The Running Girls(86)

The blows didn’t seem like they were landing. Mosley wasn’t reacting. He was still spluttering water, a manic smile on his face as the surrounding area began turning red. Laurie looked beneath the maroon-tinged seawater to see a metal rod protruding from Mosley’s gut—the source of the blood. He noticed her looking and reached his arms around her body. His strength was undeniable. Even in the water, with what should be a fatal injury to his body, his grip was still vice-like.

“I’ve enjoyed this, Laurie.” He said this in a conversational, almost intimate tone. “Who knows, under different circumstances, we could have got along,” he said, as his weight dragged them beneath the surface.

Mosley’s eyes were still open underwater as Laurie bucked against him, trying to wriggle free of his grasp. The manic smile was painted on his face and Laurie refused to allow that to be the last thing she ever saw. She tried to relax, breathing out and willing her body to go limp. She thought of the hundreds of runs she’d completed since Milly had died. So many times she’d felt just like this, her lungs fit to burst from the effort of staying in motion, but she’d continued. She could outlast Mosley, she was sure of that, as long as she didn’t panic.

As if Mosley recognized her resolve, he held on even tighter, but even so she sensed his strength fading. She wriggled in his arms, trying not to exert herself too much, and found her hand resting on the metal rod. Mosley’s eyes opened wide and she pushed down on the bar with all her might, Mosley offering her a silent, bubbling scream as his arms loosened.

He tried to grab on to her as she kicked for the surface—she felt his right hand brushing her ankle—but she was too strong for him. Above her, she could make out the orange circle of the life preserver and she kept going, with that her only focus.

Breaking the surface, she gasped out for the salt-tinged air and used the last of her strength to clamber onto the life preserver. Above her, the Coast Guard helicopter hovered, one of the team already descending toward the weirdly angled boat where, clinging to each other on the edge, waves lapping at them, were Frank and Tilly.





Chapter Fifty-Two


Laurie looked straight ahead, her leg jigging in anticipation. After Mosley’s body had been fished from the sea, Frank and Tilly had been flown to Houston, where they were both recovering. Laurie had insisted on returning to Galveston, and was now sitting in the back of a patrol car. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt like she was back on the sea, or worse, within it. She could see Mosley’s unworldly grin as he grabbed her under the surface, and it was hard to believe that he was gone; harder still to believe he could ever be related to David.

Galveston was still a ghost town as the car made its way to Tilly’s house. The mayor was still only letting emergency personnel back onto the island for the next two days, as rescue and salvage crews ground away at the work that would consume them for weeks to come. The place was still littered with debris. Power was down, the island covered in a thick layer of sludge, a combination of silt and raw sewage that swarmed with great black clouds of mosquitoes.

The number of bodies being discovered in Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula was so far very low, but Laurie feared that was about to change.

Remi had managed to get back onto the island and was driving, Lieutenant Filmore in the passenger seat, as they approached the Moorfield house, which had not yet been visited by the salvage crews. Filmore had tried to stop her from coming, but after what she’d gone through with Frank and Tilly, she felt she had to be the one to do this.

The storm surge had reached over ten feet in this neighborhood, judging by the tide marks visible on the stone walls. It was hard to see the extent of the damage the water had caused inside the buildings, but Filmore was able to break in the Moorfields’ door with a single, easy blow with his boot’s heel. Although the corpse of Mosley was secure in the Harris County morgue, the three of them had their firearms out, Remi shining a flashlight as they stepped into the house.

Water had seeped in and had left its mark before retreating, a carpet of insect-patterned mud coating the floor. They moved upstairs, past pictures of Tilly with her father. Twisted as they were, Laurie understood Mosley’s motives in his killing of Annie Randall. With Grace and Maurice, the picture was less clear. It seemed that Grace reminded him to some extent of his mother, and that Mosley had some fetish to do with legs, perhaps springing from caring for his chairbound mother for so many years? That was a charitable interpretation. Tilly and her father, though, were surely just collateral damage.

Tilly had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Mosley seemed to have just taken her along on a whim, or as a distraction.

It was wishful thinking, but as she opened the door to the master bedroom on the first floor, Laurie still hoped that Tilly’s father wouldn’t be there.

But she was disappointed.

Steven Moorfield was tied to a chair that had toppled over onto the floor. Laurie lowered her gun and moved toward him.

She honestly couldn’t believe it—would never be able to believe it, looking back—when she touched his neck and felt a faint pulse. “He’s alive,” she shouted, as Tilly’s father opened his eyes.





Epilogue


SIX MONTHS LATER

With the sun gleaming on the Gulf of Mexico, the beaches spotted with sunseekers, it was easy to think that the city island had returned to normality. But, like every time a hurricane hit the area, life would never be the same again.