Mother-Daughter Murder Night(105)

She looked toward the open door of the barn. Toward freedom, blocked by Martin. Then she looked at Jack in the corner, slumped against the wall below the lofted kayak. And she had an idea.

“Martin,” she called out. Her voice sounded scared, but she had to try. “Let’s just put this behind us, okay? I’m going to help Lana get to the hospital. You and your sister can sell the ranch. Like you wanted. And Jack’s going to get her boat.” Beth looked at her injured daughter, trying by sheer force of will to make her words sink in. “Just breathe, Jack. Focus on the boat. We’re all going to move past this.”

“No one’s going anywhere,” Martin growled. It was as if he’d barely registered her words. He was fixated on Diana, she on him, each of them searching the other for answers.

But Jack was the one Beth was counting on to hear her. To understand.

Jack nodded slightly and pulled herself away from the wall slowly, holding her hands out in front of her.

Martin turned toward her. “What are you doing?”

“I’m just getting the life jacket,” Jack said. “As a pillow, for my grandma’s head.”

Beth watched as Jack half limped, half crept to the life jacket hanging on the wall. She tossed it back to Beth.

“Stay there,” Martin barked.

Jack shrank back, as if pinned to the wall. She shifted her weight. She stayed.

Beth wedged the life jacket under Lana’s head. Lana let out a low, gravelly wheeze, somewhere between a breath and a moan.

“This is crazy,” Diana said. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Like hell you are,” Martin said. He grabbed his sister by the wrist and dragged her into the darkness of a stall, reemerging with a strange, plasticky gun. It was black and orange, small in his hand. Was it a toy? Beth couldn’t be sure. Diana looked terrified. And the twelve-gauge shell he loaded into it certainly looked real.

“Get out here, Di,” he said. “On the floor.”

His sister shuffled out of the stall and knelt, shaking, in the middle of the barn.

He waved the gun around, pointing it in Beth and Lana’s direction. “None of you move,” he said. “I’d hate to see someone get hurt.”

*

The first thing Lana saw when she woke up was the gun. Two guns, three maybe, floating in the air in a ghostly flurry of hands. Her left eye didn’t seem to be working properly. And her head was pounding. Not her forehead, like she was used to, from the medicine and fatigue and too-tight wig caps. This pain was in the back, deep-seated, where her skull met her neck.

She tried to sit up. No luck. For a terrifying moment, she was afraid she’d somehow landed back on the kitchen floor of her Santa Monica condo, that she’d fallen into some kind of cosmic wormhole and would have to relive the past five months all over again. But that didn’t make sense. There was only the chilly barn, the amber light, and the raging figure who was rapidly resolving from four men to two, to one.

She heard his voice and she remembered. Martin Rhoads. Murderer. She rolled the word around in her head, satisfaction pushing aside the blistering pain for a moment. She’d found him out. He’d made mistakes. Ricardo’s bike bag. The truck he’d driven to the land trust. He wasn’t going to get away with it.

What was it he was saying now? Something about this time not being an accident?

Lana opened her eyes another millimeter and saw him swinging around a large canister. She heard splashing, and then she felt it, cold and wet, slapping at her thighs. The smell was strong, sweet, with a chemical underlayer. It made her think of Paul. Not his swamp-grass marijuana plants. Something else, something earlier, that time she’d slid into his car outside Beth’s house, that first ride that set this whole investigation into motion.

*

“Paul . . .” Lana groaned.

Beth looked down at her mother, dumbfounded. Was this really the first word Lana was going to say at this moment?

“Paul.” It came out in a strangled croak, almost like Lana was trying to shout.

“Paul’s not here, Ma,” Beth whispered. “We have to do this ourselves.”

Beth tried to shift her mother’s weight off her lap. Her careful movements were rewarded with another groan, which drew Martin’s attention, and the gun, in their direction.

“She’s going to be okay!” Beth said nervously.

“I don’t think so,” Martin said. He shook out the last drops of gasoline onto Lana’s shoes.

“Martin. Don’t do this.” Diana rose slowly to her feet, her hands up, her voice low and desperate.

“It’s a shame you came out here, Di. While I was washing up from dinner. That the gasoline spilled. And these old bird bombs”—he looked almost lovingly at the strange gun—“they can be so unreliable. It can all blow up so quickly. You shoulda seen the damage the one I set up behind the land trust did . . .” He looked down at Lana. “Oh, wait. She saw it.”

He let out a spasm of laughter that died as soon as it had started.

“Don’t laugh at her,” Jack said. She was still in the shadowed corner, clutching her knee.

Beth had to keep him from turning in Jack’s direction. “This isn’t who you are, Martin,” she called out. “Not really.”

“You think you know me? You don’t.” He practically spat the words at her. “You don’t know what I’m capable of. None of you do.” He rotated slowly toward his sister, holding the gun level. “Not even you.”