Clarissa ran up the school steps and pulled on
the heavy double doors. They were unlocked. She stepped into the
gloomy hallway.
"Mister Reynolds?" she called softly and his
name echoed away into the gathering darkness.
The school office was deserted, the phone
dead. Clarissa poked her head into what was the nurse's office and
the vice-principal's office. The walls were ashen with soot and
desks and floors were buckled with water damage. The tiles squeaked
under her feet. Then she heard it. Footsteps. Above her on the
second floor. Clarissa grinned and ran for the stairs.
"Mister Reynolds!" she called.
CHAPTER 9
Marco pulled on a pair of black leather gloves
and watched from the second floor window as Clarissa headed toward
the front door of the school building. It would only be a matter of
minutes now and then the seething anger and hatred that had
festered in him since Friday night would be satisfied. All thoughts
of toying with the bitch were gone. So were the macabre fantasies
he had nurtured since Morgan had first brought Clarissa to the
Wolfe estate. All Marco wanted now was her dead. In small pieces.
Bagged and disposed of quickly and cleanly.
Marco smiled as he thought of the assassin,
McKinnon, waiting at the Hempstead, wondering what happened to the
intended victim. A victim that would never show. So, the asshole
would be out a quarter of a million dollars. Morgan would be
furious and demand the down payment back. McKinnon's reputation
would forever be tarnished. A career over once word spread. Too
bad.
Marco's grin vanished as Clarissa called out
for the security guard. It was time. She was walking into his trap
as easy as a baby crawling to its mother.
"Mister Reynolds?" Clarissa called again as
she reached the second floor hallway. "Are you up here? Sister Ruth
Cecilia said you would unlock the gate for me. Hello? Mister
Reynolds?"
She was uncertain which direction to take. The
hallway to the left was dark. All of the classroom doors were
closed. At the opposite end, where the fire had left only a
skeleton of charred roof beams, gray daylight threw long black
shadows along the walls and tile floor. Then came the hammering
sound. A hollow, metallic banging, as if someone were pounding on
the pipes. It came from the burned wing of the building and
Clarissa headed toward that sound.
Clarissa checked every classroom, closet, and
restroom along the corridor. There was no security guard and even
the pounding noise had stopped. At the end of the hallway she
peered into the gymnasium. It had been badly gutted from the fire.
Almost half of the floor lay down in the blackened cafeteria on the
floor below, leaving a gaping dark hole. The ceiling and roof were
gone. The acrid tinge of smoke still lingered heavily in the air.
Gray clouds crowded the sky overhead and the breeze had turned cold
and bone chilling.
Clarissa pulled the wool shirt close about
her. If the security guard could not be found it would mean taking
the old route she used to sometimes "cut" classes. That was walking
back up the hill to the convent, turn off the path behind the nun's
garage, crawl into the vine-covered drainage ditch, and under the
fence. The thought made her smile. Cuts, scrapes, spiders, snakes,
mud, nun's coming and going from the convent. Yet, it never was a
problem for her or Barry Nobbs, It was a challenge, a daring
adventure to make the break. They were never caught. They never
told a soul about the special route. It had been their
secret.
"Well, I'm taller than I was then," Clarissa
mused aloud. "But I guess that's my only way out."
With a last look at the devastation in the
gym, she turned to retrace her steps to the stairwell. Her breath
caught in her throat. The sight of him startled her, but only for a
second.
"Mister Reynolds," she said. "Thank God. I've
been looking all over for you. I need to get out of the front gate.
Sister Ruth Cecelia said you had the key."
The guard stood in the doorway. His face was
in shadow but Clarissa could see the starched white shirt with the
security company's logo on the sleeve, the police style hat, and
the hammer in the guard's hands.
"I didn't think anyone was up here," Clarissa
went on as she approached the guard. "Then I heard you
hammering...."
For the first time she looked at the tool. It
was no hammer. It was an axe. The guard took a step toward her, his
face moving into the gray light. Clarissa opened her mouth to
scream but no sound would come from her paralyzed
throat.
How had he found her? Her mind raced. She
turned to run but there was nowhere to go. Marco grinned but it was
no grin of lust or smug triumph. It was the purest hatred Clarissa
had ever seen. She stared in morbid fascination as the axe raised
higher and higher above Marco's head.
With blind instinct, Clarissa ducked the blow
and ran along the rim of the hole to the opposite wall. As Marco
whirled and raised the axe again, the floor under Clarissa's feet
gave way. Jagged boards scraped her stomach and chest as she fell.
The wool shirt caught on the protruding wood, slowed the fall, and
Clarissa grabbed the edge of the hole. Her legs kicked empty air,
her arms began to ache and tire almost immediately. She couldn't
hand on for more than a minute before she plunged down into the
cafeteria.
She didn't have the strength to pull herself
back up into the gym and she didn't have the courage to just let
go. When she looked up, Marco's evil grin loomed like a coiled
snake above her.
"Perfect," he said. "You did good, Clarissa.
Real good."
He knelt down and raised the axe, aiming for
her fingers. Clarissa pulled her hand away a split second before
the axe chopped through the board where her fingers had held on.
She groped for another hand hold but the axe fell again and again
wherever she tried to get a grip. Marco laughed, momentarily
enjoying the game.
Then her foot touched something that moved.
She kicked out again. A light fixture on the cafeteria ceiling
swung back and hit her foot. If she could just get her leg around
it. She gave it a hard kick. The axe fell. She was almost a second
too late. The blade took a small chunk of flesh from her thumb and
the hot flash of pain made her scream.
The light fixture swung back and she hooked
her right leg around it. The axe fell. Marco swore. Clarissa let go
of the edge of the hole and swung on the fixture. For only a
second. The fixture tore free from the ceiling and Clarissa plunged
toward the burned cafeteria wreckage. Then the electrical wire
reached its limit and the fall was checked five feet from the
floor.
Clarissa slipped from the fixture and crawled
with blind terror over the debris. She had to reach the outside.
Somehow. Before Marco came down the stairs. She had only a few
precious seconds. Marco would peer into the dark hole, trying to
determine if she was hurt or dead. Then he would come down to make
sure, or finish his gruesome job. She had to make it to the front
door of the school, out into the daylight, where the nuns in the
convent could see her from up on the hill or motorists see her from
the street and hear her screams, and call the police.
Her jeans tore on the edge of a melted metal
table and she cut and scraped her hands as she clamored toward the
door leading into the hallway. Despite the pain, she ran. The lower
floor corridor was empty. The front door was just ahead but so was
the stairwell. Clarissa slowed. She heard the running footsteps on
the floor above, then on the stairs. And something else. Laughter.
Feminine laughter.
Three nuns burst through the front door,
chattering and laughing. They stopped as one and stared at
Clarissa.
"Miss Hayden?" Sister Ruth Cecilia asked.
"What are you doing in here? This isn't a safe place."
The nun carried a pot of coffee. The others
carried a plate of sandwiches, fresh fruit, and a basket filled
with cookies.
"Who is this, Sister?" an older nun
asked.
"Get out of here," Clarissa tried to scream
but it came as a harsh whisper. She glanced up the dark stairwell.
"All, of you, get out of here."
"Calm down, Miss Hayden," Sister Ruth Cecilia
said. "Why don't you go outside with Sister William Joseph. We'll
be right out as soon as we deliver Mister Reynolds'
lunch."
"Please," Clarissa pleaded. "He'll kill us
all."
Sister William Joseph shoved the cookies at
the third nun and put her arm around Clarissa's shaking
shoulders.
"It'll be alright, dear," her voice was
placating and sugary. "Why don't you come outside with
me?"
"No! All of you, outside. Quick. Before he
comes. Please!"
Clarissa shook off the nun's arm. Sister Ruth
Cecilia and the plump Sister Margaret Ann took the food into the
principal's office. To Clarissa's horror, Sister William Joseph
walked to the stairwell.
"You wait right there," the nun told her.
"Mister Reynolds? Mister Reynolds? We've brought you your lunch.
It's starting to rain outside and we didn't want you to have to go
out in it. Gonna be a bad storm. Mister Reynolds?"
Clarissa had to stop her. The security guard
was never going to eat that lunch or any other meal. The fact that
Marco wore his clothes was evidence enough that the guard was dead.
The nun would be too, if she climbed those stairs.
"Sister!" Clarissa cried, then fought for
calm, trying to not to sound panicked. "The guard is over by the
bleachers next to the football field. I thought I saw him from the
window."
"Oh, well, then he'll find his lunch
eventually," the nun smiled. "Sisters, just leave it. He's
outside."
The two nuns reappeared.
"We'd better hurry, sisters," Sister Margaret
Ann said. "We've only got twenty minutes to make that teacher's
meeting."
"Can we drop you somewhere?" Sister William
Joseph asked Clarissa. "Our car is right outside."
"She's staying as the Hempstead Hotel," Sister
Ruth Cecilia told them.
"Oh, that's on our way," Sister Margaret Ann
smiled. "No problem."
Clarissa couldn't draw a full breath until she
was in the back seat of the maroon Chevy Tahoe and out the gates of
St. Hector's and back into the safety of the Hempstead
Hotel.
McKinnon checked the clip in the hand gun and
slipped it into the large leather black purse on the car seat next
to her. A half a block away from her parked rental car, the sooty
red brick Hempstead Hotel stood stark and cheerless against the
gray sky. The assassin picked up the car phone and punched up an
area code and number. She said nothing as she listened, then
punched in a bank account number. Listening for only a moment, she
nodded in satisfaction and replace the receiver. The drop had been
picked up in Tempe and deposited into the account at the Commercial
Bank of Arizona in Scottsdale.
As a streak of lightning ripped open the
western sky, a woman, bearing a resemblance to the description of
the victim, got out of an SUV and ran into the Hempstead Hotel.
McKinnon pulled a glossy color photograph of Clarissa out of a
manila envelope. It was a match. Time to go to work.
Clarissa sat on the bed, shivering. She had
her knees pulled up to her chest, listening to the thunder and the
rain. Listening for any footsteps in the hallway, uncertain whether
or not Marco had seen her leave the school and followed her back to
the Hempstead.
The steel desk chair was wedged firmly under
the door knob and, despite the gnawing hunger, she was not about to
venture outside her room until she was certain that Doc Rowland had
returned from visiting his friend. The drunk and the boy with the
camera had unnerved her. Marco had taken her terror to new heights.
She cursed Dusty for his insensitivity to her pleadings. She hated
Morgan, Marco, Virginia, and even Hugo for not being there when she
needed him. She hated herself for letting herself be so stupidly
used and taken advantage of. She blamed her mother for that, for
keeping her so sheltered, making her fragile and weak.
In the quiet solitude of the gray afternoon
she had allowed the thoughts of the past few days to become
detached images, devoid of emotion and the ever present fear. She
looked back on her relationship with Morgan Wolfe and found that
after living with him for almost two years, she hardly knew the
man. There had been only the preoccupation with the dream of it
all. She had fallen in love with Morgan's success, his charm and
sensuality, and the pampered lifestyle he offered. He had never
loved her, he had possessed her.
Everyone had possessed and indulged her. Myra
had kept her from the crushing poverty of their meager existence
and fed her fantasies of opulence and wealth. Andrew had tried to
keep her from a modeling career by insisting she live with him and
Annika in the Middle East after Myra's death. The modeling agencies
had realized her potential as a top model and they trained and
groomed her, shaped her into their own image of beauty. Morgan
Wolfe had completed her isolation. Every whim was satisfied, every
material comfort and delight was provided. She had only to belong
to him wholly and exclusively.