Page 61 of Watching You
The vacuum began to fill with a diluted version of hope.
Beth took one more step towards the cabin and forced herself to breathe out. Another step and she breathed in again, unable to control the wince that came with the movement of her ribcage.
The silence and stillness remained unbroken.
The cabin door was just a few steps away now, and inside, her car keys were on a little table that she could reach from the threshold. She wanted her mobile but would do without it if it meant a guaranteed getaway.
Beth tried another step, stumbled but righted herself on her car, then moved forward again. Now she could almost feel the door handle in her palm and remembered it would squeak as she pushed it down, but there was nothing she could do about that. If he was in there waiting for her, she was doomed anyway. Another move forward, still holding the car, but the cabin door was just a metre away. She reached for it, biting her bottom lip, desperate not to have been wrong, not to have signed her own death warrant.
He came at her from the side, running and bellowing, a warrior from some action movie holding a log aloft as he staggered.Beth lurched for the door handle, gripping it and pushing down. Inside was safety. Inside was life.
She made it a second before he reached her, rushing in and shoving the door shut with all her might, waiting to feel his weight thrust against it as she turned the thumb bolt.
Nothing.
Beth grabbed a wooden chair from the side of the dinner table and pulled it beneath the door handle, not that it fitted the way she’d seen on TV. It was better than nothing though. Clutching her side again, she stepped quietly to the window and gathered every ounce of courage to pull back the curtain. Was he poised ready to break the glass? Had he already gone round the back to find another way in? And where the hell had she put her mobile?
She peeked out.
There he was on the gravel in front of her car, face down. One of his legs was in a position that must have been agony, and his hair was a bloody mess. The log he’d been wielding had rolled out of his grasp. Beth drew the curtain fully back and took a better look, studying the rise and fall of his chest. His breathing was laboured and uneven. She could imagine exactly how it would sound if she held her stethoscope to his chest. The fingers of his left hand were spasming. He was in trouble, more so even than her.
She sighed. It was hard to watch anyone in pain as a doctor. One phone call and she could ensure her own safety and get him help, both physical and psychiatric.
‘Barbara Smith,’ Beth announced. ‘That was your mother.’
And then the world fell away.
Barbara Smith, deceased. Husband’s name long since forgotten. But it was her son who’d yelled at her in the hospital corridor. Her son, presumably, surname also Smith.
A synaptic connection snapped into place in her brain, far, far too late.
‘Oh God, it was all my fault,’ Beth said.
The man who’d started out as Karl Smith, then become Carl Smith, after that Carl Smyth, next Carlos Smit, and at the end of his overt communications Cal Smee, had targeted her daughter for one reason and one reason only. His mother had died on Beth’s operating table.
He’d never referenced it, never mentioned Beth, never hinted at it, and so Beth had never made the connection. Not once. How was it possible that she hadn’t even considered Molly’s stalker might have been her fault? It hadn’t once occurred to her, so certain was she that all she ever did in her job was good.
Beth knew that nothing would ever be enough for him. No amount of loss, pain or suffering. He would hate her forever and follow her to the ends of the earth to take his revenge. No one in her life, near or far, would be safe. And Beth had to look after the people she loved. It was all so fragile and so easily lost.
‘He came here to kill me,’ she told the transparent reflection of herself in the glass. ‘He would have done it, too, if he’d caught me.’
She walked to the door, gulped down the nerves that were rising in her throat, unlocked and opened up.
He hadn’t moved.
Beth felt her lungs burning and her right eye bulging. There wasn’t much time.
She went back to the kitchen area and picked up a knife, holding it out in front of her as she stepped onto the gravel drive and approached him.
There was no horror movie moment. He didn’t suddenly leap up or grab her ankle. She prodded him with her toes once, twice, three times.
‘You destroyed Molly,’ she said. ‘You tried to kill me.’
He didn’t respond.
How should she do it? Not should she do it, she realised. She’d skipped all the way through to the end of the argument to methodology. No time for philosophy. The sky was warning her that it would soon be lights out.
The knife was the obvious answer and she was good with a blade.
