Maidenstone Lighthouse (21 page)

He absently fingered the knife. “That damn first aid box saved my life.”

“And then?” I asked, intrigued by Bobby's story, but increasingly wary of his reasons for confessing it to me—
me,
who had thought for months that he was dead.

Bobby slowly shook his head. “Then the dirty sons of bitches just sailed away.” He drained the rest of his coffee. “Of course,” he continued, “they'd thoughtfully removed the emergency radio from the raft before they put us in the water. And, as it turned out, they'd also taken us a hundred miles in the opposite direction from where the jet had gone off the radar.”

“Guaranteeing your silence, if by some miracle you happened to survive,” I finished for him.

Bobby nodded and stared back down at the counter. “I dumped Pearson's body over the side and drifted for six days in the sinking raft before a native fishing schooner picked me up. It was another four weeks before the fishermen got back to land. Not that it mattered at that point,” he said bitterly. “Between the bullet hole in my leg and what the fishermen would report about where they'd picked me up, if anybody asked, I was a dead man. As dead as Al Pearson. Because there was no way the accidental plane-crash story was ever going to wash in an investigation.”

His treacherous story told, Bobby finally looked up and met my frightened, unsympathetic gaze. “So you see, I couldn't call you or come back to you, Sue. Not right away, anyway…Hell, it took me another two months just to work my way back to New York on a rat-infested Liberian container ship.” He laughed. “I was hired on as the damn dishwasher. Can you imagine me a dishwasher?”

“But, of course, you called me immediately as soon as you got to New York in, when was that, September?” I said viciously.

Bobby shrugged. “Even then I didn't dare contact you. I had no way of knowing if the feds were suspicious about the crash, or whether they were watching you—”

“So you watched me instead, followed me around…” My whole body was suddenly trembling. “My God, Bobby, do you realize what kind of living hell you put me through? It was bad enough at first, just thinking you were dead. But then, in those last few weeks, I actually believed I was going insane when I started seeing you on the street, in the subway…”

He reached out and tried to take my hand. Angrily I jerked it away and leapt to my feet. “What do you want from me, Bobby?” I screamed. “Why are you here?”

He remained sitting, his coldly calculating blue eyes boring into me. “Whether you believe it or not I'd hoped you might still have…some feelings for me,” he said after a long silence.

Scalding tears were streaming down my cheeks and my tenuous composure was falling away in pieces. “Yes,” I sobbed, “I do have feelings for you, Bobby. I feel disgust and revulsion and loathing for you and what you've done to me, for what you've become…I hate your guts, Bobby. Is that what you came all this way to hear?”

Bobby very deliberately picked up the knife on the counter and held it up to regard the candlelight shining along the viciously curved blade. “I sort of figured you'd feel that way,” he said, stepping around the counter and placing the needle-sharp point at my throat. “But I had to be absolutely certain.” He frowned almost regretfully, tracing the edge of my jawline with the cold steel.

“You and I had something good together, Sue,” he murmured softly.

“Lies,” I sobbed, straining to pull away from the knife. “It was all lies, Bobby. Even the reason you took the job flying the Gulfstream was a lie. I thought you did it for me…for us.”

“In a way you could say I did it for us,” he responded. “If those bastards hadn't double-crossed me we would have been set for life…”

I was much too frightened to laugh at his grotesque suggestion that what he had done was somehow for us. “How, with stolen money?” I taunted.

He suddenly spun me around, stepping deftly behind me so that I could no longer see his face. The knife tip bit sharply into my skin. “I didn't really expect you to understand,” he snarled, “which brings me at long last to the real reason for my visit tonight.

“What did you do with my skiing trophy, Sue, the one I got in Aspen?”

W
here reason departs fantasy begins.

I felt as though I had fallen into an insane nightmare, a nightmare comprised of unreasonable fears, impossible to explain. I seemed to hang in space for an eternity, with the deadly tip of the knife biting into the soft skin at the base of my throat, the wavering candlelight casting grotesque shadows onto the walls and ceiling.

But Bobby's free arm encircling my chest like a crushing steel band, his feverish cheek pressed urgently against the back of my neck, the smell of his foul breath reeking in my nostrils, all proved that what was happening was all too real.

He waited in silence for many long seconds, then whispered softly in my ear. “Where is it, Sue? What did you do with my ski trophy?”

“Ski…t-trophy?” I repeated the words like a dull student reciting an incomprehensible phrase in a dead language that she is supposed to have translated the night before.

“Yes, dammit! My ski trophy!”

Bobby jerked me around to scream in my face, then shoved me up against the counter, drawing back the knife so I could see the thin trickle of blood—my blood—running down the haft.

I gingerly touched my fingers to my throat, brought them away crimson and stared at them in disbelief. “I…I don't understand,” I croaked.

“The trophy, Sue! I need my trophy!” Bobby's pallid features were flushed with unnamable fury. “The access numbers for my bank accounts are inside that trophy, you stupid bitch! What did you do with it?”

A hysterical giggle erupted from somewhere deep inside my bleeding throat. “You hid your secret bank account numbers in a ski trophy?”

Bobby's patience was quickly running out. His face went purple with rage as he brought the knife close to my right eye. “Everything but the clothes on my back was supposed to have been lost when the Gulfstream went down,” he yelled, moving the blade a millimeter closer to my cornea. “I couldn't carry a list of bank account numbers halfway around the world with me when I might be searched or have to clear customs in some damn Third World country, now could I?”

I shook my head a terrified fraction of an inch.

“There's more than half a million dollars in those accounts from my other deals,” Bobby explained. “I put the numbers inside the ski trophy, for safekeeping. But it wasn't in your apartment. Where is it?”

I opened my mouth to speak, then paused and thought about what I was doing. So far I had done nothing but fan the flames of Bobby's growing rage. And if I told him the truth—that for all I knew his precious ski trophy could be buried in a garbage dump somewhere—he would have no reason to leave me alive.

For I had not given him any reason to believe I would do anything but turn him in to the police as quickly as my little fingers could dial 911.

So I started lying.

“I kept the trophy…as a memento of our trip,” I stammered.

Though it was exactly what he wanted to hear, I could tell he couldn't quite bring himself to believe me. Bobby cocked his head to one side like a deadly raptor about to devour a helpless rabbit.

“Smart girl! Where is it?” he demanded.

I shook my head. “If I tell you, you'll just kill me,” I sniffled, not having to fake the note of sheer terror in my quaking voice.

He gently caressed my cheek with the flat of the knife. “I'll kill you if you
don't
tell me,” he threatened, but I could tell he really didn't mean it. Because it was clear that Bobby desperately needed that half million dollars to buy himself a new life.

So we stood there, facing off in our deadly game of threat and counterthreat, while the storm outside roared and shook and battered the house.

“How do I know you're not lying?” he finally asked.

“How do I know
you're
not lying, about letting me live if I give you the trophy?” I countered.

“I'll find it anyway.”

“You might not.”

He stood there thinking and, I noticed, swaying slightly from side to side. I suspected that he was very close to collapsing from whatever sickness he had, and I quickly factored that tiny advantage into the hasty plan I was devising.

“You're not thinking clearly, Bobby,” I suddenly blurted out. “Take the knife out of my face and listen to me for a second.”

He looked startled. But he slowly lowered the knife to his side. “Don't cross me,” he warned. “Because if you do, I will kill you, and your boyfriend and that little faggot Damon.”

“They have nothing to do with this,” I said.

Bobby shook his head. “Damon saw me in New York.”

“Well, Dan didn't see you,” I shot back. “And, as for Damon, he's locked up in a mental ward, telling anyone who'll listen to him that he died and met you at the entrance to Heaven.”

A slow smile crossed Bobby's haggard features. “No shit?” he asked, seemingly pleased to hear that his nemesis had been officially adjudged crazy. “And what about you, Sweet Sue? What's going to keep you from talking?”

I emitted a long, weary sigh. “I just want to get on with my life, Bobby. Personally, I'd just as soon have you dead, if for no other reason than you made a complete fool of me. Besides,” I added convincingly, “if you kill me you're tempting fate. There'll be police and an investigation. Right now, nobody's even looking for you, Bobby. So why don't you just take your damn trophy and go? I've even got five hundred dollars in cash you can have.”

I held my breath while he considered my argument. And, to tell the truth, if I had actually been able to hand him the trophy and let him walk out of my life forever I would have happily done so.

Unfortunately, that was not an option.

“Where is it?” he asked.

I knew I had to play this just right, as if I really did have what he wanted, so I pretended to hesitate. “Do we have a deal?” I asked suspiciously.

He nodded. “Deal! You give me the trophy and I'm out of here in thirty seconds.”

I picked up the candle, turned and walked briskly out of the kitchen. “It's upstairs,” I said. “You can wait down here if you want.”

Bobby laughed through another bout of violent coughing and followed me to the stairs. “Fat fucking chance,” he said.

I climbed the steps to the darkened second floor with Bobby trailing behind. Glancing over my shoulder, I noted the way he leaned heavily on the banister, pausing at the landing to catch his breath. “Slow down,” he wheezed.

“You don't look too good,” I said as I reached the end of the pitch-black upstairs hallway. “You really need to see a doctor.”

He gestured impatiently with the knife. “Don't get any ideas about how sick I am,” he grunted. “I'm more than strong enough to kill you if I have to.”

I shrugged and started down the windowless hall toward the short stairway leading up to the turret room. This is going to work, I told myself. It has to work.

I stopped at the end of the passage and held up the candle so he could see the set of steep, narrow stairs leading to my bedroom. “It's right up there.”

Bobby glanced up the short stairway and nodded. “Ah, yes, I remember now, the famous turret bedroom I never got to see.”

I said nothing, but hurried quickly up the stairs and entered the bedroom. I heard him cursing in the darkness below as he stumbled after me. “Very cute,” he said as he walked into the room a moment later.

I looked at him as if I didn't understand what was wrong. “Oh,” I said, looking at the candle in my hand, “I didn't mean to leave you alone in the dark.”

Ignoring me, he quickly surveyed the small room with its sparse furnishings. “Okay, Sue, I'm completely out of patience. Where's my damn trophy?”

I held up the candle and pointed to the piece of tall Victorian furniture between the windows. “Over there in the wardrobe,” I answered. “It's in a cardboard box, along with a few other things of yours that I kept. I'll get it for you…”

I started to move toward the wardrobe but, just as I prayed he would, Bobby grabbed my elbow and moved me aside.

“No!” he snarled. “You stand right where you are and hold the light for me. I'll get the box.” His suspicious eyes glittered in the candlelight and he flashed a terrible, menacing smile as he brushed past me. “Just in case you have any little surprises hidden in here,” he said, putting his hand on the wardrobe door handle.

I shrugged, pretending indifference. “The box is on the top shelf, at the back,” I offered helpfully as he swung open the door and peered into the inky depths of the wardrobe. “I can't see a damn thing, bring that candle over here,” he ordered.

I glanced out the nearest window, watching the track of the Maidenstone Light as it swung over the water and across the lawn, painting the wind-blasted trees and stripped shrubbery with light. Bobby turned his head and followed my gaze to the window. “What the hell are you looking at? What's out there?” he asked.

I clapped my free hand over my eyes as the room abruptly filled with brilliant white light.

“Damn!” Bobby threw up a hand—too late to shield his dilated pupils from the dazzling light.

Then the lighthouse beacon was gone.

Blinded by the sudden flare of illumination, Bobby stood momentarily paralyzed. I snuffed out the candle, pitching the bedroom into complete darkness.

His scream of rage echoed through the house as I took to my heels and ran for my life, bounding effortlessly out of the room and down the stairs—plunging into the depths of the pitch-black hallway that I had traversed since childhood.

“I will kill you!” Bobby bellowed, crashing heavily into something on the floor above me. “I will cut out your lying heart, Sue!”

Racing blindly down the main staircase, I ran to the kitchen, pausing only to extinguish the dim flame beneath the coffee warmer. I heard more enraged shouts from upstairs, and the sound of Bobby's heavy footsteps in the hall.

I ran to the back door, then hesitated. My purse lay across the kitchen beside the sink, where I had left it when Dan and I had come in from shopping earlier in the day. And my car keys were in my purse.

“You can't get away, Sue!”

Bobby was at the top of the stairs, seconds away. I peered across the kitchen, trying to pick the outline of my purse from varying shades of shadow.

I heard Bobby's footsteps clumping down the stairs.

There was no more time.

Flinging open the back door, I hurled myself across the sunporch and down the back steps into the freezing teeth of the storm.

Blinking against sheets of rain that stung my skin like needles, I swung my head frantically around, looking for a place to run. Beyond the thick stand of shrubbery at the foot of the yard lay the narrow beach. The shoreline ran down to the Maidenstone Island causeway in one direction, back toward Freedman's Cove in the other. Bobby might not expect me to go that way.

Heedless of the thorns ripping my clothes and tearing at my hands and face, I forced my way through the head-high growth of wild rose and oleander, only to be greeted by an unbelievable sight.

The beach was no longer there. Driven by the approaching center of the storm and a rising tide, crashing white surf was licking at the exposed roots of the bushes. The beach—and the alternate avenue of escape I had counted on—was completely gone, obliterated by the inrushing sea.

“SUSANNN!”

Incredibly, Bobby's hoarse, murderous shout carried over the din of howling wind and booming surf. Though I couldn't see him, I intuitively knew that he was standing on the sunporch behind the house, peering out into the sheeting rain for some sign of me.

Within a minute or two, perhaps less, he would calm down enough to realize that there had to be a flashlight in the house. Then he would easily track me down.

If only I had thought to grab my car keys instead of wasting precious seconds on the damn coffee warmer…

“SUSAN, DAMN YOU…!”

Shivering with cold and already soaked to the skin I backed painfully out of the brambles and ducked into the shadows to scan the yard for another escape route. As I crouched there, ankle-deep in freezing water, I realized that my ripped hands were already going numb, and I knew I could not survive long without shelter.

I threw myself onto my stomach, splashing into muddy water and clinging to the shadows beneath the rosebushes as the lighthouse beacon swept the yard again. As I lifted my head from the ground, the rear of the carriage house loomed momentarily bright in my vision, its white clapboards shining wetly. Then the yard went dark again.

I got to my feet and dashed to the side of the building, then edged along the wall to the corner nearest the street. My faithful old Volvo sat tantalizingly close in the drive where I had left it, useless without keys. Cursing myself for never getting around to hiding a key in a magnetic box as Damon had repeatedly begged me to do, I pulled the carriage house door open a few inches and slipped into deeper darkness.

Inside the pitch-black building, out of the wind and rain, the temperature was at least thirty degrees warmer. I hovered indecisively by the door, chafing my frozen hands together and peering back up at the big house.

As I had feared, Bobby's rage must have subsided enough for his thinking to clear. Because, as I watched, a bright light flared in the kitchen windows, followed by the steady glow of a candle. Even now, I knew, he would be savagely ripping open doors and cabinets, searching for a flashlight.

I backed farther into the carriage house, feeling around blindly for something I could use as a weapon. The backs of my legs touched something. I turned and extended my hands, touched a smooth, cold surface with my torn and bleeding fingers.

And smiled.