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