Chapter 10
Amelia
“This way,” Tom hissed, grabbing Amelia’s hand and bolting for the trees.
“We’re going to the house?” She stumbled a little as she tried to keep up. “Won’t they follow?”
“We’ll get just close enough to pick up a wi-fi signal, call the police, and find a safe place to lay low. We have a head start. Did you get a good look at the person?”
“No, just the body shape, and then the gun. What if the police think we hallucinated the gunshots? And the shooter? I would be suspicious of us!”
“Sergeant Kamdar knows me well enough to give me the benefit of the doubt, brandy or no brandy. The figure you saw on the road… Was it—he, she, whatever—carrying a gun?”
“Definitely not a rifle, like that one. Those bangs I heard when the car was stuck in the tree… I thought it was something to do with the car, but … someone was shooting at us? What the hell?”
“My thoughts exactly,” he said, sidestepping a fallen tree, and steering her clear of it. “This must all be connected with what we saw last night.”
“A deep-sea fish and a cyclops?”
His hand tightened, and hers pinched in pain, not that she was about to complain.
It felt like the only thing anchoring her to reality.
“Not just that. Remember I brought that robot vac up from the basement? After you left, I found something in it. A clump of gray hair, with streaks of dried blood in it.”
“No way.”
“Those things pick up a lot of hair, but this was a sizable clump. Like a clump that had been yanked out in one go.”
“Like the hair we could see at the top of the rug?”
“Exactly like that.” He slowed and checked their surroundings.
She could see nothing in any direction but silver trunks, droopy gray papery leaves, and bare earth sprinkled with decaying leaf litter.
He dropped her hand and pulled something from his jeans pocket.
“There was also this—an emerald. Looks like it’s from an earring. Yours?”
She absentmindedly touched her own tiny diamond earrings, a thirtieth-birthday gift from her grandparents. “Not mine. Something to do with the body?”
“Can’t be Duncan’s. He doesn’t even wear his wedding band when he’s working, and he’s always working.” Tom pocketed it. “More likely it was lost on the stairs a century ago and you dislodged it when you fell. That was probably the last time they had a proper clean.”
“It could belong to the kill—” She stopped herself.
“To someone else. But the hair… So this person was killed in the basement last night? Maybe there was a fight, and that’s how the emerald came to be there.
It would take a lot of force to pull out a big clump of hair.
When you went to get the vacuum this morning, did you see anything out of place down there—aside from my demolition project yesterday? ”
“I didn’t really look, but nothing stood out. I went straight to the vacuum dock next to the stairs and brought it up into the light to open it. There is that old rug. I didn’t notice whether it was still there.”
“It’s not the same one we saw in our ‘hallucination.’ Or whatever that was.”
“You’re sure?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Of course, you’re sure.”
“The one in the basement is the Thomas Moore, remember? You people have no respect for antique carpet! Though it’s probably better off there than in full sun, and at least it’s dry and cool. Why am I even thinking about carpet preservation?”
He stepped closer, examining her eyebrow. She’d forgotten she had a cut there, but as he looked, it started to throb.
“Tom, I’m fine,” she said gently, understanding the reason for his concern. At least, she was fine physically. Her brain was freaking out so much it might well catch fire.
He checked his phone again, his jaw tightening.
“We can usually get faint wi-fi coverage this close to the house. Not even the wi-fi name is showing up.” He looked in the direction of the abbey.
She could just trace its monstrous outline in the gloom beyond the trees.
“Either the power is out or just the wi-fi.”
“Could I have taken it out in the crash?”
“The phone and DSL line comes in along the service driveway, so probably not.”
“The landline would still work even if the power was out, right?”
“I’m not keen to cross open ground to get to the abbey.
We’ll try Duncan’s cottage. There’s another landline there, and the wood comes in close, so we’ll have better cover.
Plus, we can check on Duncan again. He must have heard the crash, if he’s still…
He must have heard. That sound would have carried for miles. ”
Amelia pressed her lips together. For Tom’s sake, as well as Duncan’s, she hoped they’d find him happily watching TV in his cottage—not that he seemed like the type to watch TV in work hours.
“I’m sorry, Amelia,” Tom said, scanning the territory around them.
The Tom she’d known up until now, the laidback charmer—she hadn’t been able to reconcile him with being in the military, but now she could see it.
The tight jaw. The quick decisions. A calm intensity in his eyes.
“I have no idea what’s going on here, but you shouldn’t be caught up in it. ”
“None of this feels real. In fact, I’m not sure how tight my grip on reality is right now, even before hitting my head,” she added, as he frowned at her cut.
If she were to trace it back, she’d entered a parallel universe the moment Tom had knelt before her in his Darcy costume.
“It’s probably not a bad thing. Sometimes it’s best not to think too much about what’s happening.
Act now, panic later, that’s my motto. Well, it’s not, but it should be. ”
Still checking their surroundings, he reached for her hand again and pulled her close, and that simple act eased the tightness in her chest. Reaching out and connecting really was his default setting.
“Thank you,” she said, and he startled slightly, looking down at her. “For this.” He looked more puzzled. “For the comfort! For holding my hand.”
He gave a slight, asymmetric smile, showing his dimple. “Literally costs me nothing.” He tilted his head. “You might be in shock, so give me a heads-up if you feel it catching up with you, okay?”
“I will.”
A car engine became audible. He pulled her into a dip, and she crouched beside him.
“Could that be someone passing by along the road?” she said. “Could we wave them down?” She went to stand, but he pulled her back, shaking his head. “Maybe someone heard the gunshots and called nine-one-one, or whatever it is in this country.”
“Gunshots are nothing unusual around here. More likely, it’s whoever was shooting at us. And even if it wasn’t, by the time we got back to the road, they’d be gone. Come on, let’s move.”
They doubled back through the glade and crossed the drive, Tom gripping her hand as if he intended to fuse them together.
Amelia was hyperaware of rustlings in the bushes—too small to be human—plus the occasional bird call and the trickling of a nearby stream.
Deadened, wintry sounds. The crash must have been crazy loud.
It already felt more like a vivid dream than a memory.
How could she be sure any of this was actually happening?
“Amelia?” Tom said quietly.
She realized she’d slowed. Their hands were still linked but their arms were at full stretch. She shook her head, and caught up to him.
This was what the robbery had felt like—as if it couldn’t possibly be happening to her, so it wasn’t happening.
An out-of-body experience. “Disassociation,” her therapist had called it.
It had been less than thirty minutes of a terror so primal she hadn’t been able to comprehend it.
But the worst of it, emotionally, came in the aftermath.
And that phase had lasted many thousands of times longer, and was still going.
The fear of it happening again was worse than the fear when it had actually happened—the nights she couldn’t sleep because her pulse thumping in her ear sounded like footsteps, the days she couldn’t shake the sensation of being watched.
People kept reassuring her that the worst was over, but she was starting to think it would never be over.
She blinked fast. This was all too much to process, so she wouldn’t process it.
Plenty of time for that afterward. Way too much time.
Meanwhile, she could use the instinct to remain in denial as a shield—narrow her field of vision to the solidness of the earth under her feet, the constancy of the trees around her, and Tom’s strong, certain grip on her hand.
Especially Tom’s grip. She would simply leech some of his presence of mind and calmness.
“You had a nightmare last night!” he whispered. He wasn’t even puffing. “I just remembered. You screamed. You said something about a claw.”
“I remember. I woke to a scraping noise outside. Waking in the night is the worst. I usually leave a light on.”
“I’m sorry. If I’d known…”
“I don’t even remember going to bed last night. Evidently, I felt perfectly…”
“Safe?”
“Ironically.”
He grunted in sympathy.
“Wait, what kind of scraping noise?”
“Metallic. Rusty. I remember thinking it was creepy. But then, creepy isn’t a high bar, for me.”
“I can’t think what that could have been. ‘Rusty’ doesn’t really narrow it down.”
“You think it’s something to do with what we might or might not have seen?”
“I wish I knew.”