With Every Breath (40 page)

formed the promontory to the south of the house. A man worked over a pit in the sand—were they having a clam bake?—and Maddie studied the bony lumps of his spine for a moment. Like everyone else, he wore a swimsuit.

There was no mistaking Annabel. She was beautiful, and looking into her face was close enough to looking into a bizarre, dated mirror that it took Maddie’s breath away again. Annabel’s golden hair was very long, pulled back by a comb or a barrette or some such thing over each ear. She smiled easily for the camera. A man stood on either side of her, one with his hand on her shoulder, the other with an arm around her waist.

Maddie herself was nowhere in evidence.

She frowned down at the other faces. None of them really seemed familiar, but there was a face in the background, most of its chin obscured by the shoulder of one of the men in the front. Something about that man scratched at her memory.

She was sure it was someone she had met on the island. But there wasn’t enough expression, enough of his features, for her to be able to identify him. He just gave her a nagging feeling of recognition, of ... unease.

The man was looking directly at her mother, and there was something in his eyes that made her belly roll over. There was adoration there. And one of the women was watching Annabel, too, as though she had just glanced up from the man in the sand. Her face was only half-tilted toward Annabel’s, but it was etched with resentment and fury.

Mildred Diehl? On The Wick?

Maddie understood suddenly why she herself wasn’t in the picture. She flipped it over, looking for a date. There wasn’t one, but it didn’t matter. This type of paper had been common in the late fifties, early sixties.

She wasn’t in the picture because she hadn’t been born yet.

She would have to show it to Joe, Maddie thought. She hoped he could make sense of it, could identify the other people, and the half face of that man in the back.

She slid the picture into her jeans’ pocket, turning around. The kitchen, she thought. She knew that if she was going to find memories anywhere, it would probably be in the kitchen. She went the long way, avoiding the dining room.

It looked just as it had when they had left it days ago. There were still plates in the sink from the sandwiches they’d eaten when the three of them had sat in the living room, playing cards. They gave her a poignant ache, a sudden, real need to find Joe and hold on to him for a moment. She wanted badly to go back to the living-room window, to look out and see if she could spot them on the beach. Just to look at them for a moment. She started taking pictures instead.

She didn’t wait to see if she felt anything in there. She clicked away, methodically and steadily. She shot from the back door looking in. From the back door looking out. She photographed the stove and the refrigerator and the barren area where a kitchen table should have been.

And the pantry door.

She lowered the camera slowly, staring at it. Leslie had said she’d been found in there.

She moved toward it, feeling foolish for the idea that was creeping into her head. She opened the pantry and looked inside, then looked back over her shoulder although she knew there was no one to watch her and judge. If Joe came in and found her scrunched down inside, she would die of embarrassment. But Joe wouldn’t come in. He might stand outside and shout for

her, but he wouldn’t bring Josh inside, and he wouldn’t leave him alone to come in and find her.

Do it. Just do it. Who’s to know? And it could work.

She put her camera down on the counter and went to squat down in front of the open door. She looked into the little space beneath the lowest shelf. No way in the world would she be able to fit in there anymore. She didn’t see how she could even have done it then. Unless ...

She pulled out the canned goods she’d stacked upon it what seemed like a lifetime ago. Something almost frenzied took her over. She hurled them over her shoulder and they clunked on the old linoleum floor, rolling with a spiraling, metallic sound. When the shelf was clear, she pushed up against its underside.

It came loose. It hadn’t been there twenty-five years ago, she realized. Tony must have added it to give more shelf space to his rental property.

She set the wood aside, looking around the kitchen one more time. Then she crawled inside, grimacing. She pulled her knees up to her chin, then reached out, worked a finger under the door, and eased it gently, not-quite-closed again.

Her heart started hammering. After a moment, she realized that sweat had broken out on her brow. A thin line of it trickled down between her breasts.

I did hide. No one put me in here. I was hiding from someone, maybe Beacher, but probably someone else. Who? Dear God, who?

She couldn’t quite reach it. She put her forehead to her knees and realized she was humming the song again. She looked up and did it more slowly, putting words to it, the words she had always thought were right.

"Dance, little baby, dance up high. Never mind, baby, your buddy is by. Crow and caper, caper and crow, there, little baby, there you go!"

Baby ... buddy ... caper ... crow.

She shook her head, moaning softly. If it was wrong, then she really didn’t know how.

She wasn’t going to get anywhere in there. It had been a ridiculous idea, although she wasn’t sorry that she had tried it. She’d take pictures of it. Maybe they would close the gap that just sitting there hadn’t been able to breach.

She got to her knees again and pushed the door open.

The woman was in a wheelchair, and she spun its wheels to look at the pantry. She was clearly stupefied to see someone come out of such a place, maybe even frightened by the absurdity of it.

Maddie cried out and leaped instinctively to her feet. Her shoulders slammed painfully into the other shelves. Memory shrieked, fitting into her head with almost-audible little clicks.

She knew. She finally remembered. She had come into the kitchen to find someone here that day, too.

She screamed for Joe.

Chapter 33

Joe led Josh back down the road. They walked along the cracked macadam, and he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but then, he’d never really expected to. No matter what he’d told Maddie, he really had only one purpose. He was—how had she put it?—getting out of her face.

Well, he was out. And he didn’t much like it.

They reached the bridge, then they climbed down the rocks on the south part of the promontory. They slipped and slid onto the beach. There was nothing in the sand, either, but if Graycie had come over by boat, Joe figured that it would have been on the west side, and the county guys would have found it already. Or one of his own officers would have noticed it. Or it could be that the tide had taken it out again if the guy had just beached it. If that was the case, then the sea had erased any and all traces of his passage.

He thought he’d walk that side of The Wick anyway when Maddie was done. He started back up toward the house to wait for her, and that was when he heard her scream.

The hairs on his nape literally stood up. His heart seemed to leap over an entire beat. What the hell had happened? he wondered, even as he started to respond.

He’d seen Zack Morgan drive by a little while ago, but the cab hadn’t stopped. Maybe someone had come up on the house from the back. Or maybe the cab had stopped. Maybe it just hadn’t done it directly in front of Maddie’s house.

"Ah, Jesus," he groaned. "Jesus Christ!"

He grabbed Josh’s hand, and they began running. Then he heard another sound, behind him this time. He stopped, and Josh took another few steps without him. The boy came up short, crying out when his arm jerked backward.

Joe turned around.

Gina.

Gina?

She was scrambling down the promontory. He could see a car—Cassie’s car?—parked up on the crest. Gina hit the sand and ran at them, her long hair streaming. Her eyes had a glint to them.

She had a butcher knife in her hand.

Joe was hit by a deadly moment of disassociation, of unreality. As she closed the distance between them, she brought the knife up. She was sobbing raggedly. Her face was contorted. It took him a moment to assimilate everything, a moment longer to accept that she wasn’t in the hospital as she was supposed to be.

She fell once, and that saved him, because it took her a moment to get to her feet again. She stumbled and wove, coming toward them again, and he let go of Josh to intercept her.

"I’ll kill you!" she screamed. "You bastard! You can’t—"

"Shut up, Gina," he panted. He snagged her knife

arm, holding on. "Let it go! Drop the goddamned knife! What the hell are you doing?"

He wrenched her arm upward behind her. Gina howled in pain. He finally twisted the knife out of her hand and dropped it in the sand, and the feeling of unreality ebbed.

"What the hell do you think you’re doing?" he snarled again. "What are you doing here?" Then true rage filled him. Jesus, don't let Josh see this little scene.

He craned around to look over his shoulder for the boy. He felt Gina wrench the service revolver from the holster at his waist.

"Josh, get back!" he roared. But he had no idea where he was supposed to send him. Not to the house, not alone. "Go wait at my truck! Get in and lock the doors!" He heard a little click as Gina cocked the revolver, and he looked back at her.

"Put it down, Gina."

She laughed wildly. "No. No! I tried everything. I couldn’t think of anything else. Except to make you." "Make me what?" he asked carefully.

"Leave her alone. I’ll kill you."

Jesus, he thought. Oh, sweet Jesus Christ. Then he knew a moment of knee-buckling gratitude that it was him she had found and not Maddie.

Thank God she hadn’t gone to the house.

"I couldn’t think of anything else," Gina moaned, and started to cry again.

"There isn’t anything else," he said slowly. "There’s nothing else you can do. Let it go, Gina. You’ve got to just let it go now. Give me the gun."

"You’ve been with her! I saw you!"

His blood rushed. It left him feeling hot, then cold. Christ, he thought, had she been watching them, spying on them?

"You didn’t pay any attention to me!" she shrieked. "I told you no!"

He’d been trying to be logical, and he knew in that moment that it wouldn’t do a bit of good. He heard something behind him and knew, too, that Josh hadn’t left him, hadn’t gone to the truck, and he couldn’t look.

"No what, Gina?" he said levelly. He’d keep her talking, he thought. She’d be so absorbed in herself that she wouldn’t notice him inching closer. Maybe.

"What?" he repeated almost gently, shifting his weight rather than actually stepping toward her. "What did you tell me no about?"

"Don’t talk to me that way!" she screamed. "Don’t talk to me like that shrink. Like I’m stupid! Like I’m a kid!" "Well, you’re acting like a kid. Like a spoiled brat." Her face contorted. "You’re better than that, Gina. A much better person." Her expression turned to confusion.

Then she brought the gun up with both hands, the way he had taught her, holding it out, bracing one wrist with her other hand. His heart thudded. Everything else seemed slow, even his breath.

"I told
you," she went on plaintively. "I love you. I told you then. But you tried to leave and I gave you time, time to get it straight. You were supposed to come back!" "Gina." He paused. He wasn’t sure which way to go. Placate her, as he had always done? Go easy on her because she might go off the deep end, get drunk, hurt somebody else? Going easy on her had never worked before. It had brought them to this.

"Listen to me," he said cautiously. "I was never coming back."

"Noooo!"

"Gina! Stop it! We are divorced," he said slowly. "It’s over. Oh, Christ, it’s been over for so long, even before Lucy died. There was nothing left!"

"Lucy, Lucy."
Gina sneered, her face twisting.

Joe flinched. "What?"

"She was all you ever cared about. What about me?" He felt himself going cold inside. "I didn’t love you." "You said you did!"

"I was wrong. Very wrong. I’m sorry."

She was shaking. He watched the gun. It bobbled. But it stayed reasonably aimed at his chest.

"For once in your life," he went on hoarsely, "think about somebody other than yourself. Josh doesn’t need to see this, Gina."

"He’s her
kid!" she screamed.

Think on her terms, Joe warned himself. "That’s not his fault. He’s just a kid. Let me send him up to the house, and I’ll come back."

"Up to her
house."

"Yeah." He made a careful motion over his shoulder toward it. He knew immediately that it had been the wrong thing to do. Gina pulled the trigger.

He made an aborted sound, half a roar, more of a choking reflex, and he turned away from her. Josh had scooted a few more feet away, terrified. His feet were sort of splayed, and his eyes roved wildly. He was dusted with sand. The bullet had kicked it up. It had been that close.

"You’ll never go near her again!" Gina cried. "I won’t let you, Joe! If you do, I’ll... I’ll hurt you!"

"No. You won’t," Joe spat, turning back to her. "And if you shoot again, I’ll kill you."

"I'll kill her!"

"No. And you’re not going to kill yourself, either, or you would have done it the other night. So there’s no one else to hurt, Gina. Come on, give it up. No matter what you do, or how you do it, I’m not coming back." And he knew, in that moment, that he wasn’t going to torture himself over it anymore, either. He wasn’t going to cut himself off through misguided guilt and pain and regret. He wouldn’t take the easy way out and destroy the relationship with Maddie himself, the way he had with the woman on the mainland, because he felt too damned guilty over his own culpability to fight back against what Gina was doing to him.

He hadn’t loved those women. And that made all the difference in the world.

He turned away from her, suddenly caring about nothing more than getting Josh out of there, getting him safe, because he loved the kid, too, because Maddie had entrusted him to him. Gina wouldn’t shoot him, he thought. That one shot had been wild, a warning. Hating him, wanting him, was what had kept her going for too, too long.

"Stop!"
she shrieked. "Come back here!"

He kept walking. He reached Josh. "Come on, sport," he said in an undertone. "Just walk in front of me here, slow and steady, and head for the house. Got that?"

"Joe, I mean it!"

Josh looked up at him mutely.

"Keep going," Joe urged him quietly. "Right in front of me." Just in case.

"You stupid asshole! You don’t know what I’m capable of! You never figured it out, did you? Did you?
I got rid of your precious fucking Lucy because I was sick to death of you fawning over her! I was sick of sharing
you!" Joe realized, almost dispassionately, that he had stopped walking.

"You were always cuddling her, carrying her around, playing with her. And then you thought you could leave me
and just come around once in a while to see her!" She laughed shrilly. "I showed you, Joe. I showed you good. Now
do you get it? I mean what I say, Joe! I mean it! You won’t get away with this either!"

Josh tugged on his hand. Joe didn’t feel it.

Black ice.

He thought, with that odd sense of detachment again, that that was what it was like. The sensation blacked everything out for a moment, all his senses, so that he could barely see, couldn’t think.

Couldn’t feel.

But it wasn’t enough.

Anguish roared in and hit his knees first, like a chopping block when he’d been playing the game, trying to take his legs out from under him. He dropped Josh’s hand and turned back to her clumsily.

"I got drunk so I could
do it!" she shrieked. "I got drunk on purpose! But then it was easy. I just pushed the pillow down on her." Her face changed. It got eerily wistful. Even in the middle of Joe’s grief and disbelief, it dragged chills down his spine.

"But then we were supposed to be the same afterward, once I got rid of her," she went on plaintively. "You and me, we were supposed to go back to how we used
to be, without her. If she hadn’t come, you wouldn’t have wanted to leave me, Joe. You wouldn’t. You used to want to be with me, but then she made me fat, and you’d get up nights with her, and you were tired, and you didn’t want me anymore."

He knew then that he was going to kill her.

And he would have, maybe he would have. For Lucy, for his poor, quiet, still, cold baby. For all the useless, senseless anguish over the years, all the guilt, when it should have been hatred that he felt, and fury.

He was nearly close enough to grab her. He didn’t care about the gun. Then he remembered Josh again.

He looked back at him. "Go back to the truck!" he shouted angrily. "Now!"

"Joe?" Gina’s voice was shrill, nervous. She took one