The Bluebonnet Betrayal (24 page)

“The President shall have the power to veto any measure which conflicts with the mission and goals of the Society.”

Article 3, Section 6.2, bylaws of the Austin Rock Garden Society

She ran out and past “Welcome to Oz,” taking the quickest way down into the meadow and keeping to the paved pathway, where corner lampposts cast pools of light on the ground.

Pru opened her mouth to shout Rosette's name again. Instead, she stopped and listened. If Rosette was in trouble, would she be able to answer? Was it trouble? Rosette could've struck out and become lost on the way to the gate, Pru thought, her mind seeking out the least fearful possibility. But rationalizing didn't work—her stomach tightened and her heart thumped in her chest.
Breathe. Find Rosette.

A breeze blew through the grounds—still a warm breeze, even at this time of the evening. Leaves rustled, but across the wide picnic area came a thrashing of foliage far beyond what the wind could do. Pru moved toward the sound, ending up near the bandstand. She circled cautiously, glancing under the stage floor to open ground, but found nothing. That's it, she decided, she would run for help—run to the gate.

But there—a garbled scream came from the other direction and drew her away from the gate. It had come from beyond the string of small garden displays—near the wrought-iron railing that ran along Chelsea Bridge Road—and had been almost drowned out by the traffic. Pru followed the scream, and as she approached, she heard a sneeze—a loud, long sneeze.
Forde.

She called out “Rosette!” when she should've kept quiet. Instead, she had announced her arrival, giving him the advantage. When Pru broke through the holly planted just inside the railing, she found him with one arm round Rosette, her arms pinned to her sides. He held a pair of secateurs to her throat, the sharp points of the hand pruners pressing in.

Pru recoiled and put her hands up. “Forde, what is this? What are you doing?”

“Don't play the innocent, Pru, not any longer.” He sneezed again, and she saw Rosette flinch. A dark drop appeared on her neck where the secateurs had pierced her skin. Forde sniffed loudly, a snorkeling sound—a trail of mucus from his nose to his lips glistening. “You've been playing cat and mouse with me—you've known all along, haven't you?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Pru said, reaching out a hand but not daring to take a step closer. “Rosette, are you all right?”

Even in the dim light, Rosette's skin stood out so pale as to be luminous. She gave the tiniest of nods, but her eyes were wide with fear, and when Forde adjusted his grip on her, pulling her tighter and causing her to shift her feet, she whimpered. Pru looked down and saw that she stood on one foot only—the other jutted out at an awkward angle. And there, off to the side, lay Rosette's open laptop—with a rock the size of a soccer ball sunk into its keyboard.

“Where's my phone, Forde?”

“I took your mobile, Pru,” Forde said, nodding, as if proud of himself. “Yes, and Rosette's, too. And Ms. Woodford's, of course. I'm a collector of mobiles, it seems. They are all turned off—no one can find you.”

Pru sincerely hoped that wasn't true—someone would miss them and think where to look. But when? “Let Rosette go, Forde—you're being ridiculous. We're in a public place, what do you think you can do?”
In a deserted public place,
Pru thought, her heart sinking,
with road traffic loud enough that no one can hear
.

“It's a flash drive,” Forde said. “I arrived here before you, and I watched and waited. Just like that evening when you met her—you almost saw me then, didn't you? Tonight, I saw you find it. Ms. Woodford didn't tell me where she'd kept a copy of all my work and our emails. I tried to make her tell me, but she said that I wouldn't get that copy and I should give up. I'm not giving up, as you can see.”

“You can't have it, Forde,” Pru said.

“I can have it! I would already have it, but she heard me coming.” Forde shook Rosette, who grimaced. “Where is it? Did she hand it off to you and you've hidden it? It wasn't in your bag. Give it to me, Pru—it's no business of yours, and you shouldn't've gone around blethering on about it for all the world to hear.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You talk to dogs!”
Forde shouted.

“I what?” For a moment, Pru thought that Forde's delusions had taken over his entire mind. “So that was you following me on the Common. When I was with Boris. I saw your sweatshirt.”

“My mistake,” Forde whispered fiercely. “Too easy to identify, wasn't it? But I didn't wear it this afternoon, and I heard you reading what I wrote for the leaflet. You can't stop progress. My proprietary process will revolutionize—” Caught up as he was in his proprietary process, Forde must've forgotten his situation and pointed the secateurs at Pru for emphasis.

He got no further. Rosette bent forward with a jerk and broke Forde's hold round her. She followed with a sharp elbow to his stomach. He clutched at the pain and Rosette lurched away, but got only two steps before she cried out and collapsed. Forde jumped her, and Pru jumped him, trying to knock him away.

“Stop this!” she shouted, grabbing at his arms. But he was heavier than she and used his weight to throw himself backward. He landed on her hard, knocking the wind cruelly out of her. As she gasped for air, he flipped her over and put a knee on her back.

“All right, all right,” she managed to spit out. “Yes, I've got the flash drive. In the shed.”

“No,” Forde said, although a note of doubt crept into his voice. “I turned out your bag. But then Rosette slipped out with her computer and I had to come after her—too bad she stumbled as she tried to run off, isn't it, Rosette?” Rosette lay nearby, grunting as she struggled to sit up. “Ms. Woodford promised there was only the one last copy of our communications—she shouldn't've said that, but she was always a trusting sort. More's the pity for her.”

Pru strained her neck to keep her face out of the grass. “She believed you would do the right thing.”

This seemed to give Forde pause, although he didn't let up on Pru—his full weight pressed hard on her back, making it difficult for her to take a breath.

“I thought she would appreciate my work,” he said, “my breakthrough. I looked for her approval.”

“You wanted her blessing to let you destroy a natural landscape?” Rosette asked.

“It's a
minor
side effect!” Forde shouted. “Who cares about the bloody bees except for you gardeners?” He took a noisy breath and continued more quietly. “She said she wanted to meet here that evening, and so I came—I thought she would reconsider. But she wouldn't. And she wouldn't stop talking, telling me how wrong it was.” His voice dropped to a whine. “She wouldn't stop talking, and with every second that passed, I could see my business merger falling apart. I had to make her be quiet, and so I…It was an accident.”

“Accident?” Pru wheezed. “You choked her to death by accident and then dumped a load of rocks on her—was that an accident, too?”

“Look at all the people who could run that machine,” Forde said. “It could've been any one of them. It could've been Iris—look now, Pru, she almost killed you herself.”

“She did not almost kill me,” Pru said.

“And if all that wasn't bad enough, Mr. MacWeeks changes the flowers—it has to be bluebonnets in the garden, so that everyone will see what I've accomplished. Doesn't
anyone
understand that?”

“You were the one who attacked Roddy behind the shed?” Pru asked.

“You're always in my way, Pru—you got in my way then, too, didn't you?”

With the back of a hand, Rosette wiped away the trickle of blood, smearing it across her neck. She had pulled herself to a sitting position, keeping her injured leg out straight. She looked at Pru, then cut her eyes at Forde, who paid no attention. Rosette scooted backward a few inches, winced, and nodded to Pru.

“She would've told Damien and there was no way he would just hand over two million pounds to you,” Rosette said.

“What's two million pounds to a company that big?” Forde whined. “It's nothing to him—big businesses buy ideas and then do nothing with them every single day.”

“You don't even know if your idea works—if you could truly produce biofuel. It's all unproven theory.”

“So let them find out for themselves. And if it didn't work, what did it matter to me? I'd have my seed money for more research.”

“Forde, that doesn't make sense,” Pru said.

“It makes sense to me,” he wailed. Forde dug his knee into her back and groped the pockets of her trousers. “The flash drive isn't in that massive bag you carry about with you, and it isn't in the shed.”

“You didn't conduct a very thorough search, did you?” Pru asked, spitting out a piece of grass. “You didn't look in the pail of gravel at the back—you didn't turn that out and sift through?”

Forde hesitated long enough for Pru to hope he believed her—she couldn't remember if there was another pail of gravel in the shed. What had Rosette done with the flash drive?

“All right, then,” Forde said, standing and yanking Pru up with him. He took hold of her as he had Rosette—her arms cinched at her sides—and placed the secateurs at her throat. The steel was cold against her skin. “Let's all of us go back and find it.”

“I can't walk,” Rosette said.

“That's your own fault,” Forde said, “if you don't mind me saying so. Trying to kick away your computer just when that rock was coming down on it.”

A wave of nausea came over Pru at the thought of the rock crushing Rosette's ankle. “You don't have to drag Rosette along,” she bargained. “She isn't going anywhere. Let me take you back to find the flash drive. Once you have it, you can do anything you want with it. You can let us go.”

If they could leave Rosette there, she might be able to scoot herself to the gate. Would she get there in time—before Forde got away? He certainly couldn't drag both of them back to the ARGS site.

“Let you go,” Forde murmured to himself. “I'm not sure that'll work, but at least we'll be quicker, won't we, Pru?”

“Yes, quick,” Pru agreed desperately, imagining their walk in the dark with sharp secateurs at her throat. And once they arrived there, she would need to produce the flash drive.

Forde frog-marched her up the pathway, Pru moving as slowly as he'd allow while she scanned the grounds on their journey, looking for help and at the same time hoping to think of a way to break his grip. She wouldn't be able to do it with pure force—she had thought Forde a bit pudgy under his ARGS sweatshirt, but as it turned out, it was solid muscle. And the secateurs—if Rosette could be pricked with only a slight movement, the blades could slice through Pru's throat in a second. When they passed one of the lamppost security lights, she glanced round, seeking out the CCTV and locating cameras at the corner of the Rock Bank Restaurant at the end of the avenue, and she imagined their strange passage playing out on a television screen in a guard's shack. At least there would be a record of what happened, although she found cold comfort in that.

Forde didn't speak as he pushed her along, but he was breathing heavily and his sweaty face was pressed up against hers. She could smell him, too, and the sharp, acrid odor brought the nausea back—it swirled round in Pru's stomach, threatening an appearance.
Forde's afraid,
Pru realized—but that wasn't necessarily a good thing for her. She couldn't reason with fear—she must look for some other way.

They reached the Aussie garden first. The massive foliage-covered structure that represented a mountain rose up like a black specter.
Try something, anything.
Pru let out a gasp. “What was that?” she whispered.

Forde's head swiveled round. “What?” His grip on her tightened, but the hand with the secateurs moved away, as if ready to threaten someone else. Pru seized the chance.

She stomped on his foot with all her might—with no steel-toed boots to protect him, Forde screamed and loosened his grip for a fraction of a second, enough time for her to break and run. She felt the secateurs slice through her shirt and touch her arm. Which way? She had no time to consider and went straight ahead. Just inside the ARGS garden, Forde caught her arm. Pru whirled to fight him off, but fell backward onto the dry-stacked stone wall with Forde on top of her.

A hard, lumpy, painful landing as stones spilled out all in all directions and they both scrabbled over them, slipping as they tried to stand. Forde lunged at Pru again and managed to take hold of one of her feet. She kicked him with the other and began to scream, hoping that someone, somewhere, wouldn't dismiss her as a London fox.

“Shut it, shut it,” Forde rasped, panting. But perhaps he hadn't expected the fierceness of her defense. She continued to kick, landing at least one good hit. And then she reared back and punched—not a slap, not a sideswipe, but a fist to the face—and she got him right in the nose. He screamed, but so did she as she grabbed her hand in pain.

He clamped his fingers over her mouth and a hand round her throat. “You're just like her,” he hissed, “you won't be quiet.”

Pru shook her head and went limp, hoping he'd interpret her action as a signal he'd won.

Forde eased up on his grip, gasping and looking round, his face flushed and his eyes not quite focusing, as if he couldn't get his bearings. Blood dripped from his nose. He put a fingertip to it, saw the results, and gave a furious cry. In his split second of confusion, Pru took off, first on all fours until she could stand. She had made it as far as the shed when he tackled her and they both fell sideways. She felt the structure shift and it caught Forde off balance. She broke—the easiest route this time led away from the heap of stones that had been a wall and into “Welcome to Oz.” She neared the crane when she felt his hands on her back. Trying to wrench herself out of his grasp, she tripped, fell forward, and the world went black.