by Megan Crane
Then people started to come out of their houses. Some were already running, with fire extinguishers in hand. Others looked more wary.
Tracy grabbed at Kate’s arm. “This way!”
Kate was scanning the buildings they passed, looking for structural damage. She let her mother lead her away from the café and down the hill. But when Tracy started to tug Kate away from the fire, away from the beach at the other end of town where everyone else was heading, she resisted.
“We have to help,” she said.
Tracy didn’t let go of her arm. “Don’t you hear the children crying?”
Kate heard the waves against the beach. The shouts from those fighting the fire and higher up on the hill. But she couldn’t hear any children.
And by the time they made it to the far side of the harbor, where the waves were even louder and a little boat was waiting, it was too late.
There were no children. There never had been. She was an idiot.
The two men she’d seen in the café and thought were familiar-looking were standing there by the boat. Another man stood between them, though he was holding his body at an awkward angle.
But as the flames down the beach climbed higher against the night sky, Kate could see that the awkward-looking man was tied up. With duct tape.
More important, he was her cousin Will.
Everything slid into place, with a little click that sounded like a gun.
A real gun, Kate amended, when she felt the muzzle of a handgun in her back.
“I wanted to see your face again,” Tracy said from behind her, “because I wanted to see if you still needed cleansing. If you were still wrong all the way through. And you are worse, Katie. Filthy and twisted and unworthy.”
Unworthy.
There had only ever been one way to handle unworthiness in the Holiday family.
Kate stared at Will. At his expression, sad and something like resigned. As if he’d always expected to end up here, on a dark beach, on the longest Christmas in recorded history, caught up in this crap all over again.
“Are you sure, Mom?” Kate asked. Conversationally. “You make it sound like you came all this way to see if you needed to perform the ritual. When I think you and I both know this is nothing more than revenge.”
The other men laughed. And Kate belatedly realized that they might have insinuated themselves as fishermen here in Grizzly Harbor with the rest of the men who came in for the seasonal jobs and sometimes stayed, but they were in fact her second cousins. The little ones she barely remembered, all grown up now and no longer drinking themselves into a stupor in Anchorage, apparently. And she’d bet they knew their way around some C-4. If she recalled anything about them correctly, it was that the two of them had always loved playing with fire.
Her mind raced. It would take so little. Just hunker down, spend time in the Fairweather, and they’d hear enough about Alaska Force to track them. Mess with them the way someone had been this last year, but making sure that mess triggered a review by the Alaska State Troopers. Because the officer who was usually dispatched to look into groups out in the Alaskan wilderness making trouble was Kate.
They’d done all of this to get her and Will here, where they could perform that damned ritual and make the pair of them pay the way they would have years ago if Kate hadn’t escaped.
And Kate should have remembered that Tracy might have been Samuel Lee’s victim at first—but these days she was a willing one. And this kind of thing had her fingerprints all over it. Kate had no doubt she’d left prison, found these two and dried them out, then started plotting.
Kate couldn’t believe she’d walked right into it.
“Whatever works,” Tracy said, with her smoker’s cough as punctuation.
One of her long-lost cousins duct-taped Kate’s hands in front of her, and then Tracy encouraged her to climb into the boat. By jabbing that gun hard into her lower back.
The boat was smaller than the Alaska Force skiff that Templeton had used to take her to Fool’s Cove. Much smaller. Worse, it was completely open to the elements. And a temperature that seemed warm and practically springlike on the ground, after a tour of the interior the past few days, was going to be significantly less pleasant out on the water.
Something Kate got to experience in full, because she and Will were placed side by side on the bench in the bow of the boat. Tracy sat behind them with her gun. Kate’s cousins pushed the boat out and then jumped into the stern to pilot it with an outboard motor.
When the first slap of water splashed over her, Kate steeled herself and tried not to hide behind Will like a princess. The second time, she understood exactly what her mother was planning.
The only question left was whether Kate and Will would succumb to hypothermia before Tracy got around to making them strip and jump overboard to drown. Jumping into the ocean at this time of year was as close to the original ritual—strip, then get dropped out in the frigid bush to freeze—as it was possible to get. The water was usually around thirty-six degrees in December. The air tonight was about the same, if not colder. It was a half hour to exhaustion and potential death if submerged—and that was a best-case scenario.
“I can’t believe you’re going to make us walk the plank,” Kate said, because she needed to extend this. To stay on the boat as long as possible. “That suggests a level of whimsy I didn’t think you had in you, Mom.”
She had to shout to make sure her mother heard her. And all she got for her efforts was that gun in her back again, a hard jab that she suspected would leave a bruise.
“Enjoy that mouth,” Tracy told her, raising her voice so the wind didn’t steal it. “You won’t be using it much longer.”
Next to her, Will kept fidgeting. Kate assumed he was cold. And getting colder, as the December air and the ocean spray got beneath the layers she wore. Which spelled certain doom. Exposure to water plus a winter night in Alaska led nowhere good.
Kate supposed she really ought to feel a lurching sense of betrayal. But instead, all she felt was pissed. At herself.
She should have known. She should have gone with her initial instincts instead of suffering through prime rib and her mother’s terrible performance of fake emotion. Tracy had kept a low profile since she’d come out of prison three years ago, and that was a warning sign right there. Because Tracy had always lived in Samuel Lee’s shadow, sure. But she hadn’t exactly withered away there.
Kate hadn’t expected her to get in touch when she got out, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, Kate could see that the fact Tracy had seemed to take so meekly to postprison life was a big clue. One she should have picked up on.
Tracy hadn’t changed. Maybe she couldn’t change.
But Kate still should have seen this coming.
Beside her, Will kept moving his legs restlessly. Kate didn’t want to get close to him, or anyone else in this suicidally small boat that seemed tinier the bigger the swells got, but she found herself huddling against him anyway. Because it was warmer. Marginally.
She reviewed their situation. Cold. Wet. The boat was heading away from Grizzly Harbor, and not to navigate its way around the side of the island toward Fool’s Cove. If Kate, personally, was a homicidal maniac bent on enacting a twisted revenge on her own child, she wouldn’t choose one of the islands in the archipelago. She would go right for the ocean. And she would motor out as far as possible, to make sure that there was no coming back.
She had to assume that was what her mother had planned. And if all else failed, Tracy could shoot them both, drop their bodies overboard, and be done with it.
The boat kept chugging toward open water. Kate stared down at her hands and the duct tape wrapped around her wrists. Given a little time and some effort, she thought she could work her way out of it. But even if she couldn’t, they’d thoughtfully left her hands in front of her
body. That gave her more options.
And the ace in her pocket, of course, was Alaska Force. Templeton.
Something yawned open inside her, dark like despair, but she slapped a lid on it. And shoved it away.
Because the minute she thought she wasn’t going to see him again—the minute she believed she wasn’t going to get out of this—that was the moment she lost.
Fifteen years ago, some seven hundred miles north of here, she’d told herself something similar, and she’d made it.
Kate couldn’t say she particularly liked the poetic symmetry. But she intended to keep it symmetrical. She would escape this.
And while she figured out how to handle what was happening on this boat, Alaska Force was doing its part. She knew it. Templeton would notice she wasn’t there. Bethan had been in the café and would know she’d disappeared with her mother. Kate couldn’t imagine it would take them long to figure out what had happened.
All she had to do was keep herself out of the ocean.
The sound of the motor changed, going down to a low sputter. That was not a good sign.
Next to her, Will and his restless legs got a little more frantic. The first time he kicked her, she ignored it, because they were all doing the best they could out here. The second time, she glared at him.
“That actually hurts,” she said.
And got that gun jammed in her back again, in the very same spot. Which Kate fervently hoped she lived long enough to complain about. She would welcome the opportunity to attend to the ugly bruise that she could already feel spreading across her lower back.
“Sorry,” she threw back over her shoulder to her mother. “I can see how us talking will really put a crimp in your execution schedule.”
Once again, Tracy came in close. Gun in the back, mouth at her ear.
“This isn’t an execution, Katie. This is a simple ritual. I don’t understand why you’ve never been able to grasp this.”
“I don’t know. Possibly because it’s crazy?”
Another jab. Harder.
“All your father and I ever wanted was a simple life. You took that from us.”
“You want to take my actual life, Mom,” Kate said. She braced herself for that jab, but even when it came she couldn’t seem to stop. “I think even you would have to agree that’s worse, right?”
“Your life was ours,” Tracy said, and she didn’t sound angry. She didn’t sound particularly unhinged, or as if—given a black-and-white movie and a railroad track—she might start twirling a mustache. She sounded absolutely matter-of-fact. Completely devoid of the knowledge that what she was saying was, at the very least, a little outside the mainstream. “Ours to make, and ours to take.”
It was amazing how clear everything became at gunpoint.
Because while it was true that both of her parents were manipulative and deeply unwell, obviously, they weren’t actually trying to make the people around them feel crazy. They didn’t think that they themselves were crazy. Her parents had always believed that Kate was theirs to do with as they wished. It wasn’t an act. It wasn’t put on. They had moved all the way out into the literal middle of nowhere so they could do what they pleased. With themselves, with their child, with their own lives.
Kate had always assumed that because she had fiercely believed that there had to be something other than the world they showed her, they must have known better themselves. But maybe they didn’t.
It was odd, the things a person could find comforting when she was about to be executed.
Her mother was a true believer. It was possible everyone else in the family was. Maybe that was why Will had always struggled so hard. And maybe the thing that was wrong with Kate was that she couldn’t bring herself to believe in anything simply because she was told to believe in it.
Kate had never trusted the things she couldn’t see. She wasn’t wired that way.
In her whole life, there was one person who had promised that she could trust him and then proved it.
She was trusting him now, in fact. But Kate knew the danger of free-falling into blind trust. She knew where it led.
She was looking at it.
“You are my only child,” her mother was saying, in the kind of tone Kate assumed regular mothers used while chatting to their happy, run-of-the-mill daughters about delightfully bland normal things, like a grocery list. Or what to wear to church. Or something else Kate couldn’t even imagine, because what the hell did she know about normal?
“What I hope for you, more than I could possibly tell you, is that you walk through this ritual and find yourself cleansed,” Tracy said. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you, Kate.”
“Does it work if you swim through the ritual? Or do you need to stagger around in the snow? I wouldn’t want to face my unworthiness the wrong way.”
Another jab. And that one felt like the muzzle of the gun hit bone. Ouch.
Tracy hissed in her ear. “Nothing would make your father more proud than if you proved yourself to be one of us after all.”
And this time, Kate said nothing as her mother sat back, presumably to ready the final details for this exercise.
Kate scanned the water around them. Dark, forbidding. Swells too high and relentless, and only the light every now and again of the far-off land that was Grizzly Harbor.
Up above, the night was cloudy, and off in the distance, she couldn’t really see much of anything. Because there was nothing but the sea.
If she and Will went over the side of this boat, there was zero chance that they could be swept to safety. Or swim to it.
Which clearly meant that they couldn’t go over.
This time when Will kicked her, it was so hard that she had to screw her eyes shut to keep from shouting. She glared at him as best she could out of the corner of her eye, not wanting to turn her head and get that gun slammed into her back yet again.
Will caught her gaze, out of the corner of his. And almost without moving at all, his hands taped behind his back, he indicated the floor at his feet. Kate looked down.
To see the flare gun he was half covering with his trussed-up feet.
A flare gun in a watertight bag with what looked like at least three cartridges.
Kate’s heart began to beat in that hard, low way that meant adrenaline was moving through her. She knew Alaska Force would be looking for them. For her. What she didn’t know was whether they’d be checking the water.
But they would certainly see it if she set off a flare gun.
She could hear her mother and cousins talking in the back. She could feel Will tense beside her. Far off in the distance, she swore she could hear the faint whirring of helicopter blades, but she couldn’t tell if that was wishful thinking.
So she kept her eyes on the flare gun, not the sky, because the sky couldn’t save her. But the flare gun might.
There was movement from the back, and the boat rocked.
Will threw a glance at her, and she nodded.
And she guessed he’d finally chosen his side, because he surged up to his feet, making the boat rock alarmingly.
“I’m ready!” he bellowed toward the back, turning around so Kate could see that he’d worked his hands out of his duct tape but was holding them there anyway. “I’ve been ready for years. You were in prison, Aunt Tracy, but I spent all this time waiting. Wondering.”
“You’re a traitor,” one of the second cousins spat at him.
“That’s for the elements to decide,” Will threw right back. “Not you.”
Convincingly, Kate thought.
But she wasn’t about to waste her opportunity. The next time the boat rocked, she rocked with it, falling down to the bottom of the boat, slimy and smelling of low tide and rust. She fumbled with the slippery plastic, yanking the closure wide. She pulled out the gun,
then a cartridge, cursing the one second—then another second—it took her to fiddle her hands around into the right space. And then to get the job done.
“This land makes its own choices!” Will was shouting, sounding so much like his own father and hers that if she let herself, Kate could have tumbled back in time to yet more terrible memories she didn’t want to revisit.
Not while she was in the middle of reliving one.
She blocked him out. She listened. And this time, she didn’t think it was wishful thinking—she was sure she could hear helicopter blades in the distance. And when she looked, she could see a searchlight dancing along near the shore, as if they were scouring the waves.
Her mother hadn’t seen it yet. But she would.
It was now or never.
Kate surged to her feet. She kept Will between her and her mother, and she shot the flare gun into the sky.
She didn’t wait or watch. She loaded another cartridge, almost dropping it as she tried to work with her tied-together wrists, and shot off another. Then loaded the third, final cartridge.
It took seconds.
The flares lit up the sky above them, broadcasting their position in no uncertain terms. Someone screamed— probably her mother. Kate didn’t look to see if the helicopter’s spotlight was headed this way.
She had to believe it was.
She had to believe in something, and it was this.
Will shouted out some kind of noise and threw himself down the length of the boat, body checking the cousins like he was bowling with his whole torso. One cousin fell overboard. The other fell down hard but came up swinging.
Will freed his hands and fought back.
Somehow, the boat didn’t capsize, though it lurched from side to side in the waves.
And that left Kate and her mother face-to-face.
“The ritual is too good for you!” Tracy howled at her, struggling to her feet as the boat rocked this way, then that. “I should have put you down like a dog years ago!”
Kate snuck a look, because belief only went so far. The helicopter was coming.
