The Buried, page 14
Thinking of the sauna, he reached for the handle, but nothing was wound through it. But inside, he heard something crash, and then a strangled scream.
He jerked open the doors and rushed inside, into the darkness. While he didn’t know what was going on, he knew who it involved and he called out, “Mae!”
And he hoped, this time, that he wasn’t too late.
* * *
With the garrot slicing into her fingertips, Mae had had to act fast to keep from getting first her hand and then her throat sliced open. So instead of fighting against the garrot, she threw herself backward into the person holding it. She did it with such force that they both crashed to the ground.
The sudden movement caused a little slack, but not enough for Mae to pull the garrot away from her throat. So she kept throwing her head back, striking it into the shoulder or arm of the person who was trying to scramble out from beneath her
As the person moved, Mae’s head hit the hard ceramic floor, and pain radiated through her skull. But she struggled to retain consciousness, to keep fighting.
If she didn’t, she would wind up like the former sheriff, with her blood spilled all over the room. While keeping her fingers under the wire, she couldn’t use her arms or fists, so she kicked out, flailing her legs. And she connected a few times.
Maybe with pots and plants. Something fell over, crashing onto the floor next to her. Leaves touched her face, branches scratched her skin, catching in her hair.
She kicked out again.
Something crashed. Ceramic breaking.
A sharp shard ground against her hip as she kept thrashing, kicking and flailing, fighting against that garrot.
Against her attacker.
Then doors rattled and light from the hall filtered into the room. As she flailed, her head struck the floor again and everything went black, even that faint light extinguished.
“Mae! Mae!”
A deep voice called to her, bringing her back from the dark.
Then a hand touched her cheek.
“Mae?” That deep voice cracked with concern. “Mae . . .”
She dragged her eyes open, then flinched against the light. “What . . . what . . . ?”
She struggled to think, to stay conscious. If she lost it, she would die like old Sam Howell. She jerked fully awake and reached for her throat. The garrot was gone, though her fingers were bleeding. She felt the moisture from them against her throat.
Bode gasped. “Oh my God, Mae, what the hell happened?”
She blinked again and focused on his face, so close to hers as he leaned over her. With those intense, silvery-blue eyes and such chiseled features, he was so damn good-looking. “Killer good looks” was a term she’d heard before in describing men like him.
Was he a killer?
“Was it you?” she asked, her voice choked. But her throat was fine. She’d kept that wire from slicing through it. She’d survived.
How?
If Bode wanted her dead, he could finish her off right now. Unless . . .
She peered around him, trying to see over his shoulder, but nobody stood behind him. With him leaning over her like he was, she couldn’t see that far beyond him, though.
She turned her head, her hair brushing across the slate tiles and over the dirt strewn across the floor. Toppled trees and broken ceramic littered the ground around her. But she saw no one else.
Bode could finish her off if he was the one who’d attacked her in the dark. But she knew if it had been him, she wouldn’t have been able to fight him off. Even with his shoulder still healing, he was stronger than she was. She reached for that shoulder now, grasping it to pull herself up, so that she was at least sitting. Her head lightened and her vision blurred, the darkness threatening to return.
She might have fallen onto the floor again if not for strong arms winding around her, holding her upright. And then an arm slid beneath her legs, and she was lifted. She clutched tighter to Bode’s shoulders. “Stop. Wait . . .”
“I need to take you to the medical office,” he said. “Have the nurse check you out.”
Her stomach flipped with nausea at the thought of seeing that nurse again, but probably also from the movement. “No. Just give me a minute . . . to clear my head. . . .”
“You must have a concussion. What the hell happened in here, Mae?” Now he peered around the room.
She followed his gaze to those knocked-over trees and plants, the dirt, the leaves, and the blood. She was still bleeding from her fingertips onto his shirt, on the shoulder, and she flashed back to that night when he lay bleeding from the shoulder, the blood staining the snow all around him. And her stomach flipped again. “Someone attacked me in the dark.”
“The doors were shut,” he said. “But I heard something crash.”
Her. She’d been crashing and probably would have died. “You must have seen who . . .”
He shook his head. “I didn’t. I opened the doors, and then I found the lights. They’re usually always on, so I didn’t know where the hell the switch was.”
“You didn’t see anyone?” she asked.
He shook his head again. “No. It was so damn dark even with the light from the hall.” He glanced back toward those open doors now. “Maybe they ran out when I was looking for the light switch so I could see what happened in here. When I found them, when I finally got them on . . .” His arms tightened around her. “I saw you . . .” His throat moved, as if he was struggling to swallow, as if he was choking on emotion, like she’d been choking on her breath, fighting for her life.
She might have lost that fight if he hadn’t come along when he had. No might about it. She would have lost that fight.
He’d saved her life. Again.
But from whom? Or what?
Again, she gazed around the room, looking for any sign, any clue. The patio doors were all closed. Now. But she remembered a blast of cold air at one point. Maybe someone had come in and gone out there.
Or maybe the crazy old woman wasn’t as crazy as everyone thought. Maybe there were ghosts at the hall, ghosts who wanted more women to join them.
Like her . . .
* * *
Evelyn Pierce was a sensible woman. She’d even been a sensible kid, because she hadn’t wanted her parents to do to her what they’d done to her high-spirited sister.
She hadn’t wanted to be sent off to the manor. So she had always played it safe. Had always done the smart thing.
And after her parents had died, leaving her with the house and a sister to take care of, Evelyn had decided to start taking in boarders. She hadn’t gotten many in the beginning, until the construction began to renovate the manor into the fancy resort it was now.
Then she’d had subcontractors stay and, after the hall opened, some of the employees chose to stay in town, at the boardinghouse, instead of at the hall.
Like Rosemary . . .
Rosemary and her daughter were on their way from the hall now. Evelyn stood at the bay window that looked out onto the street, watching for them. Making sure they got safely back with the snow falling so hard she couldn’t even see the glow from the streetlamps.
Another blizzard.
Having spent her whole life on the island, Evelyn should be used to them. But this winter seemed harsher than other ones. More brutal. More frightening . . .
But that wasn’t just the weather.
That was the evil. It had come back to the island.
She’d suspected it had come when the hall first opened, when the men returned.
The grandsons.
And the devil himself...
He was back. But he was old. He shouldn’t be a threat anymore. But people were dying again.
And everyone was in danger.
She wanted to keep them safe, to protect them like she tried to protect Bonita. Like she’d been unable to protect her when they were kids, and their parents had sent the vivacious teenager off to that awful place, that house of horrors.
That was what it was.
What it had always been and what it would remain. Because of them: the Bainesworths.
A door creaked open, and she felt the faint swirl of cold air. And then the soft cry of a baby.
The snow was falling so thick and hard that they’d driven up without her even noticing. Rosemary and Genevieve. She heard their voices now in the kitchen. They must have parked in the driveway and come through the kitchen door.
And they’d brought that child, the baby of the man from the manor. A Bainesworth.
Evelyn was too sensible to believe a baby could be evil, but she couldn’t help but think that nothing good would come of having her here. She hadn’t been able to say no to Genevieve, though, not and take the risk the girl might stay out there, at the manor.
It was better that she was home. With Rosemary. Even with that baby.
But Evelyn couldn’t help but think that they weren’t safe here either. That none of them were safe anywhere . . .
Chapter Fifteen
“Where the hell is she?” Bode muttered. Elijah had hired the nurse to be available 24-7, but the med center was dark and empty when he unlocked the door and helped Mae over the threshold. He’d wanted to carry her there, but she’d insisted she was fine.
She wasn’t.
She was still bleeding.
He walked over to the stainless-steel cabinets and pulled open doors and drawers, looking for bandages and antiseptic. “You need stitches,” he said of the deep cuts on her fingertips.
She was trying to juggle her cell in one hand while blood dripped from her hands.
What the hell had happened in that dark room?
And where the hell had the attacker gone?
Wouldn’t he have noticed if someone had passed him to run out into the hall? Or if they’d gone outside through the patio doors, wouldn’t he have heard them? Or the blast of the blizzard raging outside?
Mae should have called the sheriff, but instead she was talking to Bruce, asking him to run through all his security footage around the conservatory while she waited on her phone. He claimed he’d seen nothing. She was the only one who’d gone down the hall until Bode.
She glanced at him, that look of suspicion back in her dark blue eyes.
“Ask him,” Bode said. “Ask him when he saw me.”
With her cell on speaker, Bruce heard him. “Bode didn’t come down the hall until a good twenty to thirty minutes after you entered the room and shut the doors.”
“I didn’t shut the doors,” she murmured, and her face went deathly pale beneath the smears of dirt and blood. “You need to pull up that footage again, enhance it, see if you can get a clearer visual of who really shut those doors.”
“We need to call the sheriff,” Bode said, but his stomach lurched with dread. He didn’t want Deacon here. He wanted him at the boardinghouse with Adelaide, wanted him to keep Bode’s daughter safe because he couldn’t. The people around him just kept getting hurt or worse.
Maybe Elijah was right. Maybe they were cursed. Maybe the whole damn island was.
“I will call him when we know more,” Mae said, to both him and Bruce. “Call me if you find anything on that footage.” That was to Bruce.
Who responded, “I’ll check it, and I’ll have guards search around outside the conservatory, see if they can find any evidence that anyone left through the patio doors. We need to get more cameras.”
“We will,” Bode assured him. He and Elijah had set up the hall as a safe retreat for their guests, so the security had been designed to keep people out of the property, with most of the cameras set up at the gates and outside the lobby. But after the horrible things that had happened there recently, they had started adding more. Just not enough.
“Don’t call the sheriff,” Mae said again before she disconnected the call with her thumb while her other fingers still oozed blood.
“Why not?” Bode asked. He knew why he didn’t want Deacon there, but he’d thought Mae respected Deacon Howell, although she hadn’t always seemed to take him seriously about Elijah. At least she didn’t think his brother was as bad as she thought Bode was.
Color rushed back into her face, and she dropped her gaze from him.
Understanding dawned on him. “You’re worried that word will get back to the state police post that you’re here,” he said.
“I’m more worried about word getting back to the district attorney’s office,” she admitted, her teeth nipping at her bottom lip, as if she was holding back a cry of pain.
As a personal trainer, Bode had gotten good at treating hand wounds, ruptured blisters, and even some cuts. These were deep. But he led her to the sink and flushed them out, dirt running with some of the blood down the drain.
“You really fought . . .” he murmured, his heart hammering slow and heavy with dread of what might have happened if she hadn’t. Of what he might have found inside that room . . .
His first dead body. He’d not seen the others. Not even Amanda after Mae shot her dead. He’d been slipping in and out of consciousness then, from his own gunshot wound.
That wasn’t how he wanted to see Mae. Ever . . .
“Not hard enough,” she said, biting at her lip again.
“Stop,” he said, touching it before she drew blood there, too. His thumb slipped over the silkiness of it, and he was tempted to lower his head, to kiss her.
Maybe he was losing his mind.
She seemed to hold her breath for a moment before releasing it in a shaky sigh that brushed across his skin. While her breath was soft and warm, he jerked back as if burned.
He probably would get burned if he gave in to his attraction to her. Especially now . . .
Especially when she still had doubts about him, thinking he might have been the one who hurt her. He sucked in a breath, then, and focused on her hands again. After drying them with gauze, he applied the liquid bandage to seal the deep cuts. He wrapped fresh gauze around them and taped it on. “That’ll keep them clean and dry,” he said.
“You really are quite the medic,” she said.
“Makes me wonder why your brother hired me,” a woman remarked as she appeared in the doorway behind Mae.
The state trooper jumped and whirled around. “Where were you?” she asked, her voice full of suspicion and, almost, accusation.
The woman was wearing a jacket, and snow had melted in her gray hair. She shook her head, and droplets of water fell onto the tile floor of the clinic. “Out at the carriage house.”
“Something happened with my grandfather?” Bode asked with a jolt of concern. The emotion surprised him. Grandfather was more a menace than a mentor, and he’d certainly never been grandfatherly toward either him or Elijah.
Helen shook her head again. “No. That nurse of his.” She snorted. “The nurse needed a nurse.”
“What happened to him?” Mae asked.
“Slipped on the ice in the driveway,” she said. “I had to check him for a concussion. He needs to go to the hospital in town, but he refused to leave your grandfather.”
“He’s there now? At the carriage house?” Mae asked, firing the questions at the older woman like she was interrogating a suspect. Though she actually seemed to suspect Theo now.
Was he the one who had tried to hurt her? And if so, if he hadn’t really fallen in the driveway, maybe she’d hurt the man even more than he’d hurt her when she’d struggled with her attacker.
Pride drew a smile from him now, as if her accomplishment had anything to do with him. She was never going to let him be her personal trainer. She didn’t trust him any more than she did anyone else. Maybe even less now, after he’d rescued her. Twice.
“Yes, he’s there,” Helen said. “And he’s probably right about not trying to get to town right now. There’s a hell of a blizzard raging outside. I was barely able to make it back here.”
“I need to talk to him,” Mae said.
Helen shrugged her broad shoulders and snow fluttered from her jacket as well. “I don’t know if you’d even be able to make it to the carriage house right now.”
Thank God Genevieve had sent him a text. He hadn’t seen it until he and Mae were walking back to the clinic.
We made it safely to the boardinghouse.
Adelaide was safe.
That was what mattered most to Bode.
And next was . . .
“I need to call my brother,” Bode said. He’d been so focused on treating Mae’s injuries that he hadn’t checked in with Elijah yet. Bode had to make sure his older brother was okay, and to apprise him of what was going on. Another attempt on the life of one of their guests. What the hell was going on at the hall?
“Not yet,” Mae said. “We need to talk.”
Bode’s stomach muscles tightened. Was she going to interrogate him now?
“Do you need anything from me?” Helen asked with a glance at Mae’s bandaged hands.
Mae shook her head, sending all that blond hair swirling around her shoulders and across her back. “No. Bode took care of me.”
Helen’s mouth curved into a slight smirk, as if she thought they were more than a guest and one of the owners. They were more, just not what she was obviously thinking. “Okay, then, if I’m not needed . . .” She turned and headed back out the door.
Bode cleared his throat of the nerves that had suddenly gripped him. “So what do you need to talk to me about?” Didn’t she believe Bruce when he said he hadn’t come along for a while after she went into the conservatory?
“The tunnels.”
He tensed. “What about the tunnels?”
“I heard something down there.”
A chill chased down his spine. “I thought I did, too. But it was probably just rats. Edie said there were a lot of them down there. I think the coyotes even found a way inside. . . .”
To drag out Erika’s body, if she had died in the tunnels.
“Rats don’t cry,” she said. “I think I heard someone crying.” But as she said it, her face flushed again. “At first I thought it was me. I was so out of it, I wasn’t even sure . . .”
“You were dangerously dehydrated,” he reminded her. “Delirious.” That was the only reason she’d kissed him.
