by Kyla Stone
“That was for us. For all of us. To hold us over in case of a disaster, or…”
“Or what, Jackson? Nothing. Nothing is happening. We’re fine.”
“We’re not fine. That’s what you don’t get.”
“Then you’ll figure it out, won’t you? You always do.”
He climbed the stairs with legs like cement. The anger drained out of him, replaced with a dull emptiness. He felt like a stranger in his own house.
He reached the top step. “Move.”
His sister gave him an even, appraising stare. A tiny sneer appeared at the corners of her mouth. “Mind your manners.”
“Please.”
Very slowly, she wheeled her chair back, allowing him passage. Her eyes dared him to challenge her. To fight. To yell. To lose his cool.
Cyrus said nothing; he didn’t need to. He stood behind Astrid and smirked. Jackson resisted the temptation to punch him in his smug face. He would deserve it, too.
Jackson knew this familiar song and dance. His parents would rush to her defense. His mother would cry. His father would yell. They would do their best to make him feel small, to put him back in the comfortable box where they kept him. It’s what they did.
“Jackson will take care of us,” Dolores said. She sat at the table and with a full plate, but she hadn’t taken a bite. “Won’t you, Jackson?”
“I’ll fix it,” he said heavily. “I’ll figure it out.”
Dolores rose and circled the long dining table. She approached him and placed her dry, thin hands on his face. She drew him close and kissed his cheek. Her breath smelled of vodka.
Love tugged at him. Love and obligation. He had never known one without the other.
Once, he’d dreamed of leaving and never coming back. Escaping the way that Lena had, the way his brother had. With his brother’s abdication, then his sister’s accident, he was the only sibling left to care for this crumbling dynasty.
He touched his mother’s silvery hair. She leaned into him, her bones thin and fragile as a bird. “What would we do without you?” she murmured into his chest.
He knew he would keep doing what he always had. He would swallow his anger and find a way to take care of them, to keep them safe, whether they deserved it or not.
It was his responsibility.
Jackson kissed the top of his mother’s head and gently extricated himself from her grasp.
“Where are you going?” Cyrus asked as Jackson headed for the front door. It was the first time he’d spoken to Jackson that morning.
Jackson took his keys off the hook and pocketed them. “I’m going to Marquette for supplies. I have to replace our stores that Astrid gave away. If it’s not too late.”
Astrid crossed her arms over her chest. “No nuts.”
“I am aware.”
“They’ll kill me. I’m deathly allergic.”
“I know,” he said with a patience he did not feel. “Nuts are an excellent survival food for the rest of the family. I’ll be careful and keep them separate from anything you would eat.”
She looked at him like he was the crazy one. He felt the strain of their expectations, their needs. It was a burden he’d carried his entire life.
Cyrus slouched into a chair at the end of the table and pulled out his phone but didn’t look at it. He watched Jackson with an intensity that was disconcerting.
Jackson met his gaze until he looked way. Furious with all of them, he clenched his jaw and fought it down. He was the peacemaker. As frustrating as they were, they needed him.
And, much as he hated it, he needed Astrid’s help. He’d been putting off the Ruby Carpenter case for far too long. “I have a missing persons. You might be able to help.”
Astrid beamed at him. “Of course, I’ll help you, big brother. I love helping other people. It’s what I do.”
“Ruby Carpenter. Her mom says she usually stays at the Harbor.”
The Harbor was a youth homeless shelter located just outside of Christmas. The facility provided a clean, safe bed for the night, drop in laundry and shower services, and free counseling.
In her great benevolence, Astrid volunteered two nights a week when she wasn’t out doing who-knew-what with Cyrus.
“Yes, I know her. She’s in and out all the time, since she was twelve years old.”
With a pang, he thought of Shiloh. Out there somewhere, lost like Ruby. He thought of Cody, how he’d been trapped in that rambling house with Amos Easton, potentially driven to kill.
They weren’t the only ones who’d slipped through the cracks. The UP had seen its share of lost girls. Lost boys too. Mostly runaways. Victims of overdoses, domestic violence, tragic accidents.
They didn’t have the resources to find them. He felt like he’d failed them all.
“She’s not at the shelter,” Astrid says. “I check the logs. She hasn’t been there in at least a month.”
“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
Astrid shrugged. For someone who worked with troubled teens, she could be incredibly indifferent to the plight of others. “She’s had boyfriends in Marquette. There’s a shelter over there she’s talked about before. Don’t remember the name. Sorry.”
He was headed to Marquette anyway. He could kill two birds with one stone. “I’ll check it out.”
She squinted at him. “Why are you wasting your time with her? She’s nothing but white trash.”
“Your sister is right,” Horatio said in derision. “That girl is a chronic runaway. Her older sister was, too. That whole family is trouble. Besides, you have far more important things to focus on.”
“Funny, the sheriff said the same thing.”
“Sheriff Underwood isn’t the sharpest tool in the toolbox, but he’s right.” Horatio Cross leaned back in his dining chair and studied Jackson. “You want a prayer of being sheriff yourself, you need to reorder your priorities, son. Solve the important cases, and stay in the sheriff’s good graces. The city manager and the governor, too. Sheriff is a political position.”
As the prior sheriff of Alger County, his father’s priorities were and always had been political alliances. Power, influence, and authority.
Jackson cared for none of those things.
While his father valued power, Jackson coveted a life of order. Right and wrong. Black and white. He sought order, rules, his faith—they were his solid ground.
Nothing more and nothing less.
“Her mother deserves to know where she is.” His stomach twisted in knots. It was difficult to focus. He couldn’t stop thinking of the empty storeroom, what that meant for their future.
He had to escape this house. He couldn’t breathe enough oxygen. Without another word, Jackson opened the door and left his feckless family behind.
30
SHILOH EASTON
DAY FIVE
Shiloh spent an hour listening to the wind-up emergency radio she’d borrowed from her grandfather’s shed. She’d rather listen to music, Billie Eilish or Glass Animals, but there were only staticky messages about the power outages and satellites not working.
There was still no power in town. At night, she drove the ATV down the long country roads. Even in what passed for town, it was dark and quiet. Those who had generators were careful in conserving what fuel they had.
Using her lockpick set, she’d broken into Sheldon Murphy’s shed behind his farmhouse and stolen the jerrycan of gasoline he kept for his riding lawnmower.
She felt bad about it, but not enough to stop.
And then last night, she’d gone to Lindsey Mae Sutherland’s out on Dancing Fern Lane because she baked chocolate mousse pies on Fridays to serve for potluck at church.
Shiloh knew this because she and Cody had been dragged to church whenever their grandfather got too guilty for slapping them around and decided God could save him. God never did.
Shiloh had been devastated to find zero pies in the rank refrigerator. Instead, she’d rummaged in the cupboar
ds and borrowed an unopened jar of peanut butter, a bag of Doritos, and five Oriental Ramen Noodle packages. Jackpot.
She never stole anything crucial. She took bags of M&Ms and Snickers, frosting-coated Pop Tarts and Lays potato chips. Occasionally a book she liked. Call of the Wild and The Man in the Iron Mask had been bootlegged from lakefront vacation homes.
She’d discovered something else in Mrs. Sutherland’s house. On the kitchen counter sat several flyers. The flyers featured a photocopied image of a girl with red hair, black eyeliner, and a hard, unsmiling mouth. “Missing: Ruby Carpenter” was scrawled in big block letters above the picture.
Shiloh knew this girl. Ruby had gone to the high school but had dropped out. Shiloh had seen her talking with Cody several times out by the bike racks after school. Cody would give her something; she’d hand him cash, their movements sneaky and furtive.
The hairs on the back of her neck had stood on end. But what did it mean? That’s what she didn’t know.
Before she’d left, she’d stuffed one of the flyers in her pocket. Now, it was somewhere in her backpack, a wrinkled mess.
Her stomach rumbled. She put thoughts of the flyer out of her mind and set about making dinner. She’d brought some food but not enough. Camping by yourself was harder than it looked: gathering firewood, starting a fire, boiling water, catching food, and then cooking it.
You had to be incredibly patient. And you couldn’t make mistakes. She’d burned the first hare she’d caught in a snare to a black crisp. Hungry as she was, it was inedible.
Shiloh had managed to recreate the Dakota fire pit the way Eli had shown her. She crouched next to the pit outside the mouth of the cave entrance and heated up a can of SpaghettiOs in a cast iron pan.
She was tired and dirty, hungry and alone. Her scalp itched. Ants had invaded her sleeping bag, probably because that’s where she’d eaten half the Doritos bag last night. She’d never missed a shower so much.
Eli made it look easy.
She kept thinking about him. How he wasn’t what she’d expected. How he smelled of woodsmoke and kerosene. Not what a murderer should smell like.
She’d gone back to his campsite three times in the mornings since she needed to refill her water bladder. She would hang back, staying within the woods, where the shadows crouched, shielding her.
Shiloh felt drawn to him, fascinated by this strange man who chose to live in the woods. She should hate him. All her life, she’d heard horrific stories about him, the terrible things he’d done. The boogie man of her childhood. A monster. The cannibalistic windigo.
But she didn’t see a monster or a windigo. She saw a man who hadn’t hurt her. Who’d talked to her like she mattered. Who didn’t belittle or scorn or send her away.
She no longer believed that he’d killed her mother. He was dangerous, certainly, but a different kind of dangerous.
Besides, she had the crossbow. If she felt threatened, she could always shoot him.
When she visited the camp site, he never looked at her directly, but she had the feeling he’d known she was there the whole time. He tended the fire, gathered firewood, fished the stream, washed his clothes, and sterilized water in a weird gadget that looked like a small rocket.
She watched him pull off his shirt and drape it over the handlebars of the mountain bike he’d leaned against a nearby jack pine. He was strong, his chest and arms padded with ropy muscles.
Her gaze was drawn to the long thin scars on his stomach. On his lower left side was a dime-sized pucker of shiny flesh, as if from a bullet. A minute later, he’d pulled out another shirt from his pack and tugged it on, hiding the brutal landscape of his flesh. He adjusted the pistol he carried tucked inside his jeans.
Then he bent and removed a protein bar and set it on a rock in the middle of his campsite, then went about his business. She knew what he was doing. He was coaxing her out into the open. It worked.
Like a fox, she’d crept out of the trees, wary and anxious, but eager, too. And so hungry. The crossbow was in her hands, nudged up against her shoulder, a bolt loaded.
“Hey,” he said.
She didn’t respond.
Eli sniffed. “You smell. Had a bath recently?”
“None of your damn beeswax.”
He angled his chin at her crossbow. “You can put that down. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“That’s exactly what someone who’s gonna hurt you says.”
He sat on a log he’d dragged near the fire and studied her. “Keep carrying it. Bet your arms are getting tired. Good luck eating that chocolate protein bar with your hands full.”
He made a good point. She edged closer. The crossbow did weigh a ton. Her mouth watered traitorously.
Shiloh lowered the crossbow and set it on a large flat rock, still loaded. Withdrawing her knife, she held it low at her side and snatched up the candy bar, then retreated several steps.
“Better?”
“If you touch me, I’ll peel your face like a potato.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “Understood.”
Keeping one eye on Eli, she ripped open the wrapper with her teeth and took an enormous bite. Flavor exploded in her mouth. Delicious chocolate and caramel and nuts.
She wanted to close her eyes to relish the exquisite joy of chocolate, but she couldn’t take her attention off the wolf.
A tame wolf was still a wolf. And nothing about Eli Pope pointed to tame.
Shiloh pointed to the rocket-shaped thing next to him. “What’s that?”
“It’s a solar kettle. You fill it with water, then open the sides like this. The reflective sides conduct heat and boil the water, sterilizing it. You never want to drink water from the lake or the river without filtering it first. You can use the hot water to make coffee, tea, oatmeal, whatever.”
“Why don’t you just boil water over the fire?”
“It takes a lot of effort and uses a lot of firewood. More than most people think.”
“Yeah, it sucks hairy coconuts.” She chewed on her candy bar. Her gaze settled on a rumpled shape draped across the log beside him. “And that?”
“That is called a ghillie suit.”
He showed her how he’d taken a surplus camo hunting jacket and sewed on strips of burlap from a coffee sack over brown netting using fishing line, 550 paracord, a sewing needle, and some glue. He’d used braided jute twine and demonstrated how he separated the twine into separate fibers. He tied them into the netting all over the jacket and then added twigs and leaves.
“It’s the art and science of camouflage. It breaks up the human outline and helps you blend into your surroundings. This is how you disappear in plain sight.”
“To sneak up on people before you kill them?”
He shot her a sharp glance. “Something like that.”
“Like a lion hiding in the grass while it creeps up on the antelope,” she said in awe, impressed. She wanted one.
The river gurgled, the water running clear over mossy rocks and submerged branches. It was sandy near the river, the ground pebbled with stones. Black flies swarmed over the water’s surface.
While Eli worked on his ghillie suit, Shiloh dug one hand into the front pocket of the hoodie she wore—Cody’s hoodie—and pulled out the small baggie she’d discovered in the pocket a few days ago.
Through the plastic, she rubbed her fingers over one of the little blue pills.
Shiloh knew what her brother did, that he gave certain kids Adderall pills in exchange for money that he was saving for art school. This is what he’d given Ruby Carpenter.
She thought of the missing persons flyer with Ruby Carpenter’s photocopied face.
Cody and Ruby had known each other. They were both missing. What did that mean? What was the connection? Was there a connection?
And if there was, how would she find it?
She wasn’t acting like a hunter. What had she done so far? She’d broken into some houses and wandered around Christmas and Munis
ing, avoiding cops, jumping at her own shadow.
Downstream, a great blue heron stalked its prey. It stepped stiff-legged in the shallows. A moment later, it plunged its beak below the surface, then plucked a wriggling fish from the water. She watched the heron swallow it whole.
Though it wasn’t cold, she shivered.
It was time to hunt.
31
JACKSON CROSS
DAY FIVE
As Jackson drove fifty miles west to Marquette, he considered the case, the many threads that had seemed so disconnected but maybe they were not.
Cody was a prime suspect in his grandfather’s homicide. He had motive, means, and opportunity. He had a history of violence. His bloody footprint put him at the scene.
And then there was Sawyer, always lurking in the background. Why had Sawyer called Easton so many times? Was there a connection between Sawyer using Cody as a drug dealer and the murder? Or the fact that Cody had borrowed a boat registered in Sawyer’s name?
There were too many coincidences. Jackson did not believe in coincidence.
He needed to talk to Sawyer himself. Even if Sawyer wouldn’t talk to anyone else, Jackson might be able to get something out of him. Though not friends, they had decades of history between them.
Needing a distraction, he turned on the radio and listened to the news. Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and dozens of countries across the Northern Hemisphere reported complete blackouts. The stock market had closed, along with all financial institutions.
China’s public transportation system was down. Hundreds of cargo ships were stranded off the ports of Singapore and Shanghai, Los Angeles and Houston. Massive global shortages were being reported across the food, medical, and transportation supply chains.
The authorities made no mention that the cascading effects might be permanent.
Apprehension shivered through him. Things were getting worse. The old adage about panic was a thin excuse. People deserved the time to prepare. They deserved the truth.
