Shadow Creek (3 page)

“What for?”

“To tell them you’re safe. To let them know where you are, tell them where they can come and get you,” she added, trying not to put too noticeable an emphasis on this last point.

Nikki shook her head. “Nah. I’ll be all right.”

“We have roast beef and a little bit of smoked turkey,” Stuart said, his head buried deep inside the fridge.

“I’m kind of like a vegetarian,” Nikki told him.

Ellen had to sit on her hands to keep from grabbing the ungrateful girl around the throat.

“How does a grilled cheese sandwich sound?” Stuart asked pleasantly, although the slight twitch at his temples indicated he was losing patience with their unexpected guest as well.

“Sounds good,” Nikki said. “I guess you don’t get a lot of visitors.”

“Not a lot,” Ellen agreed. “We’re a little off the beaten track.”

“You’re telling me! You don’t get scared, living out here all by yourselves?”

“There are some cottages not too far down the way,” Stuart said.

“Far enough. Where’s your TV?” Nikki asked suddenly, her eyes once again scanning the large room.

“We’ve never watched a lot of TV,” Ellen told her. Probably another reason the grandchildren showed no inclination to visit.

“We have a radio,” Stuart offered as he removed a chunk of cheddar cheese from the fridge and retrieved two slices of bread from the bread box on the counter, then began buttering both sides of the bread. “And we can watch shows on the computer, if we really want.”

“I couldn’t live without a TV. I’d get so bored,” Nikki said. “So, you guys have a gun?”

“Why on earth would we have a gun?” Stuart asked.

“You know, for protection.”

“Why would we need protection?” Ellen asked.

“You obviously haven’t heard about those people who got murdered last week in the Berkshires,” Nikki said matter-of-factly.

The butter knife slipped from Stuart’s hand. It ricocheted
off the counter before dropping to the floor, where it bounced along the wide wooden planks before disappearing underneath the stove. “What people?” he and Ellen asked together, their voices overlapping.

“This old couple in the Berkshires,” Nikki said. “They lived alone, miles from anyone, just like you guys. Somebody butchered them.”

Ellen realized she was holding her breath.

“Hacked them to pieces,” Nikki continued. “It was pretty nasty. Police said their place looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood everywhere. It was in all the papers. You didn’t read about it?”

“No,” Ellen said, glancing at her husband with eyes that said, Get this girl out of my house now!

“Terrible thing. Apparently, whoever did it, they almost cut the poor guy’s head right off. Here, you want to read about it?” She grabbed her canvas bag from the floor and fished inside it, retrieving a piece of neatly folded newspaper. She unfolded it carefully and handed it to Ellen.

Ellen glanced at the lurid headline,
ELDERLY COUPLE SLAUGHTERED IN REMOTE CABIN
, and the accompanying grainy, black-and-white photograph of two body bags lying on stretchers, surrounded by grim-faced police. “Why would you be carrying something like this around?” she asked.

Nikki shrugged. “How’s that sandwich coming along, Stuart? You need some help?” She pushed herself off the sofa and walked into the kitchen.

What’s going on here? Ellen wondered, trying not to overreact. “I think we should call your parents,” she heard herself say, barely recognizing the tentativeness in her voice.

“Can’t. I’m not getting any reception on my cell, and your phone’s dead.”

There was a second’s silence.

“How do you know our phone is dead?” Ellen asked.

Nikki smiled sweetly. “Oh. Because my boyfriend cut the wires.” Then she marched purposefully to the front door and opened it.

A young man filled the doorway. As if on cue, a streak of lightning slashed across the sky, highlighting the coldness in his eyes, the cruel twist of his lips, and the polished blade of the machete in his hand.

“Hi, babe,” Nikki said with a giggle as the young man burst inside the cottage. “Meet tomorrow’s press clippings.”

Stuart lunged toward the drawer containing an assortment of kitchen knives, but despite years of regular exercise, he was easily overpowered by the merciless young man, whose machete ripped across Stuart’s wrinkled neck in one fluid, almost graceful, motion. “Ellen,” Ellen heard her husband whimper, the word gurgling from his open throat as he collapsed to the floor, the young man on top of him, slashing at his limp form repeatedly, Stuart’s once-vibrant eyes rolling dully toward the ceiling.

“Stuart!” Ellen screamed, spinning around in helpless circles, knowing there was nowhere for her to run. She felt the girl at her back, hostile hands in her hair, pulling her head back, exposing her jugular to the executioner’s blade. She felt something slash across her throat, watched in horror as a whoosh of blood shot from her body in an impressively wide arc.

Fifty years together, she was thinking. Such a long time. And then suddenly, without warning, it’s over.
This is way too violent to last very long
, she thought, recalling her husband’s earlier words regarding the storm.

She fell to her knees, saying a silent goodbye to her sons as she watched the room turn upside down. The last thing she saw before one last thrust of the knife closed her eyes once and for all was the warm and loving face of her mother.

B
RIANNE,” VALERIE CALLED FROM the foot of the stairs, “how are you doing up there?”

No answer.

“Brianne,” she called a second time. “It’s almost eleven o’clock. Your father will be here any minute.”

Still no answer. Not that Val was surprised. Her daughter rarely answered until at least her third try.

“Brianne,” she dutifully obliged, “how are you coming along with the packing?”

The sound of a door opening, agitated footsteps in the upstairs hallway, a blur of shoulder-length brown hair and long, lean legs, the shock of a lacy black thong and matching push-up bra alternating with layers of bare skin, the sight of a pair of balled fists resting with familiar impatience on slender
hips. “I’d be coming along fine if you’d stop interrupting me.” Brianne’s voice tumbled down the green-carpeted steps, almost knocking Valerie over with the force of their casual disdain.

“You’re not even dressed,” Valerie sputtered. “Your father …”

“… will be late,” her daughter said with the kind of rude certainty that only sixteen-year-old girls seemed to possess. “He’s always late.”

“It’s a long drive,” Valerie argued. “He said he wanted to get there before dinner.”

But Brianne had already disappeared from the top of the stairs. Seconds later, Valerie heard her daughter’s bedroom door slam shut. “She’s not even dressed,” she whispered to the eggshell-colored walls. Which meant she probably hadn’t started packing, either. “Great. That’s great.” Which meant she’d have to entertain her soon-to-be ex-husband and his new fiancée until their daughter was ready. Which just might work to her advantage, she thought, since lately Evan had been hinting that things weren’t going all that well with darling Jennifer, and that he might have made the biggest mistake of his life in letting Valerie go.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d made that particular mistake, Val thought, walking to the front door of her modern glass and brick Park Slope home and opening it, looking up and down the fashionable Brooklyn street for signs of Evan’s approaching car. He’d left her once before, running off with one of her bridesmaids just days before their wedding. Six weeks later he was back, full of abject apologies, and begging her to give him another chance. The girl meant nothing to him, he’d sworn up and down. It was just a case of raw nerves and cold feet. “I’ll never be that stupid again,” he’d said.

Except, of course, he was.

“You’re all the woman I’ll ever need,” he’d told her.

Except, of course, she wasn’t.

In their eighteen years together, Val suspected at least a dozen affairs. She’d turned a blind eye to all of them, somehow managing to convince herself that he was telling the truth whenever he called to say he’d be working late, or that an urgent meeting had forced him to cancel their scheduled lunch. She’d even insisted it was no big deal to concerned friends when they told her they’d seen Evan at a popular Manhattan restaurant, nuzzling the neck of a young brunette. You know Evan, she’d say with a confident laugh. He’s just a big flirt. It doesn’t mean anything.

She’d said it so many times, she’d almost come to believe it.

Almost.

And then she’d come home one afternoon, tired and depressed after a day of dealing with her mother, who stubbornly continued to resist dealing with her drinking problem, to find Evan in bed with the young woman he’d recently hired to design a new ad campaign for his string of trendy boutique hotels, the girl’s toned and shapely legs lifted high into the air above his broad shoulders, both of them totally oblivious to everything but their own impressive gymnastics, and her blind eye was forced wide open once and for all.

Even then, it had been his choice to leave.

I should hate him, Val thought.

And yet, the awful, unforgivable truth was that she didn’t hate him. The awful, even more unforgivable truth was that she still loved him, that she was still praying he’d come to his senses, as he had after running off only days before their wedding, and come back to her.

What’s wrong with me?

It’s my own damn fault, she’d chastised herself now. I knew
what he was like when I married him. I knew from the first minute I laid eyes on him in the lobby of that small chalet in Switzerland, tanned and fit and holding court in front of a roaring fire, surrounded by adoring ski bunnies, that he was trouble. Exactly the kind of man she’d spent her entire twenty-one years up to that point trying to avoid, a man of grand gestures and small cruelties, as charming as he was unsubtle. She knew the type well, having been raised by just such a man.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she’d told her friends, the same words her mother had said to her.

Well, maybe it didn’t mean anything to men like her father, men like Evan, Val understood, but it meant the world to the women who loved them.

And, ultimately, where did all that fortitude and forbearance leave them?

It left them nowhere.

They got dumped anyway.

Her friends had breathed a collective sigh of relief at Evan’s departure. “He’s a moron,” her closest friend, Melissa, had pronounced. “He doesn’t deserve you,” their mutual friend, James, had agreed. “Believe me, you’re better off.”

Her mother had been too drunk to say anything.

Val could still picture the stricken look on her mother’s face after her father had announced he was leaving her for one of his much younger conquests. “It doesn’t mean anything. He’ll be back,” her mother had assured Valerie and her younger sister, Allison. But he never did come back, eventually marrying again and fathering two more children, both girls, daughters to replace the ones he’d so easily abandoned. Meanwhile Val’s mother had gradually morphed from a bright, engaging woman into a joyless and bitter old crone whose main source of comfort was a bottle. Is that what Val wanted for Brianne?

“Brianne, do you need some help?” Val called out now, shutting the front door on the oppressive July heat and returning to the foot of the stairs.

Evan was giving her pretty much everything she asked for in the divorce—the house, the white Lexus SUV, substantial alimony, more than generous child support. Within days of moving out of their large home in Brooklyn, he’d settled into Jennifer’s small condo in Manhattan, seemingly none the worse for wear.

I should hate him, Val thought again.

Except that you don’t stop loving someone you’ve loved almost half your life just because they treat you badly, she’d discovered, regardless of whether or not you should. Still, it wasn’t fair that a woman celebrating her fortieth birthday would be pining over a man who’d openly betrayed her, as if she were a lovesick teenager crying for the one who got away.

Although he wasn’t just any man. He was her husband of almost two decades, her husband for another month at least, until their divorce was final, despite the fact he was already engaged to somebody else. He was the love of her life, a man she’d traversed the globe with repeatedly, helicopter skiing with him in the Swiss Alps, white-water rafting with him in Colorado, trekking with him to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. “The only woman who can keep up with me,” he’d said … how many times?

“The only woman I’ve ever really loved.”

It had been while they were hiking in the Adirondacks that she had suddenly dropped to her knees and surprised them both by proposing. “What the hell,” he’d proclaimed with a laugh. “It’ll be an adventure.”

An adventure it had certainly been, Val thought now, trying—and failing—not to succumb to nostalgia. Those first
few years before Brianne was born had been such a heady rush that it had been relatively easy to overlook Evan’s wandering eye, to tell herself that she was imagining things, and when that proved impossible, to hold herself at least partly responsible for his actions, to urge herself to try harder, be more desirable, more available, more … all the things she obviously wasn’t, all the while reminding herself that nothing mattered except that she was the one he really loved, and that no matter how far or how often he strayed, he would always come back to her.

Evan wasn’t her father.

She wasn’t her mother.

Yet Val had been devastated to realize that she’d fallen into the same trap as her mother after all, which made her all the more determined to react differently, to not give up, and to fight for her man with every ounce of her being. She hadn’t even allowed her pregnancy to slow her down, indulging Evan’s combined love of travel and danger by continuing to chase him down the steepest slopes and up the highest peaks. She’d missed her daughter’s first birthday so that she could accompany him to the Himalayas, justifying the trip by rationalizing that her husband came first, that a year-old child couldn’t differentiate one day from the next, and that they’d celebrate Brianne’s birthday when they got home. She even wrote an article about their trip that was subsequently published in the travel section of the
New York Times
.