It seemed totally inappropriate that he remembered more about that fucking mobile than he did about his own child.
Or...maybe his child, was more like it.
And as he tried vainly to recall Amelia's infant face, or whether she had hair, or what color her eyes had been, the enormity of what Gin had cheated him of became truly apparent: A father's first moment with his child had been stolen from him. She had denied him that breathtaking, awe-inspiring, heart-wrenching meeting where he held an infant to his chest and vowed to care for her for all of his life.
Samuel felt a tickle on his face, and when he went to brush it away, he was surprised to find a tear on his fingertip.
Of course, Gin had also robbed his parents of their first bondings with their grandchild. Ever since Samuel T.'s brother had died, he had been the only son left in the family. And he knew that his mother and father were quietly waiting and hoping that he would settle down and give them another generation to carry forth the Lodge name.
There had been so much pain for the two of them, proof positive that wealth might insulate you from worrying about whether your house was paid for, but it didn't do shit against destiny: They knew all too well that nothing was permanent, no life guaranteed. So heirs mattered, not just for the dissemination of material things, but as recipients of love and tradition.
They had never talked aloud of any of this, however.
Sometimes, though, unspoken hopes were the hardest to bear.
And so Gin had denied them of their proper first meeting with their grandchild.
Assuming Amelia really was his.
As a gust of wind shouldered against the farmhouse, the swinging bed on the porch got pushed back on its tethers, and some of the wicker furniture shifted over the floorboards as if it were considering taking refuge inside the house.
With a curse, he turned away from the view...only to stall out.
There wasn't even anything to clean up in the kitchen, everything put away from breakfast, the dishwasher emptied, the counters tidied of the detritus of life.
Considering the chaos in his skull, he felt in desperate need of something that required his attention, a task that he could exert his intelligence over and improve, on his terms, in his way, at his choice and doing.
His mail and his phone seemed the two most logical avenues for this goal, and he went over to where he had dumped his navy blue suit jacket. Fishing out his cell phone, he accessed his voicemail. There were three messages, two from unknown numbers and the other from an attorney here in town who was suing one of Samuel T.'s clients.
He started with that one, which had come in just now, because why not. And as he listened to the guy make demands, he held the phone in place at his ear with his shoulder and began flipping through the household bills that had come in.
Deleting the message, he thought, Okaaaaay, maybe he'd tackle another situation first.
He triggered the next message down because he liked to do things in order, and as he put the phone back into position, he picked up the big flat envelope.
But the sound of a woman's voice on the recording stopped him.
"Hi, Sam. It's Prescott calling. I, ah, I've left you some messages. I haven't heard back about this coming weekend? Are you going to join me or...or is the fact that I haven't gotten anything from you the answer? Anyway...I'm just up in New York for today and tomorrow on a shoot. Then I'm back in Charlemont. It's no biggie, either way. But, yes, I'd love to know what your plans are. Thanks, bye."
Taking the phone from his ear, he hovered over the delete button.
He ended up skipping that and called forth the final message. It had come in about an hour before, when he'd been heading home with the top down and hadn't heard the ringing.
As the message started with nothing but static, he flipped the envelope open--and what was inside confused him.
What the...hell? Photographs?
"...Hello, Lodge," came a muffled male voice. "I just want to say fuck you. I'm going to kill her first and then I'm coming after you. You fucking..."
The message continued on as Samuel T. flipped through what turned out to be close-ups of Gin and him from the cemetery and then later as they left his building together after they'd had sex on his sofa at the penthouse.
Meanwhile, on the message, Richard Pford's cadence grew stronger in volume and urgency, the man working himself up into a lather that was going to hurt someone. Badly.
The final thing in the envelope was a single sheet of paper with a reporter's name and number on it, and a statement that a quote would be appreciated before everything ran the following morning.
Samuel T. cut off the message and didn't delete it. Calling up Gin's phone number, he waited through the rings until voicemail kicked in. Then he called her again. And a third time.
He lasted a split second after that.
With curses leaving his lips, he raced through the house to get one of his handguns out of the study.
As the storm raged across the land, he ran back to the kitchen, grabbed the keys to his Range Rover, and punched open the door to the garage, triggering the opener--
Only to stop.
Heart pounding, body flooded with adrenaline, he became trapped on a precipice he wasn't sure he wanted to be on anymore: Gin's drama was a sinkhole for him. It always had been. She was the siren who called him into tumultuous seas, the beacon that he followed toward chaos, the fire off in the distance that he couldn't resist, even as it threatened to burn down his house.
He thought of Amelia.
The lie.
The losses he had suffered with his daughter.
As the garage door finished its ascent, the hot, wet breath of the storm barged into the bays.
He imagined himself crouched over the steering wheel, the Range Rover's engine powering forward, visibility poor, his destination unclear. She had been headed back to Easterly--or at least he assumed she had been. He wasn't sure where she was.
Maybe Richard was waiting for her there.
And Easterly always had people around. So she wouldn't be alone.
Samuel T. watched the storm from this different vantage point a little longer. Then he turned away from the torrential rain and damaging winds...and went back in his house.
The door shut on its own behind him.
Gin could barely see River Road in front of her as she shot down the Ohio's shoreline, the fury of the storm muscling the car around so that she constantly had to realign left and right to stay on the pavement. As she breaknecked along, she passed a number of cars that had pulled over to the side, their blinkers flashing as they waited the worst of it out.
Richard was right behind her.
No matter how fast she went into the curves or how much she tried to pull away on the straight sections, he was sticking with her. Closing in.
As she kept going through the gallons of water falling from the sky and the flashing lightning and pounding thunder, part of her was in the car, hands locked on the wheel, body braced, foot pressed hard on the accelerator. Yet even more of her was floating above the speeding Mercedes, watching everything from a position somewhere above her right shoulder.
It was, she supposed, as it would be if she died in a crash, her spirit lingering over the chaos of the corporeal world as the car fireballed into oblivion.
Funny, she was familiar with this splitting experience. She had it whenever Richard was on her sexually, and there had been times before he had come along that she had done this: Whenever she got too wild, too drunk, too out of control, the disassociation could take over.
It could also happen if she were scared.
The first incidence had been when she was a child. Her father had come after her and her brother Lane, for some reason. She could remember the man marching down the hallway outside of the bedrooms, his face in a rage, a strap in his hand, his voice like the thunder in this storm.
She had run as fast as her feet could take her. Run, run, run, and then she'd hid
--she had known that was the only thing to do to save herself.
She had known because Lane had told her so: Run, Gin, run, and hide.
Hide, Gin, so he can't find you--go into a closet or under the bed....
She had been three and a half? Maybe four?
She had chosen the bed in her room to take cover under, and she could still recall exactly what it smelled like under there, the dusty rug and the sweet floor polish. She had been shaking and breathing hard, and tears had come out of her eyes, but she had not cried out loud.
Lane had gotten beaten but good. She had heard everything from his room next door.
She hadn't even been sure what he had done. And she didn't think Lane had known, either--no, wait, he had refused to tell their father where Maxwell was. And she had gotten caught up in it all when she had seen Lane run by and had chased after him, thinking at first it was a chance to play.
Yes, that was how it had gone down.
And she could still recall that sound of the strap on her brother. He had cried out over and over again...and the beating hadn't stopped until he had told William that Max was in the basement, in the wine cellar.
Those heavy footfalls had then come down the hall and paused in front of the open door to Gin's room. How her heart had pounded. She could have sworn he'd hear it. And yet her father had continued on--and she had stayed put.
Eventually, she had had to go to the bathroom.
She had remained there, however, until she had peed herself. Some five hours later.
She had told no one about that part; she had been too ashamed to admit that she had soiled the carpet under the bed.
When they had done her suite of rooms over when she had turned thirteen, she could still remember the decorator frowning at the stain when the old bed had been taken away.
That was why she liked her rooms to be white: In a convoluted way, it proved to everyone and everybody that she hadn't been weak and lost control of her bladder.
Craziness.
And so was this, she thought as she tried to draw herself back down into herself.
Checking the rearview again, Richard was so close to the Mercedes's bumper that she could clearly visualize him over his own steering wheel, his face full of rage, his mouth open like he was screaming at her.
As fear spiked and she decided he was truly mad, she had a strange realization. Richard, and his particular brand of unpleasantness, with its threat of violence never far from the surface, was what she had grown up around. In this way, he was like her father, a simmering explosion about to find a target.
Yes, she thought. She had chosen him for a number of reasons.
Not all of them money.
Had her father known this? Had William been aware of Richard's proclivities? Probably not. And even if he had been, it was doubtful that her father would have cared whether or not the torture continued. After all, when William had tried to force her into marrying Richard right before he had died, it had been all about the business imperative: William had assumed that with Richard "in" the family, Pford Distributors would offer better terms to the BBC.
So she hadn't been taken into account except as a lever to be pulled.
In fact, William had known what was coming with all those bad deals and bad loans, and he'd clearly planned to cut some of the financial shortfalls off at the pass by selling her to Richard. And of course, she had refused. Only to then volunteer for exactly what he'd demanded of her when it had become clear she was going to lose her lifestyle.
Her father's daughter, indeed--
Richard rammed the rear end of the Mercedes, the bump hard enough to kick Gin's head back against the rest. As she screamed, she fought to keep control and stay on the road--
He did it again. Just before a tight turn that would take them over a thin bridge which spanned one of the Ohio's larger feeding streams.
"Stop!" she yelled at him. "Leave me alone!"
But he was a nightmare of her own making, a Grim Reaper she had let into her life because she had been too scared, too lazy, and too spoiled to go forward without the money and the prominence she had grown up with.
He was her own damn fault, the culmination of her sins and her weaknesses, the reckoning she had never thought would come for every snotty thing she had ever done.
He was going to run her off the road, and he had a gun in that car of his--he had told her just a week ago that he kept it under the front seat because he had to drive around at night in that Bentley of his.
Richard was going to shoot her and maybe himself and that was how all this was going to end.
How she was going to end--
Thump!
As he rammed her car one last time, the Mercedes began to lose traction, and that was when everything slowed down. She steered hard away from the river to counter the drift, and the car corrected for a moment. But then the hood ornament over-swung to the marshes and the trees on the right.
The guardrail popped the front two wheels off the ground and she had a brief moment of weightlessness...and then the slam on the far side clapped her teeth together and made her head ring--oh, she wasn't wearing a seat belt. She'd hit the ceiling.
There was no time to think. Airbags exploded in her face, powder going everywhere as she was punched in the chest.
And the ride didn't end there.
Her foot hit the accelerator again after she landed, giving that powerful engine a huge boost that propelled her further off the road and into the marshes. Trees hit the front of the car, scratched down the side, clawed at the undercarriage.
As the airbags had already begun to deflate, she caught sight of the huge swamp maple directly in her path--and there was no stopping any of it, no changing her course, no altering the inevitable crash.
Rather like destiny.
The impact was like an explosion, and her forehead hit the windshield. Then the rebound threw her back into her seat, and she ping-ponged in between the steering wheel and the headrest.
Until she finally fell back against the seat.
Dizzy, confused, and in pain, she heard a subtle hiss in front of her from the engine and tried to focus, but her vision wasn't working right--
Bright light. Very bright light.
Had she died and this was the afterlife that people talked about?
Except no, she had stayed in her body. Hadn't she? She thought she had--
Click. Click. Clickclickclick.
She lolled her head toward the sound. And then jumped back from her door.
Richard was trying to open things, trying to get at her, pulling and yanking at the handle, getting nowhere because of the locking mechanism.
As something blurred her eyes, she pushed her hands across her face and prayed that the sunroof hadn't broken--and thus provided him with another way at her. But it wasn't rain. It was blood.
"Let me in!" Richard screamed as he pounded on the glass with his fists. "You let me in, Virginia!"
Lightning flashed and the rain fell, plastering his dark hair to his head, his face like a Halloween mask, slick and pale and horrible.
"Let me in, Virginia!"
Bam! Bam! Bam--
Scrambling across the seat, she put her back to the other door and tucked her knees up to her chest. As she linked her arms around herself and shivered, blood dripping down onto her dress, she thought it was just like being under that bed. Waiting to see if her father would come after her or stick to beating her brothers.
Bang, bang, bang--
As the sound changed, it was because Richard was hitting the window with something else. Something metal...the butt of a gun--
The safety glass spidered first--and then broke free in a chunk that fell where she had been sitting behind the wheel.
Richard put his head through the hole, his eyes and smile all Jack Nicholson from The Shining. "No more running, Virginia...now be a good girl, and open this door."
As Richard ordered her to let him in, something made a connection in Gi
n's brain. Unhinging her right arm, she patted at the glove compartment without taking her eyes off Richard. The latch evaded her fingers--and when she did find it, she fumbled with pushing it.
"You don't want to make me madder, Virginia."
Rain was running down Richard's face, but he didn't seem to notice, and as lightning flashed again, she glanced up through the closed sunroof.
"Looking for God?" he said. "I'm going to help you meet Him, Virginia--"
"That's not my name," she choked out.
"What was that? Not your name? Should I call you 'whore,' then? Is that what Lodge calls you when he's fucking you?"
Finally, the glove compartment fell open, and she shoved her hand in, pain registering in her knuckles as she clawed through its contents, praying that--
As her hand locked on the butt of a nine millimeter, she closed her eyes and tried to remember what her brother Edward had taught her about how to shoot. Where was the safety? How did she disengage it?
Oh, God, if there were no bullets, she was a dead woman.
She was probably dead, anyway.
"I'm so sorry, Richard," she said quickly to distract him. "I didn't mean it, I was wrong. I'm sorry, I was wrong--"
As Richard frowned, she sat forward and reached out to him with her free hand. "Please forgive me, please don't leave me--"
Lightning flashed, illuminating the inside of the Mercedes, and she knew the instant he saw what she was doing with her other hand. Just as she flicked the gun's safety off and started to swing the muzzle up and around, he shifted back and double-palmed his own weapon, pointing it through the hole in the glass.
"Don't call me Virginia!" she shouted at the top of her lungs as they both pulled the triggers.
Loud popping, multiple shots, the ringing sound of at least one bullet hitting metal. And as Gin kept shooting, she closed her eyes and twisted toward the dash, trying to get her major organs out of the way. Ears hurting, eyes stinging, something wrong with her leg, she just kept that forefinger down on that fucking trigger, the autoloader doing what it was supposed to do until there was nothing left in the clip.
And still she kept her arm up and that grip hard, even though she was shaking so badly that the back of her skull was repeatedly banging into something.
What was that sound?
There was some kind of rhythmic--
It was her. She was panting. And there was still a hiss, coming out of the front of the car. And rain, softer rain now, pattering on the hood, the roof, the windshield, like cats with quiet paws.