by Megan Crane
The Neanderthal in Templeton distinctly disliked the way she stepped out even farther, marching a few paces closer to the house. It left her completely exposed, and he hated it.
The strategist in him, on the other hand, admired both the move itself and how coolly she executed it.
“It’s me, Russ,” she called again, like she was someone’s elderly neighbor on a television show. “Your cousin Kate.”
The man on the roof spat. In disgust, presumably.
And for a long, tense moment, nothing else happened.
“What do you want?” the man demanded right when Templeton was beginning to feel itchy, like maybe he should shoot something to keep the ball rolling.
He could tell that Kate figured that question was a tacit agreement that the guy was, in fact, her cousin. Or he assumed that was what her serene trooper smile was all about.
“It’s the holiday season,” she said, loud enough to bounce back from the house. “People are ripe for reconciliation and reunion this time of year, don’t you think?”
“What I think is that you’re trespassing,” Russ called down into the clearing. He let out a disgruntled sort of noise. “Cousin.”
“It’s good to see you, too,” Kate called back. Like she meant it.
It was impossible not to admire his trooper. Templeton didn’t try.
There was the sound of locks being thrown, and then the front door of the cabin opened. Templeton moved his gaze from the idiot on the roof for no more than a split second, but it was enough to get a picture. A woman stood there, a regular shotgun in her arms and a scowl on her face. She looked nothing like Kate. She was rounder and softer, though her face looked more like a long-haul road in winter, cracked and hard and salted besides.
But he recognized that scowl. This was clearly Kate’s cousin Liberty.
“Are you hunting us down,” Liberty asked, her voice hard. “Again?”
“If I was hunting you down, I would be here with a SWAT team,” Kate replied, still sounding cheerful. As if they were exchanging Christmas cookie recipes, not gunfire.
Liberty motioned to Templeton with the muzzle of the shotgun, another thing Templeton did not care for. At all. “What do you call him?”
“My insurance policy.” Kate’s smile widened. “Seeing as Cousin Russ is lying on the roof with a shotgun, I suspect you know a thing or two about insurance policies.”
“We haven’t broken any laws,” Liberty said, though she lowered the shotgun. Fractionally. “Since I know that’s what concerns you, Miss Law and Order.”
“Trooper Law and Order, thank you,” Kate said, still smiling. “I saw Will last night.”
“My brother isn’t welcome around here.” Liberty’s voice was hard. “And neither are you.”
“All I want to do is talk.” Kate looked from Liberty to Russ then back. “We can do that, can’t we? Just talk?”
“Not until your goon puts down that gun,” came Russ’s voice.
Templeton let out one of his better laughs, long and loud. “You first, buddy.”
“How about everybody puts down their guns?” Kate asked, a little more edge in her voice. “Like whoever is lurking there behind you, Liberty.”
Templeton had already clocked the man lurking in the shadows and suspected there was at least one more adult in that house. But he didn’t see any more obvious weapons.
“We don’t like strangers,” Liberty snapped. “And that’s all you are to us, Kate. A stranger. Worse than that, a stranger who used to be family before you sold us all out.”
“If I’d sold you out, I would have gained something from the experience,” Kate said, as if this were a pleasant conversation, not an armed confrontation in the bitter cold. “I can’t say I did.”
“You got the attention you always wanted,” Liberty retorted. “You had no trouble stepping right into that spotlight, did you?”
“I was a fifteen-year-old girl. Terrified for my life.” Kate shook her head, and Templeton thought her smile was a little edgier than before. “We don’t have to do this, do we? I know why you hate me. I don’t think we need to do a point-by-point analysis of all the reasons why I think you shouldn’t. We’re unlikely to reach an agreement. Still, I’d like to talk to you. Maybe somewhere where we’re not all risking frostbite or worse.”
There was another long, tense silence. Templeton kept his eyes on the roof. Because as much as he wanted to keep watch over Kate—maybe he wanted that too much, a detail he was going to have to examine when he wasn’t some idiot’s idea of winter target practice—he knew that this was like any day on the job for her. And that she knew what she was doing. She’d lowered her hands to her sides, and he’d bet everything he had that his trooper was quicker on the draw than her cousin. Than either one of her cousins.
“Fine,” Liberty said.
She let out a piercing whistle. Templeton watched Russ scowl but lower his weapon. Templeton took his sweet time doing the same.
Liberty watched him closely, like she was expecting a trick. “You can leave your insurance policy outside.”
Kate smiled. “That’s not going to happen.”
Templeton was surprised that there was no argument. Liberty glared at him, but then jerked her chin in what he chose to take as an invitation, though the way she stepped deeper into the house could have been read as ominous.
He ambled inside behind Kate, and it wasn’t lost on him that once again, they fell into the kind of patterns that usually took a hell of a lot more time to develop. She marched in with all the confidence in the world, putting on a show. He followed, looking and acting lazy and aimless, and took in all the details.
“I see you share the same decorating taste as our parents,” Kate was saying. Templeton glanced around the stark room with no furniture, which that would have been a living room in any other house. It was empty, the way it looked at first glance, save for the huge yellow flag covering most of one wall with a snake coiled in the middle of it and the words DON’T TREAD ON ME emblazoned across the bottom. There were mats along the walls, but no television or comfortable sofa. And the wall across from the flag appeared to double as an armory.
“Do you all sit around and meditate together?” Templeton asked. “This looks like a great yoga room.”
All he got in return were a few stray growls. And that gleam in Kate’s gaze when she glanced over at him.
But all that muttering kept the attention on his outrageousness. He was more interested in the individual who stood behind Liberty, whom he could now see fully. The man was all dark brows and another epic beard to match. And up at the top of the narrow staircase that led to the open loft area above, there was a woman even rounder and softer than Liberty. She looked like a fertility statue as she corralled two surprisingly quiet kids under ten or so, a tearstained toddler, and the baby she wore in a sling.
At least the presence of potential spouses meant things here were a lot less Appalachian than they’d seemed on paper, he thought. Because Templeton had made a whole career out of finding the silver lining anywhere he looked.
“Kate was terrified by our childhood,” Liberty was saying. It took Templeton a moment to realize she was responding to his ridiculous yoga remark. “We weren’t.”
“So you and Russ figured you’d move back to the old stomping grounds?” Kate asked, and once again, she was in total trooper mode.
As if this weren’t her family. As if she were answering a call, didn’t know these people, and hadn’t grown up in a room a lot like this one.
An image Templeton really didn’t like at all.
Because he wouldn’t like anyone growing up here, he assured himself. Sternly. Including the kids who lived here now. It had nothing to do with any inappropriate emotional connection to—
Shut up, dumbass.
Templeton concentrate
d on the information he was receiving from the house around them. He could hear Cousin Russ’s thumping progress down off the roof, then in through a back door. He could hear it every time someone shifted position. It took maybe two full heartbeats for him to pinpoint where every person in the house was standing and to determine that there very likely weren’t any surprise visitors hiding in the rooms he couldn’t see. Still, very likely wasn’t an all clear. He kept his back to the wall so that, if he was wrong, he could disarm Liberty and the man he assumed was her husband with maybe three moves. Then help himself to one of the weapons displayed on the wall behind them, if necessary.
“It’s beautiful here,” Liberty was saying, a harder note in her voice that made it seem highly unlikely she was an avid hiker, outdoor sports enthusiast, or, say, an arctic photographer. “We were homesick.”
“You either have a heart for this land or you don’t,” Russ said, stamping in from the back of the house, looking red from the cold and bitter straight through.
“I was unaware that hearts were involved in anything that happened out here,” Kate replied lightly. “I thought it was mostly manual labor, hunger, and my father’s endless, unhinged lectures.”
“Your father is a great man,” Russ said darkly. “A great man. You watch your mouth when you talk about him.”
“Or what?” Kate asked. But she managed to make it sound like it wasn’t a direct challenge, more that she was musing on the topic. “The thing is, Russ, you might think he’s a great man, and you’re welcome to your opinion, of course. But the state of Alaska and the federal government disagree.”
“This isn’t the right place to rehash all your lies,” Liberty said, and she did not sound light or musing. “Is that why you came here? You think you can poison us the way you did my brother?”
“Will didn’t seem particularly poisoned to me,” Kate observed.
“You’re both traitors,” Russ growled. “End of story.”
“Once again,” Kate said quietly, “the state of Alaska disagrees. They don’t like it when people kill their law enforcement officers. And they took a dim view of the ritual that claimed the lives of two people that all the adults in this family allowed to happen. I’m not sure truly great men come with a body count.”
“Lies,” Russ shouted. “We all know how you twisted it. But no one in this family is responsible for two grown adults who chose to walk out into a winter storm.”
“Naked,” Kate reminded him. “And so far out in the bush that even if they changed their minds, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“You can’t blame our family for other people’s choices,” Liberty chimed in, the same impassioned—or unhinged—note in her voice.
“I understand that’s what you believe,” Kate said after a moment, and maybe Templeton was the only person in the room who could hear the fury she was obviously trying to conceal. She took a breath, then smiled. “There’s no need to litigate it here.”
Because, Templeton knew, she had been cross-examined on this subject repeatedly. Her parents, her aunts and uncles, her father’s cousins—Kate had been a star witness for the prosecution in each one of their trials. She’d been called to the stand at their appeals.
And none of that changed the fact that of the small handful of nonfamily members who had been a part of this group all those years ago, two had ended up dead. Both after participating in what the Holiday family called the ritual. The one Cousin William had referred to yesterday, which involved a so-called test of worth against an Alaskan winter. The remains of Christine Cotter had washed downstream two summers before Kate walked into the Nenana Trooper station. The remains of her husband, Gerald Cotter, had never been found.
“Let’s say that the ritual was benign in every way,” Kate said now. “That doesn’t change the fact that the family was also sending out explosives through the mail. And it certainly doesn’t change the fact that when the troopers came out to the compound, our parents refused to surrender.”
“Why are you here?” Liberty asked again, impatiently. “We’re not the audience for your lies. We know what actually happened.”
“You invaded private property with weapons; you shouldn’t be surprised if what you get is an armed response,” the man behind Liberty chimed in. “We’re within our rights to defend our land.”
“I take it this is your husband, Liberty,” Kate said. She smiled sunnily at the man. “I’m Liberty’s cousin Kate. I’m guessing you’ve heard of me.”
“This is Scott.” Liberty exchanged glances with him. “Life went on without you, Kate. Like you never existed. And let me tell you this right now. You might have ruined our childhood, but you’re not going to ruin the rest of our lives.”
“I’m not here to ruin anything.”
“We’re not breaking any laws,” Russ said.
“I think you’ll find that shooting at an Alaska State Trooper is generally frowned upon, no matter the circumstances.” Kate was still smiling. “But because we’re family and it’s almost Christmas, I’m prepared to overlook that.”
“We don’t need any favors from you,” Scott growled.
“The other option is that I call for backup and have the Troopers swarming all over this place within the hour, which I’m guessing you won’t like,” Kate said dryly. “So really, it’s up to you.”
“If you want something, say what it is,” Liberty threw at her, her pitch rising. “If you just came here to stir things up because you need more attention, you need to go.”
“Do you have your own plane?” Kate asked calmly.
“What do you care?” Russ demanded. Next to him, Scott muttered something he was very lucky Templeton couldn’t quite hear.
“It’s a yes-or-no question,” Kate said, and continued to gaze expectantly at her cousins.
Templeton swept the room, looking from the cluster of children at the top of the stairs—and the blank-faced woman who watched the proceedings down below as if none of it affected her—to the trio of adults standing together on the other side of this weird room, as if they were guarding something. Some kind of temple or treasure.
He put his money on drugs of one sort or another. Or illegal weapons.
But what he bet they didn’t have was a plane.
“And no,” Russ said, as if he was offended by the question in the first place. “We don’t have a plane. We don’t have the same uppity needs that you do.”
“What uppity needs do you mean?” Kate asked him, sounding slightly less calm. “The ability to do my job?”
“I’m more interested in how you know what kind of needs your cousin has, uppity or otherwise,” Templeton said then. “Living all the way out here the way you do and not having spoken in years.”
Liberty rolled her eyes. “I don’t think there’s a single member of this family that doesn’t think it’s in their best interests to keep up with what Trooper Holiday is doing. Seeing as how she went and built a whole career out of betraying her nearest and dearest. Who’s to say she won’t do it again?”
“What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t left that night?” Kate asked her softly. But this time that softness was temper, not entreaty.
“You think we don’t ask ourselves that same question every damned day?” Russ demanded.
Liberty nodded her agreement, her eyes narrowed. “For one thing, the family wouldn’t be in pieces.”
“It’s always a pleasure to learn how little my life matters when stacked up next to the rest of the family,” Kate said dryly. “All of our relatives are still alive, Russ. If I hadn’t left that night, I’m not sure I’d be able to say the same.”
“Boo freaking hoo,” Russ growled. “You look fine to me.”
“I want to hear more about the tabs you keep on Kate,” Templeton said then. He didn’t move from where he stood. But he did widen his stance, a
nd found it entertaining when the two other men in the room stood taller, puffing out their chests like he couldn’t take them both with his hands tied behind his back. “Because that sounds a lot like a kind of threat.”
“It’s not a threat to type a name into a search engine,” Liberty snapped. “Seems like we can’t go more than six months without another glowing write-up on the life and times of everybody’s favorite Alaska State Trooper.”
Kate smiled again. “I appreciate your support.”
“All we want is to be left alone,” Liberty hurled at her. “You and Will don’t seem to get that there are consequences to actions, like Father Samuel always said. I would have thought that you, of all people, would know that.”
“What kind of consequences are we talking about here?” Kate asked her. “Because everybody in the family seems to be unduly fire-happy. You blow anything up lately?”
“You reap what you sow,” Liberty intoned, a lot like she was throwing down her version of a prayer. “You can count on that.”
“Again,” Templeton drawled. “That’s hitting me like a threat.”
“Oh, that’s what this is,” Russ said then. He let out a little laugh. Like a huff of satisfaction. “Someone threatened you, you got your panties in a twist, and your first thought was us. What that says to me is that you know what you did, no matter what lies you tell in court. You know that the first place to look is at the people you wronged.”
“The first place we’re looking is at the lowlifes and lunatics,” Templeton said conversationally. “So.”
“I don’t think I wronged any of you, Russ,” Kate said, and her voice was crisp now—possibly in an effort to keep Russ from doing something truly stupid like launching himself at Templeton. A quick and fun way to knock himself out, to Templeton’s way of thinking. “I’m interested, in a distant sort of way, in the psychology it takes to consider yourselves victims while supporting the people who are responsible for the deaths of two individuals they called friends. Not to mention the outright murder of two men who were only doing their jobs. That takes some willful suspension of disbelief.” She made a show of looking around the room, from the ugly flag to the shrine to the Second Amendment. Then back at her cousins. “However, it’s clear to me that’s what the two of you are good at. I can’t imagine what you think you’re going to get out of re-creating the horror of that compound. I feel sorry for your children. But you’re right, you’re not breaking any laws. Not yet.”
