I eased and squeezed my body through the last part of the opening, glass slashing and ripping my coat, my mouth sucking at the clean air. I coughed and spluttered, my lungs thick with film. I had arrived at the terrace, where the hot tub was, and I stumbled towards the garden, falling over myself in a race to get away from the house before it caved on top of me. Before the deluge of flowing mud washed me over the cliff’s edge.
Run. Run. You can do it.
“Core of steel,” Juan’s voice championed. That’s what he used to tell me whenever I doubted myself. That I had a “core of steel.” “You can do anything you put your mind to,” he’d tell me. “You’re my smart cookie, that’s why I love you so much.”
I heard a bark in the distance and followed the sound. Beanie. My guide.
My only friend in the world.
Fifty-Five
It was only after I was well into the woods that I dared look back.
Just half of Cliffside remained. The red Mini Cooper hung like a limpet on the brink of the cliff, and Pippa’s Toyota somersaulted like a dead leaf blowing in the wind towards the ocean. I heard a great explosion somewhere on the rocks below.
Cliffside was a crumpled heap of smashed glass and stone. Its lush mossy roof sat like a garish wig as estuaries of mud poured over her.
A hawk circled above.
I spun my benumbed head around toward the woods and focused back on my exodus. I had no choice but to continue towards the beach. Rivers of water gushed towards where I had been, just minutes earlier.
I passed the redwood and there lay Lee amongst the ferns, bespattered like a bright yellow star in my raincoat. My eye skimmed down to her hand, and I gasped in horror at what they’d done: hacked off her finger to a bloody stump, where my engagement ring had been just a few hours earlier. When they chopped off her finger, was it me they thought they’d found? Revenge for the eight million. I hoped they’d at least done it after they’d shot her, however vile she’d been. I turned my eyes away in disgust, saliva puckering my cheeks. I wanted to vomit. Dan lay near his mother, bullet holes like red paintball splotches in his back, the spade flung to one side.
All the money gone, the hole in the earth dark and gaping, swallowing up the twilight.
How did these vicious criminals know? How did they arrive so swiftly on the scene?
Then it dawned on me: my phone. My cell phone that Lee had stolen. If they’d had any suspicions about the money, they would have bugged it, hacked into it, would have listened in on conversations. They could do that, even when it was on airplane mode. Juan had warned me often enough how a phone acts as a GPS, a listening device. So that conversation with Lee when I told her about the buried money? All recorded. And my phone would have led them to Lee’s exact position once she’d dug it up.
Karma’s a bitch.
Beanie’s distant bark snapped me back to attention, and I soldiered on, shock numbing every sense in my body, except my desire to survive, adrenaline spurring me forward.
The ocean’s great breakers were getting louder as I slogged on through the dell of pines and redwoods, tripping as I scrambled with my limp, trying to keep myself on the path. I still couldn’t see Beanie but heard his barks. I swallowed. My teeth like sandpaper, my throat barbed and dry as a cat’s tongue.
I kept running.
I stopped for breath, my pulse thudding in my red-hot ears, but looked up and noticed water beginning to pour towards me in a cascade bringing with it rocks and earth. I turned my attention back to my escape, my hand clutching my rasping throat, wishing I had water to quench my thirst. As I ran with all my might, I tore off the ragged, ripped-up coat I was wearing and flung it to the ground. It was slowing me down like a parachute.
Run. Run. Run. The mudslide was a living entity, not stopping for breath.
I had now caught up with Beanie and followed him blindly. Rain lashing at my face. Feet stumbling. I could hardly see through my storm-whipped hair plastered to my face by debris. Beanie knew the way, his little legs taking us to safer ground. Down, down, towards the bay.