Chapter 15 #2
the day before and considers tossing them in the washing machine but ends up taking them into the garage and throwing them
into the garbage can. The minutes tick by at an excruciatingly slow pace. She presses her ear to the guest bedroom: all is
quiet. Mellie must still be sleeping.
She goes upstairs to her room, lies down on the bed, and tries to read but can’t concentrate.
She gets up and wanders into the baby’s nursery where everything is a pristine white—the walls, the flooring, the crib, and its bedding.
On one of the walls is a huge art piece that Wes had commissioned for the space—an all-white mixed-media 3-D rendition of a Camarillo horse with flared nostrils and wild eyes, breaking through the canvas as if it’s leaping into the room.
It’s meant to be dreamy, otherworldly, but doesn’t quite hit the mark, but Madeline doesn’t want to hurt Wes’s feelings by complaining.
Despite the decor choices, Madeline loves this space with its many windows and panoramic view of the property.
She opens one window, and a soft, warm breeze dances across her skin.
From here, she can see the front of the property and the road that leads to the house as well as the meadow that leads to the foot of the mountains.
She hears the crunch of tires on gravel. Someone is coming. The vehicle, a pickup truck, appears. It’s approaching too fast,
barely staying on the road before hanging a sharp right onto the lane leading to the house. It’s probably the sheriff or even
Agent Saldano coming back to talk with them. Or perhaps a concerned friend or neighbor. Madeline sighs. She’s so tired, and
talking to anyone right now seems like a herculean effort.
The truck slides to a screeching stop in front of the house, and the driver throws open the door. A man steps out, and from
this distance, it takes Madeline a moment to recognize him. Dalton Monaghan, Johanna’s husband. Again, she thinks of the tense
encounter between Dalton and Wes in the hospital the night before.
“Wes! Madeline!” Dalton calls as he strides toward the front door, disappearing from Madeline’s line of vision.
Madeline turns to head downstairs to let Dalton in but freezes in the doorway when she hears pounding on the front door, followed
by a muffled “Open the goddamn door!”
Dalton is angry. She understands that. One moment his wife is at their home celebrating a happy occasion, the next she is dead.
But how can he think that she or Wes are to blame?
They loved Johanna, considered her part of the family.
Or maybe the ATF agent told Dalton how Madeline described him as possessive and about the GPS tracker he put on Johanna’s car.
Had Wes remembered to set the alarm system before he left?
“Open the fucking door, Wes!” Dalton shouts. The banging on the door becomes more insistent and then is followed by rhythmic
thuds, the sound echoing through the valley. He’s kicking the door, Madeline realizes, trying to get into the house. She returns
to the nursery windows.
From her vantage point, the ranch appears deserted. There is no sign of Wes, Lucy, or Trent, and a fingernail of fear drags
itself down her spine. She prays that Mellie is okay and will call for help.
The pounding stops, and the sudden silence is somehow more unnerving. In the meadow at the edge of the mountain, a dark smudge
appears. Wes and Lucy. They are moving at an interminably slow pace. “Hurry,” she whispers, urging them to move more quickly.
“Hurry.” Lucy is a world-class distance rider, but today’s the day she chooses to ride at a leisurely gait.
While Madeline remains at the window, trying to decide what to do, Dalton hurries back to his truck, and her shoulders sag with relief.
He’s leaving. But instead of climbing into the driver’s seat, he moves around to the bed of the truck and opens the side-mount box, reaches inside, grabs something, and then returns to the front of the house.
Next comes a sharp crack, and the sound of broken glass showering down.
A scream escapes Madeline’s throat, but she is frozen in place, paralyzed with indecision.
She waits for the keening wail of the security system, but it doesn’t come.
She has no cell phone, and the landline is all the way downstairs.
Madeline looks toward the meadow. Wes and Lucy are getting closer but are taking their time, still unaware of what’s unfolding at the house.
Hide, Madeline decides. It’s the smartest, safest thing to do.
The ranch has plenty of hiding spots, places to tuck herself away, places Dalton might not think of looking, like the unused storm cellar built into the floor of the stables, a remnant of the original structure on the property, or in the barn behind a stack of hay bales.
But again, she will have to go down the steps to get past Dalton.
She thinks of Mellie downstairs in the guest room and hopes she’s safe, that she’ll call the police.
Madeline hears the tinkle of more glass smashing and the sound of wood splintering. Wes and Lucy are close enough that Madeline
could call out for help through the open window, and they might be able to hear her, but she doesn’t want to alert Dalton.
Instead, she lifts both arms and waves them above her head, big sweeping gestures in hopes they will see her in distress and
hurry. They continue toward her at a maddeningly slow pace. Can they even see her through the window?
The hoarse scream of a red-tailed hawk fills the valley, and this is when Madeline realizes that the sounds coming from downstairs
have stopped. Is Dalton finished with his rampage? Madeline strains to listen but can only hear the rustle of wind through
the meadow and the continued shrill call of the hawk circling above. Wes and Lucy have veered off and are heading to the western
part of the property with Pip on their heels. She’s on her own.
Dalton has stopped yelling, and the house is quiet. Eerily so. Maybe he’s given up and is going home. She peeks out the window,
but Dalton doesn’t emerge from the house, and the truck remains parked haphazardly in the driveway. Where has he gone? Madeline
becomes aware of her breath, loud and rasping, and tries to quiet it.
Then comes the sound of footsteps and of something else scraping along the stairs. “Wes, come out and talk to me,” calls a
man’s voice. It’s Dalton, and now he’s in the house. “Don’t be such a damn coward.” He is coming, and he is angry. She imagines
he is carrying some kind of weapon—whatever he used to break into the house.
Madeline looks around the baby’s nursery, so lovingly decorated and filled with the best that money could buy. The closet? That will be the first place he will look, and there is no way Madeline can sneak past him and down the stairs. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.