Dead womans pond, p.15
Dead Woman's Pond, page 15
Still no sign of life other than lizards and frogs, though a steady stream of bubbles floats up from beneath the rippling surface, and the headlights still glow down there, somewhere.
Not good. Bubbles mean escaping air.
I don’t wear a watch. Without my cell, I have no idea how long it’s been, but time ticks in my head like a bomb.
I try not to think about what else might be in the lake as I wade, then dive in, the water cold on my run-heated skin. It isn’t so easy, swimming with a hammer clutched in my fist, but I’m a strong swimmer—high school diving team as well as the gymnastics—and I swam every day at the hotel pool before I met Genesis. Since her parents’ deaths by drowning, she avoids the water, and out of deference to her, I do too, but my body remembers.
Small fish dart out of my path, and slick leaves curl around arms and calves. At least I hope they’re leaves. We get gators in Florida, and snakes, some of them poisonous. I jerk and kick myself free and keep going.
It isn’t as difficult to see as I’d feared. The headlights draw me on like two beacons, straight to the car’s passenger side. No sign of anyone there, which is good, since I doubt I can rescue more than one person, if that. However, the window is a spiderweb of impacted glass, and bubbles flow away from it in several thin lines like strings of tiny pearls.
Then I’m kicking upward, hard and fast, my head breaking the surface, my mouth gulping in lungfuls of cool night air.
I swim a couple of yards to where I guess the driver’s side will be beneath me and dive again. But when I reach the right depth, the car has moved, rolling down the inclined lake bottom, deeper under the water. As I swim after it, it stops, but it’s only a matter of time before it starts rolling again.
The driver’s-side window is fractured like the other, and I heave a mental sigh. I can just make out a woman, head pressed into the marshmallowy airbag, face turned away from me. Some dark stains mark her big white cushion—blood. She isn’t moving. I can’t tell if she breathes.
I draw back the hammer, fighting water resistance and my own churning legs trying to keep me under, when she suddenly twists, her head coming around, her wide brown eyes staring right into mine. It startles me so badly, I let out an underwater shriek, all my air escaping in a huge bubble that floats serenely away.
If I had the leverage, I’d kick myself.
I reach the surface once more, expel all the air I have left, then take a massive breath and head back down. The car shifts a little farther, and the woman claws at the inside of the door when I reach her, screaming something, or maybe just screaming, though I can’t hear her through the water and glass.
She sees me and gestures frantically, shaking her head and pointing at the door, which refuses to open. I wave through the window, indicating she should get away as far as she can toward the opposite side of the car. When she’s shifted a few feet, I draw the hammer back and slam it against the window as hard as I can.
One hit, two, three. The already-weakened window bursts inward, glass and water flowing to fill the car in a torrent. The driver—and holy shit, I recognize her now, Arielle, the waitress from the wine bar—struggles in the current, pushing past the airbag and reaching for me with both hands. I let the hammer go and grab her wrists. She latches on to mine, and I pull, hooking my feet within the window frame of the car’s exterior, yanking with all my might.
My lungs burn. The car continues sliding deeper. Much more and I won’t make it back up before I run out of air, but I can’t leave her for another breath. The car is fully flooded, and she’s stuck between the bag and the seat. If I leave her, she’ll drown.
Thank God she’s skinnier than I am. Her body works itself free, blasting forward in a blinding cloud of bubbles, silt, and floating garbage escaping from her car: papers and a McDonald’s bag, a hairbrush, her purse. I lose my grip and flail without direction, tumbling over and over.
When I right myself, I’ve sunk deeper, the lights on the surface impossibly far away. My chest hurts. My bruised ribs scream. My legs kick hard and fast, and something grabs my ankle.
More underwater shouting, more lost oxygen. This time rightfully so. A buzzing fills my head, like a swarm of angry bees penetrated my skull and got stuck in my brain. My vision doubles, and it has nothing to do with the distortion of the water. I twist and come face-to-face with Kat’s ghost, her pale, cold fingers clutching and grasping. No sign of Arielle. Wherever Kat’s essence touches me, my skin turns to ice, and I realize she’s holding me under, preventing me from saving myself.
I kick hard, pushing her off with both body and mind, trying to thrust her away from the inside out like I did in Gen’s apartment. Her anger suffuses me, ratcheting up my own and giving me strength. My injured knee threatens to give out. My chest hurts with the effort not to suck in a lungful of water.
Then my hand hits open air, followed a second later by my head, and all traces of Kat vanish. Arielle breaks through a moment after, both of us gasping and spitting, flailing around in the murky dark. She starts to go under again, and I flip her around to wrap my arm from behind, pressing it across her chest and swimming with my other arm while I drag her toward shore. I’m tired, so tired now, the day’s events, hell, the week’s, catching up with me. My eyes focus on movement—lots of movement. People running, staring, pointing. Flashlights aim at us. I spot some uniforms, police, I think. Two of them jump in and take Arielle from me. A third meets me as I stagger out and wraps me in a scratchy brown blanket that smells like musty piss. He eases me down onto the sand and crouches beside me, waiting for me to catch my breath enough to talk.
While I pant and heave and spit, I scan the lake. No sign of Kat’s ghost. With my lack of oxygen, maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. Then again, no one here would see the spirit except for me.
I turn to the cop and realize it’s the same one I punched last week. He still has the shiner I gave him. Must be reunion night at Dead Man’s Pond. I wish for a beer and a bonfire, the way I shake from cold and adrenaline.
He takes out a notepad and pen, seriously old-school, and I dictate a statement while he writes it all down, asks me to repeat it, and checks it twice. More lights spring up around this side of the lake—spots cast from a news van parked beside Chris’s car. In the time I talked to the police, the media got wind of this story.
One of the ambulance guys checks me over and suggests I go to the hospital, but my insurance status hasn’t improved, and I wave him off. He shrugs, praises me for saving a life, and wanders back to his vehicle.
I just saved a life.
Another cop arrives with my clothes gathered in his arms. He helps me shake off the dirt and sand, then holds the blanket up so I can get dressed behind it. It takes a long time. My jeans are soaked from my pre-swim wading, and I have to yank and pull and wriggle them over my hips, doing the wet-denim dance. My dripping bra shows through the otherwise dry RPL Construction T-shirt. Oh yeah, I’m ready for the cameras.
I go for my cell phone, pulling it out and checking for signs of life, but it’s still dead. Dammit, I need to call Gen before she freaks. I glance around at the gawkers, hoping for a familiar face and a phone to borrow and get sidetracked by the media.
In the span of fifteen minutes, I go from a drowned-rat broke construction worker to a drowned-rat broke hero. They shine lights in my face, practically shove a microphone down my throat, and follow me when I head for the back of the ambulance to check on the woman I saved.
Arielle is there, sitting up, the attendant finishing off affixing a bandage to a cut on her forehead. Her strawberry-blonde hair flops across her face, some of it matted with blood, but she focuses on me well enough and waves me over, smiling broadly.
She describes the accident as I approach. “—don’t know! The gas pedal stuck down and stayed down.”
Yeah, I know the feeling.
The attention of the reporter standing behind me ratchets up a notch with the anticipation of what we’ll say to one another.
“When I slipped you my number the other night, I didn’t think we’d meet up here,” Arielle says, laughing.
Definitely not what the reporter expected, but apparently even better, because she steps in so close I can barely move.
I turn to her and her cameraman, raising both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Come on, guys, back up a little, huh? Give a girl some room to breathe.” When I look again, Arielle’s right in front of me. She leans in and plants a solid kiss on my lips.
“My hero,” she says.
It’s my worst PDA nightmare, caught on camera, probably being broadcast live across the county, and for all I know, the whole state. My face flushes crimson. I’m taken completely by surprise, no idea what to say. What I come out with is, “I have a girlfriend.”
Arielle’s smile falters, but she recovers fast. “Well,” she says, “she’s a lucky woman.”
That might be, but I’m not feeling so lucky as I notice said woman staring at me from beside the front bumper of the ambulance. I don’t know how long Genesis has been there, but she has to have witnessed the kiss, because she turns and walks away without a word.
Chapter 29
Aftereffects
“GEN!” I chase after her. My sore knee twists, and I end up slamming into the side of the ambulance. One of the local onlookers steadies me with a hand on my arm. The news crew closes in again. I try waving them off as politely as I can, but they ignore me. And Genesis has disappeared.
I’ve already been interviewed, filmed, and embarrassed. Just past the half-demolished Festivity sign, I hear the familiar roar of the Charger’s V8, but the reporter blocks my path.
Turning head-on to the camera, I fix the woman with my iciest glare, lean in to her microphone, and say, “Back. The fuck. Off.”
She jerks as if I’ve slapped her, hand clamping over the mic, and I wonder if I just cursed her out on live TV. Then I’m running, limping really, for the main road.
The Charger’s taillights vanish into the darkness down Festivity Boulevard.
An hour later, I make it “home.”
That’s how long it takes to get clearance from the cops to leave the scene, find some plastic to spread over the driver’s seat of Chris’s sedan so I don’t get it wet with my still damp clothing, and locate a late-night parking space behind the pub.
When I go inside the bar, everyone turns from the four mounted televisions, each tuned to different local news stations who’ve picked up the story, and all of them featuring me in one way or another: me walking out of the lake in my underwear (oh God), me dripping wet and telling how I broke the window and pulled Arielle out, and an oh-so-fabulous shot of me in Arielle’s arms being seriously, intensely kissed. Okay, she’s one hell of a kisser—not as good as Gen, but hot.
The patrons start a spontaneous round of applause. Several offer to buy me drinks. A few shake my hand or clap me on the shoulder. A couple of women and a number of men eye me speculatively. At least my T-shirt has dried.
The one person I need to see, however, isn’t congratulating me. He’s watching a replay of that damn kiss. It’s a shot taken from behind, so Arielle looks very happy, and I seem very involved in the moment. My hands held out to the sides, carefully not touching her, are completely cut off by the bottom of the screen.
“Chris….”
The news cuts to commercial break and he turns, glaring, accusing. The waitstaff around him fall silent.
And I’m suddenly exhausted, furious, and fucking sick of apologizing.
I storm up to my temporary (maybe very temporary) boss and slam his car keys on the bar.
“I broke the window on your car. I’ll pay for it. I broke it to get at my hammer because I didn’t have the keys. I used the hammer to save a girl’s life. She thanked me. You know how I goddamn feel about Gen. By now, so should she. Maybe you both would have preferred I let that girl die.”
I point a finger at the television. My hand trembles with my anger. Blood pounds in my ears, drowning out the same odd buzzing I experienced in the lake. The image on the screen doubles for a moment, then refocuses, like there’s a brief transmission interruption. “You know there’s two sides to everything. You saw one. If you and your sister have any faith in me at all, you should already know the other. And if you don’t, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.”
The fire fades from his eyes. He opens his mouth to say something, but I don’t stick around for it. Instead, I leave the Village Pub by the nearest exit.
Chapter 30
Fears
I REGRET leaving the pub as soon as I’m outside. Chris probably means to apologize. I should give him the opportunity. But there’s no going back now.
I grab my toolbox—the most valuable thing I own minus a hammer—from Chris’s unlocked car. Not much point in locking it with the window broken. I’m not worried. The parking lot is well-lit, and Festivity pays extra for regular police patrols through the community.
With no idea what to expect, I let myself into Gen’s apartment. Yeah, it’s back to being Gen’s apartment until we get tonight sorted out.
If I had anywhere else to go, I would do it, but it’s after midnight, and any friends I might have called wouldn’t thank me for waking them.
The living room lies dark and quiet, but the open curtains allow me to see. The closed bedroom door tells me our relationship’s current status and sends another wave of anger through me. One of the outside streetlamps buzzes, a bulb about to burn out. My eyesight blurs like I’m fighting back tears, but when I swipe at them, they’re dry. Weird. Then I spot the note on bright yellow paper lying on the coffee table.
I set the toolbox down and approach it like I’d approach a live wire. Angry as I am, I’m still not ready to end things. Not by a long shot.
What if she is?
Lifting the scrap by a corner, I take it to the window to read.
“We need to talk. Gen.”
That doesn’t sound good. We needed to talk at the lake. Now things have had time to sit. And worsen.
I cross to the bedroom and try the doorknob. Closed but not locked. Should have checked it when I first came in.
Bathed in moon and starlight from the bedroom window, Gen is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, like some fairy-tale princess. She lies atop the sheets, her spaghetti-strap white satin nightgown covering her from chest to midthigh and hugging all the curves between. Her red hair curls in soft waves across the pillow, her lips parted slightly in sleep as if she’s waiting for a kiss to wake her.
I’m no prince or knight in shining armor, but I kneel beside the bed and touch my lips softly to hers.
She kisses me back, hard, then awakens fully and pulls away.
Not good at all.
Sitting up, she studies my face in the dim light, searching for who knows what.
“I was not cheating,” I say. “Hoped you’d know that.”
She draws back a little farther and blinks at me. “I do know that. I knew it with the whole phone number thing too. I just wasn’t thinking, and the lie didn’t help.” She manages a laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “I saw the look on your face when that waitress kissed you. Your eyes went so wide, and your hands were flailing like you were about to take flight.”
“Then what… why did you leave?” It comes out more plaintive than I want. I never sound like this.
Gen sighs and reaches around to prop a pillow behind herself. I stand and lean against the dresser, waiting. Joining her on the bed feels like the wrong move right now.
“I was heading out to grab us some pizza,” she begins. Her gaze goes distant, not focused on me at all, but on whatever happened earlier. “I was halfway down the stairs when I felt… you.”
“Huh?” Oh, very eloquent, Flynn. You should write speeches instead of waitressing at the pub.
“I was cold, wet, suffocating. It wasn’t me. It had to be you. I felt the ache in your knee and the pain in your ribs, and I knew.” She breaks off and swallows hard. “I knew you were in trouble.”
A shiver runs down my spine. This is too weird, but I believe every word she says.
“It was like… like the night my parents died.” It comes out a whisper.
Oh.
Gen told me once about losing her folks, how she awoke in her bed, a terrified sixteen-year-old, her screams choked off by a constriction in her throat she could not explain. She stumbled to her brother’s room and shook him awake because she could not speak. She turned blue right in front of him, collapsed, and lost consciousness. He called 911. Their parents were on a weekend getaway, leaving him, nineteen at the time, to watch over Genesis.
They took Gen to the hospital, where she recovered by morning, but her parents had drowned in a boating accident that same night. And she’d known. She’d felt it all as it happened. Clairvoyance, she called it. One of her several talents.
People think being psychic would be so cool. Watching how it affects Gen, and how it’s touched my own life, I don’t ever want those kinds of powers.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say. But I do it. I do it all the time.
“I wish you’d called.”
“Tried to. Dunked my phone.”
Another small laugh escapes her. “Yes, you’d do that, wouldn’t you? You are one to jump in with both feet.”
I don’t tell her how the light in the lake caused the damage to my cell, how it drew me in without me realizing it. Let her think I did it during the rescue. She has enough to stress about.
I don’t mention Kat’s ghost reappearing either.
“I nearly wrecked the Charger trying to get to you,” she continues. “I saw Chris’s car and the broken wall, and you weren’t anywhere around. There were police and ambulances….” She trails off. “And then you were there. I should have talked to you. But I couldn’t speak. I was just so relieved… so relieved to see you. And so angry that you’d scared me so much. But proud too. Really proud. I want you to know that, Flynn.”
