With Every Breath (43 page)

There was a beeping. It was the sound that came when somebody pushed the black button repeatedly without clearing the transmission out first. It had a frantic tempo, sort of like an SOS. In fact, it was an SOS. "What?" she almost screamed.

"What the hell?" Kenny muttered again.

"What is
it?"

"I don’t know." He stepped away from the radio. "I’m going to take a car and see who I can find."

The sound kept up, beep-beeping from the radio.

"Call me, Kenny," Sheila urged as Kenny left. "Call in as soon as you know something."

"Will do."

Maddie became aware of the smell first. It was putrid, seeming to fill her throat and her nostrils. She had smelled

it at the house, too. Death. It was stronger in the place, wherever she was now. She shook her head groggily, as though that would somehow keep her from breathing it.

Someone had died. But she didn’t know where she was.

Her head hurt like nothing she had ever felt before. It was a deep throbbing, as though the pain was in the very center of her head, a place so deep that no aspirin, nothing, could reach it.

Her neck hurt, too, she realized, as though she had wrenched it. She was lying on something hard and cold and ... and damp.

She made a small, whimpering sound in her throat. She eased to her hands and knees, doing it blindly. It was so dark, so incredibly dark. Her heart roared.

She wondered again where she was and what had happened. And then she thought of Josh. "Oh, God," she moaned. "Where’s Josh?"

She began crying. She was suddenly scared in a way that robbed her of everything. It took her pride, her sense, left her with nothing. She dragged a hand under her nose, trembling, and leaned back.

There was a wall there to meet her, to take her weight. She put a hand out to it. It was smooth and cool. Stone.

Stone?

She was underground.

Claustrophobia slammed into her, a wild, frightening sense of weight pressing down on her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She spent a few moments crawling about frantically in the pitch-darkness, gasping, finding too many walls, skimming her hands over them.

"Please ... let me out ... oh, God, out ...
where’s Josh?"

She finally made herself be still and think. She pressed

her knuckles to her mouth, trembling uncontrollably.

Alone, underground.

When she had refused to leave willingly, Harry must have taken matters into his own hands. She remembered the careful way he had hit her. The gentle, no-harder-than-necessary blow. She laughed shrilly. Of course he wouldn’t really want to hurt her. He was her father.

Her laughter ricocheted off the walls. She flinched back from the eerie echo, her heart hammering.

Think.

Harry must have put her there, she thought. He wanted to keep her safe from ... from someone else.

Yes, she thought, her heart thudding, there had to be someone else. Because she remembered again that she hadn’t hidden in the pantry when she had fled after finding Harry in the kitchen all those years ago. And Harry said that he hadn’t killed Rick. He said Rick had already been dead. The kitten had been, too. But more, much more than that was another nagging, unanswered question. A horrible question. Her head pounded with it.

What had become of Beacher Brogan?

It didn’t matter who had killed her mother, she realized wildly, whether it had been Harry through his inciteful actions or Dierdre in her rage and jealousy and shame, because neither of them had killed Beacher Brogan.

Maddie mewled aloud and almost missed another sound, one she didn’t make herself. A thumping. Soft, shuffling movement, then muted weight hitting the solid slab of the cave floor.

She waited, holding her breath. No sound followed.

"Who’s there?" she whispered finally.

"Hello, hello."

Kenny found Hector first. Hector was driving north along the west road, and Kenny tapped at his sirens and motioned him over just before they reached Fifteenth Street. He got out of his car and jogged ahead to talk to him.

"You been in your car the whole last half hour or so?" Hector stumbled a bit over his explanation. Something about Kenny’s tone alarmed him. "Well, Sheila said to look for Joe. I was at the diner."

"You find him?" Kenny demanded.

"No, I was going to his house—"

"Think anybody could have gotten into your car while you were inside the diner?"

Hector drew himself up. "Hey, I always lock the doors." "It was him then. It must have been Joe’s truck." "What was him?"

Kenny turned around, looking down the street toward Joe’s condo. No Pathfinder there. He was really getting a bad feeling about this.

"All right," he decided. "You stay on this road. I’m going to take the Beach Road, and I’m going to call back to Sheila and have her drive up the boulevard. All three of us’ll meet at The Wick bridge."

"The Wick?" Hector bleated. "The bridge?"

"We’ve got to find Joe. I think he’s in trouble."

"On The Wick?"

"On the fucking Wick, Hector! And if you don’t want to go up there, then you’d damned well better find him on the big island before we get there. Now move!\" Kenny jogged back to his own car. He peeled out from the curb, swinging around Hector’s parked vehicle. He buzzed in to Sheila. She picked up fast.

"It wasn’t Hector," he said shortly. "I found him." "Oh, God," she moaned.

"Here’s what we’re going to do." He told her his

plan. "Everybody wait at the bridge until we all get

there."

Ten minutes later, they were all gathered, and nobody had seen Joe. Hector was starting to look pale.

"I don’t like it up here," he protested. "Ever since that day when Dave and I found that mess—"

"Cut it out. Hector," Kenny snapped. He looked at Sheila. "How sure are we that he’s not on the big island?" Her eyes went a little wild. "Kenny, it’s not that big! We couldn’t miss a whole truck'."

"Okay," he muttered. He looked over his shoulder at the bridge. "Smartest place to look up here is where all the trouble’s been lately. Where all the trouble’s ever
been." Hector groaned.

"Shut up,
Hector!" Sheila cried.

"We’ll check out the Brogan place, then we’ll move out from there." Kenny got back into his car.

Hector was the last one of them to go over the bridge. He saw the Pathfinder after they did, as soon as he reached the promontory. "Oh, shit," he muttered. "Oh, shit."

If there was blood this time, he was not going in. He remembered the last time, back in ’72, when Dave had told him to take the kid to Doe, and he had stepped in it and his legs had shot right out from under him and he had landed in the slop. It had taken him a week of showers before he’d finally felt like he had gotten that gore off him. And on Monday somebody else had disappeared out of the damned house. And maybe Joe was gone, too.

By the time he had parked, Kenny and Sheila were on the front deck, and both of them had already been in the house, which suited Hector just fine. Then Kenny left them suddenly and jogged down to the beach.

"I’ll check the marshes!" Sheila called out, and she came down off the deck, circling around to the back of the house.

Hector thought he would stay right about where he was and check the Pathfinder.

He went back to it. The doors were unlocked. He opened the passenger side and peered in. The handset was dangling. There was sand all over the place. He backed away from it slowly.

"Nothing," Sheila panted, coming to a stop on the drive.

Kenny ran up from the beach. "There’s blood. A big soak of it. If it’s Joe’s, he’s really in trouble."

Hector felt a tingling sensation in his fingertips, in his toes. "Well, where is he?"

"How the hell should I know?" Kenny snapped. "Christ, here we go again. We got blood, we got no gun, and no damned bodies. What the hell is going on up here? It’s like there’s a spell over this lump of land or something."

Hector swooned.

Maddie cried out in relief, then her voice was drowned out by an ungodly rumbling overhead. She shrank back instinctively, then she looked up.

It sounded like traffic going over a bridge, she thought. Almost like that, but more resounding, less rickety, and a little farther behind her.

They were underneath the promontory, she realized.

But Angus had found her. Trust him to know of a strange place like this.

There was a sputtering point of light, low, near the floor. It caught and glowed. Some kind of lamp. She started to look up into Angus’s face, then she saw Joe at his feet, and something—someone else—just behind him.

Rick. His neck lolled crazily, and there was a bullet hole between his eyes, and air filled her lungs and simply hung there. For a wild moment, the edges of her vision went black.

She looked at Joe again and fought it.

"Angus," she choked. "What’s going on?"

And then she knew. Memory clicked again, coming back too fast, pounding into her head. Finally, she remembered all of it. But she couldn’t think, couldn’t sort through it then because Rick was dead and Joe was hurt.

And Josh was nowhere to be found.

"Noooo!"
she wailed. "Oh, God, Angus, no!"

She crawled to Joe. And then she saw the blood. It was everywhere, too much of it. Angus had dropped him on his back, and it still seeped out from beneath him a little. It was streaked across the front of his shirt. It was smeared on his neck and on his face and in his hair. She put a trembling hand to his cheek. It was cold.

He was so pale, so white, and his lips were blue. She clutched at his wrist and felt for his pulse. It was faint, thready, but it was there.

She shot to her feet, staggering around to face Angus. "What have you done?" she screamed.

He looked injured. "Not me. Not me, Maddie. That lady did it. Joe’s lady."

Joe’s lady? Gina?

No, she thought, no, Gina was in the hospital. But maybe not. She found she was willing to believe almost anything at this point.

"Where’s Josh?" she asked, struggling for sanity when her mind wanted to hide behind a blank again. "Angus, what have you done with Josh?"

Angus shook his head miserably. "Couldn’t find him. I looked. I did. I knew you would want him here. But I couldn’t find him."

Maddie swayed. "Why are you doing this? Why now?"

She understood what had happened before, all those years ago. In a pathetic way, that had made sense. But not this. Never this.

Angus’s lantern jaw jutted. She watched him warily and knelt to feel for Joe’s pulse again, trembling, keeping one wary eye on the big man.

"You could come back to The Wick," Angus said. "You did
come back. Joe lied when he said they wouldn’t let you. But I’ll take care of you. I always
took care of you. We’re buddies."

They had been, she thought, feeling sick. Yes, they had. Suddenly he was lumbering past her, to the back of the cave. "I even saved this for you. I saved it all this time. I was going to give it to you before, but he took you away. Joe took you to his house."

Maddie recoiled as he moved close by her. As he disappeared into the lingering pools of darkness in the back, she leaned over Joe again.

"Hang on, just ... hang on. Josh is out there, somewhere. And I can get away. I know I can get out of here, if I just don’t fall apart."

She thought wildly of the one thing they hadn’t asked Angus that afternoon when he’d come to Joe’s house. Did you kill Rick?

Yes, she thought, shaking inside. Yes, he must have. To protect her. The kitten, too. For her. To take care of her. It was his job.

Oh, God.

He came back into the light. "What, Angus?" Her voice was too thin and sharp. She softened it deliberately. "What have you got there?"

He handed her a scrap of pink.

The smell that came off it was partially his own—fish and excrement and dirt. And mold, and age. She took it, saw what it was, cried out, and dropped it again.

Her T-shirt. The T-shirt that she had been wearing that day. Pink, with fake, white lace at the collar. Stained with old, flaking blood.

"I had to use your jeans," he said solemnly. "I’m sorry. I had to use them. To pull him down. To get him in here. Over the rocks. I tied them around his ankles and pulled. He was heavy, and I couldn’t carry him over the rocks. It was too hard."

Him. Her father. No, not her father. Beacher. Harry was her father.

Her head swam. She was losing connections again. She had to get out of there, she realized, had to find Josh and get help for Joe.

"That’s okay, Angus," she managed. "I understand." He smiled beatifically.