Chapter 72
amy
Nicky disappears around the corner just ahead of me, moving with surprising speed, his lolloping, awkward gait as achingly familiar as the hunched set of his narrow shoulders, his mop of dark hair.
I call out to him, but if he hears me, he shows no sign.
It’s not a mirage. He’s really here, in this house with me, living and breathing the same air. My son’s alive, and I don’t care where he’s been for the last fifteen months, what he’s had to do to survive, why he hasn’t come home.
I just want the chance to tell him I love him.
I try to run after him, but my legs feel spongy and unresponsive, as if I’ve been drugged.
I can’t seem to get my brain to work properly.
It takes all my energy to wade through the soupy water towards him, and the faster I try to move, the slower I go.
Every time I come close, he just moves further and further away.
I shout his name, but my voice is lost over the sound of the waves.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ someone says beside me. ‘Wake up or shut up, you noisy bitch.’
Something cracks me hard between the shoulder blades. I open my eyes, and immediately pitch to my left to vomit.
‘Jesus fuck,’ the voice beside me says.
I retch until all I’m bringing up is bile.
My eyes adjust to the darkness and vague outlines emerge from the shadows.
I’m lying at the bottom of a boat: I can tell from the roll of the deck beneath me, the damp, musty odour, the sound of seagulls circling overhead.
There are two small portholes high above my head on either side of the cabin, just above the waterline.
The sky is indigo outside; it must be close to sunset.
My head is pounding like someone’s taken a sledgehammer to it.
I try to sit up, but my hands are tied behind me, and I fall backwards again.
‘What the fuck,’ Colt says. ‘Get your shit together, Amy, or we’re never going to get out of here.’
I struggle to make sense of what’s happening, clutching at fragments of memories that fall apart as soon as I touch them like cobwebs in my hands.
‘Amy,’ Colt snaps.
It comes back to me in a visceral rush:
The text from Iris, telling me to meet her at Colt’s house.
Colt in his armchair, his mouth covered with duct tape.
The sudden, skull-crushing blow I never saw coming.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘Who did this? Why are we here?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Colt says. ‘Fucker cold-cocked me when I walked through the door.’
I try again to sit up, my head swimming with nausea.
The sail cord binding my wrists behind my back is tight, but there’s just enough slack for me to work my hands beneath my bottom.
With a great deal of effort, I manage to wriggle my legs through the loop of my arms, my damaged shoulder – which has never really healed from the accident – screaming in protest.
Eventually, my hands are in front of me. I catch my breath, and then squirm to the side of the boat, using the wall to finally work myself up into a sitting position.
I close my eyes, and wait for the world to stop spinning.
‘Don’t just fucking sit there,’ Cole snarls. ‘Untie me!’
I open my eyes and look at him. The ropes binding my father-in-law are of an altogether different kind from mine.
He’s lying on his side, hogtied with his ankles and wrists bound and then roped together behind him.
There’s a viciousness to his bonds; they’re designed not just to immobilise, but to humiliate.
Whoever did this to us, their grudge against him runs deep.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say stupidly. ‘Why are we here?’
‘Jesus Christ. Why do you think? Whoever brought us here isn’t taking us on a fucking cruise!’
I glance around the cramped cabin. ‘Whose boat is this?’
‘Jesse’s,’ Colt says tersely.
‘He did this?’
‘He hasn’t got the balls. Stupid fuck left the keys in the ignition for anyone to take. Three-hundred-thousand-dollar boat, and he left it to fucking rot in the boatyard.’
‘Then who?’
‘What the fuck does it matter?’
I start to chew at the sail cord wrapped around my wrists, trying to undo the knots with my teeth. ‘It’s probably someone who just wants to scare us,’ I say, not sure which one of us I’m hoping to convince. ‘Teach us a lesson—’
‘Oh, I think they fucking want us dead,’ Colt says.
For the first time, I notice the water at the bottom of the boat.
And then I understand.
Neither Colt nor I are coming back from this.
‘Who’d do this?’ I say. ‘Who’d want to kill us?’
Colt laughs harshly. ‘Be quicker to ask who doesn’t.’
There are very few people in Stowebury who’d grieve to see me or Colt at the bottom of Lake Champlain. But it’s a long way between wanting someone dead and murdering them in cold blood.
Someone planned this very deliberately.
A punishment carefully designed to fit the crime.
Feverishly, I run through a list of the parents of those doomed children in my head: all the people who blame me for taking their sons and daughters out on the lake that night, for surviving when their children drowned.
No one believes Mac’s allegation that his father took the dredger out that night and hit the Lady – or if they do, they’d rather close their eyes to the truth than take on the town’s biggest employer and his powerful cronies.
Mac never had any proof, and without Jesse’s corroboration – the fucking coward – everyone assumed my husband was just trying to save our skins.
Poor Mac. He did his best for me, but people wanted someone to blame.
And I didn’t even try to defend myself back then, because those parents were right to hold me responsible, even if they did so for the wrong reasons.
I didn’t sink the Lady, but I put my child before all of theirs when I let those teenagers drown behind that locked door.
Colt thrashes around on the floor by my feet, his jaw clenched as he rocks side to side, trying to find leverage. I watch him, feeling oddly remote, as if I’m watching from a thousand miles away.
My head aches from the blow to my head. Nothing makes sense. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate, my thoughts slipping in and out of focus.
Why would anyone wait all this time for revenge? If one of those grieving parents wanted to kill me, I’d have been hit by a car while walking home in the dark, or burned in my bed, long before now.
Maybe it has nothing to do with the accident after all. Colt’s got a lot of enemies: maybe he’s the target, and I’m just collateral damage. Wrong place, wrong time—
And then the realisation drops like a cold stone in my stomach.
It’s not a coincidence I was there.
Iris sent a text to make sure of it.
My sister has always blamed Colt for not going back to rescue survivors when his dredger hit the Lady, slinking away instead under cover of darkness so his part in the disaster would remain secret.
She’s blamed Jesse, too, of course, but she chooses to see him as weak, not evil.
She’d never take him away from Rose. However much she hates him, she wouldn’t do that to her daughter.
Colt and me, though?
That’s a different matter.
God knows, she’s capable of murder: she hit Ashley over the head with a rock to keep our secret. She’d have been happy to let the girl die there on the shoreline if I hadn’t insisted on getting help.
My sister is the one who wants us dead.