“Where are you?”
“Canada.”
“Well thanks for letting me know you’re alive. I’ll pass along the good news to Dad.”
“Mom, stop it, just—”
“No, you don’t get to not call me for two months and then be friends.”
“Will you just stop talking for two seconds? Something very big has happened in my life. I can’t talk about it now, but it’s exciting. I just wanted to call and say I love you.”
“What, are you in danger?”
“No. I don’t think so. Look, I have to go. I promise I’ll call you again soon.”
“Horace—”
He hung up the phone, walked back to the Land Cruiser, where he sat behind the wheel for a moment, clearing his head, going once more over everything he would say to Andrew Thomas—the praise, the questions, the threat.
Then he cranked the engine and headed off toward the woods, trying to ignore the very real possibility that he would not be coming back.
24
HURTLING down the dirt road toward my cabin, I discovered what an enormous coward I had become. All the way home I tried to pretend I hadn’t read the news. My dream was to remain in the wilderness outside Haines Junction until the end of my days, writing for the joy of it. I’d intended to die out here, an old recluse. This last year I’d been happy for the first time since Orson and Luther ripped my life away from me. I felt at home in these woods and I had never expected to feel that again.
I reached my narrow drive and turned into the forest.
The anger subsided but fear crept in, eroding the lining of my stomach with that old familiar ache. It conjured a parade of images I’d spent years trying to forget, and as I glimpsed my cabin through the trees something whispered, One of them is alive.
No. I’d watched my brother Orson take a full load of buckshot to the chest. I’d seen the vacancy in his eyes thirty seconds later, the life running out of him. I’d left him frozen on the porch of a remote desert cabin. My twin was dead; he wasn’t coming back.
I parked in front of the cabin and turned off the Jeep. Staring through the cracked windshield, I thought of Luther Kite, recalled standing over him holding a twelve gauge to his chest, my finger grazing the double triggers. But I hadn’t killed him. I’d thrown the shotgun across the room and left him to die on that cold front porch, severely wounded and miles from the nearest town with no mode of transportation. He could not have survived. He was dying when I left him. Please God, You would not have let that monster survive. And then this piercing thought: What if my unwillingness to pull that trigger has cost six people, including an entire family, their lives?
I wasn’t ready to accept that. Luther Kite died with Orson in that snowy Wyoming desert. The Worthingtons’ and Karen’s killer—whoever had blazed that gory trail across North Carolina—was a copycat. It’s not my fault.
I opened the door, stepped out of the Jeep, the woods cold and still.
Walking toward the porch, I wondered, But why kill in Davidson across the lake from my old home? And why kidnap Beth Lancing? As I thought her name, my self-interest evaporated and it registered for the first time that she’d been taken, that if she weren’t dead now she was in the company of a madman.
Halfway up the porch steps, a sob spurted out of me. I sat down and wept like I hadn’t wept in years, hanging blame around my neck for everything that had befallen that ill-starred family. The Lancings would’ve been better off never to have known me. I’d taken everything from them. Everything. And now, seven years after the death of Walter, their association with me continued to produce suffering. How could I not try to help Beth?
I stood up and walked into the cabin, aware that the defense mechanisms in my brain were attempting to unplug me. The immense pain I’d endured through those dark years had nearly turned me into a stoic. The tears surprised me. I’d wondered recently if I had it in me to ever cry again.
Between the time I closed the door and set the news article on the breakfast table, the decision was made and I’d acknowledged that it could only be Luther.
So I walked over to my bed and dragged a suitcase out from underneath it, shaking as I began to pack.
I was rummaging the bottom drawer of a dresser in search of an envelope of hundred-dollar bills when I heard a car approaching down my drive. Closing the drawer, I came to my feet in pure astonishment. In the five years I’d lived in this cabin I rarely received visitors and was not expecting one now.
Though only three in the afternoon, the sun had slipped back behind the peaks, the forest draped in an eerie twilight. I heard a door slam and through the window watched a figure step onto the porch.
There was a knock.
Taking the subcompact .40 caliber Glock from the top dresser drawer, I slipped it into the pocket of my fleece pullover and went to greet my guest.
When I opened the front door, firelight from inside the cabin streamed across the gaunt visage of a young man I’d seen around the village these last few weeks, a small kid with an acne-cratered face, swallowed in a huge down jacket. The moment we made eye contact he looked away.
“Help you?” I asked. He found my eyes again, his hands fidgeting behind his back.
“Mr. Carmichael?” he said.
“Yes?” I sensed a frightened innocence behind those twentysomething eyes.
“May I come in for a moment?”
“Why?”
“There was something I wanted to talk to you about.”
He was letting in the cold so I stepped back and ushered him inside.
The young man stood beside the breakfast table, took a good long look at me. His Adam’s apple rolled in his throat and his hands shook.
I said, “Well, do I have to guess?”
“What? Oh, no.”
As he leaned against the breakfast table, our eyes fixed simultaneously on the article which lay face-up, its headline in large black font:
FAMILY SLAYING LINKED TO ANDREW THOMAS
He looked up quickly and said, “Julie Ashburn sent me out to see if you could work tomorrow night. The Curling Club is having a dinner.”
I reached back, pulled my hair into a ponytail.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Horace. I just started helping her out. Sort of a gofer. Lucky to get the job.”
“Well, you’ll have to tell her that I can’t do it this time, Horace.”
“Oh, okay. That’s fine, I mean…” He glanced once more at the article, then back at me, becoming breathless. “I’ll let her know. Should I tell her you’re going on vacation? That that’s why you can’t?” I just stared at him and slid my hands into my pockets, fingering the cold metal of the handgun, trying to talk myself down from the paranoia. He doesn’t suspect anything. He’s acting strange because he’s strange. World’s full of strange people. Nothing more than that. He doesn’t know who I am.