Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
I knew that voice. And a part of me knew what was happening, what this meant. But it took a moment longer for my heart to catch up. For it to believe what was happening. For me to accept that I was right.
“I’m heading out for more firewood, Ma!” Rudy yelled.
“Okay!” Grace yelled back.
I opened my mouth, but his hand slid over it. He pulled me backward, away from the stairwell and toward the back door. The knife pressed ever so slightly into my lower back.
“If you make any noise at all, I will stab you right here,” he seethed. “You’re coming out with me to get firewood, and we’re going to have a little talk.”
He pulled me through the door to the outside. My eyes adjusted quickly. We were behind the inn. To the left was the creek path. To the right, a woodshed, and the forest beyond.
The wind roared, and the snow felt like icy pellets hitting my face. I was glad I’d worn my boots, but the rest of me was not dressed to be outside. My body trembled violently, whether due to fear or the cold was a toss-up.
Rudy slid his hand from my mouth and onto my arm, the other hand still holding the knife precariously close. He dragged me through the snow, pulling and yanking painfully at my arm. Each step felt like my foot weighed a hundred pounds. My eyes threatened to close, and my brain worked slowly.
“You drugged my hot chocolate,” I slurred. I expected him to yell at me for making noise, but he just pulled me along. Now that we were further from the building, no one could hear me talking anyway.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. Rudy? Sweet, awkward Rudy? He was just a teenager. A six-foot tall one, but still. I waved at him every day. We’d chatted several times. The knowledge that he was actually a killer chilled my bones.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, keeping my voice small. “I thought we were friends.”
“We just need to talk,” he said, pulling me harder.
I barely recognized the awkward, sarcastic teen boy I’d gotten to know. His face had morphed into a determined scowl, his eyes dark and focused.
The drugs he’d slipped me tugged at my consciousness, but my adrenaline fought back, helping me think. No one knew I was out here. They thought I’d headed upstairs to bed. No one would be looking for me.
“It’s so dark,” I said. “You should use a flashlight or your phone to light the way, so we don’t trip and fall.”
“Or to make it easier for others to see us, right?” he said. “You’re pretty smart, Kelsey. Unfortunately, too smart.”
My heart thudded anxiously. “What does that mean?”
“I saw the way you looked at me when you realized the knife was missing,” he said with a sad undercurrent to his voice. “You figured it out.”
If only I’d run upstairs to call Nick immediately. If only I hadn’t drunk the cocoa while putting the pieces together. Still, even as Rudy dragged me through the snow, I didn’t want to believe it. Even with Holly’s voice echoing in my brain, reminding me that anyone could be a sociopath.
“But why?” I blurted, dragging my feet as my legs turned to jelly. “Why destroy your own family business? Your future?”
“I did it to give myself a future,” he said angrily.
“Mom’s finally going to get rid of this place now, and I’ll have my freedom.
I can live wherever I want. Do whatever I want.
I won’t be tied to this creepy, cultish town, forever stuck on Christmas Day for the rest of my life.
I won’t be forced to work and live my entire life in the same one building. ”
The whole time, I couldn’t understand why a local would want to destroy their own town.
But it was someone who wanted out and only saw one way.
So many moments from the past days resurfaced in my mind.
The first time I met Rudy, in the hallway outside Mr. Sudbeck’s room that first night, he’d snapped at his mother about legally changing his name to something non-Christmassy.
In our first chat, he’d referred to the “outside world” like this town had him trapped.
He couldn’t wait to go to college and worried about fitting in with people from “normal places.” He’d complained that his mother had his future all planned out.
Even Grace’s complaints about Rudy being an “ornery teenager” seemed different now in this light.
I’d thought it was all usual teen drama, but there had been something more simmering beneath.
“You didn’t have to kill people.” My tongue felt too big for my mouth, but I still forced the words out, kept him chatting. “You could have talked to your mother.”
“You think that wasn’t the first thing I tried?” His voice vibrated with rage. “We fight about it all the time. And things only got worse after Dad died. She insisted that I had to carry on the family business. I had no choice. I had to live out his dream. She doesn’t care about mine.”
I thought about his father’s death, the fall off the roof, and the chill in the air settled into my bones. Grace had said Rudy was up there with him.
“D-did you push your dad?” I asked, my voice trembling in the cold.
“It was an accident,” he growled. “I never wanted … I wasn’t thinking … it was a split-second and then … I only wanted him to listen to me. I lost my temper, but I didn’t want him to die.”
He stopped for a moment and looked down at me with wet eyes.
“I see that you think I’m some kind of monster now, but I’m not.
What happened to Dad was an accident. But after he died, I thought, maybe things could get better.
Mom would sell the inn, and we could move and live a normal life.
But things got even worse. Mom doubled down on keeping the inn as some sort of tribute to Dad.
And we were losing money, so we all had to sacrifice more time running it.
But no matter what, Mom wouldn’t even consider selling.
So, I thought if I couldn’t change her mind, I’d change the situation.
I’d scare the tourists away and force us out of business.
I didn’t want to hurt people. I tried other things first.”
“Like vandalism and littering creepy flyers around,” I said, my mind putting things together despite the haze of the drug threatening to pull me under.
“I just wanted to make tourists think twice about the town, have us lose their business.” He gritted his teeth and dragged me forward again. “But they kept coming.”
“Rudy, you killed people,” I said, my voice shaking.
“I chose bad people,” he said dismissively, as if that made it all right.
“The old man was rude to my mom and completely inappropriate with Angelica. And I would have stopped there if it got the job done, but the tourists kept coming. My mom dug in even harder to save the inn. Don’t you see I had to keep going?
I tried to at least pick people who deserved it. ”
That particular theory of mine had apparently been correct, but I hadn’t seen the whole picture. My legs gave out a bit, and Rudy dug his fingers into my arm even harder.
He was in the room to witness my argument with Isabella. Our fight had put her on his radar. She was dead because of me.
“This town is so corrupt,” he said. “Every time, I thought that would be the last one. I wouldn’t have to keep going. But this town kept covering up for itself. Didn’t care if the tourists they claimed to love so much were in danger. I even tried to warn them.”
I pushed out a hoarse whisper, “TheChristmasKiller.”
His eyes looked despondent. “Can’t you see that I tried my best? I didn’t want to have to go this far. But the flyers and vandalism didn’t work. The social media threats didn’t work. I had no choice.”
He’d justified his escalation to murder completely in his head. And I knew that probably now included me. I’d figured it out. I was going to tell. So I had to die.
We were approaching the woodshed, but Rudy made no effort to slow down, dragging me along, knife still pressed to my side.
I searched the area for anyone or anything that could help me.
I spied a large tree stump that they used as a splitting block, but no ax.
Not that I could even lift an ax right now.
The drugs were going to pull me under any minute.
I dropped to the ground beside the stump. A few logs were scattered about, but I knew I couldn’t lift one. I felt like I was fighting under water.
“Come on,” Rudy growled. “Not here.”
He pulled my arm so hard, I thought my shoulder would dislocate. I let out a yelp, which angered him even more. He got me back up to my feet, but I was so woozy and floppy, it was like propping up a rag doll.
“Where … we … going …” I gasped between breaths. My breathing was too shallow now. I was conscious enough to know that.
“Not as far as I’d like.” Rudy groaned with the effort of keeping me up. “Just inside the tree line.”
“What are you going to do to me?” Tears flowed from my eyes now. Because I knew I was going to die. I was too weak to run away. I couldn’t fight. I was using every ounce of strength just to stay conscious.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Rudy said. “You were always nice to me. But you figured it out, so I have no choice. I’m going to wait for you to slip into la-la-land and then I’m going to leave you out here, a little hidden.
By the time anyone finds you, you’ll be frozen to death. You’ll be asleep, it won’t hurt.”
Oh, great. So he wasn’t violently murdering me. Just, like, a nice gentle murder.
I tried to appeal to his common sense. “They’ll know I didn’t die accidentally. They’ll see the drugs in my system.”
“It’s my mom’s antianxiety prescription that she takes sometimes to help her sleep. A very common prescription. Though some people abuse it. Buy it off the street. Take too much. They’ll think you took some, went outside for some reason, and got confused in the storm.”
He spoke about my pending death with such a detached coldness that I knew … he was irreparably broken. Whether it was his father’s death that caused it or an innate sociopathy, he would not listen to reason. I would not be able to talk him out of this. There was no way to appeal for sympathy.
My head lolled to one side and my breathing slowed. I slumped down, and rather than heft me back up, he let me fall.
“Fine,” he grumbled, putting the knife in the pocket of his coat. “Here will have to do.”
He pushed me up to sitting, my back against a tall tree, its branches bare. The snow was painfully cold against my ungloved hands, especially the one I’d hidden under my leg. The one that contained the shard of wood I’d grabbed when I purposefully fell near the chopping block.
“Well, this is it,” Rudy said, his breath warm on my face. “I gave you a good amount in that hot chocolate. You’ll probably be asleep soon. You won’t even feel any pain.”
My eyes snapped to his. “You will.”
With every ounce of life left in me, I brought my arm up, the sharp shard of wood raised high. I knew I couldn’t stab his body with it. It would break it half, barely do any damage. But if I could get it straight into his eye …
My arm came down with all of the force I could manage. He turned his face at the last second, guarding himself. I missed his eye but caught his cheek, and dragged the wood down as deeply as I could.
“Bitch!” he screamed, falling backward. He scrambled back up to his feet, easily slapping the shard out of my hand. His teeth bared like a vicious animal. “Now you’re gonna get it. No peaceful death for you. No accident. You’ll be TheChristmasKiller’s number five.”
His hands formed claws and aimed for my throat.
“Rudy!” Grace’s voice yelled in the darkness, edged with worry. “Rudy, where are you?”
“Shit,” he spat. Then he looked at me with thinly veiled contempt. “Doesn’t matter. You’re dead either way.”
He shuffled off, trudging through the snow back to the orange glow of the inn.
And then I was alone, slumped down, the cold from the snow numbing the back of my head.
My breathing slowed. I tried to force myself to move an arm, a foot, a toe.
Nothing. I tried to yell and scream, but all that came out was a pathetic cry that no one would hear.
My body shivered violently against the cold as I spent my final seconds staring up at the falling snow, drifting down from a darkened sky.
This wasn’t how my life was supposed to turn out. This wasn’t what happened in the cozy Christmas romance movies. A laugh bubbled out of me. What a joke. I came here for a fresh start, but all I was getting was a tragic end.