“So you killed him?” Diana’s voice was low, her face ashen.
“I protected what’s ours. I took out the trash. Like our father should have done thirty years ago.”
Beth didn’t know what Martin was talking about. But it didn’t matter. Not compared to her family getting out of there. Jack was leaning against the wall near the door, which was good, but she was still clutching her knee, and Beth wasn’t sure whether she could walk. While Martin and his sister argued, Beth scanned the barn, looking for something useful, something within reach. All she saw were shadows.
“What about Daddy?” Diana asked. Her voice was a broken whisper.
Martin’s eyes went dark. “I went to see him the next day. I asked him about the project.”
“And?”
“He was going to take away the ranch from us, Di. Our inheritance. Your children’s inheritance. I tried to talk sense into him, but you know how he gets when he’s set on something—”
Some part of Beth knew that if Martin confessed to killing his own father, he’d never let them out of there. She imagined Mr. Rhoads in his little room at Bayshore Oaks facing his wild-eyed son, his aggrieved, furious son, with stubborn calm. With kindness. And it not being enough.
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.