by Megan Crane
“On Christmas? That’s surprising.”
Templeton’s gaze was too dark, but it was that golden gleam that caught at her. “Not when she can charge double.”
What he didn’t say was that it was likely wise to have this conversation with Tracy in a public place, which could be monitored by Alaska Force and other witnesses. Instead of going off for a cozy chat somewhere private, where who knew what might happen? He didn’t say any of that, but since Kate felt exactly the same way, she nodded.
“Perfect.” She looked back at her mother. “Look at that, Mom. We get to celebrate our first real Christmas together. Can’t you feel the joy?”
The Tracy she’d known back in the day would have slapped her. Or worse. But this version of her mother was less readable. More contained, maybe. As if she’d learned to temper herself along with casual disrobing during her incarceration.
“I’ve prayed for you every day we’ve been apart,” Tracy said, with a certain edge to all her piety that made Kate grit her teeth. “I’ve prayed to change your heart.”
“I’ve prayed for different parents,” Kate shot back. “I guess none of our prayers have been answered.”
Tracy took her time putting on her coat and then walked jerkily out of the inn, back out to the cold street. Kate followed behind her, keenly aware of Templeton moving along with them, soundless and intense.
“I’ll see you and your friends later,” Kate said to him in an undertone as he closed the door of the inn behind them. She thought it was highly unlikely that her mother’s appearance was a coincidence, which meant Tracy probably knew exactly who and what Alaska Force was. Samuel Lee had been the showboat out there in the bush, but it was always Tracy who’d set the stage. Kate wouldn’t put it past her mother to have spent the past three years plotting revenge. But on the off chance she hadn’t—and was somehow uninvolved in what was happening—Kate saw no reason to advertise who and what Alaska Force was.
Templeton’s dark gaze touched hers. “Count on it.”
And Kate hadn’t been being melodramatic when she’d told him she was used to working alone. Or not too melodramatic, anyway. She was. That was part and parcel of the job.
Except she couldn’t deny that she liked knowing she was in Alaska Force territory now. That when Templeton nodded to her mother, then melted off into the dark, he wasn’t abandoning her. He was calling in reinforcements.
“How did you know where to find me?” Kate asked briskly as she led her mother down the cold street toward the Water’s Edge Café. Which was lit up and open for business, just as Templeton had said. She had clearly been too annoyed at him to see it on the way up.
“If it was a secret that there was a body in your plane, they probably should have kept it out of the papers,” Tracy replied.
“Since when do you read the papers?” Kate walked next to her mother, but not too close. She didn’t think Tracy would take a swing at her, but you never could tell. “I would have thought you’d object to them on philosophical grounds. Heaven forbid you get current cultural ideas implanted into your brain.”
Tracy sniffed. “I keep telling you. Things change.”
When they arrived at the café, they weren’t the only ones there. Caradine—dressed in head-to-toe black, complete with thick black eye makeup, in case anyone was tempted to mistake her for an elf—scowled at them when they walked inside.
“Christmas prices,” she said without preamble. “No bargaining or bartering.”
“Is that double the usual?” Kate asked.
Caradine smirked as she swiped at her forehead briskly enough to make her dark ponytail bounce. “It’s whatever I say it is. Based entirely on how annoying you are.”
“Then I’ll be certain to be as annoying as possible,” Kate told her, because she was apparently irreverent now. “As a Christmas present.”
Caradine didn’t actually sneer, though Kate had never met another person who could give the impression of sneering without actually doing it. She stomped away, and Kate waved a hand toward the nearest empty table. Tracy took a seat.
Kate looked around the café. In one corner there were what looked like two couples, each with small babies—though the longer Kate looked, the less she could tell which configuration of couples was together, and whose baby was whose. There was a weathered old man sitting alone, but he was engaged in conversation with the rowdy table to his left. Kate recognized the harbormaster at another table. And a couple of other faces at yet another table that struck her as familiar, but they were hardy-looking men in outdoor gear, so she assumed they were local fishermen she might have seen in passing on the docks.
That made her mother and her the only tourists. The only outsiders, and given that Kate had been an outsider her whole life, no matter where she went, she couldn’t think of a single good reason for that to sit on her the way it did tonight. This wasn’t her home, no matter how comfortable she felt here.
“Don’t bother ordering anything,” she told her mother. “You’ll get what she gives you.”
Tracy sniffed again, but she didn’t argue. And Kate settled across from her, shrugging out of her coat to hang it on the back of her chair.
And she wasn’t surprised that her mother did nothing but stare back at her, silently. Because, really, what was there to say?
“How is your father?” Tracy asked. Also not surprising as an opening gambit. “You said you saw him.”
“He’s older.” Kate studied her mother’s face, looking for cracks. Clues. “Did he send you here?”
“I haven’t seen your father for years.”
“Yet, last I checked, you were still married to him.”
Tracy moved a bony shoulder. “Too much paperwork.”
Kate wanted to pepper her mother with questions, but that urge came from the daughter in her. Not the trained cop. So instead, she waited. Caradine stormed over and slammed down water glasses between them. Then a basket of bread.
Tracy made a production out of taking a thick slice, then buttering it as if she’d never seen either dairy or bread before.
The door to the café opened, and Bethan walked in. She looked dressed for a winter hike, not a battle, with her hair down. As if she were a regular person.
When she looked past Kate like they’d never met, Kate understood she was the reinforcements. Kate watched as Bethan and Caradine exchanged a total of three syllables, then Bethan took a table for herself.
And the fact that she was here made Kate feel a little lighter.
Almost as if wine and pasta in a cabin mattered after all.
“I told you five minutes, but now you have a whole dinner,” Kate said when Caradine came out with big plates for them, heaped high with prime rib, roasted potatoes, and roasted brussels sprouts. “Use it wisely. Why are you here?”
Tracy picked up her fork and pushed a roasted potato around on her plate. “I know you won’t believe this, but I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe it. And if I was inclined to think you had that kind of sentimentality in you, the fact that it’s bubbling up now? On the fifteenth anniversary of the night I escaped you?” She shook her head. “I think we both know that’s not who you are.”
Tracy stopped pretending to eat and stared at Kate instead. Kate cut herself a big bite and was aware that it was far and away the best prime rib she’d ever had in her life. But she couldn’t quite enjoy it. Not under the circumstances.
If anything was going to make her cry today, during this seemingly endless marathon of ghosts from Christmas past, it was that.
“I know it’s been fifteen years,” Tracy said with an edge in her voice again. “To the day. Of course I know that. I just wanted to see my daughter.”
“Now you have.”
Tracy’s lips moved, but it wasn’t a smile. Not really
. “You’ve always seen me as your enemy. You still do.”
“I don’t see you at all, Mom,” Kate said softly. “By choice.”
Tracy sniffed. “The judge was pretty clear that it was your father making all the decisions. Telling us all what to do. But you blame it all on me, not him.”
Kate opened her mouth to refute that, but stopped herself. Because Tracy wasn’t wrong. And she had to sit with that a moment.
“You knew what he was,” she said, when she could put words to it. “And you liked it so much that you married him. Had a baby with him. Moved out into the middle of nowhere with him, where he could do whatever he wanted, unchecked. He is who he is, and believe me, I don’t have anything nice to say about him or to him. But you.” She shook her head. “Sorry, Mom, but sometimes I can’t help thinking you’re worse.”
Tracy looked down at her plate. “I’m the only reason you’re alive.” Her voice was quiet, and the cop in Kate wished she could see her expression. The daughter in her was glad she couldn’t. “Your father wanted to put you out when you weren’t much more than seven.”
“It’s exactly that kind of tender memory that makes me wonder about you.” Kate put her fork down, her appetite gone entirely. “What kind of mother stays with a man who even discusses putting a child out into an Alaskan winter? Or at all?”
“I don’t expect you to understand the choices I made.”
“Good. Because I don’t. And neither did the judge, which is why you spent twelve years in prison.”
“Sometimes I miss prison.” Tracy’s faint rasp barely rose above the sound of the other diners all around them. “The same way I miss the compound. All that clarity.”
Kate made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Oddly enough, I prefer freedom.”
But her mother didn’t reply. And Kate stared down at her food, wishing that when she took a bite she could taste it again, but she seemed to have lost her taste for anything.
“You have to pay for that anyway,” Caradine said, when she came by to refill water glasses. “Triple if you don’t eat it.”
Kate sighed when she was gone. She shrugged her coat back on.
“Are we going somewhere?” Tracy asked.
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Kate said, and hated that it was hard to sound calm. “But I don’t see any practical reason to extend this interaction. We have nothing to say to each other. I don’t want to talk about the past. It doesn’t sound like you have any new perspectives to share. As a law enforcement officer, I find it concerning that you could spend twelve years in prison and have nothing to say for it. But your rehabilitation is not my problem.”
She stood, tossing some money on the table that she hoped would cover the bill in triplicate. She didn’t wait for her mother. She didn’t catch Bethan’s eye. She just headed outside.
And for a moment, she faced the embrace of the December cold, squeezed her eyes shut tight, took a breath, and wished . . . for all those things she’d never been able to name. And the thing she could name but didn’t bother to ask for anymore.
One breath, in deep, then she let it go.
When she opened her eyes, her mother was pushing out of the café door behind her.
And for what felt like forever, they stood there, facing each other across the gulf of their history, the night, and the few feet between them.
“I only wanted to see your face,” Tracy said. “Is that wrong?”
And if she’d said it the way she’d said everything else tonight, with that aggressive undercurrent, Kate would have gone full trooper on her. But it was so plaintive. Almost lost.
Kate had to remind herself that her own feelings aside, Tracy Warren had been as much a victim of Samuel Lee Holiday as anyone else. Kate had spent so much time focusing on the ways she was complicit that it rarely occurred to her to remember that her mother had met her father when she was all of nineteen years old. She’d been pregnant at twenty-one. What did she know of the world that wasn’t shaped by him? Could she have been an entirely different woman if he hadn’t gotten his hooks into her so early?
Kate would never know. But maybe it wouldn’t kill her to find a little compassion somewhere inside herself for this woman. She could do that, surely. It didn’t mean she wanted a relationship with Tracy, or really anything to do with her, but she could certainly try a little empathy.
Something she knew wouldn’t have occurred to her if it hadn’t been for Templeton. Who might not be as perfectly fine as he claimed he was, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a little more evolved than she was when it came to these interpersonal matters.
Like everybody else, as far as she knew, except the woman standing across from her.
“Mom,” Kate said softly, without the usual irony she usually threw into that word. “I appreciate you coming all this way. I do. Thank you for looking me up after all this time.”
Because she could, too, be the bigger person, she assured herself.
For a moment, Tracy didn’t do anything but continue to stare at the ground, her phone in one hand. Kate wondered if she might actually see her mother get emotional about something that wasn’t Samuel Lee—
But Tracy didn’t look the slightest bit lost when her gaze lifted to meet Kate’s. Or when she smiled. She didn’t look sad or soft. She looked . . . smug.
Every instinct Kate had screamed at her that something was wrong. Very wrong.
Tracy hit something on her phone, and her smile got smugger.
And that was when the night split in half and the harbor caught fire.
Twenty-two
The explosion went off, the blast loud enough to rock the windows of all the houses along the street but not enough to shatter them.
Templeton registered that, but he was already moving from his position on the stairs that sat up high and looked out over the harbor. Running like he was daring the ice to try him.
People were pouring out into the street, staring at the bright column of fire down on the beach. Or running toward it, like Templeton. Like Jonas, who appeared out of nowhere from wherever he’d been keeping watch, barreling down the hillside.
A seaplane was on fire. Fumes and flames burned, and there was confusion already, the way there always was, as the volunteer firefighters—some official, some not—appeared and did their thing.
“Bethan.” Templeton gritted out her name into the comm unit as he ran back up the hill toward the café. “Report.”
Because everyone in town was coming outside, clustering together on the hill or lending a hand to the effort to put out the fire below. But Templeton didn’t see his trooper.
And he didn’t need that extra kick in his gut to make it clear to him that there was no way Kate would fail to react to something like this. No way in hell.
His worst fears were confirmed when Bethan met him outside the Fairweather, a wary look on her face.
“Kate stepped outside with her mother,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since the explosion.”
And somehow, he’d expected that.
Something in Templeton had known this would happen the minute he’d gotten the call that Tracy Holiday had appeared.
“Does anyone have eyes on Kate?” he clipped out into his comm unit, already moving. Fading back from the crowd, his eyes scanning the darkness. “The explosion is a decoy.”
He repeated that, in case he wasn’t clear the first time.
Templeton didn’t go back up into town, because Bethan and Jonas had that covered. He headed down to the beach instead, past the docks and out toward the rocky point that marked the end of Grizzly Harbor. The farther away he got from the fire, the more his heart kicked at him.
It was like clockwork. All he had to do was feel something, and sure enough—
Lock it up, dumbass, he growled at himself. You can wallow after you find her.<
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“I have it,” came Jonas’s voice over the comm. “Chris Tanaka and his bottle of whiskey saw a dinghy headed out right around the time of the blast.”
“A dinghy.” Templeton managed to get the words out past the cold, gnawing fury that had him in its grip. Somehow. “In the dark at this time of year.”
“It looked to be headed out to sea,” Jonas confirmed, with zero inflection. “No running lights.”
And Templeton was breathless.
There was silence on the comm because everyone knew what that meant. In even the most experienced hands, a little boat was hard to handle out where the harbor gave way to the swells of the open water of the cold Pacific.
In anything but the most experienced hands, it was a death sentence.
Templeton stared out at the water, scanning the darkness. But he saw nothing.
It was happening again. It was happening again.
But this time, Templeton had every intention of dying himself if that was what it took to make sure Kate was okay. If he had to swim out there and find that boat himself. Whatever it took, this was not ending the same way it had last time.
He was an Army Ranger, and he would not allow this to end badly. He would not lose her. The truth he beat himself up with from time to time was that he barely remembered the woman he’d lost. He had known her so briefly, lost her so quickly.
But Templeton knew that Kate was burned on his bones. There was no forgetting his trooper.
Not tonight, Templeton vowed, still scanning the dark water for signs of her. Not ever.
“Rory,” he growled into his comm unit, to the Green Beret who was running point back in Fool’s Cove. “Bring me the helicopter.”
* * *
• • •
The explosion rocked her, then confused her.
Kate had forgotten that creepy smile of Tracy’s as she’d tossed herself at her mother and brought them both to the ground. She’d rolled up to her feet again and had automatically started cataloging the scene as an odd silence hung over the town. One beat. Another.
