Rescue At Cedar Lake

“What trunk?” She tried to turn her head toward him but his grip held her tight. “Look, this isn’t my cottage. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’re looking for a trunk!” Castor shouted, so loudly her ears rang. His mouth grew even closer to her face. The stench of stale coffee and cigars grew stronger as he leaned toward her, shifting his weight deeper onto her torso. “You know, a large, heavy, old-fashioned luggage trunk. Something big enough to hide a body in.”

Snickering came from the other side of the room.

“Again, this isn’t my cottage!” She could almost feel the defiance rising in her voice, battling back against the fear as her breath pushed its way out of her aching lungs. “I just got here this morning. I haven’t seen a trunk.”

Castor sat back, relieving just enough of the pressure on her torso to let her gasp a deeper breath. He turned and shouted more frustrated profanities at his two henchmen. For a moment, she was ignored again as they ransacked Mandy’s family cottage. She closed her eyes, prayers filling her heart as she listened and tried to focus on any tiny sliver of information she could glean. Castor called the other two Brick and Howler. Brick sounded angry and frustrated by the futility of the search. Howler barely spoke.

“Where’s Mandy Rhodes?” All too soon Castor was back barking in her ear again. “And that other woman she drove up with?”

A shiver of fear ran through her heart. How did he know who they were? Had they been watching them?

Lord, please keep Zoe and Mandy far, far away from here.

“I don’t know where they are. They went for a drive.”

“Where did they go?” Castor’s grip tightened. “When are they getting back?”

“I don’t know! They didn’t tell me!”

Her hands were yanked back. She heard the rip of duct tape tearing. Then she felt him bind her wrists together behind her. Castor stood and pulled her to her feet. She looked up at the tall, heavyset man, whose sneering mouth and dangerous eyes seemed to float unmoored through the holes of a ski mask. “You’d better not be lying to me.”

“I’m not. I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

Castor leaned in so close that his face was inches from her, making it difficult not to turn away from the stench of his hot breath. “What if I threaten to kill you, slowly and painfully? Would that help you remember?”

No. But it would make her even more determined to not go down without a fight. She head butted him, as hard as she could. His head snapped back as her forehead cracked hard against his jaw. He let go of her. She turned and sprinted across the wooden floor toward the shattered remains of the doorway. Melting puddles of snow seeped into her socks. A bracing winter wind brushed her face. A sharp pain filled her skull as Castor’s rough hands grabbed her hair and snapped her backward. “Now I’m really going to make you hurt.”

Lord, please. I need You now...

“Come on, dude! This is a waste of time!” The rail-thin masked man the others called Howler snorted loudly from the corner of the room. The sound that was halfway between a laugh and a snarl. He waved his shotgun in their direction. “This wasn’t the job I signed up for. You want her dead? I’ll kill her. Bang. Right now. No problem. Or if you can, kill her quick so we can move on. Whatever. You said we’ve got a trunk to find. All I care about is getting my cut of the money. And I don’t wanna not get my money just because we’re stuck here waiting while you punish that finicky little princess chick for not telling you what you want to know!”

Finicky little princess? Theresa blinked as the words clanged like old bells at the corner of her mind. But before she could decipher the ringing, Castor shoved her across the room. He pushed her into the broom closet. She fell, landing hard on her knees among the mops and cleaning supplies. Castor stood over her. Blood seeped through the mouth of the mask. Her head butt had split his lip. “Fine. We’ll go find the trunk. But then I’m coming back and dealing with her when we’re done. She knows something. I’m sure of it. It’s in her memory somewhere. Even if she’s too useless to remember it.”

“Whatever,” Howler said. “Do whatever you want to do. Just after I get my money.”

The closet door slammed shut. Darkness fell. She heard a chair being scraped against the door.

“Brick!” Castor snapped. “Sit here. Watch the door. Shoot her if she tries to escape. But don’t kill her. I might need her later.”

There was a muffled argument and some more swearing that ended when Castor snapped that Brick would get an extra cut of payment at the end if he stayed behind to watch her, and a shotgun slug in the head if he didn’t. Then there was the thud of a body landing in a chair against the door. Castor and Howler’s voices faded away.

Theresa pulled herself into a seated position, slid a metal bucket behind her and scraped the duct tape binding her hands against the spout. It loosened slowly. Her socks were so wet and cold her feet stung. Theresa prayed hard, begging God to save her life and to protect Mandy, Zoe and Alex from danger. Then she took a deep breath and focused her mind on the criminals, pulling together the scraps of what she knew as if this was a file that she’d gotten through Victim Services.

These men were thieves. That much she knew. Castor and his lackeys were looking to steal some kind of trunk that he seemed to think she’d know about. But why? What could it hold that was worth ransacking a cottage over? Whatever it was, the henchmen were worried about running out of time and not getting their cut of the bounty. Castor had mentioned Mandy by name and knew about Zoe. So she couldn’t rule out that it had something to do with Mandy’s anxiety. But Theresa couldn’t be sure. Both Mandy’s older brothers were successful enough to have enemies.

Howler had called her a “finicky little princess.”

She closed her eyes and worked her duct-taped hands faster against the pail as the words pricked at painful memories buried so deep in the recesses of her mind that she had to ease them out slowly, bit by bit, like getting burrs out of her hair. She’d almost managed to forget that some of the kids at Cedar Lake had called her “princess.” They’d called her “useless,” too, and other things implying they thought she was too pampered and nonathletic to ever be one of them. She didn’t know who’d started it. But it’d definitely gotten worse after they’d seen her sailboat capsize in a sudden summer storm. She’d gotten tangled in the rigging and might’ve drowned if Alex hadn’t come to her rescue.

Back then, her parents owned a large seasonal equipment store on the highway north of Toronto. It sold boats, personal watercraft, sporting goods, barbecues and cottage furniture, along with whole rooms of decorative country kitsch. As a family, they’d always had the newest and nicest toys on the lake—sample models to trial, mostly. At the end of every summer, one of the other families on the lake, the Wrights, would host a huge team scavenger hunt. Afterward, Theresa’s mother would invite all the families on the lake over for barbecue.

That annual barbecue was also going be her wedding reception the summer she’d been twenty.

So, maybe there’d been some jealousy. Or the misconception that her family had more money than they did. But just before she’d turned twenty a warehouse fire had wiped out most of their inventory. The family then lost a long, hard court battle, in which, because the security cameras apparently hadn’t been working, the insurance company had accused her dad of setting the fire to cover some bad debts. So less than a month before her wedding, her parents realized they were probably going to go bankrupt and started making quiet plans to sell their business, cottage and home in a last-ditch effort to pay off their debts.

She could still remember the anxiety filling her heart as she’d gone to tell Alex. She’d been looking for a shoulder to cry on. Instead, he’d met her with the news that he’d dropped out of yet another university program, just tossing away a full scholarship and paid internship, as if real-world responsibilities didn’t even matter.

But that was just the way Alex was. He was spontaneous. But that day he’d been so full of blather that her sadness had turned to frustration. She’d said maybe they should postpone the wedding until he grew up enough. They’d fought. He took the cruel taunt that the other kids made about how she seemed to think she was royalty and aimed it at her heart with an added sting: should’ve known better than to fall for such a finicky little princess like you.

She’d handed the ring back, feeling too hurt to even cry. And that had been that.

“I’m done waiting.” Brick’s voice snapped through the closed door. “I’m cold. This is stupid. I want my money. I’m going to go find the thing myself. But I don’t know my way around this stupid lake and Castor thinks you know something. So you’re going to help me, whether you want to or not.”

The cupboard door flew open. With one desperate tug she yanked her hands free. Duct tape tore. The bucket clattered behind her. She launched herself headfirst into Brick, knocking him back so hard he slipped and hit the floor. He’d taken off his ski mask, showing a square face with fat cheeks, thin lips and deep-set eyes. She pushed past him and ran down the narrow hallway leading to the cottage’s smaller back door. If she could just grab her boots and her gloves and make it out the back door she might be able to escape through the trees and find somewhere to hide.

A sawed-off shotgun blast sounded behind her. Splinters exploded in the wall ahead as a hunting slug struck the wood.

“You keep running, I’ll shoot you,” Brick said. “Castor’s made me put up with too much nonsense to stick me on babysitting duty. I need that trunk. I want my money. So, you’re gonna help me find it. Even if you’re bleeding and in pieces.”

Her stocking feet froze beneath her as her brain struggled to think. Even if she cooperated, he was likely to kill her eventually, unless she just went along with him until she found a way to escape. But if she tried to keep running, she had no doubt he’d shoot her on the spot. There was a thud on the roof above them, like a sudden clump of snow falling off a tree branch. The hot barrel of a weapon brushed against the back of her head.

“I don’t know anything about a trunk.” Her hands rose slowly. “But I’ll help you leave Cedar Lake if you promise not to hurt anyone else.”

“Nice try.” He snorted. “But I’m the boss now. We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but, either way, I’m not leaving this lake without what I came for. Castor said he was willing to pay me good to find this trunk. He’ll probably pay me double if I find it first. And if he gets mad at me for hurting you, I’ll just tell him it’s your fault for running away.” He spun her around and marched her back into the remains of the living room. “Now, you’re going to start cooperating. Because if ya don’t, I’m going to hurt you so bad you’re gonna wish I’d just shot ya.”

An ugly grin spread across his flat face. She closed her eyes and prayed.

A crash sounded from the low roof above. Brick swore. She opened her eyes in time to see a snow-covered form in jeans, a brown leather jacket and snowmobile helmet swing down through the open doorway. Brick grabbed her hard around her neck and yanked her back in a headlock, pressing her body back tight against his like a hostage. The tip of the sawed-off shotgun pressed into the soft flesh at the base of her skull just behind her ear.

“Look man, whoever you are, I’m just a guy looking for the same thing you are!” Brick shouted. “The trunk’s not here. We don’t have it and we don’t know where it is! So there’s no need for any problems. Just turn around and pretend you never saw us.”

“No can do.” The man in leather moved forward. “Drop your weapon, and I’ll let you leave. But you’re going to let her go.”

He pulled off his helmet. Her breath caught in her throat.

It was Alex.

TWO

Theresa’s jaw dropped as her former fiancé stepped toward her through the ransacked cottage. How was he here? It’d barely been twenty minutes since Castor and his thugs first attacked her. There was no way Alex could’ve driven around the lake in that amount of time, and the ice on the lake was hardly safe. Snowflakes clung to his body. Jeans and a leather jacket hung on his tall, muscular frame. A long scarf looped around his neck and hung all the way to his waist. His blue-eyed gaze brushed her face.

“Hey, Theresa.” He took another step forward with that casual saunter of his that always made it look like he was all joints and yet totally comfortable in his skin. Brick tightened his grip. Alex stopped. His hands rose slightly. But his smile never faltered.

What was he doing, strolling casually toward the armed man who held her captive like he was some action hero?

“Look, clearly your buddies have taken off and left you all alone without any backup. So how about you drop that shotgun and we talk this out?” Alex asked. Something she’d never seen before flashed in his eyes, an edge that was as firm and unrelenting as steel. “Because there’s no way I’m letting you hurt her.”

The wind outside grew louder. The cottage seemed to shake on its foundations.

“I’m the one in charge here!” Bravado and uncertainty pushed through Brick’s words in equal measure, and it wasn’t clear which one was going to win. “Me! Not you. Not Castor. Not anyone! I’m going to take her with me and find that trunk, and nobody’s going to stop me!”

Alex shrugged, and as he did his whole body seemed to shift forward in one smooth motion. “You sure about that?”

Panic crawled up Theresa’s throat. Alex was going to get them both killed. He meant well. He was a great guy. But was he really equipped to handle any of this?

The headlock tightened until all she could feel was the pressure choking the oxygen from her lungs. “Look, man! I’m not playing! She’s gonna die. I’m gonna kill her. You got that?”

“Loud and clear.” Alex leaped. In one quick motion he struck the weapon away from Theresa’s body and yanked Brick’s arm around behind him. Theresa fell free and stumbled forward. Brick yelped in pain. Alex wrenched Brick’s arm upward, using the pain and leverage to force him down onto the floor.

“Theresa, are you okay?” Alex stood over Brick. Concern filled his eyes as he searched her face. “Did he hurt you?”

She blinked. It had all happened so fast she’d barely been able to see it happening. But there Brick was, groaning on the floor, while Alex stood over him, keeping the huge thug down through pressure on his wrist alone. Her mind swam. This couldn’t be happening. She must be dreaming. Her former fiancé had always been an athlete, and Zoe said he excelled at his private security training, but she’d never expected...

“Theresa!” Alex’s voice rose. “Look at me. You’re in shock right now. I need you to focus. Are you hurt? Can you move?”

The word shock snapped her mind back like a jolt to the system. She spent a lot of her professional life explaining to clients that the surreal, frozen feeling people went through in a moment of crisis was perfectly normal. Not that knowing that had prepared her in the slightest for suddenly having her dashing ex come swinging in like an action hero.

“I’m okay. Not hurt.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Thank You, God.” A quick prayer slipped through his lips, then his eyes locked on her face again. “Check him for weapons. Then grab the shotgun. Point it at buddy here. And tell me everything you know about his friends, where they’ve gone, who this Castor he mentioned is and whatever trunk he thinks I was here to steal. Quickly.”

“There were three of them.” Quickly she patted down Brick’s jacket and the legs. No weapons. Then she pulled the shotgun from a puddle of melting snow and trained it on Brick. Still Alex didn’t loosen his grip. “They’re looking for a trunk. Castor and Howler left while I was locked in the closet. I don’t know where they went. This guy’s named Brick. Castor asked me if I knew where Mandy and your sister were. He mentioned Mandy by name.”

“Well, as long as Josh is serving overseas we can’t ask him what he thinks his second cousin might be mixed up in.” Alex’s mouth set in a grim line. “Josh’s grandfather was in the military, too. Maybe Mandy’s side of the family inherited some old war medals or weapons, or something valuable from his tour of duty. Because, for me, a military footlocker is the first thing that springs to my mind when somebody mentions a trunk. But Mandy’s brothers are pretty well-off. Maybe one of them was storing something at their parents’ cottage that was worth stealing.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Castor seemed to think I should know something about it, but I don’t. You and Zoe know Josh’s family better than I ever did. I wondered if the intended target was Emmett or Kyle, too, not that an old trunk is the usual place a guy who’s almost thirty would keep his valuables.”

“Did Mandy say anything at all that would shed some light on any of this?” Alex asked.

Theresa shook her head. “No. Mandy was upset, but nothing to make me think she was afraid, let alone of something like this.”

“Doesn’t mean she wasn’t.” Alex took a step back, but his grip on Brick’s wrist didn’t falter.

“Do you have anything to add to this conversation?” he asked. “How about you tell me what you know about who this Castor is and why he hired you?”

A gun blast shook the air.

“Theresa, get down!” Alex shouted.

She turned toward him. For a second the world froze as she saw the strength that shone in his eyes. Then time sped up again and suddenly it was as if everything was happening at once. Alex dropped Brick’s wrist and pulled Theresa to the floor, knocking the couch over in front of them like a shield. A second gun blast sounded, then a third and a fourth, shattering what remained of the windows and tearing up furniture. Brick leaped to his feet, yanked a small handgun from inside his boot and returned fire, momentarily seeming to forget about her and Alex. Only then did she realize she no longer had a grip on the shotgun.

“We can’t look for it now,” Alex shouted. “Something secure. Somewhere low. Any thoughts?”

“There’s a hatch under the floor.” She pointed.

They crawled toward the hatch opening. Alex kicked it open. They tumbled through onto the brick floor below. The hatch snapped shut behind them. Darkness filled the space. Alex urged her up against the very corner of the wall. Then his body covered hers. His heart beat against her back. He pulled a rough tarp over them. Bullets and shotgun blasts rained in the cottage above them, roaring like a hailstorm. Then the noise stopped. Silence surrounded them, punctuated by nothing but the sound of their ragged breaths, their pounding hearts and whispered prayers mingling in the darkness. Her legs cramped beneath her. Her arms were pinned tight against her chest. She started to stretch.

“Wait.” Alex’s breath filled her ear. “Not yet.”

And then she heard the footsteps, one set, walking slowly through the cottage, stepping on the broken glass, kicking furniture aside. There was swearing in a muffled male voice.

Then there was the slow creak of the hatch door opening above them.

Light filtered down through the hole. Fear filled her chest. Panicked prayers filled her heart. Then the hatch clanged shut again, the footsteps moved on and eventually silence fell. After a long moment, Alex unfolded his body and crouched. “Stay here.”

He forced the hatch open and looked out. And she heard him sigh heavily, then pray for God’s mercy under his breath.

She crouched up beside him. “Everything okay?”

“I think we’re alone. The cottage is a wreck.” He hauled his body up through the hole. Then he looked back down at her face. “Brick is dead.”

* * *

Alex searched the rest of the cottage quickly, while Theresa waited in the relative shelter of the storage hatch. He found nothing. Except for Brick’s corpse, they were alone. The cottage had been so totally destroyed it was hard to imagine the criminals having any motive other than causing damage. When he returned to the living room, Theresa had already hauled herself up and was sitting on the edge of the hatch with her legs still dangling in the hole.

Okay, not quite where he’d asked her to wait. But no harm done.

“They’re gone, whoever they were.” He reached for her hand, helped her up and then closed the hatch behind her. “I only saw one shooter and it was a fleeting glance at that. He was about six-three, I would guess, masked, with square shoulders.”

“Sounds like Castor.” Her face paled as her gaze ran to where Brick’s body now lay. “But that doesn’t make sense. Castor knew I was here, too. He should’ve gone searching for me. But he barely checked the hatch.”

“We were pressed right up against the wall in the shadows,” Alex said. “If it was Castor, he probably thinks you escaped somehow. Do you have any idea why he would come back just to kill one of his men?”

“I have no idea.” She shook her head but she was still looking at Brick’s body. “But if it wasn’t him, it means somebody else is running around Cedar Lake destroying cottages. This is my fault. I didn’t think to check inside his boots when I was looking for weapons, and then I dropped the shotgun. If he’d run instead of returning fire he might not have gotten shot.”

Gently, he took her by the shoulders and turned her away from the body.

“Hey, it’s not your fault,” he said. “You do know that, right? It was chaos. That gun was hidden pretty deep inside his boot. I might’ve missed it, too. You pointed out the hatch. If we hadn’t hidden in there, we might not still be alive, and we can thank God for that.”

She nodded and looked down at the ground. Her lips quivered. He pulled her into his arms and hugged her. She hugged him back. Somehow standing there with their arms around each other felt as instinctively right as breathing.

If someone had told him, even an hour ago, that he would ever hold Theresa in his arms again, he’d have laughed. But he’d loved her once, she’d been his friend and right now she needed him. Something inside him whispered that he wouldn’t be able to keep those old, lingering feelings at bay forever, but for right now, he needed to be stronger than his heartache.

“How are you even here?” she asked. “There’s no way you could’ve made the drive that quickly.”

“I took a snowmobile across the lake.”

“That’s crazy.” She pulled back out of his embrace. “It’s been a really warm winter. Or, at least, it was until recently. The lake never froze properly. There’s no way the ice is consistently thick enough for that to be safe, especially in the middle. You could’ve fallen through.”

He crossed his arms. She was right. It hadn’t been safe. It had been downright risky. But her life had been in danger. He’d taken a calculated risk in order to save her.

“It was fine,” he said. “I kept an eye on the shifts in the colors of the ice patterns, followed the channel markers and watched out for the buoys. I know this lake.” He looked down. “You’ve got duct tape on your sleeves.”

“Castor taped my wrists together behind my back.” She ran her hands over her arms self-consciously. “Fortunately, he did it over the sweatshirt and not on my skin.”

Part of him wanted to ask if he was right in thinking the sweatshirt was his old one, and if so, why she was wearing it. But something inside stopped him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “How did you get free?”

“I tore it loose on a metal bucket in the cupboard that they threw me in.” Her fingers picked at the duct tape. “I’m guessing you haven’t heard from Zoe and Mandy?”

His jaw tightened. Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence that gunmen decided to ransack Mandy’s cottage the same weekend that Zoe brought her up for a quiet study break, could it?

“No,” he said. “I tried Zoe’s cell phone again before I left the cottage but I couldn’t get a signal. I placed a really quick internet call to my boss, Daniel, on the laptop, though, and let him know what was happening. He said he’d keep trying to reach her and obviously that he’d also call the police and send them straight here. But considering the road and the distance, it’ll take the police a while to get here and we’ve got to get out of here, now.”