Daniel Palmer - Helpless

Tom floated in the water, clutching Adriana’s limp body in his arms. It wasn’t just the cold water making it hard for Tom to breathe. No, something else was wrong. A spot on his abdomen felt exquisitely sore to the touch.

Tom suddenly knew why he’d begun to sink. Water filled his nostrils. He gagged to clear his airway, but the pain felt worse than drowning.

Tom’s body bobbed vertically in the water, as if he were climbing the rungs of an invisible ladder. His mouth angled for each struggling breath. He let the water fill him up and pull him under.

His muscles were tiring. Any moment now .

Drowning wasn’t anything like the movies or TV portrayed it to be. It was far more terrifying, because no overt signals, like splashing or frantic hand waving, warned of any peril. Drowning, Tom knew, was a far more cerebral experience. But no matter how people imagined a drowning victim suffered, in the end everyone died the same way: the heart simply stopped beating.

Tom’s limp body sank into a free fall. He made several hard kicks, fighting to surface against the decreased mobility of his denim jeans. His lungs were afire. His chest felt as if it were being squeezed by a bone-crunching weight.

He felt a sudden pull on his shirt. His whole body jerked upward. His body jerked again. Instead of sinking, Tom felt himself starting to rise. Tom broke the surface, the fire in his burning lungs extinguished with that first blessed breath of air. He began to tread water. He could feel the blood rushing out the bullet hole in his stomach. He saw Jill treading water beside to him. She was holding on to his shirt. A body, floating facedown nearby, had to be Adriana. He could see the depression where the railroad tie had crushed her skull.

Tom felt another tug on his shirt, followed by the sensation of being pulled. Jill was swimming for the shoreline. And she was dragging him with her.

Tom felt the rocks and sand of the shoreline pricking at his neck and arms. He could see the moon and the stars above him. The world was spinning. The last words Tom heard before he lost consciousness repeated in his fast-fading thoughts.

“Don’t you die on me, Dad! Don’t you dare die!”

Tom struggled to open his eyes. When he did, he was looking up at Rainy’s smiling face.

“Are you an angel?” he managed to croak.

“No. I’m not.”

“Is this heaven?” he asked.

“No. It’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,” Rainy said.

“I don’t believe you. No, I’m sure this is heaven.”

“Have you ever been kissed by an angel?” Rainy asked.

Tom felt the warmth of her lips pressing gently against his eyelids, then brushing over his mouth. “I think I can get used to heaven.”

“Well, heaven can wait.”

“Warren Beatty,” Tom said.

“What?”

“That’s my favorite Warren Beatty movie. Heaven Can Wait. ”

“I see.”

“We can watch it together.”

Tom tried to sit up and felt a sharp pain in his gut.

“Not time for that just yet,” Rainy said.

He lifted up his hands, expecting at least one of them to be handcuffed. “I’m still a free man?” he asked.

“You’re a lucky man,” Rainy said. “The bullet hit you in the side, not the stomach. But it was touch and go for a while there.”

“Rainy… what happened… ?”

“What happened is the Boyd family is not going to make the cover of Parents magazine, that’s for sure.”

“How did Adriana frame me? Why?”

“A lot’s happened since you’ve been out of pocket.”

“How long?”

“Three days. Going on four.”

“Jill?”

“She’s fine. She’s with Lindsey Wells.”

Tom’s expression went blank, and his jaw fell slack.

“But I thought Lindsey was dead. The police found her body in the woods. That’s why they were coming to arrest me.”

“They found her blood-soaked jacket in the woods and your knife nearby. Frank Dee was supposed to kill her but decided to keep her locked up in the icehouse. Apparently, he’d been… assaulting her. Instead of killing Lindsey, he cut her hand and soiled her jacket. I guess he planned on absconding with her, but Adriana didn’t give him that choice. One of the Willards Woods employees noticed the lock on the icehouse door wasn’t the one she put there. She called the police, and they found Lindsey alive. Traumatized, but at least she’s alive.”

“Thank God,” Tom breathed. “What happened? Did Mitchell try to kill her?”

“He did,” Rainy said. “Lindsey called Tanner and told him about the flash drive Jill gave her. Tanner called Mitchell. They hatched a plan to get the flash drive back. Mitchell planned to kill Lindsey. Only he couldn’t do it. He choked her until she passed out. He put her in the trunk of his car and drove her back to his house. Then he went to Daddy. He told Roland everything, about his illegal image business and what he did to Lindsey. Only, he didn’t tell Dad that Mommy already knew about his sexting ring and told him to shut it down.”

“Sexting ring?”

“This kid was pretty entrepreneurial. He contracted a bunch of his friends and strangers he met over the Internet. These kids coerced their girlfriends into taking naked pictures of themselves. Mitchell paid them for any pictures they got, then sold them on the Internet for a profit. He basically tapped into an underserviced, but highly desired fetish market. The kid was making a fortune.”

“Tanner Farnsworth?”

“He was one of them. So was Gretchen Stiller.”

“A girl was coercing her own girlfriends into taking these pictures?”

“Sexting is anybody’s game.”

“So Mitchell knew his mom was framing me?”

“He did. This family kept a lot of secrets from each other.”

“I saw Adriana kill Dee and Roland. It’s like she just snapped.”

“Well, Adriana wasn’t who she pretended to be,” Rainy said, stroking Tom’s hair. “This woman nearly destroyed your life.”

“How? She’s not a computer wizard.”

“No,” Rainy said. “But following your tip about Cortland, we made several arrests. One of the people we arrested, a guy named Aaron Donovan, turned state’s witness. He told us everything.”

“Everything?”

“Adriana seduced Simon Cortland. She knew about the stock scheme Cortland concocted with her husband. She knew he had the ability to destroy people’s reputations. Apparently, Adriana was curious about Mitchell’s growing wealth. She seduced Cortland and had him install spyware on Mitchell’s computers. That’s how she found out Mitchell had been running a sexting ring.”

“So Adriana got Cortland to frame me for Mitchell’s crimes.”

“Simon Cortland hijacked Lindsey’s wireless network and wrote the Tumblr blog posts about her supposed affair with you. He was ‘Fidelius Charm’ and sent you the text messages of one of Mitchell’s many victims. Marvin was right.”

“How so?”

“Adriana came up with the idea to make it look like you were sleeping with one of your players.”

“Why?”

“She wanted to make you look like a sexual predator. A jury would be more willing to believe you were running a sophisticated sexting ring that way. According to Donovan, Adriana was paranoid about the plan falling apart. That’s why she posted your bail. She wanted to keep the suspicion as far away from herself and Mitchell as possible. Who would think that the woman who bailed you out of jail was also the one who put you there?”

“So Cortland put that Leterg program on my computer? Faked those bank accounts, too?”

“He did,” Rainy said. “Only Cortland couldn’t easily get to your home computer, especially after you installed the alarm, which is why he used your work computer instead.”