With Every Breath (28 page)

He’d have to organize a search party, Joe realized. He’d call every able-bodied islander out of their beds, out of their snug little homes, and drag them up here whether they liked The Wick or not.

Maddie and Josh were alive. They had to be alive. He would believe that until he found them dead.

Then again, nobody had ever found Beacher, or Annabel’s body, either.

The thought made his knee give out suddenly as he put weight on it. He stumbled down the deck to the drive again, unsure why he should be thinking of that old horror just then, when this was so much worse. But the idea lingered.

Beacher and Annabel, Maddie and Josh.

He went around to the driver’s side of the patrol car.

"Uh," Lou said, startled. "I was just coming in for you. A call just came over the radio. Miz Brogan and her kid are over at Tony Macari’s place."

Emotion—shock, relief, disbelief—swept through Joe. It was so sweet, so amazingly rich, that he had to put an arm against the roof of the car for support. He put his forehead against it.

"How bad are they hurt?" he rasped when he could speak.

"Didn’t say," Lou answered. "Must not be too bad, or they would have mentioned it. They would have called medevac back, right? Hey, are you all right?" "Yeah," Joe said shortly, breathing again, straightening. "Okay, here’s what we do. You stay here. I’m going to take the car and go get her. On the way I’ll radio for the county boys or somebody from Ellsworth. The phone’s out here again."

"Joe, I don’t like—" Lou began to complain.

Joe cut him off. "Don’t touch anything. Just wait for somebody important to get here." It was an old, standing island joke. They had never needed Somebody Important before.

"Somebody died in there," he said, going with his instincts. And if Maddie was alive, if Josh was unhurt, then he was starting to have an idea who it might be.

But Christ, he wondered, where was the body this time? He’d driven halfway around The Wick and was pulling up in Macari’s driveway, having a hard time with the brakes, nearly going through a wall of cedar and glass, before he remembered that his knee was too busted out, too inflamed, for him to be able to drive.

Maddie did not think the chill would ever leave her. It was in her bones. Her skin was frigid and clammy to the touch.

Tony had brought them inside, through a marble-and-white foyer, past a towering, nearly vertical staircase of blond wood. They went into a family room. The entire back wall was two stories of Palladian glass looking out over the western sea. The fireplace was immense, and a low fire cracked and snapped there, orange flames twisting.

Maddie stared at it, and her teeth snicked together with her shivers. She sat on the sofa, a blanket around her knees, one over her lap, and another around her shoulders. Josh was sitting on the floor at her feet with two blankets of his own. She hadn’t been aware of how wet they’d gotten until they’d come inside. She wasn’t sure how they’d gotten wet. Somewhere in the marshes, she thought.

Tony Macari came back into the room.

"T-thank you," she managed, looking up at him. Funny, she thought, how you could always tell by the look of a person when they had more money than God. It was in the cut of the man’s white hair, in the perfect gleam of his teeth. He wore a bathrobe and slippers, but they were an expensive
bathrobe and slippers. When he’d given them the blankets, she’d noticed that his fingernails were buffed and polished.

He held two mugs. He gave one to Josh, the other to her.

"Hot chocolate for the lad," he said. "I put something stronger in yours. Brandy. I hope that’s all right."

"Yes. T-thank you," she said again.

"There’s no need for that. I would have helped anyone who knocked on my door in your condition, but if I had not especially helped you, I fear your mother would come back to haunt me."

That shocked her with more than cold. "My m-mother?" she whispered.

"Annabel used to bring you to the mainland every weekend. I owned a candy store over there then, among

other enterprises. She brought you in every Saturday morning. And then you two would spend the night at Minnamini Hall. It was a fine hotel on the water." Maddie shook her head, the ache there growing. She knew that couldn’t be. Her mother hadn’t loved her ... or maybe she had ... maybe she’d died. Maddie couldn’t think, couldn’t remember. All that was dangerously muddled in the back of her mind again.

She set her jaw and resolved not to let it happen again, not to start forgetting things again. It was just the horror of the night, the trauma . ..

She swallowed brandy and coffee and nodded hard. "I r-r-remember your face," she said, as though by speaking it forcefully enough, she could hold on to that memory and all the others that had gradually come back to her since she had come home.

Home. She heard her own thought and trembled harder. Rick had followed her all the way home, into her past.

"Those were good times," Tony said thoughtfully, as though there had never been any since, and she dragged her attention back to him.

"Yes. Mr. M-M-Macari—"

"Tony, please."

"Your t-t-telephone—"

"I’ve already called the authorities, as you asked." Finally, peace filtered in, and it began to thaw her. Maddie slumped back against the sofa cushions, nearly spilling her mug.

Tony had called the authorities.

Joe was coming.

Joe.

The soft gong of the doorbell echoed from other corners of the house, almost as though her thoughts had summoned him. Maddie was on her feet before she heard the cracking sound of wood on wood as the front door burst open. She took an unsteady step, then she was running.

They met by the staircase.

Joe looked like a wild man. His hair was sticking out every which way, his shirt was half-untucked from his jeans, and he was limping so badly she cried out in the split second it took for her to fall into his arms. She heard Josh behind her and thrust a hand out for him blindly. She felt his fingers slip into hers, then she cried out a second time as Joe reached for him, too, hauling him up into his arms. Somehow he held both of them, though she didn’t think he could stand much longer, and when she looked up and saw the pain etched on his face, she was sure of it.

We belong together, she thought wildly, the three of us, all broken and wounded but somehow whole and strong together.

"R-R-Rick," she managed. "Where’s R-R-Rick? Did you find him?"

"No. I don’t know." It was too curt, and she deserved more, but he couldn’t think past his relief and the pain in his knee.

"He c-c-came, had a g-g-gun—"

"And who might Rick be?" a voice behind them interrupted.

Joe looked up at Tony Macari. "I’ll make an official report in the morning when I know more," he said shortly, neither intending to be rude nor wanting to be polite, not particularly caring about anything except the two people who were in his arms. Safe.

Then he relaxed a little. "Short of that, just keep your ears open. Enough went on tonight to keep people talking for a year," he went on with a bitter twist of a smile.

"I’m afraid people don’t often gossip in my presence," Tony answered. "I don’t think they’ve ever really considered me one of them."

"Well, you’re not," Joe said bluntly. He looked down at Maddie’s too-white face.

"He was ch-chasing me," she managed, her eyes frantic.

Joe thought of the blood on her dining room wall, and he kind of doubted it.

"Come on. I’ll take you to my place. I need to be near a phone, to stay on top of this."

He didn’t think she even really heard him. She looked dazed. Sooner or later, the truth would explode into her head, he thought, but he hoped it wouldn’t happen yet. Her eyes said she couldn’t take much more. He knew she wasn’t thinking straight, or she would have bombarded him with questions already.

"Come on," he said again.

He stepped down onto the walkway, stopped, and swore. Maddie flinched and jumped visibly.

"What?" she cried, ready to slide off into terror all over again.

"You’re going to have to drive, babe." Now that he’d found her, he couldn’t believe he had gotten the patrol car this far.

"In that?"
she asked vacantly.

His mouth quirked. "It’s just your average sedan. Put it in drive and go, and stay off the sirens." He moved to the passenger door and got in, pulling Josh onto his lap. A few minutes later, Maddie slid behind the wheel.

"Gina?" she forced herself to ask.

He frowned. "Alive."

"Where?" she whispered, and he knew she wasn’t talking about Gina. She had started shaking again. "Where did he go? Where is he?"

"When we get home," he interrupted. "We’ll talk when we get home."

There was that word again, and it sounded different this time. It sounded so right, so good. Home. Maddie

realized that she had stopped feeling as though she had one somewhere along the line. Even in so short a time, Fort Lauderdale was a distant memory, a place where she had never really belonged. The Wick house had become a place of fear and cruel tricks and secrets. Home ... for that moment it was wherever Joe was, she realized, and she was too overwhelmed to fear it.

Maddie put the car in reverse and coasted back out onto The Wick Road. When she got to the big island she followed it down the west side. Joe had said that he lived on the water.

After a short time he made a soothing sound and she looked over at him quickly. He was stroking Josh’s hair. Josh was dozing against his chest. Hiding again, Maddie thought desperately, but then she saw Joe motion to a span of four tall condominiums, and her concentration veered.

"Here. The one on the end."

She pulled into the carport almost before the unreality of driving around in a cop car fully hit her. They got out and went into a narrow foyer with a mudroom at one side and a flight of stairs straight ahead. They climbed as though the weight of the world was pulling at their heels.

The place was clean, stark, nearly empty . . . except for her own photograph over the mantel in the family room and a chair in front of it. Maddie went to it and sank down weakly, pulling the blanket more tightly around her shoulders.

She heard Joe doing something with Josh. She didn’t look around for them.

She finally looked up at the picture of the bleeding starfish, and peace settled in her, impossible, absurd peace.

Home.

But then it hit her once more—Rick was still out there somewhere, right there on the island.

Chapter 23

It seemed like a very long time before she heard Joe talking on the telephone somewhere at the back of the condo. Maddie even wondered if she had dozed off.

Then she heard his irregular footsteps on the carpet behind her. "Josh?" she asked, when he stopped in front of her. It didn’t escape either of them that she had trusted him with the most important thing in her world—again. She had done it without qualm, without thought, while she tried to steady herself.

"Guest room," he answered. "Upstairs, all tucked in. I gave him one of my sweaters to sleep in." He paused, and when he finished, his voice was tight. "Came down past his knees. Cute as hell." Another pause. "I really miss that kind of thing."

Maddie winced for him. "Do you have to go back up there?" she asked softly, after a moment. "To The Wick?" He hesitated. "Nah."

"But—"

"What the hell good would I do?" he interrupted.

"Makes more sense to have my able-bodied men looking for him, and I’ll stay here with you."

She heard all he didn’t say. He felt impotent, useless, and he was angered by it—and she wasn’t safe alone.

"Hector and Kenny and Lou are organizing the islanders," he went on. "They’ll fan out over The Wick from east to west. Not much of it to search."

She began shaking her head frantically. "He’ll kill whoever finds him! And what if he left The Wick—"

"He didn’t."

"You don’t know
that! And you don’t understand what he is! He’s—"

"Badly hurt," he cut in one more time. "Probably dead by now. There was blood, Maddie. There was a hell of a lot of blood all over your dining-room wall."

She kept shaking her head, but her eyes were going dazed. They were flicking, not touching his, barely settling on anything.

"I heard him, Joe," she whispered. "He was right behind me. And he was moving just as fast as I was." Joe’s gut clenched painfully. Somebody
had chased her. But he didn’t think it had been Rick Graycie.

Then again, he really was going purely on instinct. That blood could be anyone’s. He wouldn’t know until they got it typed ... and found a body to match it to. And The Wick hid its bodies well.

He reached a hand down to her and pulled her to her feet. Joe settled into the chair in her place. He tucked the portable phone down into the cushions to hold it, and tugged her back down into his lap. And in spite of everything, despite the way her heart was hammering, it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

"So now what do we do?" she managed.

"Not much we can do, babe."

"Wait," she whispered.

"Wait," he repeated. "We sit here and hope somebody finds him."