Final Edge

CHAPTER 19

The horseback riding at an end, Lucas and Meredyth found themselves invited by the horse wranglers, brothers Jeff and Tommy Farnsworth, to dine on steaming-hot tamales, burritos, and Texas chili cooked up by the boys' mother. Lucas learned that they lived in a small house at the end of the property. They ate off the back of their pickup, the gun rack in the cab displaying a bolt-action Remington rifle that fired a,223-caliber bullet at high velocity. Lucas began talking guns with the young men, telling them of his handgun collection, and bragging that he owned a U.S. 7th Cavalry eight-shooter hanging on his wall at home, one which had been authenticated to have been taken off one of George Armstrong Custer's men by a Sioux warrior at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. He left one brother fascinated, the other squinting and skeptical.

"Damn!" responded the younger brother, Tommy. "Could it be Custer's gun?"

"No, but it definitely belonged to one of his men."

Jeff skeptically said, "Custer fought the Sioux. How'd it get into your family?"

"Came down to my family in a horse trade. My grandfather recognized the value of the thing. He was a shrewd man."

The boys were duly impressed. "Sure would like to see it sometime." said Tommy. "Think next time you're out this way that you could bring it along?"

"Sounds like it ought to be housed in a museum," said Meredyth, "and not carted about like a baseball trading card."

"I keep it in a gun case, and I transport it in a gun box, not a cereal box, Mere."

Lucas wound up handling the Remington bolt action.223-caliber rifle, looking down its sight, testing its scope. "Do you know this thing is loaded?" he asked the brothers.

"Keep it handy for runnin' off the occasional coyote," said Jeff matter-of-factly.

"And sometimes, real, real early in the morning," added Tommy, "you get a fox messin' round the henhouse. Lost some good layin' hens to foxes. Really got Ma pissed off."

Lucas's large red hands caressed the length of the Remington, his eyes taking in its every line and feature. "Damned pretty weapon."

"It's good for two hundred and fifty freakin' yards," boasted Jeff.

"Bagged a lot of deer with her," added Tommy.

Meredyth had begun humming the tune to "Pretty Woman," and then began singing, "Pretty weapon…firing down the street… pretty weapon… the kind I'd like to meet…to clean one day… come what may…."

The men ignored her. "What do you carry when you're on duty, Lieutenant?" asked Jeff.

"A Police Special.38, Smith amp; Wesson on the ankle, but in my shoulder holster I carry a German-made Glock nine-millimeter semiautomatic."

"You got it on you now?"

"No, no. Left 'em up at the house, otherwise we'd get in some target shooting."

"Enough with the gunplay already," announced Meredyth, who then whispered, "Anyone would think you love your gun more than me."

"I hate to imagine what a good shrink might do with that," he replied, causing a snicker to erupt from Jeff. Tommy asked his big brother what was so funny.

Meredyth ignored Lucas's remark and said, "Are we or aren't we going fishing on the lake, Lucas?"

"Yeah, sure."

Jeff Famsworth replaced the Remington on the gun rack dangling across his rear window. Meredyth, looking off in the distance toward the lake, saw Howard Kemper puttering about on his lawn mower still. "Howard's working late," she muttered.

"Got a late start, 'bout an hour ago," said Jeff.

"What time is it?" she asked.

A glance at his watch told Lucas it was nearing six P.M. He showed her the watch face.

"We should see a beautiful sunset over the lake," she said.

Lucas offered her his arm, and they started in the direction of the boathouse. The closest neighbors were also on Lake Madera, but they were across the mile-wide water on the opposite shore. As Lucas and Meredyth walked off, behind them Jeff and Tommy shouted their good-byes.

Approaching the boathouse from a winding path leading away from the stables, they lost sight of Howard and his mower, but they could hear the motor growing fainter and fainter as it moved back up the hill toward the house and driveway.

Coming on a clearing, they saw that the gardener had done an uneven job of it, whole areas still thick and in need of cutting. "Got to be something wrong with Howard's mower," she said.

"Or Howard. Does he drink on the job?"

She playfully punched him in the shoulder. "No, not that I know of, that is."

Lucas watched the lawn man puttering about the back of his truck now, having climbed off the mower. Lucas had expected Howard to drive the mower back up the ramp and onto the flatbed of his large truck, but he simply shut it off and left it sitting alongside the rear tire in the drive. From this vantage point, looking up the steep knoll to the house, the spindly upturned rakes, hoes, and other garden tools looked like dead tree limbs reaching skyward, creating a bizarre mosaic against the darkening eastern sky.

Meredyth stared to where Lucas watched Howard grab some hedge clippers from the well of the truck, and slowly the middle-aged gardener began snipping away at the oleander bushes surrounding the house.

"Looks like he's fine, Mere. Just missed a section of grass is all."

"Damn, he's really hacking my oleander bushes all to hell. Maybe I'd better put a stop to that before we go out on the lake."

"Must know what he's doing. Mere. Isn't it true that the more you cut flowering bushes back, the more they flower?"

"I don't know. You're probably right." Her body language told him she opted for the lake over a confrontation with Howard Kemper. She now pulled Lucas onward toward the docks, and soon their shoes were making a pitter-patter against the weathered boards winding about the boathouse. On one side bobbed a canoc and a rowboat, and on the other, beneath the canopy of the boathouse, Lucas made out a motorboat hovering on davits just above the water.

She placed a hand over the switch that would send the motorboat down and into the water. "Your choice," she said. "I just want to enjoy the sunset from the lake."

"Rowboat. It's more romantic, and I can use the exercise."

She pointed out to where the fishing poles hung in the boathouse. adding, "And there's live bait in the cooler. We keep it stocked at all times. By the time we get out on the lake, the worms will've thawed, and you can count on their wiggling their behinds coming off hibernation. We'll have lake perch for dinner. You clean 'em, I'll cook 'em."

"Nothing better than lake perch," he replied, opening the cooler and staring at its empty contents. "No worms here. No ice either."

She looked over his shoulder, perplexed. "Must be those damn Farnsworth boys. They've emptied us of fresh bait and not replaced it."

"Forget about it. Let's just go boating," he suggested, replacing the fishing poles he'd lifted from their hooks.

As they boarded the rowboat, Meredyth continued berating the Farnsworth brothers. "Gotta talk to those two. I don't begrudge them enjoying the lake and using what's here while we're gone, but the least they could do is show a little respect for the property of-"

"It's only worms, Mere. Let's just enjoy the lake and the evening."

"You're right." She nodded, smiling. They went out on the water as the final rays of daylight began to wane in the west. Meredyth sat in rapt attention to the display of light, color, and brushwork across the sky created by the mix of sunset, cloud, and haze.

"Oh, Lucas, look at it!"

"Beautiful," he agreed.

"It's like a light show, like I imagine the aurora borealis to be."

"I've seen the northern lights in Alaska."

"Alaska, really?"

"Now there's a show," he said. "Looks like God's version of a Navajo sand painting, only in the sky."

"When were you there?"

"On a trip last year, one of those adventure travel packages that followed the 1890s Gold Rush from Skagway to Dawson. Want to do it sometime? It's a rough trip but great fun. We can see the lights together."

"I'd like that. I really would."

"Alaska's incredible, Mere, a religious experience."

Lucas had rowed them out to the center of the lake, had rested the oars, and had allowed the boat to drift and glide, going about in a lazy circle with the wind and the eddies. Meredyth had gotten comfortable, her shoes kicked off, and she now lay nestled into him, her back to Lucas, and he leaned into her and wrapped his arms about her. They watched the changing, lavender sky, considering each unique, evolving reflection that changed with each drifting cloud in the western horizon.

The wind had grown cold and biting, lifting Meredyth's hair into his face, and Lucas laughed as he struggled with it. The rowboat twirled now in the wind like a Disneyland Tea Cup ride. They laughed at the joy of it, Meredyth shouting, "Horray! Whoa!" as if on a roller coaster.

"Wind's really gusting. I'd better get control of this thing," he finally said.

"Why? Let it be. I love seeing the sky and clouds go round and round."

Something hit them a hard, teeth-jarring thud that shook Lucas's oars off their gunwale rests, noisily jangling the oarlocks.

"What the hell was that?" she asked.

They were rammed by something large and threatening, and Lucas wondered aloud, "Some big-assed Texas alligator maybe?"

In order to look around, Lucas hefted her up to a sitting position and they both gasped, simultaneously seeing a loose rowboat on the now-dark waters. The moon had disappeared beneath scudding clouds, and the lake had become a black mirror image of the night sky.

"What the hell…a loose boat."

"Happens out here on occasion," she calmly replied. "Looks like it tore loose from the Brody pier."

The boat had ricocheted off and was drifting away from them. Flies hovered above the little ghost boat, and Lucas began swatting a few that had jumped ship and come aboard with them. Getting to his knees and using an oar, he began pulling the errant boat toward them. "We'll run it back across the lake to your neighbors," he said.

"Forget it. They'll find it in the morning."

But as the wayward little green boat approached under Lucas's control, they both saw the flesh of a dead man under returning moonbeams, the dead man lying stripped and cold against the bottom, covered in squirming, feeding worms.

"Your missing worms… thawed out hours ago."

The worms covered the man's features, and his blood- soaked throat, where they slithered like miniature snakes in and out of a gaping knife wound zigzagging from ear to ear below the rugged beard, creating a second mouth that crawled with life.

"My God, it's Howard Kemper!"

"The gardener? That's impossible."

"Yes, it is!"

"Then who the hell was up at the house on the mower in his clothes?"

"It's her, Lucas! Lauralie! She's somehow found us!"

"I need you calm, Meredyth! Calm down. Get a grip." He held her shoulders firm in his hands, shaking her.

"And here we sit, literally sitting ducks, in the middle of the fucking lake, defenseless!"

"We can row for the other shore, get to your neighbors, call for help!" He lifted one of the oars and pushed off the boat that had carried Howard Kemper's worm-eaten body to them. He then lifted the second oar and began rowing desperately for the opposite shore.

"There're no lights on at the Brody place," she shouted, shaking the boat. "There's always a light."

"Maybe they're away!"

"No… they'd use a timer. Something's terribly wrong. She's been there…used their place to watch us…used their boat to come across to my house, killed Kemper, and masqueraded as him." She recalled the ferocity with which Kemper had attacked her oleander hedges.

"Then we'll break in at the Brodys, sound an alarm, get people out here one way or the other, and snare her in her own trap."

"She's up there in my house. God knows where…doing what? Making a special delivery of some sort. God, what I'd give for my cell phone right now."

"And my guns."

A muffled thunderclap came tumbling down to the lake from the house, followed by a second identical clap. "What the hell was that?" asked Meredyth.

"Sounds like rifle fire crackling in the distance." Like gunfire heard in Civil War reenactments, Lucas thought, except these shots were live rounds.

In the gloom of darkness, it was difficult to see what was happening on land at the house, and at the stables, but Lucas and Meredyth could make out the faint silhouette of the Farnsworth pickup truck up at the house, in the driveway alongside Kemper's truck. Following their eyes down the slope of the lawn, they saw the two bodies downed by gunfire, and in a moment, a glimmer of hope welled up, as each boy. Tommy and then Jeff, showed signs of life.

"The bitch somehow got hold of the Remington," Lucas said, "and shot them with their own gun. Damn her!"

"She sent them running toward the lake, toward us."

"Then opened fire."

Tommy and Jeff, both shot and bleeding, had begun to crawl for the cover of trees. Lucas and Meredyth watched, helpless to do anything as another shot rang out, killing Tommy. "Nooo!" Meredyth cried out.

Another shot hammered into Jeff's back. Both young men were dead. No one could survive two such rounds. Lucas had seen Jeff's body respond to the fourth shot, absorbing the powerful impact. "God damn the bitch!" he shouted.

"What're we going to do, Lucas? We're next!"

A fifth shot rang out, and Tommy Farns worth's head exploded. She was now using the bodies for target practice, telling Lucas and Meredyth that she could hit any target she wished from the upstairs window of the house, and given that it was hunting season, no one would think the shots unusual.

Lucas had already pulled Meredyth down below the gunwale of the rowboat, hoping to leave Lauralie with as small a target as possible. But bullets began to ping into the metal hull. "We've got to take our chances in the water!"

Lucas rocked the boat, calling for Meredyth to do the same. Another bullet whistled past, spitting up water. Suddenly, the boat gained momentum and flipped, sending them into the lake. Holding onto the upturned boat, Meredyth came up fearing that he had been hit, but he assured her otherwise. "Keep hold of the boat and kick like hell for shore!" he shouted as more rounds pinged into the water around them.

They guided their cover toward the opposite shore. "We've got to get out of range of the gun," Lucas told her.

Bullets continued to ping off the rowboat.

"She's stringing this out," gasped Lucas, spitting water. "She could have hit either one of us with that scope and range. Likely had both of us in her crosshairs."

"Else she's a lousy shot." Meredyth gulped lake water, continuing to kick for shore.

"A weapon like that… with the scope, a child could pick us off out here. No, she deliberately chose to wound those two Farnsworth boys, and she also chose to finish them off when they posed no threat at a moment when she could have put one through my head or yours, Mere."

"But she didn't, and we both know why."

"She wants to watch us sweat…doesn't want to end the game between us, not yet."

"She wants me to think about life without you, Lucas, before she takes you away from me."

Continuing to use the rowboat as cover, they paddled farther and farther from the sniper's scope, kicking for the Brody pier. Panting, Meredyth said, "Lauralie means to make me suffer for the rest of my life, Lucas, which means-"

"She never intended to kill you."

"Exactly. It's you, Lucas, she's after. She intends to destroy my life by killing you and anyone I love. She wants me to mourn all the people I love that she's taking from me. Thank God Mom and Dad aren't here."

They reached the Brody pier, but remained in the water, pulling themselves along beneath it as cover until they reached shore.

"She wants me to suffer the guilt of all these people dying around me, Lucas. Now those poor boys out there on my lawn brutally killed, my innocent gardener, for God's sake, Mira Lourdes, the old nun, Katherine Croombs, even Arthur Belkvin and his dogs…she wants me to feel responsible for it all. That I somehow caused all their deaths-and the culmination of it all? The death of the one I love most, you."

The gunfire had ceased as darkness had enveloped Lake Madera.

"The moon's gone under again," he said. "Now's the time! Make for the house. Gotta get to a phone."

As they ran, dripping wet and cold, toward the darkened house, the upturned rowboat floated off and into a weedy backwash. No shots came as they made it to the stairs, Meredyth slipping and falling. No shots came as they made it to the front door left ominously ajar. In the driveway, they'd seen the family RV, waiting like a patient dog for its master. They burst into the Brody home, Meredyth calling out each of the Brodys by name. "Myron! Lorene! Candice! It's Meredyth Sanger! Where are you?"

Meredyth called out over and over for them as Lucas tore open doors in search of the family. No answers, no finds.

"No lights," he ordered her as they searched the downstairs den for a phone. Grabbing it, Lucas heard the dead air of a disconnected line. "Bitch has cut the lines. No big surprise." He looked around for a weapon, but the man's glassed-in gun rack was smashed and all his weapons were missing. Lucas instantly realized on seeing this that they might well find a triple murder here, quite possibly mutilations on the same scale as they'd found with Byron Priestly and Arthur Belkvin. Lauralie seemed to take glee in slashing people open. "Stick close by me," he solemnly ordered Meredyth.

She took a tentative step up a flight of carpeted stairs, but he stopped her, pointing to a trickling trail of blood on the kitchen tiles. The blood looked burgundy in the absence of light. "She's left us another intentional trail to follow."

It led them through the expansive kitchen and to a basement door off the kitchen. Meredyth buried her head in his chest, and he held her. "My God, Lucas, she's killed them all."

Lucas had no words that might comfort her. He reached a hand out to the basement door, cautiously opening it, and staring into the black hole of the stairwell. "Stay here, Mere."

"Don't you dare leave me alone."

"I have to step inside and close the door before flicking on the light switch. I don't want that madwoman to know where we are. Understood?"

"I go with you."

He saw the adamant fire in her eyes that said no use arguing. "All right, but it could be a shock. Brace for it."

Once on the stairwell, he flicked on the light, and it instantly revealed blood on the interior door and on the panels of dry wall on both sides of the stairwell. They were, in effect, surrounded by a red rain that looked like paintbrush flecks and spurts, the kind of high-velocity blood residue that comes of gunshot wounds at close range, creating a crazy mosaic only a blood-spatter evidence expert could read. It said to Lucas, They were shot here at the top of the stairwell and the killer used their own weight to her benefit, simply allowing the bodies to fall atop one another. The flood of light revealed the heap of three bodies lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.

"That bitch knows we're here looking at what she's done," said Meredyth, trembling under his embrace. "Directed us across the lake and to the kitchen and here.

Lucas. She's orchestrated the whole damn thing…watching us tip over in the water, climb out at the pier, all of it."

"She can watch our every move through that scope," he agreed. "But she can't see through walls."

Lucas held Meredyth's head close to him, not wishing her to look down the stairwell again at the carnage that lay there, mother, father, and teen daughter. He ordered her to stay on the top stair as he went below. At the foot of the stairs, Lucas got to know the Brodys up close and personal.

Myron, Lorene, and their child, Candice, all with gags, blindfolds, and hands tied at their backs. They'd been summarily shot in the head on the top step. Lauralie had guided each to the basement stairs one at a time, fired into each cranium, and had simply let gravity do the rest.

Myron Brody was at the bottom of the heap, and it recalled Lucas's time in Viet Nam below such a death heap. He truly hated this Lauralie Blodgett now, and he wanted in the worst way to see her dead before this night was over.

Lucas now worked to separate the dead from one another in an effort to find keys for the RV and possibly a cell phone. He pried Myron Brody from the weight of his wife and child and fished into the pants pockets for keys. There were none. He tried Mrs. Brody's pockets. No keys. Finally, he tried the young girl's jeans. Nothing. Finally giving up, he located a tarp and covered the Brodys.

He hurried back upstairs to Meredyth where she sat quietly sobbing. He helped her to her feet, turned out the light, and guided her back into the kitchen. "No doubt she's emptied the place of any keys and cell phones along with any weapons." He indicated the empty chopping block.

"Not entirely," said Meredyth, upending the dining table.

"What're we doing?"

"Arming ourselves." She began unscrewing one of the table legs. In a moment, she had a baseball-bat-sized weapon with a two-inch screw protruding from the end.

Lucas removed a second table leg. "Makes a damn nice war club."

"Lucas, you see what I see?" Meredyth pointed to a clear cookie jar on the countertop, and inside were keys.

Lucas grabbed the jar and emptied out the set of Chevy keys. "I think it's the RV. Come on! We're out the back door and to the car."

Outside, they strapped in before Lucas learned that neither the correct key nor hot-wiring would do, as he could not get a spark from the ignition. Exiting the RV, he rounded to the front and lifted the hood, flashing a light found in the glove compartment now over the dead motor. She had gotten out, clutching her table leg and asking, "What is it?"

He pointed. "She's made off with the distributor cap. Biiiitch!" He ground out the word.

"She's got us right where she wants us, doesn't she?"

"How could she've known we were without our phones, my gun?" he lamented. "Hell…I even left my Texas toothpick in your bedroom, Mere."

"A bowie knife's hardly going to help us now."

"I think it'd beat nothing."

"We have our war clubs, remember?" She hefted her chair leg. His lay on the seat inside the RV. "Lucas, she's thought every detail through. She's been in this house for hours and hours, all damn day. And she's been watching us."

"From where? Exactly where to watch our every move, Mere?"

"Upstairs…Candice's room in the front. It overlooks the lake and she…she is a stargazer, owns a super telescope."

"How damn fortunate for Lauralie."

"She knew when we got up, when we ate, when we left for the stables and left on horseback. All of it."

"She saw the rifle when we passed it back and forth at the stable," he thoughtfully said. "Saw everything that happened across the lake."

"She saw when Howard arrived to do the lawn, and gauged how much time she had to row across and take his identity before we'd be back."

"But how'd she arrange for Kemper's body in the boat to bump into us out there on the lake?"

"She didn't, but she arranged it as a horrid, heinous crime designed for maximum effect whenever I should discover it," Meredyth said. "Didn't matter whether it was to-night, tomorrow, or the next day, because-"

"— because you'd be left alive to savor all the terror she wants to rub your face in."

"Exactly." Meredyth's knuckles had gone white with the grip she held on her table leg club.

"So…here we stand in the dark, and she could be anywhere out there, taking a bead on you at this moment, Lucas. She'd like nothing better than to leave me entirely alone, holding your bloodied body in my arms throughout this night of terror she has planned for me. So, if you please, can we take cover and decide what we do next?"

"What are our options?"

"We go back inside the house, huddle up in the dark in a center room without windows, and wait for daylight."

"Can we walk out of here?"

"Not another house or a road for several miles this side of the lake, and if she is watching, she'll stalk us and either kill us or turn us back."

"What about Jeff and Tommy's place, their mother's home?" he asked.

"God, I pray she hasn't been killed, and oh, God, if she is alive, how are we to tell her about her sons, Lucas? How do we explain their deaths?"

"As the senseless act of a madwoman, Mere. Their deaths are not your fault. You give into such guilt, and Lauralie wins. She puts you precisely where she wants you."

"Oh, you mean like now?" She threw up her hands, the flashlight in them sending up crazy circles of light into the leaves of overhanging trees. "Look where she has us! Drip-ping wet, freezing, trapped, and at her mercy!"

"Then we don't lay down for the bitch."

"What do you mean? Go after her?"

"Go after her, yes."

'Tonight?"

"Now."

"In the dark?"

"In the dark."

"With a lake between us and her?"

"Guide me to Candice's room and that telescope."

Meredyth took a deep breath and nodded. "Follow me."

"Douse the light first, will you?"

"Yeah, good idea." Meredyth's mind again filled with the image of Jeff and Tommy lying dead on her front lawn. This followed by the image of the dead in the Brody basement. This followed by the awful image of the worm-covered gardener at the bottom of the waterlogged rowboat.

She led Lucas back into the house through the rear door, both carrying their war clubs. He followed her inside, up the stairs, and to Candice's pitch-black room. Meredyth switched on the flash, but he grabbed it, covering it with his hand and shutting it off. "No lights! It'll tip Lauralie off to our plans!"

"Sorry…I knew that." The little light that guided him to the telescope came in the form of stars reflecting off its metal veneer where it poked through the open window. Balancing the table leg in his crotch, Lucas settled in at a chair before the telescope, realizing that he was in the exact position that Lauralie Blodgett had been in for most of the day. Had she planned this too? For them to be here in the dead girl's room eyeballing Meredyth's cabin on Lake Madera through the very telescope Lauralie had used?

How devious is this sick mind we 've locked horns with, he wondered, in this life-and-death competition?

From the condition of the Brody family bodies downstairs, he guessed the murders here had taken place as early as nine A.M., possibly earlier. He imagined that somewhere hidden in the surrounding woods they might find Arthur Belkvin's BMW, but stumbling about in the dark in search of the car would likely prove as futile as an attempt to walk out of here or around the enormous lake to Mrs. Famsworth's for a phone. The nearest contact opportunity remained the one he now stared at across the lake, his radio car, if she had not destroyed it.

He searched the grounds for any sign of Lauralie, imagining that by now she had shed the gardener's clothes for something out of Meredyth's closet. Behind him, he sensed Meredyth's growing trepidation.

"What do you see? Anyone on the water? Any movement up at the house?"

"No…nothing. She could be anywhere, like you said."

"Damn it, Lucas. What're we going to do?"

"The horses. If we could get to the horses, we could ride out of here."

"No, it's too risky."

"It'd be a piece of cake. We could upend the rowboat. It's still down by the pier, and we float quietly over to the boathouse. From there, we take that back path to the sta-bles."

"Don't you see, Lucas? She's planned it this way, every step of the way. She knows we'll go for the horses, because she's cut off every other alternative means of escape or communication with the outside."

"All right, say she is lying in wait at the stables. We at least know to expect it, and so we're tuned in."

"And she's tuned in at two hundred yards from the house with that damned gun of Jeff's. You don't stand a chance."

Frustrated, he swore and stood up, pushing the chair over and making her start and back up. When she did so, her back hit something solid in the dark-Lauralie Blodgett, her mind screamed even as she called out the name! And the dark figure swayed and returned to hit Meredyth a second blow, and she slipped and fell, her bare feet skidding as if still wet. On hands and knees, she was stung by an unmistakable odor of blood, bile, and decaying flesh as it filled her nostrils. She screamed again as Lucas pushed himself between her and the shadow in the darkness-the thing attacking her. He grunted with the power behind the blow he dealt Lauralie-defending Meredyth with the table leg, slamming it into the dark terror.

Meredyth, from the floor, flashed the beam on the assailant, hoping to help Lucas, expecting to blind Lauralie Blodgett, but instead, the light illuminated the dripping half-torso of Mira Lourdes. her legs and lower abdomen dangling in the blackness, each heel lashed to Candice Brody's white ceiling fan.

"Christ, my heart!" shouted Lucas.

"It's our final ration of fun with the Antichrist and her twisted miracles," Meredyth bitterly said. "Behold the beast cometh. Damn that ugly bitch child of evil wherever she is."

Lucas slipped now on the dank gruel below the half- corpse, and he instantly grabbed Meredyth up in his powerful arms, giving up any effort to regain his feet so he could lift her at the same time from the wet floor soiling their clothes.

"I'm going after her, Mere. You stay here, and I will track her in the night, comer her, and bring her pain and ours to an end."

"No, you can't leave me here alone, and you can't go after her alone, Lucas, no!"

"I can move faster and stealthier alone. Mere. Having you to worry about is more apt to get me killed, trust me. You remain here. I can revert to the old ways and blend in with the night. I can get close enough to break her neck before she sees me coming."

"She's got a high-powered rifle with a scope. I can at least help create a diversion."

"Doing so could get you killed."

"No, don't you see? She gets me in her scope, she won't pull the trigger. She wants me to survive and suffer your loss."

He took a deep breath and then began peeling off his clothing down to his black BVDs. 'Try to keep up," he told her, taking his table leg with him.

Even as she kept pace down the stairs, Meredyth peeled off her own clothes, beginning with her soiled pants, down to her Navy blue bra and panties. She'd not forgotten her war club, which thudded down the carpeted stairs with her. "Lake's going to be cold," she said, shivering at the thought.

"Cold is a state of mind. Hold on to that thought and you'll be all right."

Lucas turned on the flashlight and placed it on the chopping block so it would flash to the ceiling. It decoyed their whereabouts, as it would be seen clearly in the window in Lauralie's telescopic lens. They exited out the back, and belly-crawled to the water's edge down from the pier among the reeds where the. capsized boat had hung up. There they inched into the water and took hold of the waiting, upturned boat. They began to make their way across the lake, back toward Meredyth's home.

Once on the other side, they were masked by the boat- house, where they tied the roaming overturned boat to a mooring. They went into the boathouse by swimming under. Once inside, they caught a moment's rest. Meredyth was trembling and exhausted. He found a blanket and wrapped her in it. "My squaw," he said, smiling. Then, holding his table leg high, he asked, "Where is your war club?"

"At the bottom of the lake by now. I couldn't hold onto it and the boat any longer."

"I want you to remain here until I get back with the horses," he ordered her. "No arguments."

"Just because I dropped my…my war club?"

"Come on. Mere, we both know your ethics alone prevent you from drawing blood. And like I said, I can move faster and safer on my own."

"Lucas, it's too dangerous. She's up there in one of those windows just waiting for one glimpse of you and-"

He put his finger to her lips. "It's not so easy hitting a moving target, especially a painted Cherokee with a war club."

'Tell that to Jeff and Tommy."

"Jeff and Tommy were forced to run ahead of her down a slope, their backs to the bitch. She won't know when I'm coming. She won't see me coming. When and if she fires, she'll miss. If you hear multiple shots, you'll know she missed. Just have faith and wait here for me, understood?"

"No, Lucas! No!"

But he'd already dived into the blue fluid floor, swimming underwater to the outside, going for the boggy, swampy area on the north side of the structure. "Damnit, Lucas!" she whispered, then dropped the blanket and dove in after him.