Chapter 3 - A Body in the Current
Tobias pushed Rosalind under the rock as the rifleman's flashlight cut across the water.
“Head down,” he murmured.
They flattened themselves against slippery stone. Above them, the stranger called, “You sure they were both inside?”
“Absolutely,” Garrett answered.
The stranger had a broad build and a flat voice. He swept his beam over the river once more. “Current runs south. They'll turn up below the old mill.”
Rosalind's teeth chattered so hard she bit her tongue. Garrett had not simply left her to drown. He had brought someone to make sure she stayed dead.
Penelope said, “We shouldn't be here when the sheriff arrives.”
“Sheriff knows what's coming,” the man replied.
Tobias gripped Rosalind's arm. His fingers were numb, but his face was fiercely alert. When the truck pulled away, he led her along the submerged ledge toward a drainage culvert. They crawled through mud, broken reeds, and a smell like rusted pennies. By the time they reached the far bank, Rosalind could barely walk.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Vance Mercer. Garrett's business partner.”
“Garrett said Vance moved to Denver.”
“Garrett says a lot of things.”
Tobias pulled a waterproof pouch from inside his jacket. In it was a cheap phone, cash, and a small silver key. He offered Rosalind a dry emergency blanket.
“You expected this,” she said.
“I expected a move. I didn't expect him to drive us into the river.”
“You sat behind me and said nothing.”
His jaw tightened. “I was trying to catch the person who arranged my accident. I thought I could protect you without telling you.”
“You were wrong.”
“I know.”
A siren sounded in the distance. Rosalind wanted to run toward it. Tobias caught her shoulder.
“The sheriff's deputy who found my car fifteen years ago?” he said. “He works for Vance now.”
A second siren joined the first. Then Rosalind's borrowed phone, sealed inside Tobias's pouch, lit up with a notification from Garrett.
I found her body. Please don't call me. I can't talk.
He had sent the message to her best friend.
When they stopped beneath the culvert, Rosalind tried three times to call emergency services. Each time Tobias made her hang up. She wanted to hate him for it. Instead she hated the tiny part of herself that knew he was right.
“Your husband picked the river,” Tobias said. “He picked that curve, that barrier, that hour. Nothing about this was panic.”
“He told me we were going to dinner.”
“Then he needed you dressed for dinner.”
She remembered Garrett bringing her favorite cream blouse from the closet and saying she looked beautiful in it. She remembered him taking Tobias's wheelchair from the garage himself, which he had never done before. Each kindness became another piece of machinery in a murder she hadn't noticed being built around her.
“I told him I was afraid of deep water,” she said. “I told him when we first met.”
Tobias lowered his eyes. “I remember.”
For a moment the brother and sister were children again, crouched beneath the dock while their father taught Rosalind to float. Her father had promised the river would hold her if she stopped fighting it. Tonight the river had tried to take her. A man she trusted had pushed her into it.
“You taught me not to panic,” she told Tobias. “But you taught me to trust people, too.”
“I know which lesson failed you.”
May you like
She looked at the damp night beyond the culvert. “I won't let Garrett write the ending.”
Before anyone had found a body.
