Heroes are My Weakness (15 page)

She managed to get this pup safely to the fire pit, but the water was growing deeper, and she had to struggle to reach the back of the cave for the third one. The flashlight she’d left on the ledge had grown dimmer, but she could see enough to tell that the cardboard box was close to collapsing. She’d never get them all out in time. But she had to.

She lifted the third pup and stepped off the ledge. A wave caught her, the dog struggled, and she lost her grip. It slipped into the water.

With a sob, she plunged her arms into the churning salt water and reached frantically around for the small body. She felt something and snatched the pup up.

The undertow dragged at her as she tried to wade toward the fading light at the mouth of the cave. She was having trouble breathing. The pup had stopped struggling, and she didn’t know if it was dead or alive until she placed it in the fire pit and saw it move.

Three more. She couldn’t go back in yet. She had to rest. But if she did, the animals would drown.

The undertow was growing stronger instead of weaker, and the water was rising higher. She lost a sneaker somewhere and kicked off the other. Every breath was a struggle, and by the time she reached the water-sodden box, she’d gone under twice. The second time, she swallowed so much salt water, she was still choking when she climbed up.

Before she could grab hold of the fourth pup, a wave knocked her back. She found her footing and climbed again, gasping for breath. She made a wild grab and pulled out another pup. The pain from the scratches on her arms and chest, the fire in her lungs, were excruciating. Her legs were giving out, and her muscles screamed for her to stop. A wave pulled her feet out from under her, and she and the pup were swamped, but somehow she managed to hold on. She tried to cough out the water she’d swallowed. The muscles in her arms and legs burned. Somehow she reached the fire pit.

Two more . . .

If she’d been thinking clearly, she would have stopped, but she was acting on instinct. Her entire life had led to this moment when her only purpose was to save the pups. She fell on the rocks as she scrambled back to the cave, and a long gash opened on her calf. She staggered inside. An icy wave pushed her down. She struggled to swim.

Only the faintest glow came from the flashlight on the ledge. The wet cardboard box sagged precariously. Her knee scraped the rock as she pulled herself up.

Two pups. She couldn’t do this twice. She had to get them both out. She tried to pick them up together but couldn’t make her hands work. Her foot slipped again, and again she fell back in the water. Gasping, she fought her way to the surface, but she was choking and disoriented. She barely managed to hoist herself up to the ledge again. She reached inside.

Only one. She could only save one.

Her fingers closed around wet fur. With a wrenching sob, she took the pup and started to swim only to discover that her legs wouldn’t move. She tried to get them under her so she could stand, but the undertow was too strong. And then, in the dim light coming from outside, she saw the monster wave barreling toward the cave. Rising higher and higher still. Scudding inside, engulfing her, and throwing her against the rocky cave wall. She twisted and tumbled, her arms flailing, knowing she was drowning.

A hand pulled at her. She fought, struggled. The arms were strong. Insistent. They dragged at her until she felt clean air on her face.

Theo.

It wasn’t Theo. It was Jaycie. “Stop fighting!” the girl cried.

“The dogs . . .” Annie gasped. “There’s another—” She ran out of oxygen.

Another wave crashed over them. Jaycie’s grip stayed firm. She dragged Annie and the pup against the current and out of the cave.

When they reached the rocks, Annie collapsed, but Jaycie didn’t. As Annie struggled to sit up, her rescuer rushed back to the cave. It didn’t take her long to return carrying a wet, wriggling puppy.

Annie was dimly aware of the blood streaming from the gash in her calf, of her scratched arms, and the stains blooming like crimson roses through her T-shirt. She heard the dogs’ yips coming from the fire pit, but the sound brought her no pleasure.

Jaycie hovered over the pit, the pup she’d rescued still in her arms. Annie slowly absorbed the fact that Jaycie had saved her life, and through her chattering teeth she mustered a ragged “Thank you.”

Jaycie shrugged. “I guess you should thank my old man for getting drunk. I had to get out.”

“Annie! Annie, are you down there?”

It was too dark to see, but Annie had no trouble recognizing Regan’s voice. “She’s here,” Jaycie called up when Annie couldn’t answer.

Regan scampered down the shallow stone steps and rushed to Annie. “Are you all right? Please don’t tell my dad. Please!”

Anger coursed through Annie. She came to her feet as Regan hurried to the puppies. She lifted one to her cheek and started to cry. “You can’t tell, Annie.”

All the emotions Annie had suppressed exploded inside her. She left the pups, left Regan and Jaycie, and climbed awkwardly over the rocks to the cliff stairs. Her legs were still weak, she was shivering, and she had to grip the rope handrail to pull herself up.

The lights were still on around the deserted swimming pool. Annie’s pain and fury gave her legs fresh strength. She rushed across the lawn and into the house. She flew up the stairs, her feet pounding on the treads.

Theo’s room was toward the back, next to his sister’s. She flung open the door. He lay on his bed, reading. The sight of her, with her matted hair, bloody scratches, and gashed calf brought him to his feet.

There were always bits of riding gear lying around his bedroom. She didn’t consciously snatch up the riding crop, but a force she couldn’t control had taken over. The crop was in her hand, and she was rushing toward him. He stood there, not moving, almost as if he knew what was coming. She brought up her arm and swung the crop at him as hard as she could. It caught the side of his face and split the thin skin over his brow bone.

“Annie!” Her mother, drawn by the noise, raced into the room with Elliott right behind. Elliott wore his customary starched long-sleeved blue dress shirt while her mother wore a narrow black caftan and long silver earrings. Mariah gasped as she saw the blood streaming down Theo’s face and then Annie’s condition. “My God . . .”

“He’s a monster!” Annie cried.

“Annie, you’re hysterical,” Elliott proclaimed, hurrying to his son.

“The dogs nearly died because of you!” she screamed. “Are you sorry they didn’t? Are you sorry they’re still alive?” Tears streaming down her face, she lunged at him again, but Elliott twisted the riding crop from her grasp. “Stop it!”

“Annie, what happened?” Her mother was staring at her as if she no longer recognized her.

Annie poured out the story. As Theo stood there, his eyes on the floor, blood running from the cut, she told them everything—about the note he’d written, the pups. She told them how he’d locked her in the dumbwaiter and set the birds on her at the boat wreck. How he’d pushed her into the marsh. The words rushed out of her in a torrent.

“Annie, you should have told me all this earlier.” Mariah pulled her daughter from the room, leaving Elliott to stanch the flow of blood from his son’s wound.

Both the gash in Annie’s calf and the cut in Theo’s forehead needed stitches, but there was no doctor on the island and simple bandages had to do. This left each of them with a permanent scar—Theo’s small, almost rakish, Annie’s longer but eventually fading more than the memory ever could.

Later that night, after the puppies were resettled in the stable with their mother and everyone had gone to bed, Annie was still awake, listening to the faintest sound of voices coming from the adults’ bedroom. They were speaking too softly for her to hear, so she crept out into the hallway to eavesdrop.

“Face facts, Elliott,” she heard her mother say. “There’s something seriously wrong with your son. A normal kid doesn’t do things like this.”

“He needs discipline, that’s all,” Elliott had retorted. “I’m finding a military school for him. No more coddling.”

Her mother didn’t relent. “He doesn’t need a military school. He needs a psychiatrist!”

“Stop exaggerating. You always exaggerate, and I hate it.”

The argument gathered steam, and Annie cried herself to sleep.

T
HEO GAZED DOWN FROM THE
turret. Annie stood on the beach, the ends of her hair whipping from beneath her red knit cap as she stared toward the cave. A rockslide a few years ago had blocked the entrance, but she still knew exactly where it was. He rubbed the thin white scar on his eyebrow.

He’d sworn to his father that he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone—that he’d only taken the pups to the beach that afternoon so he and Annie could play with them, but that he’d started watching TV and forgotten about them.

The military school he was then sent to was committed to reforming troubled boys, and his classmates survived the austerity by tormenting one another. His solitary nature, preoccupation with books, and status as a newcomer made him a target. He was forced into fights. Most of them he won, but not all. He didn’t much care either way. Regan, however, did, and she staged a hunger strike.

Her boarding school was the sister institution of his former school, and she wanted Theo back. At first Elliott had ignored her hunger strike, but when the school threatened to send her home for anorexia, he’d relented. Theo had gone back to his old school.

He turned away from the turret window and packed up his laptop along with a couple of yellow legal pads he was taking to the cottage. He’d never liked to write in an office. In Manhattan, he’d traded his home office for a library cubicle or a table at one of his favorite coffee shops. If Kenley was at work, he’d move to the kitchen or an easy chair in the living room. Kenley had never been able to understand it.

You’d be a lot more productive, Theo, if you’d stay in one spot.

Ironic words from a woman whose emotions could race from manic highs to paralyzing lows in the span of a day.

He wasn’t going to let Kenley haunt him today. Not after having his first restful sleep since he’d come to Peregrine Island. He had a career to rescue, and today he was going to write.

The Sanitarium
had been an unexpected blockbuster, a circumstance that hadn’t impressed his father. “It’s a bit difficult to explain to our friends why my son has such a grisly imagination. If it weren’t for your grandmother’s foolishness, you’d be working at the company, where you belong.”

His grandmother’s foolishness, as Elliott called it, was her decision to leave her estate to Theo, and, in his father’s estimation, take away Theo’s need to have a real occupation. In other words, go to work for Harp Industries.

The company had its roots in Elliott’s grandfather’s button manufacturing business but now made the titanium pins and bolts built of super alloys that helped hold together Black Hawk helicopters and stealth bombers. But Theo didn’t want to make pins and bolts. He wanted to write books where the boundaries between good and evil were blazingly clear. Where there was at least a chance that order would win out over chaos and madness. That’s what he’d done in
The Sanitarium,
his horror novel about a sinister mental hospital for the criminally insane with a room that transported its residents, including Dr. Quentin Pierce, a particularly sadistic serial killer, back through time.

Now he was working on the sequel to
The Sanitarium.
With the background already established from the first book and his intention to send Pierce back to nineteenth-century London, his task should have been easier. But he was having trouble, and he wasn’t sure why. He did know he’d have a better chance of breaking through his block at the cottage, and he was glad he’d been able to bully Annie into letting him work there.

Something rubbed against his ankles. He looked down to see that Hannibal had brought him a gift. A limp gray mouse carcass. He grimaced. “I know you’re doing it out of love, pal, but would you mind knocking it off?”

Hannibal purred and scratched his chin against Theo’s leg.

“Another day, another corpse,” Theo muttered. It was time to get to work.

Chapter Nine

T
HEO HAD LEFT HIS
R
ANGE
Rover for her at Harp House. Driving it over the treacherous road into town to meet the weekly supply boat should have been a lot more relaxing than driving her Kia, but she was too wound up from waking that morning and finding Theo sleeping next to her. She parked the car at the wharf and cheered herself up thinking about the real salad she’d fix herself for dinner.

Several dozen people waited at the wharf, most of them women. The disproportionate number of older residents testified to what Barbara had said about younger families leaving. Peregrine Island was beautiful during the summer, but who’d want to stay here year-round? Although today’s clear, sunny sky and bright light reflecting off the water had a particular kind of beauty.

She spotted Barbara and waved. Lisa, bundled up in an oversize coat that probably belonged to her husband, was talking with Judy Kester, whose bright red-orange hair was as loud and cheery as her laugh. Seeing the Bunco women together made Annie desperately miss her own friends.

Marie Cameron hurried over, looking as though she’d been sucking on lemons. “How are you doing out there by yourself?” she asked as dolefully as if Annie were in the final stages of a terminal illness.

“Fine. No problems.” Annie wasn’t mentioning last night’s break-in to anyone.

Marie leaned closer. She smelled of clove and mothballs. “You watch out for Theo. I know what I know, and anybody with eyes could see a squall was coming in. Regan wouldn’t have taken her boat out in that weather, not voluntarily.”

Fortunately, the converted lobster boat that served as the weekly supply ferry was pulling up to the wharf, and Annie didn’t have to respond. The boat held plastic crates filled with grocery bags, as well as a spool of electrical cable, roofing shingles, and a shiny white toilet. The islanders automatically formed a bucket brigade to unload the boat, then reloaded it in the same fashion with the mail, packages, and empty plastic crates from the previous shipment of groceries.