Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake)(64)

I’m sitting up on the carpet. My back’s to the door. I don’t feel movement behind me until the last second, and then it’s too late.

Something hits me in the back of the head with such force everything explodes into a flash of white, and I feel myself falling, losing the gun. The world is a long, loud smear.

When I blink again, I’m down. My whole head is pulsing with red-hot pain, and I’m struggling to make sense of things. My gun’s beside me, and I grope for it. A boot kicks it away.

He’s getting away. The man with the shotgun. He’s leaving. I crawl toward the gun but things go gray. I’m lying on the carpet. My gun isn’t where it was.

I see Sam, bloody and stark with fury, lunging out the door. He’s got my gun. He’s going after Connor.

Lanny’s next to me. I can see her terrified face, but I can’t hear her over the scream of the panic siren. I can’t turn my head; my body feels heavy and cold. The sound of the siren gets dimmer, slower, and then . . .

. . . then, despite the racing of my heart, the desperate need to get up and go after my son, everything fades to black.





17

GWEN

I wake up in a red mist of pain, and the first thing I try to do is touch the throbbing spot on my head.

Someone pushes my hand down. I open my eyes, but all I can see is a blur of shapes and shadows, and then slowly I focus on a face looming over me. It isn’t Lanny.

It’s Vee Crockett. She’s holding a cold cloth to my head, and when I try to get up, she shakes her head and presses me back. “Nope,” she says. “You need to rest, Ms. Proctor.”

“Connor,” I whisper, and this time I don’t let her stop me from sitting up. The whole world does a greasy slide around me, and I gag from the pain of the headache. I sit, shaking, until it subsides a little. “Where’s Connor?”

“I got help,” Vee tells me. “I heard the sirens, but I thought it was the cops at first. There was a cop car here. But then I saw them assholes dragging Connor to their RV, and I knew it was trouble.”

“Where’s my son?”

Vee sits back and looks up, and I realize that Lanny’s put her hand on Vee’s shoulder. My daughter looks pale but steady, and she crouches down and takes my hand. “Mom, I need you to be calm,” she says. “Okay?”

“Are you all right?” It bursts out of me in a blind panic, because if she’s been hurt . . . but she looks okay. I think she’s okay.

“I’m not hurt,” she says. “Mom . . . I’m sorry.” Her reluctance to tell me what she has to say makes me shake, and tears burn like acid, boiling up in a hot, melting rush.

“They took Connor,” she says. And I immediately, irrationally react, trying to move, to stand, to find him. “Mom. Mom! He’s going to be okay. They won’t hurt him, they’re just—they’re holding on to him until you get this Carol person, right? And we’ll do that. We’ll get her.”

She’s trying so hard to be the adult right now. She’s scared to death, and she’s holding on to Vee for support. “You said you found help?” I say to Vee, and I realize I’m still not myself; I didn’t mean to say that out loud. “Who—”

She points, and I turn my head. I’m expecting Kezia, a full contingent of Norton police, but instead I see an old man with a thick white beard and cold blue eyes.

It’s Jasper Belldene. The pill-pushing Santa of Norton. I’m hallucinating. I have to be. But the blinding headache I’m fighting off, the taste of metallic blood—that’s all too real.

“Easy,” Jasper is saying, and holds up steady when I try to scramble up to my feet. “Hold on, there, woman, take it easy!”

The effort makes my head go gray and throb even harder, and I need all their help to get me upright and standing. “Sam,” I say. “Where’s Sam?”

I’m still in my own living room. The silence is as deafening as the panic alarms I remember before I passed out. The damage to the ceiling and the wall looks raw. Spots of blood on the rug, but I think it’s mine, or maybe Sam’s. Where is he?

Jasper Belldene looks at me with a mix of dispassion and keen focus. “Best I can tell, your man tried to take on two out there,” he says. “Signs read that there was a hell of a fight. Looks like he made it into the RV, but the RV done took off. So I guess they’ve got him and your son too.”

It’s like an icy stab to my chest. I have trouble getting my breath. Focus! I scream at myself inside. Think! I can’t. I pull free of Lanny’s hands and stagger to the front window. It’s still dark outside. The police car is there, but someone’s turned the flashing lights off. My SUV and Sam’s truck are still parked. “Where are the police?” I ask. “You called them?”

“No,” Jasper says. “And neither will you, if you want those boys back.”

It isn’t that I forget the headache, or the pain; it’s that they cease to matter. I shove it aside, along with the fear. Fear will only slow me down. I turn my face toward Jasper and say, “You’re part of this. You said you’d come after us.” He’s an old man, and I’m barely standing, but I’m about to lunge for him anyway.

He must see it, because he holds up both hands. “Ain’t saying we don’t have issues,” he says. “But you agreed you’d move, and I think you mean to keep that promise. I wouldn’t have nothing to do with kidnapping your boy. Whoever these people are, they ain’t mine.”