The Off Season (33 page)

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, his attention partly on the traffic. “But could you forward it to my phone, so I can see it?”

“How would I do that?” she asked.

He talked her through it and then thanked her, promising to call her the minute he knew anything.

“I’m t-trusting you to bring them home,” she said, her words shaky.

“I swear to you,” he answered, feeling nothing but affection for the woman who’d always treated him so kindly, “I won’t rest until I know they’re safe.”
All five of them,
he thought, his mind drifting from Renee and Jacob to Lilly, her aunt Annie, and the woman who had commandeered his heart.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

By the time Christina reached the level of the lower gallery platform encircling the lighthouse like a belt, her stitched left arm was throbbing, and her hands were a bloody mess from the corroded metal rungs. Unable to feel her feet in her sodden sneakers, she used the outer railing to haul herself upright.

Her strength failing, she stumbled to the double doors. When she came upon the padlock that must have secured them lying broken on the galley platform, her heart pounded at the sign that someone might well be waiting inside, just as the caller had claimed. Queasiness slithered through her stomach, a reminder that the same fate that had befallen her mother could be waiting behind the peeling red paint of the entrance.

But turning back was not an option, so she grabbed the right-hand door and pulled. Hinges creaked—a cry like a woman’s scream—and she stumbled inside. Seeing no one, she collapsed to her hands and knees, shaking with exhaustion.

As she fought to catch her breath, her gaze went first to the floor a few feet ahead, at what appeared to be an antique lantern. Behind its grimy windows, the lantern’s flame painted ash-coated walls in shifting shadows, and the stink of charred wood and ocean dampness reminded her that the place had been abandoned for more than twenty years.

Beyond the lantern, a spiral staircase dominated the dark space. Its metal rails and treads dared her to climb to where the living quarters had been. It made sense that the woman holding her family would have them there—more sense than dragging Lilly and Annie to the very top, where the light had once been housed.

Hauling herself to her feet, Christina stumbled to a salt-filmed, porthole-style window, where she looked back in the direction of the Kia. Disoriented with exhaustion, she couldn’t find its headlights. She saw no sign, either, of the rocky spine, the path—along with her escape route—already erased by the rising tide.

Did her tormenter know she’d made it? Or had she given up on her?

“I’m here!” Christina shouted, her cries echoing up the tight coil of the stairs. “I’ve come, just like you asked me. Where are they? You promised!”

She heard a sound from above, a harsh clatter on the staircase.

With her heart doing its best to beat its way free, she picked up the lantern by its wire bail and called the words she guessed her tormentor wanted most to hear. “I’m coming for you, Mother. I’ll be right up. You’ll see.”

As she began to climb, Christina noticed the ash clinging to the brick walls and metal stairs seemed thicker. The air felt heavier as well, chilled and tainted by the burned wood of the living quarters, where she’d heard the fire had started.

Against the overall gloom of the steps above her, something white and rounded stood out on one of the steps. At first she took it for a broken bowl—an artifact of the men who’d once lived here for weeks or months at a time.

It wasn’t until she’d nearly reached it that she realized she’d been wrong. What she was seeing wasn’t the curved wall of any kind of crockery—but a skull, certainly human, lying on its side.

Harris had nearly made it back to town when Maya’s harried-sounding voice blasted over the radio. “Answer your cell, Chief. I’ve got some news you’re gonna want to hear.”

Harris’s pulse ticked at his throat as he slowed the Tahoe. The moment he heard the phone vibrate, he thumbed the “Answer” button. “What is it, Maya?” he asked, worried she might be calling with bad news about his injured rookie—or any of those missing, including his son.

The thought had him pulling to the shoulder. “Please tell me it’s not—”

“Kym Meador just called, scared out of her wits. She found Lilly Paxton sleeping in her bathtub—someone had made a little nest of blankets for her and left her there—with a half-empty bottle of liquid cold medication nearby.”

Alarm sucker-punched him.
Drugged.
“Is she okay?”

“Pretty groggy, but Kym was able to rouse her while I had her on the line. She’s getting her checked out at Shoreline ER just in case. But she’s terrified for Annie, said she’d never do something like this willingly.”

Agreeing, Harris asked himself, “Where the hell has she gone?”

“No one’s found her yet, or Christina Paxton, either,” Maya told him.

Heart sinking, he asked, “What about Renee and my son?” The moment he’d finished his conversation with his ex’s mother, Harris had called in to report their disappearance, his gut telling him that finding the two would lead him to Christina and her family.

“Give it time. They’ll turn up,” Maya assured him. “How far from the station are you?”

“Be there in about ten minutes,” he said before wrapping up the call.

Despite the urgency he felt, though, he sat there for a minute, unable to escape the suspicion that he was missing something crucial. Opening his phone’s texts, he studied the garbled message Renee’s mother had forwarded from her daughter’s phone.

Will it’s point,
he read aloud, desperate to make sense of the jumble.
Calms has Lilly and anniversary. Hurry, Hair is.
”

The final two words jumped out at him,
Hair is
.
He’d seen them before—when his own first name fell victim to someone’s hurry and a smartphone’s autocorrect feature.

Hurry, Harris,
Christina had meant to write. But why send such the message to his ex-wife—especially considering their recent falling out?

She never meant to text Renee.
Christina must have accidentally messaged the other Bowers whose contact information she’d stored in her phone. Had Renee seen it before rushing out—and pieced together the intended message?

“Not
Will it’s point
,” he told himself, tension tightening his jaw. “
Willet’s Point
, you idiot. The lighthouse.” Keeping autocorrect in mind, he pieced together the rest of the intended message:
Claims had Lilly and Annie.
That was it—they were all there, at the lighthouse. The same abandoned lighthouse Christina, Annie, and Renee had visited during their childhood.

But had Renee gone to try to save them—or was she more involved in Zach Fulton’s and Ashley Paxton’s plot than he wanted to admit?

Enveloped by an icy sense of unreality, Christina stared with her jaw unhinged as her pulse pounded in her ears. But she didn’t cry out, telling herself instead that the skull was no threat to her. The dead, at least, were past inflicting pain.

But what about the person who’d sent it rolling down the stairs? The person attempting to shatter her mind with cruel threats and crazed demands?
That’s what these games are really meant for—not to kill me, but to drive me to another breakdown.
And the only way to beat her enemy was to keep her grip on reason. To hold fast despite the fear threatening to swallow her alive.

Forcing herself to slow her breathing, she grabbed the railing and bent forward, holding the lantern close enough to give the disembodied head a better look. It was real, she knew at once, with a few leathery scraps of flesh clinging to ivory-colored bone—even strands of hair. Blonde hair—or maybe white, with one side of the mandible hanging loose to give the face the appearance of a crazed grin. But that damage could have easily been done when the skull came crashing down.

The damage to the back of the head—the parietal bone—was another story. She was no forensics expert, but she knew a depression fracture when she saw one, and this one—a round spot a little large than a quarter, with cracks radiating outward from the center—could have easily been the cause of death of the skull’s owner.

Christina shivered at a vision: a woman with her back turned, a man swinging a pipe or brick with all his might.
Maybe,
she thought, guessing from the finer facial bones, with their lack of brow ridges, that she really was looking at the skull of an adult female.

Or it could be instead that she’d been thrown off by the length of those pale strands, along with the words of the woman who’d lured her here. The woman who’d been playing games with her—was she really upstairs, holding Lilly and her sister?

Christina’s rational mind kicked into gear, followed by her fury. “So where are they?” she shouted up the stairwell. “Because they can’t really be here, can they? Lilly could never climb that ladder, and Annie would be screaming and fighting you with every step.”

The only answer that came to her was the echo of her own words, and doubts crept in. What if Lilly and Annie were both silent because they’d been killed, just like her poor mother?

My mother . . .

Christina’s scalp prickled as she remembered Lilly looking up from her cereal to point out the painting of the lighthouse. “Gramma’s house,” she’d announced, absolute certainty in her voice.

But which grandmother?
Christina stared back down toward the skull, a lump aching in her throat as it hit her that this—this could be her . . .

Murder me. Bad people.
Wasn’t that what her daughter had been trying to tell her all along?

“She’s—she’s
not
my mother!” Christina shouted, memories of the battered body she’d found last night crowding into her head. “She’s not!”

“She
is!
” shrieked a female voice above her. A voice Christina knew too well. “She
was
, because she came back. Came back for us before that heartless bitch and the man we called our father killed her!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“That
bitch
?” Christina cried, reeling with the comprehension that this skull belonged to the birth mother who had apparently come looking for them—and with the idea that the loving woman who had raised them could possibly have been involved in that woman’s death.

Then reeling once again with the sudden understanding that her own sister—poor, sweet, deluded Annie—had attacked and killed their adoptive mother in a fit of rage when the horrible reality of their birth mother’s end had collided with the fantasies Annie had built around that unbalanced, absent figure . . .

A biological mother who had passed on her legacy of instability not to Christina, as she’d feared, but to her younger daughter.

“Oh God, Annie, what have you done?” Christina said as she headed up the stairs.

“No more than they did to her.” Annie’s voice reverberated off the brick. “Daddy—he told me himself when I was taking care of him while he was so sick two years ago. He asked me to forgive—to forgive them both. He claimed she was still messed up when she showed up, higher than a kite the day she tried to make him give her money for stealing her kids.”

As she rounded the curve leading her into what had been the living quarters, Christina got her first glimpse of her sister standing, wild-eyed and filthy, with a pair of bolt cutters in hand—probably the same tool she’d used to break into the lighthouse. Lit by a second lantern, the room behind her was so badly burned, from wall to floors to ceiling, that it looked like a black cave.

“When?” Christina managed, her gaze darting everywhere as she searched for any sign of Lilly. “When did this happen?”

“I only know we were still just kids,” Annie said, her voice distorted by sobbing. “You were going to your therapy for the nightmares, and they thought—he said she would’ve only hurt us. They didn’t care that she really wanted us, that she wanted to take us to our real home. They didn’t even—didn’t even ask her what my name is, Katie.”

Christina fixed her with a hard stare. “Where’s my daughter? What have you done with Lilly? You didn’t hurt—”

“I’d never hurt her. Never,” she insisted, shaking her head. “But I need you to understand. They killed our mother.
Murdered
her. He said it was an accident, that he never meant to, except—except she kept trying to go upstairs where we were sleeping, and he couldn’t—wouldn’t—let her.”

“So this happened at our house?” Christina asked, sidestepping Annie to peer into another fire-ravaged room. On the floor she saw what looked like burlap, partly unwrapped, more bones jutting from it. As if the body inside it had gone to pieces.

“
Their
house. In that horrible basement, where they took her so we wouldn’t hear them talking,” Annie told her. “But later on, they moved her—he hid the body out here. He still had a key at the time, even though this place had been condemned after the fire.”

Seeing no sign of Lilly, Christina once again turned to her sister, who was blocking her path to a second doorway. Her sister, whose assurances about never hurting her niece now meant nothing. “I need you to let me past you.”

Annie didn’t budge. “You have to understand,” she said. “I—I thought it was just him at first. It’s what he told me on his deathbed. Until, two weeks ago, that bitch was on me again, lecturing me again over money, calling me irresponsible and childish and—and accusing me of whoring myself with a married man.”

Christina grimaced at the bitterness she heard—and the realization that things had been far worse between her sister and their mom than she’d imagined. That they had both hidden the truth because they thought of Christina, who’d overcome childhood night terrors, postpartum psychosis, and the death of a husband, as too fragile to handle it? “Edgewood, you mean?”

Annie nodded, tears spilling as she explained. “She wouldn’t believe me when I told her I’ve never slept with him. That men—men aren’t even on my radar right now. And then, when she told me how our—how that man I always thought of as our father—would be ashamed, I just—I told her straight out that I didn’t give a damn what that murderer thought of me.”

Christina stopped looking for a way around her sister and looked at her, through the mask she’d worn for so long. It came to her that Annie had dealt with their dad’s deathbed confession—maybe buried it—for more than two years all on her own. But at what cost to her sanity—and her relationship with their adoptive mother?

“And then what happened?” As Christina set the lantern on a partly burned projection that might once have been a shelf, her stomach turned. Because she knew, or thought she did, already. Had found the horrible evidence last night, wrapped in that makeshift tarp.

“She—she slapped me,” Annie said through tears. “Slapped me and told me that it wasn’t him.
She
was the one who did it, with some tool off his workbench. He’d lied for her about it. Lied to me when he was dying. And I just went—I went crazy. But you have to understand, Christina. I don’t want you to be mad.”

Christina felt both brows rise as she stared, gaping, at her sister. “You—you didn’t want me to be
mad
at you? That’s why you’ve been telling Lilly—why you’ve been faking the calls and—it was
your
voice, wasn’t it? On the monitor and the phone? You disguised it somehow?”

Annie’s gaze dropped, as if she were too ashamed to bear Christina’s scrutiny. “You’re all that I have left. And I’m all that
you
—”

She cut herself off, the bolt cutters rising as she noticed Christina had gotten out her phone. “What are you
doing
?”

What I should’ve done—and would have, if I’d been thinking halfway straight—the moment you called me to come out here.
Christina pressed to connect, praying her phone would have enough of a signal at this elevation to get the call through. “I’m calling Harris, Annie. Maybe you’ll be willing to tell
him
what you’ve done with Lilly.”

“No! You can’t!”

As Annie advanced on her, Christina stepped backward, her elbow toppling the lantern she’d set down. As glass shattered, the flame went out, halving the already-dim illumination.

Alarmed by her sister’s approach—and her maniacal expression—Christina dropped the phone back inside the pocket of her jacket.

“Then tell me, where’s my daughter, you delusional little—” Christina launched herself at Annie, meaning to grab her by the shoulders and shake the truth out of her. Because if she’d hurt Lilly, too—

Annie gasped and jerked back, swinging the bolt cutters in her hand straight at her sister’s face.

“No!” shouted Christina, backpedaling to avoid the blow—

Then crying out in panic, her arms windmilling as she pitched backward down the same steps she’d ascended.

“Christina? Christina, are you all right? Say something if you hear me,” Harris shouted into his phone over the sound of the dark water lapping at the hull. But it was too late. The call had dropped already, leaving him with only the memory of her scream.

His stomach pitching with the light chop, he tied off the little johnboat, with its pull-start motor, that he’d cut loose from its dock at the small natural harbor sheltered by the submerged point. Smacking up against the lighthouse’s base was a smaller craft beside it—another boat that shouldn’t be here. Did it belong to Christina’s tormentor, or had she
borrowed
this boat the way he had?

Feeling his phone vibrate again, Harris snatched it from his pocket, praying it would be Christina calling back to tell him she was fine at home, that the message she’d sent Renee had been nothing but a huge misunderstanding.

Instead, he saw a text from Maya. He hesitated for a moment and then clicked it open.

RENEE & JACOB SAFE WITH OFFICER WASHINGTON, FOUND WAITING FOR YOU AT YOUR HOME.

“Thank God,” Harris said, relieved beyond measure that both were unharmed—and that he wasn’t about to confront his ex-wife as he’d feared—or find her standing over Christina’s lifeless—

Unable to finish the thought, he put away the phone, then reflexively checked his shoulder holster before scrambling for the ladder. The climb was awkward, scar tissue stubbornly hampering his right hand’s ability to grip. Thrusting his right elbow through the rungs and using his strength as a lever, along with his capable left hand, he managed to fight his way up, rung by rung.

By the time he made it to the double doors, he was breathing hard and bathed in sweat. He stepped cautiously through the right-hand door, which stood open, and into the darkness, with the echo of Christina’s scream shadowing his thoughts.

But he knew that rushing in was a good way to get someone killed. So he stood in silence for seconds that felt more like hours, straining his ears and eyes for the slightest sound or flicker of light, and inhaling air that tasted faintly of burned wood.

Slipping a hand beneath his jacket, Harris reached for the SIG Sauer. He left the small flashlight he’d brought in his pocket, unwilling to give away his presence, though he knew it was possible that his approach by boat had been observed. As his eyes slowly adjusted, he made out a faint light above him to his right—a light that led him, with careful sliding steps, to the bottom of what he quickly realized was a spiral staircase.

But was there anyone alive to find above?

A sharp metallic clang from overhead answered his question.

Step by step, he climbed, praying that he wouldn’t find Christina’s battered body—murdered as her mother had been. That she wouldn’t be lying beside the sister she’d fought so hard to protect for so long—the sister who . . .

His mind ticked back to the missing records for Annie’s cell phone. What if she hadn’t gotten the dates and times wrong, but instead had
lied
for some reason? What if—

He again heard something overhead, this time a soft, fleeting sound. Scarcely daring to breathe, he strained his ears to be sure. Yes, there it was again—another soft gasp, the sounds of someone weeping. Someone female, he thought.

Christina—she’s still alive.

Hurrying to find her, he noticed the charred scent growing stronger a moment before he caught the glimmer of light off a railing.

“Please don’t—” came the woman’s desperate whispers. “Don’t be mad at me. It isn’t my fault. You weren’t there. You didn’t hear the awful things—she could be so hateful—”

Hell . . . 
Harris’s foot knocked into something with a hollow thunk, sending the hard object clattering downward. The sound against the metal steps was as loud as an explosion.

A frightened shriek rose. “Who’s there? Who is it?”

“Annie?” he called, recognizing her voice. And putting the words he’d overheard into the context of the calls she’d never actually received, and the decision to leave her beloved niece behind tonight, alone in that tub. Putting it all together with the years she’d spent living in her smarter, more successful older sister’s shadow . . .

Years that had undoubtedly done nothing for her relationship with the adoptive parents trying to shape her in Christina’s image.

“H-Harris?” Annie cried. “Harris, help my sister! He’s—he’s hurt her!”

“
Who
hurt her? What’s happened?” he asked as he spotted a silhouetted form through the metal grating of the treads above him. Hurrying to reach it, he found Christina motionless on her side, her head and arms pointed downward and her hair across her face. He spotted Annie a few steps higher, squatting beside her sister’s legs, which curved upward with the staircase.

“Please, you have to help her,” she pleaded, looking every bit as desperate as she sounded.

“Christina, can you hear me?” Harris’s heart jerked as he noticed the odd angle of her neck, from where her head—now at his eye level—was leaning against one of the metal rungs supporting the railing.

Was he already too late?

“She’s out cold,” Annie said. “He shoved her—knocked her down before he ran off. He—he’s gone now.”

“Ran off? Who did? Who did this, Annie?”

She wasn’t making any sense, but still he set his weapon on the stair beside him and reached for Christina’s wrist to find a pulse. Nothing—no, there it was. Swift but strong, except . . . He brushed the hair off her face and then ran a hand down the column of her neck, terrified of what he might find there.
Please, Christina, wake up.

“The man who took me, the kidnapper,” said Annie, the story gushing from her now. “A big, nasty-looking guy—I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

No bulges or sharp angles on Christina’s neck, thank God. But Harris’s hand came away damp—bloody from the back of the unconscious woman’s head. He pulled out his phone, needing to add to his earlier request for backup a call for a medevac crew—or maybe the coast guard would be better—to get her down from here and onto a chopper without further injury.

But first, he fixed Annie with his sternest look. “A
stranger
?” he asked. “A complete stranger did this to your sister?”

Her gaze darted away, like a school of minnows evading a hungry egret’s beak, and she retreated a step higher. “Come to think of it, I’ve seen him. Hanging around the Shell Pile a few times, staring. And I think—yes, he was following my car the other day, too. I think he’s, like, a stalker.”