Sunset Bridge (34 page)

“Baby…” His voice broke again, and he gave a terrible laugh. “I didn’t even think. The baby! Our baby. It was you, just you, I was thinking about. I thought…I thought I’d lost you!”

“You didn’t.” She stepped back so she could see his face, although she had to wriggle free. “But almost. Marsh, before something else happens? I love you. I realized it when I was stuck on the bridge. That fight? That awful fight? I just…I just thought I needed more from you. But I’ll take you the way you are, whatever you feel.”

“What I feel?”

His words finally penetrated. “You were thinking about
me,
not the baby?”

“I know. That makes me a bad father. I’m sorry, but the baby is still a stranger. I couldn’t imagine—I
can’t
imagine—life without you.” He stopped. “You love me? Did you just say that?”

Surely she had said the same words to CJ at some point in their marriage. Surely she’d said them on her wedding day. But she had never said them like this, with all the feeling she had refused to acknowledge for so long.

“I
love
you. I adore you, as exasperating as you are.” Then she began to sob again.

“Ah, Trace…” He kissed her hair. “It’s just…I’ve made so many mistakes. Look at us, you and me. We’re so different. I thought…”

“That I didn’t want you enough.”

“Yeah, something like that.” He turned her face up to his and kissed a tear, then another. “That’s why I asked you to live with me. I thought maybe we could ease into being a family, that one morning we’d wake up and realize it was going to be okay and the world wouldn’t cave in on either of us again.”

“It almost caved in on me today. Marsh, all those people!”

“We don’t know how many went down with the bridge.”

She wrapped her arms around him, and now the words tumbled out without restriction. “But
I
didn’t. It’s so selfish, but I am so, so glad I wasn’t one of them. While I was trying to get off the bridge I kept thinking that I had to live, that I had to tell you I love you, that I’d finally realized how much, and I wasn’t going to be cheated out of saying the words, no matter what you said back to me.”

“I love you, too,” he whispered, and she heard what saying it cost him. Still, she was sure, finally and for the first time, that he really did.

“I don’t want to interrupt this touching display of affection,” Wanda said, joining them, “not after all the time you two have wasted, but we got problems. More than either of you know. First off, we’re stuck here on the key with two little kids. No way we can get across that bay to Palmetto Grove without a bridge. And the weather’s only going to get worse and worse while we stand here trying to figure out when to schedule your wedding and what to name the baby. We got to get these kids to shelter, and I’m thinking your house, Marsh, is the place.”

Marsh didn’t release Tracy. They were both soaked now, hair plastered to their heads, clothes clinging, but he held on to her as if he was never going to release her. “Best choice,” he agreed. “I’ve got a skiff, but it’s not big enough to navigate
waves this big or the debris in the water from the bridge collapse. What other problems?”

“Well, we lost people on that bridge.” She cleared her throat. “But we can’t think about that right now. Maggie didn’t come home. Something’s wrong there. Could be she’s still in town, but Ken said she might have gone to Blake Armstrong’s house, maybe to snoop around.”

“Snoop?”

“She thought it was possible Blake had something to do with the Dutta murders,” Tracy said.

“You got it,” Wanda agreed.

“Blake?” Marsh sounded skeptical. “How does she figure that? Why?”

Tracy pulled away from him, horrified, as the truth hit her. “Marsh, Blake and his partners were in charge of the repairs, weren’t they? Oh, God help us all, they were! Well, take it from me…” Her voice was shaking again. “Somebody didn’t do his job!”

For a moment the only sound came from the rain and wind. Palm fronds were blowing across the street, and the rain on Marsh’s windshield rattled like a drum tattoo.

Marsh took charge. “First we get everybody and everything to my house. Then we figure out what to do from there.”

“Where’s Bay?” Tracy asked, realizing for the first time that the boy was not with his father.

“He’s at Adam’s. I was supposed to pick him up there once I got back into town. He’ll be safe. Their house is almost new and they’re at least a mile from the water. They’ll take care of him. But I have to get word to him that I’m all right. Once the bridge collapse makes the news, he’ll be frantic.”

“Good luck with your cell phone,” Wanda said. “Mine stopped getting through, and the landlines are down and have
been for a while. Can you get Maggie’s stuff in your truck? And the rest of Janya’s and mine? It’s in the house.”

“I have boxes, too,” Tracy said. “I can fit those in my Bimmer.”

“Janya’s car won’t start, but maybe we can jump it together,” Wanda said.

In the flurry, Tracy was pulled one way, Marsh the other, but at the last minute, as she was climbing back into her car to drive to her house, he caught up with her and pulled her close one last time.

“We’ll get through this,” he promised. “My house has stood through a lot worse.”

“You’re darned right we will. Not losing you again. Done with that.”

He kissed her. Hard. Then he set her away. “Try your cell, then turn on your radio. See if you can get a station. I’ll do the same. We need to find out what’s going on out there. We have to know about the bridge. Then we’ll go look for Maggie.” He left to get his jumper cables.

Tracy wondered how she could feel this wonderful and this terrible all at the same time. And until they knew the fate of all the people they cared about, until the storm was well and truly over, nothing was about to change.

M
aggie came awake gradually. At first she just felt uncomfortable, as if, in the midst of a nightmare, she had thrashed so violently that she had wrapped the sheet around herself. Then she became aware of a throbbing in her head, much worse than waking up in the morning after one too many of Felo’s fabulous mojitos. Not even in the same universe.

Opening her eyes was difficult, and once she had managed it, the room was still black. Her eyes felt strange, too, as if something was just in front of them. She attempted to reach up and brush whatever it was away.

When her hands wouldn’t move, she remembered.

Blake.

She was still too groggy to flat-out panic, but fear was immediate. She tried to piece together the puzzle of her recent waking moments. Information seeped in slowly. She remembered her realization that a photo on the living room wall hid a safe. And that when she’d turned to find the remote that might open it, Blake had been waiting for her, lamp raised.

She had been taken down like an old tree in a new development. She remembered the look on Blake’s face. He had been furious. She was surprised she was still alive.

How could she have been so foolish? She was a cop. How could she have allowed him to sneak up on her? At first she had been so careful to watch and listen. But then, close to the end of her own illegal activity, she had grown careless. She’d been busy trying to remember where she had seen the photograph. The shrieking wind had hidden the rest.

Up to speed on the past, she started on the present. Although her head was fogged with pain, self-loathing and fear, she tried to piece together her situation. Her hands were bound behind her, and all attempts to move her feet indicated that they, too, were tied together. The utter darkness was evidence of a blindfold, and the bad taste in her mouth, like somebody’s dirty underwear, indicated a gag. Whoever had done this—and she had the perfect candidate in mind—hadn’t taken any chances. She was not only slumped against a hard surface but fastened to it, so almost all movement was impossible. She wasn’t going anywhere, that was for sure.

She retracted that. This was no time for hasty conclusions. There was lots of rope around her, and not all of it had necessarily been tied well. As if to encourage that line of thinking, when she wiggled her hands again she felt just the tiniest bit of give. There was space where her palms were supposed to meet, just a fraction of an inch, but enough to change her assessment from “impossible” to “dismal.”

She realized quickly enough that the give in the rope was her best—in fact, her only—shot at escape. She tried moving her hands again. Rotating her right hand seemed like the best idea. Rotating and sliding. If she could slide her hand high enough and hook her thumb over the rope above it, quite
possibly she could pull the rope down far enough that the rest of her hand could slip free. Then she would be in business.

Of course, figuring out the route to freedom was the easy part. Following it was another matter. She managed to slide her hand perhaps half an inch before she couldn’t move it any farther. She began to rotate both hands again, over and over, until the rope seemed slacker. Then she inched her hand a fraction higher.

She was getting somewhere. Not quickly, and certainly not with any guarantees. But she was encouraged.

As she twisted her wrists back and forth, and slid her hand another quarter of an inch, she listened to see if she could determine where she was. She could hear rain falling, although “falling” was an anemic term for rain at the edge of an approaching hurricane. Driving. Sluicing. Pounding. But even with all that water pelting the earth from the heavens, she wasn’t getting a lot wetter. She was wet, yes, but a mist, not rain, was striking her face. After standing outside in the rain watching the house, she had been soaked by the time she got inside, and quite possibly the soggy condition of her clothing was due to that.

Wind howled loudly, but while she felt occasional gusts against her cheeks, she was sure the worst of it was blocked. She heard crashing, like small objects colliding, and something scraping back and forth not far from where she was bound.

She guessed she was somewhere not far removed from the outdoors. Not snug in a house like Blake’s, where walls packed with insulation would shield some of the storm’s racket and all the wind. The air felt wet here, not controlled and dehumidified by an air conditioner. She thought perhaps she’d been packed away like a piece of driftwood in a storage shed
or a boathouse. She tried to remember what outbuildings the beach-house property included and couldn’t. Perhaps she was in the same garage she’d broken into, but even that seemed too carefully cloistered, too comfortable.

She worked her hands as she listened. The wind was so loud, she wasn’t sure she would hear whispering, or even the soft approach of footsteps. She thought she was alone, but she couldn’t be sure. After all, she had thought she was alone in Blake’s house. Despite not knowing, she kept working her hands, trying desperately to inch her right hand higher and higher. Her thumb still couldn’t touch the rope, but she had to believe she was getting closer.

Minutes passed. She listened, her hand creeping higher; the wind growing louder. At last her thumb brushed the rope that bound her wrists. Foolishly, hope filled her. Of course there was no guarantee that hooking her thumb over the rope would accomplish anything, but it was something. A thumb could probe a knot. A thumb could, eventually, untie one, or loosen it enough to provide access for a finger. Opposable thumbs. The very thing that separated man from his brethren in the animal kingdom.

A hand suddenly ripped off her blindfold. She gasped, sucking the gag farther into her mouth. She began to cough.

The gag came off next, and the man who’d removed it stepped back. “Woke up with a magnificent headache, did we?”

Still coughing, she stared up at Blake, her heartbeats coming so fast she couldn’t have counted each one. She let her eyes adjust. He was a shadow at first, but then his features began to emerge.

“I
have
to get the wax cleaned out of my ears,” she said when the coughing fit passed.

“Save the bucks. Not much point anymore.”

“That lamp looked brand new. Your landlord won’t be pleased.”

“What, no begging, no pleading?”

“I don’t think you’ll believe me if I promise this’ll stay our little secret.”

“I kind of liked you. Why did you have to keep poking around?”

She kept up the patter, sure that showing fear would just make him feel more powerful. “In my genes. My father’ll continue the tradition if I suddenly disappear, by the way. As will my boyfriend. I told him I was on my way here.”

“There’s a hurricane coming. Think they’ll find anything?”

“Depends on your plans.”

Another man materialized out of the gloom. Lankier, older, what hair he had plastered by water to a glistening scalp. Maggie recognized Ned Bournes. Ned of the framed commendation and the abandoned bag of Hershey bars. Now she wished she’d nabbed one.

“You look like a pretty sane guy to me, Ned,” she said. “Surely you know kidnapping me is only going to make things worse.”

“Can’t get much worse,” Blake said.

“Why did you take off the blindfold and gag?” Ned asked Blake.

“Gag’s going back on. She was choking. Blindfold isn’t. She’s going to walk to the boat.

Maggie was listening, but she was also cataloging her surroundings as the men talked to each other. This was not a tidy boat or storage shed. The building, whatever it was, was sprawling and dilapidated. Not too far away she saw rain
pouring in through a hole in the roof and the filthy broken windows. Cobwebs hung from the driest part of the ceiling, which consisted of nothing more than crossbeams under a peaked roof. A broken table lay on its side maybe fifteen yards away, and several tipped chairs lay much closer.

They couldn’t have taken her far. She searched her memory for abandoned buildings in the immediate area of Blake’s house.

The fish camp.

She’d passed the deserted camp every time she’d driven to the bridge, although she’d rarely paid much attention. Now she pictured a ramshackle half-burned-out building that had once housed a bar and bait shop on a shallow, narrow inlet to the Gulf. Guides had picked up tourists for a day of deep-sea fishing there, or driven them across the key to the bay side for quieter fishing among mangrove islands along the shore. She thought the land was protected now that somebody—maybe Wild Florida or even the state—had bought out the owners several years ago, but not yet cleared away the debris.

“You’re going to let her walk? You don’t think she’ll try to run away?” Ned asked, his tone incredulous.

“She can try. It could be fun to stop her.”

“Somebody might see us. Put the gag back in, and let’s leave her. This place will flood. It’s guaranteed.”

“Right, and when Miss Maggie dies here, all trussed up like a pig at a barbecue, you don’t think somebody will think that’s a little strange? If they find her body, I mean? And we can’t untie her, because she’s a resourceful little thing, and the moment we leave, she’ll find her way to help faster than our bridge went down.”

“There has to be another alternative.”

“I could finish her off right here, but why me?
You
need
to get your hands dirty. Break something else over her head. Bash it in good this time.” He raised a brow at the pained expression on Ned’s long face.

“But before you do,” Blake added when Ned didn’t respond, “see if you can think of a good reason why she would have been here, one that preferably doesn’t involve us. If you
can
think of a good one, maybe we’ll be lucky and the cops will come up with the same explanation if they find her in these ruins, skull fractured and not a drop of water in her lungs. If not, I’d say killing her here and now is
not
a good plan.”

“I don’t think killing me at
all
is a good plan,” Maggie said. “I suspect you boys are already in a lot of trouble, and despite your obvious misconception, the more bodies linked to you, the quicker your date with Old Sparky.”

“How about
no
bodies linked to us?” Blake asked. “I kind of like the sound of that one.”

“What about the Duttas? It’s only a matter of time until somebody follows up my leads, even if it’s not me.”

“Shut up.”

“And did you say something about a bridge?” she asked.

“Shut up!” Blake stepped forward and slapped her so fast that she didn’t even have time to close her eyes.

Maggie inhaled sharply, but she didn’t cry out. She had learned one important thing in the sheriff’s department. Not to give bullies satisfaction. When she could speak, she looked straight at Ned.

“You really want to link yourself to this guy?” she asked.

Blake raised his hand again, but Ned grabbed his arm. “Cut it out! We don’t have time for this. We have to get out of here while we can.”

“Then we have to take her with us.”

“Nobody I know can afford a ransom payment,” Maggie said.

Blake glowered at her. “Nobody has to.”

“She’s right, Blake. We have to rethink this,” Ned said. “It’s just a matter of time until we’ll be held accountable. For everything. And she’s right, killing her’s only going to make things that much worse. The bridge, the barber—”

“You shut up!” Blake shoved his partner in the chest, and Ned nearly fell backward, awkwardly catching himself just in time. “Either you help me get her in the boat or you aren’t getting a ride to the mainland. You understand? You can stay here and take the consequences, whatever they are. All by yourself. I’ll be long gone.”

“Don’t let him do this,” Maggie said. “Use your good sense, Ned.”

But Ned, clearly frightened, just shook his head. “We’re in too deep.”

“Exactly where you’re going to be before long,” Blake told Maggie. “As deep as we can get you.”

He stooped and started untying the rope that held her feet. She waited until he was nearly done, then she kicked out at him, striking his chest, but not with the force she had hoped for. At the same time she screamed, although she knew that unless someone was standing right outside, it wasn’t going to do any good.

“Hold her knees,” Blake told Ned when he regained his balance and his breath.

Ned held back for a moment, and Maggie prayed he was reconsidering Blake’s plan, but in the end he grabbed her legs and held them tight as Blake finished what he’d started. And he didn’t apologize.

Getting everyone settled at Marsh’s house was accomplished as efficiently as possible, which still meant precious time went by when they couldn’t figure out how to notify anyone they were safe, or find out how many people, or who, had gone down when the bridge collapsed. They didn’t even know how much of the structure had fallen into the water. Worse, they couldn’t search for Maggie.

Nobody’s cell phones were working, and neither Marsh’s nor Tracy’s car radios had picked up strong enough signals to make out more than snatches of the news reports. The words
Phyllis, bridge
and
Derek Forbes
had all been audible. As had
deaths.
No amount of tuning and switching of stations had helped. The only one that came in clearly was playing easy-listening music without news breaks, as if someone at the station had set up endless hours of Barry Manilow and Anne Murray, then locked the door behind them to head for higher ground.

Janya took the children up to Bay’s room to work out sleeping arrangements. Tracy moved her things into Marsh’s room, and Wanda took a guest room, as Marsh turned the electricity and gas back on.

Once everything was out of the car and stowed away, they met in the living area and received assignments. Tracy filled the two bathtubs and every available container with water for the inevitable moment when the electricity failed and the pump stopped working. Wanda made coffee, then boiled eggs and potatoes and threw frozen chicken parts in the oven to defrost and bake. They could finish making dinner on charcoal in the fireplace if necessary. Marsh gathered all lanterns, flashlights and emergency supplies. Even Vijay helped by bringing kindling for the fireplace from its storage bin near
the door, while Janya, with Lily in tow, changed sheets and put out towels.