Authors: Liv James
She noticed the nail file on the floor near
David’s feet. Blood was streaming down his leg. She crawled across the hardwood
floor to where the gun had fallen and pointed it at David.
“It’s over, you son of a bitch,” Jon said,
punching him hard again. David’s legs buckled and he collapsed onto the floor.
Jon dropped down on top of him, hitting him one more time to make sure he
stayed down.
The sirens were getting louder. Clara was
still kneeling on the hardwood floor, the gun aimed at David’s limp body
sprawled in front of her.
“Clara,” Jon said, stepping off David and
crouching down beside her. “Hey, Clara.”
She didn’t move. She sat staring at David
motionless on the floor, trying to keep the gun steady as she aimed at him.
Jon reached out and put an arm on her
shoulder. “Clara?”
She looked at him as if she’d forgotten he
was there. His eyes filled with pain as he looked at her, bruised and
frightened, more than willing to pull the trigger if she had to. Her eyes
filled with tears.
“Thank you,” she managed to say, slowly
lowering the gun as her body shuddered. She fell back from her knees onto the
floor, sitting as her legs began shaking uncontrollably.
“Are you cold?” he asked, pulling the
afghan down from the back of Grammy’s loveseat and covering her.
She shook her head no.
He put his arm around her.
“My father,” she whispered.
Jon grimaced. “They’re looking for him.”
“I need to get back up there. I need to see
his body,” she said flatly, attempting to pull herself up from the floor but
finding her leg muscles wouldn’t cooperate. She was vaguely aware that the
sirens had grown louder and then stopped.
Jon slipped a hand around her back and
tried to lift her so she was standing. She was leaning into him when she heard
a noise on the porch.
“What the hell happened here?” a policeman
barked as he stepped over the broken door, scanning the room with his weapon
drawn. He lowered his gun when he saw them.
“Jesus Christ, Clara, is that you?” Grady
asked. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be up at Foster’s
Glen with Meg.”
Clara’s shoulders fell with relief when she
realized the policeman was Grady Brown, Meg’s husband.
“Grady,” she cried, pointing at David. “You
need to arrest him. He’s had my father killed.”
CHAPTER
21
Jon took Grady aside and detailed what had
happened while two other officers secured the scene. Clara went into her
bedroom and slowly cleaned herself up, pulling on her old college sweatpants
and t-shirt again as if she were in a dream. None of this seemed real, except
the throbbing pain in her feet from running barefoot through the woods.
She’d taken all her shoes with her to camp,
so she rummaged through Grammy’s closet until she found a pair of old beige
bedroom slippers. She slipped them on to try to protect her feet and went out
to the living room, where Grady’s partner was snapping photographs for
evidence. David had stirred not long after the police arrived, but by that time
they’d already had him handcuffed. He was now secured in the back of Grady’s
police cruiser out on the front lawn.
“Can we go?” she asked Grady, who was
jotting something down on a small spiral-bound tablet. “I want to get up to
Foster’s Glen.”
“Jon told me,” Grady said. “God, I’m sorry
Clara. How the hell did you get yourself wrapped up in something like this?”
She shrugged and looked down at her
slippers.
“I called up to the airport and told them
we’d be flying back up to Foster’s Glen today,” Jon said. “They’re getting the
plane fueled now. It should be ready when we get there.”
Clara nodded and headed toward the hole in
the wall where her front door used to be. She stood there waiting for Jon.
“We’re clear?” Jon asked Grady.
Grady nodded and motioned toward the door.
“Get going. And do me a favor. Tell my wife to call me. I haven’t been able to
reach her since she left for that Godforsaken place and I’m starting to get
worried with all this shit going on.”
“You got it,” Jon said.
Clara stared straight ahead as she walked
past the police cruiser where David now sat, slamming his fist against the
window trying to get their attention. Jon wrapped an arm around her and led her
to the rental car, which was sprawled out on the front lawn, the driver’s side
door still hanging open from when Jon had jumped out.
As he helped her into the passenger’s seat
he told her he’d used her father’s name to get the rental agency to have the
car waiting for him when he landed in Brighton.
It made sense. There was only one airport and one rental agent in town, both of
whom knew Bill Spritzer and respected him enough to pull strings when they
could.
Clara barely said a word as they headed
toward the airport and buckled into the plane. She sat in the co-pilot’s seat
and watched as Jon meticulously completed his preflight check. The plane David
had brought her in was tied down on the other side of the field. She shivered
when she saw it.
Jon handed her a headset. “When you want to
talk to me, press this button,” he said, showing her. “The tower may cut in and
out as we make our way up there.”
She nodded, then sat back and closed her
eyes. They’d reached altitude when she opened them and pressed the little
button.
“Does my mother know about my father?” she
asked, her voice scratchy.
“She insisted on going with the search and
rescue party to get him,” Jon said. “The Staties arrested Rebecca when she came
up off the mountain. Elizabeth
is safe with her parents.”
Clara nodded but she didn’t say anything
more. She pulled the headset off and closed her eyes again. She was still groggy
from what ever David had slipped her and her head hurt from being slammed into
the floor.
It was a good thing they’d arrested
Rebecca, she thought, because if they hadn’t she would have hunted her down and
killed her herself. It was one thing to have David, a stranger, screw with
them, but quite another to learn that her own sister had been such an integral
part of the dirty work. They’d never gotten along, but Clara hadn’t understood
the degree of Rebecca’s hatred toward her until today.
And now her father was suffering because of
it.
Thirty minutes later Jon was setting the
plane down on the short runway at Foster’s Glen and taxiing to the small tower.
The old man in the baseball cap wandered out and Jon asked him to tie the plane
down. A lone helicopter still circled overhead. Jon had listened into its
communication with the ground and learned that they’d recovered Bill but that
it was safer to bring him up the trail than to try to airlift him out. There
was no word on whether or not he was still alive, but Jon assumed the chopper
pilot’s use of the word recovery instead of rescue didn’t bode well. He was
glad Clara had removed the headset so she didn’t hear them talking.
They stuck to the trail, but Clara’s feet
were raging in the light-soled slippers after the damage David had caused to
them when he dragged her through the woods. She grimaced at the pain but kept
moving, more concerned about her father than her feet.
They bypassed the trail spur that would
have led them back to Firelight
Falls and headed toward
the Foster’s Folly summit instead. She gritted her teeth when she saw the fence
that she’d been so oblivious on, a proverbial sitting duck.
There were several officers and two EMTs
near the spot where Foster’s Folly broke free from the woods. They didn’t
notice as Jon and Clara approached them. They were focused on something on the
trail. As Jon and Clara drew closer she immediately saw what they were looking
at. She could make out a whole disheveled group carefully maneuvering up the final
stones that served as makeshift steps to the top of the trail.
Their progress was slow because one of the
officers and a shirtless Patrick were steadying her father under their arms,
helping him half-walk, half-stumble up the trail. His right arm was strung up
in a makeshift sling, which Clara surmised must have been made from Patrick’s
shirt. As they reached the top, the EMTs took her father from the men and laid
him on the stretcher that had been waiting.
Clara ran to her father, kneeling down on the
hard dirt beside him. “Oh Dad,” she cried, tears running down her cheeks.
“Thank God you’re alive.”
“It’d take more than Rebecca to do me in,”
he croaked, trying to smile at her. “But you owe me one. That was supposed to
be you out there today with her on that hike.”
Clara put her head down on the stretcher
and silently offered a prayer of thanks. When she looked up her mom was
kneeling down on the other side of the stretcher.
“Your father is a scrapper,” she said, love
welling up in her eyes as she regarded him. “I don’t know how he survived that
fall but he did.”
“We need to go,” the EMT said. “The chopper’s waiting to take him.”
The group followed closely behind as the
EMTs carried her father toward the airstrip, Josie at his side.
“Clara,” her mother said, walking backward
as she spoke. “I know you want to come to the hospital with us but I need you
to do something for me.”
“What is it, Mom?” she asked. She hated the
thought of staying behind when her father was airlifted out.
“Can you take care of cleaning up the rest
of the mess up here? Karen has disappeared and Meg and Marcy will probably need
your help getting everything wrapped up.”
She hated to do it, but she knew her mother
was right. For once she was going to listen to her. “Sure, Mom,” she said,
slowing to a stop. “But I’m calling the hospital in a few hours to see how Dad
is.”
Josie nodded and turned back around.
Clara stood there for a moment, watching
them walk toward the chopper. She felt Jon slip an arm around her waist as he stood
beside her.
“He’s alive,” she said softly.
Jon leaned down and kissed her hair. She
glanced up at him, but something behind him caught her eye.
Mark had emerged from the trail several
minutes behind everyone else.
“Hold on,” she said to Jon. She limped over
to Mark. His eyes flew open in surprise.
“Clara?” he asked, sounding too astounded
to be ignorant about where she’d been.
She gathered up what little was left of her
strength and punched him hard in the nose. A dribble of blood started leaking
out of his left nostril almost immediately.
“You’re so fired,” she said. “Don’t you
ever come near my family again.”
She could feel his eyes on her as she
walked back to Jon.
“What the hell was that all about?” Jon
asked, slipping his arm back around her waist and turning her toward the trail
that led to Firelight
Falls.
“I’ll tell you later,” she said, well aware
that if she told him now a bloody nose would be the least of Mark’s problems.
They started toward Firelight Falls
to find Meg and Marcy. The pain in Clara’s feet was almost unbearable now that
she had nothing else to concentrate on. Jon stopped when she fell behind.
“Are you okay?” he asked, walking back to
her.
“My feet,” she said, sitting on the ground
in the middle of the trail and peeling off the slippers. They were soaked in
her blood.