Blue Moon Bay (35 page)

A file that had clearly been stolen from the Proxica offices had been hidden inside Clay's backpack. It appeared to contain some sort of old log sheets for various Proxica farms in Texas, Kentucky, and several other states, many dating back to the seventies. Clay had marked columns of numbers and written other numbers beside them in red.

“Oh, Clay,” I whispered. No matter how valid the cause, breaking into the offices of a corporation and stealing property was illegal, not to mention dangerous. With the money and connections Proxica had, Clay could end up in prison. I needed to be careful about how I handled this, who we turned the information over to. We'd have to find someone who would listen, with whom we could bargain for a promise of amnesty for Clay. But whom? I had no idea where to even begin looking.

I couldn't just call the local police department for something like this. Clay would be prosecuted so fast it would make his head spin—and potentially for more than just stealing the documents. With all the terrorism scares these days, there was no telling what the charges might be. Vast stores of ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia were kept at Proxica facilities—fertilizer in the right hands and a powerful bomb-making material if procured by criminals, as well as an ingredient used for the manufacture of methamphetamine in backwoods drug dens of Chinquapin Peaks. Proxica's lawyers could accuse Clay of all kinds of things.

I touched the computer to wake it from sleep mode, leaned close, and scanned the contents—a newspaper article about the class-action lawsuit in Kentucky. There was a jump drive attached to the computer. The article had been saved there. I pulled the jump drive out of the slot, tucked it into my pocket. The computer chimed, the noise seeming inordinately loud in the silent house.

A cabinet door closed in the kitchen. I jerked back. “Clay?” I whispered.

No one answered.

“Clay?”

Something fell and hit the kitchen floor with a smack that reverberated through the house like a gunshot. Closing the computer, I took a step backward, my heart bounding into my throat. The floor creaked just around the corner. Maybe Clay was here, after all.

Maybe someone else was here. . . .

Possibilities raced through my mind as a shadow wavered in the rectangle of light from the kitchen. I heard a rhythmic clicking sound. The shadow lengthened, began to take on a shape.

“Roger,” I gasped as a nose and a lolling tongue rounded the corner, followed by the rest of Roger. He trotted happily across the room, and I patted him on the head. “You goofball,” I breathed, my heart still hammering. “You stupid dog. Where's Clay? Is he here?”

Roger rolled a look at me, as in,
Beats me
. We crossed the dining room and turned the corner into the kitchen, but there was no sign of Clay. On the opposite end of the room, the doorway to the living area was dark, no lights burning in the rest of the house. Apparently, Roger had been left here for safekeeping while Clay and Amy proceeded with tonight's clandestine visit to the Proxica plant.

Please, God, just let them be all right. Just bring them home safely.
The prayer whispered in my mind as I hurried back to the dining room, stuffed everything into Clay's backpack, looped it over my shoulder, and grabbed the laptop. I would take it all for now, put it somewhere safe until I could find Clay to talk some sense into him. If we put our heads together, we could figure out a way to reveal the information about Proxica without putting Clay in legal jeopardy, and then—

A noise pressed through the cracks in the floorboard. A voice . . . no . . . someone coughing? Downstairs. In the cellar.

Time seemed to bend and twist as I set the laptop back on the table and crossed the dining room, then the entryway, moving toward the small, wooden door that lay in shadow at the other end. The vision from my dreams flashed in my mind, the entryway stretching, becoming impossibly long, the door always out of reach.

Fear and need intertwined, an impossible web, pulling me closer, screaming at me to run, to be anywhere but here.

I'm not running. I will not run this time.

I stopped in front of the door, listened. Roger bumped my legs. Laying a hand on his head, I sought comfort, listened for the voice. I couldn't hear anything. Maybe it was only my imagination, just the joists groaning and settling.

I already had the backpack and the jump drive. I could just leave and . . .

Memories of my last day in this house permeated the door, pressing through cracks, smelling of must and aging wood, blending today into yesterday, yesterday into sixteen years ago. The past, all the moments that had been blank, came rushing back like flames bursting through a firewall. My mother had screamed at me, told me not to come down the stairs, but I'd seen. I'd seen his legs, his feet splayed out behind the desk. He was wearing the boots he liked to wear when it was muddy. His
farmer boots
, we called them.

I'd moved to the bottom of the stairs, touched the banister, felt something warm and wet, a spatter that didn't belong there. I heard him heave a last gush of air, the long rattling sound of it, and then silence, a seep of red running from beneath the desk in a narrow river. I'd rushed toward him, looked down, seen him lying in a pool, his lower torso coated in blood, his legs contorted unnaturally, nerves causing them to jerk before going still.

Mom blocked my path, screamed at me again, told me to find Clay, to keep him out of here. She was grabbing the phone, my father's blood smearing the receiver. . . .

The moments sped after that—running up the stairs, washing off the blood, looking for my brother, the paramedics coming. The awful realization of what had happened.

If I didn't do this now, if I didn't go into that cellar, I never would. I'd be trapped on this side of the door forever.

My fingers trembled on the knob as I turned it. I swallowed the pulsating lump in my throat.

Please make me strong enough. Please.

The scents of must, damp limestone, and soil solidified in my chest as the door creaked open. I clutched Roger's fur, and we started down the steps together. The dog didn't try to bolt ahead, but moved soundlessly with me on the hollow wooden stairs—one step, two, three, and then another.

There was a light at the bottom, a dim glow illuminating boxes, paint cans, gardening tools covered in dust. The workbench where my father liked to create things from scraps of wood was laced with filmy cobwebs. I still had a jewelry box that he'd made for me.
For Heather's treasures,
the inscription read under the lid.

My father had always wanted me to be happy. He would want me to do this, to walk through this fire.

I'm not alone. I'm not.

A circle of light shone around the corner of my father's desk. The dull
clink-clink
of a moth battering itself against the bulb wrinkled the silent air. Descending another step into the darkness, into the past, I slowly squatted down, clutching Roger for support as the desk chair squeaked, testifying to the fact that someone was in it. My gaze traveled slowly over a hand, then the arm of an overcoat, upward until I could make out the form of a man with his back toward me. He'd leaned over the file cabinet on the other side of the desk, his form bisected by the circle of light, so that he was halfway inside it and halfway in the shadow beyond. His short, dark hair, the sunbaked wrinkles on the back of his neck, the way he towered over the chair was familiar.

Past melded with present, and my mind stumbled from one into the other.

“Dad?” I whispered.

But at your rebuke the waters fled,

at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;

they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys,

to the place you assigned for them.

—Psalm 104
(via Jake Moskalak, game warden, north end of the county)

H
e swiveled toward me, the chair's squeal splitting the air, the moment seeming to move in slow motion, too bizarre to understand. That couldn't be my father. I knew it in some practical, concrete way, yet an illogical hope floated with the dust, hovered there, then died as the lamplight caught the man's face, illuminating his profile—a long, thin nose, an earlobe that belled outward slightly, a square, chiseled chin with a cleft in the middle. Not my father's face, but I knew him. . . .

I scrambled through memories, trying to place his features, my thoughts sliding on ice, my body suddenly cold. It was
him.
The man I remembered. The man I'd seen with my mother all those years ago—either her partner in an affair, or an agent with the Justice Department, depending on whom you believed. The man who was, in some way, culpable in my father's death.

Without him, everything might have turned out differently. Without him, my father might still be alive.

A firestorm of anger and hatred swirled from that hiding place within me—the place where I'd stuffed all the unanswered questions, all the resentments toward my mother, all the fears and needs and unspoken grief. There wasn't time for it during those terrible months after the funeral. But now I felt the shell cracking, the contents still molten under the surface. How dare he come here! How dare he touch my father's things, sit in my father's chair! Did my mother know? Had she told him he could come here?

“Get out!” I heard myself growl, the sound deep and guttural, animalistic and instinctive in nature. Rushing down three more steps, I grabbed at the antique tools that hung on the stairway wall, and came up with a rusty machete-like potato knife. I raised it like a weapon, the sharp, rusty spike on the end sending an ominous message. Roger barked and tried to squeeze past me. “Roger, no!” I scolded, pinning him against the wall with my knee. “Get back.”

The man behind the desk rose slowly, his face moving out of the light, a long, dark overcoat falling around him, making him little more than a shadow.

I should have been afraid, but there was no space inside me for fear. There was only rage, white-hot and molten.

He lifted his hands, his palms raised in a surrender position.

“How dare you come here,” I growled. “How dare you touch my father's things. You have no right to be here.” I descended another step. Why was he in the cellar? What was he looking for in my father's file cabinets?

His coat caught a sheet of paper on the corner of the desk, sent it floating downward like a falling leaf. My mind rushed back. I remembered a leaf skipping across the floor the day my father died. It was vibrant and red, tumbling along with a smattering of lacy white petals from a late bloom of crape myrtle, snow-like, innocent, beautiful, then trapped in a pool of my father's blood. . . .

I blinked now, trying to banish the past and focus my mind into the present.

“It's best that you leave.” The stranger was calm, his voice measured. “Go back up the stairs and get in your car.” He shifted in the dim light, glanced over his shoulder, then back at me. “This place isn't safe tonight.” The request was authoritative in a way that made it seem almost reasonable, yet I wanted to charge at him with the knife, to bring it slashing down, to let it carry all the anger that had been living inside me, undirected, misdirected, constantly circling in on itself in a confined space.

“I'm calling the police, but first I want to know who you are. Why are you here? What happened between you and my mother before my father was killed? What did you do to him? Did you threaten him?” I couldn't ask the last questions thundering in my head:
Did you push him to the breaking point? Was his death an accident or did he do it on purpose?

The stranger's long, thin fingers flexed and then straightened, his body language still indicating that he didn't intend to try for the knife. He seemed either unwilling to provoke me or confident that he could overpower me, if I came at him. “I promise you, Heather, that the truth will come out soon enough. But you need to go back to your uncle's house. Lock the doors. Make sure your brother and Amy stay there, and the rest of your family, as well. Our cover may have been breeched. I'm not sure who we can trust.”

His words and the mention of Clay and Amy swirled anger into fear. He knew all of us. He knew everything about us. Had he been the one watching us?

At the top of the stairs, the door between the cellar and the house groaned softly and then blew shut. I jerked at the sound, my heart lurching, then settling into place again. “Who are you and how do you know so much about my family?”

“It'll all be out in the open soon enough. Right now I need you to lea . . .”

A floorboard creaked overhead. He lowered his hands, took a step sideways, the bottom half of his face coming into the light again. Placing a finger to his lips, he whispered, “Shhh.” He motioned toward Roger, who had turned at the sound of footsteps.

Clay
, was my first thought, and I felt comforted. But the sensation quickly evaporated, leaving uncertainty. Roger growled low in his throat. The footfalls upstairs were heavy, the hollow sound of boots on wood. That wasn't Clay.

The stranger motioned for me to come down the stairs, then he doused the light. I hesitated, not knowing which way danger might lie.

Something crashed overhead. Glass shattered.

Roger cowered against my leg in the darkness. I circled my fingers around his collar, held him close, and crept down the stairs, Clay's backpack sliding on my shoulder. The stranger caught my arm when I reached the bottom step, pulled Roger and me into the immeasurable blackness beneath the stairway. I felt the man's body against mine, the backpack pressed between us, his arm encircling me just below my neck. He leaned close to my ear, murmured, “Keep quiet.”

“What's happening?” I whispered, terrified.

“Shhh,” he hissed. His arm tightened, pulled me farther into the darkness. My body went stiff. As the door opened at the top of the stairway, I fought the urge to pull away, run, scream. A partial sentence drifted downward with a flashlight beam.

“ . . . you wanna do with the little whistleblower and her boyfriend? How 'bout we toss them both down here and throw in this can of diesel with 'em? This place'll go up like a tinderbox. We'll get rid of that computer, whatever other proof they think they got, and the two of them all at once. Time the fire department gets way out here, there won't be nothin' left to find. Ain't nobody gonna know nothin'.”

“You're as dumb as you look, Frank.” The second man's voice was gravelly and rough, chilling in its lack of emotion. “It's gotta look right. Think about it—if her and her boyfriend was out here cookin' a little meth with some anhydrous they stole from the Proxica plant, and it blew up on 'em, they wouldn't be down in the basement, now would they? Dump that diesel can down the cellar stairs and leave the cellar door open. I'll go set things up in the kitchen, then we'll get Hampton and his girlfriend outta the trunk and put 'em in there. Them fumes'll start a flash fire quick enough, and that diesel on the stairs will suck it right down into the basement, too. The whole place'll go, but it'll all just look like an accident—like he got sloppy. Ain't gonna be as excitin' as if that boy's truck had rolled over that gas meter last night. Man, I had that thing set to blow, too. Just a little tap's all woulda took, and we'd have had us some real fireworks. It's cleaner this way, though. Now that we know his girlfriend was in on it, we can do 'em both at once.”

Terror raced through me, and I caught a breath. They had Clay and Amy outside? They'd rigged the gas meter at Harmony House? If Clay's truck hadn't veered into the fig tree last night and missed the gas meter, we would have all been dead.

I shifted toward the stairway, but the man behind me held tight as the plans continued overhead.

“Don't let it splash too far from them stairs, but make sure the diesel gets all the way to the bottom. We don't want to do nothin' to make the fire marshal suspicious when he checks this place out, afterwards. It's gotta look like that diesel can just fell over down there and spilt accidental-like.”

Frank laughed appreciatively. “Yeah, all right.” The top stair creaked under his weight, dust sifted downward, and the man behind me slid his fingers over mine on the handle of the potato knife. I let him take it from me.

The second step creaked and the light came on, the bulb swinging on a single, narrow cord. Diesel splashed in the can as he unscrewed the lid. Fumes filled the air. A cough convulsed in my throat, and I pressed a hand to my mouth to stifle it, then pulled my shirt over my nose, gagging on the smell of diesel as Frank passed just inches from our heads, then splashed the bottom of the stairs and began working his way up. Thoughts raced wildly in my head, the urge to bolt becoming almost too strong to control. I wanted to run for the door across the room, scramble up the old stone stairs that had been chiseled from the hillside in back of the house, and burst into the fresh air. Closing my eyes, I willed myself to be still, not to move.
He'll leave in a minute. He'll leave in a minute. . . .

I didn't want to die here in the darkness, in this cellar that had swallowed the last moments of my father's life.

“Frank, we got comp'ny! Someone's comin' up the driveway! Turn out that light down there!” Frank stopped, his feet just above my head.

A string of curses followed him as he climbed the stairs again, doused the lights, then set the diesel can on the top step. I heard the click and slide of metal against metal. The cartridge of a gun.

Roger growled low in his throat. I closed my eyes, slid a hand over his muzzle.

Who was coming now? Another accomplice? Someone else? Maybe Mom or the uncs, showing up to check on us?

Terror balled in my chest. Anyone arriving now would have no way of knowing this was a trap. Overhead, Frank kicked over the diesel can before moving through the door into the house. The acrid smell of fumes floated on the air.

The stranger let go of me, and I stumbled from under the stairway, still clinging to Roger's collar. “We have to get away from here.”

“Go through the outside door.” His voice was measured but insistent. “Don't stop anywhere near the house. Hide in the brush, and no matter what happens, stay put.” He rushed up the steps, then slipped soundlessly through the door at the top. When it closed behind him, only inky darkness remained. Feeling my way with one hand and clutching Roger's collar with the other, I moved forward, fumes filling my lungs, making me lightheaded and sick. I couldn't get my bearings. Which way was the door that led up the steps to the yard? Which way? The ventilation windows at ground level were tiny and dirt-covered, allowing almost no light.

Overhead, the house had gone silent—no movement, no voices, no footsteps. What was happening?

My head floated and spun. I felt like I was falling. Roger tugged at his collar, pulling me sideways, causing me to stumble against something solid. I pressed against it, coughing, my lungs burning. I couldn't get my breath.

Clutching the desk, I tried again to gain my bearings, to feel my way. Which way? Which way? Something caught my leg, and I lost my balance again, tumbling over Roger. We fell against the desk chair, tipped it and crashed to the floor with it, the sound reverberating through the cellar. I scrambled to my feet again, Roger barking, my heart hammering in my ears.

Beyond the pounding, I heard something, then strained toward the sound.

Someone was calling my name—beckoning me. Not upstairs . . . outside.

Blaine?

A rush of relief came with his voice, and then fear. Where were Frank and his accomplice? Outside? In the house? Were they waiting to see if Blaine would leave, trying to figure out if he was armed? Was a gun pointed his way right now?

Sifting through the darkness with my hands, I found the wall and moved toward a ventilation window on the side of the house, closer to Blaine's voice. Boxes, buckets, and bits of furniture caught my feet and legs. Old tools, rakes, and shovels resting against the wall skittered sideways, each noise sending my heart into my throat. Was anyone upstairs? Could they hear me? Grabbing the handle of a hoe, I held my breath and tapped the glass of the ventilation window.
Please, please let it be Blaine who hears.

There was no response. Upstairs, someone was moving, the footsteps careful, almost soundless, one floor joist crackling, then another. Someone was still in the house, heading toward the front door, toward the sound of Blaine's voice. I had to do something. Turning the tool over, I swung and hit the glass hard, threw an arm over my face as shards rained down around me.