She clawed at the floor with her fingers and realized she was over one of the trapdoors that fishermen used to access the ice. She felt a loop of metal catch under her fingernail, and she pried the small door open and nearly sang with joy as a rush of cold air blew up from the lake water into her face. Her lungs gagged, trying to cough out the remnants of smoke and replace them with oxygen. After a few deep breaths, she felt alive again.
The flames were now circling her like wolves. She felt a singeing heat on her back that told her the cot itself was now on fire. She began to think she had saved herself just to die in the worst way.
The shanty took a heavy jolt, and she heard a voice not even four feet away. "Serena!"
It was Jonny. Inside.
Stride took two steps and ripped something off the wall. The whoosh of compressed air exploding in a burst of foam filled the space. The nearest flames fell back and died. He sprayed until the fire extinguisher was empty, beating back the fire and creating a temporary bubble of safety around them.
He attacked the tape on her ankles. Serena saw the glint of Blue Dog's knife within reach, and she grabbed it and waved it in the air. "Jonny, use this! Hurry!"
She felt him quickly cut through the tape where it tied her to the steel legs of the cot. In seconds, her legs came free. He flung the bed frame away from her and pushed aside the mattress, which was smoldering. She tried to turn over but found she didn't have the strength to do so. Her legs were leaden. The blood flowed back to her feet slowly.
"Can you walk?" he asked.
"No." Her voice was ragged.
Jonny squatted in front of her. "Grab onto my shoulders. Hang on."
She wrapped her arms around his torso from behind and clung to him as he pushed himself off his knees. He swayed, holding her weight.
"Don't let go," he said.
Then she heard him say, "Shit."
As the two of them watched, half the ceiling of the shanty collapsed. A wall of fire came down like a steel curtain in front of the doorway. The fish house lurched again, a dying ship slipping under the water. The lake spread in a deepening pool across the floor. Steam and smoke mingled. There was no way out.
Stride squatted down again and eased her back onto the hot floor. She hid her face under the trapdoor. There was still fresh air blowing below the shanty, but the ice was weakening, and the pool of water was rising and threatening to flood inside. When she looked up, she saw Jonny with a wet scarf wrapped around his face. He kicked furiously at the tin wall behind them with the bottom of his boot, but the metal hung tough. Sparks landed on his clothes and started to catch fire. He spotted a gas-powered auger in the corner and lugged the three-feet steel coil to the wall. He pulled the crank cord, and the motor coughed and sputtered. The shanty swayed; it was sinking fast. The fire raced over their heads. He yanked it again, and again, and finally the whiny engine roared to life. Stride plunged it against the wall, and the metal screamed and gave way, and then he pulled it back and punched another hole and twisted his body to drill a jagged tear down to the bottom of the wall. When that was done, he brought the drill back up and cut sideways and down, until the gap in the metal formed a three-feet square.
He threw the auger down. He kicked again, and this time the wall yawed and bent, and the flap of metal pushed outward toward the open air. The rush of new oxygen fed the fire, and the flames closed in on them. He didn't need to tell her what to do; she grabbed hold of his waist, and he squirmed through the gap in the wall, dragging her behind him. He fell out of the fish house and splashed into frigid water, and he kept snaking forward until Serena spilled out behind him. She let go and fell into a foot of slushy water, but there was a sheath of ice below her.
Stride clawed out of the shallow pool and reached back and pulled her out beside him. The snow froze her wounds with an awful sting. She wanted to lay there forever, but he was already moving. He stripped off his jacket and made her put it on, then hoisted her onto his back again. Next to them, the fire spat through the hole they had made in the wall. The rest of the ceiling collapsed with a roar, and the walls caved in over the space where they had been only seconds earlier. A new tower of flame rose and fell, consuming what was left of metal and wood, until there was nothing left of the fish house.
She couldn't walk, but she knew that Jonny was near to breaking. In the distance, though, she saw rescue. Maggie ran toward them, waving madly. Behind her, only a quarter mile away, half a dozen squad cars converged on the scene.
Jonny saw them, too. He sank to his knees, unable to go any farther. She felt both of their bodies shiver and tremble, but she repeated over and over to herself that it wouldn't be long, that help was coming, that warmth and blankets and morphine were minutes away. She prayed it wasn't a mirage.
Someone else saw the police cars coming, too.
Nearby, the snow-covered Lexus sedan near Blue Dog's van came alive. Windshield wipers pushed aside the snow. Its tires spun, and it shot off away from them, away from the police, away from the wreckage of the shanty, heading straight out toward the belly of the lake, where the blizzard quickly swallowed it.
"Who the hell was that?" Jonny murmured.
Serena didn't answer. She was already unconscious, and in her dreams, the pain went away, and she was warm.
59
Lauren was in a white cloud, unseeing, with the storm blinding the night and the lake as big and open as the ocean itself. The wheels of the Lexus churned silently at a hundred miles an hour across the ice. She could have been flying.
She had no illusions of escape. She was dying. You could only lose so much blood and stay alive. Her heart kept pumping, and the red river soaked into her blue shirt and turned it purple and puddled on the leather seats of the Lexus. Dan would hate that. He could forgive almost everything else, but he'd be standing over her grave asking why she couldn't have died in the snow and spared the custom interior. That was Dan. Love was sex to him, but money was love.
It didn't matter to her to die out here. The infuriating part was that no one would understand. It was never about money or power or exposure. She didn't swing the flashlight into Tanjy's head because she was afraid of the truth coming out. She did it because Dan was in love with Tanjy.
Lauren willed the knowledge of Dan's other affairs out of her mind, because in the end, he came home to her and relied on her for everything. If he wanted to sleep with trophy girls who thought they had a chance of displacing her, she didn't care; she just didn't want to know about it. Sex was never of much interest to her, so she let Dan do what he wanted. She was the one who loved him, who created him. Their partnership was more important than anything else.
Until Tanjy.
Until that perverted, beautiful bitch destroyed their lives.
She didn't understand how Tanjy and her vile fantasies turned Dan inside out and made him forget what Lauren had done for him. People called Lauren an ice queen and made jokes about the cold face she showed everyone else, but they were so wrong. When that huge, awful blackmailer named Billy Deed showed her what was going on between Tanjy and Dan, she became obsessed with punishing Tanjy. Erasing her. Obliterating her.
It wasn't just the photographs, although she couldn't believe Dan would be so reckless. Any one of those photos would have brought their world tumbling down, ruining everything. But there was more. Blue Dog had e-mails, too. Those were the things that scared and enraged her. Dan telling Tanjy how much he loved her. How she aroused him. How he never stopped thinking about her.