The Final Victim(22)

"I saw you try the door and I heard you curse when it didn't open."

There's little she can say to that, of course. To her credit, she remains silent, glaring up at him.

No stranger himself to adolescent prowling in the wee hours, Gib can't help but admire her spunk. As he recalls, Charlotte wasn't the kind of girl who would be caught dead disobeying her parents' rules. How interesting that this apple fell hard and rolled quite a long way from the tree.

"So what are you going to do now?" he asks Lianna, folding his arms. "Wait it out until morning? Break the door down?"

Before she can answer, his ears pick up the sound of a door creaking closed down the hall. Footsteps approach.

"Please don't tell," Lianna hisses at him, before slipping into a shadowy nearby nook.

It takes three attempts before Mimi's violently trembling hands are successful in fastening the carseat buckle snugly across her son's chest.

By then, Cameron is asleep again, as blissfully unaware of his mother's growing panic as he was before she plucked him from his bed five minutes ago.

Mimi slides into the driver's seat, manages to get the key into the ignition, and says a brief prayer as she backs out into the street.

Please, dear God, don't let anything happen to Jed.

Then she shifts into DRIVE and races off toward the highway that leads to Savannah, and the hospital emergency room.

Moments after Gib watches Charlotte's daughter disappear into the shadows of the hall, her stepfather appears.

Royce is fully dressed, carrying luggage, and striding briskly, though he stops short at the sight of Gib standing before him.

"Hey, what's up?" Gib asks, as though they're casual acquaintances running into each other on the street in broad daylight.

"I'm leaving to catch an early flight. What are you doing…?" The remainder of Royce's sentence trails off, as though he isn't sure whether to conclude it with an "up" or a "here."

"I'm going to bed after a late night," Gib says truthfully. He adds, at Royce's doubtful look, "I couldn't sleep so I drove down to the other end of the island for a nightcap at the Reef. That always was my favorite beach bar-It sure looks a lot different these days, though. It used to be a dive."

He just hopes Royce isn't, say, friends with the owner or something. The last thing he needs is to be caught in a lie.

"Where's your girlfriend?"

Gib resists the urge to correct the terminology. Let Royce think whatever he wants about his relationship with Cassandra. It'll be much easier that way. "She's probably asleep. She stayed here."

Royce frowns.

"What's the matter?" Gib asks.

"Nothing, I just… I thought you were talking to someone. I heard voices."

Gib hesitates, weighing his options.

Should he tell Royce about his stepdaughter sneaking around in the middle of the night? How will he react? Gib doesn't know what kind of guy he is-they never even met before this week. But he seems like a decent fellow, unlike Charlotte's first husband. He couldn't stand Vince, and the feeling seemed mutual on the few occasions they were thrown together for family functions.

Anyway, Royce would probably go tell Charlotte that her kid is up to something. Why get the kid into trouble? Gib has to give her credit, having this much spunk with such a Goody Two Shoes for a mother.

So he shrugs and tells Royce, "I don't know what you heard… maybe it was just me, talking to myself. I do that sometimes."

"We all do, I suppose." Royce barely cracks a smile.

"Have a good trip," Gib calls after him in a whisper as Royce walks off down the hall, unwittingly passing within a few feet of his stepdaughter's hiding place. "See you when you get back."

"Maybe not. I'll be gone for a few days."

"Oh, I'll be here," Gib replies, relishing the stiffening-just barely visible-of the other man's spine at the news.

Yes, he'll be here. Where else is he going to go? Oakgate is as much his home as anybody else's, and at this point, it's the only one he has. Not that he's about to let on to his sister or cousin or even Cassandra.

Cassandra.

Stirred by renewed lust, he hurries off down the hall, leaving Lianna to resolve her own dilemma. She'll undoubtedly be grateful he didn't rat her out to the old man. It might have been tempting if Charlotte's second husband didn't seem to have the temperament of a tree stump.

The kid will just have to owe me a favor, Gib decides, smiling as he lets himself into his room.

A big favor that he has every intention of collecting at some point. But for now there are other things on his agenda.

Slipping into his room, he steals across the carpet to the canopy bed.

There, instead of a slumbering beauty, he finds a note impaled on the pillow with an antique hat pin.

He has to turn on the bedside lamp to read it, but he probably shouldn't even have bothered.

Gib,

I decided to go back to Boston.

Sorry,

Cassandra.

For a moment, he stands there staring at it.

Then, with a smirk, he plucks the paper from the pin, wads it into a ball, and tosses it in the general direction of the wastebasket. The pin he stabs into place on the cushioned top of a dusty sewing box that rests on the nearby bureau, a forgotten relic of some bygone Remington spinster.