47

Kay Parker was locked in fear. Her lover was dead. She had just fired a shotgun at her husband. The police were on the way, and the eight-year cover-up of Selina Royce’s murder was about to be lifted. She was running for her freedom.

There was no way she was going to prison. She had already served more than enough time for killing Selina. She had been in exile for eight years, hiding in her apartment and using the dead woman’s name. For all that time she had been afraid to contact any of the old friends who had once worshipped at her feet, afraid to take even a small step back into society, afraid to make a friend who might learn too much about her. Robert Leavitt had been her only solace—really, her only reason for living. And now he was gone. Her hopes of moving back into the world, even with Selina’s identity, were completely dashed.

“Go ahead, kill me, you bitch” was what she had hissed when Jane stood in the driveway and aimed her gun. “Pull the damn trigger.” But the car had found a bit of traction and snaked its way out of the driveway. Now she was on the road, which was still dangerous but nevertheless manageable at a decent speed. She was in low gear, steering carefully and trying to keep her foot off the brake.

She had no idea where she was going. Certainly not back to Paris for another appearance in the role of Selina. Or to New York, where there were still important people who might recognize her before she had a chance to alter her appearance. It seemed that there was no life left for her, just as it had been when she caught Selina coming down from the bedroom and fired both barrels. At that instant the life she had known was over. A trial… prison … disgrace. It had looked completely hopeless until Robert had shown her an escape. He had come up with the idea to switch identities and bury the headless corpse in her place. He had arranged for her life in Paris. She had fled the murder scene and disappeared out of the country on Selina’s passport. Now she needed another plan. Where could she go? How would she hide? She needed Robert with her now!

It was Robert who had made her exile bearable. “I’ll take care of you,” he had promised. “I’ve always loved you. I’ll keep on loving you.” He had been true to his word, but now he was gone. There was no one to save her, to love her, and keep her alive. This time she was on her own.

The car began to skid, its rear end sliding toward the mountain and then, when she corrected, out toward the void that lay beyond the road’s edge. She steered frantically, trying to get the car back on track, knowing that she would lose all control if she touched the brakes. It straightened out in the center of the road. With her foot off the gas, the car began to slow. When she touched the accelerator, she was back in control and able to take the breath that seized in her throat.

Bill slumped into the sofa and let Jane lift his feet onto the coffee table. The pain had become dull rather than intense. As far as he could tell, the bleeding had stopped. But he was having trouble focusing on the details of the room and even on the features of Jane’s face. When he tried to speak, the best he could manage were half sentences. Jane tried to be upbeat. “Your color is coming back. It’s just a shoulder wound, nothing life-threatening.” Every few seconds she would repeat, “The medics will be here any minute.” But, in truth, she was afraid that she was losing him. He was less and less responsive. His clothes were blood-soaked, and the folded towels were showing a stain. She could only guess how much blood he had lost outside in the woods.

She was saying “medics” to imply a skilled medical emergency team. But she remembered the few peeling buildings and the two-room police station in Mountain Ridge. Was there even a doctor? How far away was the best excuse for a hospital? How long would it take to stabilize him from shock and get the lost blood back into his system? How long to get a surgeon to start repairing his shoulder?

She had no recollection of pulling the trigger. He had appeared out of the trees so suddenly, she had acted on impulse. But the image of his toppling forward was there in terrible detail. The crack of the gunshot. The smell of the burned gunpowder. The shocked expression that flickered for an instant in her husband’s eyes. The blood on the snow. How could she have thought he would ever hurt her? Why did she try to run from him? How could she have tried to kill him?

Jane heard his breathing, suddenly more labored. “Jesus, where are you?” she screamed at the police. They weren’t going to make it in time.

————

The police Jeep was halfway up the road, its roof lights blinking even though the chief hardly expected to encounter traffic. He was doing the best he could, in a four-wheel drive with the engine laboring. Most of the snow had melted off, but there were still long white patches that were slick and dangerous. Rush to the rescue and he might never get there at all! Besides, he wasn’t counting on finding someone to arrest or someone to save. The drive was eerily similar to the one he had taken years ago, when the victim was shattered beyond recognition and the killer had vanished. The woman said that she was Mrs. Andrews and that her husband had been shot. If William Andrews had been killed, he wouldn’t be doing any investigating. The state boys would be all over the place within an hour, taking their orders from the media tycoon’s next-in-command.

The emergency medical specialist was in the pickup truck that was following the Jeep. The driver, who owned the general store and had taken medical training as part of his volunteer fireman commitment, kept pulling close, hoping that he could encourage Pete to drive faster. In his two years of medical service he had never had a case where a life hung in the balance. The bloodiest thing he had ever seen was a fisherman’s foot that had caught in his outboard motor. In his most serious case, the patient was already dead, his body fished out of a lake hours after his boat capsized. But still, he wanted to hurry. He remembered from his courses at the firehouse that in emergency medicine, time is the killer. A wound that was superficial when incurred could be beyond repair only a few hours later. Oxygen never seemed to revive people who had already died.

Kay saw the blinking police lights appear on the switchback below. “Don’t panic!” she admonished herself. She had to stay calm and in charge. There was no room for her to turn around. She could never get away by backing up. Nor could she even consider surrendering. She couldn’t survive an arrest. The grim photographs of her entering and leaving police stations in handcuffs. The prison cell. The mousy attorneys trying to line their pockets and get their faces in front of the cameras. And the trial, with the daily headlines of her jealous murder, her years in hiding, her adultery with her husband’s best friend. Not the kind of ending the fabulous Kay Parker could allow. Not as flattering as the global sympathy that had followed the announcement of her murder at the hands of an intruder.

She began to see the shape of the car beneath the blinking lights. It had pulled to the center of the road and stopped. A man stepped out of the driver’s side and began waving a flashlight. His hand was raised, an unmistakable signal for her to stop. The police weren’t going to let her pass.

Kay stepped down on the accelerator. She thought of turning to the mountain side of the road and passing the police car on her right. But there was another car right behind, parked in the inside lane. She had no choice. Still adding speed, she aimed at the officer who was trying to flag her down.

For a moment he held his ground, waving at her furiously. But as she bore down on him, he dove across the headlights of his own car, leaving an escape path between the police car and the road’s edge. Kay eased over until the side of her car was dinging against the guardrail. She flashed past the roadblock and steered back toward the center of her lane, her face now giddy at her triumph. There was no way that Kay Parker would let herself be stopped by an ordinary policeman.

The rear end began to slip. She had used too much speed and turned back too abruptly. She turned into the skid and hurtled across the road toward the face of the mountain. A quick correction brought the front of the car around just as the rear tires found traction. The car raced to the edge. The cable of the primitive guardrail snapped like a piano string, scarcely altering the car’s momentum. A second later it was gone, over the edge.

It fell a hundred feet before striking the sheer side of the mountain, where it sent up a small fireball. Then it cartwheeled back out into space, burning at its edges and leaving a smoky trail. After another hundred feet it hit the lake, nose first, so the splash was minimal. It dove through the surface and disappeared in an instant.

“Jesus!” Pete couldn’t believe what he had seen. He was still laboring back to his feet when the car had crashed through the guardrail and gone over the side. He ran to the shattered cables. Halfway down there was a small fire oozing into the crevices of the rocks. Below that he saw the lake, with a few concentric rings moving out from a rough patch of water. The car had vanished.

“We have to get down there,” he told the medic, who had come up beside him.

“Down there?” the man asked incredulously.

Pete started back to his car. “There might be someone still alive down there.”

“Not as likely as someone being still alive up there.” The medic pointed up to the top of the mountain.

Pete thought for an instant, and nodded in agreement. He got back into the Jeep and continued up the road. No one could have survived that fall, he reasoned. And it wasn’t likely the car would ever be found. He’d round up a couple of the local divers to take a look. But the lake filled a canyon between two sheer rock faces. No one had ever found the bottom.

The volunteer fireman rushed directly to Bill and began working with urgency. When he snapped open his aluminum medical kit, his hands moved knowingly to the instruments and medicines he needed. “Blood plasma,” he said, lifting a plastic bag. “Hold it as high as you can.” Jane obeyed.

He shone a light into Bill’s eyes. “Okay,” he announced.

“What? What’s okay?”

“He’s okay. Not in shock. Still a decent pulse. We’ll get him stable and airlift him out to Lake Placid. They have a pretty decent trauma unit.” He called to the policeman, who was examining what little was left of the front door. “Call the medevac for me, will you, Sergeant, I have them standing by.”

Pete went to the phone and made the call. “Fifteen minutes,” he told the medic, who nodded in response. He was busy spreading antiseptic over Bill’s wounds.

“J. J. Warren, isn’t it?” Pete said to Jane as he took the plasma bag from her. “Didn’t I tell you to find another story?”

“I can explain all that,” she answered.

“I’m sure you can. And while you’re at it, maybe you can explain that car that went over the cliff back down the road a ways?”

“The cliff? She went over the cliff?” Jane was stunned. She looked down at her husband, who was suddenly alert.

“She? Can you give me a name, because I don’t think we’re ever going to find her. The car went into the lake.”

She kept her eyes on Bill, but his expression told her nothing. It was up to her to decide. “Her name is Selina Royce. She came here to kill my husband. She was in love with him and couldn’t give him up.”

Jane knew she was joining a conspiracy of lies. But there was no way to explain that Kay Parker, her husband’s first wife, had once again died a violent death.