Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (42 page)

“How could I
not
work? There’s so much
else
going on besides this . . . this never-ending crisis,” Amanda sputters without specifying exactly what else is going on.

They stop at the master suite to furnish Amanda with a scarf and Laurel with a hooded sweatshirt, then clatter down the backstairs to the kitchen, where Gemma Earle seconds Sam’s caution about the weather.

“We’re not going far,” Laurel assures the housekeeper. “Just far enough to put some color in her cheeks and ease the creak from her walk.”

That produces a polite smile from Amanda, who still appears reluctant about leaving the house for the first time since she arrived.

From the terrace, they start out on the path leading to the prized beech tree and the helicopter landing pad beyond. They silently pass the studio, which now serves as a monitoring station, the sobering lineup of support trailers for security personnel, and a pair of pole-mounted surveillance cameras. Two cameras later, Amanda has drawn deeper into her jacket with the headscarf pulled forward Muslim-style and her eyes cast straight ahead as though blinkered.

“That’s it.” Laurel calls a halt. “That’s enough. I’m with you. Absolutely. How the hell can we go for a walk when we know we’re being ogled by that hired goon squad?” She scowls up at the nearest camera before reversing their direction.

At the studio command center, Laurel halts again. “Wait right here,” she instructs Amanda, “this won’t take a second.”

Inside the studio, to forestall a false alarm upon their return, she warns the oglers that she and her jeans-clad friend with the great little ass will be leaving the televised area. Amanda will have to see the specimen copper beech tree another time—if the time ever comes when their every move isn’t being recorded.

Now headed in the direction of the oast houses and stowage, Amanda’s only concern is with the possibility of repeating her previous experience there.

“Don’t worry,” Laurel says. “We won’t go that far. No funny business—no rats, no snake-eating roosters today. We’ll just go as far as the stone wall. Okay?”

Amanda’s nod is semi-convincing, but once they penetrate the no man’s land between the monitored area and the fenced perimeter she does open up a little. “Was Chris Thorne actually looking for Jakeway when he found the bike and that other stuff in the woods? Did he ever say?” she asks.

“He never said, but I believe he was. I don’t think he was just out for a casual stroll, not in woods that dense.” Laurel answers, reflecting on last week’s excitement. “I have to say—when Chris burst in here with the news—then when every spare cop in the county burst in, I thought they’d caught the bastard. I let myself hope.”

“I’m still back there with Chris, alone in the woods where God knows the bastard could’ve ambushed him.”

Laurel pretends not to see Amanda shiver and her eyes fill up. From a stray gust of wind? From the strain she’s been under as long if not longer than everyone else?

“Are you all right with this . . . this?” Laurel gestures at the atmosphere in general when words fail her.

“I’m not afraid to take a walk within the confines of the estate, if that’s what you mean,” Amanda says.

That’s not what was meant, but Laurel lets it stand and gropes for another opening that might draw Amanda out a little further. “Did I understand Special Agent Bell chimed in—pun intended—on this latest development? On Chris’s find?” she says.

That gets a nod and no details.

They advance to the slope leading to the chestnut thickets, where she tries another approach. “My brother Ben tells me the Glen Abbey house is scheduled for demolition before winter sets in,” Laurel says.

Another nod, this time with an unintelligible murmur.

“Ben went on to say that Mrs. Floss’s death has tentatively been ruled a homicide. Did you know that? Did Detective Helowicz comment on that when he showed up the other day?”

“Don’t know. Helowicz only spoke with Emmet.”

“I understand Emmet’s now the go-to guy, the chief liaison officer, to put it in military terms,” Laurel says. “Was that his idea or Nate’s?”

Nothing but a momentary frown and a shrug from Amanda.

“I got a clean bill of health from the doctor on Monday. There’s no reason I can’t get pregnant again and carry to term,” Laurel says in exasperation. The real Amanda would be all over that news, wanting to know the details no less than Emily did when told.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda says without looking up. “I’ve heard everything you said, I know what you’re trying to do, I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just that I’m not tuned in yet, I’m not yet over having been brought here against my will all because I got a little carried away with collecting crime statistics and almost lost it in a public place after having been flippant and mean-spirited about things that deserved better and having been a total bitch for longer than I can remember and . . . and having been no freaking good to anybody anywhere, so I guess I had this coming . . . I freaking
deserved
to be locked up.”

“Wait a minute.” Laurel casts about for a stopping place, someplace more conducive to understanding whatever in hell Amanda’s talking about than the rugged course they’re on. “Hold that thought—those thoughts,” she says and leads the way through the chestnut stumps with their vicious whips of new growth to the tumbledown stone wall that comes with another set of problems.

But when they reach the section of wall that Anthony was warned away from the last time they came this way, the adjacent nettle patch is gone. Removed by a scrupulous groundskeeper? By a foraging animal? What kind of groundskeeper has time for tidying up wild outlying areas when there are so many groomed areas to look after? What kind of animal eats stinging nettles? And what else should she be worried about out here in this isolated hollow approaching the oast house complex?

“Okay, let’s have it,” Laurel says, shaking off a mild attack of the willies and patting a space beside her on an unbroken portion of wall.

Amanda complies with another rush of words. Given what they’ve all been through lately, none of her self-directed lamentations are that remarkable until she bemoans the way she responded to Nate’s marriage proposal.

“Good lord! You didn’t turn him down, did you? Is this another case of your being scared? Or thinking you’re not worthy or something? You can’t still be carrying a torch for . . .” Laurel trails off rather than state the name of Amanda’s only other known suitor, a distant lost cause, and refrains from suggesting Amanda’s rock-ribbed relatives might object to her marrying a Jew. “I know, you’ve reverted to thinking he’s too good to be true,” Laurel supplies the better, more acceptable reason.

Whatever Amanda comes back with is drowned out by the sound of running feet. They both leap to their feet and assume laughably defensive postures before the barking of Anthony’s little dog, Toby, announces it’s only the boy they have to fear.

“Dad had to let me go early,” Anthony explains why he’s not at his piano lesson with Colin. “He had to go to the attic and loosen the bolts on those rickety stairs they’re gonna take down tomorrow.”

This only makes sense to someone with foreknowledge of the exterior iron stairs sagged into rusted decrepitude under the weight of the recently removed wisteria vine, and of how these stairs relate to an attic-level outside door secured from the inside.

Laurel attempts to fill Amanda in, but even a brief description is impossible with the dog running interference and Anthony wheedling to go to the oasts and stowage when they’re this close. He carries on until she points out that he’s already pushing his luck for having strayed beyond the video barrier. “I’ll guess that you didn’t tell anyone where you were going, did you. How do you expect to get back in if no one knows you left? How do you know the SWAT team won’t come after you with weapons drawn and—”

“Because they didn’t the other times . . .” His eyes widen, his mouth forms a silent swear, his throat visibly contracts on the self-incrimination he tries to swallow.

Played out in slow motion, these actions would be hilarious if the infraction were less severe. Even so, Laurel has to look away and pretend scowling interest in an ominous cloud formation, in what the dog is doing, in Amanda’s reaction, in anything but Anthony’s predicament. When she does focus on him again, he has hope written all over his face in one of the quickest turnarounds she’s ever witnessed. But his appeal is directed at Amanda.

“The
real
reason I legged it all the way out here was to tell you your boyfriend’s come down from London with that writer bloke and Emmet. I thought you’d wanna know straightaway.”

“Of
course
you did, my darling. And how lucky you were to have found us on your very first try. Just imagine that, will you?” Laurel executes an exaggerated all-knowing wink and whistles for the dog that’s disappeared in the direction of the oasts.

“He’ll come back after he’s had his rat,” Anthony says.

“Thank you for reminding me,” Amanda says, hurrying to establish a pace back to the main house that precludes anymore talk about botched marriage proposals.

Hoop is ready when the dog comes within range. If need be, he can give chase. Thanks to the rooster meat and the water squeezed from the hand pump attached to the horse trough, his strength is almost back to what it was. And thanks to seven straight nights of unbroken sleep, his mindset is pretty much restored. Enough so that he’s not real happy about having been stuck here for a full week with nothing to show for it but a steady water supply and the means to cook whatever he can catch or forage.

The dog raises no alarm at finding a stranger in the queer chimney house, so Hoop was right to stay put and make the animal come to him. When it does, when it closes in to take the gristly rooster shank held out as bait, it bares its throat to the blade.

Hoop jumps aside to avoid the blood spatter that’s heavier than that from the rooster and doesn’t have any appeal now that his own juices are flowing again. When the animal stops twitching, he rolls it onto a gunny sack for skinning and gutting. He’d prefer hanging it as he would a deer; he’d prefer dressing out a deer, but beggars can’t be choosers. Not that he should be calling himself a beggar when food comes to him this easy.

The pelt doesn’t want to come off any too easy, though, and the meat, when he gets a look at it, is even stringier than the rooster’s. All the more reason to be glad he remembered how charcoal burns without smoke and thought to rig a spit of sorts before he’d eaten overmuch of the rooster raw. Slow roasting looks to be the best means with this catch as well and if it isn’t, he can always stew the dog meat in the leftover nettle soup made in a beat-up kettle found in the barn.

He takes a break when the dirty work’s done and steps outside to shallow-bury the offal alongside the latrine pit dug once he was strong enough to squat without support. He lingers a minute or two, leans on the handle of a scavenged spade and watches a boil of clouds overtake what’s left of sunset. These are peculiar clouds, funny-colored clouds, different from any he’s seen here or anywhere, for that matter. And the air feels strange. No, that can’t be. That’s not right. That’s his nerves acting up again because you can’t feel air unless it’s moving and there’s no wind at the moment.

With full dark dropped down early tonight, he has to feel his way back through the barn to the lair established in one of the chimney houses. The stone tipi, as he now thinks of the peaked and vented space, is outfitted with all manner of comforts and conveniences brought from the barn once he was able to do for himself. In the low glow of the fire kept burning there, he skewers the dog carcass on a long threaded rod picked from the scrap heap next to the old tractor, and supports it above the fire on a pair of upended cream cans.

He checks his watch, figuring to give the meat a half turn a little after seven-o’clock, thirty minutes from now. With nothing else to do in the interim, he attends to his sleeping pallet, straightening and smoothing the gunny sacks piled atop an actual pallet found beneath a stack of bagged charcoal. He toys with lighting an oil lantern now that he’s used his nose to figure out the stuff sloshing around in the pour-can marked “paraffin” is, in fact, kerosene. He tests the water in the dented wash boiler found beneath the stairs in the barn, and with the pair of age-stiffened hide gloves that came in handy for harvesting the nettles, he pulls the boiler closer to the fire pit. He debates getting in the water once it’s hot enough, decides that’s too big a chance to take unless he intends doing it with all his clothes on and the knife at his side.

In the end, he makes do with a sponge bath that contents most of his needs and concerns. But when that’s done with, he quick strips off the knife, empties his pockets and trades his outer clothes for the rainsuit he still has with him. For what it’s worth, he drops the shucked clothing into the water bath, doubtful that even a good long boiling will remove the stains of all that’s happened since leaving the guest house.

He buckles back into the belt and knife sheath, conceals it under the roomy jacket of the rainsuit. The other items he’s not so hurried about putting away.

A glance at his watch says a few minutes remain till it’s time to adjust the spit, minutes he can spend wondering if he’s responding to the carrot or the whip for having lasted this long. Running a hand over his stubbled head, fingering the scar on his chin and the sparse whiskers on his upper lip, he longs for something stronger than the goads and lures laid out on an old-timey milking stool. Why didn’t he bring a likeness of Audrey the way she used to be? Not that he ever had one. Not that he ever saw a picture of her that wasn’t overlaid with her ruination.