4 Malice in Christmas River (22 page)

I pressed “stop” on the recording function. I hit playback, making sure it had actually been recording.

I heard my voice come through the speakers, and then Laurel’s. Then Ashley’s.

The sound quality was faint, but it would work.

I let out a sigh of relief. My fingers trembled as I hit save. Then I spent the next few minutes making sure the recording went out to everyone: Daniel, Trumbow, Owen. And Erik Andersen.

A few minutes later, I called Trumbow. He didn’t answer. I left a message telling him he needed to check his email right away. It was urgent.

He’d probably get some satisfaction that I’d been wrong about Tex Stevens being the one to hurt Daniel, but I didn’t much care. All I wanted was for him to at least do some of his job. If not the solving cases part, the arresting and pressing charges part.

I gripped the wheel for a moment, resting my forehead on the back of my hands, trying to get a handle on what I’d just done.

Ashley had thought she was so smart. She thought she could get away with anything, as long as she could bat those long eyelashes of hers and play the innocent, good girl card.   

She thought she could beat the consequences.

But her arrogance had been her downfall. She hadn’t even considered that I’d gone to the McSween house with a plan. That I wasn’t there just to throw accusations around.  

She didn’t seem to have any idea that I’d been there to get her confession.

Maybe I’d seen too many cop movies, thinking I could do something like that. That I could draw a confession out and record it. But it had worked, and now, Ashley McSween was going to get what was coming to her.  

Chapter 62

I felt my cheeks grow hot and darken as he shook his head angrily at me.

“How
could
you do this to me, Cin?”

His tone had come as a total shock. My knees grew weak and I felt my stomach lurch into my throat.  

He held himself up with the crutches, his arms trembling slightly. It was the first time I’d seen him use them.

He was doing it to make a point, I realized.  

I had just walked through the door. Feeling victorious. Feeling relieved.

But I’d been shot down the second I stepped over the threshold.

“You… you heard it?” I said, having trouble finding my voice.

“
Yes
,” Daniel growled in a low tone. 

He glanced over at Warren, who was sitting at the kitchen table by the computer.

I had the feeling Daniel was holding onto his anger as best he could out of consideration for the old man. But I could tell he was losing the battle.  

“I heard it all right,” he said. “Do you know how much danger you put yourself in by going over there? Do you know what could have happened to you?”

He shook his head.

“That girl’s a sociopath. She could have killed you, and her mom would have helped bury the body. No one would ever have heard from you again.
I
would have never heard from…”

He sucked in wind. The effort of standing was too much after so many days of being laid up in bed.

“And maybe what’s worse is that you lied to me, Cin,” he said, his tone rising. “You flat out lied about where you were going. You jeopardized yourself. You jeopardized
us
.”

“I did it
for
us,” I said, trying to hold back tears. “I couldn’t just sit by and let someone do this to you. I love you too much, don’t you see that? Don’t you see that someone had to bring this monster to justice?”

I could tell he wasn’t buying it.  

“You should have come to me first,” he said. “You can’t make decisions like that alone. Not something that big. You can’t sneak off and play Nancy Drew.”

Tears were streaming down my face now. I couldn’t hold them back anymore. 

Daniel had never been so angry with me before.

I wiped them away, but it was useless. More replaced them.

Warren cleared his throat.

“Listen, kids, I’m going to give you two some room,” he said.

He grabbed his wallet from the kitchen counter and walked passed me, patting me on the shoulder.

“It’s just part of marriage,” he whispered to me on his way out the door. “But don’t worry. You’ll work it out, Cinny Bee.”  

He left, leaving the two of us just staring at each other.

“I can’t believe you’d lie to me like that, Cin,” Daniel finally said. “I didn’t think you’d
ever
hurt me like this.”

I went over to him, reaching for his arm, but he pulled away.  

“Daniel, I—”

“I don’t even care that it was her,” he said. “I could have been happy the rest of my life if I never found that out. So long as you never put yourself in danger like that.”

“Daniel, that’s not—”

“There’s nothing you can say,” he said, hobbling away. “If I could, I’d go out for a long drive right now. But I can’t. All I can do is take the couch tonight, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

I let out a gasp when he said that.

We weren’t that kind of couple. For as long as we’d been together, nobody was ever relegated to the couch. We didn’t have fights like this.

I just stared at him, my heart aching for a minute. I brushed away the tears.

I didn’t know how he could be so cruel. So cruel after everything I had done for him. After I’d cared for him. After I’d cooked for him. After I’d given up our honeymoon because of his job.

For Chrissakes
. After I’d figured out who had tried to kill him that night.

I had done it because I loved him. And this was the thanks I got for that.  

It was me who should have been angry. Not him.

My emotions changed in a split second. I stopped crying and felt anger bubbling up deep from my core.  

“Fine,” I said, gritting my teeth. “You do what you want. But you don’t know the half of what I’ve gone through these last few weeks, Daniel Brightman. Everything you put me through, and this is what I get? It’s B.S.”

I grabbed my purse.

“And you know, you can get on your high horse and say I lied to you. But you’ve been lying to me too,” I said. “You held back on that story about Tex all these years. Maybe if you actually told me things, I wouldn’t have to go around acting like Nancy Drew.”

I stomped angrily into our bedroom, slamming the door as hard as I could.

I threw my purse across the room and then threw myself onto the bed.

I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.

Then I fell into an exhausted, hollow sleep. 

Chapter 63

I didn’t know whether it was the bright flash or the sound of the sky splitting overhead a few seconds later that woke me up.

I felt my eyes fling open. With blurry vision, I searched the walls of the room, trying to remember where I was. Who I was. What I was doing alone in the bed.

When I remembered that I was home, I thought for a moment that Daniel was still back in the hospital.

But it didn’t take long for the fight, in all of its ugly intensity, to come back to me.  

I sat up, turning on the nightstand lamp. I fumbled for the glass of water next to it, and brought it to my lips, chugging it until there was nothing left.

Rain began to splatter against the windows in random patters. A gust of wind wailed against the panes.

I was placing the water glass back down on the nightstand when another noise jarred me.

My phone rang. I glanced at the alarm clock. It was just after midnight.

I answered

It was Trumbow.

My heart sped up

“Hello?” I croaked.

“Ms. Peters?”

“Did you get her?”

He had called me earlier, shortly after getting my message and email. He said they were going out to the McSween Ranch to arrest her, just as soon as they got a warrant to do so, and that he would call me as soon as she was at the station.

“Well, uh,” he stammered. “You see, there’s no need to worry. It’s just, uh, well, that mother of hers got in our way, you see, when we tried to bring her in. The McSween girl took off on one of the horses on the ranch. We were trailing her for a while, but it’s dark in those fields, Ms. Peters, and we weren’t prepared for that kind of chase. She got into the woods, and then we…”

“You lost her?” I said in a harsh whisper.

I didn’t know what else I could have expected from Trumbow.

I’d been a fool to think he could have handled something like this cleanly.

“Now like I said, there’s no need to worry,” he said. “We’re sending Deputy McHale over to your house as we speak.”

I furrowed my brow.

When I had walked in earlier, a cop car had been sitting outside the house, the way one had been since Daniel upped security earlier in the week.

“Are you…” I stammered. “Are you telling me
nobody
is here right now?”

Trumbow cleared his throat.

“Well, you see, George had an emergency back at home. Seems his mother…”

I didn’t hear the rest.

I dropped the phone and killed the nightstand light. I tiptoed over to the window, searching the dark night frantically.

I couldn’t see a damn thing out there. Just the rain.

I shuffled as quietly as I could across the wood floor. I opened the bedroom door and walked down the hallway.

The guest bedroom was shut, and I pressed an ear to the door. I heard Warren softly snoring.

He would be safest in there, I reasoned. The window in that room faced the backyard, and was too small for anyone to get into.

I let him be and then went out into the living room. I walked over to the sofa, leaning over it.

“Daniel,” I rasped.

But I realized he was already awake. His eyes shined up from the sofa. He saw me and placed a finger up to his lips. As if to say,
shhh
. 

“Come here,” he whispered. 

He sat up. I came around and took a seat next to him.

He looked at me as if the fight had never happened. As if we both hadn’t said those ugly things to each other.

He looked at me the way he always did. An ocean of love and respect in his eyes.

Relief flooded through me.

It sounded insane. But I had been more worried about Daniel and me getting past this fight than about a crazy, psychotic teenager breaking into our home and murdering us as we slept.

Because I knew that if I had Daniel, than I could face anything. Anything in the world.  

“Trumbow called,” he whispered.

“He called me too.”

He held me close to him.

“It’s going to be okay, Cin.”

“You think so?” I said, looking at him.

I fell into his eyes for a moment.  

“Cin, I’m so sorry about what I—”

Huckleberry suddenly started growling. A moment later, a loud noise, one that was loud enough to hear over the wind and rain, came from somewhere outside in front of the house.

It sounded like branches breaking.

I looked out the large window of the living room that faced the front porch. I could see nothing but darkness.

Huckleberry stood up on the window’s edge and started to bark.  

I looked at Daniel. His eyes had narrowed and they were probing the darkness. He looked like a predator, searching for its prey in the shadows of the jungle.  

He leaned forward and quickly reached for something on the table.

“She’s not getting in here. She’s not getting anywhere near us.”

“Daniel,” I said, placing a hand on his chest.

He looked down at me.

“I love you, Cin,” he said.

Just then there was another noise, this one louder. Huckleberry was foaming at the mouth, pressing at the glass on the window pane.  

Another bright white flash lit up the sky outside.

And for a split second, the land was washed in light.

It was only for a split second, but it was enough.

I saw it through the window.

I saw the horse’s silhouette, rearing up, like a beast from hell.

I saw the figure of a girl holding onto the reins.  

And maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought I saw her face too.

She looked like the monster that she was.

I screamed louder than I’d ever screamed before.

Chapter 64

“Cin—wait!” Daniel shouted.

Shortly after seeing Ashley on the horse, another flash of lightning had illuminated the night, showing a different scene.  

One where the horse’s rider was pulled down off the beast.A dark figure ripping the girl from the stirrups and bringing her to the ground. There had been a high-pitched scream, and then a moment later, no noise at all.

Daniel had drawn his gun, and was holding it toward the window. But there was nothing to aim at anymore. The horse was gone.

We just had sat there several minutes, staring out at the darkness as Huckleberry kept barking and howling at the window.

Daniel finally lowered his gun. And I finally managed to pull myself out of shock.

I got up off the sofa and ran outside. Daniel yelled after me a second time.

“Wait, Cin!”

But I couldn’t turn back.

If he didn’t know who he’d married by now, then this was going to have to be a lesson for him.

Cinnamon Peters wasn’t the type to cower on the sidelines.

I flipped the front porch light on and squinted as the brightness of it pierced my eyes. The horse, the same blond one I’d seen at the McSween ranch that first time I visited, was walking aimlessly now in the distance. No longer the hell beast it had appeared to be under its owner’s command.

She was lying face down in the gravel and mud of our driveway.

I glanced around, searching for Owen or George or Trumbow or whoever had stopped Ashley McSween from carrying out her half-baked plan to hurt Daniel and me.

But there was no one in sight.

Cold raindrops splattered through the fabric of my pajamas, but I hardly felt them as I ran over to the body lying face-down.

I leaned over, reaching for her ponytail and yanking it the way I had wanted to earlier in the evening.