Meredyth had watched Lucas disappear below the water and swim out of the boathouse to the hidden side where trees and bush covered his movements. She followed, bobbing in the water, watching him now as he caked himself with mud until he became a living shadow. Hearing her in the water and seeing that she'd disobeyed him and followed, he shot her a disapproving look. He waved for her to go back into the shelter. Then he disappeared into the cover of the path they had so leisurely taken down to the boathouse that afternoon. Lucas seemed to become part of the weave of the green-black cloth of the world around him, and once more she was reminded of just how wild and predatory he could be when circumstances warranted. In the past, she had been both excited by this side of him and afraid of it, but tonight Meredyth thanked God for Lucas's wild side; tonight, she realized she would always be safe in his care. She knew that Lucas was risking his life for her, and that he wanted this opportunity at blood vengeance-payback usually reserved for the death of a loved one. This situation, she decided, was close enough to satisfy his Cherokee blood.
But if she were to lose Lucas tonight as Lauralie planned, if there were no more tomorrows with Lucas, Meredyth decided that she would not want to go on. This conclusion spurred her to climb from the water and coat her body with the war paint of the muddy bottom. Lauralie had brought her to this, a state of being calling for her to smear her scantily clad body with muddy, pungent earth. And to a state of consciousness never before experienced, one of pure hatred for another human being, for Lauralie's unfixable, poisoned soul. And what of the classically mad Lauralie? For all the research and study and analysis and scrutiny of Meredyth's life that the younger woman had done, Lauralie actually had learned nothing of Meredyth's core traits. Now her raw personality, stripped of any pretense and faced with a monster relentlessly stalking her, stepped forward. Not even Meredyth was familiar with the Meredyth now smearing the lather of sludge over her face and the remaining white comers of her skin.
As a scudding army of dark clouds continued to hold captive the moon, Meredyth made her move, doing a slow, even belly crawl along the tree line leading up to the knoll her house sat upon. Lauralie occupied the high ground in this private war. As Meredyth crawled past Tommy's body, his white oversized cowboy shirt lifting in the wind, the bloodstain long dry by now, made a gentle slapping sound rivaling the insect hum. The sight made her think of all the innocent people who had been caught in the vortex. Closer to her as she passed his body lay Jeff, his eyes staring wide, his hair matted with blood. At any time, their mother might drive over in that little coupe of hers in search of her boys, and if she did, Lauralie would likely take her down with a sniper shot as well.
'Where is the bitch?' she muttered to herself. Might she be at the bam, say in the loft? Or was she in the house at the bedroom windows, one overlooking the lawn, the other the stables? Was she alternating between the two views?
She inched onward, gaining confidence with each foot, each yard gained. She could read Howard Kemper's logo- LAWn ORDER-on his truck from here, and she made out Lucas's car just the other side of the gardener's truck. If she could make it to the driveway undetected, get to Lucas's radio, she could call out for help, if only-big If — Lauralie had overlooked the radio in the unmarked vehicle.
She moved on, praying Lucas was being as cautious as she. At any moment, she expected a gunshot to ring out. She feared how she might react when it came. A single gunshot without any follow-up shots must mean Lucas had been hit and brought down like Jeff and Tommy. She prayed it would not come before she could get to the squad car.
Then she froze, seeing the sash at the second-story window overlooking the lawn and lake move with the glint of steel revealed by returning moonlight, but that same blue moon meant danger for her and for Lucas. She dared not move a muscle, her painted face turned up, her eyes watching the dark figure at the window. It was Lauralie.
She wished to God she could get a message to Lucas; he was free for the moment to rush the stable door and gain the safety of the interior, but he had no way of knowing Lauralie was surveying this side of the house. 'Go, Lucas, go now!' she whispered, willing him to somehow psychically hear her plea. But suddenly Lauralie was gone from the window.
'My time to go!' she told herself, lifting from her belly and racing for the safety of the Farnsworth truck, hiding behind it. Glancing inside, she saw there were no keys in the ignition. She slipped around the rear, and glancing up at the bedroom window, she dashed to the gardener's truck, skirted round it, and found herself kneeling outside Lucas's car.
She was winded from the effort, breathing so heavily, she feared anyone within fifty feet must hear her. She inched along the length of the car to the front door, quietly, cautiously squeezed the handle, and opened the door just as a blast from the hunting rifle thundered, startling Meredyth into action. She leaped into the car and grabbed for the radio receiver, but it was not there. It'd been ripped out, gone.
She sat for a moment, paralyzed, hearing only the single shot and fearing that Lucas was down, bleeding, lying halfway between the trees and the stables in the sawdust road. She then heard a second shot and did not know whether to be relieved or not; she recalled what the second shot had meant for young Tommy and for Jeff.
'Lucas!' she called out, and leaped from the car, returning to Kemper's truck and grabbing at his tools, finally selecting a long-handled, three-pronged earth turner, a kind of clawing pitchfork. With it clutched in her hands, disregarding any obstacle in her way, she raced up the steps and through the front door as a third shot rang out. A good sign, she prayed. Perhaps Lucas, while spotted, and perhaps even wounded, had found a hiding place, and Lauralie was attempting to ferret him out with additional shots. A lot of good a damned table leg was now, Meredyth thought bitterly as she inched her way quietly to the second floor.
Making the second-floor landing, Meredyth now inch- wormed her way toward the expansive second-story bedroom. Glancing in, she saw that Lauralie Blodgett's complete attention was on Lucas, trapped somewhere below and under her gaze through the scope. Was she about to squeeze off another shot to pump an additional bullet into him where he lay helpless? Or was she patiently awaiting his next move, anticipating where he would next dart? Meredyth could feel the woman's unadulterated hatred culminating in the finger curled about the trigger of the big gun held snug against her shoulder here in the dark.
Slowly, cautiously, the barefoot Meredyth tiptoed over the carpet, moving within striking distance, raising the neat little earth turner with its three razor-sharp prongs over-head. She could stab the woman in the back of the neck and end it now and shed no tears, but a small voice held her in place. Can you do this? Is it murder? How will it play in the cold light of day to the outside world, to the police, to a D.A…, a grand jury, a judge? Was she justified morally and legally to murder the murderer? Lucas would not hesitate. It's either her or Lucas, her mind screamed at the instant one of the cell phones in the room went off, causing Lauralie to start and turn just as Meredyth let the mini- pitchfork fall. The fork bit into Lauralie's neck just as she had turned. Lauralie tried to bring the big gun around to bear, the pitchfork swinging wildly around with her, Meredyth having let go of the handle. The trio of teeth at the end of the spear had bitten deep into Lauralie's jugular vein, spraying the air with her blood, causing her grip on the rifle to steal away. The deadly weapon hit the win- dowsill and thudded against the garden tool, which had already released its stinging bite on her, leaving her fatally punctured. Lauralie's eyes had gone wide, her nostrils flaring, bleeding, and her gaping mouth swallowed repeatedly, desperate for air, choking on her own blood, struggling against the pain in a pirouette of horror about the room that painted Meredyth's white bedclothes red. Even dying so, Lauralie fought to speak.
'Mommie? Is it…you? 'Ave you…come back…for… for me?'
She fell forward into Meredyth in a paroxysm of cold trembling, and Meredyth, overwhelmed, took Lauralie's hand as she lay dying in Meredyth's ams. Meredyth's muddy feet had left a trail from the doorway to here, and Lauralie's blood commingled with the muddy tracks in a starburst of purple spreading over the carpet.
Meredyth eased the now-silent girl from her embrace, and she rushed to her bathroom, finding and tearing into her state-of-the-art first-aid kit to the sound of a gurgling death rattle beginning a slow roll that welled up from Lauralie's depths. She tore into the case, tossing aside creams and syringes, bottles and pills to get at the Fresh Flesh textured bandage wrap, an item developed in aerospace technology for stopping blood loss in a battlefield wound. She rushed back to Lauralie Blodgett and worked the bandage into the wound, allowing the blood to coagulate around the porous synthetic weave of the bandage to eventually stem the blood flow.
Lauralie spat up blood as Meredyth worked to save the life of the multiple murderer. On her knees over the woman, Meredyth caught a glimpse of herself in a full- length mirror. Her features and body caked in dried mud, she realized that the lunatic Lauralie had driven her to become an assassin herself. 'Christ, what am I doing? Saving you for what? To give you just what you've wanted all along? A media-circus arrest and incarceration, a jury trial, a forum for your twisted mind? A lifetime in a federal facility for the criminally insane?'
