32. Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
Juliet
T he chimes and dancing colors in Nan’s clearing lost their charm as I stumbled and fell to my knees beneath them.
My sketchbook, the one I lost at Cooper’s Point, lay open on the grass to my left. I blinked away the haze of tears to see a sketch of my mother—the vivacious, healthy version of her from my childhood, before illness robbed her of that. It was the last drawing I did during my final day in her house, a farewell to everything I was leaving behind to come to Spruce Hill.
“I hoped you would come down the path to me that day,” he said from behind me, “but the sketchbook was a nice consolation prize. It kept me company while I waited, along with her note to you.”
The note. I hadn’t accidentally thrown it out. He took it—the night I came home to find the door unlatched.
He’d been in the cottage.
A new rush of nausea washed over me at the thought of him in my home, touching my things.
“I had them with me the day I watched you through the window, you and your boyfriend, nothing but those useless curtains between you and my binoculars. I used to watch Missy up in her room from that very spot.”
I nearly gagged again, closing my eyes as I fought down a surge of bile. The gun was no longer pressed to my back, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think he didn’t have it ready should I try to make a run for it.
“If that bitch wanted to protect you, she should’ve told you what was waiting for you here,” he taunted. “A matter of life and death. Leaving the old woman to explain? Even if she hadn’t kicked the bucket, she had no clue. If she had, I’d have killed her the minute Missy ran.”
I closed my eyes against a wave of grief, but I heard him moving over the leaves underfoot, circling me, and opened them again. This was no time to be caught off guard.
For the first time since learning his identity, I looked at Tom Heller head on as he came to stand in front of me. With a gleeful smile, he turned in a slow circle beneath the suncatchers, arms out wide in a macabre rendition of my first reaction to this sacred place.
“Perfect, isn’t it?” he asked, his eyes strangely bright now as he smiled down at me. “An ending fit for an artist. I couldn’t create the masterpiece I had in mind for Missy, but yours will honor you both. Mother and daughter, joined in death.”
“Why are you doing this?” I asked hoarsely.
His expression twisted into something that might've been sympathy on any other person. He slid the gun into his waistband and reached out to touch my face. When I flinched away from his hand, he caught my hair in a painful twist, jerking my face up toward him. A sharp cry of pain slipped past my lips before I could stop it.
To my horror, the sound seemed to please him. He gently stroked my cheek with his other hand as bile rose in my throat.
If I puked on him, would he kill me any faster?
“This is the way it has to be, can’t you see that? None of the others held a candle to Missy. Just poor, sad substitutes.” A reminiscent smile lit his face. “She would have fought like a wildcat. I spent months planning it after I first saw her. I knew it would be beyond anything else I’d done.”
“You’re vile,” I whispered.
“Oh yeah, you’ll do just fine. The temper, the spirit. Just like her. Missy was worthy of being my masterpiece. I could have drawn it out for days, maybe even weeks. I told her how special it would be between us, but then she left. Stupid, sneaky little bitch!”
With the hand that had caressed my cheek, he drew back and struck me hard across the face. The sudden burst of pain sent tears sliding down my cheeks and stars dancing across my vision. When he yanked my head back up, I saw the twisted pleasure in his eyes. Every one of my fears was confirmed by that unholy glint.
He was going to kill me, and it wasn’t going to be an easy death.
After all my mother had done to save my life and her own, this bastard was going to finish what he’d started before I was even born. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that he would succeed.
I’m sorry, Mom. You told me to protect myself, but I failed.
“Such a pretty thing you are, Juliet,” he said softly, pressing the pad of his thumb so hard against the bruise blossoming on my cheek that I cried out. “We could have had such fun, if you weren’t a meddling little whore like your mother. Still, it can’t be helped. The clock is ticking. We’ll just have to leave a pretty picture for your boyfriend to find, won’t we?”
He reached for his belt and drew out a tiny pocket knife that filled me with a terror even more paralyzing than the gun had. Henry’s name echoed in my head as I did the only thing I could think to do.
Fisting my hand, I punched upward between his legs, throwing all of my strength into the blow.
Heller let out a bloodcurdling scream and dropped the knife to the forest floor, doubling over as I shot to my feet. I bolted in the direction I prayed would lead me back toward the inn. With tears blurring my vision, the trees around me morphed into a hazy wall of green and brown.
My legs and lungs burned as I ran. With gasping sobs ripping from my chest, I wouldn’t have been able to hear his footsteps behind me, but I didn’t dare to assume he wasn’t following me.
Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look , I repeated over and over as I wove between the trees.
I didn’t bother to wipe at the tears that soaked my cheeks, could think of nothing beyond getting as far away as fast as my feet would carry me.
When I collided with a rock-solid mass, I shrieked and drew my fists defensively upward. A whiff of sea salt and driftwood filtered through my terror even as I struggled against the arms that encircled me.
“Red, it’s me. Look at me, Juliet. It’s me, I’ve got you,” Henry said in a frantic whisper.
“Henry,” I gasped, throwing my arms around him.
I clung to him so tightly he probably couldn’t manage a deep breath, but his hands fisted in the back of my shirt and he buried his face in my hair. My entire body trembled in his embrace. I gave myself only the span of a few seconds to hold onto him before insisting we get moving.
A few seconds, however, was too long.
“Ah, young love. How adorable.”
The words came in a sing-song voice from a few yards away. Henry shifted to position me partially behind him as he looked toward Heller. I peered around his shoulder, unwilling to let him shield me from this. His presence had flipped a switch in my mind from panic to determination.
This monster would not get the best of us, not now that we were together in facing him down.
From this distance, Heller looked so benign, so harmless in his faded jeans and red flannel shirt, that his malicious sneer alone would have taken me aback, even if he hadn’t also been pointing a gun straight at us.
“Star-crossed lovers, aren’t you? So precious, really, but destined to part. Maybe it’s even better this way, a true homage to Melissa fucking Montgomery. Come on down, folks! Let’s have a volunteer. Which one of you should I kill first? I wanted to leave her butchered in the clearing for you, boy, but making her watch while I put a bullet in your brain might heighten the emotion a bit, know what I mean? I love the smell of fear on a woman.”
The shudder that wracked my body caused Henry to flinch in front of me.
“At least let me say goodbye,” he pleaded.
He sounded so desperate to buy at least one more moment with me, I thought my body might tremble into pieces. I knew what he was trying to do, to buy time for me to escape while he sacrificed himself.
There wasn’t a chance in hell that I would let that happen.
Heller waved the gun magnanimously. “Make it quick.”
Henry turned, taking me in his arms as he murmured, “I need you to run. Run as fast as you can toward the inn. Roberts is on his way. You have to run.”
He kissed my forehead, looking so earnest that my heart shattered, then peeled my arms from his neck even as his eyes shimmered gold beneath the sheen of tears.
I shook my head frantically, but Henry hadn’t even managed to step away from me when another voice shouted from somewhere behind us. We both turned and I almost wept with relief when I saw the ring of police officers emerging from the trees around Heller, weapons drawn and trained on the man who wanted to kill us both.
“Drop your weapon! We have you surrounded!”
Then Heller smiled—that broad, cruel smile Nan had captured so perfectly in stark charcoal strokes—and winked at Henry as he pulled the trigger.
I screamed, throwing myself against Henry’s chest as fire burst through my shoulder.
We both hit the ground hard enough to knock us breathless as a volley of gunfire broke through the quiet forest. The sound reverberated through the trees, causing a raucous exodus of birds from the branches overhead.
When silence fell once again, Henry dragged in a breath as he rolled over to look down at me.
“Juliet? Look at me. We’re okay. It’s over now.”
My face tipped toward his and I stared up at him, watching his gaze settle on my cheek, where I could tell a bruise had already formed. I felt strange, like I wasn’t present inside my own body.
“We’re alive,” I whispered.
A joyous smile split his face as he nodded, but I didn’t smile back, couldn’t quite get those muscles to move. Instead, I took in all the warmth of his expression, hoping it would fill me up enough to regain control.
“Yes, we are. We’re alive, Red.”
“My arm feels funny,” I said thickly.
My tongue became awkward in my mouth and my body seemed weighed down, like I was made of concrete. Henry’s hands grasped my arms as he scrambled to his knees. I stared up at him, thinking I must be in shock, until he squeezed my left shoulder. Dizzying spirals of pain permeated the numbness, shooting along my limbs as I cried out.
“She’s been shot!” Henry shouted, but to my ears, it sounded like his words were coming from a great distance.
The forest overhead went starkly white, then darkness swam across my vision as I slipped from consciousness.
T he sounds that finally wove their way through the fog were disjointed, incoherent, tweaking at the corners of my mind from across time and distance. I struggled to open my eyes, to put names to the voices that seemed so close and yet so far away, but my eyelids were so very heavy.
Even with them closed, the room was too bright for me to bear. With a soft sigh, I let sleep overtake me once more.
When consciousness finally pricked at me again, the room seemed darker and my eyelids cooperated after only a momentary struggle. As I blinked away the haze, I saw Henry slouched in a chair beside me, his eyes closed, his face shadowed with stubble now thick enough to be considered a beard.
One of his hands clasped mine on the bed, and with no small effort, I managed to squeeze it. Those hazel eyes I’d come to adore shot wide.
“Juliet.” My name caught in his throat as he leaned forward. “Hey.”
I watched drowsily as his gaze traveled over every inch of my face, like he was searching for any sign of pain or fear. Though he looked utterly exhausted, he was blessedly, beautifully alive.
Emotion welled up in my chest and I squeezed his hand tighter. I tried to reach for him with my other hand, but it was trapped close against my rib cage. I watched him for a minute before I tried to speak.
“Hey,” I replied, startled when the word came out a hoarse croak.
Henry flinched slightly at the sound, but he reached out to stroke my cheek with his other hand. It was a moment before I realized he was avoiding the bruise where Heller hit me, coasting his fingertips across my skin like his affection could erase the mark of violence.
I cleared my throat and spoke again, mollified a bit when the second attempt sounded more like myself. “Hey. Where are we?”
Even in the dimness, the room looked wrong.
“At the hospital. You—” His voice broke and he lifted our entwined fingers to press his lips to my knuckles. “You were shot. Left shoulder, not too much damage, but the bullet was lodged in the muscle there and you needed surgery to remove it. The doctors said you were damn lucky.”
At that, I smiled. “I feel lucky.”
“Jesus, Red, you took a bullet for me. Pretty sure that makes me the lucky one.”
He gave me an unreadable look, but my vision wasn’t so bleary that I couldn’t catch the shimmer of tears in his eyes.
“I guess I did. Gerard, is he okay? He was bleeding.”
Panic flooded me just as swiftly as it had when I found his grandfather on the ground. The details of what happened in the forest started coming back to me in a rush of sound and color that left me dizzy.
“Gramps is fine, just a little banged up. He was released this morning. My brother came up to get him, so he’ll stay with Aaron and Lee for a few days until he’s back on his feet. You’re the one everyone’s been worried about. You lost a lot of blood.”
“What happened with . . . him?” I asked.
Henry sighed softly and lifted his free hand to stroke the tangled curls back from my face. I leaned into his touch, more grateful than ever that he was there to give it.
“After he shot you, he opened fire. The cops tried to disarm him, but he kept shooting until they finally took him out.” He paused, then said quietly, “He’s dead, Juliet. Chief Roberts said they found enough evidence at the cabin he’d been staying in, over by Cooper’s Point, to pin over a dozen unsolved murders on him.”
My eyelids fluttered slightly under the weight of exhaustion and relief, but I forced them upward again to smile weakly at him. His lips brushed across my forehead as my eyes closed once more.
“Rest now. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”
I let his reassurance drape over me like a cloak and drifted back off to sleep.