So Pretty It Hurts

Chapter 20

I dashed to the door, guided by the flashlight, and yanked. Nothing gave.

“Hey,” I yelled again.

For a split second I thought that the farmer had locked the door, making his rounds before dark. But that stupid idea morphed almost instantly into the truth: I had been tricked—and trapped on purpose. My heart began to pound so hard I could feel it in my ears.

I peered through a crack in the barn door, but all I could spot was a sliver of my rental car. Where had the person come from? If there’d been a car, I would have heard it. If he had arrived by foot along the road or the field, surely I would have seen him—I had only been inside for a few seconds.

Then suddenly there were footsteps, scurrying along the north side of the barn. I hurried over and peered through a crack in the planks. I saw a flash of dark coat, so close I could have almost touched it. The person continued, running along the edge of the barn toward the back, but the endless stacks of hay blocked my view down there. The footsteps receded. Whoever had done this had come by foot apparently—at least part of the way—and had now taken off.

I stuffed my hand in my coat pocket to grab my BlackBerry and then remembered, panic-stricken, that it got no service here. I checked the screen anyway, just to be sure I hadn’t managed to pick up a signal somehow, but it was dead.

I tried the door again, yanking as hard as I could, but I could see there was no way to open it. Remembering all the old farm tools on the walls of Scott’s barn upstate, I trained the beam of the flashlight over these walls; there was nothing like that, only a rusted oil can sitting on a small shelf. I checked for another entrance. Nothing.

I leaned closer to the door, pressed my mouth against one of the gaps in the wood, and yelled, “Help!” seven or eight times, hoping the person who lived in the house on the hill might hear. I saw through the crack that it was almost dark. I realized the chance of someone being out now was next to nil.

I was starting to feel nearly freaked with fear. No one who cared about me knew that I’d come to the barn, and even if Beau became concerned by late tonight and reported my disappearance to the police here, they’d be looking for my Jeep, not a rented Toyota. I would have to count on the fact that the homeowner up the hill or the farmer who owned the barn would begin to wonder what the hell my car was doing out in front and investigate.

But what if they didn’t? I paced a small section of the barn, the beam of my flashlight twitching crazily. I willed myself to be calm. I had to figure a way out of this.

I did a few jumping jacks, just to keep the cold at bay, and then perched on a haystack. The straw pricked through my jeans uncomfortably, but still, sitting down seemed to relax me a little. The good news, I realized, was that I probably wouldn’t freeze to death. It was going to be below freezing tonight, but there was tons of hay for me to snuggle into. Wasn’t that how little calves and lambs stayed warm? I had a candy bar in my pocket, too, and that would stave off any serious hunger pains.

Though I was desperate to find a way out, I also wanted to know who had done this to me. I tried to hash through everything in my mind. Though I had driven out to the barn a half hour early as a safeguard, the person who had lured me here had probably come out even earlier and hidden nearby, lying in wait. He or she must have left the barn door open, banking on the fact that when I decided I’d been stood up, curiosity would have compelled me to take a quick look inside before leaving. As soon as he saw me enter the barn, he must have sprung forward and slammed the door shut.

So who was it? Richard? He could have easily guessed I’d be coming to Pine Grove and laid the trap.

But there were others I’d recently provoked as well: Jane, by revealing that I knew of her book deal and that she had probably lied about Cap and Devon; Christian, by implying there might be trouble with the modeling agency.

As my mind danced around the houseguests, a troubling thought began to surface. What if the person came back? What if the idea wasn’t simply to leave me here to freeze my ass off, but to return and attack me under cover of darkness? I had to get out.

I thrust my hand in my pocket and grabbed my BlackBerry again. Last winter, during a trip to West Virginia for a freelance article, I’d ended up in a similar situation with my cell service, but during the night I must have picked up a faint signal because a few e-mails had come through. Just in case this same phenomenon happened here, I typed an SOS to Beau with copies to Jessie and Landon, explaining my dilemma and giving not only my location but also a description of the rental car. Though Landon only checked his e-mail about once a day, Beau looked at his frequently and Jessie was good for every minute and a half.

Once again I trained the beam of my flashlight over the barn walls. I was looking for either a loose piece of wood I could use as a crowbar or a way out. But I didn’t see a thing. I squeezed my forehead with one hand, trying to make my brain work better. Barns. What did I know about them? When I was a little girl, my father took my brothers and me to a working farm for a weekend, where we fed newborn calves with bottles and attempted to milk the cows. I remembered grimy windows in the barn there—not like in Scott’s big barn, where most of the windows had all been added after the fact, but one or two cut in a wall to let light stream in as the farmer worked. This barn didn’t seem to have any. Maybe because it had always been for storage. Or for animals to sleep in.

There might, however, be a window at the far end, blocked by the hay. Or even a back door. The killer might have assumed I would never guess it was there with all the hay. But if it was, I needed to find it.

I bounced the light over the bales of hay. They took up almost the entire rear half of the barn. I realized that the only way to reach the back would be to shift the bales, one by freaking one.

The bales weren’t exactly light, but I could tell right away that moving them would be doable. I wedged the flashlight into some hay, so that it was pointed toward the back, and quickly chucked a few of the top bales out of the way. Before too long, I’d worked my way toward the back. I grabbed the flashlight again and ran it over the top of the wall. As I did, I heard something scurry off on tiny feet. Great. Nothing like a few rodents to up the terror factor.

But there was no way out, from what I could see. My heart sank. How, I wondered frantically, could there not be a door in the back? If the barn had once been used for cows, there would have had to be an exit to the field. The word pigs suddenly flashed in my mind. There had been pigs, too, at the farm we’d visited with my father, a separate barn for them. As I pictured them in my mind—huge and pink with their funny snouts and woeful eyes—I remembered something. The pig door. It was the hatch they used to move the animals from the barn to the outdoor pen. Maybe this barn had one at the bottom of the back wall.

I started to work again, heaving bales of hay from the back row out of the way. Underneath my jacket I could feel my body growing sweaty from exertion.

And then, as I worked, I heard another sound. I froze. It wasn’t scurrying this time but someone moving outside in the dark, to my right, along the north edge of the barn again. Shit, I realized. The person was still out there. Was he planning to come inside now?

The sound stopped, but I could sense where the person was—about halfway down. His body was like a force field I could feel. What was he doing? I wondered desperately. Then there was a noise again, the sound of a coat shifting, and then something thick and liquidy being splashed on the barn. Some of it, I could tell, spattered inside. Omigod, I thought, what was going on?

A second later I knew. A wisp of smoke snaked into the barn, and my nostrils were filled with the pungent smell of wood burning. The freaking barn was on fire! The breath froze in my chest, and my eyes pricked with tears.

I swung around and frantically hurled another bale out of the way, and then another. My hands were trembling now, but I kept going. Over the thunder of my heart, I heard barn wood begin to crackle. Please, please, I thought, don’t let this happen to me.

Outside the back of the barn, an engine suddenly roared to life. A car. For a second I thought the driver was going to ram right though the back wall of the building, but a second later I realized the person was rounding the barn, heading back to the road.

I glanced back to where the fire was. Flames were now licking the walls. They weren’t huge, but the smoke was another story. It was starting to fill the barn, like a fog rolling in from the sea. I turned back and desperately kept working, reaching down and grabbing bale after bale. Finally I’d managed to create a corridor along the back wall. I grabbed the flashlight and jumped down. I bounced the flashlight over the wall. And there it was. The pig door. About three feet by three feet, with a wooden bolt on one side. I nearly sobbed in gratitude. I knelt down on the cold floor of the barn and, after undoing the bolt, slid the door over.

A blast of cold air hit me. I dove through the opening and scrambled up to my feet. I was shaking—in both fear and relief. I’d made it out, maybe with only seconds to spare before the smoke overwhelmed me. In the western sky, there were still smudges of light, enough to see that there was no one around. I raced to the front of the barn.

The lower north side was now engulfed in flames. Smoke was circling upward, and big flames flicked along the old, dry wood, making loud crackling sounds. Instinctively I glanced up to the house on the hill. There were lights on inside, practically in every room, and I thought I could make out the shape of someone standing just outside the front door. I jumped in the car and drove it down the road twenty yards or so.

I was shaking hard by then, and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. Should I go up to the house and make sure they’d called 911? But then, from far off, I heard the wail of a siren. I decided to sit in my car on the road and wait for help to arrive.

Two minutes later, a fire truck came roaring up the country road. It pulled up in front of the barn, and five or six guys in big boots, helmets, and slickers sprang from inside it. By now the flames were shooting up the whole side of the barn. It took the firefighters a minute or two to unload the hose, and then they were shooting a hard stream of water at the barn. Even from inside my car I could hear the flames begin to hiss into submission. About ten minutes later, the flames were gone, and there were just curls of dark smoke ascending toward the night sky.

I knew that the firefighters had more work to do, but I didn’t want to wait any longer. I opened the car door and propelled myself toward the fire truck.

Before I’d made it just a few feet, the fireman nearest me caught my movement out of the corner of his eye and spun around. He put a hand up, motioning for me to stop. He was about thirty, hefty, with a big strong jaw.

“You’re going to need to step back, ma’am,” he said. “We can’t have spectators getting this close.”

“But I’m not really a spectator,” I said.

“Do you own the barn?”

“No, but I was in the barn when someone set the fire. They locked me in. They were trying to kill me.”

His jaw fell in surprise. He turned around and called for one of the other guys to come over—an older man, who’d taken his helmet off and was wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. I figured he might be the dude in charge.

I went through my story quickly with them, trying not to sound like a lunatic because I knew how far-fetched the whole damn thing sounded. They exchanged a couple of looks as I spoke, especially when I touched on the Devon Barr connection, but I couldn’t really read them. I got the feeling the young guy thought something funny was up, especially when I described escaping by the pig door, but the older man, the chief, seemed to buy what I was saying. Behind us the rest of the crew kept dealing with the fire. A few of them had gone in the barn and were looking around with big torches.

When I’d finished my story, the chief stepped back to the fire engine, grabbed a clipboard from inside, and returned.

“I want you to write down your name, address, and phone number, okay?” he said. “The arson investigator is going to want to talk to you. And then I need you to stop by the state trooper’s office and report this.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Are you sure you don’t need medical treatment?” he asked. “How much smoke did you inhale?”

“Very little,” I said. “I got out before it filled the barn.”

I said good-bye and trudged back to my car. I used the GPS to find the state trooper office, which turned out to be about fifteen minutes away. At least it was in the same direction as the highway toward New York, because I was completely frayed around the edges by now. When I stepped inside the squat cinder-block headquarters, there were a couple of troopers huddled by the front desk, and they glanced at me almost expectantly. I realized after a second that the fire chief had called ahead.

A detective named Joe Olden took my statement. His face looked like it’d last cracked a smile in 1997. He seemed pretty curious initially, but the more details I offered—the weekend at Scott’s, the Lasix in the water, the gypsy cab experience—the more skeptical he appeared. It was like I’d started off reporting a minor traffic accident, but was now describing how I’d discovered alien spacecraft when I stepped out of the car to inspect the damage.

Finally, I gave him Collinson’s info and begged him to call the man. Just as I was wrapping up, the fire marshal arrived and asked me a series of questions as well.

Later, as I nearly staggered out to the parking lot, I called Collinson myself, reaching his voice mail. I told him I had important news and desperately needed to speak to him.

It was an utter relief to be back in my car and headed for Manhattan, but even with the heater cranked up and Maria Callas arias playing, I couldn’t keep my body from trembling. It was partly from the exertion of hurling all those bales of hay, but also from the sheer terror I still felt. I knew that if there hadn’t been a pig door in the barn, I probably would have died tonight.

I hadn’t traveled far on the highway when my BlackBerry rang. I had service again. I realized that I had never deleted my SOS e-mails to Landon, Jessie, and Beau, and they’d all gone through. When I answered my phone, a frantic Beau was on the other end.

“Are you okay?” he demanded anxiously. “Are you still in the barn?”

“No, I’m out and I’m fine. But I was nearly killed.” I felt myself tearing, and I shook the drops away. I blurted out what had happened since I’d sent the message.

“God, Bailey, I can’t believe this,” he said, his voice laced with worry. “Is there any chance this person could be following you?”

“No, I bet they beat it out of Pine Grove once the fire started. . . .”

“Do you want me to come meet you someplace?”

“I’m okay. But—it would be great if you could be there when I get home. I’m still pretty shaken up.” Without warning, a sob caught in my throat. “It was just so scary when the smoke filled the barn.”

“Why don’t you call me when you’re about twenty minutes away. I’ll just hop in a cab.”

“You’ve got to do me one other favor. Will you get in touch with both Jessie and Landon and tell them I’m fine? I want to concentrate on the road.”

As soon as I signed off, I checked the rearview mirror instinctively. I was positive I wasn’t being tailed. There’d been stretches on the trip so far when no one had been behind me. But that didn’t mean I was safe. Once the fire starter learned that his efforts had been thwarted, some other deadly plan would surely be hatched.

I’d have to be as careful as I possibly could. My trouble in Pine Grove had sprung in part from not watching my back well enough. I’d thought I was being such a smarty-pants by arriving at the barn early, but my assailant had come even earlier, and must have been parked out in back the whole time. And lucky for them, my BlackBerry hadn’t worked.

Suddenly my stomach flipped over. Had it just been luck? I wondered. Or had the killer known I had no service in that part of Pennsylvania? And then, one after another, my thoughts fell into place, like a key tripping a lock. Yes, the killer had known, I realized. I now had an idea who the fire starter might be. The problem was, there were two possibilities. I was going to have to figure out which one was the culprit.

I made better time than I’d planned, driving eighty miles an hour in my desperation to put as much distance as possible between Pine Grove and my sorry ass. I dropped off the rental, and once I found a cab, I called Beau, telling him I was on my way to my apartment. I felt almost weak from hunger and asked him to pick up food, anything. Plus, having a few more minutes to myself would give me a chance to pop by Landon’s and reassure him.

It turned out to be a good plan because Landon was nearly bug-eyed with worry when he opened his door.

“I can’t tell you what a fright your e-mail gave me,” he said after we’d hugged. “I was about to call not only the police but also Homeland Security. Thank God Beau called me a few minutes later.”

I took him through the story quickly, knowing Beau would be arriving any minute.

“Who’s doing this to you?” Landon asked.

“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I have a few ideas.”

“And you’re going to fill the upstate police in, right?”

“Yes. The detective in charge up there didn’t seem to buy my idea that Devon might have been murdered, but this may change his mind. The problem is that he doesn’t have any jurisdiction down here, and that’s going to limit what he does. Hopefully he can involve the state police.”

“Please don’t give me the usual Bailey Weggins punch line—that you’ll have to take matters into your own hands. It terrifies me when you say that.”

“I don’t really have a choice.”

“Oy.”

“But I’ll be careful. I made a mistake at the barn—I let down my guard. I just can’t do that again.”

After giving him another squeeze, I scampered back to my place. Jessie called just while I was letting myself in, and I reassured her, too. And then moments later the doorman was buzzing to tell me that Beau was on the way up. He arrived carrying not only a deep-dish pizza but also a bottle of wine. As soon as he set the stuff down, we hugged each other fiercely.

“I’m just so relieved you’re all right,” he said, pulling back enough to study my face. “In those two minutes between when I read your e-mail and talked to you on the phone, I felt totally frantic.”

“Thanks for being there for me tonight.”

“What do you need first? Pizza? Wine? A shoulder to cry on?”

“Everything at the same time,” I said.

I practically inhaled the pizza, though I also managed to fill in the blanks of the story for Beau. When I’d polished off three slices, I leaned back into one of the chairs at my dining table and took a slug of wine. Beau sat across from me, his back to the window. Behind him was my enchanting Manhattan view, at this hour just the dark outline of a dozen apartment buildings dabbed with lights and topped with old wooden water tanks. It always seemed wonderfully fake to me, like the backdrop for a Broadway show.

What a relief to be here, I thought—not just safe in my apartment, but with Beau.

“I’ve never seen you devour food that way,” Beau said, laughing. “There were a couple of times where I thought I might have to administer the Heimlich maneuver.”

“I think it’s because I’m so hyped up. Being trapped in that barn and then smelling the smoke and not knowing if I’d get out. I guess feeling lucky to be alive has made me ravenous. I want to consume everything in sight.”

“Should I take that as a promise or a warning?” Beau said, smiling.

I laughed. We had once again shoved our troubles aside because of Devon Barr, but that was okay.

Beau’s expression turned suddenly sober. He pushed his chair back and crossed one leg over the other.

“So the person who did this was surely one of the houseguests. And they were all out in Pennsylvania, right?”

“Yes, they were all there,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure that whoever locked me in the barn is also the one who put Sherrie up to calling Nash. It’s all part of a plan to shut me down.”

“And obviously the reason for their actions is that they’re afraid you could expose them.”

“Exactly. The person must be the one who put the Lasix in Devon’s water.”

“So who has your vote at the moment?”

“It’s someone pretty clever,” I said. “They found a desolate location, waited for me to arrive, and had the accelerant ready. The only person I’d automatically eliminate would be Tory—she doesn’t seem smart enough to know how fires even start.”

“But they weren’t all that clever, were they? You could have called 911 and been rescued fairly quickly. It was fortunate for them that you had no service.”

“No,” I said. “That’s what I thought initially, but on the drive back I realized it wasn’t at all a matter of them being lucky.”

Beau squinted his deep brown eyes at me.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I’m not tracking.”

“I’m pretty sure the person knew I didn’t have service in Pine Grove. They knew that even if I had my phone with me in the barn, it wouldn’t work.”

“So somehow they knew what carrier you used?”

“Yes. And I know who it is. Or rather who they are. Last weekend two of Scott’s houseguests used my BlackBerry. And I think one of them must be the killer.”