Chapter 61. Holly
Holly
Gail and Serena stood near the front door, directing guests to the first-floor bathrooms and away from Ethan, who was working the lock.
Standing close to the door, Holly heard something she hadn’t before—the notes of an evocative, dreamy piano sonata she instantly recognized as “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy.
Ethan stood up and turned to Holly. “Finally,” he said.
“We’re in.” He turned the knob and the door opened easily.
A burst of cooler air bathed Holly’s face.
The stairs led up and down, but Holly heard a commotion above, so they hurried, moving quickly over the uneven stone steps as fast as they could.
Ethan took the lead, his body disappearing around the first bend in the stairwell, then reappearing before vanishing again. Up, up, up they went—the stone walls echoed with the sound of their quick footsteps. The piano music was audible even over the roar of what sounded like a fight.
They burst into a dimly lit room. Holly paused in the doorway, stunned by the sight before her.
Conrad was in the middle of a wrestling match with Dr. Vernon Hill. From the looks of it, Conrad wasn’t winning. The front of his white dress shirt was soaked in blood. Holly could see he was bleeding from a cut in his neck—not a fatal wound, but definitely a messy one.
And he was hardly down for the count. In his bloodstained right hand, Conrad clutched a syringe, its needle hovering inches from Dr. Hill. Nearby, a frail, exhausted woman, swallowed up inside a large bed, gazed blankly at the ceiling as if she were catatonic.
“He’s trying to kill her,” Dr. Hill screamed as Conrad lunged at him with the needle. Shifting his weight, Dr. Hill dodged the strike in the nick of time.
Before Holly had a chance to intervene, Ethan pounced. He wrapped Conrad in a tight bear hug, lifting him off the ground from behind. In one violent motion, he pulled both Conrad and the needle away from Dr. Hill.
“Let me go!” Conrad demanded. “I’m going to fucking kill him.” His legs bicycled uselessly in the air.
Ethan’s biceps strained, but his vise grip held.
Conrad’s eyes burned like the sun. His skin turned a deep, dark shade of crimson. The veins on his neck and arms pulsed, venom flowing through every part of his body. His muscles were coiled, vibrating—ready to snap.
Gone was the calm, composed, debonair host of the party. In his place stood a savage beast. A deep, guttural growl rose from his throat—more animal than human.
Dr. Hill’s medical note came back to Holly: PTSD … with potential for violent behavior. That might have been a wild understatement.
The woman in the bed moaned as if she were in pain, but Holly went to help Ethan instead. Conrad’s hand was close enough to Ethan’s leg to deliver what could be a deadly strike. Who knew what was in that syringe?
Holly moved deftly. With a quick upward thrust, she seized Conrad’s wrist with one hand.
With the other, she dug her fingernails into his flesh.
She pressed harder and harder until she felt blood.
The coppery smell from Conrad’s multiple wounds—the one to his neck and now to his hand—turned her stomach.
He yelped like a wounded pup, loosening his hold on the syringe. It fell to the floor with a clatter that Holly could hear over the music, the same song starting again. Maybe it was set to repeat.
Maddening, she thought.
She let go of Conrad, hoping he would give in now that he was unarmed, but instead he snapped his head backward, head-butting Ethan.
Incensed, Ethan spun Conrad around to face a stone wall.
He opened his arms. For a moment, Conrad was free, but Ethan wasn’t finished with him yet.
He delivered a hard shove to Conrad’s back, which sent him crashing into the wall.
He hit his head hard enough to leave a smear of blood on one of the jagged stones.
His legs buckled, but Ethan didn’t give him a chance to fall.
Coming up from behind, he wrenched Conrad’s arm behind his back and then led him to the staircase.
Navigating down the narrow stairs was tough enough.
Managing with someone else was nearly impossible.
Ethan’s grip loosened, and as it did, Conrad twisted at the waist, delivering an elbow strike to Ethan’s temple that snapped his head back, and he fell quickly.
On impulse, Holly threw herself behind Ethan to cushion his fall.
His weight pinned her to the ground, trapping her for a moment.
“Dr. Hill—help, you have to stop him,” Holly cried out.
Vernon Hill sprang into action, stumbling into Holly and Ethan as he raced down the stairs after Conrad.
Amazingly, Ethan wasn’t far behind. He bounced up as if he were made of rubber. Holly was slower to get to her feet.
“Are you all right?” she shouted to Ethan’s back, but he was too busy running down the stairs to respond.
Holly left the bedridden woman, taking a million questions with her. Was that Elizabeth Ward under the covers? What was Conrad planning to do to her? More important, how did Jade fit into all this? Did she see something she shouldn’t have?
Holly stormed down the stairs, her back aching, heart pumping, and lungs sucking in air, in time to see Ethan chasing Conrad out the front door.
She followed because Conrad held the key to locating Jade.
She could barely keep up. They galloped at the speed of horses.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Serena and Gail, just outside the entrance, mouths agape, but she didn’t pause to explain.
Piano music spilled out of the open tower door, clashing with the sound of jazz emanating from the beach below.
Plunging ahead, Holly descended the outside steps as if she were flying.
Conrad was sprinting full speed, Ethan close behind. To Holly’s surprise, Conrad wasn’t heading away from the estate or toward a car to escape. Instead, he ran down the red carpet toward the staircase leading to the party. Confused, Holly kept chasing after them as quickly as she could.
She reached the staircase. Stopping for a moment to catch her breath, she saw Ethan slip on the uneven steps and tumble down a flight. Ahead of him, Conrad vaulted over the railing near the bottom of the stairs, landing in the soft sand.
Where was he headed? Down the beach? Into the ocean? Nothing made sense.
Holly hurried down the stairs, being mindful of her footing.
Below her, Ethan clambered to his feet before jumping the railing as Conrad had done.
Sand flew up behind him as he continued his pursuit.
For the first time, Holly wished for help from the Beauport police, but the officers had left their post by the stairs and disappeared into the crowd, all of whom were staring in disbelief at the ongoing chase.
It looked like Conrad was slipping away until he glanced back and stumbled, his feet catching in the loose sand.
Ethan closed in. Before Conrad could regain his footing, Ethan leapt through the air, arms outstretched, tackling him just outside the party tent.
They collided with the buffet table, then slid over the top like a pair of intertwined figure skaters, knocking off fruit skewers and spilling plates of shrimp before crashing into the punch bowl and landing hard on the sand.
Guests shrieked in astonishment.
Ethan landed on top of Conrad, pushing his face into the sand.
Tommy Boy appeared out of the dark. He lumbered over, reaching the mayhem at about the same time as Holly.
Dr. Hill brought up the rear. He was breathing harder than anybody. “He tried to kill Elizabeth,” Hill told Tommy Boy, with his hands on his knees, wheezing out the words.
The cop sprang into action, grabbing his cuffs and reaching for Conrad. At last, it seemed, Tommy Boy was good for something.
The jazz music had stopped. The party guests were stunned into tense silence. Everyone was uncertain what to do and couldn’t look away from the scene before them. Only the flickering tiki torches and gentle sound of ocean waves proved that time was still moving forward.
Conrad was handcuffed and dazed, propped up against the leg of the buffet table, his bruised face dotted with a five o’clock shadow made entirely of sand. His shirt was dyed red from the fruit punch, which intermingled with the very real blood from his neck wound.
Dr. Hill applied a gauze bandage to Conrad’s injury—he had retrieved a first-aid kit from behind the bar, and it lay open at his feet. It was heartening to see the doctor care for the person who just moments ago had tried to kill him.
Little by little, an uneasy chatter filled the air. Holly wanted to grill Conrad for information about Jade’s whereabouts, but Tommy Boy used his impressive girth to block her way. “Give the fella a second to catch his breath, will ya?” he said.
Holly got in his face—or his chest, he was that much taller. “Jade might be in danger. He knows where she is. Let me talk to him.”
“Right now he needs medical attention. If there are questions to ask, leave it to us.”
“I don’t think you understand me. He knows about Jade. I need to talk to him now.” She tried to push past him again, but Tommy Boy wasn’t budging.
“You might have questions for Conrad, but I’ve got some for you. What the hell happened? Big author brings big chaos?”
Holly pressed her hands to her eyes, her head pounding, but she tried to answer him as succinctly as she could.
“Conrad attacked Dr. Hill, I saw it all—and he’s been keeping his wife—at least I think it’s his wife—locked up in the tower, heavily medicated.
” She’d read crazy stories of people being held in captivity, sometimes for years, but never thought she’d be involved in one.
“Whoever is up there, you need to check on her right away, make sure she’s okay.
And he may have taken my friend, Jade Jensen, but I don’t know where. ”
Tommy Boy looked disapproving. “Still on that, are we? I thought I made it clear—runaways run. But I’ll send someone to check on the woman in the tower.
” He waved to the second officer working the party, a young woman, possibly new to the force.
He briefed her, told her to go check out the scene, and report back as soon as possible.
Before Holly could make another plea to Tommy about Jade, the busker sauntered toward them.
He approached from the direction of the stairs, carrying two bags full of ice.
Holly released an audible groan. He had on his tattered scally cap, which clashed terribly with his Hawaiian shirt, but Maeve wasn’t around to scold him for his attire.
He came to a stop beside Holly, setting the bags in the sand.
“What about you?” asked Tommy Boy. “See anything unusual up there?”
The busker stared down his pinched nose at Holly and the cop before pointing toward the house. “Only thing weird I’ve seen up there is a generator.”
Holly rolled her eyes. Could this guy ever give a straight answer? “There are a bunch of generators powering the party,” Holly said. “You can’t have all the lights down here without them. Nothing strange about that.”
“I’m telling you, this one was strange. See, I went to the kitchen to get some ice. It’s faster to walk out the back door and around the tower than to go through the house. So that’s what I was doing and I notice this generator running, but nothing is plugged into it.
“Now, I’ve been a musician a long time…”
Holly bit her tongue, recalling the beleaguered staff at the Bean There Café desperate to muffle his sound.
“And I’ve played a lotta gigs, worked a lotta parties, and usually you plug something into a generator—an extension cord, an amp, you know? But there’s nothing plugged into that machine other than a metal tube venting through a small window into the basement.”
There’s a basement? Holly’s entire body thrummed with adrenaline. Then she remembered the tower stairs that went up—and down.
Her heart dropped. She whirled, shoving the busker aside brusquely, eliciting a cry of surprise and annoyance. She didn’t pause to apologize. She increased her pace, long strides pushing through the sand, propelling her up the stairs, until Miramar was back in view. She sprinted toward the house.
Ethan was right behind her.