“Tell me.” Covie shook Frank again. “Tell me. Where is Winn?”
“She shouldn’t have asked so many questions.”
That statement had me flying across the room, ripping Frank out of Covie’s grip. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.” He gulped and there was real fear in his eyes. Because I would murder this motherfucker, and he knew it. “I wouldn’t hurt her.”
“Then where the fuck is she?” I bellowed.
The stench of whiskey on his breath was overpowering as he lost it, breaking down into a fit of sobs. When I dropped him, he collapsed to his knees.
“Where’s Rain?” Covie asked him.
Frank didn’t answer. He buried his face in his hands and cried.
Covie bolted for the door that led to the house, whipping it open. “Rain!”
There was no answer.
He came back and scanned the empty space. “Her Jeep is gone. Maybe she’s shopping. Let’s call her. See if she knows where he might have taken Winnie.”
The sound of the river grew louder as Covie went for his phone.
The river. The mental image of Frank holding Winn’s head beneath the water exploded in my head. Her lungs filling with water. Her lifeless body floating downstream. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the picture away.
When I opened them, they landed on the safe in the corner. Maybe Frank had taken out a pistol. Maybe he’d pressed the barrel to her head. My stomach roiled.
“I told her not to do it this time.” Frank’s babble tore through my brain.
“What?”
“I told her not this time. That it was different. But Winnie knew. She’s too smart. She’s always been too smart.”
“Wait.” I held up a hand. “You told who not to do what?”
His whisper was barely audible. “Rain.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Winslow
The blood trail coating half of my face made opening both eyes almost impossible. With my hands bound behind my back, there was no way to wipe my eyelid clean. Every blink was sticky. Every breath strained. Every step excruciating.
“Rain—”
“Shh.” She poked her knife at the gash in my head. The metal tip barely made contact with my flesh, but even the graze was enough to send me to the dirt.
The crack of my knees against the rocks rang through my bones like the vibration of a bell, but instead of a beautiful chime, it was agony. Sheer agony.
My head spun in a dizzy circle, like a spinning top the moment before it collapsed. Blackness tickled at the edges of my consciousness but I shoved it away, forcing a breath into my lungs. Breathe.
I’d had the wind knocked out of me countless times in physical training or karate. I’d strained muscles and earned thousands of bruises. But this was my first concussion. Each move was sluggish, and all I wanted was to sleep. Just for a minute.
I leaned forward, the ground beckoning, and twisted enough so that when I dropped, I hit my shoulder and not my face. Wrong move. The second I crashed, pain ripped through my arm. Either my shoulder was dislocated or I had a fractured bone.
When I’d been unconscious, Rain had done something to my arm. Maybe, when she and Frank had been loading me in the Jeep, she’d dropped me. Maybe she’d stomped on me or used the meat mallet again. Something was definitely wrong because my muscles didn’t want to work right and any strength in my left hand was gone, stolen by the ache.
But before I could close my eyes and succumb to the dark, Rain’s knife was back, the tip digging into the smooth skin at my neck.
Pain had a way of cutting through the haze.
“Up.” She gripped my elbow and forced me to my feet.
I swallowed the urge to puke as I stood. “Please.”
“Shh.” She shoved me up the trail. “Walk.”
One foot in front of the other, I rushed nothing. For every step, I took two breaths.
Think, Winn. My brain didn’t want to think. My brain wanted sleep. Wake up. Fight. “Why are you doing this?”
“Stop talking.”
“Rain, please.”
She lifted the knife to my head, to the place where the blood felt thickest. “Quiet.”
I clamped my mouth shut and nodded, taking another step.
Up and up Indigo Ridge.
To the end.
Was this how Lily Green had died? Forced to make this miserable climb? Was this the path that Harmony Hardt had walked too? What about the others?
It hadn’t been suicide. I was right. All this time, my instincts had been pushing me to this conclusion. But those same instincts had failed me too. They’d failed me for not suspecting Frank. For not seeing the monsters who’d lived next door.
Now it was too late.
The sky was the purest of navy blues above my head. The stars appeared to be dancing in a dizzy circle, but it was my fuzzy head playing tricks on me. The one spinning was me.
Rain had slammed that meat tenderizer into my skull and, in a blink, there’d only been black.
I hadn’t even raised an arm to block the strike. I’d be disappointed in myself later. If I survived this.
That had to have been hours ago. I’d woken in the back of her Jeep at the base of the ridge. When she’d waved a vial of smelling salts under my nostrils, only the faintest of golden glows had been left on the horizon. The light was nearly gone now. And there was just enough moonlight to see the narrow trail that loomed ahead.
Rain didn’t relent for a moment. She pushed me up that trail, step by step. My lungs were on fire and my legs burned. She breathed like she was lounging on a couch, not hiking to the apex of a cliff.
Rain. How had it come to this? Who was she? The pain in my heart made this all so much harder to believe.
“I thought you loved me,” I whispered.
“Loved you?” she scoffed. “Liked you. Yes. You go too far with using that word. You’re like my cheating husband. Always spouting words of love.”
“He loved them?”
“He was obsessed with them. Leaving them notes. Arranging their secret rendezvous. Even when he promised me he’d stop, he didn’t. So this is his punishment.”
“You could divorce him.”
“That’s too kind. Did you know this used to be one of his favorite hiking spots? He proposed to me here. Now he can hike this ridge and think about what he’s done. About what he’s made me do.”
“I never touched Frank.”
“No, you asked questions.” She shoved my elbow, nearly knocking me off-balance. “You should have let it go. They got what they deserved. So did he. And it could have ended there if you had done what everyone else in this goddamn town has done for years and believed what you were supposed to believe.”
That these girls, at least some of them, had killed themselves. And yes, everyone had simply believed.
“I told him to stop this.” Rain’s seething words seemed more for herself than for me. “I told him the last time had to be the last time or I’d bring him up here next.”
“If you want to take me to town and collect him instead, I won’t argue.”
She laughed, the musical, sweet laugh that I’d known since childhood. It sent a chill up my spine. “Keep going, Winnie.”