The Burnt Island Burial Ground Part 18

He quickly covered the s.p.a.ce that separated them, and his form came into view. His temple sported a large purple bruise, and a crust of dried blood had formed on his perfectly-chiseled cheekbone. He wore a tight-fitting jacket, which was open at the front. In one hand he carried a heavy flashlight. In the other, a shovel. As he leaned toward Lindsay, various scenarios played out in her head. He'd strangle her and then use the shovel to bury her. He'd kill her with the flashlight or the shovel and then leave her body in the open for wild animals to devour.

"How did you get out here? Did she hurt you?" he asked, setting down the shovel and laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Lindsay regarded him with a perplexed expression. He seemed so concerned for her. Why was he approaching her in this careful, solicitous way if he intended to harm her?

"What are you talking about?" she asked. "Did who hurt me?"

"Jess," he said. "I think she has Owen. That's why I'm out here. I'm trying to find Owen. I think she took him."

"I don't understand what you're talking about."

Adam shook his head. "Sorry. Of course you don't. I was totally wrong about Jess. You know how I said I thought she was in danger? Well, it turns out she is the danger."

"You kidnapped her. Her and Owen. He told us that you tied him up and put him in the trunk," Lindsay said. Again, she was surprised at how calm her voice sounded.

"What?! No. You have to listen to me, Lindsay. I told you I was trying to help Jess, right? To keep her safe so she could carry out the rest of Boughtflower's wishes. Well, I found her at a hotel in Raleigh where she'd arranged to meet Ellen. I went to the room and found Ellen dead. When I saw that, I finally figured it out. It was Jess. She'd lured Ellen there, not the other way around. She was the one who drugged you. She set this whole thing up. When I went to the hotel room, Jess pulled a gun on me and forced me to help her kidnap Owen. She made me drive her down here and then she clunked me on the head. I can't believe she didn't kill me. Maybe she thought I was dead. I don't know."

"I don't believe you," Lindsay said. "That doesn't make sense. How did you know what room they'd be in? And how did you get into the room? Why would Jess need to take you and Ellen out? She has power of attorney. If she wanted the money, she could've taken it for herself at any time."

"I don't think she just wanted the money. You know how I said there was one more thing she needed to do? One more thing she needed to get hold of? Well, I found out what it is."

"You're a liar," Lindsay said, edging away from him.

"I know I lied to you, and I'm sorry," Adam said. "I was just doing my job. I know that's not an excuse. But I'll prove myself to you now. Come on, I'll show you what I'm talking about. I'm on my way there now. We need to stop Jess before she gets it."

"I don't think she's in a position to get anything," Lindsay said. "She was bitten by a snake. Owen and his father have taken her to get help."

"Are you sure?" he asked, fanning the beam of his flashlight over the surrounding woods.

"Of course. I just watched them go. She was in bad shape. She looked like she was dying."

"Is it possible she was faking?"

"No," Lindsay said.

It wasn't, was it? She'd seen the puncture marks and the blisters. She'd felt Jess's thready pulse. Her mind flashed back to what Owen had said about Jess's acting skills, about her ability to change her appearance and fake emotions. And his description of how he'd lost track of her in the woods for a few minutes right before she collapsed. Lindsay quickly dismissed the idea. n.o.body could fake something like that. She held onto that belief, and onto the thought that Mike was still carrying the gun. Even if what Adam said was true, surely Jess wouldn't be able to overpower him and Owen?

"Well, let's hope not. There might still be time then for us to get the letters," Adam said. He started walking purposefully in the opposite direction of the road, back the way they'd come.

Lindsay followed him, trailing at a distance both because of her still-tender knee and her continued distrust of him. "If all this is true, we need to go after Mike and Owen and warn them about her. They were carrying her to the road."

"When did they leave?" Adam asked.

"They're maybe ten minutes ahead of us."

"You can go, if you want, but I can't risk it. They've probably linked up with the cops by now. I'd like to avoid getting arrested tonight, if possible. If I can find what Jess was after, it'll prove everything. You can take the proof to the police and my name will be cleared," he said.

"Why can't you tell them yourself?" Lindsay asked.

"I need to go and get the proof first. Besides, keeping a low profile is my bread and b.u.t.ter. Any involvement with the police is bad for business in my line of work. If you'll help me, maybe I can finish my work for Boughtflower and get safely back on a plane out of the States before I have to answer any unpleasant questions about what I've been up to."

"Where are you going?" Lindsay asked.

He turned back toward her. "I'll tell you while we walk."

She hesitated for a moment. She stole a quick glance at Mike's phone. Still no service. Should she follow Adam? Did she have a choice? Owen and Mike were probably nearly to the road by now. Even at a flat-out run without an injured knee, she had no chance of catching them. She could stay in the forest by herself and wait for the cops to find her, but what good would that do anyone? Surely if Adam had wanted to hurt her, he already would've done it. If he'd missed his opportunity after their dinner together, he really couldn't expect a much better scenario for mischief than being alone in the dark woods with her.

She hurried to catch up with him, moving as fast as her injured leg would carry her. "Okay, tell me where we're going," she said.

"Well, I found out at least part of Boughtflower's secret. Jess told me at the hotel. You know how I said whatever he wanted Jess to take care of for him was an actual thing? Well, it's a packet of letters."

"What letters?'

"Do you know who Henry Berry Lowrie is?"

Lindsay nodded. "Actually, I've become a bit of an amateur biographer of his over the past couple of weeks."

"Good. Then you don't need a lot of background. Tell me what you know about Lowrie's death."

"Well, basically, his death has always been mysterious. The sequence of events is that the gang's last big heist was in February, 1872. Shortly after that, Lowrie went missing, never to be seen or heard from again. Some people said he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun. Some people think he escaped with the money from the robbery. Then a few weeks later, during the first week of March, Boss Strong, Lowrie's number one guy, was killed by Donahue McQueen, who claimed the bounty and then moved away."

"What do you think it would be worth to find letters that would change history? Henry Berry Lowrie is a hero to the Lumbees, right? And Boss Strong was his right-hand man, as well as his brother-in-law. Well, apparently these letters prove that Lowrie did die that February. It also proves that he didn't accidentally shoot himself. Boss killed him."

"What?!"

"He hatched a plan with Donahue McQueen. They worked together to kill Lowrie, steal the money and then fake Boss's death. They split the money from the Pope-MacLeod robbery and the bounty that Donahue collected on Boss," Adam explained. "They both went off in separate directions. Donahue went to California and then eventually settled in Pennsylvania."

"Wow," Lindsay said, beginning to think that Adam might, in fact, be telling the truth. The image that she'd conjured up just moments before began to shift. She could still envision Boss, Henry Berry's trusted second-in-command, sitting alongside him in the moonlight. Only now, Boss's dark eyes would be surrept.i.tiously darting to the undergrowth just beyond the circle of the campfire's light-to the place he knew Donahue McQueen was lying in wait. He'd be full of false camaraderie, all the while planning to slip off later that night and meet McQueen in secret. As the other men celebrated, he'd be plotting the details of their elaborate plan to fake his own death and murder the man he'd devoted his entire young life to following: Henry Berry, the Robin Hood of the Lumbees, his own sister's husband.

"How do the letters prove all of that?" Lindsay asked, bringing her mind back to the present.

"They were Boss's. He and Donahue split up after they faked his death and agreed never to be in touch again. Boss changed his name and used his share of the money to start up a textile mill."

"Boughtflower," Lindsay said.

"Exactly. Donahue found him. He wrote to him about ten years after they parted, asking for money. He'd spent his share. He was trying to blackmail him. The letters are only Donahue's side of things, so we don't know what Boss's replies said. But we do know that shortly after the second letter arrived, threatening to expose the whole scheme, McQueen was killed." Adam stopped to look at a device Lindsay initially thought was a phone. He held it up for her to see. "GPS. It runs off a satellite." He began walking in concentric circles, scanning the ground as he moved. She followed him, and eventually they found themselves in front of a large, flat rock.

Lindsay regarded it curiously. One thing that struck her when she had stood alone observing the forest was the almost complete lack of rocks on the ground. Anyone who'd ever tried to dig out a garden in the rolling hills of north-central North Carolina knew that you'd find plenty of granite scattered on top of, and embedded within, the thick, red clay soil. Here, however, the rock-free ground was littered with fallen leaves, pine needles, and little else.

"It looks like a tombstone," Lindsay said.

"It is. Boss and Donahue dragged that rock out here to mark the spot where Henry Berry Lowrie is buried. It was mentioned in the letters. Apparently, Otis Boughtflower inherited the letters from his grandfather and spent years trying to find this place. He finally found it sometime in the 50s and buried the letters here, too. Jess managed to work out the coordinates based on the directions her grandfather left. He'd mapped it all out using a star chart and a rough longitude and lat.i.tude, but it wasn't exact. You know I said she had to wait until the stars aligned? Well, that was literally true. She waited until the right time of year based on when he'd buried the letters and then mapped it all out using the chart. She transposed that into GPS coordinates and voila." He gestured with the shovel. "Why don't you have a seat over there? I'd better start digging if I'm going to be out of here before the police find us."

Lindsay leaned against the trunk of a dead tree near the rock. "This is unreal. Why would Jess want the letters so badly? Did she want to destroy them? Or sell them? I bet they'd be worth a lot of money to a lot of people."

"You're right. I've already made a few calls about it. They'd be worth a fortune to collectors."

"They should be in a museum," Lindsay said, raising an eyebrow at him, "not with a collector."

Adam nodded. "You're probably right." He stopped digging and leaned on the handle of the shovel. "Hey, I need to ask you something. I know it's a little weird to bring this up right now, but I was wondering." He moved closer to her until his body was squared with hers, her back pressed against the trunk of the tree behind her. "If it hadn't been for all this other stuff, do you think you and I could've had something? I mean, I feel like we had a connection." He took hold of her hand as he spoke.

"I don't know what to say," Lindsay sputtered. She looked down at their joined hands and then back up to his face.

He focused his penetrating gaze on her. "Come on. Admit it. We had something."

As usual, that sultry gaze caused a tingling sensation to zip up Lindsay's spine. This time, though, it didn't feel like s.e.xual attraction. It felt more like fear. There was something empty in his expression, almost reptilian. His grip on her hand was far too tight.

"I don't really know you," she said at last, trying to edge a little further away from him. "Um, going back to the letters, I don't get why Boughtflower wouldn't have just destroyed them when he first saw them. If his grandfather was such a sc.u.mbag, wouldn't he have wanted to disavow any kind of relationship and hide the family's connection to Lowrie?"

Adam dropped her hand abruptly, turned his back to her, and began digging. "You tell me. You know a lot about being related to sc.u.m. Take your mother. She's lowlife sc.u.m, and yet you faithfully write to her and visit her."

"What?" Lindsay said. She was so taken aback by the vitriol of his words that she felt like she'd been punched.

"Your mother," Adam said, turning around to face her. In the harsh beam of Lindsay's headlamp, his features seemed to have twisted into a grotesque caricature of the mild, handsome face she recognized. "She supplied the gun that Leander Swoopes used to kill Lydia Sikes," he continued. "She knew where he was and she helped to hide him. She was willing to trade so many people's lives-even yours-for her own. She's sc.u.m. Human sc.u.m. But you did everything in your power to help her get a light sentence. With good behavior, she could be out in less than two years. With Leander Swoopes missing and maybe dead, no one will ever really be held accountable for Lydia Sikes's death."

Chapter 24.

Lindsay took a step backwards. "Adam, you're really freaking me out."

"Am I?" He smiled. "I was right. This is so much better."

"What are you talking about?" She began to back further away from him. Despite the lingering soreness in her knee, she was prepared to run if necessary.

Adam seemed to sense her plan. He leaned down and drew a gun that had been strapped to his ankle. "Have a seat and I'll tell you all about it." A thought suddenly seemed to occur to him. "Actually, better yet, you can come over here and dig. That'll be ironic. Since you're such an expert on Lumbee history, you probably know that that's what started the whole Lowrie war in the first place. Henry Berry had to watch while the Home Guard made his father and brother dig their own graves before they were shot."

Lindsay's brain raced, trying to a.s.similate what was happening. Clearly, all the debates she'd been having with herself about Adam's character were now resolved. He was, without a doubt, the bad guy. It only remained to try to figure out why. Her earlier conversation with Warren flashed back into her brain. Christopher Sikes. Who else but a son would care so much about the death of a woman who, by all accounts, had been little mourned? Now that she'd put the pieces together, she felt that, on some deep level, she'd always known. There was a connection between them all right-Leander Swoopes had cut his path of destruction through both their lives. But how had this made Adam decide to kill her?

"Come on, Reverend," Adam said, holding out the shovel to her. "Tick-tock. Time's a'wastin'."

Lindsay looked around, the beam of her headlamp raking its yellow light across the trees and bushes that surrounded them. What were her options? She'd never before understood how someone could be forced to dig their own grave. Why, if you knew you had only moments to live, would you want to spend them in abject terror, performing humiliating physical labor for your soon-to-be killer? If you were going to die anyway, why not die with dignity, standing on solid earth, refusing to comply? Why not make your killer at least have to put in the effort to bury you after the deed was done?

But now she understood with painful clarity. It was human to hope against hope. The digging could buy time. After all, she'd had close shaves like this before, and both times, she'd escaped with her life. Maybe she could somehow use the shovel to disarm or disable Adam. Maybe, any second, the nighttime sounds of the forest would be split open by the sound of a police helicopter coming to rescue her. Maybe there was a SWAT team perched in the trees even now, just waiting to get a clear shot at Adam. She wondered if Henry Berry's father and brother had made a similar, frantic calculation when the Home Guard's guns had been turned on them. As they, too, hoped against hope that their salvation would come.

Lindsay rose, took hold of the shovel, and dug the blade into the sandy soil. "Why do you care so much about my mother?" she asked.

"Because n.o.body cared about mine," he snapped.

"Lydia Sikes," she said quietly.

He nodded.

"I didn't know she had children."

He laughed a bitter, mirthless laugh. "There wasn't much coverage of her life, was there? In all the news coverage-and believe me, I've read it all-she's only mentioned in pa.s.sing, if at all. The reporters couldn't get enough of the pretty, young minister who rescued her mother and great grandmother. Every story painted you as the hero. But my mother? She was just some junkie s.l.u.t who had it coming. If they ever showed a picture of her-and only a few of them did-it was one of her old mug shots where her hair is all messed up. I've heard you talk about Leander Swoopes or about your mother a dozen times, but you've never once mentioned her name. For all your legendary curiosity, it never occurred to you to find out anything about her."

"How would you know if I talked about her or not? And what do you mean you've heard me talk about Swoopes and my mother? I never gave a single interview about what happened. I had no interest in publicity, and I definitely don't consider myself a hero."

Lindsay was openly crying now. She wished she could turn off the tears; she didn't want to give him the satisfaction. But she was hungry, frightened, tired, confused, and in pain. And more than anything, she was furious with herself. She'd been a fool. At every turn, she'd drawn the wrong conclusion, made the wrong choice.

Adam shined his flashlight in her face, seeming to take pleasure in her distress. Looking at him she wondered if these were the same kind of cold, pitiless eyes that would've shone out from the face of the snake that had bitten Jess.

She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. "You put something in my house when you went in as Doer, didn't you? Bugged my phone or something?"

"Now there's a bit of the s.p.u.n.ky heroine I've read so much about! Yes, I put a listening device in your kitchen. Pretty much undetectable to your average Joe Policeman. Although I'd argue that the New Albany and Mount Moriah forces, especially Detective Warren Satterwhite, are well below average. For weeks, I've heard every word you said."

"And picking that name, Doer, wasn't a coincidence," she said.

"I hoped you'd figure it out, and that it would remind you. Maybe cause you to take a moment to think about the woman he murdered, but it didn't."

Lindsay plunged the shovel into the dirt with force and wiped her tears away with the backs of her hands. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about Swoopes. Your mother wasn't his only victim."

"She's the only one who died. Why her? Your mother was with Swoopes for years. Years! And he didn't kill her. My mother was with him for a couple of months and she's dead. And what about you? I've read the police reports. You had him right there, helpless on the floor in front of you. You could've ended him there so easily. Made him pay for what he did. But you let him get away!" His eyes glittered in the light of Lindsay's headlamp. "Did you know that we'd just gotten back in touch? Just a few months before she died. She was trying hard to get clean. Right before she met Swoopes, she'd been in rehab and things were going well for her. I was keeping tabs on her, so I knew she'd really made a change. Not all of what you know about me is fake. I really do have a security consulting business in Europe. It's a great way to get people to hand over their computer pa.s.swords, even the keys to their d.a.m.n houses! These people are so rich they never notice if money goes missing. Or sometimes, I'll set it up to look like they've had a data breach before I came to work for them. Then I get to be the savior and they get to be the dupes."

"So you want to be the savior? You still can be. You have the ability to track people down. Why not help the authorities track down Swoopes?" Lindsay said.

"The authorities?! They had him! He was in prison and they let him out on a plea deal. They're worthless."

Lindsay had trouble mounting an argument on that point. She, too, had often been angry when she thought of how the criminal justice system had failed in the case of Leander Swoopes. She also wondered where the authorities were at that very moment. She and Mike had managed to find Owen and Jess in this vast forest, but the police didn't seem anywhere close to finding her. She half wondered if they had even started looking.

"So you got in touch with your mother?" Lindsay asked, changing the subject.

"Yes. We made plans to meet up over Christmas. I hadn't seen her since I was 10 and they cut off her visitation rights." His features softened for a moment but then became rigid once again. "But then Swoopes came into her life. He got her doing drugs again. And you know what happened in the end," Adam said.

"I'm sorry for your loss. I truly am. That's an awful way to lose someone." She turned toward him, the light from her headlamp illuminating his twisted, red face. He looked nothing like the handsome man she'd first met in the hospital parking lot a few weeks before. Instead, he seemed to her like an angry child trying desperately not to cry.

Adam narrowed his eyes. "Take off your headlamp and throw it over here," he commanded.

Lindsay complied. The only light now came from Adam's flashlight, which was pointed at her head, along with the barrel of his gun. The pit she was digging was plunged into black. She dug in silence for a few moments, and then said, "I don't get it. Why come after me? You and I are on the same side. We both want to get Swoopes."

"I'm on my own side," he replied.

"What was all that stuff about feeling a connection? Why did you say that?"

"I just wanted to see how far you would go. I was guessing it would only take one date to have you believing my every word. When I took you out, I could practically smell how desperate you are for affection. But I underestimated you a little. Since you're a minister and a bit of a prude, it probably would've been two dates before you would've thrown yourself at me." He gestured with the gun. "Don't forget to dig."

For awhile, the sharp slice of the shovel digging into the ground was the only sound. "Don't worry," he said, breaking the silence. "I'll get Swoopes. And everyone who played a part of letting him get away. Your mother, Warren Satterwhite-everybody who had a hand in how my mother was treated. You were just the low-hanging fruit."

"Why did you lie to me about Jess being the mastermind behind all this?" Lindsay asked. Even in her state of near-panic, knowing that her life was about to end, her curiosity burned more intensely than ever. If she was going to die, she didn't want to die with loose ends.

"In a way, she was," Adam answered. "She was planning to get Owen to take her down here to get the letters. That's why she started dating him, because he had a nice car and seemed willing to be her personal chauffeur. But first she had to figure out exactly where the star chart led. Thanks for that tip, by the way. You and Simmy and Dunette explained the details of the will so clearly, and I listened to every word you said. With that information, it was easy to convince Jess. She was so patient in setting everything in motion, but I got her to trust me in a matter of hours. She really thought I was working for her grandfather. How else would I know what was in the will? She led me all the way here and gave me all the information I needed to 'help her.'" He smirked.

"Good for you, psycho. You outwitted a teenage girl and a chaplain," Lindsay muttered.