Findings (22 page)

“Because you’re hoping I won’t kill you. Maybe I’ll try to buy you off with part of the treasure. And maybe you’ll let me do that, if I promise not to kill him.” She reached out a hand and shoved Joe, hard. With his feet hobbled, he couldn’t stop himself from toppling. It broke Faye’s heart to watch him fall, but then she noticed something. Sprawled as he was, with his hands and feet under him, he was freer to struggle with his bonds. And his position put Ms. Slater a slight disadvantage.

With Joe on the ground and Faye standing up, the librarian couldn’t keep them both in a single field of vision. To look from one prisoner to another, she had to shift her eyes slightly. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Faye stuck out a foot to the right and shifted her weight in that direction, widening the gap between her and Joe. Making it harder for Ms. Slater to look at Joe made it slightly easier for him to work at freeing himself.

“No, I don’t have the magic field notebook that tells me the key to your sampling plan. So I don’t know the exact spot you found Bachelder’s flask. But I’ve finally got something better than a bunch of field notes that maybe, just maybe, will point me to the spot where you dug up that flask. I’ve got you. Start digging.”

Faye reflected that Ms. Slater must think she was a supernaturally good archaeologist, if she expected her to walk straight to an excavation she’d dug and backfilled years ago. She had only a general idea of where it was, but it was certainly near the spot where she’d found the emerald a few days before. No way was she going to dig there and risk giving Ms. Slater what she wanted. Not while Joe continued to unobtrusively stretch his bonds.

An inspired idea struck her. She would lead Chip and Ms. Slater to the messy pit that Nita and Wayland had left behind. It was near enough to the true location to be realistic, and someone had obviously been excavating there. Her captor was surely smart enough to know the general vicinity of Bachelder’s treasure, so it was important that the decoy spot be plausible. Otherwise, Faye would have taken this expedition to a spot right on the waterfront and hoped that a passing fisherman would notice her distress.

Joe followed along, but his hobbles caused him to lag behind. Faye could see him taking slow strides, but long ones. He was stretching that tape with every step. If she could just give him a chance to break free, they could…what? She knew she didn’t want Joe to rush a murderous woman with a gun. Still, if he could break those bonds, the two of them would be that much freer to exploit an opportunity for escape. She quickened her pace, trying to force Ms. Slater to divide her attention between two captives who stood slightly farther apart with every step.

Chip was another factor to consider. He was no idiot—Liz had been right when she bragged on her boy’s smarts. He was steering a path slightly further away from Faye and Joe than necessary, and to their right. Faye could tell he was trying to position himself to keep them both within eyeshot at the same time. At least his hands were empty of weapons. Still, he was nearly a match for Joe in size, and he’d been proven capable of murderous violence. Chip bore watching.

Standing on the lip of the muddy hole Nita and Wayland had left behind, Faye took the shovel Ms. Slater had forced her to carry and carved a bite of dirt from the bottom of the hole. The rhythmic digging tranquilized her, as it always did, and it focused her thoughts. If she could just get her enemy to stand beside her and look down, the woman’s balance would be thrown ever so slightly forward, and her focus would shift away from her gun. Faye’s notion of what she would do at that point was fuzzy, but it might be her only chance to do anything at all.

It was clear that she’d have to find a way to neutralize the gun. Joe would be stretched to his limit by taking on Chip, one-on-one, especially if his hands and feet were still severely constrained. Joe was big, strong and fit, so he might be able to pull it off. Unfortunately, Chip was also big, strong, and fit, and he was several years younger than Joe. Was there a significant difference in physical prowess between a man who was twenty-two and another who was twenty-nine? She didn’t know. Probably not, but this situation was critical enough that having even a small edge might give their captors the ability to take their lives.

She sneaked a look over her shoulder at Joe, without having any hope that he’d already worked himself free. He opened his hand a millimeter to give her a look at the piece of flint that it held, and she let a little hope take hold. Ms. Slater might have been trying to humiliate Joe when she shoved him to the ground, but she had accomplished something else. When his hands were trapped under him, his body had shielded them from view. He’d used that chance to work open the leather pouch that always hung at his waist…and that pouch was always brim-full of deadly weapons.

She was dead-certain that Joe had already used the blade in his hand to slice through the tape binding his hands. Nothing could be done about his feet without alerting Chip and Ms. Slater, but a fair fight between Joe and Chip might now be possible. Chip would have the use of his feet, but Joe had a weapon that could slice Chip right open, and he knew precisely how to use it. Faye just needed to give him the opportunity.

She raised the shovel higher than strictly necessary and paused, taking aim at a target that just might save them.

“Would you get on with it?” Ms. Slater barked. “I know you dig faster than this when you’re on the clock.”

Faye thrust the shovel down hard into a tree root, and she got what she wanted--the clacking sound of metal on wood. Peering down, she asked, “Is that a wooden box?”

Ms. Slater, hearing what she had expected to hear, stooped forward slightly for a look at her hoped-for treasure chest. There was no doubt that Joe would see this opportunity and realize that Faye was about to take it.

Afterward, Faye was amazed how clearly she could recall the next seconds. She could visualize the sudden and unexpected reactions of three other people with so much detail that her memories felt like movies, shot from above. It was as if she could look down and see how all four of them were reacting to unforeseen events—Ms. Slater, Joe, Chip, and even herself.

Their actions intertwined like a demented minuet. Faye and Ms. Slater, facing each other, bowed to peer into the pit. Joe leapt in Chip’s direction. The younger man’s arm rose gracefully in front of him to shoulder height.

And then all hell erupted.

That brief glance between Faye and Joe had communicated everything they needed to coordinate their assault. Faye would distract Ms. Slater, then attack, hoping to get control of the gun. In the hubbub, Joe would take on Chip.

The flaw in this plan was to presume that when Joe charged Chip, the younger man would defend himself.

Chapter Twenty-five

When Faye remembered those moments…when she could no longer avoid remembering those moments…she saw Ms. Slater lean forward slightly over the hole to see what Faye had found, and she saw herself yank the shovel out handle-first, aiming for the librarian’s throat. Perhaps things would have gone differently if she’d only connected with that throat. Instead, the handle poked hard in Ms. Slater’s upper chest—hard enough to knock her on the ground, but not nearly hard enough to eliminate the woman as a danger.

Joe, in a single motion, had lifted himself from the ground and charged Chip. He needed to cover a fair distance to reach Chip, which cost him the element of surprise, but he still might have been able to pull it off through sheer athletic prowess. The odds should have been at least even—one well-muscled man beating the hell out of another well-muscled man—but neither Faye nor Joe had even considered that Chip might be armed. He just didn’t seem subtle enough to have let the tiny little handgun in his pocket remain a secret until needed.

He’d always given the impression of being a gregarious and affable young man—intelligent, maybe, but not terribly shrewd. Today, Faye had learned that he had a serious violent streak. And, at this terrible moment, she’d been reminded of what Liz had been telling her for years. The boy was smart.

Joe should have been dead in an instant, launching himself at nearly point-blank range toward a man with a gun, but that instant passed, because Chip had another target in mind. His arm swung to the left, so that he could take aim on Faye, and Joe saw it happen.

Why had Chip done that? Why would he have wanted to shoot her, rather than taking out the more immediate threat?

Faye now saw the answer as clearly as she saw the intricate moves of their desperate dance. Chip hadn’t committed all his grievous sins out of a lust for treasure, though the promise of treasure was what had brought him to the rare book room in the first place. Chip had done burglary and kidnapping, and he’d done murder twice, because he loved the woman that Faye was trying to beat into unconsciousness.

Chip had seen that he only had time for a single shot before Joe was on him, and he had chosen to use it on Faye, because she was trying to hurt the woman he loved.

How could Chip have possibly known that Joe would make the same choice?

Joe had passed up the opportunity to rush Chip while the gun was pointed elsewhere, because he couldn’t take the chance that he’d be too late to stop a bullet from hitting Faye. Instead, he had called Faye’s name in an effort to warn her, prompting her to take the dangerous risk of turning away from a woman with a gun. This meant that she saw it happen. She would never forget that she saw it happen.

Joe had twisted around to call out to her and, at the same time, he had launched himself sideways, putting himself between Faye and a loaded gun. He was quick—Joe had always been quick—so he was in the air, acting as a human shield, when Chip pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him dead-center in the middle of his back.

At this point, it no longer mattered to Faye that there were two loaded firearms pointed in her direction. Her shovel had hit the ground as she fled to Joe’s side.

She’d screamed, “There’s no treasure! It’s not here. It hasn’t been here in a long, long time!” then she’d leaned down and put a trembling hand on the side of Joe’s throat, looking for a pulse.

Dropping to the dirt beside him, she’d dropped her wet face into her hands and shrieked, “You’ve killed him. You killed him for nothing, because Bachelder took everything away, the first chance he got. Why would you think he didn’t? Greed, that’s why. You wanted that gold and those emeralds so bad, it never occurred to you that it made no sense for them to be here.”

Her sobbing had echoed across Joyeuse Island as she sat, rocking back and forth, waiting for a bullet or two to come and take her out of her misery.

***

The bullet came. She couldn’t tell where it struck her. She just sensed the physical shock of a tremendous collision, followed by pain radiating through the entire upper left quadrant of her torso. She couldn’t keep her body upright any more, so she let herself drop down beside Joe.

She had a clear sense that consciousness was ebbing, and an equally clear sense that she had control over that. She could succumb to shock, and let the fear and rage and anger go. She could die in peace. Or she could try to live.

She decided in favor of living, because Joe needed her. He needed her bad.

She had lied about the weak, thready pulse she’d felt in the hollow beneath his jaw. If fortune smiled, then Chip would believe her, and he would fail to walk over and put a bullet through Joe’s head.

It was possible. He had failed to make sure Douglass was dead after he’d beaten the life out of him—after he’d beaten almost all the life out of him. And he’d walked away from Wally without taking the time to be certain he was dead. In both cases, he’d been right in the end. He had indeed inflicted injuries that were fatal. But for whatever reason—squeamishness, denial, or the simple need to get away before he was caught—Chip had walked away without making sure his victims were really gone.

It was possible that her lie had convinced him that he had no need to finish Joe off. Now she needed to convince him that one bullet had been enough to kill Faye, too.

Maybe it had. A bullet in the upper left part of her body might have passed through her heart or her lungs or any one of the huge vessels transporting blood to and from those organs. She didn’t know how badly she was hurt, but she had fallen with her chin tucked down toward her chest, and she didn’t see blood spurting with every heartbeat. That was the most hopeful thing she could think of at the moment. If she lay still and tried to look like someone who’d been shot through the heart, maybe Chip would go away so she could save Joe—though how she might manage that was anybody’s guess.

“You’re insane!” Faye heard Ms. Slater scramble to her feet. “Why do you keep killing people? I never said to kill anybody. Now…God. I don’t know whether it’s safe to go home. I don’t know whether there are witnesses out there who saw us with these people. I can’t…”

“But we were going to go away together. It doesn’t matter whether anybody thinks we killed them.”

“Idiot. We were going to go away with the treasure. With Bachelder’s necklace and the Confederate gold, we could have gone anywhere. Now…I don’t have enough money to get us out of the country. Do you?” She continued to back away from him.

“None of that matters. Not if we’re together. Elizabeth…”

Faye had tried to keep both eyes half-open. She imagined that a hooded, blank gaze would make her look good and dead. Also, it gave her just a tiny sliver of vision. She couldn’t see much, but she sensed that her adversaries were distracted. She needed to find a way to exploit that.

Chip took a step, as if to follow Ms. Slater. Then Faye saw her do what Chip had done…and what Faye had done, and what Joe had done. She acted instinctively to save the person closest to her heart.

Herself.

The gun rose from her side. She aimed it squarely at her young lover’s heart. “Don’t take another step. I’m getting out of here, and you’re not. I can make the police believe that you kidnapped me from the library when you snatched these two. I can make them believe you killed the other two men, because you did. I am not going to lose everything because of you.”

She scuttled backward and disappeared down the path that led to the dock…and to Joe’s john boat, the vessel that held Joe’s only hope for life. Faye had been doing a mental inventory of her fleet of watercraft, and it told her that the
Gopher
was at Liz’s marina and her skiff was at Emma’s house. If she was going to get Joe to shore, she needed that john boat. Even worse, Chip had taken both their cell phones, and they were on that boat. If it sped toward shore without her, she’d have no way to call for help.

Faye watched Ms. Slater retreat until she was out of sight then waited until Chip disappeared, too, in hot pursuit. Then Faye tottered to her feet, pausing just long enough to say, “I’m coming back to you, Joe. And I’ll bring help.”

Chip and his faithless lover had a head start on her, and they weren’t losing blood with every step, but Faye had a single advantage. She was on her home turf.

***

The path back to the dock wasn’t hard to follow. Ms. Slater and Chip would have no trouble getting back to the boat, so Faye couldn’t hope to gain any time because they’d gotten lost. There was an even more serious obstacle to Faye’s hopes of stopping them. She needed to get to the house before she went to the dock, if she had any hope of keeping that lifesaving john boat from leaving the island.

There was another path that led to the house, and it was an easy walk from there to the dock—fewer roots to trip over than Chip and Elizabeth Slater would encounter, and fewer holes to break an ankle in, too. Faye was grateful for that advantage, but it hardly outweighed her severe disadvantages. She was badly wounded, and she needed to spend a few critical seconds in the house. She forced herself to move, and she found that she could still run.

It was an odd sensation, moving so quickly, when she sensed that each step might sap the last ergs of energy from her battered body. These next few minutes would be all-or-nothing. She would move at top speed, or she would fall down and never get back up. She plunged down the narrow path, wondering what she would do if she arrived too late.

When she burst from the wooded path into the peaceful clearing that surrounded her home, Faye searched for the welcome feeling of homecoming that this place always brought her, but it was gone. And it would always be gone if she lost Joe.

She stumbled into the house, energy ebbing, and bypassed her own room. The thing she needed—the thing she had to have—was hiding in Joe’s room. She prayed that it would be easy to find.

***

It wasn’t in the drawer in Joe’s bedside table. It wasn’t in the cedar chest at the foot of his bed where he stored his clothes and his moccasins and the leather he used to make them. It wasn’t behind the perforated tin door that kept the dried berries and meat stored in his pie safe well-ventilated. Where would Joe have hidden the handgun that Liz gave him?

Please tell me that you didn’t trash it.
Faye had never realized that she talked constantly to Joe, even when he wasn’t there.
I know you don’t trust guns and you think they smell funny, but you wouldn’t have dumped something that cost Liz a lot of money. Where did you put it?

If she were Joe, she could have smelled it. She could have sensed its presence disturbing the peace of the room. But she wasn’t Joe.

Where would he put something with an odor that disturbed him?

A breeze wafted into the room and brought an idea to Faye. Joe’s window was fitted with a double set of shutters. Outside, the shutters were crafted of solid wood to shield the window from the onslaught of hurricanes. These shutters were folded back to expose almost all of the window opening. Inside the room, the window was fitted with louvered shutters that let in air, but kept the room cool by filtering the sunlight. These shutters were closed.

Faye rushed to the window and folded back the louvered shutters. There, on a windowsill made broad by the house’s thick masonry walls, rested Liz’s weapon, tucked out of sight behind the folded-back outer shutters. Faye prayed that she wouldn’t be required to use it on Liz’s son.

***

Faye was too late. And Chip was too late, too.

As she stumbled from the house to the dock, trusting her body to find reserves of strength that probably didn’t exist, she heard the john boat’s motor start. At that moment, Chip burst out of the woods. When he saw Ms. Slater backing the boat away from the dock, he kept sprinting straight into the water, his gun still in his hand. It was as if he thought he could run right across the Gulf of Mexico, if that’s what he had to do to reach the woman he loved.

He could have reached her, and they could have escaped together. The boat had hardly traveled ten feet from the dock. He could have plunged through the water and lifted himself over the gunwale before the boat picked up enough speed to leave him in its wake. Unfortunately for Chip, Elizabeth Slater had already decided that her chances of escape were better without him. And she had already shown that her own safety far outweighed any concern for Chip’s wellbeing, and probably anyone else’s.

The handgun was off her lap in an instant. Her hand was steady as she raised it and aimed. Despite everything he had done, Faye felt a sharp stab of pity for the man as he watched the woman he loved fire a bullet into his forehead.

Chip disappeared beneath the water and Ms. Slater laid the gun back in her lap so that she could maneuver the boat away from the dock, away from Joyeuse Island, and away from the victims of her venality. At that moment, Faye knew that Joe couldn’t be saved, not even if she ran clear across the Gulf of Mexico. Without that boat, and without the cell phones it carried, there was no way to get help to him in time.

She stood there with a gun in her hand and wished Elizabeth Slater dead. Of its own volition, her hand rose in front of her, taking aim with Liz’s handgun. She found herself quite willing to shoot another human being because, second by second, that human being was killing the love of her life. If she squeezed the trigger right now, before the john boat was throttled up to full speed and pointed at the mainland, there was a glimmer of a chance that she could swim out to it and go fetch Joe a doctor.

Elizabeth Slater saw her take aim and raised her own handgun, taking aim. Faye was glad. If she succeeded in killing Ms. Slater before the woman got her weapon steadied enough to fire it, fine. If she didn’t then maybe the woman would kill Faye, and this nightmare would be over.

Faye pulled the trigger.

The bullet didn’t tear into Ms. Slater’s head or her chest or her belly. It did something worse than that. It hit the john boat’s gas tank.

The explosion was deafening.

The water rippled with the concussion, then its surface was dimpled by bits of boat and motor, as they dropped out of the air. If any large chunks of boat still existed, Faye presumed they had gone to the bottom of the channel. She presumed that Ms. Slater had gone there, too.