Jane? Answer me, please!”
Now he sounded closer. He had come into the woods and was doing his best to track her. Jane got up slowly, stretched out, and picked up the gun. She started to walk but felt herself toppling again. Her right shoe had broken, the heel snapping away cleanly. Each step she took threw her off balance, but she had to keep going.
“It’s getting dark in here,” Bill’s voice called from a distance. “You’ll get lost.”
He hadn’t gained any ground. Maybe he was afraid to go too deep into the forest. Or maybe he had lost her trail and was simply wandering.
She fell again, this time against the trunk of a tree. The damn shoe. She should take them both off and get back her balance. But the ground under the snow was hard and rocky. Her feet would be cut to pieces. Besides, they were already cold and wet. How far could she go barefoot?
Jane hobbled ahead, holding the pistol in one hand and using the other to ease branches aside. The snow from the branches was dropping down on top of her. Her hair was wet and she could feel ice under the collar of her jacket. In another minute, the cold would overcome her. Then it wouldn’t take long for her to freeze to death. She had to change her direction and get back to the house, where the car was waiting.
She stopped and listened. There was nothing. The woods seemed deathly still, with just an occasional rustle of wind in the treetops. But she knew he was there, and not very far away. She turned to her right, at a sharp angle from the direction she had been moving. She planned to make a wide turn, away from her pursuer and around to the front of the chalet. Then she would rush out of the woods to the car. Once again, if she could get inside with the keys, and now with the gun, her chances of escape were better than even. There would still be the road with its snow-covered surface and its sheer drop down to the lake below. She would have to move carefully. But Bill would be on foot, unarmed, and without his helicopter to come to his rescue.
“Jaynnee!” he called at the top of his voice, stretching her name into a long cry. He had lost her, she guessed. He was calling desperately, not knowing which direction she had traveled or how far she had gotten. And even with his scream, he sounded farther away. She was going to make it! If she could just fight the cold for another few minutes, she would be safe in the car.
She saw the house through the trees, sitting up in front of her on cleared ground. How far? It was hard to tell through the branches. Maybe a hundred yards. Maybe less.
Something snapped somewhere behind her. Bill’s voice cursed, probably at the whiplike sting of a branch. He was close. In turning back toward the house, she had moved closer to him. Jane stood still and held her breath, knowing that any noise she made would give her away.
“Dammit, Jane, why are you doing this?” he shouted nearby. “There’s no place to go. You can’t keep running.”
She pressed flat against a tree, hoping to make herself invisible. She heard his footsteps crunching in the snow, and then the sound of his heavy breathing. Snow fell nearby. Bill swore. Then he appeared, a shadow moving in the spaces between the branches no more than fifty feet away. She was caught. She knew she couldn’t make it to the car.
She remembered the pistol, completely forgotten even though it was clutched in her hand. “Don’t let him close,” she remembered Leavitt telling her. She put the other hand on the gun, raised it in front of her chest, and aimed in the direction of the approaching figure. She caught a glimpse of his face. A branch pushed aside. He stopped abruptly when he saw her.
“Don’t come near me,” Jane said, her tone more hopeful than determined. “I have a gun.”
“Jane, what in hell…” He took one more step toward her.
She turned her eyes away and pulled the trigger. The sharp crack of the gunshot rang in her ears and echoed in sequence off the distant peaks. She smelled the gunpowder, almost like holiday fireworks. Slowly she turned her eyes back to her husband, afraid of what she might have done.
He was on his knees, looking up at her, his eyes wide with surprise. His lips contorted as he tried to say something through his pain. He glanced down at the red droplets that were already staining the snow. Then he toppled forward onto his face.
Jane watched for a second, the gun still pointed as if she expected him to get up and attack her. She heard him groan. “Bill?” she said, asking him if he was still there. He didn’t answer. She let the pistol drop from her fingers, then turned and ran.
She stumbled coming out of the woods and sprawled out on her chest. Snow clung to her hands and face. The damaged shoe had come off and was buried somewhere behind her. But she didn’t stop to look or to brush at the snow that was in her mouth and eyes. She pushed up to her knees, crawled a few yards as she scampered to her feet, and raced for the car. Halfway there, she threw a glance back over her shoulder. No one was following.
She tore open the car door and threw herself into the seat. As she was closing the door, she realized the engine wasn’t running. She reached down to the ignition. There was no key. Where was it? She did a panicky search of the seat next to her, felt under the seats, and lifted the floor mat. Where had he left it? It was only then that Jane realized he hadn’t left it. Sometime after he had pushed her into hiding, Robert Leavitt had gone out, turned off the engine, and taken the key.
She stepped back into the snow and nearly fell. Her feet had no feeling, and she couldn’t find her balance. She staggered the short distance to the house and fell against the front door. “Bob,” she screamed in desperation, then turned the handle and stepped inside. “I killed him,” she said. “He was reaching for me. I shot him.”
“Of course you did,” a voice answered. It was a woman’s voice.
Jane blinked to clear her eyes. Leavitt was standing next to the sofa, showing a thin smile in answer to her obvious confusion. Seated next to him was a face she had seen before. On the street, in a bank, and then faintly in the dim light of her Paris hospital room. “Selina?”
The woman laughed and flashed a smile. Jane recognized her from the pictures. The grainy newspaper photos where the face was formed by a pattern of black dots. The fuzzy reproduction of old magazine photos she had pulled up on the Internet. She knew her. But something didn’t fit. This wasn’t the woman she had glimpsed only once in a picture of an eight-year-old awards banquet. This face had been in ball gowns at opening nights at the symphony. It had peered out of a tent, flanked by two lovely children. It had been on the dresser of the flowered boudoir that Bill had never redecorated. It wasn’t Selina Royce.
“Kay Parker,” Jane said. She blinked hard and tried to sharpen her focus. The woman turned her face slightly and glanced upward in a classic pose. “Jesus,” Jane said, “you can’t be. You’re—”
“Alive,” Kay said.