With Every Breath (44 page)

"You’re going to take care of me here?" she asked, then she took a breath and steadied herself when her voice began cracking. "Is that it?"

"I always
took care of you," he repeated. "During the week. That was my job. You remember our song."

Baby ... buddy ... caper... crow. "Yes." Her voice was strangled. She still couldn’t figure out how the words were wrong, but at least she finally knew where she had learned it.

"It was our
song," Angus said proudly. "Your mama gave it to me, and I gave it to you, so you’d sleep when you couldn’t go back there to your house. Because of him."

And that, she suddenly understood, was why she’d remembered so little of the house. Because she really hadn’t spent a whole lot of time there. Not as she had gotten older. She’d stayed with Angus. In the shack. Every time Beacher would drink, yell, start throwing his fists, she’d go to Angus. Her mother had made her go.

"Run, Maddie, go into the reeds.
"

Now she could hear her mother’s voice as clearly as though she were standing beside her.

"Stay with Angus. He’ll take care of you. He’ll know when it’s safe to bring you back. "

But it had never been safe, not really. Whenever he saw her, Beacher would go into a rage, especially if he was drunk.

The belt, she recalled, with that big, raised buckle, and sweet God, his fists. She remembered and cringed unconsciously all over again. Angus had hardly ever brought her back to the house. She hadn’t wanted to be in the house. She’d go to school, then home, then run into the reeds and the dunes at the first opportunity, to the shack she’d remembered so easily on Monday night, as soon as she’d seen it.

"Can’t go there now," Angus said as though reading her mind. "Too dirty. Too dirty for you and your boy. But this is good."

"It’s not good, Angus," she managed.

His face fell. "Why?"

"Well, it’s fine for me, and for you and Josh, if we can find him, but Joe needs help."

He was keeping her for his own, she realized, still and always, even though there was nothing left to protect her against. But Joe ... dear God, why, she wondered, had he brought Joe?

"If the others start looking for him, they’ll probably find your place here," she went on, fishing. "It’s secret, isn’t it?"

His expression cleared. He smiled happily. "Nobody knows about it."

Her heart sank. Maybe, she thought. Maybe not.

She swallowed. Her mouth was like sandpaper. "What... what if Joe dies?"

"Dies?"

Damn you, Angus, think! For once in your life, think! But he couldn’t, of course he couldn’t. Maddie bit back on a howl of frustration.

"He’s hurt really bad, Angus. He needs help." Then she had a brainstorm. "Why don’t you just take him back up to the road where someone can find him? Then you can look for josh again, too, and we can all stay here together."

His jaw hardened. "No."

She fought to keep the rage from her voice. "Why not?" "You’ll go. When I’m gone, you’ll go away again. Back to his house. You shouldn’t have gone there, Maddie. You’re mine."

Her head pounded. "No, Angus, no," she managed. "I promise. I won’t go anywhere. I just want my boy."

He seemed to think about it, scrunching up his face in that way he had. as though the process was physically painful. "Later," he decided. "After the water goes. I’ll take Joe out. Too late now. It’s coming."

"The water? What water?"

He pointed behind her, at the cave opening. There was a thin shaft of sunlight there. Horror dawned on her, enough to make her heart and her breath go still again.

"Angus, if the tide comes in here, we’ll all
die. We won’t be able to breathe."

He scowled. "We’ll breathe."

"Angus, please! We won’t! Have you ever been in here when the water was in?"

He hesitated, then he shook his head. "But I know it only comes halfway because it only gets wet up to here." He moved and pointed to the floor.

Even as he spoke, Maddie thought she could hear water rushing outside.

It was her imagination. Paranoia. It had to be.

"Angus, we’ve got to leave here. I’ll stay with you. I’ll always stay with you. You protect me. But we have to leave this place. We have to put Joe somewhere where somebody can find him. Then we can go to your shack. Or we can stay forever in my house. I can buy it, Angus. I can buy it back from Tony Macari. I have money now. I can buy it for us. You could live in a real house. With me and Josh." She was babbling, rambling. She forced herself to drag in breath. "We can go anywhere, but we can’t stay here. And we have to find Josh."

Angus’s mind wandered off again. She wanted to scream as he looked sadly at Joe.

"He’ll take you back. He loves you. I know it. And you love him. When he came, you stopped making sandwiches. Just like your daddy. When he came home, your mama stopped making me sandwiches."

She remembered that, too, Maddie thought dizzily. She remembered eating at the table in the kitchen, and then Beacher would come home and her mother would chase them out the back way.

"Go on, now, play. Bring her back after he goes to sleep, Angus."

But he hadn’t always brought her back. Sometimes he had just kept her there. In his shack. For his own, like a pet, or a teddy bear. And her mother? Maddie shuddered. Her mother had surely believed that that was better than having her husband break her arm again in one of his drunken rages.

"So you killed him," she said hollowly, thinking aloud.

Angus looked legitimately startled. "No, Maddie. No!"

Her head was spinning. "I saw you, Angus! After I left Harry, I ran to find you." Her buddy, she thought wildly. Her always-protector. She had fled to find him, to tell him what she had seen. "I found you, and I took you back to the house, and you saw, then he came in and you grabbed him from behind and ... and hurt him, somehow." He fell, she remembered. Beacher had fallen, sliding limply out of Angus’s grasp. And then Angus had taken everybody away, her mother and the man she’d always thought was her father. But he hadn’t cleaned up the blood. She’d slipped in the blood. She’d gotten it all over her, so he’d taken her clothes. He’d saved her shirt, and had used her jeans to drag Beacher into the cave.

The tide must have carried him out. As it would carry Rick, sooner or later.

But Angus was shaking his head. "Not because of the sandwiches, Maddie! I didn’t hurt him because of the sandwiches. It was because he killed your mama."

Maddie’s jaw went slack. "You killed Beacher because you thought he killed my mother?"

"He killed your mama. I saw. Already you couldn’t talk right. Too surprised." He nodded sagely. "That’s what you were, all right. Surprised and crying. But I saw her dead. With my own eyes, and I knew it. I knew her man did it."

He was proud of himself. Maddie closed her eyes.

And she realized that it was so senseless, so useless, to tell him that he had been wrong.

She wasn’t imagining it, either, she realized—she did hear water.

Then she thought she heard Joe groan. He was still alive then. Please God, let him still be alive.

She scrambled to his side again. How much time, she wondered, did they have before the tide came all the way in? After that, she thought they’d have an hour, maybe less, of air. Unless she was wrong. Maybe the water wouldn't fill the whole mouth at high tide.

She thought of the shape of the promontory. She looked around the cave in the dim light of the lamp. She didn’t believe it.

If the water didn’t come all the way in, it was because the back of the cave rose slightly. More than slightly. The mouth, from what little bit she could see of it in the darkness outside the pool of light from the lamp, looked much lower. And yes, it would fill with water.

Soon. Not yet. She still had time.

She had to think of a way to talk Angus into taking them all out of there. If she tried to run, he would catch her, drag her back. He would keep her for his own again, to protect her, to take care of her, just as he had done before. Her mother had told him to, and he would never stop.

Even if she managed to escape, he would leave Joe there to chase her, and then the water would come in, trapping him in and them out.

She closed her eyes and prayed. Oh, Josh, baby, where are you? I really do love you so much. But he knew that. She had never given him cause to doubt it.

She realized she was thinking in terms of dying, of never seeing him again.

No! She fought back against the helplessness, and looked at Joe. Hope fell away again.

She was almost sure that when the tide came in it wasn’t going to matter. Not for him. She didn’t think he could hold on that long.

The water slurped.

Only one question mattered—what was she supposed to do?

Chapter 36

Kenny stepped over Hector and ran back to his car. "I’ll get a search party together," he called back to Sheila. "And I’ll call medevac, get them over here so we don’t waste any time once we find him."

"Don’t leave!"
Sheila cried. She wasn’t thinking straight.

"I’m just going up the road to find a phone. This one’s out, and there’s no one at the station to buzz in to." Sheila watched him speed off again. She looked down at Hector and kicked him in the thigh, frustrated.

"Damn it, wake up!
What good are you? We’ve got to look, Hector. We’ve got to keep looking for him!"

The man didn’t make a sound.

Well, she would do it herself, Sheila decided.

Kenny had said there was blood on the beach. A lot of it. So whether Joe had walked or crawled off somewhere, or if someone had carried him, maybe there would be a trail of it leading to wherever he had ended up.

Probably not, she thought. Wouldn’t Kenny have noticed that? But it was worth a try.

She started toward the road, then she heard it again.

"Mmmmm ... ahhhh."

Sheila whirled around. "What?" she screamed. "Who are you? Where are you?"

There was a single bayberry bush in front of the deck, just to the right side of the steps. It seemed to be rustling. Sheila took a slow, measured, wary step that way.

"Who’s there?" she demanded again.

"Mmmmm ... ahhhh."
And then a hand came out, thrusting through the leaves. A kid’s hand.

Maddie Brogan had a kid. A kid would know SOS. And Sheila finally remembered that folks said that this one couldn’t talk.

Suddenly, everything made sense. Sheila cried out and ran to him.

She helped him out from beneath the deck. He was white as a sheet and trembling. She pulled him into her arms and he flinched at the contact with a stranger, trying to twist away, but she held onto him doggedly, unwilling to let him go.

"Shhh, now. Shhh. It’s okay. Where’s your mommy, honey? Where’s Joe? Do you know what happened to Joe? Who hurt him?"

The boy’s face screwed up. He started sobbing. He groaned and ground his teeth together, and his throat worked. He was furious. At himself, Sheila realized.

Then he screamed, a rusty sound.

"J-J-Joe’s d-d-down!"

The sea was slurping at the mouth.

Maddie could definitely hear it out there. She put her head down on her knees and cried.

Angus was rambling on senselessly. She had taken all

she could take, had heard all she could hear, and a very big part of her was just blotting him out. Blotting everything out. His thick slow voice, and the smell of death, Joe’s shallow breathing and Rick’s sightless eyes. She was trying desperately to think.

Every option she came up with had enormous pitfalls. She didn’t think screaming would help. They were probably too far under the rocks for anyone to hear her. It would do her no good to get Angus to leave, to ask him to go look for Josh again or to get them something to eat, because she’d never be able to get Joe out while he was gone. She knew his body intimately. He was a big man. Even retired from playing ball, she was sure he had to weigh at least 220 pounds. All the adrenaline and desperation in the world wouldn’t let her move him, not while he was inert like this, deadweight. She could rig up her jeans the way Angus had once done to Beacher, but she still didn’t think she could pull Joe up the promontory.

Angus touched her shoulder. She recoiled.

"Don’t cry, Maddie," he said. "You shouldn’t cry." "We’re going to die," she accused. If he was going to do this to them, then she was damned well going to make sure that he knew what he was doing. He would go to heaven or hell carrying it in his soul.

"Damn you, Angus!" she cried. "We’re all going to die if you don’t take us out of here. You’re going to kill me. You’ll kill yourself. And Joe, if we don’t take him where somebody can find him. And Josh."

"Your boy won’t die," he insisted stubbornly.

"Angus, you can’t think! You don’t know how to think! For God’s sake, why won’t you listen to me? Maybe Josh won’t die, but he won’t have a mother, and he won’t have a father because you’ve already killed him too!" In her fear and desperation, she forgot that Rick