THE WOOD FLOOR beneath my feet goes soft. Like I’m no longer standing on something solid, but instead, sinking into quicksand. This nightmare is only getting worse. The burning wood pops. It startles me, like a gunshot I didn’t expect.
Penny presses PLAY on the video that’s now appearing on her smartphone screen. I see a field reporter standing outside the Lake Placid Village Police Station where Chief Joe Walton is holding a press conference in the rain.
“We are saddened by the events of this morning,” he says into the multiple microphones attached to the wood podium before him, the rain pelting the visor on his police lid. “Namely the presumed loss of a little girl, Chloe O’Keefe, eleven years old, the child who’d been reported abducted by her parents yesterday afternoon, and the loss of one of the village’s most prominent citizens and a former decorated member of this police force, forty-five-year-old Giselle Fontaine. While Fontaine was found dead in her bathtub only a few hours after her harrowing abduction ordeal with the accused, we have not yet uncovered the body of Chloe. Although based on the physical and circumstantial evidence at hand, we are suspecting and expecting the worst.”
The press lobs questions at the cop, but he holds up his meaty hands as if to say, Not now.
“The photos we’re about to show you are disturbing,” he warns. “You should all be cautioned.” He turns, nods to one of his uniformed policemen who pulls out a big white poster board that serves as a backdrop for six full color eight-by-ten-inch glossy photos.
“Can you all make these out?” Walton asks.
The cameraman working the presser for the news channel broadcast on the digital smartphone zooms in on the first photo. It shows a woman who is most definitely Detective Giselle Fontaine, her face bruised and battered, her mouth gaping open, along with her blue eyes. There’s something wrapped around her throat. It’s a pair of yellow polka-dot bikini bottoms. The bottoms are bloodstained, if not blood-soaked.
“Oh God,” I mumble to myself. “What the hell has happened to our little girl?”
Penny’s eyes are rolling back in their sockets. She begins to fall. She’s overwhelmed, physically, emotionally. Her heart is palpitating. She’s going into shock. I grab onto her.
“Penny,” I say. “Breathe, honey, please breathe.”
Each photograph is broadcast over the news channel, one by one. All a different version of the same thing. Giselle dead, her face and neck horribly black and blued. Her neck choked by Chloe’s bathing suit.
The chief moves in closer to the microphones.
“Currently, our number one suspect in the double homicide is a fifty-year-old male and the father of the suspected deceased, Chloe O’Keefe, namely Sidney O’Keefe. Released from a downstate maximum-security penitentiary only last week for which he had been doing a twenty-five-to-life sentence in the murder of four undocumented Chinese aliens back in 2007, O’Keefe is proof that some natural born killers should never be paroled. And I can’t stress the word never enough.
“As I’ve already indicated this morning, O’Keefe and his wife took Fontaine hostage, holding her with her own gun, which they took off her person. They then fled the police who’d arrived on the scene to investigate the beating of one Tom Bertram, who identified O’Keefe as his attacker late last night. While the O’Keefes fled to the woods located in and around Keene Valley, it appears they doubled back to exact their revenge on Fontaine as she was heading home. At this point, we can’t be certain when O’Keefe assaulted his daughter, but said assault was likely deadly, and the primary reason behind his false story of her having been abducted right off the beach on Mirror Lake.
“As of this moment, both local and state police have joined in the hunt for O’Keefe who, at present, is at large with his wife, Penny. Penny, it should be noted, is considered coconspirator in the double homicide. Like her husband, she should also be considered armed and dangerous. If anyone within the vicinity of Lake Placid and/or the Keene Valley should accidentally come across the two perpetrators, we urge you not to engage in any open contact with them, but to instead immediately dial 911 and contact local police authorities.”
Chief Walton walks away from the mic to the shotgunned questions lobbed by the many reporters present. That’s when the video ends.
“What the hell just happened?” I say, my voice barely exiting my dry mouth.
“They killed her. They killed them both. And they’re blaming us, Sid.”
“But that’s impossible. The only pictures they showed were of Giselle, and even then, we can’t be sure she’s dead.”
It hits me with all the intensity of the electrical storm still waging outside the log walls of this long-abandoned cabin. Setting the smartphone onto the stool, I grab hold of Penny’s shoulders.
“Don’t you see what’s happening here, Penny? We’re being set up. We’re being made to look like murderers. Or, at the very least, I’m being set up.”
“But why, Sidney? Why go to the lengths they are going to? I mean, it’s the police for God’s sakes. I thought you said it was Rabuffo who wanted his revenge. But we’re running from the very people who should be helping us. Helping our daughter.”
I think about my phone call with Joel. About the reason they baited me with Chloe outside the hotel room last night. About them needing something from me in order to get at what they want.
“Because they want something,” I say.
“What exactly can they want that bad, Doc?”
Realization … It’s like a bright white light that suddenly turns on over my head. Joel wasn’t lying when he said Rabuffo’s lieutenants are going after their fair share of his fortune.
“They want Rabuffo’s cash, Pen. And they think I alone hold the key to it.”
“So you think it’s possible our daughter is alive?”
I nod.
“I do,” I say. “They want us to think she’s dead so that we’ll come out into the open. It’s their leverage. But we’re not going to take the bait. We’re going to stick it out right here until we can figure out a way to get back to town, find out who knows where they’re keeping Chloe, and then we’re going to get her back. Only then will we turn ourselves into the police.”
“With Joel’s help.”
“With Joel’s help,” I agree.