Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [113]
Her eyes narrowed.
“I don’t know who you are, I swear I don’t,” she told him.
“She has eyes, but does not see,” he mused.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’ll have that coffee now.” His smile faded and his mouth straightened into a hard line. “And so will you.”
She grabbed a mug in each hand. The heat bled through the sides of the mugs into her fingers, and at that second, she knew she might not get a better chance. Reacting before she’d fully thought it through, with a quick twist of her wrists, she tossed the scalding coffee into his eyes.
His scream was angry, surprised, confused. And lethal.
“You bitch!” he roared, coming at her blindly.
No time to search for car keys, she shoved past him and raced down the back steps for the barn and the canoe that rested against the outer wall. As quickly as she could, she dragged the canoe into the water and pushed off, half running alongside the vessel to get as far from the house as possible. Paddling furiously, Kendra made her way toward the lake, her heart pounding painfully in her chest, sobs ripping from her throat. Once she made it to the other side, she could reach the emergency phone in the parking lot where the day-trippers left their cars while they explored the Pines.
But first she would have to make it through the narrow waterways in the dark. Though well acquainted with the creeks, Kendra had never navigated these passages at night. She paddled swiftly, and several times the paddle threatened to slip from her shaking hands. She could not slow down, but she could, she told herself, calm down. She should have paid more attention when she first started out, but the panic was so fresh and the fear so great that she’d paddled mindlessly, escape her only goal. Now that that had been accomplished, she needed to be rational, calculated, if she was to find her way in the dark.
The canoe glided through the shallow channels, but to what destination she was no longer certain. She rested the paddle across the canoe and drifted just slightly, enough to know she was headed downstream. But which stream? And in which direction?
The cedar grew thick here, the trees standing tall right down to the water’s edge. Gnarled roots reached like twisted fingers into the stream from either side, and the treetops met thirty feet over her head in a dense web of branches. She could be in one of two or three places. Without light, it simply wasn’t possible to tell. She began to paddle again, thinking that perhaps this might not have been such a great idea after all. But what options had she had? Her car keys were in the foyer, which would have required her to pass the chair the man—she could not bring herself to think of him as Ian—was sitting in. Without access to a weapon that could not be turned against her, the hot liquid had seemed her only choice. But she knew that scalding his face could only be counted on to disable him for the briefest of time, time that had allowed her to escape from the house and from the man.
“Not many choices,” she muttered softly as she searched in the dark for something that appeared familiar.
She paddled straight ahead until she emerged from the overhead canopy. Clouds that had drifted past the moon now eased aside, and the faintest bit of moonlight spread through the trees, here where the tall cedars were replaced by pigmy and pitch pines and a lone catalpa tree, last year’s long pods still hanging here and there from its branches. Kendra relaxed. She knew the tree—some of the older locals used to call it Webb’s Pub, for the still buried nearby where years ago a man named Jonathan Webb made moonshine out of wild blueberries. It wasn’t where she wanted to be by over a mile, but at least she knew where she was now. Through the night she heard the familiar cry of the whippoorwills, and the sound soothed her.
The channel at this point being too narrow and the current being strong, Kendra got out of the canoe and manually turned it around. She’d have to backtrack half a mile or so, then bear to the left to get to the lake. But it was okay now. She let out