In the Running Read online

  -In the Running—

  By Dee Lloyd

  Published by Awe-Struck E-Books

  Copyright ©1999

  ISBN: 1-928670-15-6

  Prologue

  Although the words and numbers were beginning to swim in front of Maura’s eyes, her building anger kept her plugging on. That much seafood and produce had never arrived in her kitchen!

  What else had been going on under her nose? She dug right to the back of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. The bulges of the fat brown manila envelope she pulled out were the wrong shape to be more doctored invoices. She took out a rolled printout of columns of figures; some smaller, folded papers; then a few loose negatives. Last, she found several eight by ten-inch glossy photos.

  One glance told her they weren’t anything she wanted to examine closely. She was in no mood to tolerate someone’s secret stash of porn. Just as she was about to ram the photos back into the envelope, she froze in disbelief. Four very clear, black and white pictures featured her fiancé! In each one, Jon Casen was having sex with a different woman. Maura felt sick.

  The first photo was an unflattering view of Jon’s fairly broad posterior. The handsome champion of the environment, everyone’s knight on a white charger, was mounting Danny’s cousin, Lucy Spadafore. In the next shot, he was with a blonde who’d been working at the Lodge less than two weeks. The miserable cheat! Maura didn’t know the other two women. The fifth photo hardly registered. It showed Jon, actually with his clothes on, in earnest conversation with two men. One was Sal Gerardo, a local crime boss. The sanctimonious phony! No wonder he’d been so patient about her reluctance to go to bed with him. She put everything back into the manila envelope and rammed it into her large tapestry bag. She couldn’t wait to see Gran’s face when she saw the photos of her Golden Boy when Maura got to Lansing later tonight. On second thought - she yanked out one of the nude pictures at random - Maura decided to confront Jon with one first.

  She hoped he was still in Danny’s office. She had an engagement ring and a blistering message for him!

  As she marched along the corridor to the front of the building, Maura angrily crumpled the photo of Jon and the waitress in her hand and rehearsed what she was going to say before she threw his ring and the photo in his face. When she started across the thick carpet of the dark lounge, she was only vaguely aware of the faint smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke that hung in the air in spite of the deodorizers the cleaners used to cover it. She heard voices. Good! They were still there.

  Upended chairs on bar tables cast elongated shadows in the bright light slanting from the partially open door of the office.

  “Scumbag!” The angry shout stopped her in her tracks.

  Not much of the room was visible. Maura could see the back of Jon’s head over the back of his leather chair and her boss’s angry face as he loomed over him.

  “All the times I’ve saved your ass, made you my partner, and you steal from me! Well, no more, Jonny. This time you pay up. If Sal and the old lady see those pictures, you’re dead meat. And they’ll see them if I don’t get every cent back by this time tomorrow. Now, get out.”

  Jon stood up slowly.

  “Wilson.” Danny’s voice was harsh with disgust as he turned to go back to his desk. “Get him out of…”

  Jon lunged at Danny knocking him out of her field of view.

  “What the hell!” Danny’s words ended in a grunt.

  Something hard, maybe a chair, skidded across the floor and hit the door with a crash, knocking it almost closed.

  “Hold him, Wilson.” Jon’s usually cultured voice was so rough she hardly recognized it.

  Wilson? Wilson Foster was the assistant manager of the lodge. He worked for Danny - not Jon. What was going on?

  She heard the unmistakable sound of flesh repeatedly hitting flesh, then a cry and a moan. This couldn’t be happening!

  “Make it easy on yourself, partner. Tell me where you put the negatives and we’ll forget all about this little error in judgment.”

  “F– off!” Danny’s words were blurred.

  “Take over, Wilson.” Jon sounded almost bored.

  If she had any sense, she’d get out of here before they saw her. But, the envelope she’d found figured in this. Had Jon been stealing from his client? No. Danny had said “partner”. Maura eased the door open just far enough to see what was going on.

  Danny was bent over, trying to protect his stomach from Wilson’s fists. Wilson grabbed him by the scruff of the neck with one hand and gave him a hard punch to the jaw. Danny went flying across the room. As he landed, his head hit the corner of the desk.

  Wilson followed him over, nursing the knuckles of his right hand. When he crouched down by Danny’s still body, he hissed something and began to search for a pulse.

  “Christ! He’s dead.”

  Danny certainly looked dead. Blood trickled from his mouth and nose. His grey hair was dark with it. Jon’s right hand man, Walt Ames, appeared from somewhere and dropped to his knees on the other side of Danny. Jon, his back still to the door, leaned over to check for himself.

  Jon must have heard Maura’s sharply indrawn breath, because he whirled around. His pale eyes flared with anger, then narrowed to an icy glare.

  “Do come in, Maura,” he drawled. There was blood on the knuckles of his right hand.

  She slammed the door to cut off the menace in his eyes and ran. She was pulling out onto the highway before she realized she’d dropped the photograph.

  Jon knew she’d found the envelope.

  Chapter One

  With every mile she drove into the Uplands, Maura found the mustard-green Buick station wagon more disgusting. She hated its oily smell, its spongy brakes, its loose steering, its nauseating color. Most of all, she hated the fact that it had taken all but the last one hundred and eighty dollars and fifty-two cents she could get her hands on to buy it in Grand Rapids this morning. Concentrating on hating the car helped take her mind off her real problems.

  If she had known she’d be running for her life in a few hours, she’d have cashed a larger check yesterday afternoon. As it was, even after withdrawing the daily limit from the bank machine at Kent County International, she was almost out of money. Now, she had to disappear. And she had one hundred and eighty dollars and fifty-two cents to do it with.

  She couldn’t go to the police. What would she tell them? She didn’t know if Danny was really dead. She’d called Emergency Services from a pay phone at the airport last night and told them to send an ambulance to Driftwood Lodge because someone had been seriously injured in a fight. But she’d heard nothing on the radio about it. If Danny was all right, what would she tell the police? That Jon Casen had looked at her with murder in his eyes? Yeah, right! Jon played golf with the D.A., and the local sheriff was in his weekly poker club.

  There was no one else to turn to. Gran would simply refuse to believe her story. Lately, she seemed obsessed with the dream of reliving her glory days in the governor’s mansion. Unfortunately, the fulfillment of that dream depended entirely on Jon Casen’s political success. She was using all the Fitzpatrick political clout to back Jon. His marriage to Maura would cement the tie. Gran had gone on about Maura’s duty to the family and the expectations that neither Maura nor her father had fulfilled until Maura had given in.

  Jon had never professed to love her but he had offered to be a faithful husband and father in exchange for her loyalty and public support. What a joke! She realized now that she hadn’t known Jon at all. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to her own reluctance to accept the deal? No self-respecting woman would have sold herself so short. Well, that was water under the bridge.

  Gran would see Danny’s death, if he were dead, as an unf
ortunate accident. Even if Maura showed her the photos of Jon with those other women, she’d find a way to make Jon’s actions Maura’s fault.

  “What does love have to do with it?” she had exclaimed impatiently when Maura had told her that she admired Jon but didn’t love him. “This is an important merger. Not a fairy tale. Your job is to consolidate the connection.”

  There was no help there. And in the year and a half she’d been head chef at Driftwood Lodge, she’d been so busy that the only friends she’d made were people Jon introduced her to.

  She didn’t dare access her bank account again. When they found her Mustang in the airport lot, they mustn’t find a paper trail beyond the bank machine there. She’d thought of everything. She hoped. She was going to survive this. They wouldn’t find her.

  “Don’t think about them. Concentrate on your driving, Maura Irene,” she muttered to herself.

  Luckily, it was the off-season. Traffic on most Michigan roads was light in this hiatus between the boating and the ski seasons. She checked her watch. It was only three-thirty. Considering her stops at the Thrift shop and the hairdresser, she’d made good time. The highway ten interchange was just ahead. Another couple of hours and she’d be at Dad’s old hunting cabin.

  Damn! A cluster of glaring orange and black signs read CONSTRUCTION AHEAD - then INTERCHANGE CLOSED. A large freestanding NO EXIT sign sat squarely in the middle of the off-ramp. Detouring onto secondary roads until she hit twenty-seven North would cost her at least an hour. It would be dark before she reached the empty, cold cabin.

  Maura squinted through the smeary windshield at the darkening November sky. The weather was closing in. With luck, the freezing rain would hold off long enough for her to reach the cabin.

  She could use a little good luck. She’d had enough of the other kind dumped on her last night. She would never forget the cold resolve in Jon’s pale blue eyes when he realized the threat she had suddenly become to him. If he’d said the words aloud, the message wouldn’t have been clearer. The man she’d been going to marry had decided to kill her.

  Only her quick reaction time in slamming the door shut and punching the preset lock button had saved her. She was grateful to the elaborate security system Danny had insisted on installing. She’d had some luck, after all. She was still alive. She wondered if Danny could possibly be.

  Maura could feel the panic rising again. It was fluttering inside her like a bird trying to get out of a cardboard box. Its beak and talons were tearing at the flimsy walls of her self-control, its wings beating hard. The thudding strokes were almost up to the base of her throat.

  Somehow, she had to keep that lid firmly down until she got to Dad’s cabin. She’d been too busy to go up there since her engagement. Jon wasn’t even aware she’d inherited the place. The only thing about her life that had interested him, she realized now, was Gran’s political influence.

  “When I get to the cabin,” she repeated like a mantra. Then, she could fall apart. She could let the bird fly free and scream out her terror and her fury in safety, but she couldn’t do that until the cabin’s heavy wooden door closed behind her.

  In the meantime, she had to concentrate on her driving and go over the things she absolutely had to do. She’d had the propane tank topped up and the refrigerator serviced last spring. There were canned goods and staples in the larder and plenty of split wood in the shed. She’d have to spend a few of her dollars on milk and other perishables.

  Her mind refused to stay focused on these ordinary details. What was she going to do next? Even though the log house was winterized, she couldn’t stay there long - particularly not with a car that was running as roughly as this wreck was.

  Just as the first drop of freezing rain flattened on the windshield, not too far ahead of her, a Jeep Cherokee towing a heavy old wooden boat on a trailer eased itself carefully onto the road. Maura drew a long exasperated breath and muttered words that Gran would have been shocked she knew. However, Gran wasn’t the one being held up on a hilly, two-lane road by some elderly local hauling his ancient, over-long fishing boat behind his shiny new four-wheeler. The way her luck was going, the driver would probably inch slowly down the middle of the road to be sure he didn’t damage either one.

  Actually, he wasn’t driving slowly, but she wasn’t going to be able to pass him any time soon. With the strong Northwest wind buffeting the boat, he was having a hard time holding to his own side of the road. Halfway up a long, steep grade, the trailer began to weave more erratically behind the Jeep. Maura, reluctantly, slowed down to leave a few more car lengths between them.

  Suddenly, a whitetail deer materialized out of the dense tangle of evergreens and dashed across the road in front of the Jeep. The driver swerved hard to the right to avoid the animal. As he did, the boat trailer swung around ninety degrees and snapped free of the trailer hitch.

  Maura couldn’t believe her eyes. The trailer with its massive load jerked to a stop, then began to veer crazily back down the hill, casting sparks like a Fourth of July sparkler as its metal tongue dragged over the old, potholed asphalt. It was gathering speed as it went and headed straight for her.

  She floored the accelerator and cranked the steering wheel to the left. The boat streaked past her, narrowly missing her rear fender.

  The heavy old station wagon lurched as its tires ploughed deep into the soft shoulder on the left side of the road. Maura wrestled the steering wheel but the hulk had a mind of its own. The gravel sucking at its tires slowed it a bit but not enough to prevent it from careening down the steep bank. No matter how hard she tried to control the steering, the nearly treadless tires found their own route in the soft loam. Her scream was shrilling in her ears as the twelve-year-old Buick made jarring contact with a century-old birch.

  Maura felt a stabbing pain above her left eye before she lost consciousness.

  As Matt Hanson eased the Jeep onto the highway, three minutes earlier, all he could think of was how good a hot shower and warm, dry clothes were going to feel when he finally got back to the house. He was soaked to the skin, chilled, and questioning his own sanity for ever thinking that coming home to take over the family marina was a good idea.

  He checked the road behind him. The only vehicle in sight was an old Buick station wagon with a bad paint job almost a quarter of a mile back. He had lots of room.

  He couldn’t wait to put a big maple log on the embers that should still be glowing in the stone fireplace, collapse on the overstuffed sofa with a hot buttered rum, and absorb the welcome heat from both. The only reason he’d agreed to pick up Hazel Leigh’s ancient cedar-strip inboard-outboard was that the Leighs had been his father’s customers for years. Besides, she had sounded so lonely and bleak when she’d apologized for leaving it this late. Old Wilf Leigh had always been responsible for getting the boat taken out of the water and stored at Hanson’s boatyard.

  “It should’ve been done weeks ago,” Matt muttered to himself for the hundredth time that day.

  He’d spent hours in the cold water, hauling the waterlogged cedar-strip to the surface from its sunken position at the dilapidated dock and bailing it by hand. He rotated his right shoulder gingerly and winced. Damn. He’d probably pulled something dragging the hulk onto its creaky trailer in the freezing drizzle. He hated run-down equipment. He wasn’t too crazy about courting pneumonia either.

  The Buick was still behind him. The driver had the good sense not to crowd him. He scowled at the desolate landscape. A Northwesterly was blowing in from Superior across the top of Lake Michigan, dragging grey streamers of what could even be snow across the leafless Uplands.

  Without warning, a whitetail sprang out of the bush and leapt across the road not twenty feet in front of him. Matt wheeled hard to the right, missing the deer’s flank by inches.

  He didn’t have a moment to waste in self-congratulations because the sharp turn had snapped the rusty coupling on the trailer hitch. Relieved of the weight of the boat, the back of the Jeep
bounced so violently that only Matt’s seat belt kept him from being flung against the windshield.

  He undid the belt as he pulled onto the gravel shoulder and was out of his car almost before it came to a stop. Hitting the paper-thin layer of ice that coated the asphalt, Matt’s feet almost slid out from under him. Swearing at the weather, faulty equipment and rotten luck, he skittered down the hill after the trailer, which was zigzagging drunkenly, but determinedly towards the puke-green Buick that had been following him.

  Alertly, the driver dodged the runaway boat. The station wagon was barely clear of its path when one of the trailer’s wheels hit a deep pothole. The jolt swung the boat around, slowed it down, and brought the ungainly vehicle to a jolting stop in the shallow ditch on the right side of the road.

  Simultaneously, with a nice bit of driving, the driver skidded his station wagon neatly onto the left shoulder. He didn’t quite get it stopped.

  Matt held his breath and watched in horror as the heavy car teetered, then dipped and slid inexorably into the deep gully. The driver’s shrill scream wavered on the air for a long second before the Buick hit a tall stand of birch at the bottom. The sound of splintering glass and the screech of rending metal ripped through the wet woods

  Matt slithered and stumbled through the soggy undergrowth. The Buick had snapped a lot of small lumber before it smashed into the birch clump. Getting the driver out wasn’t going to be easy. The right front wheel of the car rested on a three-foot stump, jamming the driver’s door against the birch clump. That side of the car was a mess of crumpled metal. Luckily, the frame seemed to have held.

  A strong reek of gasoline stung his nostrils. He prayed the leak was a small one as he heaved a massive piece of birch off the passenger’s door, then clambered up to tug at the handle. The damned door wouldn’t budge.

  Dreading what he might see, he knelt on the door and peered down through the side window. In the driver’s seat, a woman’s still form sagged from her seat belt and shoulder harness. There was blood everywhere - on her face, her clothes. Her dark hair was matted with it. Had the branch that shattered the window on the driver’s side struck her forehead hard enough to kill her? He had to get that door open. In the silence of the wet woods, he heard the steady dripping of gasoline from the ruptured gas tank.