So Pretty It Hurts (21 page)

I was just in time to see Sherrie stagger into church, and then the doors were closed behind her. It was clear that I’d missed all the arrivals—and the casket—while I was on my stakeout. I’d have to wait until the end to see who had showed. I held my position on the fringe of the crowd. Temperature-wise, it was only in the midthirties, and the wind had started to kick up, whipping around everyone’s hair. Even though I’d worn hiking boots and several pairs of socks, it wasn’t long before I was doing the foot shuffle myself.

The service lasted only about thirty minutes, and as soon as the doors were flung open, the crowd sounds swelled. Cameras began to click and TV commentators droned into their mikes. As you’d expect, Sherrie was one of the first to exit, along with her prop-her-uppers, followed by a cluster of people who were obviously friends and relatives. Scott emerged next, along with Christian, Cap, and Whitney, clutching Cap’s arm. So she was in town after all. She’d opted for a black mink for the occasion and her blond hair was brushed back, held in place by what seemed to be a matching mink headband.

And then, to a crescendo of murmurs from the crowd, came Tommy and Tory, holding hands. It looked as if Tory hadn’t let the fact that she thought Tommy was a loser and an asshole get in the way of some red-carpet-style shots that would be seen around the world. He was in tight black jeans and a black suit jacket, no overcoat. His ego clearly generated enough heat to keep his body warm in near-freezing conditions. Tory was wearing skinny, skinny black pants with some sort of tabs on the calves, black stilettos, and a black coat that seemed to be made of a techno fabric. While she descended the stairs, she flipped the hood up, revealing the thick black fur that lined the coat. Tommy might not care about the weather, but Tory was going for a downtown–meets–Doctor Zhivago effect.

Jane was one of the last to appear, followed by a spurt of people who looked like area residents.

No Richard, interestingly. And no casket either, I suddenly realized. That actually should have been the first thing out the door. Just as I was contemplating what was going on, I overheard a TV sound guy explain to someone that there was going to be no burial. It seemed as if Devon was going to be cremated. Maybe her ashes were going to be dropped from a plane over Seventh Avenue.

And then all of a sudden, I was staring right at Thornwell. He’d been tucked away in a throng of reporters but was visible now as the crowd had begun to disperse. I could have sworn he stared right at me. Had I been tagged? I wondered anxiously. But then he jerked his head to the left to say something casually to the man next to him and didn’t glance back in my direction. I exhaled in relief. Thornwell had definitely looked right at me, but clearly hadn’t realized who it was in the baseball cap, sunglasses, and butt-ugly parka.

Since there’d be no mad dash to the cemetery, I headed back to Sherrie’s. There were more cars lined along the street now, probably visitors at her house, and I ended up parking farther away than last time. But it didn’t matter. In the next half hour, no one of note came in or out of the house. There was no Passat in sight and no Beemer.

At three twenty I took off. I had promised myself I’d arrive at the barn a half hour early as a precaution. One thing I knew for sure. If a Passat pulled up, I was going to beat a hasty retreat. The fact that Richard had not attended the funeral indicated he’d come to Pine Grove not to mourn Devon but to discuss something with Sherrie. And if he were the person behind Devon’s death and Sherrie’s incrimination of me, I certainly didn’t want to be chatting with him at dusk on a deserted country road.

I found the barn again easily. Parking my car along the side of the road was going to be a hazard to anyone driving by this late; I realized that my only alternative was to pull into the short drive that led up to the double doors of the barn. I backed in so that it would be easy for me to peel out if necessary.

I stepped out of the car and surveyed the area. There was an outdoor security light shining already from the house on the rise, but no lights on yet at the farmhouse down the road. The sun hung low in the sky, shining dispiritedly. I glanced down at the ground. It was frozen hard, but there was one small area where I could make out the edge of a tire print. Had the person who’d texted me parked here earlier, checking out the location?

Back in the car, I took two unenthusiastic bites of the sandwich I hadn’t finished earlier and tried to stay calm. I had to hope that the person coming really wanted to help me. Regardless of who drove up, I wasn’t going to emerge from my car. I’d insist that we talk from our windows, and I’d keep the motor running. I just couldn’t let my guard down for a second when he—or she—arrived.

At ten to four, a car headed down the road from the south, the direction I’d come from, and my heart skipped. But the driver kept on without even glancing my way. The next ten minutes passed torturously slow. And then ten more minutes went by. And ten more. Someone, it seemed, had decided to play a nasty little game with me.

I stepped out of the car again and scanned my surroundings. There was absolutely no one in sight. Maybe the person I was supposed to rendezvous with had sent an updated message to me, not realizing that I had no service here.

I glanced back at the barn and noticed for the first time that one of the double doors was slightly ajar. The wooden bolt that was used to fasten it closed had been slipped over into its sling. I leaned into the car, grabbed the flashlight I’d brought with me, and walked up to the barn. After glancing instinctively behind me, I grabbed the wooden bolt. As I slowly pulled the door open, it let out a long, sad creak. The last rays of daylight reached a foot or two into the barn, but most of the interior was pitch-black. I swept the beam of the flashlight over the insides. Stacks and stacks of hay filled the back half of the barn. And that was it.

Was I meant to find a message in here? I stepped a couple of feet inside and trained my light over every surface. Nothing. Pulling my BlackBerry from my jacket pocket, I reread the message. It had clearly stated that the person would meet me here. It was time to get the hell out of Pine Grove.

And then I thought I heard something. Toward the back of the barn. I froze for a second. No, now the sound was coming from along the side of the barn,
outside
. I spun around, a wave of fear crashing over me. As I faced the door, I saw it slam shut with a wallop.

“Hey,” I yelled. Except for the light from my flashlight, I was in total darkness. “Who’s there?”

There was no reply. Just the sound of the wooden bolt being slid into place.

Chapter 20

I
dashed to the door, guided by the flashlight, and yanked. Nothing gave.

“Hey,” I yelled again.

For a split second I thought that the farmer had locked the door, making his rounds before dark. But that stupid idea morphed almost instantly into the truth: I had been tricked—and trapped on purpose. My heart began to pound so hard I could feel it in my ears.

I peered through a crack in the barn door, but all I could spot was a sliver of my rental car. Where had the person
come
from? If there’d been a car, I would have heard it. If he had arrived by foot along the road or the field, surely I would have seen him—I had only been inside for a few seconds.

Then suddenly there were footsteps, scurrying along the north side of the barn. I hurried over and peered through a crack in the planks. I saw a flash of dark coat, so close I could have almost touched it. The person continued, running along the edge of the barn toward the back, but the endless stacks of hay blocked my view down there. The footsteps receded. Whoever had done this
had
come by foot apparently—at least part of the way—and had now taken off.

I stuffed my hand in my coat pocket to grab my BlackBerry and then remembered, panic-stricken, that it got no service here. I checked the screen anyway, just to be sure I hadn’t managed to pick up a signal somehow, but it was dead.

I tried the door again, yanking as hard as I could, but I could see there was no way to open it. Remembering all the old farm tools on the walls of Scott’s barn upstate, I trained the beam of the flashlight over these walls; there was nothing like that, only a rusted oil can sitting on a small shelf. I checked for another entrance. Nothing.

I leaned closer to the door, pressed my mouth against one of the gaps in the wood, and yelled, “Help!” seven or eight times, hoping the person who lived in the house on the hill might hear. I saw through the crack that it was almost dark. I realized the chance of someone being out now was next to nil.

I was starting to feel nearly freaked with fear. No one who cared about me knew that I’d come to the barn, and even if Beau became concerned by late tonight and reported my disappearance to the police here, they’d be looking for my Jeep, not a rented Toyota. I would have to count on the fact that the homeowner up the hill or the farmer who owned the barn would begin to wonder what the hell my car was doing out in front and investigate.

But what if they
didn’t
? I paced a small section of the barn, the beam of my flashlight twitching crazily. I willed myself to be calm. I had to figure a way out of this.

I did a few jumping jacks, just to keep the cold at bay, and then perched on a haystack. The straw pricked through my jeans uncomfortably, but still, sitting down seemed to relax me a little. The good news, I realized, was that I probably wouldn’t freeze to death. It was going to be below freezing tonight, but there was tons of hay for me to snuggle into. Wasn’t that how little calves and lambs stayed warm? I had a candy bar in my pocket, too, and that would stave off any serious hunger pains.

Though I was desperate to find a way out, I also wanted to know who had done this to me. I tried to hash through everything in my mind. Though I had driven out to the barn a half hour early as a safeguard, the person who had lured me here had probably come out even earlier and hidden nearby, lying in wait. He or she must have left the barn door open, banking on the fact that when I decided I’d been stood up, curiosity would have compelled me to take a quick look inside before leaving. As soon as he saw me enter the barn, he must have sprung forward and slammed the door shut.

So who was it? Richard? He could have easily guessed I’d be coming to Pine Grove and laid the trap.

But there were others I’d recently provoked as well: Jane, by revealing that I knew of her book deal and that she had probably lied about Cap and Devon; Christian, by implying there might be trouble with the modeling agency.

As my mind danced around the houseguests, a troubling thought began to surface. What if the person came back? What if the idea wasn’t simply to leave me here to freeze my ass off, but to return and attack me under cover of darkness? I had to get out.

I thrust my hand in my pocket and grabbed my BlackBerry again. Last winter, during a trip to West Virginia for a freelance article, I’d ended up in a similar situation with my cell service, but during the night I must have picked up a faint signal because a few e-mails had come through. Just in case this same phenomenon happened here, I typed an SOS to Beau with copies to Jessie and Landon, explaining my dilemma and giving not only my location but also a description of the rental car. Though Landon only checked his e-mail about once a day, Beau looked at his frequently and Jessie was good for every minute and a half.

Once again I trained the beam of my flashlight over the barn walls. I was looking for either a loose piece of wood I could use as a crowbar or a way out. But I didn’t see a thing. I squeezed my forehead with one hand, trying to make my brain work better.
Barns
. What did I know about them? When I was a little girl, my father took my brothers and me to a working farm for a weekend, where we fed newborn calves with bottles and attempted to milk the cows. I remembered grimy windows in the barn there—not like in Scott’s big barn, where most of the windows had all been added after the fact, but one or two cut in a wall to let light stream in as the farmer worked. This barn didn’t seem to have any. Maybe because it had always been for storage. Or for animals to sleep in.

There might, however, be a window at the far end, blocked by the hay. Or even a back door. The killer might have assumed I would never guess it was there with all the hay. But if it was, I needed to find it.

I bounced the light over the bales of hay. They took up almost the entire rear half of the barn. I realized that the only way to reach the back would be to shift the bales, one by freaking one.

The bales weren’t exactly light, but I could tell right away that moving them would be doable. I wedged the flashlight into some hay, so that it was pointed toward the back, and quickly chucked a few of the top bales out of the way. Before too long, I’d worked my way toward the back. I grabbed the flashlight again and ran it over the top of the wall. As I did, I heard something scurry off on tiny feet. Great. Nothing like a few rodents to up the terror factor.

But there
was
no way out, from what I could see. My heart sank. How, I wondered frantically, could there not be a door in the back? If the barn had once been used for cows, there would have had to be an exit to the field. The word
pigs
suddenly flashed in my mind. There had been pigs, too, at the farm we’d visited with my father, a separate barn for them. As I pictured them in my mind—huge and pink with their funny snouts and woeful eyes—I remembered something. The pig door. It was the hatch they used to move the animals from the barn to the outdoor pen. Maybe this barn had one at the bottom of the back wall.

I started to work again, heaving bales of hay from the back row out of the way. Underneath my jacket I could feel my body growing sweaty from exertion.

And then, as I worked, I heard another sound. I froze. It wasn’t scurrying this time but someone moving outside in the dark, to my right, along the north edge of the barn again. Shit, I realized. The person was still out there. Was he planning to come inside now?

The sound stopped, but I could sense where the person was—about halfway down. His body was like a force field I could feel. What was he doing? I wondered desperately. Then there was a noise again, the sound of a coat shifting, and then something thick and liquidy being splashed on the barn. Some of it, I could tell, spattered inside. Omigod, I thought, what was going on?

A second later I knew. A wisp of smoke snaked into the barn, and my nostrils were filled with the pungent smell of wood burning. The freaking barn was on fire! The breath froze in my chest, and my eyes pricked with tears.

I swung around and frantically hurled another bale out of the way, and then another. My hands were trembling now, but I kept going. Over the thunder of my heart, I heard barn wood begin to crackle. Please, please, I thought, don’t let this happen to me.

Outside the back of the barn, an engine suddenly roared to life. A car. For a second I thought the driver was going to ram right though the back wall of the building, but a second later I realized the person was rounding the barn, heading back to the road.

I glanced back to where the fire was. Flames were now licking the walls. They weren’t huge, but the smoke was another story. It was starting to fill the barn, like a fog rolling in from the sea. I turned back and desperately kept working, reaching down and grabbing bale after bale. Finally I’d managed to create a corridor along the back wall. I grabbed the flashlight and jumped down. I bounced the flashlight over the wall. And there it was. The pig door. About three feet by three feet, with a wooden bolt on one side. I nearly sobbed in gratitude. I knelt down on the cold floor of the barn and, after undoing the bolt, slid the door over.

A blast of cold air hit me. I dove through the opening and scrambled up to my feet. I was shaking—in both fear and relief. I’d made it out, maybe with only seconds to spare before the smoke overwhelmed me. In the western sky, there were still smudges of light, enough to see that there was no one around. I raced to the front of the barn.

The lower north side was now engulfed in flames. Smoke was circling upward, and big flames flicked along the old, dry wood, making loud crackling sounds. Instinctively I glanced up to the house on the hill. There were lights on inside, practically in every room, and I thought I could make out the shape of someone standing just outside the front door. I jumped in the car and drove it down the road twenty yards or so.

I was shaking hard by then, and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. Should I go up to the house and make sure they’d called 911? But then, from far off, I heard the wail of a siren. I decided to sit in my car on the road and wait for help to arrive.

Two minutes later, a fire truck came roaring up the country road. It pulled up in front of the barn, and five or six guys in big boots, helmets, and slickers sprang from inside it. By now the flames were shooting up the whole side of the barn. It took the firefighters a minute or two to unload the hose, and then they were shooting a hard stream of water at the barn. Even from inside my car I could hear the flames begin to hiss into submission. About ten minutes later, the flames were gone, and there were just curls of dark smoke ascending toward the night sky.

I knew that the firefighters had more work to do, but I didn’t want to wait any longer. I opened the car door and propelled myself toward the fire truck.

Before I’d made it just a few feet, the fireman nearest me caught my movement out of the corner of his eye and spun around. He put a hand up, motioning for me to stop. He was about thirty, hefty, with a big strong jaw.

“You’re going to need to step back, ma’am,” he said. “We can’t have spectators getting this close.”

“But I’m not really a spectator,” I said.

“Do you own the barn?”

“No, but I was in the barn when someone set the fire. They locked me in. They were trying to kill me.”

His jaw fell in surprise. He turned around and called for one of the other guys to come over—an older man, who’d taken his helmet off and was wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. I figured he might be the dude in charge.

I went through my story quickly with them, trying not to sound like a lunatic because I knew how far-fetched the whole damn thing sounded. They exchanged a couple of looks as I spoke, especially when I touched on the Devon Barr connection, but I couldn’t really read them. I got the feeling the young guy thought something funny was up, especially when I described escaping by the pig door, but the older man, the chief, seemed to buy what I was saying. Behind us the rest of the crew kept dealing with the fire. A few of them had gone in the barn and were looking around with big torches.

When I’d finished my story, the chief stepped back to the fire engine, grabbed a clipboard from inside, and returned.

“I want you to write down your name, address, and phone number, okay?” he said. “The arson investigator is going to want to talk to you. And then I need you to stop by the state trooper’s office and report this.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Are you sure you don’t need medical treatment?” he asked. “How much smoke did you inhale?”

“Very little,” I said. “I got out before it filled the barn.”

I said good-bye and trudged back to my car. I used the GPS to find the state trooper office, which turned out to be about fifteen minutes away. At least it was in the same direction as the highway toward New York, because I was completely frayed around the edges by now. When I stepped inside the squat cinder-block headquarters, there were a couple of troopers huddled by the front desk, and they glanced at me almost expectantly. I realized after a second that the fire chief had called ahead.

A detective named Joe Olden took my statement. His face looked like it’d last cracked a smile in 1997. He seemed pretty curious initially, but the more details I offered—the weekend at Scott’s, the Lasix in the water, the gypsy cab experience—the more skeptical he appeared. It was like I’d started off reporting a minor traffic accident, but was now describing how I’d discovered alien spacecraft when I stepped out of the car to inspect the damage.

Finally, I gave him Collinson’s info and begged him to call the man. Just as I was wrapping up, the fire marshal arrived and asked me a series of questions as well.

Later, as I nearly staggered out to the parking lot, I called Collinson myself, reaching his voice mail. I told him I had important news and desperately needed to speak to him.

It was an utter relief to be back in my car and headed for Manhattan, but even with the heater cranked up and Maria Callas arias playing, I couldn’t keep my body from trembling. It was partly from the exertion of hurling all those bales of hay, but also from the sheer terror I still felt. I knew that if there hadn’t been a pig door in the barn, I probably would have died tonight.