Blood Kin (35 page)

“I'm dying. Have a little respect,” Will rasped.

“Maybe you are . . . and maybe . . . you're not. Maybe you're too danged mean to die.”

Emma staggered to the kitchen and returned with a cup of water. She eased onto the floor beside Will and lifted his head. “Try to drink some of this.” She brought the mug to his lips with trembling hands. “It might keep you alive until the cavalry gets here.”

Will knocked the cup away. “You think I'd take water from a man who raped my—”

“I never did, Will. I watched it.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “That's my sin. I watched Joe and Creed take turns with her . . . but I never laid a hand on her.”

“Liar. Grace should have used the three-oh-eight on you.”

“Probably so,” Emma agreed. The pain in her belly was a constant grinding, but she'd come to terms with it. “But maybe the Lord had a hand in it. Or maybe she was too smart. Could be she killed Joe Marshall with that gun and throwed it in the bay to hide her tracks.”

Will coughed up more blood. “You better hope I don't . . . live long enough to get to the hospital. If I can . . .” He swore softly. “If I live . . . long enough to get to the hospital, I'll get hold of a scalpel and skin you alive.” Will closed his eyes and for a minute, Emma thought he'd quit breathing altogether, but then he opened his eyes again.

“Like I told you . . . we were all drinking.”

“Liar. My Beth never—”

“She was human, Will. She drank. I saw her drink. . . . She wasn't used to it. It went to her head.”

“A scalpel's too good for you.” He groaned. “I'll cut your black heart out with a rusty spoon.”

“Not if I die first.” Emma laid her own head on the rug and curled into a fetal position as the pincers gnawed at her innards. “Maybe your girl and Matthew got up to mischief they shouldn't have that day. But she was only fifteen, and he wasn't much older. They were just kids, and kids do stupid things. As Mama always says, ‘The little lambs will play.' ”

“I don't want to hear . . . it.”

“You're gonna hear it, Will Tawes. Beth was a Tawes, wasn't she? And God knows you sowed enough wild oats in your day.”

“Go ahead, torture . . . a dying man. Add that to . . . your sins.”

Emma was sorry Will had spilled the water. She wanted some badly, but the kitchen sink seemed a long way off, and she was tired, so tired. It was hard to string words together to make sense. “Matt cared about her. He never meant for anything bad to happen. Afterward . . . he was just scared. As scared as the rest of us. As scared as Beth must have been when she figured out that she had a baby growing in her and didn't know who the father was.”

“Why didn't she come to me? Why didn't she trust me enough to tell me what—”

“I don't know. Maybe she was too ashamed of what she'd done. Maybe she thought you'd stop loving her if you knew.”

“I never would have,” Will sobbed. “I would have stood by her.”

“I didn't know about the baby. I swear I didn't,” Emma said. Her voice was nothing more than dried husks rattling in an empty corncrib. “I would have married her myself. Maybe I'm more woman than man, but I would have done that much for her. I would have given her my name.”

“I loved her, Emma. More than anything in the world. I loved that child, and I couldn't save her. If I'd told her how much she meant to me—if I'd told her what she was to me, maybe—”

“Maybe it was her time, Will. The Good Book says we all have a time. Maybe it was meant to be. But it wasn't for nothing, was it?”

“How so?”

“Bailey. She left you Bailey. . . . And if you quit fighting so hard to die and quit hating so much . . . maybe you've got another chance to be for Bailey the man you couldn't be for Beth.”

“You think that, or you . . . humoring a dying man . . . trying to save your own worthless skin?”

“Maybe both . . . Will. Maybe . . .” A whirring sound filled Emma's head. Birds? Angels? No angels for her. Helicopter. Maybe one of them would live to see a hospital. The noise grew louder.

Emma began to cough, and suddenly it was hard to stop. Blood was choking her nose and her throat. Vaguely she heard shouting and the pounding of boots. She tried to cry out . . . to tell them Will needed help . . . but she'd talked herself out. It was easier just to close her eyes and drift . . . just drift . . . and forget all about what she'd seen that afternoon . . . what she hadn't tried hard enough to end . . . the day she'd stopped calling herself a man.

Daniel circled Black Oak Island in the skiff to approach from the south. The area was a maze of intersecting marsh and waterways, native reeds and phragmites, patches of woods, at least one freshwater pond, and two high, sandy areas where little would grow. There were also deceiving grassy flats that appeared firm enough to support a man's weight but wouldn't. The actual landmass was no more than a mile long by a half mile wide, although it had been a lot bigger when he was a kid.

Year by year the Chesapeake was nibbling at the islands. Like as not, Tawes, Deal, and Smith—the fields and forests, farms, and villages—would all vanish under the bay in a few centuries. But if Black Oak had ever been inhabited, other than by the foolish trapper who'd built the solitary cabin of virtually indestructible cypress timbers a century ago and died of swamp fever the same year, it had been by Indians, long before the first Englishman set foot on these shores.

Despite the hordes of mosquitoes and blackflies,
Black Oak was a hunter's paradise, so overrun by deer, foxes, otter, and smaller mammals that they were stunted in size. Waterfowl of every description flocked here, finding shelter from the winter winds and food enough to sustain them in every season. Any hunters tough enough to survive the environment and canny enough to find their way around the island without drowning or being sucked down by the bottomless muck were assured of all the game they could shoot.

The old cabin didn't stand on the bay; it was inland on a hillock above a creek barely wide enough to get Will's skiff up in low tide. Now the mud flats and sand-bars were exposed, but the tide had already turned and was fast rising. If Grace was hiding here, there were a half dozen inlets where she could have hidden her small Boston Whaler and crossed to the cabin through the marsh. If she knew Black Oak as well as Will Tawes, she'd be hell for the authorities to find, let alone catch. And Daniel knew his sister-in-law could kill him and Bailey before he even caught sight of her.

If Grace had taken Bailey anywhere but Black Oak, he'd lost her. Daniel was betting everything that Emma's guess was right. But he had no intention of motoring up that narrow waterway to be shot from the cabin or the trees that surrounded it. Will had taught him far more than the agency ever had about moving stealthily in marsh and woodland, and he had the feeling he'd need every ounce of what he'd soaked up.

When Will had shown him the finer points of stalking game and hunting waterfowl, the old islander had never paid much attention to state game rules and regulations. Like other traditionalists who fed their families from the land and bay, they hunted and fished
when they were hungry, and they had no intention of being stopped by game wardens or code enforcers.

Daniel cut the engine and dropped anchor near what appeared to be a collection of driftwood and tangled reeds. He wanted Will's skiff to be in plain view of any police helicopter that flew over. Using his satellite cell, he took the time to make a quick call to his cousin Jim Tilghman aboard the state conservation boat
Sweetwater
.

“Daniel! Where are you? The word's out. A full-scale search is on for Grace and the Boston Whaler.”

“Could you send out some messages to watermen for me?” Daniel dug in a compartment for the waterproof bags he knew Will carried to protect his cameras and sketchbooks, and double-bagged his pistol and all the ammunition he had. Then he reached for the camouflage Will always kept in the skiff.

“Just told you, every boat is already hunting her. If she's on this bay someone will see her. We're headed your way ourselves, but we're on the far side of Deal.”

“Do you know anything about Will and Emma?”

“They're on their way to shock trauma at Johns Hopkins. A copter picked them up a few minutes ago. Both alive, but rocky, from what I gather. Will's in a lot worse shape than Emma. I spoke to one of the dispatchers, Ernie Thompson, Cathy's cousin. He said Will's lost a lot of blood. Maybe more than a man his age can stand.”

“I'm on Black Oak.”

“Emma told the EMTs that's where you were going. I wouldn't be surprised if you had company real soon. Maybe you'd better wait for backup. Grace could be heavily armed.”

“I can't wait, Jim. If anything happens—”

“I don't want to hear talk like that.”

“I'm serious, Jim. Anything happens to me, my place and whatever's left goes into the wildlife preservation fund to protect Tawes from development.”

“Be careful, cuz.”

“Just pass on the news that I'm here. I don't want some trigger-happy vigilante mistaking me for Grace. I'll be the one in camouflage.”

“Keep your head low. If anything happens to you, Cathy will find some way of putting the blame on me.”

“Somebody's got to take the blame,” he answered. “Got to go. And you remind those mainland lawmen that the women on Tawes usually hit what they shoot at.”

“I'll do that.”

Daniel pushed the disconnect button and set the phone to vibrate. No one except the agency had his number, but he didn't want any surprises. Quickly he removed a bottle of insect spray, stripped to his shorts, and rubbed it over every inch of his skin. He smeared black and green stain over his face and body, and lastly, strapped on his belt, waterproof holster, and sheath knife.

He slipped into the water and swam the twenty yards to the pile of debris. Underneath, just as he'd expected, he found Will's cypress dugout and a paddle. There was an old-fashioned sneak boat hidden in the reeds the next creek over, but it was slower and heavier, made to carry two men and their dogs. What he needed today was something that could float in six inches of water and move through the reeds as quietly as an otter.

Aided by the incoming tide, Daniel pushed his way into a narrow passage and began to paddle. In two minutes
he lost of sight of Will's skiff, and in another three the phragmites closed in over his head, making him so much a natural part of the marsh that the three black ducks flying overhead took no notice of him at all.

Bailey didn't bother to struggle as Grace bound her wrists together and tied them to the post. She'd been bleeding on and off since Grace had shot her in the attic back at the farmhouse, and she knew she had to preserve whatever strength she had left for a fight she could win. She'd lost one shoe somewhere, and she'd already sunk almost to her knees once in the gooey mud.

Grace had tried to force pills into her mouth, but Bailey had spit them back out into the bay. “Suit yourself, Beth,” Grace had said. “I was only trying to spare you the distress of your final minutes.”

“Why?” Bailey had asked her for tenth time . . . or maybe the twentieth. “What did I ever do to you? What did my mother ever do to you that you hated her so?”

Grace gave the knot a solid tug and backed away. The black water came up to her waist and tugged at her clothing, but she didn't seem to notice. “How many times do I have to tell you?” she replied patiently. “You tried to steal everything that was mine. You took my life and tried to make it your own. People called me the town whore, when it should have been the other way around. I was the good girl. I was the one who could be the wife and helpmate Matthew needed, not you. You would have dragged him down to your own level.”

“I'm not who you think I am,” Bailey said, trying not to think of how fast the water seemed to be rising around the rotting dock. “I'm not Beth. She's dead and buried. She can't hurt you. You have Matthew.”

Grace waded back toward the muddy shore and up
onto the sand. Behind her the door to a square log structure stood open. The rifle Grace had used to shoot both her and Will leaned against the door frame. “You should have died in that cemetery, both of you,” Grace said. “I don't like this. I don't enjoy seeing people in pain. I'm not a monster, but I won't stand by and see what's mine be stolen.” She slipped her bare feet into her Nikes and tied them.

Insects buzzed around Bailey's head. Something bit her in the center of the forehead. “I don't understand,” Bailey said. “I don't hate you. I don't even know you, but I think you have a real faith in God. Is this what He would want you to do?”

“God helps those who help themselves,” Grace intoned. “They thought I was ignorant, too stupid to do anything but work in a crab-picking plant or wait tables in a bar. But I showed them, and I showed Joe Marshall. I picked him as clean as a steamed blue claw at a Sunday picnic.”

Something buzzed around Bailey's right ear. She fought panic and the weariness that made her want to give up. There had to be a way to reach Grace, to convince her that she didn't really want to do this. “If you'll let me go, I'll leave Tawes for good,” she lied. “I'll never tell a soul what happened.”

Grace laughed. “I guess you won't, at the rate the tide is coming in. You should have gotten in that trunk when I told you to, girl. If you're so religious, you'd already be knocking at those pearly gates. The smoke would have killed you long before the flames reached you. It would have been painless.”

“Would it?”

“So I've read. I don't know for sure. But drowning probably isn't much worse. They say you should just
breathe in the water. Don't fight it. Just let it fill your lungs. You'll go fast.”