Page 2 of Edge of Ruin
I’d made it to the town of Silverfish, Oregon at around two in the afternoon, if one could even call the place a town. It wasn’t much more than a wide spot on the road. Through the torrents of rain, all I saw was a convenience store, a gas pump, a bait and tackle shop, and a boarded-up old Dairy Queen.
I had followed the directions, which I’d been advised to print out, since the place was out of the reach of GPS, and made my way onto progressively smaller roads, finally arriving at a dirt track with a hand-painted sign that read Moffat’s Way. The directions offered nothing more. At that point, it was straight on til morning.
But Moffat’s Way wasn’t a driveway, it was an old logging road, deeply rutted and frighteningly steep. By the time I had realized how rough the road was, those ruts had become streams, with no place anywhere wide enough to turn around.
Then I made a sharp turn into a deep puddle, sank into the mud at a terrifying tilted angle, and that was that.
I leaned my hot cheek against the cool window, mind racing. Still procrastinating. Edna stuck her nose into my hand, gave it a sloppy, comforting lick, and then started enthusistically in on the side of my face.
Who knew how much farther this road went on before it came to Jack Kendrick’s land? I hadn’t bothered to inform myself about such nitpicky details. I just figured, I’d get there when I got there, since the road stopped at his house. You couldn’t go wrong, the directions said. Hah. If there was one thing I was unusually good at, it was taking wrong turns. Everyone had his or her own little superpower, and that was mine.
I spun the tires a few more times, just to torture myself. It was time to take action. The self-sufficient, proactive, fearless Vivi D’Onofrio could rise to any occasion, I bracingly told myself. Psychopathic kidnappers? Bring ’em on.
A long shudder racked my body. Well. Maybe not so much.
The rain had eased off from a pounding torrent to a regular shower, so I flung open the door of the van, looking around myself in vain for a solid place to put my feet. Edna crawled eagerly over my lap, and I clutched at her harness in alarm. “No way, babe,” I said sternly. “All I need is a mud-covered dog. Get back inside. In!”
Edna shrank back, looking reproachful. I rolled my pants up, looked at my cheerful, bright-green high-tops regretfully, and jumped out. At least they were old, like most of my clothes at this point. Maybe a run through a washing machine would salvage them.
Cold, sucking mud swallowed my feet to the ankles. I slogged around the van and assessed the damage.
The tires were half buried. Chilly rain plastered my hair to my scalp and the green t-shirt to my body. I let loose with a stream of explicit profanity, the foul, biting kind I’d learned in the Bronx as a child, and punctuated by kicking a slimy tire. Hard enough to make a bolt of pain shoot up my leg.
Yeah, that’s right, Viv. Check me out, yapping like a fishwife at inanimate objects. Very impressive. Very mature.
Farther back, I’d seen what looked like a collapsed shack. Maybe some planks laid down in front of the tires would give them purchase to get out of the muck. Beyond the puddle, the road looked almost drivable.
I would exhaust every possibility before limping to Jack Kendrick’s house on foot like a cat left out in the rain. A fine first impression that would be.
Kendrick was still a mystery. I knew only what Duncan had told me. That he was some sort of ex-spy commando who’d been on a top-secret intelligence-gathering task force with Duncan years ago.
Now, unaccountably, he grew flowers. Duncan had been vague about the details of that career change, his brain being flash-fried from being insanely in love with Nell.
This mysterious Kendrick lived alone in the woods. He evidently had an apartment in his barn. According to Duncan, the man was cool with letting me huddle in this flowery bower like a quivering, nose-twitching bunny until we figured out what to do about our art-hungry, murdering psychopaths. Very nice of him, but it didn’t say much for his smarts, or his sense of self-preservation. He must owe Duncan money. Only a true bonehead would take on a hard-luck case like me.
I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Duncan had assured me that Kendrick knew the score, that he had agreed to the plan, that he wasn’t intimidated by the risks. But come on. No normal person would agree to something that crazy. The guy must have a screw loose. Yeah, sure, invite the unknown girl with the deadly psychopath stalking her to crash in my barn. What could possibly go wrong?
This quiet, bucolic retreat had sounded so perfect, back in New York City. Too perfect, in retrospect. Now that I was pondering it all alone, stuck in the mud.
Ah, yes. There it was, a stack of gray, weathered planks with the odd rusty nails sticking through them at crazy angles. I wrestled and yanked until I’d extricated a few boards, along with some ugly splinters, then negotiated the slippery boards through the fir thickets. By the time I got back to the van, soggy, scratched, and panting, I was spewing a fresh stream of profanity. I hauled out my toolbox, hammered the nails flat, and started wrestling them into place. Mud oozed over the tops of the planks, and I was thoroughly slimed from chest to feet when I heard the deep voice from behind me.
“I don’t think that’ll work right now.”
I jolted up, knocking my head on the bumper. “Who is that?” I scrambled to my feet, looking frantically around myself. There was no one there that I could see.
I scanned the trees and reached for the tire iron stowed under the seat, groping until my fingers closed over the bar of cold, hard metal.
“Where are you?” I called out. “Say something.”
“Over here.”
I spun, brandishing the tire iron. A tall man stood there, half hidden in the trees. He was shrouded in a dull-green hooded rain poncho, dripping with rain. I would never have seen him if he had not spoken.
Adrenaline zinged through me. I gave the tire iron an experimental heft. “What do you think you’re doing, sneaking up on me like that?” I demanded.
He took a step forward. I raised the tire iron with a menacing face, and he stopped.
“Sorry I scared you,” he said.
