Lemon Tart (35 page)

Her chest still felt as if it were strapped down in
duct tape, but her legs seemed to work well enough. She grabbed the keys out of
the ignition and ran for the trees instead of the road, only realizing twenty
yards later that she never told her position to Cunningham. Her brain wasn’t
working very well. She found a large tree—an oak she thought,
due to the fact that there was no growth underneath the branches and the trunk
was wide and thick. She leaned against it, leaning forward slightly as she
tried to catch her breath. She was nauseated and dizzy, two things that
did not help her come up with a plan.

As she stared at the ground, her eyes moved beyond the tree and
she saw the thin layer of fresh snow. She didn’t dare look behind her but knew
she’d left tracks. Luckily, it was a very thin layer and patchy beneath the
thick trees, but still, it wouldn’t take Madsen long to follow her trail. She
looked around and began picking her way deeper into the trees, stepping on the
bare patches of ground to hide her tracks, moving away from the car until she
found another oak tree, a good fifty yards from the first. The wide trunk was
on the edge of a copse of aspens and scrub oak, making it a good hiding spot
for the moment. “Think,” she said to herself, just as she heard Madsen’s first
call.

“I know you’re here,” he yelled in the distance. She assumed he
was at the car. “And I know you couldn’t have gone far, not with that air bag
having gone off in your face. I’ll outlast you, old woman, I swear to you I
will. But if you come out now, I’ll leave the rest of your family alone. If I
have to chase you, I’ll take it out on the people you love. I swear I will.”

You’re already
taking things out on the people I love, Sadie thought, trying to keep
her breathing slow and quiet. He
was allowing Jack to take the fall for Anne’s murder. . . . Her thoughts came
to a stop. Why was Jack taking the fall for Madsen?
But she instantly knew he wasn’t. Jack must think he was taking the fall for
Carrie—and Carrie had let him believe it. Shame for her
sister-in-law, sympathy for her brother, and fear for her
circumstance dog-piled inside her head. She had to get out of here,
she had to get to the cabin.

“Your nosy nature is going to get them killed. Maybe I’ll start
with your daughter—Trina told me all about her.”

There was no time to sift through the details that were finally
making sense—though a twisted kind of sense for sure. A single
word came to mind, keeping her in the moment, keeping her focused on getting
out of here. Trevor. She was the only one who knew where he was, and who had
killed his mother. Her heart rate increased and she swallowed. Oh, why didn’t
she pay more attention to her driving? How could she have hit that tree?

“Ah,” Madsen yelled, his voice a bit closer. “Look at this,
tracks in the snow.”

She looked down to make sure she hadn’t left tracks in the last
few dozen yards. Her shoes caught her attention and she had an idea. Bending
ever so carefully, she began undoing her laces. The handcuff on her right wrist
clanged against itself and she quickly quieted it, then removed the keys from
her pocket and undid the cuff. She stowed the handcuffs in her pocket; they
might come in handy. She went back to work taking her laces out of her tennis
shoes, barely able to see them through her burning eyes. She was well hidden
and the wind in the trees and his steps in the leaves seemed to mask the sounds
she made.

When both laces were free, she tied them together with a square
knot and scanned the area, finally finding two scrub oaks close enough together
to anchor her self-made trip wire, but far enough apart to make sense
as an escape route. As she carefully made her way to the trees she questioned
her ingenuity but silenced her own doubts with the fact that she hadn’t been
able to come up with anything else.

By the time she finished setting the tripwire, Madsen had been
silent for several seconds and she wondered if he’d gone another direction
after her tracks had disappeared. She was terrified to move for fear he was
sneaking up on her, but she managed to turn around slowly, checking every
direction. All she could see through her still-foggy vision were the trees
around her. Her swollen face burned in the cold and the wind.

Should she stay? Should she run?

What she wanted to do was make it back to the car and call
Cunningham to let him know where she was, but did she dare? What if Madsen was
waiting for her at the car? She bit her lip and peered around the tree once
more, screaming when Madsen suddenly appeared, ten feet ahead of her.

His face was pale, his dark eyes standing out on the sallow
skin and the cut on his right cheek still oozing blood. There was another patch
of blood at his hairline, presumably made by the car door. He looked positively
gruesome. His hand was wrapped in what looked like the suit jacket he’d been
wearing earlier and was cradled across his stomach.

“Told you I’d outlast you,” he said, advancing slowly. The
expression on his face was one of sheer hatred. She’d never seen anyone look at
her that way and it was frightening.
He took another step and she carefully stepped over the shoelaces she’d tied
between the two trees. If he’d follow her just right . . .

“How will you explain my disappearance?” she asked, stepping
over the laces with her other foot, walking backward, keeping her eyes locked
with his. She didn’t want him looking too closely at the ground. “People know
me, they’ll wonder where I went.”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Madsen replied gruffly. “But maybe
I’ll get rid of Trevor and tell them you took off with him.”

Sadie was horrified and felt her eyes widen. “He’s a child!”

“He’s another complication!” Madsen roared back, the veins
standing out on his neck. “Just like you are. I’m tired of complications.”

“Is that why you killed Anne? Because she complicated your
plan?”

“If she hadn’t betrayed me, she’d be alive, but she knew in
those final moments that I am not a man to be crossed. You’ll learn the same
lesson.”

“That’s awful,” Sadie said, moving backward at the same pace he
moved toward her. “And you cleaned up the basement?”

“I had to. My fingerprints were everywhere. How would I explain
that?”

“I find it odd that you feel so justified, and yet you know you
have to hide it. Quite a contradiction.”

“Do you even know who I am?” he suddenly shouted and started
moving forward faster. It was all she could do not to look down at the trip
wire. She’d kept it low to the ground and piled pine needles and leaves to
conceal it. He was only a few feet away from her now. “My father runs this
state, my father is the law.”

He took another step and she couldn’t help but look down,
holding her breath and already picturing him falling on his face. He followed
her eyes and then kicked at the pile of leaves. They fell away from the laces,
exposing her pathetic attempt at stopping him. Her heart sank. They made stuff
like this look so easy on TV.

He lifted one foot over the trip wire and then the other. He
stood there, half a dozen feet from her, looking smug. “I wasn’t about to let
some whore like Anne ruin everything for me. Not after she used me to try to
make things work with your pathetic brother.”

Sadie didn’t know she had it in her, didn’t know that there was
that much anger and that much aggression inside her—she’d
always been such a gentle soul—but at the sound of such angry
and foul words, she suddenly lunged forward, dropping her head and running
straight for his chest the way she used to when she and Shawn played football
in the backyard, only she’d never put so much power behind her tackles back
then. She’d never wanted to hurt her son, but she very much wanted to hurt this
man. She saw him, in the moments before impact, brace himself and reach out his
good arm, a look of excitement on his face, as if this was what he wanted—hand-to-hand
combat with a woman twice his age.

But he took one instinctive step backward—the
one step she needed him to take. His foot hit the trip wire after all and he
fell back, twisting in the air and putting both hands in front of him in hopes
of breaking his fall, the suit coat falling away. Right before his mangled hand
hit the ground, he cried out, realizing what the impact would do to it, but it
was too late. Sadie veered right, away from him, as his crushed hand slammed
into the ground. He howled as the rest of him fell on top of it. She had too
much momentum by then and couldn’t stop until she was a few feet past him.

He rolled on the ground, his feet already scrambling for
leverage to help him up. She didn’t give him a chance. Instead she pulled the
handcuffs from her pocket, grabbed his good arm and managed to slap the ring on
his wrist despite his clawing and kicking at her. Then, as if she too had been
officially trained in this, she hooked the other cuff to a scrub oak, a type of
brush that though small, was excessively strong. Above where the cuff linked to
the tree, hundreds of smaller branches shot out in every direction. He’d have a
hard time breaking his way free from the tree. For a moment he stopped
struggling, staring at the handcuffs as if not understanding what she’d done.
Then he started fighting again, cursing and kicking up leaves like a trapped cat.

She didn’t stay long enough to even look at him, instead she
ran for the car as fast as she could, accidentally—of
course—stepping on his injured hand amid her flight. She felt
the shattered bones slide beneath the skin as he howled in pain once more. It
was really quite gross. When she got to the car, she picked up the speaker and
pushed the button, her eyes trained on the section of woods where she’d left
Madsen.

“This is Sadie Hoffmiller. Is anyone there, er, does anyone
copy?”

What did copy mean
anyway?

Her heart was thumping like a bongo drum in her chest. She kept
waiting to see Madsen come out of those trees. She could hear him yelling, and
that gave her confidence that he wasn’t free yet.

“This is Sadie Hoffmiller,” she said, and noticed her breathing
was becoming even more shallow than before. Maybe the shock was catching up to
her. “Please answer me!”

She waited. The wind blew through the trees and she noticed
lazy snowflakes falling from the sky. She looked up at the gray sky above her
and sent a silent thanks toward heaven. God had spared her that moment she’d
asked for. Would he spare her another one?

The speaker continued in its silence and she wondered if
perhaps the damage to the car had rendered it useless, though it had worked
earlier. But there wasn’t even the sound of static now. Just in case they could
hear her, she gave her location before turning away from the car. Her face was
swollen, her eyes still burned, and her chest was difficult to inflate, but she
had to get back. She had to get Trevor, clear Jack, confront Carrie, tattle on
Madsen, and . . . find someone to teach her Sunday School class on
Sunday. Surely the kids would be terrified if they saw her like this.

Then she remembered her cell phone. She opened the back door of
the car and found it on the floor. She immediately tried to call Breanna. The
words “No Service” blinked back at her and she wanted to scream; she would have
if her throat wasn’t still burning. After pausing for a moment, she went into
her messaging program and typed out a text message telling her daughter where
she was. She sent it to her outbox where it would wait for cell phone service
to return.

Chapter 37

Sadie followed a bend in the road, walking as fast as
she could manage, trying to estimate how far in they’d
driven—she feared it was several miles—when she
heard a car coming toward her. She stopped in the middle of the road, unable to
react before a white minivan came into view, slamming on its brakes to avoid
hitting her. She lifted her arms up to block her face from the rocks and dirt
thrown up as the van skidded sideways to a stop ten feet away.

“Sadie!”

Sadie lowered her arms and blinked as Mindy Bailey jumped out
of her van and ran over to her. She was dressed in pink scrubs with little
purple panda bears on the shirt. The panda bears were eating lollipops. Sadie
felt as if her thoughts were moving in slow motion. Why was Mindy here?

“Are you okay?” Mindy asked in her usual hyper tone, the words
all pushed together to allow as many as possible to follow after them. “You
don’t look okay, in fact you need to get to the hospital. We can be there in
fifteen minutes. Oh, I’m so glad I found you, I got lost, see, and I’ve been
driving around trying to—”

“What are you doing here?” Sadie interrupted, still staring at
her neighbor.

Mindy looked confused, then seemed to realize she hadn’t
explained. She took a breath. “I came home for lunch.” That was it. She’d use a
thousand words to say something that only needed ten, but all she said now was
that she’d come home for lunch. Sadie blinked again, unable to figure out what
lunch had to do with Mindy being in the mountains right now. A gust of wind
blew and both women shivered.