Black Opal (16 page)

“Nadine!” My scream echoed back at me. “Nadine!”

“She’s outside beating the rugs. Now, you’ll want to come with me.”

“Fuck you,” I spat, breathing hard. “Go on and kill me here. Then you’ll have the mess to clean up before anybody finds you.”

Colton moved toward me.
Oh shit
. Was he going to try to kill me? Adrenaline surged. I scrambled for a stalling tactic.

“Why’d you bury the coin with Shayne?”

“That’s a pretty good question. Trey’s coin collection wasn’t the windfall I hoped it would be.” He sneered. “That particular coin was rare but only worth thirty or forty bucks. Figured it would go a long way toward framing the little turd if Shayne’s body was ever discovered.”

“Did Shayne figure out you stole the coins? Is that why you killed her?”

“She—”

I ran for the door. In a tackle that would have made a football player envious, he slammed me into one of the built in book cases. The edges of the shelves dug into my ribs. The air whooshed out of my lungs. Colton used his belt to secure my arms at my sides while I gasped for oxygen. I screamed, and he punched me in the head. Dazed, I barely struggled as he pulled a crusty hanky from his pocket and stuffed it in my mouth. I gagged but fought for control once I realized throwing up in my mouth would kill me.

Unable to fight, struggling to breathe, I went along for the ride as he dragged me right out the front door. The area teeming with workers just that morning was deserted. The work had moved to the back of the property. I heard Nadine beating rugs back there. She was so close, yet she could have been a million miles away. Colton stuffed me in his trunk and closed it on my muffled pleas.

16

The stuffy darkness of the trunk and my thundering heart made it even harder to catch my breath. Colton started the car engine and drove away from the house, gravel rolling and cracking beneath the wheels. The sound smoothed when he turned onto the blacktop road in front of the Turgeau house. We drove for what seemed like an eternity but was probably less than ten minutes. Colton pulled off the road again, this time onto something soft that made shushing sound against the tires. He didn’t retrieve me immediately, and the waiting almost drove me crazy. By the time the trunk cracked open, sweat covered my body and I gasped for air.

My first good look at Colton scared me even more. Tears streaked his face, but intense purpose burned in his eyes. That alone inspired me to scream behind my gag. I paused for breath, and he picked that moment to speak.

“You’ll pass out if you keep on,” he said. “But that might make dying easier.”

Everything stopped. My shoulders sagged. I didn’t resist much as he pulled me out of the car, removed his belt, and bound my hands in front of me with duct tape. Belatedly, I began to fight when he tried to loop a dog leash around my neck. I ducked out of his reach. “I don’t want to kill you, but you and Lisette are the two nosiest bitches I’ve ever seen.”

Lisette? What did she have to do with this? Julienne banished her from the house.

Colton struck while I thought things over, grabbing me by the neck and slipping the dog leash over my head. He jerked it, trying to lead me away from the car. I dug my heels into the dirt and locked my knees. Colton pulled again and the looped leash tightened around my neck, choking off my air supply. A pressure and a spookily reassuring darkness built behind my eyes. It hit me that I might not want to let Colton choke me into unconsciousness. If I passed out, I wouldn’t have any chance of fighting my way out of this. The next time he jerked the leash, I followed.

He led me into a clearing looking out on a murky, slime covered pond. A long pier stretched out onto the water. A figure sat tied to a pylon. We drew closer, and I recognized Lisette. My imagination ran wild. I tried to push thoughts of what Colton had planned out of my mind. If I let them enter, I’d panic. If I panicked, I’d have no chance of getting out of here. So I focused on Lisette.

Could there be any more horrible way to die than with my boyfriend’s ex-wife?
I half-heartedly considered asking Colton to go ahead and kill me so I wouldn’t have to suffer her company for even a minute. Then, our eyes locked. Rather than her usual arrogance, I saw fear…and something else I could work with: anger.

###

Colton led me to a spot next to her and forced me to a kneeling position. I made myself hold still. Fighting would only convince him I needed to be further restrained. More restraints meant less chance I’d see the next day. He duct taped me to the same post, back to back with Lisette.

Lisette spoke behind her duct tape gag. Colton tensed, his movements becoming jerky. Realizing what bothered him, I began to scream behind my hanky gag. Colton stood and shook his fist at us.

“Y’all stop that. Nobody’s going to hear you back here. We’re acres away from the house and the workers.”

Knowing I was onto something, I closed my eyes and screamed through my nose. Behind me, Lisette started up. Colton clenched his fists and grimaced.

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.” He yelled louder than both of us put together. We kept on screaming, only pausing to gather more air. Colton dropped to his knees in front of us. “If I take out your gag, will you stop?”

I nodded, and he pulled the disgusting hanky out of my mouth. He held one finger to his lips for me to be quiet. I nodded. At least I could breathe. He went through the same routine with Lisette. Of course, she started talking as soon as the tape was off her mouth.

“You sorry bastard.” Then, to my amazement, Lisette pitched her voice in a whisper, as though that would keep Colton, who bent over us, from hearing, “Come on. Do something. You act like you get into fights all the time.”

This had to be a nightmare. Surely, I’d wake soon, perhaps in the afterlife. Anything would be better than this.

To Lisette, I said, “Yeah. I whup people’s asses all the time when my hands are duct taped together.”

Colton chuckled. “Peri, I am really sorry it has come to this. I think we could have been great friends.”

“You know, if you hadn’t kidnapped me, I wouldn’t have suspected you,” I said. He sighed, sat down on a cinderblock, and took out his switchblade.

“That’s bullshit. I saw it on your face. Lisette here figured it out, too. She can place me in Houston the summer after Shayne’s disappearance.”

Lisette figured it out before me? Now, I really want to die.

“Houston is where I bought the ring.” She paused and shifted against my back. The duct tape binding us together tightened, and pins and needles tingled in my fingertips. “When I confronted him today, he cried like a little bitch.”

I wished I could kick her. She had no reason to crow. She was about to die over her stupidity.

“Why didn’t you tell the Sheriff’s Office back then?” I moaned the words, not really expecting any answer from Lisette. But she wasn’t one to take a rebuke in silence.

“Because it never hit me then. I never put the two together.” She said it like I should have known, the same way she’d have told me water was wet. And I guess that’s how it played out in her mind. Lisette saw what she wanted and ignored what she didn’t want in every situation.

“So you confronted this idiot by yourself after you knew he murdered Shayne?” I twisted as far as I could, trying to look at her. “How have you lived this long, Lisette?”

“You shut up.” She cried a few half-hearted sobs. They sounded more like frustration than genuine remorse. “I didn’t think Colton could do anything like that. That summer, after Shayne died, he was in Houston, taking graduate classes. I called him. We went out. We—”

I closed my eyes and made a disgusted sound. Not only would I die with Dean’s ex-wife, I’d die with Dean’s trampy ex-wife. I faced forward again. I didn’t want to see Lisette, to see the person who cheated on Dean with strangers, with their teacher, and who knew who else.

###

Colton ripped another strip of duct tape off the roll and pushed it over Lisette’s mouth. “That’s enough. You’ve reminded me of that afternoon too many times over the years, and I’d just as soon forget it. You laid there like a fish. It wasn’t anything worth remembering.”

Had I not been about to die, I’d have smiled. Then, he ripped another strip of duct tape off the roll and pushed it down on my lips. I squealed in protest.

“I’ve been thinking of the most painless way to do this, girls.”

Girls?
I cursed at him behind my tape.

“I think the quickest way is blunt force trauma to the head.” He picked up a posthole digger, gripping it as though testing its heft. “You’ll only feel a flash of pain. I’ll weight you down with those cinderblocks.” He pointed. “And I’ll dispose of you in the pond. Even if you aren’t quite dead, you’ll drown before you wake up.”

My heart stuttered. Cold sweat broke out over my body. I had a hard time sucking oxygen through my nose. Imagining myself at the bottom of the pond, fright overtook me. The world around me seemed distant. I couldn’t follow any one train of thought. Colton mistook the look on my face as a signal I wanted to talk more.

“I made a mistake with poor Shayne, trying to strangle her.” He shuddered as he remembered. Then anger flashed over his face, transforming his features into twisted evil. “Shayne didn’t understand why I needed top billing on the
Disappearing Culture
project. I’d have never gotten grants for graduate school without that.”

Lisette mumbled some words at him from behind her gag.

“You don’t understand, ‘Sette.” He dropped the posthole digger on the pier and approached us, squatting on one of his cinder blocks. “You’ve had every advantage money can buy. My sister and I grew up orphans, shuffled from one relative to another. The only way I could go to college was with a scholarship. I dreamed of having a great job where I earned enough money to not have to depend on others.” He held out his hands, palms up, like he was giving a speech at Toastmasters.

Though grateful for the reprieve of execution, I didn’t understand why he needed to justify his behavior. He planned to kill us. Did he care what we thought?
What a weirdo.
At least every moment he talked gave me another few seconds to think of a way to get out of this.

“That project—
Disappearing Culture
—was my ticket out of teaching high school English and into teaching college-level folklore.” He gave us a smile. “But Shayne wanted credit for the interviews. I couldn’t do that. What if it hurt me in grad school? She figured out I sold some school property. I needed that money for grad school. She tried to blackmail me. And, of course, she’d figured out I stole those stupid fucking coins. So that was it.” Colton stopped speaking, staring out into the distance, lost in thought, probably working up to killing us. “Shayne never understood we all sometimes have to sacrifice for the greater good of others.”

Underneath my terror, my anger brewed. I hated people who thought the world owed them something. Yes, Colton’s early life sounded hardscrabble. He worked hard to pull himself out of it. And I respected that. But he shat all over his accomplishments by cheating, stealing, and murdering to tip the scales in his favor. Colton, despite his physical beauty, was a disgusting troll of a human being.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to figure out a way to live through this. Thoughts swirled around, none of them making any sense, and Lisette blubbered behind me. I was well and truly stuck. Then I sensed a shift in the air, the kind ghosts usually cause. For once in my sorry life, I was thankful for what I was.

###

A board creaking snapped me out of my reverie, and I cracked my eyes open to see Colton put his face in his hands. He whispered to himself, but I couldn’t hear the words over the roaring in my head.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed flashes of Shayne’s ghost as she moved along the banks of the pond. It seemed she wanted to help but didn’t know how.

She materialized next to Colton and tapped his shoulder. He jumped and looked around him, trying to figure out what had touched him. Shayne materialized next to Lisette and me. She reached out one translucent hand and caressed my cheek. Her frigid touch burned, and I jerked away. She was my last hope, but we hadn’t communicated very well thus far. I decided to try again.

I conjured a picture of Dean, the only person who could save us at this point, and pushed the image at Shayne. She continued flickering in and out of visibility in the clearing. I begged her to help us as hard as I could, but she remained unaffected. Calling up every bit of energy I had, I pushed it at Shayne. She whipped around to stare at me, her eyes black holes, and disappeared.
Shit. I ran her off.

Colton picked that moment to grow a pair. He stood and walked over to where he’d dropped the posthole digger and took it up again. He walked slowly toward us, practicing his swing. If he carried out his plan, Lisette and I would pay for his lack of skill. I suspected it would take several blows for him to kill us. My legs jumped and trembled on their own accord.

Something pressed against my hand, and I jumped. Shayne’s cold fingers curled around my wrist, and pressed the item into my hand again. By this time, I recognized the feel of Fayette’s crazy necklace. I closed my fingers around it, feeling the zing of power shoot up my arm. I gave myself to it, closing my eyes with the effort.

I felt myself rising, floating upwards and out of my body. I cracked my eyes and looked down at the scene below us. Everything seemed so clear up here. I couldn’t hear Colton’s thoughts, but I sensed them in a weird way.

Colton didn’t want to kill us, but he’d already killed Trey and Shayne to preserve what he’d worked so hard to achieve. Why not two more? Besides, Lisette would one day spill the beans about the afternoon they spent doing the naked monkey dance when she was still a teenager and he a grown man. That would be embarrassing and possibly ruin his relationship with the Turgeau family.

Lisette didn’t want to die and was scared. But she also worried about how she’d look when her body was found. She wondered if Dean would be sorry now for not taking her back. She hated she had to die with me.