With Every Breath (45 page)

had never been a qualified father to begin with. "Josh will be an orphan, and he’ll have to live somewhere like you always have, with people making fun of him and hitting him with sticks! I hate you, Angus!" She dared it. She had no idea what effect it might have on him, but there was nothing else left. "I hate you for doing this to us, to all of us!"

He flinched back as though she had hit him.

"I hate
you," she repeated, meaning it with every fiber of her soul. "And I did then, too, when you killed Beacher. I was scared of you.
Of what you
did. That
was why I hid in the pantry. So you
couldn’t find me."

"Don’t talk, don’t talk, shut up!"

"Why? What are you going to do? Kill me?" She laughed crazily. "You don’t have to worry about it. You’re already doing it just by keeping me in here while the water comes in! And you’re going to die, too, right along with me!"

"No!" he roared, anguished. He pushed back to his feet. He had been kneeling beside her, but he trod heavily to the back of the cave again.

Maddie looked wildly over her shoulder at the mouth. At the sounds of the water.

She had to make a run for it. She could not wait any longer. There was literally nothing else she could do. If he caught her, if he stopped her, then at least she had tried.

Unless she got him to leave first. Her mind kept going back to that, picking at it desperately.

If she got him to leave, maybe she could slip out and get to a phone before he came back. She could call for help for Joe, tell someone where he was. Maybe they would be able to get there before the water came in. Before he died.

She groaned aloud.

The Pathfinder. The radio in the Pathfinder, she thought. Her heart hitched. That was it. That was her only chance. Didn’t it connect right to the police station? And the Pathfinder was in her driveway.

She got to her feet again, trembling.

The boy ran to the blotch of blood on the beach that Kenny had already found. Sheila looked at it despairingly, and that was when she realized that the boy was still running. He hadn’t stopped. He was leading her somewhere.

She chased after him again, her heels sinking in the soft sand until she made an unintelligible sound of frustration and kicked them off. Then she hurried again, hiking her skirt up, lengthening her stride to catch up with him.

He scrambled up on the rocks of the promontory, looking back for her, making that strange sound again. When he was sure that she was following, he turned around again and disappeared.

Disappeared? How could he disappear?

Sheila ran until her muscles spasmed. She tore her stockings trying to climb up the rocks. She balanced precariously for a moment, then she picked her steps carefully, trying to get to the place where she had last seen the boy.

It was in the middle of the rocky crest. She reached it and turned slowly, looking around. It gave nearly a bird’s-eye view of The Wick. She turned the other way and realized that there was a crease in the rocks, like a zipper, where stone crumbled down into a narrow crack. The boy must have gone that way.

She started down, fanning her arms for balance,

then hesitated again. Whatever was going on, it involved someone crazy enough to draw Joe’s blood. She knew instinctively that it wasn’t safe to go down there.

Then, suddenly, the kid’s hand shot up again. He was down there. He waved at her and hummed again, and Sheila started down against her better judgment. She fell once, taking skin off her knee. She struggled up again and continued her descent.

She came down in a small square of sand, with boulders on both sides of her, hemming her in. There was barely enough room for her and the boy to stand. The sea was pressing in on them from behind, and even as she stood there, squinting into the darkness of a hole in the front of the rocks, the icy water surged up enough to soak her feet and rush into the hole.

"What?" she managed, looking uncertainly at the boy. "Joe’s in there? Are you sure?"

He nodded hard, and Sheila’s heart plunged.

"Josh!" Maddie cried suddenly. God help her, but her voice sounded phony, odd, even to her own ears. Angus would never believe she had heard him. Then again, maybe he would.

He’d fly if you asked him to. Maybe he would believe her, she thought, just because he loved her and couldn’t imagine that she would lie to him.

"Josh!" she tried again. "Oh, Angus, I hear him out there!"

He looked about to cry. "You do?" he asked warily, still upset with her.

"Listen!"

And then, dear God, she really did hear something.

For a wild moment she wondered if she had conjured the sound by needing so desperately for him to believe he heard it. But no, it came again.

She pushed frantically at Angus. "Go look! You’ve got to go look for him! Please! I want my boy!"

He shook his head hard and obstinately. "He’s gone, Maddie. I looked and looked. He’s not there."

"He is now."

"No. Can’t bring him in here anyway. You said, Maddie. Because of the water. You said we’re going to die. Can’t kill your boy. I won’t, Maddie."

And that, she realized, was it. She had dug herself into a hole and could never get Angus to leave first.

She opened her mouth to argue, then her voice choked off in her throat. She heard another faint, thudding, scrabbling sound from above.

What if it was Josh? she thought. If he was right outside, Angus wouldn’t have to search far for him. He would go outside and find him easily and bring him right in there, too.

And then, as Angus had said, they would all die.

Not my boy.

She didn’t think. Couldn’t think anymore. Everything was emotion, a rush of anguish that demanded she act— not Josh—and she didn’t think about Joe—he can’t hurt Josh—she didn’t even think about herself. She simply ... loved.

Maddie ran.

She dashed through the mouth of the cave, colliding hard with another body. Maddie screamed and retreated a little, wheeling around, but there was only rock, everywhere rock, then she hit another body in her frantic, confused spiraling.

Josh. It had been Josh.

She looked down at him and cried out even as the woman who was with him spoke. "Oh, my God!" Sheila gasped, startled.

It was the woman from the police station, Maddie realized.

Inside the cave, Angus roared a sound of anguish. "Maaaddie!\"

"Go, go. go!" Maddie screamed, lifting Josh bodily, pushing him up onto the rocks over her head.

"What?" Sheila cried.

"Go!" Maddie yelled. "Run! He’s coming!
He’ll keep us all in there. He’ll drown us all."

Sheila scrambled up again. It didn't make sense, but she didn’t care. She moved, propelled by instinctive terror.

Maddie reached up and the woman grabbed her wrist, pulling her. |osh took her other arm and she was almost up ... and then Angus was there, his big, beefy hands closing around her calf.

"Don’t go! He hit you! He hurt you! Got to stay!"

Maddie sobbed. She kicked frantically, wildly, but he was so very strong. He had broken Beacher’s back with one massive squeeze. Bruised Gina just by lifting her. Maddie sobbed and fought.

His grip slid, but only down to her foot. Maddie slid backward, down, closer and closer into his outstretched arms.

She felt her heel connect with something. His chest? His face? He grunted, and his hold slackened again, almost imperceptibly, but it was enough, just enough. Josh pulled on her arm and the woman grabbed the back of her coat. In the next moment Maddie found herself belly down on the slanting boulders, lodged in a crack, and she felt Angus’s hand on her foot again.

She kicked him off hard, got a knee under herself, and pushed the rest of the way.

"Run!\" she screamed. Josh and the woman spilled down the other side of the promontory. Maddie didn’t look back. She crawled and scrambled after them.

Joe, oh, Joe. She had to get help for Joe.

She fell, scraped her elbow, didn’t feel it. She tumbled the last of the way to the beach. Josh was waiting for her, but the woman was well ahead of them, running, her arms flailing to give her balance in the soft, deep sand.

Maddie grabbed Josh’s hand, and they raced for the road.

Chapter 37

Within fifteen minutes, nearly the entire population of Candle Island descended on The Wick.

Sheila stood in the middle of the road, coatless, barefoot, in shredded stockings. Whenever another able-bodied man approached, she waved him toward the promontory, sending them to the cave after Kenny. Hector was sitting in the stones of her driveway, and that seemed odd, but to Maddie it was just another disjointed piece of the whole nightmare.

The helicopter came, lowering slowly to the beach. Maddie pulled on Josh’s hand again.

"Come on," she said hoarsely, as paramedics spilled out of the chopper. Sheila shouted and pointed them toward the promontory, too. "We’ll wait at medevac. They’ll bring Joe back to the helicopter," she went on. Alive,
she prayed, please, God, let him still be alive.
Surely help had come quickly enough.

But so much could have happened, she thought helplessly. She didn’t think the water had come all the way in yet, because too many men were still going in there.

But Joe could have lost so much blood that he had died on his own.

There was nothing she could do but wait and hope and pray.

When she and Josh were standing beside the helicopter, she could see the crowd up on the road. She got a better appreciation of who had come, of how many people there were. There were faces she recognized and faces she didn’t. Mildred and Cassie and Karen Eagan were there, and all the waitresses from the diner. She saw Doe Carlson and Tony Macari, and even the girl who had overcharged her at the liquor store. The bartender from the Sandbar was there, vaulting out of his car and running for the beach at Sheila’s direction. There had to be six hundred people gathered, Maddie thought, overwhelmed.

They might not like The Wick, but they took care of their own. When there was trouble, real trouble, they closed ranks. Maybe that was good, and maybe it was bad, but they did it with their hearts in the right place. And they truly loved Joe, their own gruff, sometimes rude, small-town hero.

Heads began popping back up from the promontory. There was a tangle of bodies there, men still streaming in even as the first to arrive tried to get out. And then the paramedics came up with a stretcher.

Maddie had to put a hand against the helicopter for support as her knees nearly buckled again. And if she had known in the cave that she loved Josh to the exclusion of all else, even sanity, then she knew, in that moment, that she had loved Joe Gallen as deeply as any human being could love as well.

The sheet covered the entire stretcher. His face was covered.

She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t breathe. There was a surge of voices from the crowd, then a cheer.

A cheer?

She looked back at the promontory again. And this time another stretcher was being hefted up on the rocks. And this one was Joe.

The sheet didn’t cover his face. He was alive. She gave a keening sound of relief.

The first one had been Rick. And God help her, but she felt no sorrow at all, just an overwhelming relief.

He was really gone. It was over.

A moment later she saw another crowd of heads rise up from the rocks. No less than a dozen men pulled Angus out. The big man’s face was confused and frightened, and for a moment, she felt spasming regret. Maddie wondered if he even knew that what he had done that was so horribly wrong.

The stretcher had just about reached them. Maddie finally managed to move. She stumbled toward it as it reached the chopper and looked down at Joe.

He was so ungodly white. His eyelids looked like parchment.

"Is he—" she whispered, afraid to ask.

"You his wife?" one of the paramedics interrupted, and she didn’t disabuse him because she knew that if she said no, they wouldn’t let her ride along. She only looked at him helplessly.

"Come on then. Get in. We don’t have much time here."

She scrambled into the chopper after the stretcher, pulling Josh with her.

Leslie was at the hospital waiting for them. She stood in the door of the emergency room as the medevac chopper landed in the parking lot. Someone had called her at her office on the mainland, and even though they took Joe to Ellsworth, she had narrowly beaten them there.

The paramedics unloaded Joe, and Maddie and Josh climbed out after him, watching them rush him inside. Suddenly, Maddie felt faint. Everything that had carried her this far—the strength, the adrenaline—washed out of her.

Leslie caught her before she could fall and guided them inside. Maddie realized that she was badly shaken, too.

"I’ll get us coffee," Leslie said nervously, "and then I want to hear everything."

When she came back with two Styrofoam cups and a can of Coke for Josh, he moved down the line of chairs and glued himself to the television. Maddie sipped coffee, and her trembling eased. Slightly.

"He seems steady," Leslie said at length, looking at Josh.

"Does he?" Maddie asked helplessly. "I can’t tell right now. I’m too shaky myself. Oh, God, what if Joe