Chapter Thirty – Let Your Tears Fall #2
I strained my eyes, trying to find the attacker, and found a phone instead.
It was propped up on the old window ledge, facing the door and my father’s body.
As I approached, my distorted image filled the screen, a strange black-and-green shape like the ones you saw on the ghost shows when they filmed at night.
I stalked over and picked the phone up, voice quivering with anger as I said, “I will find out who you are.”
A cackle emerged. “I highly doubt it. But even if you do, I’ll just take care of you the same way I took care of him.
Now, be the good girl you’ve always been, and do what you're told. Leave town. Forget everything about Swift Rivers and your friends and family. Don’t ever come back, and you’ll keep them all safe.
Otherwise, who knows who might be next? Maybe Beckett?
Or Fallon? How about that cute little girl of hers?
How about if I start another fire, this time burning this entire, rich-as-hell ranch to the ground? ”
I couldn’t help the pained gasp that escaped.
The evil laughter returned. “Your choice… Make the right one this time.”
The image went blank as the person hung up.
I wanted to cry. Wanted to grab the phone and toss it to the floor and break it into pieces.
But I wouldn’t mess with the evidence. I’d already done too much simply by touching it.
More importantly, Dad needed me.
I tossed the phone back where I’d found it and rushed back to my father. I searched for any visible injuries and found none. No blood or marks appeared on his face or neck. His hands and arms had scratches, as if he’d been dragged along the ground, but there was nothing else.
I inhaled sharply, fighting the tears. I had to get him out of here. I picked up my phone, swiping for 9-1-1 just as I heard a bark followed by someone shouting my name.
Beckett!
Relief had my legs quivering.
“Up here! We’re up here! He needs an ambulance!” My throat screamed as I raised my voice, hoping he’d hear.
Vader found me first, barking and whining as I tried to keep him away from my father, but Beckett was right behind him. He stormed in, the flashlight in his hand twisting the light and bouncing it around eerily.
“Fuck! She’s here!” he called out.
He fell to his knees at my side and wrapped his arms around me. He held me so tight my breath, which was already coming in strange pants, almost disappeared. Vader tried to squeeze between us, and when he couldn’t, he licked both of our faces.
“I’m okay,” I said, but my voice shook. “It’s Dad.”
I pushed away from Beckett just as Fallon and Parker sprinted through the door.
“He’s breathing,” I said, trying desperately to keep my voice calm, to give the assessment as if I were in the emergency room and the patient wasn’t someone I loved. “He’s got a pulse, but it’s slow and erratic. I can’t see any injury. It’s too dark.”
Three flashlights slanted over my father.
“Goddamnit, Maisey,” Beckett cursed. “That could be you!”
I threw him a look. “Be mad at me later. Right now, I need you to call for help. Whoever this is, they think they killed him. They think he’s dead, but he’s not—” My voice cracked on the last words, and I fought the tears that flooded.
“Where are they?” Beckett leaped to his feet just as Parker whipped around to scan the detritus and refuse for the unseen enemy.
“He’s not here!” I told them. “But there’s a phone. None of that matters! Dad needs help! Now!”
Fallon made the call to Sheriff Wylee while the two men tore through the room, searching for clues, and I stayed by my father’s side, my pulse thundering with fear.
Not being able to properly examine him sent my panic spiraling higher.
There were no visible injuries, at least nothing I could point to, so what had they done to him?
Had they poisoned him? Was something vile coursing through his veins, stealing him from me one slow heartbeat at a time?
Would he be gone before I could do anything to stop it?
Our attacker had already assumed he was dead, so how much longer before that became true?
I caught a sob before it escaped. Crying wouldn’t help Dad. I needed my wits about me. Vader whined again, pushing his body into mine, and I tried to soothe us both by rubbing a hand over his fur.
While Fallon talked with Sheriff Wylee, Parker and Beckett returned from their scan of the room. Parker held the attacker’s phone in the sleeve of his jacket.
“We need to get Dad out of here,” I said. “Now.”
“Is it safe to move him?” Parker asked, handing the horrible phone with its robotic voice off to Fallon and crouching down next to us.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I can’t find any injury, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a break I can’t see.”
“Wylee can’t get a helicopter here in the thunderstorm,” Fallon said as she hung up. “We’ll have to get him down to where the rescue ATVs can reach us.”
“We can use the old bed frame,” Beckett suggested.
He and Parker began pulling items from the stack of debris. A twin, metal bed frame and wooden planks became a makeshift stretcher we tied Dad to using the men’s jackets. As Beckett and Parker lifted it, Dad’s head lolled to the side, and my stomach lurched.
I reached for his neck, felt the barely-there pulse, and tried to swallow around the lump in my throat. “Stay with me, Dad. Please stay with me.”
Fallon led the way outside, picking her way down the stairs that creaked and groaned.
Beckett’s foot broke through rotted wood, and we all held our breath while he pulled it back up.
It was slow going, but we finally made it down.
I stopped them at the base of the staircase, searching Dad in the better light for injuries.
When I peeled open his eyelids, the way his pupils remained pinpoints, unchanging even in the light, made me want to cry.
The rain had slowed, and the clouds that had circled the tower when I’d gone inside were lifting, but it was still a long, arduous journey along the cliff down to the bottom of the watchtower’s path. The horses waited for us, huddled together against the wet weather.
The hum of motors had us all turning to watch as two ATVs zipped through the trees toward us.
The first quad had barely stopped before I was reaching into their emergency medical kit.
Finding a syringe of naloxone, I ran back to Dad and plunged the needle into his thigh, delivering a dose, and hoping beyond hope it would help.
Hoping whatever drug he’d been injected with was one of the many naloxone could combat.
Dad didn’t wake. His eyelids didn’t even flicker, but he was still breathing.
Keep breathing. Please, Dad. Keep breathing.
With the search-and-rescue team’s help, Parker and Beckett transferred Dad from our makeshift stretcher into the Stokes basket and strapped him in. Then, I climbed up into the space behind it, where I could monitor his condition.
I glanced up to find Beckett watching me. His relief and anger and remorse were easy to read. They were the same emotions I was battling. Guilt so strong it felt like I was drowning. Dad had almost died…because of me. He still might not make it due to whatever had been given to him.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Beckett said.
I nodded and gripped the roll cage with a hand that shook as the ATV took off. I reached for Dad’s hand with my free one and held it all the way back to the ranch, where the ambulance waited for us.
Sheriff Wylee met me at the back doors as Bugsy and the search-and-rescue guys loaded my dad inside, and I updated her on his status and the naloxone I’d delivered.
“They think he’s dead,” I told Wylee, choking on the words and rush of emotions that came with it. “Whoever this is, they think they killed him.”
Wylee’s lips flattened in anger. Over seventy years old, the large, white-haired, light-skinned man had always prided himself on keeping our community safe and didn’t take it lightly when evil touched down in Rivers.
“If they believe he’s gone, we may be able to use that to our advantage,” he told me. “We’ll keep Lewis secluded at the hospital for now.”
The idea of actually losing my father, especially this way, to violence, had the world spinning around me.
There was a good chance I’d been too late with the naloxone, or it might not have been enough, or permanent damage could already have been done to his body.
And if I hadn’t been fast enough to save Dad, that robotic voice mocking me would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Wylee squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it now. Just concentrate on Lewis. I’ll figure the rest out with my team.” He looked over to where Josh was getting into his sheriff’s vehicle. “Cleaver is following the ambulance, and he’ll stay with both of you until I can work out a security plan.”
Unable to find my voice, I simply nodded and climbed into the back of the ambulance to sit next to my father. Typically, they didn’t let a civilian in the back, but I wasn’t a civilian. I was a nurse, who Bugsy had seen in action many times in the emergency room. I wouldn’t get in her way.
The door shut, the sirens came alive, and the vehicle took off.
I pulled my father’s hand into mine again as Bugsy administered a second round of naloxone via a spray to his nostrils. He didn’t wake, but he was still breathing. In an attempt to stop the tears that threatened, I bit my cheek so hard I tasted blood.
Questions and doubts flooded me. About our attacker. About the promise I’d made so they’d give me Dad’s location. I’d promised to leave Swift Rivers. I’d promised to vanish and never look back.
I’d promised to leave Beckett.
And just the idea of that tore through me almost as much as the idea of Dad dying. Because if I left Beckett, if I abandoned him like his mother and Liza had, it might not end his life, but it would kill his soul.
I’d be responsible for two deaths instead of one.