“Oh, my God,” Keely breathed. “I have to go get those papers.”
“I’m going with you,” Mary said.
The bank was within walking distance. She told Tammy where they were going and once inside the bank, she explained that she didn’t have the key. She had no idea what Ray had done with it, but she didn’t have it and if it was in the house, she’d never find it now. Thank God for small towns and people who’d known her since birth and broke the rules.
The box contained one slim legal-size envelope, not the piles of manuscripts she might have expected.
Mary was waiting for her when she came out of the vault. “Let’s go back and get your car,” Keely said. “I want to take this to the police station. I’ll open it there.”
Mary nodded. “Okay. Good idea.”
They got back to the store parking lot and found Lise by her car. She turned and Keely saw the tears in her eyes.
“Tom’s at the police station,” Lise choked out. “I have to get there.” She started sobbing.
Oh, God she was in no shape to drive. And she knew. She knew about Tom. The news wasn’t going to get any better, either. Keely put her arms around her friend, looking at Mary over Lise’s shoulder. “Come on. Come with us.”
Lise got in the back. It was only a mile up the road to the police station. Keely looked back at Lise after they pulled out of the parking lot. “Are you o—”
She wasn’t crying anymore. “Just drive,” Lise said, the small pistol she’d pulled out of somewhere suddenly jammed against the back of Mary’s head. “And keep driving.”
It took four hours for Tom Tanner to crack under police examination while Jake, by professional courtesy, was allowed to watch and listen behind a concealed observation window, and when he finally did crack Jake knew he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. And once again, someone was going to die.
Someone he felt more than protectiveness toward, and the fear he’d felt about that was completely gone in the face of danger. He was going to lose her.
“I really hate to do this to you guys.”
She had a gun. Lise had a gun. Her friend Lise had a gun and she was pointing it at the back of Mary’s head while she continued to drive. The car swung wide, nearly running into a guardrail as they wildly rounded a sharp curve.
Keely’s heart pounded. “Then maybe you shouldn’t do this,” she said. What was Lise going to do?
“No, I’m going to do it. I just feel bad about it, I want you to know that.”
Lise sounded shockingly calm. Like this was no big deal. And she didn’t really sound like she felt bad about it.
“Why?” Her mouth felt thick. Fear. Fear was taking over her. She was almost afraid she’d pass out from it, but she had to keep her wits about her. She had to do something. What? They were careening down the highway out of Haven at fifty miles an hour down a winding, sharply curving road through mountain hollows. They whipped by a two-story farmhouse. A horse munched grass behind a wooden post fence in a field beside it. A trembling Mary just barely missed hitting the mailbox by the road. The serene country scenery contrasted sickly with the nightmare playing out inside the car.
“You know why, you idiot,” Lise said. “You found that damn locket. If we hadn’t been in such a drunken mess that night, we’d have realized she was wearing it.”
“We? Who’s we?” Who all was involved? Keely’s head reeled.
“Me and Tom and Ray and Jud. We were drunk, driving around, too many of us piled in a car with too much alcohol. Stupid! And then Tom tells us that moron Ilene Klasko was pregnant—he was going to leave me even though we’d just gotten back together.”
Ilene Klasko. I.L.K. Keely didn’t know an Ilene Klasko, but she had to have been a couple classes ahead of her in school, like Danny and Tom and Ray and Jud. Mary had been in Keely’s class, but Mary had started dating Danny long before Keely’d hooked up with Ray—
“I swear to God, it was an accident,” Lise said, angry now, the hand holding the gun shaking. Shaking but still pointing at Mary. “I wanted to go see her. I told Tom to tell her to get an abortion. We went to her house and he told her, then we backed out, turned back around and Ilene was standing in the damn road. It was so dark, we didn’t see her till the last minute. She was running and I was trying to brake. I was trying! I was drunk. And I was angry, dammit. I hit her and—”
She broke off.
Lise had hit her. Lise had been driving.
“It was all Tom’s fault,” Lise snarled. “He should have gotten that property for the town. Then it would have been a nature preserve and we wouldn’t have had to do a thing. Everything got screwed up then. We buried her there, all of us. We were scared, okay? Scared!”
Her eyes burned. “We wrote letters to her mom, said she’d run away, signed them from Ilene. Tom had some notes from her, so we faked her handwriting. Her mom’s a drug addict, and she was in jail the next year. Ilene’s older sister ran away the year before. Nobody ever expected Ilene to do any different. Nobody cared! Ilene disappeared and nobody cared. Her mom didn’t even make a police report. It was perfect.”
Perfectly horrible. Keely’s mind spun. All this time, her friends had been involved in this awful secret. Ray, too.
Then Ray had up and died in an accident, leaving that locket and his manuscript. She hadn’t even looked at it yet, but she knew what it had to be. Mary knew, somehow.
“What’s in those papers of Ray’s?” Keely asked, wanting to hear Lise say it.
“He said if anything ever happened to him, if any of us ever did anything to hurt him—He said he’d left something behind that would be found after his death. He said he’d written it all down. We weren’t that worried about it. We knew you’d think it was his damn fiction. Then you found the skull. Then everything changed.”
They knew she wouldn’t think it was fiction now. Her throat all but closed up in horror. It could have stayed secret forever if she hadn’t found Ilene’s skull. And if the locket hadn’t revealed too much truth…
Jake was with the police. He was with Tom. Maybe Lise didn’t think Tom would break, but maybe he would.
But even if he did, it could be too late for her.
“That developer bought that old farm,” Lise was saying. “So Ray said he’d move the body. He wouldn’t tell anybody what he’d done with it, but he started talking about the locket, getting money out of Tom. Then Jud wanted money, too. Tom was the only one who had any, at least that kind of money. He sent Jud to your apartment last night but he screwed up again and he was going to go to the cops when Tom threatened him. Tom killed him. He didn’t tell me he did, but I know he did. It’s the second time Jud screwed up—he was supposed to dig up the rest of the bones but he didn’t get them all. He got scared when that damn Jake Malloy came out there and nearly ran him down trying to get away. Jud was a liability. I had to fix it. I have to fix everything.”
Keely knew she was a liability now, too. Now that Lise had Ray’s papers, Keely was expendable.
“Tom’s at the police station,” she said sharply. “You aren’t going to get away with this, Lise. If you hurt us, you aren’t going to get away with it. They’ll show Tom the picture in the locket. They know he was involved with Ilene somehow. And they found those bones at my farm. They’ll start putting it together, and there’ll be some evidence, some kind of DNA, that’ll connect up to Jud’s murder. It’s all falling apart. Don’t make it worse!”
She wanted to beg, but she didn’t think that would work. She had to try reason.
And she had to get out of this car. Wherever Lise was taking them, nothing good could happen there. They’d make her and Mary disappear, just like they’d made Ilene Klasko disappear. And Lise was crazy.
“They’re going to find out, Lise. Tom’s going to tell them everything!”
“They’re not going to know. Tom isn’t going to break and tell them. He knows I was going to figure out some way to get Ray’s papers. Nobody’s going to tell. I’m going to fix it.”
They’d been covering up this crime for so long, Lise couldn’t believe it would all come apart. And she was going to kill them. Hopelessness swamped Keely. A car came toward them from the other direction. She needed help, but she had no idea how to get it.
“I’m sorry, I really am, but I’ll get over it,” Lise said with a hard laugh. “I’ll even feel bad about it for a little—Oh, my God!”
Keely jerked her head to the front windshield of the car, following Mary’s suddenly horrified gaze. She couldn’t see anything, just winding blacktop and the other car, but she felt a biting wave of cold rushing over her bones.
“Get out of the road,” Lise screamed. “Oh, my God! Ilene!”
The car spun out of control. All Keely knew then was the rush of trees coming at her, too fast, too blinding.
She had no idea how much time passed before she woke. She felt heat, terrible heat. Opening her eyes painfully, she saw Mary, head thrown on the steering wheel, completely still. Lise, too, was still—thrown clear out of the front window.
Something hissed.
The engine was going to catch on fire. The engine. Keely’s head reeled with pain and she felt herself passing out. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. Arms reached for her. The door of the car was open, somehow. Arms reached for her, pulled her to safety, depositing her gently on the sloping pine-covered bank. They were over the river. She could hear the sound of water swishing through rocks over the hissing of the car. Only a line of trees had stopped them from careening into the water.
She opened her eyes. A girl she recognized smiled down at her. Keely blinked, hard, her vision wavering. She reached up, tried to touch the girl, but her hand went…Right through her.
Ilene Klasko. The name burst through her head.
“Ilene?” she whispered brokenly.
The girl smiled and the vision of her fell apart, disintegrating. She sensed Mary laying down next to her. And then all she could see was smoke and flames and all she could hear was the sound of sirens. The other car…Someone had seen the accident. Someone had called for help.
She struggled to sit up, still afraid. The car was going to explode. She crawled, desperate.
Then something grabbed at her ankle and she felt the business end of a gun at the back of her head.
Jake scrambled down the embankment, past trees, sliding, down to the bottom where smoke choked the air and seared his lungs. “Keely!”
He hadn’t waited for the officers coming behind him when the call had come in reporting an accident. The car they’d described fit with Mary’s. Mary had gone to get Keely and Ray’s papers, they knew that from calling the store to look for Keely. Tom had spilled everything. Lise had run down Ilene Klasko years ago, and he had killed Jud after he’d failed to fix things at the farmhouse yesterday morning. They’d all participated in covering up the old crime. Tom had transformed from a coolly elegant, almost academic, politician to a quivering, weeping mess. Jake had no sympathy for him.
He could only pray he wasn’t too late for Keely and Mary, the innocents in this complicated, dark drama. The sirens came closer and he stopped short feet beside the car, searching inside.
There was no one there.
He swung around, backing away. The car could explode and only the fear that Keely was inside had brought him that close.
“Jake!”
He pivoted, saw them through the trees, Lise shoving Keely ahead of her. He could see Mary now, on the ground near them, not moving. Lise grabbed Keely by the hair when she didn’t get up fast enough, swung her arm around and he saw the gun pointed straight at him.
Keely rose up suddenly, shoved Lise forward. The other woman lost her footing, dropping the gun. Keely was on it in two seconds, tackling Lise, putting that same gun to the back of her friend’s neck. Her shocked gaze jerked to Jake’s.
“Jake!” Keely screamed.
It was too late when he realized why she was screaming. Keely was okay, but he wasn’t.
The force of the vehicle’s explosion knocked him to the ground even as he saw Keely throwing herself down atop Mary and covering her own head from the blast. He heard officers shouting. As he fought off blackness, he knew Keely was okay.
“Jake,” he heard her crying. It was Keely, he knew it was Keely. He heard shouts, officers barking orders. They were taking Lise into custody and getting medics for Mary.
But Keely, she was here, by his side, despite the flaming heat still too near.
He couldn’t get up. God, he wanted to get up. He had to work to lift his eyelids, focus hard to make even one bit of his body obey his directions.
Her sexy, drop-dead, drown-in-me eyes seared his gaze.
“Don’t die on me now,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare die on me now. I need you,” she went on sweetly. God, he loved her voice. “I need you.” She wasn’t in danger anymore, but she still needed him….
“I’m not going to die,” he promised. “But I think I’m going to black out.” He grabbed her arm, focusing desperately on her, keeping himself conscious by sheer force of his will. He felt himself floating. “I just have to know one thing.”
“Anything.”
“I’m thinking about falling in love with you.” Maybe he was in love with her already. And it felt right. Real. Perspective. He was about to pass out and he’d finally found perspective. “Is that okay?”
He heard the sob Keely caught in her throat. “I thought you didn’t believe in love.”
A laugh rose inside him but it hurt too much. He hurt everywhere. He’d hit the ground hard. And he was losing it fast. He had to tell her. She had to believe, the way she’d made him believe.
“You’re not going to start arguing now, are you?” he said. “I want you to believe me.”
“I do,” she choked out, “I believe you.”
“Anything can happen in Haven,” he whispered roughly. “Anything.”
Her tears were falling fast. He felt first one then another hit his face as she leaned down to kiss him. “And probably will,” she cried. “And probably will.”