Page 21 of Dearly Departed

“Stand up.” I try to lift Jacob. It doesn’t work. “Jacob, get up. We have to go.”

He drags his feet closer and leans on me with a softer oof that would probably be something we laughed about in London and feels deadly serious right now. My eyes have adjusted to the moonlight, so I can see Raymond Harris crawling around on the plane’s wing like a huge bug. My heart sticks in my throat, pounding like I’m at a horror movie.

I hate horror movies.

Another wave of anger doesn’t stop the throat-pounding beat, but it sends fresh energy into my arms and legs.

“Come on. Let’s stand up together. Ready? One, two⁠—”

On three, I get halfway to my feet, all of Jacob’s weight balanced on my shoulders.

Weight training. I’m going to get into lifting after this. I’m going to get so strong. I’m going to ride horses, too. Who knows? Maybe I’ll bring a horse with us everywhere we go. To Mougains for sure, for the summer in France Raymond Harris isn’t going to take from us, for God’s sake.

I collect Jacob’s bag from the ground and get the handles over my shoulder. It’s not really meant to be carried this way, but I’m not really meant to be crash-landed in an unknown place with a murderer and a husband with a head wound, so having to carry the bag awkwardly just makes sense.

“We have to walk,” I tell Jacob in my most assertive tone. No. I do not want to look at the mummies and think about my dead father’s casket. Thank you for the offer, but I’ll be going. No, we cannot stay here with the murderer. We will be going. “We’ll find somewhere else to rest.”

“Cheers, darling,” Jacob says his poshest accent.

“Oh, God. Come on. Let’s go.”

My husband—my husband, who should be sleeping comfortably in the warm embrace of a five-star resort or ancestral property on loan to us for our honeymoon or his villa in France—blinks hard.

“I’m fine, Catherine. I’m fine.” He doesn’t sound fine. Now that my heart isn’t beating quite so hard, I can hear what’s around us. Raymond Harris scrabbling on the wing. The ocean rushing onto the shore. The hum of insects in the trees. There’s forest on one side of the crashed plane, dirt and more plants underfoot, and a rocky beach on the other side. The left wing is tilted into the sand. It doesn’t look like we were in immediate danger of sliding into the ocean, but the plane did slide off a low outcropping between the trees and the sand.

Better than crashing directly into the outcropping. Better than going nose-first into the ocean. Better than the plane exploding and taking us with it.

“Great! Come with me.”

“To the ends of the earth and beyond, my love.”

We take a step away from the plane. Jacob shudders, and then less of his weight is on me. That’s a positive sign, right? If he can stand up a little better, it’ll be easier to outrun Raymond Harris.

I do not feel positive about being able to outrun anyone, but I put a smile on my face anyway. It feels more like a grimace, so I stop.

Jacob leans on me again. “Give me a moment, kitten. I just need⁠—”

Whatever Jacob needs, he doesn’t get it, because Raymond Harris swings himself over the edge of the wing and drops like a stone. I pull Jacob back a few steps on instinct. Raymond crumples, the air going out of him in a whoosh, then unfolds himself with a growl. Then he smiles, his teeth appearing in a slow, menacing stretch, his teeth an eerie white against the shiny black oil that’s all over his face.

Oh—

That’s not oil. That’s blood.

“I want to watch you die,” Raymond informs us in an even, professional tone. I know just how it would sound if he said we’d arrived at our destination and were waiting for a gate. “Getting to kill you is even better.”

“I didn’t do anything to you,” I shoot back. “Did you come to our house in London? Are you really that obsessed with being creepy and horrible?”

Raymond Harris ignores me. He keeps smiling, even while some of the blood on his face drips onto his teeth. It makes it look like they’re falling out of his head or disappearing into his mouth. I don’t know which one’s worse.

“You could have killed us before. There was no need to go to all this trouble,” Jacob offers.

“Trouble?” Raymond tilts his head. “This isn’t trouble, Chambers. This is fun. Didn’t your parents teach you how to play?”

“If they did, I can’t recall the rules of this one. Does it always happen on—” Jacob’s voice falters. He sounds exhausted. He is exhausted. What he admitted to me in New York is a full-time job’s worth of penance trips, conducted on red-eye flights while I slept obliviously in our London townhouse. Jacob has to be at the end of his rope. “Does it always happen on a deserted island after a hijacked flight, or is the setting incidental?”

Raymond Harris laughs. His deep voice is rough, like it’s been ground down with sandpaper. My stomach sinks. It’s an awful way to laugh, full of grief and despair, and it reminds me, sickeningly, of how my sisters used to laugh after our father had done his worst and left for the office, when they could be sure he wouldn’t hear.

“The setting is incidental. You can play this one anywhere, you worthless son of a bitch. The side of the road was good enough for my wife. It would’ve been good enough for you, but it’s better out here where nobody can save you. They won’t find the bodies, either.” More of his teeth are gone, blackened by the blood. “The least they can do is wonder where you disappeared to for the rest of their lives.”