work at the center. Anyway, he's broken into the Erick
sens' house. He's talking to somebody on a walkie-talkie, Hilda, and he's gone to Rosie's house, looking for me. I've called Quinn to see if he sent Will out here, but he's not there. I need—”

Her voice broke off. Just what did she need exactly?

“Help,” she said. “And I can't stay here because somebody else is coming and I don't know who.” The panic in her chest rose a little with each passing second. What if Will came back before she got out of the house? What if whoever he was talking to showed up? What if… “I know I'm rambling, and I'm sorry. But…I'm taking Annmarie to my house. Come get us there, okay?” She disconnected the phone and then dialed Cal's number, and then she heard it—the sound of the ATV returning. She was out of time.

She hung up the phone and ran out of the house. She raced across the yard faster than she had run since she was a girl, her lungs feeling as though they would explode. She jumped over a log and scrambled down the shallow embankment where she had left her daughter hidden.

Annmarie gave her a reassuring smile. “You run very fast, Mom. Almost as good as Aunt Rosie.”

High praise since Rosie was in much better physical condition.

The sound of the ATV grew louder.

“Come on, sweetie,” Lily said, once again leading the way into the thicker brush, looking back one last time. The ATV skidded to a halt in front of the house. Curious as she was about Will, her overriding instinct was to get as far away as she could in as short a time as she could. Since Will had said she wasn't an “outdoorsy” sort of person, she chose a route that took them through the thick undergrowth.

“Where are we going?” Annmarie asked.

“To our house.”

“Oh, good.” She slipped her hand inside Lily's. “And maybe that's where the little dog is going, too.”

“Maybe.” Within a hundred yards Lily decided that Will had been dead-on. She was a city girl, and she would have
given a lot for a nice groomed trail that led through a postcard-perfect forest rather than tangle of primeval wilderness that made each step a battle.

Twice she was sure that she'd heard vehicles on the road. She hoped they belonged to Quinn or Hilda. She feared they belonged to Will and his unknown buddy. Lily heard the unmistakable sound of a seaplane revving up its motor while taking off, and a minute later the plane itself appeared above the trees. It had the distinctive logo of the evac planes, which confirmed Hilda's whereabouts.

Lily trudged along, holding branches to the side for her daughter, her thoughts circling from yesterday to Patrick's beating to Will's breaking in. She frowned, remembering that she'd seen the two of them arguing a couple of days before.

They hadn't walked much farther when she became aware that Annmarie kept digging into her pocket. Lily stopped and saw that Annmarie was dropping something on the ground. A closer look showed that it was a piece of cheese that she had torn off one of the slices.

“What are you doing?” Lily asked.

Annmarie grinned up at her. “I'm leaving a trail so we don't get lost. Just like Hansel and Gretel.”

“I see.” Lily glanced back in the direction they had come. Now wasn't the time to be reminded that Hansel and Gretel had ended up as the witch's prisoners. “We're not lost, sweetie.”

“But just in case,” Annmarie said, holding up the entire package of sliced cheese.

Lily didn't think it was likely that Will would follow them by a trail of cheese, and it had the benefit of keeping Annmarie's mind occupied with something other than the danger that marched step-by-step with Lily.

It took nearly an hour to reach the house. Had they taken the road, it would have been an easy walk. When they reached the clearing, she once again decided that staying hidden within the protection of the trees made the most sense.

“Aren't we going inside?” Annmarie asked.

“Not yet,” Lily said.

“'Cause we're still hiding from that bad man.”

“Yes.” Agreeing was easier to explain than that Lily wasn't sure if he was, especially since she had just put them through an arduous walk. So they sat on a log and played the guess-what-I-am game that soon had Annmarie in giggles and kept Lily's mind off the fact that she hadn't put on a jacket and was once again cold.

As the minutes dragged by Lily worried that Hilda had gotten her message, that Quinn had returned to the house and found them gone or, worse, mugged by Will and his unknown partner, that Will had somehow found Annmarie's trail of cheese and would find them.

A little while later Annmarie whispered, “Mom, look.”

Less than ten feet away was the little black-and-white dog—a cocker spaniel mix, Lily decided, based on her huge floppy ears and the shape of her face—nibbling at the last piece of cheese Annmarie had dropped. She promptly sat on the ground and took another slice of cheese out of her pocket and broke a piece off, then held it out to the animal.

 

Quinn arrived at Lily's house later than he'd intended. By the time he had made the phone calls to the university and to Patrick's parents, the evac plane had arrived. As promised, he'd gone to help. His only other stop had been to pick up new locks from the general store.

Whistling under his breath as he came up the porch steps, glass crunched beneath his feet. He looked down, then up at the door. The gaping hole in the bottom pane of glass next to the doorknob made his heart stop.

Quinn went inside, calling Lily's name, then Annmarie's. Neither one answered.

Cursing himself for leaving them alone, he dropped the sack from the general store on the freezer top and rushed through the house. Stupid. He should have never let himself be talked into leaving. Within thirty seconds he knew they weren't in the house. He came back to the porch and again
looked at the glass and the fist-size rock that had been tossed onto the porch floor. Other than the glass, there were no signs of a struggle.

Where the hell were Lily and Annmarie? He strode down the path to the boathouse. It was locked, and near as he could tell, nobody had been inside. In the next instant he decided that near-as-he-could-tell wasn't enough. He had to know for sure. He remembered seeing keys in one of the drawers in the kitchen, and headed back there to find them.

Halfway back to the house, the telephone started ringing. Quinn sprinted toward the house and made it inside to the phone just as it rang for the fifth time.

“I was hoping you'd answer,” came Hilda's voice on the other end of the line.

“And I'm hoping you know where Lily is,” he said.

“Her house.”

Fear clutched Quinn by the throat. “I'm here, and she's not.”

“Not the Ericksens' house,” Hilda said. “The one she's building.” Then she explained about the message that Lily had left on her answering machine, including Will's break-in, ending with, “Lily was trying to figure out if you'd sent him out.”

“I haven't seen him today,” Quinn said.

“One more thing, Quinn. I just went by Max's house, and he's not there.”

“Maybe he went to work.”

“No. I mean he's not there. His place is cleaned out—no clothes, no toiletries, nothing but the furniture that was in the place when he rented it.”

Quinn's gut knotted. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Somehow Hilda laughed. “I'd be real worried about you if you had a good feeling. Go get Lily.”

“I'm on my way.”

The turn off to Lily's new house was little more than a two-rutted track, and he nearly missed it. None of the underbrush had been cleared away from the road, and it
scratched against the sides of the vehicle, the sound grating on his nerves like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard.

The road curved left, then right, and then up a final incline. The house sat on a promontory and looking vaguely obscene with the plywood exterior uncovered yet. A dark bottle-green roof, windows, and doors gave the house at least some protection from the rain. Quinn noticed and cataloged all that while he looked for any sign of Lily and her daughter.

“Lily,” he called. “Annmarie.”

“Over here,” came Lily's answering yell.

He turned in the direction of the ocean and started down the incline, still not seeing them, a thousand different awful possibilities racing through his head.

Then he spotted Lily on her hands and knees, and he was sure that she had been injured. Except that conclusion totally didn't fit when Annmarie looked up, a big smile lighting her face. In her arms were wriggling puppies. When Lily turned around, he saw why she was on her hands and knees—she was gently petting a dog whose soulful eyes pierced right through him.

“God, but you scared the life out of me,” he said, dropping to one knee next to Lily and putting his arms around her. “When I got to the house and couldn't find you, and then Hilda called.”

Lily hugged him back. “You think you were scared.”

“So what happened?” Seeing that she didn't have a jacket and was shivering, he took off the micro fleece vest and dropped it over her shoulders, reminded of that very first day.

“We found puppies,” Annmarie said. “Lots of 'em.”

Quinn grinned as one of them licked her face. “I can see that, but what happened?”

While she continued to pet the mother dog, Lily related the morning's adventure, ending with, “You didn't send Will?”

Quinn shook his head. “Nope.” He stared at the scenery without seeing it. The whole thing was like setting up a
chemistry experiment without knowing whether the combination would blow up the lab or make table salt.

“Maybe some other emergency came up.”

“If you trusted that in your gut, you wouldn't have run. That's good enough for me.” He stood, taking in the bouncy puppies who seemed as enamored with Annmarie as she was with them. “I suppose they're going, too.”

“Yes,” Annmarie said. “I think they will be very cold and scared and hungry if we leave them here.”

“Let's go.” Quinn scooped up one of the wriggling puppies who barked, then licked his face.

Lily gathered up two of the others, leaving Annmarie to carry one. “Come on, Duchess,” Lily said to the mother dog. “We don't want to leave you behind, either.”

The dog watched them with her big sad eyes, then followed.

“She's yours,” Quinn said, watching the dog follow Lily. When she lifted an eyebrow in question, he added, “You've named her already.”

She chuckled. “My dad used to say the same thing. ‘Don't name the strays. Please don't.'”

“Can we keep her, Mom? And the babies, too?”

“I'm—”

“Thinking about it,” Annmarie finished with a sigh.

“We have to find out if they're lost, first,” Lily said. “And if they are, they are going to need a forever family.”

“Like us,” Annmarie said.

If Quinn hadn't been watching Lily closely, he would have missed the shadow that chased across her face.

“Like us,” she agreed.

As Quinn helped Annmarie and Lily into the car, he thought about that—a forever family and Lily's comparison last night of growing yeast to growing families.

Was it possible that finally, after all these years, he had what it took to be part of a forever family? A painful buoyancy filled his chest. Did he have the guts to go after it?

T
hey had pulled onto the road running between Rosie's place and Lynx Point when a battered ATV roared up beside them.

“It's Will,” Lily said.

Deciding he looked frantic with all that waving of his arms rather than threatening, Quinn pulled to a stop and rolled down the window. “What's up?”

“The one pressure tank that you were worried about—the gauge is sky-high. I can't figure out how to shut it down,” Will said.

“That's why you came to see me this morning?” Lily asked.

“Well, yeah.” He flushed. “You didn't answer the door.”

“I was out for a walk, and I watched you drive away.”

“Sorry about the window,” Will said. “I just was trying to find you.”

“Who were you talking to on the radio?” Quinn asked.

“Kev,” he said, naming one of the students.

“We're on the way,” Quinn said.

“Okay.” Will revved up the ATV and took off ahead of them.

“Do you believe him?” Quinn asked when they were under way.

Lily took her time before saying, “Yes. Now that I'm not scared out of my mind and imagining the boogeyman jumping out, it all makes sense. I feel so stupid—”

“Don't.” Quinn covered her hand with his own. “I'd rather you be safe—”

“Than sorry?”

“Yeah. I was going to stop and board up the window.”

“It doesn't sound like there's time,” Lily said. “We can take care of it after you've checked on the tank.”

“If the pressure's too high, your barophiles are—”

“Cooked,” Lily finished. “Let's hope that's the least of the problems.”

Quinn wished he shared her perspective, though he supposed if equipment had to malfunction, better to be at the beginning of a project rather than later when the loss of specimens would also mean the loss of months, possibly years, of research.

At the center Quinn parked the car. He rushed inside, leaving Lily and Annmarie to follow along behind. The munchkin was doing her best to convince her mom the dogs needed to be with her, and Lily was equally adamant they'd had enough excitement for one day and probably needed a nap in the back of his car. Will zoomed around the building to the workshop.

Argument won and the dogs settled in the cargo area of the SUV with partially opened windows, Lily set her daughter down at the empty desk in the office with pencils and crayons and said, “You stay right here, sweetie.” When Annmarie didn't quite meet her gaze, Lily added, “I mean it. No visits with the dogs in the car, no coming into the lab. You sit here.”

“Is this my punishment, Mom?”

“Yes,” Lily said, then headed for the lab and propping
the door open so she could see Annmarie from inside the lab. Quinn was on the floor under the tank.

“What can I do to help?” she asked.

“The damn valve is stuck, so I'm trying to shut off the backup,” he said. “There's a set of allen wrenches in the workshop that I need—somewhere over by the window.”

“I'll get them.” She headed for the door that led to the back of the facility and the workshop.

“Lily?”

She glanced back.

He'd stood up and was reaching behind the tank. “Do you really know what an allen wrench is?”

She grinned at him. “You'd better be teasing me or I'll bring you a crescent wrench, instead.”

“One more thing.” He waited until she turned around to look at him. “I get what you were saying about the yeast.”

“Good.” She went through the door, smiling. In the next instant she remembered. Unless the threat against her went away right now, helping Quinn to see they could be a family wouldn't matter. Instead she had just set him up for heartbreak, and that was unbearable.

She pressed a hand against her belly again thinking about her period that still hadn't come. If there was a baby…wouldn't that be a miracle? What was the right thing if that were so?

She opened the door to the workshop and, to her complete surprise, there stood Cal. With a gun pointed toward the floor.

“Cal?”

He motioned, and her shocked gaze lit on Will who lay sprawled on the concrete—his eyes sightlessly fixed on the ceiling, a neat little hole in his forehead and a pool of blood under him. Will…who had just waved at them as he drove the ATV around the building. She glanced through he open garage door where a truck was parked next to the ATV.

She went numb. Instead of seeing Will lying there, she too vividly remembered another man. A man in a conservative
suit—the assistant D.A., she had learned later—caught in the obscene glare of headlights. Standing one instant, then toppling over, that same awful hole in his head. Standing over him, two others. Men with the guns and cold, blank eyes. Like Cal's.

“This is the guy behind the accidents,” Cal said. “He tried to kill Patrick after he got remorseful—”

“Why?”

“Drugs. Patrick needed them and Will supplied them.”

“I…see.” But she didn't. What she really wanted to know…and perversely didn't want to know…was why had Cal killed Will. Lily took a step back, her gaze fixed on the gun. “You killed him?” Surely the most stupid question ever. Finally she realized what looked strange—inexperienced as her eye was, she recognized the silencer on the end of the barrel.

“It was him or me.”

Lily looked around, trying to clear her head, trying to remember why she had come here, trying to stuff down the panic bubbling through her chest, trying to imagine Will being threatening enough that it really was “him or me.” She swallowed when she looked down at him, and tears filled her eyes.

“You're not going to cry over that scum, are you?”

“His name was Will Baker.” A low rumble filled the air. Or maybe she felt it. Or maybe it was her own panic trembling through her chest.

“And he was trying to kill you,” Cal said. “All those accidents. Your car, the snapped line on the winch, the kids being lured—”

“You've made your point.” Recognizing the adrenaline rush didn't do a thing to make it better. Except she could swear the floor was vibrating. She had to—God, what had she come here for? It was important.

The allen wrenches. The pressure tank.

An explosion knocked her to the floor, and she realized too late that she had been smelling propane. She screamed,
her thoughts fighting through the encroaching black cloud of unconsciousness, for Annmarie, for Quinn. Cal reached her as her last thoughts stretched toward Annmarie and Quinn. Oh, God, please let them be okay.

 

About thirty seconds after Lily went to the workshop, a seam on the tank gave way with a tremendous pop and a geyser of water shot from the ripped opening. In the next nanosecond the tank split down the side as though it had been unzipped, the pressure of the escaping water as intense as a fire hose. The force of it threw Quinn through the open doorway into the office. He slid across the floor on his back.

Godawful ringing pounded through his head. A torrent of water spewed into the office, soaking everything in its path. He scrambled to his feet. Annmarie, looking dazed, sat on the floor near the window. He sloshed through the water toward her and scooped her up.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded, her lower lip trembling.

Quinn headed for the outside door and pulled on the fire-alarm handle as he passed by. No fire. Simply a gush of water pouring out of the once-pressurized tank. But the alarm would bring help. He had to get to the gate valve in the rear hallway near the workshop and shut off the water. As soon as Annmarie was safe. She clasped him tightly around the neck.

His mind raced. Gate valve first. Shut off the gas. Next the breakers. He glanced back toward the lab and the godawful mess they'd have to clean up, the loss of equipment and experiments and research piling up and weighing him down.

Under one of the desks in the office, bright fire flared suddenly and danced across the top of the water the way it did when elemental sodium melted and produced burning hydrogen. Odd, he thought. With the flash of igniting hydrogen came the realization this was very, very deliberate…and dangerous. Small explosions burst through the water here and
there, and then flames spread over the surface of the water. Horrified, Quinn watched as the water and the flames spread. If the fire reached the gas line, all hell would break loose.

He ran from the building, his first thought to get Annmarie as far away from it as he could, his second to warn Lily before she returned from the workshop.

Halfway to the parking lot, an explosion ripped through the building. Quinn heard it the instant before he felt it. He fell to the ground, sheltering Annmarie with his body, a single thought chanting through his head—Lily was in there.

When Annmarie cried out, his arms tightened around her.

“I've got you, munchkin,” he whispered. “You're okay.”

Another explosion tore out of the building and a fireball bloomed out of the roof accompanied by the awful odor of hot metal, raw propane, and his own choking fear. Barely comprehending, he rose to his feet. He couldn't see the back of the building—the workshop where he had sent Lily.

“Mommy!” Annmarie screamed.

The sound reverberated to the bottom of Quinn's soul, and he did the only thing he knew how—hold her. Simply hold her.

A truck with its siren shrieking came up the road. Even before it stopped, men piled out of the cab and out of vehicles that followed.

Hilda appeared at Quinn's side, and he thrust Annmarie into her arms. Then he raced into the building. Everything beyond the lab door was engulfed in flames. He couldn't get to the workshop from there.

Shaking off hands that would have stopped him, he ran back outside and around the perimeter of the building. The size of the building seemed monstrous to him as he ran flat out and with each step his heart thundered and his fear grew and he ran faster feeling the burn in his lungs and ignoring it while his heart cried out for Lily and the first prayer since childhood passed his lips.
Lily be safe. Lily be safe.

Fire roiled out of the open doors to the workshop, licking around the ATV parked right next to the building.

The heat was so intense, his body simply would not obey the command of his mind to go in, to find Lily.

Again and again, he rushed toward the flames, and again and again the fierce heat drove him back. Someone tackled him. Quinn fought to escape.

“Where's Lily?”

Quinn focused and Dwight Jones stood in front of him.

“Did everyone get out?” he asked with the thin patience that came with repeating. “Where's Lily?”

Quinn looked at the inferno that had once held his dreams and goals.

His heart broke. He cried out, a roar of pain and denial and fury. Tears blinded him, and he shouldered Dwight out of the way. If she was still in here… A tremendous shove pushed Quinn to the ground, and when he tried to stand, Dwight was there again, holding him down, shouting at him.

Quinn watched flames devour the workshop through the open garage doors. Open. The doors were open. Quinn stood, looking at the encroaching woods. Maybe she had made it out.

Convulsive raw hope flickered to life. Dwight's fierce grip eased when Quinn headed away from the building rather than toward it. He searched through the brush. Finding Lily, that's all that mattered. She had to be here somewhere. She had to be.

And when she wasn't, despair poured out of him in great waves that brought him to his knees. It couldn't end like this. He'd finally understood what she was saying to him, practically from the first day—he didn't have to be scared of loving her.

“Come on, buddy.” Dwight helped him to his feet. “We can't do much else here until the fire is out.”

The research center was gone. Completely gone. The ancient pumper poured water through the open cavity of the roof.

At the front parking lot, Hilda was in command mode, but
that didn't keep her from giving him a hug when he got close enough. It was the last thing he expected from her.

“Where's Annmarie?”

“My mother took her.”

Quinn nodded, tears burning at his eyes again—a thousand images of Lily and Annmarie together searing their way through his brain. The stench of fire, soot and water seeped into him until he was sure he'd never be rid of it.

“Was anyone in the building besides the three of you?”

He realized then what had struck him as odd from the moment they arrived. No one had been there. There should have been a half dozen other students working, unless they'd been doing an environmental survey. Maybe that was right. Hell if he could remember. Finally he shook his head, then said, “No, that's not right. Will Baker should have been here.”

Through the raw pain the pulsed through Quinn in waves, there was another thought he couldn't quite grasp. Then it came—Cal Springfield.

“Anyone seen the U.S. Marshal?” Quinn asked. Hilda and Dwight both shook their heads, so Quinn shouted his question to the others. An awful possibility burgeoned through Quinn. The explosion was the mechanism to get Lily into the witness security program. Was this how it happened—some awful thing so they'd all believe she was dead? If it wasn't, why in hell wasn't the man right here?

“He's driving Frank Talbot's truck, right?” one of the volunteer firefighters said. When Quinn nodded, he added, “I saw him as we were coming up the hill. Looked like he was on his way to the marina.”

Quinn ran to his car and climbed in. To his surprise Dwight jumped into the car with him, saying, “I figure you could use some help.”

A sharp bark from the rear of the vehicle reminded Quinn about the dogs. The incongruity of it—a car full of lost dogs in this life-and-death moment—forced a laugh that morphed into a yell of frustration and fear.

He raced down the hill, the glow of the fire vivid in the rearview mirror. Black smoke billowed toward the sky, carrying with it his worst fear, greatest hope. Lily wasn't inside dead—she was with Cal.