Chapter Sixty-Two

IT SEEMED EVERY light in the inn was on. Susan and I had come through the woods and along the narrow beach to the property, hoping to shelter from sight by the cars parked along the tree line. We crouched by the bumper of Vinny’s sedan and watched the house for movement, but there was none. Blinds were drawn on the lower floors, and the porch doors were hanging open, being pushed back and forth gently in the breeze. I looked over at the open doors of the garage and counted cars along with those parked at the tree line. Angelica, Clay, and Effie all had cars missing from the lot, as well as April Leeler and her son, whose bronze van had been parked at the end of the garage. Neddy Ives didn’t own a vehicle. Aside from Vinny’s sedan and Nick’s car, there was only one other car in the lot; a sleek black car parked right by the edge of the porch.

It took me a moment to recognize the rental.

“Karli Breecher,” I said. Susan looked grave but nodded. Her instincts were as good as if not better than mine, and to her, too, it all made sense. Which meant that Breecher was either inside the house with Nick and in danger from the four “bad guys” Effie had mentioned…

Or she was one of the bad guys.

It’s a hell of a thing to sneak into your own home. To try to be silent, and watchful and alert for danger, while at every step, signs of violence present themselves. There was glass on the pavement outside the laundry window. The frame bashed and shattered, muddy footprints on the windowsill. The mind wants to respond to each sign of defilement with a singular burst of rage. That someone would break my window. That someone would knock over my shelves. By the time Susan and I reached the hall, it was clear that someone had been injured and had fled—perhaps through the kitchen door. There were blood spatters, dark and heavy, on the floorboards. Smears on the walls. The kitchen was trashed. We stood and listened at the kitchen doorway, systematically discounting each individual chime of the strange music the house always played. Pipes creaking. Roof beams relaxing out of the warmth of the day, and the branches of those trees that could reach the house brushing against the weatherboards. Susan touched my wrist, and I met her questioning eyes. She and I seemed to understand simultaneously how bad this was, the silence. There were supposed to be at least five people here.

I slipped into the dining room and covered my mouth with my hand to stifle a shocked groan at the sight of Vinny slumped back in his wheelchair, a bullet in his head. His color told me he was dead, but I went to him anyway, put a finger into his cooling jugular and felt nothing. Someone had been lying, bleeding badly, by the foot of an armchair. Susan appeared in the doorway, her face a sickly shade of gray even before she’d taken in the sight of Vinny in the chair.

She had to gulp a couple of times to get the words out.

“Two dead in the dining room,” she whispered.

I had the same kind of trouble getting the words out, myself.

“Is it Nick?”

She shook her head. “Don’t know them. Driver’s guys, looks like.”

“Breecher was here,” I said, my mind racing. “And Driver. At the same time.”

Susan and I stared at each other, each trying to understand. I didn’t like the coincidental nature of it, the idea that Driver and his men might have been waiting in the forest for something to draw Effie’s attention away from her watchpoint, and that very thing arriving conveniently in the form of Karli Breecher.

I didn’t have time to think longer on that awful scenario, to try to fit the pieces together, before my life nearly ended then and there—in the doorway of the dining room in my own home, my girlfriend looking at me, my possessions and my world in tatters. But the bullet Driver fired from the end of the hall only nicked my left ear. The pain came afterward. Before I had a sense of what was happening, I was thrown sideways into the wall, the whole side of my head throbbing like I’d been punched.

Susan ducked instinctively, turned and whipped out her own gun. Two more shots peppered into the floorboards at my feet. Susan fired a couple of shots at Driver as he disappeared around a corner, heading for the stairwell.

We pursued.