"The bitch somehow got hold of the Remington," Lucas said, "and shot them with their own gun. Damn her!"
"She sent them running toward the lake, toward us."
"Then opened fire."
Tommy and Jeff, both shot and bleeding, had begun to crawl for the cover of trees. Lucas and Meredyth watched, helpless to do anything as another shot rang out, killing Tommy. "Nooo!" Meredyth cried out.
Another shot hammered into Jeff's back. Both young men were dead. No one could survive two such rounds. Lucas had seen Jeff's body respond to the fourth shot, absorbing the powerful impact. "God damn the bitch!" he shouted.
"What're we going to do, Lucas? We're next!"
A fifth shot rang out, and Tommy Farns worth's head exploded. She was now using the bodies for target practice, telling Lucas and Meredyth that she could hit any target she wished from the upstairs window of the house, and given that it was hunting season, no one would think the shots unusual.
Lucas had already pulled Meredyth down below the gunwale of the rowboat, hoping to leave Lauralie with as small a target as possible. But bullets began to ping into the metal hull. "We've got to take our chances in the water!"
Lucas rocked the boat, calling for Meredyth to do the same. Another bullet whistled past, spitting up water. Suddenly, the boat gained momentum and flipped, sending them into the lake. Holding onto the upturned boat, Meredyth came up fearing that he had been hit, but he assured her otherwise. "Keep hold of the boat and kick like hell for shore!" he shouted as more rounds pinged into the water around them.
They guided their cover toward the opposite shore. "We've got to get out of range of the gun," Lucas told her.
Bullets continued to ping off the rowboat.
"She's stringing this out," gasped Lucas, spitting water. "She could have hit either one of us with that scope and range. Likely had both of us in her crosshairs."
"Else she's a lousy shot." Meredyth gulped lake water, continuing to kick for shore.
"A weapon like that… with the scope, a child could pick us off out here. No, she deliberately chose to wound those two Farnsworth boys, and she also chose to finish them off when they posed no threat at a moment when she could have put one through my head or yours, Mere."
"But she didn't, and we both know why."
"She wants to watch us sweat…doesn't want to end the game between us, not yet."
"She wants me to think about life without you, Lucas, before she takes you away from me."
Continuing to use the rowboat as cover, they paddled farther and farther from the sniper's scope, kicking for the Brody pier. Panting, Meredyth said, "Lauralie means to make me suffer for the rest of my life, Lucas, which means-"
"She never intended to kill you."
"Exactly. It's you, Lucas, she's after. She intends to destroy my life by killing you and anyone I love. She wants me to mourn all the people I love that she's taking from me. Thank God Mom and Dad aren't here."
They reached the Brody pier, but remained in the water, pulling themselves along beneath it as cover until they reached shore.
"She wants me to suffer the guilt of all these people dying around me, Lucas. Now those poor boys out there on my lawn brutally killed, my innocent gardener, for God's sake, Mira Lourdes, the old nun, Katherine Croombs, even Arthur Belkvin and his dogs…she wants me to feel responsible for it all. That I somehow caused all their deaths-and the culmination of it all? The death of the one I love most, you."
The gunfire had ceased as darkness had enveloped Lake Madera.
"The moon's gone under again," he said. "Now's the time! Make for the house. Gotta get to a phone."
As they ran, dripping wet and cold, toward the darkened house, the upturned rowboat floated off and into a weedy backwash. No shots came as they made it to the stairs, Meredyth slipping and falling. No shots came as they made it to the front door left ominously ajar. In the driveway, they'd seen the family RV, waiting like a patient dog for its master. They burst into the Brody home, Meredyth calling out each of the Brodys by name. "Myron! Lorene! Candice! It's Meredyth Sanger! Where are you?"
Meredyth called out over and over for them as Lucas tore open doors in search of the family. No answers, no finds.
"No lights," he ordered her as they searched the downstairs den for a phone. Grabbing it, Lucas heard the dead air of a disconnected line. "Bitch has cut the lines. No big surprise." He looked around for a weapon, but the man's glassed-in gun rack was smashed and all his weapons were missing. Lucas instantly realized on seeing this that they might well find a triple murder here, quite possibly mutilations on the same scale as they'd found with Byron Priestly and Arthur Belkvin. Lauralie seemed to take glee in slashing people open. "Stick close by me," he solemnly ordered Meredyth.
She took a tentative step up a flight of carpeted stairs, but he stopped her, pointing to a trickling trail of blood on the kitchen tiles. The blood looked burgundy in the absence of light. "She's left us another intentional trail to follow."
It led them through the expansive kitchen and to a basement door off the kitchen. Meredyth buried her head in his chest, and he held her. "My God, Lucas, she's killed them all."
Lucas had no words that might comfort her. He reached a hand out to the basement door, cautiously opening it, and staring into the black hole of the stairwell. "Stay here, Mere."
"Don't you dare leave me alone."
"I have to step inside and close the door before flicking on the light switch. I don't want that madwoman to know where we are. Understood?"
"I go with you."
He saw the adamant fire in her eyes that said no use arguing. "All right, but it could be a shock. Brace for it."
Once on the stairwell, he flicked on the light, and it instantly revealed blood on the interior door and on the panels of dry wall on both sides of the stairwell. They were, in effect, surrounded by a red rain that looked like paintbrush flecks and spurts, the kind of high-velocity blood residue that comes of gunshot wounds at close range, creating a crazy mosaic only a blood-spatter evidence expert could read. It said to Lucas, They were shot here at the top of the stairwell and the killer used their own weight to her benefit, simply allowing the bodies to fall atop one another. The flood of light revealed the heap of three bodies lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.
"That bitch knows we're here looking at what she's done," said Meredyth, trembling under his embrace. "Directed us across the lake and to the kitchen and here.
Lucas. She's orchestrated the whole damn thing…watching us tip over in the water, climb out at the pier, all of it."
"She can watch our every move through that scope," he agreed. "But she can't see through walls."
Lucas held Meredyth's head close to him, not wishing her to look down the stairwell again at the carnage that lay there, mother, father, and teen daughter. He ordered her to stay on the top stair as he went below. At the foot of the stairs, Lucas got to know the Brodys up close and personal.
Myron, Lorene, and their child, Candice, all with gags, blindfolds, and hands tied at their backs. They'd been summarily shot in the head on the top step. Lauralie had guided each to the basement stairs one at a time, fired into each cranium, and had simply let gravity do the rest.
Myron Brody was at the bottom of the heap, and it recalled Lucas's time in Viet Nam below such a death heap. He truly hated this Lauralie Blodgett now, and he wanted in the worst way to see her dead before this night was over.
Lucas now worked to separate the dead from one another in an effort to find keys for the RV and possibly a cell phone. He pried Myron Brody from the weight of his wife and child and fished into the pants pockets for keys. There were none. He tried Mrs. Brody's pockets. No keys. Finally, he tried the young girl's jeans. Nothing. Finally giving up, he located a tarp and covered the Brodys.