Chapter 81
Now
the day of the murders
kate
Kate Walker has nothing left to care about.
Her daughter is dead. Her marriage is over in all but name: she and David live in separate bubbles of grief, unable to comfort each other, sleepwalking through their days.
She has no job to go to; her counsellor told her it would help to return to work, but if she did that, she’d have to move forward, into a world without Maggie, and let go of the anger and hate tethering her to the past.
And Maggie deserves more than that.
She didn’t listen to her daughter when she came to her and begged for help against the bullies. Sticks and stones, she’d told Maggie. Ignore them; graduation’s only a few weeks away. You won’t have to see any of them after that.
She’s failed Maggie once.
She won’t do it again.
Ashley Lincoln is awake. The girl who drove her sweet, lovely Maggie to kill herself is awake. She’s going to make a full recovery. She’s giving television interviews. She has the rest of her life to look forward to while Maggie rots in her grave, eaten by worms, and really, how fair is that?
So Kate, who has nothing left to live for, and nothing left to lose, drives to the hospital to get justice for her daughter.
She isn’t entirely sure what she’ll do when she gets there – a pillow over the girl’s face, perhaps, or the injection of an air bubble into her IV, like she’s read about in novels; she’s vague on the details – but one thing she’s certain of: Ashley Lincoln isn’t going to be able to do to anyone else what she did to Maggie.
Kate makes it all the way to the corridor outside Ashley’s room. No one challenges her; there’s no security on the rehab ward, not like the ICU or neonatal unit.
But she’s too late.
Call it God, or fate, or karma: Ashley had a post-coma seizure less than an hour before Kate got there. It overwhelmed her brain’s oxygen supply, leading to cerebral hypoxia and catastrophic brain death; there was nothing anyone could do.
The doctors are preparing to switch off the machines keeping her alive when Kate arrives. Ashley’s mother, Jenna, is sobbing on a nurse’s shoulder. No one even notices Kate.
She finds herself oddly at a loss as she leaves the hospital. She’s waited fifteen months to give Ashley Lincoln the justice she so richly deserves, and now the moment has been taken from her.
She’s about to head out of town, to the sketchy neighbourhood where Amy lives, to take up her usual position outside Amy’s apartment – Kate can’t forget the consequences of Amy’s actions for a nanosecond, so why should Amy?
– when she suddenly sees Iris’s Audi shoot past her on Main Street, and then take a sharp turn onto the road leading down to the marina.
Kate often goes to the boatyard, the last place she saw her daughter alive before they boarded the Lady that night.
She’s not the only one drawn there; she’s seen Rose flitting through the mildewed boats and rusting trailers a number of times, and occasionally a bereaved parent will come down to the lake and lay flowers.
But Iris hasn’t returned to the marina even once since the accident.
Kate doesn’t know why she follows her now, but she does.
She parks her own car beyond the entrance to the boatyard, out of sight, and walks back along the lakeshore towards the marina, passing a small motorised dinghy that has been dragged up onto the beach and half-hidden beneath some brush.
Someone has knifed its grey rubber walls, and it lies pooled on the sand like a deflated balloon.
Her pace quickens.
She reaches the chain-link fence marking the perimeter of the marina, and edges along it, keeping to the shadows.
Iris is tugging at some tarps, clearly trying to pull them away from one of the stored boats. She staggers back a little as a rope gives way, and Kate realises it’s not a boat hidden beneath the tarps, but a pair of WaveRunners.
It takes Iris a few minutes to coax one of them into life. She drags its trailer towards the lake, passing less than ten feet from where Kate’s standing, but too preoccupied with what she’s doing to notice her.
Only when Iris has pushed the jet ski into the lake and sped off into the darkness does Kate realise someone else is in the marina.
Metal clanks from somewhere within the boatyard. A few seconds later, there’s a shout, and then a muffled curse.
Kate runs as quickly as she dares along the inside of the chain-link fence towards the noise, dodging around decrepit vessels and corroded trailers, tripping more than once in the darkening gloom.
Two men are fighting near the concrete repair pit.
One of them she recognises immediately as Jesse Spencer.
The second she’s never seen before.
He looks like a mountain man: his hair and beard are wild and matted, and he’s so filthy she has no idea which part of him is skin and which is clothing. It looks as if he’s trying to follow Iris, and Jesse is doing his best to stop him, but for all Kate knows, it’s the other way around.
Jesse has the advantage of height and build, but too much soft living has made him slow. The mountain man clasps him in a bear hug from behind, and Jesse can’t break free.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ he yells. ‘Get off me, you fucking asshole!’
He flings his weight forward in an effort to break the mountain man’s grasp, but only succeeds in pitching them both off balance.
They’re right next to the yawning repair pit.
Both men stumble. The mountain man abruptly releases Jesse, his scrawny arms windmilling as he tries to stay on his feet.
But Jesse’s weight and momentum count against him. He teeters on the edge of the pit, his back towards it, desperately clawing at the air in front of him.
He lands at the bottom with a sickening, wet thud.
He doesn’t even scream.
The mountain man flees into the darkness. Kate doesn’t go to check if Jesse is alive, because she really doesn’t care. She’s heard the rumours about the dredger. She knows what kind of man he is.
Instead, she heads over to the second WaveRunner, the one Iris couldn’t start. There’s a trick to the jet ski: she remembers Nicky showing her how to coax it into life the summer before he died. You just have to show it some love, he’d said, smiling.
It starts on the second try.
Kate hauls the jet ski down to the lake edge and shoves it from its trailer into the water with a gentle splash.
She was entirely prepared to kill Ashley this afternoon; it’s only chance the girl died before she got the opportunity. Ashley and Jesse Spencer both got what was coming to them today – but Kate’s had enough of sitting idly by, waiting for fate to intervene.
She speeds out onto the water, following the sound of Iris’s WaveRunner ahead of her. She hasn’t planned this, has no idea what she’s going to do when she catches up to Iris; but sometimes life is about making the most of the opportunities that come your way.
Once you’ve made up your mind to commit murder, it’s surprisingly easy to do it again.