CHAPTER EIGHT
HEARING HIM TALKING on the phone behind her, she risked opening her eyes a slit. Her best friend still looked back at her with the shock and vacancy of death, a line of blood drying where it had trickled from her mouth. Without moving, she could see only Colin’s legs and feet where he lay sprawled on creamy plush carpet. Carpet splashed with scarlet splotches, as was the glass-topped coffee table. Keenan, now...
His fingers twitched. His shoulders rose and fell slightly with a breath. In. Out.
Her terror swelled. If his father saw any hint of life, he’d pump another bullet into his eight-year-old son. He thought they were all dead—Paige, eleven-year-old Colin, Keenan and the baby of the family, six-year-old Molly.
And Paige’s friend, who had happened to drop by this evening with a book of quilt patterns that Paige had wanted to look through. Wrong time, wrong place.
Except, she’d managed to inch over when Damon’s back was turned so that she could shield Molly’s small body. Molly was breathing. Damon couldn’t be allowed to see. Once she’d laid a hand over the little girl’s mouth to stifle a moan.
She ached to whisper reassurance to Keenan, who wasn’t within reach. To beg him to stay absolutely still.
Every breath was agony, searing pain flaring from her abdomen. Blood had spurted when the bullet struck and she had gone down with that first shot. She vaguely remembered hearing Colin’s terrified scream. Damon had turned away to shoot his son and forgotten her. Probably, she thought dully, her wound would be fatal. But she desperately wanted Molly and Keenan to live. All three of them might survive if the police stormed the house soon.
There’d been a bullhorn earlier, before Damon answered his cell phone. That could have been fifteen minutes ago, or two hours ago. She floated in a dreamlike state. Only the pain anchored her here.
No. Not only pain. Molly and Keenan.
It took an enormous effort to comprehend what Damon was saying.
“Hell, no, I’m not going to let that bitch talk to you! If you don’t quit asking, that’s it. Do you hear me?” The savagely angry voice bore little resemblance to the smooth baritone she knew from phone calls and the times Paige had invited her to dinner with her family.
Pause. “They’re with their mother. No, I’m not going to upset them by putting them on the phone, either.”
They’re dead or dying. Paige is dead. Please, please. We need you.
Time drifted. Occasionally, she heard him talking.
“I lose my job and she’s going to leave me?”
Molly was still breathing. Keenan...she wasn’t sure.
Whoever was on the phone with Damon listened, sympathized, gave him all the time he wanted to air his furious grievances.
While we die.
She quit listening, quit peeking at a dying boy. She let herself float away.
“NOW, WE BOTH know you want that quilt.” The auctioneer had strolled down the aisle between folding chairs until he was only a few feet from one of the two bidders on a spectacular album quilt. “And for a cause this important, you can spend a little extra. Isn’t that right?” He thrust the microphone toward the woman next to the man holding the bid card.
She giggled.
Nadia Markovic held her breath. She’d put in a huge amount of work to make tonight’s charity auction at Brevitt House happen, and it was paying off beyond her wildest dreams. The ballroom in this restored pre–Civil War house was packed, and bidding had been lively on the least-coveted quilts, intense on the stars of the evening. Watching from beside the temporary stage, she felt giddy. Profound relief had struck when the trickle of first arrivals had appeared two hours earlier then had gathered strength, until her current ebullience made her wonder if she’d bob gently toward the ceiling any minute.
“We’re at twenty-eight hundred dollars right now,” the auctioneer coaxed. “What do you say to twenty-nine hundred?”
The poor guy glanced at the woman, sighed and raised his bid card again.
The crowd roared.
The other bidder’s number shot up.
The silver-haired auctioneer, lean in his tuxedo and possessing a deep, powerful voice, looked around at the crowd. “Three thousand dollars, all for the victims of the recent tornadoes!”
This time, he couldn’t persuade the second bidder to go on. He declared the album quilt sold to the gentleman holding bid number 203.
Sturdy, middle-aged Katie-Ann Chupp, the Amish
