The Sense of Reckoning (28 page)

Just to be on the safe side, she Tased him again.

Then, she loaded her last cartridge.

Chapter 42

Ann backtracked the short distance to the causeway that carried the road over the tidal flats. She couldn’t see those disembodied hands any more, but she strained her ears for any indication that Biden was following her. She wasn’t even sure if a spirit would necessarily make noise. She should know these things.

When she reached the causeway, she looked north up the tidal area and could see the rectangular mass of the hotel over the tree tops. She struggled over the guardrail and then fell to her knees on the other side, the effort reawakening the clanging in her head. She put her hand to her temple and felt the stickiness of drying blood, but also felt the drip of fresh blood down her neck. She should have someone take a look at that.

911! She almost laughed at her foolishness—all she had to do was call 911 and they would come and help her. She reached into the outer pocket of the knapsack, her groping becoming increasingly frantic as she searched. Then she remembered: seeing Biden, dropping the phone on the floor of the car. She shook her head, which proved to be a bad idea.

Okay, if she couldn’t call for help, she would go get help. With frequent glances over her guardrail bastion in the direction of the abandoned Audi, she located her cap and a packet of tissues in her knapsack. Pulling the tissues out of their plastic sleeve, she pressed them to her head, then pulled the cap over her makeshift bandage. This seemed like progress. She felt a bit more optimistic about ... whatever it was she was supposed to do.

She would think about it later. She zipped her knapsack closed, slung it awkwardly onto her back, and struggled to her feet, using the guardrail for leverage. She closed her eyes for a moment, dizzy and unaccountably breathless, and when she opened them there were two ghostly hands resting on the guardrail next to hers.

She snatched her hands back, stifling a scream—she had screamed enough for a lifetime already—and took a step backward. Her feet tangled in the long grass and she fell, twisting so she could at least see where she was falling. Her ankle sent out a strident protest. She scrambled to her feet and half limped, half fell down the rest of the slope to the muddy flats, that jeering laughter floating behind her.

She looked toward the end of the peninsula and thought she saw a faint light—but whether it was from a lamp in the hotel or from the stars that were now dancing before her eyes, she couldn’t tell.

Chapter 43

Ellen stepped into the hall and flipped on the light, then returned to the storage room and, putting the flashlight in her cardigan pocket, moved cautiously toward Garrick. She bent, the Taser pointed now at his head, and grasped the collar of his heavy black coat. She leaned back and Garrick’s body slid slightly on the linoleum. She repositioned herself and leaned back again and gained another few inches.
 

Inch by inch she got him to the door, but the hallway was carpeted in a nubby fabric and she couldn’t move him on it with one hand. Putting the Taser in her pocket, she grabbed the collar of his coat with both hands and pulled, but his arms flopped upwards and she could see that she was just going to pull his coat off with this approach. Instead, she moved to his feet and, grabbing the heels of his boots—unfortunately very heavy but fortunately tightly laced up—rotated him and then started to drag him down the hallway toward the elevator. The three Taser cartridges still attached to Garrick’s body trailed at the ends of their wires. His coat peeled off his arms as she dragged him down the hall.

By the time they reached the elevator, she was gasping for breath. She went back to the stairs and descended to the first floor, grabbing for the railing when she stumbled—it wouldn’t do for her to break an ankle now. In the lobby, she slid the wooden door and the metal grate of the elevator open, entered, closed the door and grate behind her, and moved the brass lever, which sent the elevator trundling upward.

On the fourth floor, she was relieved to see no sign of movement from Garrick. Grasping his feet again, she wrestled him into the small elevator. She jammed his legs into one corner and pushed his head in with her foot then, pulling the doors shut, returned the elevator to the first floor. She dragged Garrick onto the wooden floor of the lobby, then she re-entered the elevator and sent it up to the second floor.

She took the stairs back to the first floor slowly—her breathing was ragged and her legs were rubbery. When she reached the lobby, she went to the window next to the elevator and from behind the curtain pulled a metal rod—pointed at one end and with a metal loop at the other. She inserted the pointed end into a small hole in the elevator door and poked around for a moment, then the door slid open, revealing the empty elevator shaft. Cables hung like guts from the darkness above. Below, in a space several feet deep, was a huge spring—questionable protection in case the cables failed.

Ellen turned Garrick’s body so that his feet were toward the elevator shaft and then lowered herself the several feet onto the floor of the shaft. She had chosen this hiding place thinking it would be a relatively easy place to hide the body—assuming she was able to incapacitate him in the hotel—and that, since the column that had been added to the hotel to house the elevator shaft was uninsulated and the weather cold, she would have some time to decide how to dispose of his body before the smell might attract an off-season visitor’s attention.

But this was more work than she had anticipated. She should have gotten him to walk to the first floor before Tasering him. Plus, once she decided how to dispose of the body, she would have to find a way to get it back out of the bottom of the shaft—she hadn’t considered that. But she could take her time hooking up a winch of some sort. She was good at that kind of thing, just like her father and brother had been.

A new thought struck her. Would his spirit remain with her if she moved his body elsewhere? She had counted on the location of Garrick’s death bonding him to the hotel, just as the location of Loring’s death—as it turned out, the very room where he had hidden the painting—had seemingly held him here. Lacking any other instructions from Loring himself, she had scattered his ashes in various locations on the property; maybe that had strengthened the bond. Perhaps she could bury Garrick’s body in the Lynam pine woods. Perhaps his spirit would advise her on the best approach.

Grabbing Garrick’s ankles one last time, she hauled him toward the shaft. She tried to be careful, but when the weight of his lower body overbalanced the weight of his upper and he tumbled to the floor, his head cracked with a sickening thud on the side of the shaft. Ellen winced.

“I’m sorry, Garrick,” she murmured.

Taking the flashlight out of her pocket, she turned it on and put it on the floor of the lobby to provide some illumination. She pushed and pulled until she had him arranged as flat as possible on the floor of the shaft—she had no wish for part of him to get crushed when she brought the elevator back to the first floor—and then hoisted herself out onto the lobby floor. In the process, she knocked her glasses off and, taking a step toward where she thought they were, she felt her foot connect with something that went skittering across the floor. She sighed. It didn’t matter—she could find her way around the hotel in the dark. She’d look for the glasses tomorrow.
 

Picking up the flashlight and returning the metal rod to its place behind the curtain, she climbed slowly back to the fourth floor and retrieved Garrick’s coat. Then, trudging back to the first floor, she tossed it as carefully as she could over his body. She didn’t think she could do another climb in and out of the shaft.

She grasped the door of the elevator, ready to pull it shut, when she thought she heard a faint sound. She switched on the flashlight again and shone it on the heap on the shaft floor.

“Garrick?”

She heard the croaking beginning of a word, a pained cough, and then his voice, reed thin. “Ellen, for God’s sake ...”

Sighing, she aimed the Taser one last time.

Chapter 44

Ann’s head didn’t hurt as much now, but she was cold—the night chill was seeping into her bones. Her shoulders began a violent shaking. And she was getting sleepy. She wasn’t sure what she was doing out in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, but she felt it was important that she keep going, although she couldn’t remember what her destination was. How long had she been stumbling along ... an hour? a minute? She thought she should be watching out for hands, but that didn’t make any sense.

She had been picking her way along a series of rounded rocks, but in the light of the moon she could now see that between the rocks and the water was a narrow strip of beach—it would be much easier to walk there. She crawled carefully across the rock and stepped onto the flat and her foot disappeared up to her ankle.

She tried to step back onto the rock, sending a protest up from her twisted ankle, but momentum carried her forward and her other foot came down onto the flat just ahead of the first and disappeared into the muck. And then, amid the jumbled confusion of her thoughts, one popped out with desperate clarity: Garrick cautioning her to go through the woods if she couldn’t follow the road on her way back from Lynam’s Point Hotel—“the tidal flats will be like quicksand.”

Claustrophobia clamped down on her and panic bubbled up—a faint voice of reason whispered for her not to fight, not to thrash. She took a hitching breath and pulled up tentatively on one foot but the only result was that her other foot slipped another inch deeper. Even her increasingly violent shivering felt as if it was shaking her further down into the mud.

Trying to keep her feet as still as possible, she twisted to look behind her. She was just a few feet from the rocks. She stretched her arm out, but they might as well have been a mile away. Turning forward again, she looked across the flats. The skim of water across the mud reflected the moon, the tops of the trees on the opposite bank created a lacy pattern against the star-speckled sky beyond. It looked so peaceful. She might disappear into the mud and no one would ever find her body. She had a sudden vision of two hands pushing her head under, water and sand filling her nose and her lungs. A whimper escaped her.

Trying to steady her breathing, she reached slowly down into the mud and began working the laces of her hiking boots loose, her breath catching at each new pull of the mud. When she got them both untied, she wriggled her feet to loosen them, with the result that she sank a bit further and mud began to fill her boots. Still moving like someone defusing a bomb, she worked her knapsack off her back and then, twisting, placed it gently onto the mud behind her. Then she removed her parka, the wind cutting like knives through her sweater.

In one awkward, flailing movement, she pulled one foot out of a boot and, twisting, lunged onto the knapsack. As it began to sink, she tossed her parka onto the last stretch of mud separating her from the rocks and, pushing off from the knapsack, pulled her other foot free, and stepped onto the parka just as her knapsack disappeared beneath the mud. A last, sticky scramble brought her onto solid ground.

She lay on the rock gasping. The pain in her head and her ankle, which had been pushed to the back of her mind by fear, came rushing to the fore again, clamoring for attention. She put her head down on her arm.

She would lie here, just for a minute—like Dorothy in the poppy field. If she could rest, maybe things would make more sense. Maybe she would remember why she was here and where she was going.

The shaking in her shoulders was starting to affect her torso—her back muscles were cramping against the cold—but her mind floated peacefully, pleasantly even. Then she heard a voice, close beside her and insistent.

“Hey, wake up!”

She dragged her face up. Her vision seemed to have clouded, but she could see clearly enough the man standing over her—a man who had shown her a painting but now seemed more vital. Clearly, though, a spirit.

“What?” she asked blearily.

“Don’t fall asleep. You need to come with me. What’s your name?”

“Ann. We’ve already met.”

“I don’t think so.”

His name bubbled up from the depths of her sluggish brain. “You’re Loring. You showed me the painting.”

The man looked blank for a moment and then smiled thinly. “Ah, now I see. Yes, I’m Loring but I think you spoke with my father. Ann, you need to come with me, Garrick needs you.”
 

“Garrick?”

“Yes—please, come with me right away, it’s not far.” He backed away from her, beckoning. “And you look like you could use some help, too. You can call for help from the hotel.”

Ann dragged herself to her feet. “I have to warn Garrick.”

“I think it’s too late for a warning,” he said grimly, “but you might still be able to help him.” He turned away and began climbing the hill that led away from the tidal flats. “This way, it’s safer.”

Ann hauled herself up the shallow incline, sometimes putting her hands to the ground for balance, her head and ankle throbbing. Loring stopped periodically until she caught up, then walked quickly ahead. “Hurry!”

At some point she was no longer climbing and could sense, rather than the openness of the tidal flats, the enclosed space of the pine forest. Loring was ahead of her, urging her on, clearer than she had ever seen a spirit.