The Running Girls(73)

Laurie had meant what she’d said to Filmore. She needed to find Frank. But that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. What power they had was coming from the backup generator, and although she had bars on her phone, there was no service. As she made her way to the main hall, she wondered where Frank was now and if he’d managed to get out of Galveston while he still had the chance, or if he’d suffered the same fate as his brother and was lying somewhere in the trophy position.

A buzz of frightened excitement filled the high-ceilinged gymnasium as Laurie moved through the people spread across the floor toward her bunk, which had been taken over by a young family, a girl who couldn’t have been any older than eight sleeping in the bed. “Excuse me,” whispered Laurie to the girl’s mother, retrieving her bag and scanning the room, where eventually she found David and Warren, who’d both also given up their beds and were hunkered down in the corner.

“Mind if I join you?” said Laurie, both men smiling silently at her as she sat down next to David. The proximity of death meant there was no room now for recriminations. David placed his arm around her and she moved into his side, his familiar scent calming her.

As the eye of the storm moved on, Laurie imagined the tendrils of the hurricane reaching down for the island city. Yet, despite the screeching howl of the wind as the hurricane picked up, she somehow found her eyelids drooping, and within seconds she was fast asleep.





Chapter Forty-Three


Randall had stopped trying to free himself. It had been hours since the man who had claimed to be his son had departed. He’d been left chained to half a dozen stout metal rings drilled into wall studs, as the house moaned and creaked in time with the buffeting wind outside. Directly in front of him sat the corpse of his high school love, Sadie Cornish. The man had done a fine job securing her chair in place. Each gust of wind set the creaking chains to work, providing Randall with a new perspective on the woman he hadn’t seen in nearly four decades.

Could the killer really be his son? Everything felt so off-kilter nowadays that the man’s claim had felt like just another surreal twist in Randall’s life. But had he seen a glimpse of David in the man that first time he’d met him? A steeliness in his blue eyes that he’d dismissed, but now felt recognizable. Had Maurice seen it in him, too—even perhaps known about it from the beginning?

Randall was trying his best to fight the growing hysteria, but if the madman who had killed Maurice and kidnapped him was his son, he was also the person to have killed Annie. The thought filled him with a mounting dread, as if poison was slowly filtering into his bloodstream. He’d had no idea, but that was irrelevant. His son had killed his true love, and fitted Randall unequivocally with the blame for her death.

He’d tried to do right by Sadie, but not hard enough. When she’d told him about her diagnosis, he’d proposed to her on the spot, but she’d dismissed him. She’d assured him she didn’t mind, and that he should get on with his life, but he’d carried the guilt with him ever since. He’d loved Sadie in the infatuated way of first love, and his proposal, however ill-advised, had been genuine. He’d had no idea that, as the killer had suggested, she’d been pregnant at the time, and had never heard from her again until her circumstances at last grew desperate enough to compel her to write that first letter. If only he’d been more persistent . . .

Feeling his thoughts beginning to loop in on themselves, he tried to shut his mind down. All he could hope for was that it would soon be over. The house he and Sadie were lashed to was on stilts, and Randall could hear the water rumbling beneath them. He’d been in prison during Rita and Ike, but he’d read about the damage the hurricanes had caused and knew it was feasible, if not inevitable, that the storm surge could reach where he was sitting now. He didn’t like the idea of a slow, drawn-out death, waiting for the water to rise high enough to drown him, but nothing about the present situation was particularly palatable.

Judging by the condition of her body, Sadie’s death must have occurred in the last few days. He hoped to God it had been from natural causes.

Randall had thought about her often over the years. Her life had been undeniably tough, and she’d deserved far more than this final horror. He wondered what type of love the boy—if the killer was her son—had had for his mother. It was clearly twisted, but he hoped that the child had shown Sadie love over the years.

Outside the storm raged, causing the house to shake. Vibrations rattled the walls, and Randall felt it shuffle into his bones.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

The boy had returned and lurked in the shadows behind Sadie. Such was Randall’s fragmented grasp on time and reality, he couldn’t be sure if he’d been there all along, and that he’d imagined being alone.

“Why didn’t you come and see me? I could have helped you,” said Randall, his voice all but lost in the storm’s rising bedlam.

“I tried that, Dad, didn’t I? And where did that get me?”

Dad sounded alien on the man’s tongue, and not only from the sarcasm-laden way he used the word. “What do you mean?”

“I wrote to you, Dad. Those letters weren’t from Mom, they were from me. We needed help and you didn’t provide it.”

“I gave you what I had.”

“And I took what I had to take.”