Ayres took charge. “Then phone again.” She sent a killing glare up at Lynch. “Better yet, since you’re the director, you handle it. You call nine-one-one.” She reached into her first-aid kit as Lynch, no longer arguing, found the phone. “If they’re on their way, we’ll get him on a board and stretcher and wheel him over to the helipad.” She pointed to Flannagan. “What the hell are you waiting for? I need that backboard, blankets, and oxygen. STAT!”
“You got ‘em!” Flannagan was out the door as fast as he’d swept in.
Lynch was already dialing 911. Within seconds he was connected. “This is Reverend Tobias Lynch,” he said solemnly. “I’m calling to check on the status of a life flight to Blue Rock Academy.”
The reverend sounded cooler than he looked, Trent thought as he watched Ayres place a tourniquet around Drew’s arm and swab it, searching for a vein to start an IV line. At least Ayres seemed to know her job.
“Yes, I’ll hold,” Lynch said as the door opened again.
This time Jacob McAllister strode in. His face was set and hard, all the boyish charm he usually radiated cut off.
“What happened?” he said, dropping to a knee at Prescott’s side.
“They’re on their way?” Ayres asked without looking up from the procedure, not giving the young preacher an answer.
“The dispatcher says it’s in progress.” Lynch cringed when he dared to look down at the boy, who was still hanging on, his skin pallid.
“How did this happen?” McAllister demanded.
“We don’t know,” Trent said.
Lynch was shaking his head. “Why would he be here alone? And naked?”
Trent scowled as he thought. “Was he alone? I wouldn’t bet on it.” He met the questions in McAllister’s eyes.
“Oh, dear God, there could be others,” Lynch whispered, running a shaking hand over his neatly combed hair, mussing it, no doubt his thoughts on the reputation of the school.
Creeeaaak!
The unworldly sound again. Like a ghost moaning.
Trent felt a whisper of dread crawl up his spine.
“What’s that?” Lynch stepped back, squinting up toward the opening to the hayloft.
A knot in his gut, Trent was already on the first rung of the ladder.
Was someone else in the loft?
Injured?
Oh, hell.
He climbed, his boots ringing through the stable, one of the horses letting out a worried neigh. The minute he hoisted himself into the upper story, he knew something was wrong. He looked down. Yeah, obviously Drew had fallen through the opening around the ladder; blood showed on the rough edge of the board where the kid had hit his head when falling through. And there was more—evidence of someone being dragged through the scattered straw.
What the hell had gone on here?
Who had Drew met? Or had the kid walked in on something he wasn’t supposed to see?
He stepped closer to the stacked bales, noticing a dark stain in the thinly strewn hay at his feet, hearing someone following him up the ladder.
A trail of blood.
Drew’s?
Creeeaaaaak!
The sound was louder, gave him the willies. He looked up to the darkened rafters, then jumped backward, nearly falling through the hole in the floor himself.
“Jesus!” he whispered as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.
He thought he might be sick.
A young woman’s naked body swung gently from a rope tied to a crossbeam. White and ashen, her eyes bulging, she twisted slightly as a breeze blew through the open window.
“Goddamn it!” He couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him as he stared at the details of her face, puffy and pale.
Nona Vickers was hanging from the rafters, her bare skin blue in the half-light.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath, questions cutting through his brain.
“For the love of the father.” McAllister was standing next to Trent, staring up at the dangling corpse, his hand to his mouth as if he might be sick. “Saints be with us.”
Who had done this?
Trent wondered.
Why?
Drew?
Had he, after stringing Nona up, fallen through the opening by mistake?
No, no. It didn’t make any sense.
Two pinpoints of light in the dark rafters startled him … the eyes of an owl, roosting above the girl’s body.
“What is it? Did you find something?” Reverend Lynch’s voice boomed upward, through the opening to the floor below.
Oh, yeah,
Trent thought, still staring at the girl. He’d found something all right. And it looked like the work of the devil.
CHAPTER 15
“I
don’t know anything!” Shay insisted, her eyes round with fear.
Watching her, Trent felt bad that the girl had been rousted from her bed and hauled into Reverend Lynch’s office in the middle of the night.
Trent stood near the window, watching the road, listening. He didn’t like what was happening here; it seemed more like an inquisition than a casual questioning, but the stakes were high. Someone had killed Nona Vickers, and until that person was caught, fear and terror would haunt everyone on this campus.
Adele Burdette leaned against the door as if to block it, just in case Shaylee decided to bolt.
And run where?
Trent wondered.
“What’s going on?” Shay asked. “Where’s Nona?”
Lynch was calm, his voice even. At least he was trying to keep things under control. “You and Nona share a room. When did she leave?”
“I didn’t know she did!” Shay’s skin was sickly white against her black hair. “She was still up when I fell asleep. And … and the next thing I know, she”—Shay hooked a
thumb at Burdette—“bursts through the door like there’s a police raid and orders me to get dressed.” Outraged, Shay turned furious eyes on the dean of women. “Then she waited in the room while I put some clothes on. What are you? Some kind of lesbo perv?”
Burdette’s jaw tightened as she folded her arms over her chest, but she didn’t rise to the bait.
“Let’s not resort to name-calling,” Lynch said, but his own equanimity was obviously rattled.
“What happened?” Shay asked. “I saw the helicopter. Someone was airlifted out of here. Is that what happened? Is Nona hurt?” Her eyes were round and wide. Scared. “Look, she was my roommate. I deserve to know.”
Trent agreed.
“I’ll be making a statement shortly,” Reverend Lynch said.
“A statement about what?” Shaylee demanded.
Trent had heard enough. It was time they quit beating around the bush. “Nona’s dead.”
“What?” Shaylee nearly jumped out of her chair. “Dead? No. Dead? Oh, God … no. You’re wrong. She was there in the room last night and … and …” She turned horrified eyes to Trent. “They wouldn’t take her body out in a helicopter. She has to be alive. She has to!”
“That was Drew Prescott.” Trent walked closer to her, resting a hip against the desk, leaning closer.
“What? Drew?” Shay squinted. “I don’t get it.”
“We found him in the stable, along with Nona. She was dead; he’s in critical condition.”
Shaylee shrank into her chair. “Jesus Christ. How? I mean, where … Oh, God, she said she had a boyfriend, but I didn’t believe her.” She drew her legs up on the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. “They snuck out and there was an accident?” She shook her head in disbelief.
“Did she tell you she was sneaking out?”
“No.”
“But she told you about Drew.”
“Just that she had a boyfriend … that was all; she wouldn’t tell me his name. It was like some big secret or something.”
“So the last time you saw her was—”
“In our room. She was there when I went to bed, and next thing I knew, there was all this pounding on the door, and here I am.”
“Your baseball cap was near her body.”
“What?” Shaylee’s head snapped up, and she clamped two hands atop her head as if to locate the hat in question. “No, it wasn’t.” She was shaking her head again, as if in so doing she could change everything that was happening.
Trent nodded. “In a pile with her clothes.”
“She … she wasn’t wearing her clothes?” Shay whispered, and bit her lip. “Why not?”
“Why was your hat there?”
“I don’t know! The last time I saw it, it was on the hook by the door in our room. That’s where I put it. How it got … wherever she was.” She looked at Trent. “Where was she? In Drew’s room?”
“In the stable.”
“That’s enough,” Lynch said. “We’d better wait for Sheriff O’Donnell before we question her further. He promised to come out personally, with the detectives.”
“The sheriff? Detectives? This was an accident, right? They got themselves trampled or fell or …” Shay’s eyes were huge, dark with fear.
Trent felt for her. “They always look into accidents.” He didn’t want to panic the girl, but it seemed too late.
“Police officers, yeah. Accident-reconstruction people … but that’s not what he’s saying.” Shaylee sank down in the chair.
Trent said, “Detectives are called when someone dies.”
But Shaylee would not be reassured. “Wait a minute, you don’t think that someone …” She swallowed hard, blinking back tears. “Wait a friggin’ second. Do you think that I …?” She looked from Lynch to Trent, and some of the color returned to her face. “The talk about my hat—you think I’m responsible for whatever happened to Nona and Drew? Do I need a lawyer or something?” She was more than scared now. Terrified. “What the hell happened to Nona?”
“A lawyer?” Burdette repeated, her eyebrows rising as if she were truly surprised. “Shaylee, you’ve been watching too much TV.”
“This is over,” Trent said. “When the sheriff gets here, he’s going to want to talk to a lot of us, so for now, let’s just wait.”
But Shaylee lowered her head into her hands, a gesture of surrender. “Don’t you have cameras everywhere around campus? In the dorm rooms? In the hallways? Even in the stable?” She turned accusing eyes at Reverend Lynch, who blanched visibly. “Then everything’s on tape, right? So why the hell am I here being treated like some kind of criminal? Look at your sicko—probably illegal—tapes and let me go.” Finding Trent as her only ally in the room, she turned big, pleading eyes up at him. “And I don’t mean back to the dorm. I want out of here. Someone call my mother. Tell her what happened, that kids are dying, okay? I want to go home. And I want to go now!”
Jules was hungry and tired, and her butt was starting to ache like crazy from hours of sitting behind the wheel of the car.
Still, she drove, eyeing the road ahead. This part of I-5 was a treacherous gray snake that curved and twisted through the steep, forested mountains of southern Oregon.
Having been behind the wheel for over seven hours through most of Washington and Oregon, she stepped on the accelerator, her Volvo’s tires singing as she passed semis that crept up the hills, then barreled down steep inclines.
Her stomach was rumbling, her mood decidedly souring. Sleep had eluded her this week, the recurring nightmare of her father’s death creeping through her subconscious, images of Cooper Trent interspersed with the horror of blood seeping over the hardwood floor.
After popping a couple of headache pills with two cups of black coffee this morning, she’d only stopped for a burger and a Diet Coke from a drive-through outside Portland. No wonder her stomach was roiling.
She’d drunk most of the bottle of water she thought to pack, and her headache was back, inching its painful way through her skull.
In the past few days, she’d cleaned out her refrigerator, prepaid her rent, and settled Diablo in with her neighbor, Mrs. Dixon, who’d been delighted—actually clapping her hands—at the prospect of caring for her favorite cat. Jules had also squared things with Tony and Dora at the 101, left messages with Gerri and Erin that she would be “out of town” for a while, then offered up a flimsy excuse to Edie about a possible teaching job in Northern California.
Now, with her head throbbing, Jules had to look ahead to her ultimate goal. If Blue Rock Academy was all it was cracked up to be, then fine, Shay would have to do her time. But, if Jules’s suspicions that the school wasn’t the shining institution for youth it claimed to be turned out to be true, then Jules intended to spring her sister and let the whole world see the academy for the sham it was.
Edie would have to deal with her daughter and find Shay a day facility. Or, if that didn’t work, Shay would have to swallow her considerable pride and attitude and live with Jules.
As the miles sped away, doubts assailed her.
What if you’re wrong? What if everything down at Blue Rock is totally on the level? What if you ‘re, as your ex so often said, an alarmist, a person looking for a good conspiracy?
“I’m not,” she said aloud as the radio station she’d picked up around Eugene started to fade. Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl,” part of the station’s playlist from “the eighties biggest hits” was rapidly being replaced by crackling static.
She hit the SCAN button and heard the remnants of an old Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson tune about mamas not letting their babies grow up to become cowboys.
In her mind’s eye, she saw Cooper Trent’s rugged face: crow’s-feet fanning out from deep-set eyes that shifted from green to gold in the sunlight. Straight hair, forever mussed, streaked by hours in the sun. A nose that had been broken more than once and a jaw that could be set so hard a pit bull would be envious. Not Hollywood handsome by any means, but strong and sexy and a major pain in the rear.
“Damn it!” She clicked off the radio. “Go away,” she muttered, not allowing her mind to linger on that son of a bitch. What had she been thinking, falling in love with a bull rider and, as it turned out, a bullshitter? What was the saying? When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Yeah, well, that’s the way it had been with Trent, and she was ticked at herself for even having the tiniest thought of him.
“A long, long time ago,” she reminded herself, and flipped on her wipers. Rain mixed with snow had begun to fall.
She didn’t have a GPS, so she was using a map she’d pulled off the Internet. So far, the trip had been easy: Drive onto I-5 and head south for over four hundred miles. But
now things were getting a little dicier, as snow was beginning to fall, fat flakes skittering over her windshield and gathering along the edges of the highway.