Page 37 of Her Last Refuge

The man held underwater thrashed once, then again, the water breaking around them in short, ugly bursts.

Rachel cleared the last of the trees and was unable to fight what her instinct told her to do.

She jumped directly toward the water.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Rachel left the bank in a single hard leap and drove her body straight at the man who still held George Tremaine under the water. She meant to spear him with her full weight, not realizing until she was airborne just how much speed and force was behind her. The surface of the pond rushed up at her as she flew at Roy Alcott. Cold, dirty water closed over her legs and hips an instant before impact.

Just before she struck Alcott, she saw the confusion and alarm cross his face. And then, in the very last moment, he raised an arm. Sunlight caught the short blade of a pocketknife in his hand. The glint flashed once across the surface, bright and sharp against the dark water. The danger of it registered in a single compressed second. The same knife he had used on Officer Barrett was now between them, close enough that a single thrust could open her side or her throat before she ever reached him.

She brought her forearm up hard. The block was late but solid. Her arm smashed into his wrist with enough force to knock the knife free. Pain flared along the bone of her forearm where it met his. The blade spun once, caught a last flash of light, and disappeared into the shallow water with a soft plink. The impact of her body carried both of them sideways. They hit the surface together in a tangled heap of limbs and dark water. The sudden cold closed over Rachel’s head, momentarily disorienting her. Silt and pond water flooded her mouth, bitter and gritty. She choked once, found the muddy bottom with one knee, and pushed upward.

The man who had been held under—George Tremaine—broke free in the chaos. He thrashed toward the bank, coughing in hard, wet bursts and gasping for air. Water streaming from his hair and clothes and came in dark spurts out of his mouth. But Rachel kept her attention locked on Alcott.

She got a hand on the front of his shirt and another on his upper arm and drove him backward through the knee-deep water. The bottom was soft and uneven, and her shoes sank with every step. Alcott was older and lighter than she expected and there wasn’t nearly as much fight to him as she’d been expecting. His strength was already fading, but he still fought as well as he could. He twisted hard against her grip and managed one solid blow that landed against her ribs. The punch forced a short grunt from her lungs and sent a bright line of pain along her side. She would have likely been able to dodge it altogether if she’d been able to get better footing. It carried no real power behind it, yet it was enough to make her shift her weight and reset her hold.

She absorbed the hit and kept moving. Water streamed into her eyes and she could taste it, bitter and stagnant in her mouth. She blinked it away from her eyes and spit out what she could as she shoved him the last few feet to the bank. They reached the muddy edge in a clumsy scramble of knees and elbows. Rachel drove him down onto the wet ground and followed him, using her full weight to keep him pinned while she got one knee across his thighs. She glanced over to Tremaine and saw that he was lying on his back, not moving. This concerned her, but she couldn’t let Alcott slip away again. Even then, with her concentration momentarily broken, he twisted once and tried to roll toward the water again. She shifted with him, dropped her shoulder into his chest, and held him there until the fight went out of his arms. Her breathing came hard and fast and her chest did indeed start to grow tight like she’d feared.

A flood of relief washed over her as Novak reached the clearing. He took a single moment to process the scene mentally and then went straight to Tremaine, still not moving at the water’s edge. She did think she heard a low moan escape his lips and that was at least something.

Novak hauled the older man farther onto solid ground and rolled him onto his side so the water could drain. In doing so, Rachel saw the man’s color and it was not good. He’d gone a sickly pale color and is eyes were open but unfocused. He had been lightly choked and held under for an unknown stretch of time. Rachel figured he could be perfectly fine in about thirty seconds or absolutely not fine.

She kept Alcott face-down long enough to pull his arms behind him and lock the cuffs. The moment the metal clicked shut, something inside of him seemed to break open. He began to weep. The sound started low in his chest and then rose into open, uncontrolled sobbing that shook his whole body. His shoulders jerked hard enough that the cuffs rattled. He trembled from head to foot. When he tried to speak the words came out in broken bursts between the crying, half-formed and wet….from tears and maybe from ingested pond water.

“The picture,” he managed. “Please. Shirt pocket. Please get it out. The water—don’t let it ruin it. Please.”

Rachel hesitated only a second. She reached into the front of his soaked shirt, found the folded square of paper pressed flat against his chest, and pulled it free carefully. The paper was wet along the edges but still held together. She unfolded it once. It was an old photograph, the corners soft and creased from years of handling. It showed a young boy in a Boy Scout uniform smiling into the camera, squinting slightly against bright summer light. Danny Alcott. She recognized the face from the research they had done days earlier.

She held the photograph where Alcott could see it. His eyes went wide and then his crying intensified. Tears mixed with the pond water still running down his face and dripped onto the front of his shirt. He stared at the image as if it were the only solid object left in the world.

“That was the last one,” he said. The words came out thick and exhausted, scraped raw by fifty-five years. “Last picture anyone took of him. I was eight. I remember all of it. Danny in the water. The thrashing. It looked like play at first. This one,” he said, whimpering and pointing to Tremaine, “was over by the edge talking to Cecilia, flirting with her. And the Durst woman was with some friends talking about boys.” He wasn’t quite screaming, but the words came out clipped and raw. “None of them were watching the pool. I tried to call for help. I yelled. Nobody took me seriously. Too many kids already laughing and screaming. By the time anyone looked it was too late. He was already…he was already under.”

He drew a long, shaking breath that caught in the middle and kept going, the sentences tumbling out under the weight of the years he had carried them.

“Mr. Alcott, you—”

But he wasn’t done. His voice was tight and manic now, each word like its own little sob.

“Howard Pelham got them off. Not just easily. Smugly. He stood up in court and said no one can prove anything. A dead boy with three lifeguards on duty at a community pool should have proven everything. I tried to ignore it. I tried for decades. But Danny kept speaking. He wouldn’t stop…wouldn’t leave me alone. I had to make it right. I had to!”

Rachel listened without interrupting as she got Alcott to his feet. His legs barely held him now and she had to support his weight. She walked him the short distance to the wooden bench that faced the pond and lowered him onto it. He sat with his cuffed hands behind him and his head bowed, still crying in long, uneven waves. The photograph rested on the bench beside it but now it seemed that he couldn’t bring himself to look at it. She stood a few feet away, water still dripping from her clothes onto the grass, and let her own breathing slow while she took stock of the clearing.

The pond had already begun to settle. The surface that had been broken by the struggle now showed only small ripples spreading outward and dying against the muddy bank. A few ducks that had fled to the far side watched from a safe distance, their shapes dark against the water. The sunlight slanted across the surface and turned the disturbed silt a dull brown.

She took a few steps toward Novak, still with Tremaine. He had one hand on the older man’s shoulder, the other already on his phone calling for an ambulance. The sound of his voice carried clearly across the quiet that had returned to the trees as he spoke to dispatch.

Rachel looked at the broken man on the bench. Part of her felt the pull of pity. Fifty-five years of carrying that death from that one afternoon must have truly eaten away at him. The photograph worn soft by decades of handling. She could see how grief had bent him until the only shape left was this. At the same time she held the plain fact that he had killed three people. Ruth Durst. Howard Pelham. Cecilia Brand. And he had attacked Novak and Officer Barrett. He had planned the deaths, staged the bodies, and come here to finish the list. But with this pond available to him, he’d chosen a more poetic death—perhaps a death he saw as somehow coming full circle with another drowning.

She hated that she pitied him…that she could almost understand why he did it.

But sometimes this was the hardest part of the job.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Rachel and Novak stood near the ambulance while a pair of medics lifted George Tremaine onto a stretcher and secured the straps across his chest and legs. The park that had been nearly empty an hour earlier was now crowded with movement and noise. Police cars sat at odd angles across the small parking area beside the old tennis court, as well as the strip of street closer to the park entrance. Radios crackled from open doors and from the belts of officers who moved between the trailhead and their vehicles. Yellow tape was already going up in uneven stretches, some of it tied to the low wooden posts near the entrance and some of it held by officers waiting for a better place to anchor it. A second ambulance had arrived and sat with its rear doors open, waiting for whatever came next.

The first news crew had pulled in along the far side of the lot. A camera was already up on a shoulder and a reporter spoke into a microphone while an officer kept one arm extended to hold them back from the active ground.