She's Not There (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Was he dead?

She wiped a hand across her glasses and stared at him, breath held, frozen hands gripping the gun.

Amelia inched closer. The man lay face up, his legs in the shallow water from his knees down. His face was turned toward her on the snowy sand and his eyes were closed. She could see a stain of red on the snow under his left arm.

Run!

She looked around frantically in the gathering darkness and finally spotted her duffel. She snatched it up and started to run. The snowy sand grabbed at her feet and she stumbled, her eyes searching for the road she had driven in on. Everything went by in a dark blur.

You shot a man!

She ran down the road, her mind racing, her lungs burning. Where the hell had she parked?

Then she saw a flash of red sticking out from behind a building. She fumbled with the duffel, dropped the gun inside and groped for her keys, terrified she had lost them in the struggle. But then her fingers touched the cold ring of metal.

She skidded to a stop. Not far from her Impala sat a second car—gray and dusted with snow.

It must belong to the man. Don’t worry about it. Get out of here.

She yanked open the door to the Impala and threw the duffel inside. But her eyes swung back to the other car, and hand on her door, she hesitated.

Wait. Check the car. Find out something about the man who just tried to kill you.

Her eyes shot back to the beach. She couldn’t see the man, couldn’t see if he was still lying there or had gotten up, couldn’t see anyone in the whirl of snow and darkness.

She hurried to the gray car, trying to take in everything she could in one sweep of her eyes.

Tennessee plates.

What the hell?

Look inside. Get a name.

She pulled on the passenger door. It didn’t open and at first she thought it was locked, then suddenly it gave way, almost knocking her over. The dome light felt as bright as a search beacon in the gloom, and she looked back toward the shore again, but there was no one coming.

Hands shaking, she ducked inside the car, opened the glove box, and pulled everything out. Sunglasses, a pint of whiskey, receipts, manuals, and maps scattered across the passenger seat. She frantically sifted through them, finally finding a black leather folder. She opened it, found the car registration, and stuffed it in her sweater pocket. She was backing out of the car holding the leather folder when she spotted something else—a black phone wedged between the seats.

She decided to take it, too, so he couldn’t call anyone when he got back here. If he got back here. If he wasn’t dead.

What if he’s dead?

She looked back toward the lake. Get to a phone and call the police? They would help her. They would help him. But did she want him to be helped? He had tried to strangle her.

No, she couldn’t call the police. She had to make herself safe first so she could think this through.

She grabbed the phone and ran back to the Impala. It took her three tries to get the keys in the ignition, but when she turned over the engine, the car gave a dying groan.

Come on!

She wiggled the key and tried again. The Impala engine roared, and she jammed the car into drive. With one last look toward the beach, she wheeled the car around and raced down the road, under the big white arch and onto the highway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Black and ice. Nothing but deepest black and coldest ice. His body was so stiff he couldn’t even move a finger. Was he dead? Was this what it felt like? Not warmth and light but this awful piercing cold and darkness?

But then he began to shiver, so hard that his teeth hurt, and he knew he was still alive. Water was lapping under his legs and he could taste something gritty on his lips, like sand, and then it all came back—the pop of the gun going off and the burn in his shoulder.

And his head . . . it was throbbing, hard and steady. Buchanan struggled up to his elbows and looked around. It was pitch black, not a star in the sky overhead, but he could make out pinpricks of lights across the lake. He sat up further, fighting a wave of nausea, and touched his left shoulder. He couldn’t see it in the dark, but he could feel it and smell it—blood, sticky on his fingers and metallic in his nose. He reached up and felt the back of his head. More blood in his hair and a large knotty bump.

With a groan, he slowly turned over onto his hands and knees. His stomach heaved, and he let it all come up, the bile almost choking him. He had to wait for the wave of nausea to subside before he could push himself to his feet. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and squinted into the darkness of the shoreline but couldn’t see anything.

Then the clouds parted, and a sliver of moon gave him just enough light to see the rippling of black water on the shore, the glint of snow, and beyond that the outlines of the amusement park rides and buildings.

He looked right to the rock jetty. It was coming back to him now in detail, Amelia raising the gun with two hands, the first shot hitting his left shoulder, the second missing his head by inches; then he had fallen backward against the jetty, hitting his head on the rocks.

He looked down at the rock jetty. Jesus, if he had fallen to the right instead of the left he would have landed in the water and drowned.

How long had he been out? And how badly hurt was he? He felt dizzy and sick, and he was freezing. And he could feel the wound in his shoulder pumping out fresh blood.

The snowy sand dragged at his feet as he trudged down the shoreline and back to the road. He staggered to the building where he had left his car. The Impala was gone. He stopped abruptly, staring at his car.

The passenger’s side door was open, the dome light on.

Clutching his arm, he went to the car and peered in. He hadn’t left anything of value inside, his duffel and laptop bag were locked in the trunk. But the glove box was hanging open. On the floor was the Toyota’s manual, maps, a bottle. He slid into the seat and thrust a hand into the glove box.

It was gone—the folder where he kept his car repair receipts, insurance card, and registration—was gone.

She had his name.

He leaned back into the seat, letting out a long slow breath that caught like a dull knife in the back of his lungs. Slowly, he brought his wrist up to his face and peered at his watch. Almost seven.

She knew who he was, and she had a two-hour head start.

His fleece was hard with dried blood, and he gently pulled it down his arm. In the glow of the dome light he got his first look at his shoulder. His shirt was soaked through, dark and wet, and the wound was still bleeding. Everything from his left ear to his elbow was stiff. He couldn’t tell if the damn bullet was still in his flesh or not.

He wasn’t going anywhere tonight. Not even to an emergency room. Because there was a chance she had gone to the cops, and if she had, they were probably already looking for him.

He was shivering violently now. He had to get warm.

Gritting his teeth against the pain, he pulled his keys from his jeans pocket and started the car. He almost passed out when he had to strain across his bloody shoulder to pull the door closed with his right hand.

He switched the heat on high, but when he reached down to put the car in gear he froze. It was gone. He had left the Tele-Bug receiver in the cup holder and it was gone. She had taken it. Most likely, she wouldn’t even guess what it was for. But still, now his link to Hannah Lowrey was gone.

He sat motionless in the seat, eyes closed, as the car heated up. When he finally stopped shivering, he eased the car into gear and started back down the asphalt road.

Passing under the arch, he stopped.

North or south? Did it matter? Right now, the only thing he needed to do was find a good place to hide and hope he didn’t bleed to death.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

He stayed on US 71 heading north as long as he dared and then veered off onto back roads, eyes alert for cops. Finally he picked up Highway 9 going west. He passed up a Super 8 and a Ramada Inn, heading out into the flat emptiness of the Iowa farmlands. The lights grew farther apart and the night sky more vast until after about forty minutes he finally spotted lights ahead. It was a four-pump gas station—Kum & Go—with a convenience store. Two cars in the lot and too many bright lights. He slowed to a crawl, and that’s when he saw the sign about fifty yards beyond the gas station for the Wind Vane Inn.

It was one of those old mom-and-pop motels, a long line of rooms facing the highway. There was one truck in the lot and no lights on, except in the office. Buchanan pulled the Toyota into the darkest corner, got out and popped the trunk. His strength was waning, but he managed to get a clean hooded sweatshirt out of his bag. He peeled off the bloody fleece, tossed it into the trunk, and slipped on the sweatshirt. He wadded up a T-shirt and worked it gently under the sweatshirt against his shoulder. He locked up the car and went to the office.

A skinny kid with pimples looked up from his comic book as Buchanan came in.

“I need a room, please.”

The kid stared hard at him. Buchanan realized he should have put a hat on, that the blood in his hair might be visible. Suddenly, he felt like he was going to pass out or puke, and he had to put a hand on the desk to steady himself.

“You okay?” the kid asked.

Buchanan looked up and forced a smile. “Yeah. I’m just drunk. I don’t want to drive any farther and end up wrapped around a telephone pole. I need to sleep it off. Can I have a room, please?”

The kid slid a card across the desk. “Fill this out. The room’s forty a night, free HBO.”

Buchanan filled out the form with a false name and address. He handed over two twenties, and the kid gave him a key.

Nothing about the room registered in Buchanan’s consciousness as he entered except the strong smell of Lysol hanging in the cold air. He dropped his bag on the bed and began to slowly peel off his sweatshirt.

Pain and exhaustion were advancing on him fast now, and for a moment, the knotty pine walls seemed to move, undulating in the dim light, like he was on some sort of bad acid trip. He fought it off and went into the bathroom, holding the T-shirt against his shoulder.

In the hard glare of the bathroom light, he examined the wound. It had stopped bleeding, but the hole was swollen and red. He turned to look at his back in the mirror. He let out a deep breath of relief when he saw the dark hole crusted with blood.

Exit wound. The bullet wasn’t still in him. That meant he had a good chance. He went back to the bag on the bed and rummaged inside until he found the bottle of Crown Royal. Back in the bathroom, he stripped off his jeans, underwear, shoes and socks, and stood in the small tub, holding the bottle of booze.

He screwed off the top, took a long drink, and then poured the whiskey over his left shoulder. He let out a howl as it burned into the bullet hole, but there was no one there to hear him. And there was no one there to pick him up when he buckled to his knees in the tub.

When the pain had passed, he rose slowly, steadying himself against the wall, pressing his forehead against the cool tile. He reached out to turn on the water to take a shower, but his hand was shaking and he was too exhausted to stand up.

He got out of the tub, staggered to the outer room, and fell down on the bed. He managed to pull the bedspread up over his naked body and then everything went black, as black as the sky above the lake.

Amelia sat on the bed in the dark motel room, arms wrapped around her duffel, head bent. Her chest hurt from the constant pounding of her heart.

She had driven due south on US 71, not slowing until she hit her first red light in some small town called Milford. But once out into the farmlands again, she pushed the Impala up to the 65 mph speed limit, heading into the blackness on a road as flat as a velvet ribbon. Her plan was simple—get as far away from Arnolds Park as she could.

It was two hours later that she spotted the sign for the Little Sioux Motel. Ten minutes and fifty-five dollars later, she was here—locked inside an icy room in the middle of nowhere.

Amelia drew a breath and finally looked at her surroundings. Cheap paneling, floral drapes, a blond dresser with a flecked oval mirror. On the nightstand was a beige rotary phone and a Bible.

She got up, turned on the heat, and stripped off her wet clothes. In the bathroom, she blinked hard when she switched on the light, and looked in the mirror. Her neck was already bruising. She could actually see the pattern his fingers had left on her skin.

After a quick hot shower, she changed into clean jeans and a T-shirt. While she was hanging the sodden sweater coat over the heater, she felt something in the pocket.

She pulled out a piece of paper. It was the car registration from the black leather folder she had found in the man’s glove box. She stared at the name and address.

Clay Buchanan. Nashville, Tennessee.

Who was this man?

Why had he tried to kill her?

God, her damn heart wouldn’t stop pounding, her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and her neck was pulsing. She sat down on the edge of the bed. She needed to talk to someone, needed to not feel so alone.

Hannah . . .

Amelia pulled the phone on the nightstand to her lap and dialed, hoping Hannah would still be awake. Just as it started to ring, she heard a beeping coming from her open duffel on the bed beside her.

She looked inside. The man’s black phone was lit up, flashing something on the small display. She pulled out the phone. The display read
I
NCOMING
C
ALL
followed by Hannah’s number.

Amelia slammed down the rotary phone’s receiver and looked back at the display on Buchanan’s phone. It read
C
ALL
E
NDED
.

What the hell?

She sat there for a moment, and then redialed Hannah’s number on the rotary phone. The other phone chirped again, with the same message about an incoming call. Again, she hung up and again the display read
C
ALL
E
NDED
.

This phone—this strange black gadget—was somehow connected to Hannah’s phone. But how? Did this thing also record conversations?

Amelia dialed Hannah again. The black phone chirped an alert, but Amelia didn’t hang up.

“Hello?”

The sound of Hannah’s voice melted Amelia’s heart, and she wanted to tell Hannah she was okay, but she couldn’t.

“Yes, I’m calling from American Subscription Service. Can I interest you in our offer for a subscription to
House Beautiful
?” Amelia asked, taking care to alter her voice.

“What? Hell, no. My house is plenty beautiful already.”

Hannah hung up.

Amelia turned back to Buchanan’s phone. The display now read:
O
NE
N
EW
R
ECORDING
P
RESS #
T
O
L
ISTEN
. Amelia pressed the # button. Her own voice came back, asking Hannah about the magazine. She turned the thing off, in case it had a GPS connection. For a long time she sat there in the shadows, her mind spinning with questions.

The only person who could know about Hannah was Alex. He could have made the connection through her phone call to the dog spa. Had he shown up in Georgia after she left? Was he the person Hannah said she saw sitting in a car across the street? Had he tapped Hannah’s phone, hoping Amelia would call her and tell her where she was?

But something in her gut told her Alex wasn’t the type of man who would tap a phone. He had money and connections. He would have hired someone—this Clay Buchanan—to tap the phone.

Which meant he had also hired Buchanan to kill her.

Had the car accident in the Everglades been his first attempt? Had Alex hired Buchanan for that as well? But Buchanan had light hair. He wasn’t the dark-haired man from her visions. She had always felt that it had been Alex in the car.

Tears burned in her eyes, and she squeezed them shut.

What had she done to make her husband want her dead? And who was this man Buchanan who would agree to do such a horrible thing?

God, she wanted to just curl up and sleep, to drift into a darkness that would feel safe and warm. But she couldn’t.

She picked up her iPad and tried to go to Safari. No signal. She moved around the room, holding the iPad near the window. Finally, the signal icon appeared, and the Safari screen popped up. She sat down at a table under the window and typed in Buchanan’s name. The first link read:

BUCHANAN INVESTIGATIONS

www.claybuchanan.com

Skip Tracer. I can find anyone, anywhere.

There were other links to him. An article in
Eye Spy
magazine: “Skip Tracers: The 21st Century Bounty Hunters.” A blog called Technewsworld.com with the heading “Following Digital Footprints.” And a story in
PI World
: “Clay Buchanan: Hunter of Humans.”

Amelia shut her eyes, feeling sick.

When she opened them again, the screen seemed to waver before her, and she was about to shut down the iPad when another link caught her attention.

NOWHERE TO HIDE—AMAZON.COM

www.amazon.com/ClayBuchanan

Skip tracer extraordinaire Clay Buchanan recounts his decades of tracking down scoundrels, scofflaws, and anyone with secrets to hide.

She clicked on it, which took her to a page offering a book for sale for $19.95. The cover showed a motel sign and the shadowy silhouette of a man watching the place.

Amelia leaned back in the chair. The bastard had written a book. Was that how Alex had found him?

She scrolled back up and clicked on the link to his personal website. His photograph popped up and her heart caught. The man on her screen was a little younger, his face a little thinner, hair a little lighter. But it was the same man who had put his hands around her neck and tried to kill her.

The blurb on his site boasted that he could find anyone anywhere and warned people who wanted to disappear that because of technology and people like him, there was nowhere left in this world to hide. Under that was an image of his book cover and a link to buy it. At the bottom of the page was a final link: E-mail Clay Buchanan.

She stared at the e-mail link for a long time, not sure what she was feeling. She was almost tempted to send him an e-mail to tell him that she knew who he was and now it was his turn to disappear. But she knew that if Buchanan was dead, they could find her through his website. Still, the thought of rubbing her survival in his face gave her an unexpected feeling of satisfaction and something else. And she realized what it was—anger.

What’s the matter, Mellie?

I hit a girl at school, Grandma. Mama took away my bike.

Was the girl bothering you?

She’s always bothering me. Mama said I should’ve just ignored her, that nice girls don’t lose their tempers.

Your mama is wrong. Getting mad is a girl’s right. Sometimes it’s all you got.

The Bird was right. Her anger was justified, but it wasn’t all she had. Not anymore.

Amelia set the iPad aside. Her whole body hurt, and her mind was shutting down. She knew she needed to get some sleep. In the morning, she would pull up some newspapers online to see if there was any information about a body being found at Arnolds Park. Then she would decide what to do.

And where to go next.