Blindfold (21 page)

She was wearing heeled boots. She lifted one swiftly and brought the heel down, as hard as she could, on James Keith's left foot. He yelped in pain, and weakened his grip, just a little. Maggie took advantage of the moment to yank her left arm free and drive that elbow into his midsection with all her might.

He let out a whoosh of air. And let go.

Maggie ran. Chantilly, her face a startled mask of fury, was barring the way back to the sheriff's office, so Maggie had no choice. She had to run in the other direction.

She ran wildly, her legs pumping furiously, the heels of her boots pounding out a rat-a-tat-tat on the worn floorboards. She had no breath to spare for screaming, and instinct told her it was more important to flee than to summon help. If she didn't run fast enough, Chantilly would catch up, and by the time help arrived, it would be too late.

So she ran, fast and furiously and blindly.

Too blindly. She had no sense of where she was, wasn't aware that she had flown down corridors so fast and far that she had entered the older wing. The same older wing that housed the coal bin. The same older wing where the cave-in had taken place. The same older wing where a bass-drum-sized portion of the corridor floor was missing.

There were no barricades around the hole. Mr. Petersen, the town clerk, had not yet made up his mind that barricades were necessary. He would not decide to do so until the following Tuesday.

The floor disappeared from beneath Maggie's feet suddenly and completely. She had no time to scream. She simply fell, hard and fast, feetfirst, landing in the coal bin. The momentum of her fall drove her downward into the hill of black nuggets like a shovel, until the mountain had made a place for her in its middle.

When she came to a rest, buried in coal up to her

waist, her arms free, it took her several stunned minutes to understand what had happened. When it sank in, she realized where she was, and waited for her eyes to become accustomed to the semi-darkness. The window she had shattered with her elbow had not yet been replaced, and the opening allowed in more light than the old, dirty glass had.

That was unfortunate. Because when her dizziness had passed and her eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, what met her eyes was so shocking, so unbelievable, she stopped breathing entirely.

If her legs hadn't been hurting fiercely from her drive downward into the hill of coal, she might have convinced herself that she had struck her head as she fell and was now unconscious, that she wasn't really seeing anything at all. She was only dreaming it... or, rather, nightmaring it.

Because how could she be seeing what she thought she was seeing?

White -- the cold, raw white of bare bone -- protruding right there in front of her. And in the white bone ... horrible, horrible ... two empty, hollow eye sockets staring back at her as if to say, what are you doing here, this is my pile of coal, I was here first. There were cheekbones, high and angled beneath the eye sockets . . . there was a hard, unyielding bony white jaw ... an open, grinning mouth...

Still not breathing, Maggie stared.

White bones and empty eye sockets and grin-

ning mouth ... no skin ... no flesh ... no covering of any kind to hide the white bone ...

What she was looking at, what had popped up right beside her like the feature attraction in a haunted house at an amusement park, was a skull.

The bony, unseeing, grinning, white skull of a person long dead.

Maggie opened her mouth then, and began screaming.

When Alex, Helen, and Lane came to visit her that afternoon, she flatly refused to talk about what had happened. Couldn't. Impossible. She hadn't accepted it, couldn't, and struggled to convince herself that it was all just a terrible nightmare.

Her mother said gently that it would be better if Maggie came to terms with it. "Then you can put it behind you, sweetie."

Maggie thought that was a crock, and said so.

And her mother said, "I suppose you're probably wondering ... who ... who it was."

Maggie wasn't wondering any such thing. Because in order to wonder that, she first had to admit that the bony-white, nightmarish thing in the coal bin with her had once been a living person. No way was she ready to do that.

She just wouldn't think about it.

So she slept all day, and when the trio arrived, she said, "We can talk about anything you want except that Don't even think about bringing it up. Where's Scout?"

Helen sighed and sat down on the foot of the bed. "At the bus station. His father has arranged for his mom-to go to rehab. In California. Twenty-one days. She refuses to fly, so Scout had to get her a bus ticket."

"He's going to bunk with me while she's gone," Alex said.

Maggie didn't know what to say. That's awful? That's great? Wasn't it both? It was awful that Mrs. Redfern needed to go, but it was great that she'd finally agreed to get help. Maybe when she came

back, life in Scout's house would improve.

"Don't say anything to him about it," Alex warned. "He doesn't want anyone to know. He only told me because he needed a place to stay. And I told them," waving toward Lane and Helen, "and you, so no one would ask him why he's staying at my house."

"What I want to know," Helen said to Maggie, "is if you're okay. I feel bad that this happened because you were hanging around the courthouse waiting to lend me moral support. That's what the deputy told me. Are you okay?"

Was she? No, probably not. But she could pretend that she was. She could do that. Maybe she could even fool herself.

The sheriff had visited that morning, asking her only about Chantilly and James. Maggie had given him the details of their threatening visit, and he had taken notes. When he left, he said he would see to it that they gave her no more trouble. She believed that he meant it. But she didn't see how he could promise that unless he was willing to keep the two of them in jail forever. Or at least until Maggie left for college.

When asked, Helen said that the sheriff had been "nice" to her yesterday morning, not treating her like a criminal or anything. But she felt bad that she hadn't been able to give him a description of the person wielding the saw at the old courthouse.

Lane seemed to be okay, although her right cheek was bruised a little, and she moved stiffly, as if she'd overdone a workout.

Scout arrived, looking very tired. Maggie felt sorry for him, but she kept Alex's warning in mind, and didn't ask him where he'd been. He held her hand and asked her if Whit had been to see her.

"No," she said truthfully, and Scout looked relieved.

But ten minutes after they had all left, the doorbell rang again, and a minute or so after that, there was a knock on Maggie's open bedroom door. When she looked up, Whit was standing in the doorway, a fat bouquet of golden autumn flowers filling a glass vase in his hands. "Your mom's vase," he said as he entered the room. "But the flowers are from the garden at Picadilly. They're mums."

"I know what they are," she said. "We wear them for Homecoming."

Her bedside table was too cluttered for the vase, so he set it down on her desk, then moved to stand beside her bed. "I heard what happened. You okay?"

"Sit," she said, pointing to the chair Scout had vacated not ten minutes earlier. "Yep, I'm okay. I guess." Pretending to him didn't seem like such a good idea, after her hissy fit about his lack of honesty. "It was pretty grim. Chantilly and James scared ten years off my life. I felt really helpless at first. He came up behind me and there she was in front of me with that board..." To her horror, tears sprang to Maggie's eyes. She was mortified, and turned away to hide them.

But Whit reached out and turned her face back toward him, saying, "It's okay. Shedding a couple of

tears doesn't make you helpless, Maggie." Keeping his hand on her cheek, he said, "And you can avoid talking about that nasty business in the coal bin all you want, but it happened." He handed her a tissue from the box on her table. "I can't believe how wrong I was."

"Wrong?" She swiped quickly at her eyes. "About what?"

His eyes regarded her carefully. "You don't know? You haven't heard?"

Feeling unsteady, Maggie sank lower in her bed, clutching the edge of the comforter as if it might balance her. "I don't want to hear it," she said angrily. "Whatever it is, don't tell me. It won't kill me not to know, will it? So don't tell me. Not now. Next month, maybe, or next year ..."

He took one of her hands in both of his. "You need to know this. Quit pretending you don't have the guts to hear it. And quit pretending that you don't know what I was wrong about. We both know you do."

Maggie thought about ripping her hand out of his and clapping both her hands over her ears. But she knew he was right. It was silly and childish to keep pretending. It didn't do any good anyway. It wouldn't change anything that was real. "What were you wrong about?" she asked, although she already knew the answer. She hadn't guessed it in the coal bin because she hadn't been thinking then, not thinking at all. But later, in the hospital...

"I was wrong about Dante coming back here."

She looked at him then. "He never left, did he?"

Whit shook his head. "No. They think he tried. His cell door had been jimmied. But something went wrong. Maybe the coal chute window was locked from the outside and he couldn't get it open without breaking the glass and rousing a guard. Or maybe he was climbing up the chute and fell backward, into the bin. Hit his head or something. We won't know that until the medical examiner has done his thing."

"How do they know it's him?"

"Dental records. They went to his mother, then to his dentist, right here in town. It's Dante, all right. No question."

"Your friend."

Whit nodded. "My friend." Still holding Maggie's hand, he leaned back in his chair. "It's weird, you know? I hadn't seen him in so long, but as long as I knew he was out there, I figured there was always this little bit of hope that something would happen to clear him, and he could come back to town someday. Now . . ." He shook his head, his brown eyes bleak.

"Well, this is weird, too," Maggie said, "but I was just thinking, if it weren't for James and Chantilly, we might never have known that Dante didn't escape. If they hadn't come at me like that, I wouldn't have run, and I wouldn't have fallen into the coal bin. The courthouse would have been torn down, cemented over, and no one would ever have known." She laughed without humor. "Hard to believe we have something to thank those two for, but isn't it better to know what happened to Dante?"

"That's just it," Whit said, frowning, "we don't know what happened to him."

"Well, I meant..."

"I know. But it bothers me, not knowing. Dante was athletic, and he was smart. If he'd really wanted to get away, I think he could have. What stopped him?"

"If he was innocent ..." she began, but he interrupted her.

"If he was innocent, he wouldn't have tried to escape. Looks like I was wrong about that, too. Let's not talk about it anymore, okay?" He hitched his chair closer to the bed. "So," he said, smiling at her, "are we okay now? You've forgiven me?"

"I don't know. I've been kind of busy lately, you know? Preoccupied, you might say. Haven't had much time to think about who I'm mad at and who I've forgiven. Except, of course, for James and Chantilly. I'm pretty sure about that one."

"You're avoiding the subject at hand again. Are you going to look at me or not?"

Maggie turned to him. They talked for a while, carefully avoiding certain subjects. Whit said that although his mother liked Picadilly, she disliked the country, which was why they spent so much time in Cleveland. "They argue about it a lot," he confided. "But I figure, if that's the worst I have to deal with, I'll survive. Everybody has something. I mean, Helen's parents are off in Egypt, Lane's father lost their farm, Scout's parents are splitsville, and Alex's dad died. So," he asked Maggie, "what's your deal?"

She laughed, almost bitterly. "You won't believe this," she said, "but my deal was boredom. I mean heavy-duty, no-holds-barred, terminal boredom. Nothing ever happened here, and I couldn't wait to get out of Felicity. Now, I still want to get out of here, but it's not because I'm bored, it's because I'm scared."

"I guess you'd settle for being bored again, am I right?"

"You are so right."

She saw no need to explain then that kissing him was not the way to boredom, as he seemed to think it was. She'd set him straight later. Or not.

I hate her, I hate her, I hate her! She's ruined everything!

I can't believe this has happened. It was all set, all finished, the plans canceled, the building about to be destroyed, once and for all. Fd done what I set out to do. And I'd never been so relieved in all my life.

And now thisl Everything I went through destroyed, useless, a waste of time and risk, all because of her. I was almost caught sawing through that well cover ... some runner, couldn't see who it was. That would have ruined everything. Maybe it was overkill. But I needed one last thing, just one, to make sure the WOH didn't change their minds again. And it worked perfectly, thanks to the very detailed plans and charts at their own offices. I knew exactly what I was doing.

This is just the worst. But I should be fair here. It wasn't really her fault. It was theirs, Alice Ann,

is truly brave only when she's doing the attacking. So maybe it doesn't take more than a few hard thumps to her rear bumper to make her heart pound in her chest and make her hands shake on the steering wheel. The blows send her car skidding dangerously close to the deep, overflowing culvert beside the road.

"Cut it out I" she screams, hunching over the wheel and holding on tighter. Then, "James? What's he doing back there?"

But before James can figure out what the girl wants from him, the car behind them suddenly pulls out around them, its left wheels riding on the berm because the road is narrow.

The girl says with relief, "Oh, good, he's pass-ingl"

But he doesn't pass. He travels alongside of them for thirty seconds or so; then, just as the girl has decided that if she slows down he'll pass them, the driver of the other car whips the steering wheel viciously to the left and slams into the side of the blue car with full force.