against her knees to keep from going headfirst onto the ground while she retched and heaved until she was shaking. When the spasms finally passed, she managed to pull herself upright and resume her search.
As was so often the way with tornadoes, she found Susan’s car completely untouched and right where she’d parked it yesterday. She opened the door and leaned in. The keys were in the ignition, and her cousin’s purse and suitcase had already been loaded.
Cari shuddered on a sob. Susan hadn’t wanted to go walking with her and had opted to check her e-mail instead. If she hadn’t been waiting for Cari to come back to say goodbye, she might already have been gone.
Cari shut the door of Susan’s car, then paused with her hand on the hood and said a brief prayer.
Please, God, help me. I can’t find Mom. I can’t find Susan. Please let them be all right.
A few minutes later, it was the bottom of a brown leather lace-up shoe sticking out from beneath part of the roof that caught her attention.
“Oh…no, no, no,” she moaned, as she recognized the shoe as her mother’s.
She dropped to her hands and knees and began moving away debris, finally locating her mother’s lifeless body. The look of horror still etched on her face shocked Cari to the core.
“Mommy,” Cari whispered, unaware she’d slipped into the name she’d used as a child.
Too sick at heart to weep and with shock pulling at her sanity, she sat for a moment beside the body, just holding her mother’s hand, as if it might change the outcome of the storm. Finally she thought of Susan again and pushed herself upright. She had to keep searching. Susan had to be somewhere. Surely God wouldn’t take them all. He wouldn’t let them all be dead.
When she finally found her cousin, lying flat on her back behind what had once been the smokehouse, she knew she’d been wrong. Susan’s face had been crushed beyond recognition.
Too numb to cry, too sick to think, she stood without moving, trying to wrap her mind around everything that had happened and what to do next.
At the same moment it hit her that she was the last living member of her family, she remembered Lance Morgan and why she’d been running for home.
She pivoted quickly as she flashed a swift look toward the road, then felt in her pocket and realized she didn’t have a phone. She couldn’t call for help. Lance could come driving up at any minute and do to her what he’d done to that man. No one would know the difference. They would just think she’d died in the storm.
Panic hit.
She had to get away.
She needed to get some medical help and figure out what to do next. But she knew Lance well enough to know that he would be behind her at every move. She could take Susan’s car and drive into Bordelaise. Someone there would help her. She could—
She stopped and moaned, blinded by a sudden pain from the deep wound in her head. She needed to regroup first. No need making accusations against Lance that she would never be able to back up. Lance might be a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. Whatever she said, he would just chalk it up to her head wound. And now that he knew she’d seen him, there was no way he would bury that body where he’d been digging. He would move it, of that she was certain. And until she could figure out where, she needed to keep herself and her accusations under wraps.
She started toward the car when her legs suddenly went out from under her. She fell only a few feet away from Susan’s body. It took every ounce of strength she had left to get back on her feet, and as she did, found herself looking down at Susan again.
They’d been born to twin sisters and within a month of each other. They had grown up like sisters, their features so similar that people had often mistaken them for twins, as well. They even wore their thick dark hair in the same casual style. At that moment, a thought occurred. It was daring, if not crazy, but it might give her the space and time she needed.
Susan’s facial features were forever altered by whatever had killed her. But she was wearing jeans and black shoes like Cari’s, as well as a white T-shirt. The only difference was Cari’s dark green, three-quarter-length all-weather coat. If she put the coat on Susan’s body and got away before anyone saw her, whoever eventually found the bodies out here would quite naturally assume Susan was Cari. Especially Lance, who’d been the last person to see her alive.
And better yet, even though Susan was known in Bordelaise, no one knew she’d driven over from Baton Rouge to spend the night, so no one would suspect anything. Convinced this was the answer she needed, Cari took off her coat and, without looking at the wreck of Susan’s face, knelt down and managed to put it on her by rolling her first one way, then the other.
Shaken and sick at heart, she finally crawled to her feet, then stopped and looked down. As she did, she shuddered. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought she was looking at her own dead body.
Suddenly afraid she would be caught before she could get away, she headed for Susan’s car as fast as she could go, stumbling once and falling yet again before she managed to get behind the wheel.
Her hands were sore from the splinters, and sticky with the same blood that was all over her clothes, but she couldn’t let it matter. With every ounce of strength she had left, she started the car and put it into gear. The only thing she could think of was getting herself to Baton Rouge and, under the guise of her cousin’s identity, getting some medical attention. She’d been to Susan’s town house countless times and knew the way almost as well as she’d known the way home from the woods.
It wasn’t that far.
All she had to do was get there.
Lance had been only vaguely aware of the thunderstorm while he’d been inside the cave burying Austin Ball, but when he got back to where he’d left the rental car, he was shocked by the devastation. Trees were uprooted. Bits and pieces of sheet iron and lumber were scattered about, and the car was nowhere in sight.
At first he’d thought someone must have stolen it. But the farther he ran toward home, the more certain he was that it had become a casualty of what must have been a tornado. He began to panic, fearing Morgan’s Reach might have been hit, but when he reached the back of the property just beyond the stables and saw the familiar roofline, he started shaking from relief. There was evidence of damage, but nothing drastic, and nothing that couldn’t easily be repaired. Some corrals were down, and there was a portion of roof missing off the barn, but the house seemed intact.
He ran through the mud and then to the back door, taking off his shoes at the stoop before going inside. Too many years of not bringing in mud on his shoes had been drummed into his consciousness to do it now—even if he was the one in charge.
He made a quick run through the house, checking for further damage. The electricity was off, but he still checked the laundry to make sure all the blood had washed out of the clothes he’d tossed in earlier. It had.
Unable to use the dryer, he took the clothes out and spread them over the washer and dryer to air-dry. No time like the present to put his world back in order. Except for a broken windowpane and some missing shingles he’d seen earlier, the house seemed solid, although he couldn’t bring himself to do more than glance into the library where he’d committed the murder.
Now that he knew his home and property were in basic order,
