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As Adam drove Beverly back toward town, it was such a lovely day—several degrees warmer than average—that Adam entertained the idea of opening up his car’s sunroof. As long as Beverly was in the passenger seat, he might as well show off the best feature of his car.
Adam moved his hand to push the button for the roof but stopped with his hand in mid-air when he looked in the rearview and spied a black car bearing down on them. The vehicle moved uncomfortably close to Adam’s bumper, so he put his foot down on the accelerator to put more space between them. “Tailgaters,” he grumbled.
They rounded a curve in the road, and Adam thought the other car had turned off. But then he caught sight of it as it closed the gap between them. Adam said to Beverly, “Can you get a good look at the driver of the car behind us?”
She craned her neck around to take a good look. “He’s sitting up tall in his seat with the visor all the way down. I can only make out his chin. The car is too close to get a plate.”
“Keep an eye on him, okay? As soon as you get the tag, let me know, and I’ll run it through the database.”
He heard the frown in Beverly’s voice. “If he were any closer, he’d be in the back seat. Can you shake him?”
Adam accelerated. Looking up the road, he decided to catch the right-hand turnoff ahead on the north side of the pond that ran parallel to the road. That way, he could turn around and get behind the guy. But he didn’t have a chance to enact his plan when the black car whipped around Adam’s driver-side bumper.
A sickening crunch followed by a heavy thud told Adam all he needed to know—someone was playing death-by-car. Adam felt the car veering to the right and tried to correct it to bring the tires back toward the road, but the black car bumped them again and hard.
They always say crashes happen in slow motion, but it was more like a macabre roller coaster blur, as their car tumbled over on its side, sliding down the embankment. By now, Adam’s frantic turning on the wheel had no effect, and with one last, awful shudder, the car rolled over and tumbled into the pond upside down.
Thanking his lucky stars he hadn’t opened the sunroof, Adam was grateful to see they had plenty of air in the car. For now. Within a few seconds, the car stopped moving with a shaking thud.
They were no longer in motion, which was the good news. The bad news was they only had one to two minutes before the car was totally filled with water.
Over in the passenger seat, Beverly was taking panicky gasping breaths. He said sharply, “It’s okay. It’s survivable. We’ll be fine. The pond is shallow, and we’re wedged in the mud. We’re stable for now.”
As the water came up to the bottoms—or rather tops—of the windows, Beverly shrieked, and her words came out in gasps. “I’m terrified of drowning. Ever since I was a child. We were at the beach. A giant wave created an undertow I couldn’t escape from. It almost killed me.”
Adam reached over and fumbled around to touch her on the arm as he talked soothingly. “Beverly, listen to me. You’re tough. You can do this. I believe in you.”
Her breathing slowed, and he said, “We’re going to unbuckle our seatbelts, okay? The water’s not pouring in yet, but it will.” Adam spied trickles of water beginning to leak through car joints.
“What do we do?”
“We unbuckle, we fall to the roof.” Adam carefully opened a console next to his seat and eased out a safety hammer before it slid toward the upside-down roof. “Then I use this on my window. When you see the window shatter, hold your breath. The water will start pouring in when I knock out the rest of the glass. Then we’ll swim out.”
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Sure you can. When I get ready to swim out the window, I’ll grab you and pull you with me, okay? I won’t leave you behind. I promise.”
“Adam, I . . . “ Her breathing got shallower again.
“Beverly, do you trust me?” He looked over at her.
She nodded.
“Okay, then. First, buckles off. Ready?”
He unbuckled his seatbelt and tumbled down to the roof, which was now the floor, then wiggled his body to right himself in the correct orientation toward the surface. She followed his lead and then took the strap off her purse and used the purse’s clasp to attach it to the belt on her slacks. They were now both upright—but rapidly getting wet with water up to their waists.
“Okay, then,” Adam said. “I’ll count to three and hit the glass. Ready?”
She nodded again and took a long, deep breath. Then he counted, “One, two, three.”
With a sharp tap of the tool on the driver-side window, it shattered into a mosaic of broken glass, and he used his sleeved arm to clear away the last pieces of glass. With the water now pouring in, he held his breath and was pleased to see Beverly was still doing the same.
Adam grabbed her hand and yanked her with him as he did a fishtail kick with his legs and used his free arm to push them toward the surface. Thank god the pond wasn’t that deep, but the ten feet to the surface felt like an eternity. When Adam’s head broke the surface, he gulped in the air and released Beverly’s hand to tuck under her arm and bring her up alongside him.
The two tread water, glad to be out of the car and breathing good old clean Vermont air. But if they stayed too long in the cold pond, they might get hypothermic. “Can you swim?” Adam asked her. He was glad to see the sparkle return to her eyes as she grinned at him and executed a perfect freestyle over to the shore. How in the world was she doing that while wearing her purse?
Once they were both high, if not yet dry, they sat on the bank of the pond staring at the water where the car was now submerged. Beverly coughed, and he turned to her with concern, but she smiled at him. “It’s okay. Swallowed a little water.”
He looked at her purse. “Do you have a cellphone in there?”
She pulled out her phone, but it was dead. Adam contemplated diving back down to the Subaru to detach his radio. But when he spied a car down the road heading in their direction, he instead grabbed his badge from his pocket. He stood in the middle of the road waving his arms.
The driver slowed, then stopped, and Adam went to talk to him. With a big thank you to the inventor of the cellphone, Adam used the man’s phone to contact the PD and relay their position and SOS. After sending the man on his way, he rejoined Beverly on the bank.
“Look at it this way—trying to kill us so soon after the kidnapping is a desperation move. And a dumb one. They’re making it much easier for us to catch them.”
Beverly smiled but was shivering. He wished he had a dry coat to give to her but didn’t think putting his drenched jacket around her shoulders would do much good. He moved closer to help block the light winds.
“Thank you,” she said.
He wrung some water out of his shirt. “For what? Coming close to getting you drowned?”
“That wasn’t your fault. I meant for knowing what to do. Keeping me calm.”
“You really did nearly drown once?”
“I was six. Grammie and I were at the Bay of Fundy, and I went swimming. You know about the tides, there?”
“Highest tides in the world.”
“More so to a short six-year-old. I got out a little too far, a tide came at me, and when I tried to run back toward the shore, I felt the forces pulling at my feet. It was like walking in quicksand. I didn’t make it. The waves gobbled me whole, and I spun around and around like I was in a washing machine.”
“But you’re a good swimmer.”
“Now, I am. I wasn’t then. I signed up to learn how to swim the day we got back home.”
“You really are something, you know that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people would be so traumatized, they’d never go near the water again. But you confronted your fears head-on.”
She grinned. “Blame Eleanor Roosevelt. She said ‘you must do the thing you think you cannot do.’”
“Good advice.” Adam looked back over the dark blue waters of the pond. “Why Laborde?”
“What?”
“Why did you take the name Laborde instead of your grandmother’s name of Gras or your father’s name, Zayette?”
“Truthfully?”
“Yeah, truthfully.”
“I saw it in a phone book.”
Adam laughed. “As good a way to choose a name as any.” He looked toward the pond as if willing his submerged car to pop up to the surface and onto the road. “I’m guessing Forsythe was behind this. Getting someone else to do his underhanded work for him again.”
“Goldie?”
“Maybe. But I do know one thing. Whoever it was—well, just like my car, that bastard is going down.”
