From This Moment (38 page)

The boat was getting close to land. To her left was a rocky shoreline. There wasn’t much of a beach. Most of it was jutting gray boulders.

Looking farther ahead, she saw that they were nearing an island that couldn’t have been even a half mile in diameter. It was covered with decaying buildings, probably the abandoned fish cannery Ernest had mentioned. The outbuildings looked ready to topple over. Some of the roofs had collapsed, exposing heating tanks, pulleys, and a water turbine. Were they headed to the shore or the fish cannery? Neither looked safe.

A man with a thin mustache jiggled the rudder of the dinghy, while the man with the rifle still had it trained on her.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“We’re going to land on the beach,” Ernest said. “There is a cave tucked into the cliff where you’ll be safe and won’t be
able to get into any trouble. All you need to do is cooperate and everything will be fine.”

She wondered if Gwendolyn had cooperated. Assault, kidnapping, and drugging people were not the crimes of a novice criminal, and in all likelihood one of the men in this boat was responsible for strangling the life out of her sister.

“Hey, do you remember that Caslon type I bought in Philadelphia?” Ernest asked. “It turns out another set just got listed for auction in London. The lowest bidding price is twice what I paid for mine last month.” He looked pleased, as though he expected her to be impressed.

“Congratulations,” she managed to say in a pleasant enough voice. “It seems you found quite the bargain.” Find common ground with him. Perhaps that would help him see her as a human and not some inconvenient insect that needed squashing.

“It’s a rare set, and one of great beauty,” he said. “I think all the modern printing methods have really lost something. The artistry of the typographer is gone. It’s all just machine printing now.”

She scrambled for something, anything, to say that might placate Ernest. “You’re right,” she said. “The soul of a craftsman can be seen in all kinds of type. Even bookbinding has a certain beauty to it, don’t you think?”

It seemed to be the right thing to say. Ernest’s smile was broad as he nodded his head. “Wonderful artistry! Of course, leather bindings are far more fragile than good metal type. That’s why I never bothered collecting books. The leather ages and decays, and the lifespan of a book is so short. Not like good steel type that can last for millennia.”

Stella felt a little sick inside. She was like the fragile, mortal leather book, except instead of being able to age and decay with time, she suspected she was about to come to a swift end.

They were almost ashore, and Jason Mason of the Harbor Department hopped into the surf, the water rising only to his hips. Grabbing the front of the boat, he dragged it toward the boulder-strewn beach. A bump and a rasp below her indicated the boat had run aground. The fourth man still kept the rifle trained on her.

“Time to go ashore,” Ernest said brightly. “Here’s the part where it is important to keep your wits, Miss West. Raymond is going to keep that rifle trained on you the whole time, so don’t try to get stupid or heroic. All you have to do is follow instructions, and everything will be fine. Hop on out now. Don’t worry, the water is shallow. You might want to hike your skirts up, because the surf is cold and you don’t have a change of clothes on shore.”

A sheen of frothy bubbles swirled atop of the gray surf. Her knees wobbled and her head pounded, but she could do this. They didn’t know she couldn’t swim, and she had no intention of telling them. Jason stood beside the boat and reached up to guide her out.

The last thing on earth she wanted was to touch that man’s flesh, but she needed his help.

The water was so cold! She yelped, and almost lost her balance, but Jason grabbed her elbow and righted her before she fell.

“Come on, move along,” Jason grumbled.

She focused on the shore ahead of her—anything but the water swirling around her knees. Dry land was only a few more yards away. It was a good thing she’d worn tightly laced boots. Otherwise the sucking pressure from the surf would have pulled them off.

Relief trickled through her as she reached the shore. The man let go of her arm, and she stepped carefully amid the wide,
flat-topped rocks littering the shore. She kept moving toward a sandy area ahead, water squishing out of her sodden boots with each footfall.

“We made it,” Ernest crowed when they were all ashore. While one of the men hauled the dinghy higher onto the beach, the other two each raised their rifles. Ernest had a pistol strapped to his belt, as did the man dragging the boat ashore. Four men, four guns. What did they need so many for? If they were going to kill her, one would do the job just fine. Although didn’t firing squads usually use a team of men?

“What now?” she asked.

“Now we head toward that cave on the north end of the cliffs. I’ve brought a canteen of water, and we can all have a bit of a rest.” Two men set off toward an outcropping of rocks, but one of the men with a rifle stood behind her.

It wasn’t until Ernest mentioned the canteen that Stella realized her thirst. Her mouth was cottony, and her raging headache was probably from dehydration. The canteen dangled from Ernest’s hand as he set off toward the cave, and she followed as quickly as possible. Her limbs trembled and her entire head ached, but the canteen of water motivated her steps.

The cliffside ahead was made of pitted black rock, flecked with bits of mica and carved away by thousands of years of surf. A deep indentation in the rock lay straight ahead, and the three men headed inside. Stella hurried to follow. The canteen was small, and she didn’t want the others drinking all the water before she had a chance at it.

It was dim inside the cave. The bottom of the cave was mostly sand, with a few jutting boulders and some shallow tidal pools with water puddled inside. It was tall enough to stand in, but not by much. She instinctively ducked and covered her head as she moved farther into the dank cave.

Ernest extended the canteen. “Ladies first,” he said with a smile.

She took the canteen, a metal canister about the size of a small loaf of bread. The nozzle was open, and she sniffed. No matter how thirsty she was, she didn’t fully trust anything out of Ernest Palmer’s hand.

“I’d prefer if you drank first,” she said, handing him back the canteen.

He understood, and with a grim smile, he took a hearty sip.

“More,” Stella said, and he drew more, his throat bobbing. When he handed the canteen back to her, it was lighter. A glance inside showed the water level had gone down significantly.

She put the cold metal opening to her lips and drank. She didn’t care that Ernest had just been drinking from it, she was dying of thirst and couldn’t swallow quickly enough. A few trickles dribbled down her chin, and she stopped for a moment to breathe, then went back to drinking. Good manners dictated that she offer the canteen to the others, but manners didn’t come into play when dealing with kidnappers.

At last she’d had enough. She carefully twisted the lid back in place while surveying the four men standing in a semi-circle around her. Now that her immediate thirst had been quenched, the fear returned.

“We are going to leave you here for a spell,” Ernest said. “You are welcome to keep the canteen, but we need to be on our way now. It is important to stay in the cave until we return for you, hmm?”

“And when will that be?”

“When our business is done,” Ernest said. “Don’t be difficult about this, Miss West. I’m sorry things have gotten so unpleasant. As I said, I always liked you. I find you so much more interesting than the other women who work at City Hall,
most of whom are nothing more than cackling harpies worried only about clothing and suitors. You had real worth.”

She swallowed hard, wishing he hadn’t referred to her in the past tense, but the men were already turning around and heading out of the cave. Was she really supposed to stay here? But she didn’t mind putting a little distance between herself and those guns. It was hard to hear over the pounding of the waves, but their voices did indeed seem to be fading into the distance. Stepping a few feet closer to the mouth of the cave, she saw all four men walking back to the dinghy, and a surge of hope took root inside. They were clearly up to no good, but if they really intended to leave her here while they set off on some nefarious task, perhaps she had a good shot at escaping.

As the men drew closer to the dinghy, they occasionally looked back over their shoulders to be sure she remained at the cave. One of them even pointed his rifle at her casually, and she immediately jumped back behind the sheltering wall of rough basalt rock. A few minutes later, she saw the dinghy back at sea, all four men inside.

Where were they going? Before she had long to ponder, a rush of chilly water raced toward the cave in a gentle hiss. It swirled around her ankles and replenished the water in the tidal pools, then raced back out, but the damage had been done. Her skirts were soaked to her knees. Leaning over, she grabbed hunks of fabric and wrung out the water. She liked this skirt, too! It was hand-dyed twill and shouldn’t be abused like this, but it wouldn’t do to stand about in wet clothes. Heavens only knew how long they intended to make her wait here.

Another rush of water came only moments later, undoing her work. She squeezed out the skirt again, then scooted to a natural rock ledge in the wall. She had to hop up to sit on it. It was horribly uncomfortable, but at least her feet were above the surf.

She clenched the canteen in her lap, tempted to drink again, but this might prove to be a long wait and she should probably ration it.

It stank like wet stone in here. The cave only went back about fifteen feet and had rough, uneven walls and ceiling. The back of the cave was completely submerged in water.

How long had she been here? It felt like hours but was probably no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

A surge of water brushed her boots and she lifted them higher, grabbing at the canteen to prevent it from falling into the water, which rose higher than ever before. Even though she lifted her feet as high as possible, they still got wet.

This was ridiculous. She waited until the surf rushed out of the cave, then pushed off the ledge to see where the dinghy was. She had no intention of staying in here and getting soaked once those men were out of sight. The palms of her hands scraped against the grainy rocks, but she’d worry about them later. Almost a foot of water remained inside the cave even after the waves retreated.

She slogged to the front and peeked out of the cave, scanning the water for the dinghy, but she couldn’t see it. How could it have disappeared from sight so quickly?

A movement on the island a quarter-mile away caught her attention. That’s where they were! Sitting amid the abandoned fish cannery, all four men casually lounged on the pier, two of them leaning back against a corrugated tin shed. The dinghy was tied to the pier.

One of the men spotted her and scrambled to his feet. The other three men stood, and within moments, all four guns were pointed straight at her. She froze.

Another wave came rushing toward the cave, hitting her at the knees. She grabbed the side of the cave for balance as the waters
churned around her. The grainy rock hurt, but the undertow was strong as water rushed back to the sea. One of the men fired a warning shot in the air, then aimed the rifle back at her.

Now she understood their plan. The tide was coming in, and there was no escape from this cave. They wanted her drowning to look natural, for they had messed up Gwendolyn’s murder by leaving bruises on her throat. They’d learned. Her drowning was going to be genuine, not staged. Once she was dead, they could take her body back to Boston and do whatever they wanted with it. She had a morbid suspicion they’d dump her precisely where Gwendolyn had been found, for it would surely appear to be a suicide.

The four men still stood on the pier, guns trained on her. They would only shoot as a last resort, she realized. She closed her eyes as despair knifed through her. It looked like she’d never get a chance to marry, which was a shame. It would have been nice to have had a chance to mend fences with Romulus. They would have been great together.

The wind made her sopping clothes seem even colder, and another wave was on its way. The sight of the guns was nerve-racking, and she retreated back into the cave, wading through the calf-high surf toward the ledge. There was still water in the canteen, and she drank. It hadn’t been an act of kindness on Ernest’s part to offer her the canteen. It had been a way to lure her into the cave without a fuss, and she had stupidly walked into his trap. All for a drink of water.

She pulled up her feet and huddled on the ledge, clutching the canteen to keep her hands from trembling.

Two hours later, the water was at her waist. The men were still outside, still scrambling to their feet each time she poked
her head outside the cave. She was getting shaky, whether from hunger, the cold, or fear was anyone’s guess. Probably all three.

But the peculiar thing was that a faint glow came from beneath the water at the back of the cave. It wasn’t until it got darker in the cave that she noticed the strange source of light. It was barely visible, but it wasn’t going away. What was it?