The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

by Karin Slaughter

  The idea of food made her stomach turn, but she would need to keep up her strength in case the opportunity presented itself to run.

  Dash said, “I can handcuff you again, but I think you’ve already figured out how remote we are from civilization.”

  Sara had figured no such thing, but she nodded.

  “Good girl.” He stepped aside so she could go ahead of him.

  Sara tried not to let the girl grate, as if she was a child or a horse. One of the sentries from the motel stood outside the door. AR-15, black tactical gear.

  Sara stepped down onto a log that served as a stair. She tried to orient herself. The forest was thick, but there was a cleared path beyond the cabin. She squinted at the sun peeking over the horizon. Five thirty or six in the morning. They were in the foothills of the Appalachian mountain chain, though that didn’t narrow things down. If she assumed the motel had been in the western part of Georgia, they could be in Tennessee or Alabama. Or she could be completely wrong, and they were in the North Georgia Mountains near the Carolinas.

  Sara started down the cleared path. She picked her way over a fallen tree. She could feel Dash reaching out to help her. She moved away from him, away from his feigned chivalry.

  He said, “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find here.”

  Sara bit her lip. Unless she found a car at the end of this path that was going to drive her home, there was nothing pleasant about her surroundings. “I am a hostage. I am here against my will.”

  “You had a choice.” His tone had an overly familiar teasing element. He was trying to establish an easiness between them, as if the gun on his hip and his armed sentry didn’t give him all of the power.

  Sara pushed a branch away from her face. Her skin was furred with grime, blood and sweat. She had furtively washed herself with tepid water from the bucket, but had no choice but to put back on her dirty clothes. The shorts were rigid with blood. Her shirt reeked of her own body odor. Her bra and underwear had turned into sandpaper. There was no shortage of forensic evidence on her now. She wondered if there was something she should do—cut herself on a bramble, leave a blood trail, mark the path in some way so that Charlie Reed or Will would know that she had been here.

  Will.

  At the motel, Sara had drawn the heart on the ceiling first. She had been taking a risk leaving the message, but the most important thing she wanted to convey was that she knew that he was looking for her.

  Will put on active duty. ATL.

  “Daddy!” a little girl screamed with excitement. “Daddy!”

  Sara watched a child running across a clearing. She guessed by the girl’s wriggling movements that she was around five, possibly six years old. Her fine motor skill hadn’t yet gotten the hang of running at speed. She fell, but quickly pushed herself up again, giggling. The child was wearing a plain white dress that swept down to the ground. The collar was buttoned to her neck. The sleeves stopped just below her elbows. Her blonde hair was down to her waist. Sara did not feel so much like she was stepping back in time as walking onto the set of a Laura Ingalls Wilder adaptation.

  She glanced around the clearing, which was roughly the size of a basketball court. There were eight more one-room cabins tucked into the trees. These were larger than her nighttime cell, with windows and Dutch doors, stone chimneys. They felt permanent, but impermanent at the same time. Women sat in chairs peeling corn and snapping beans. Some were sweeping the dirt patches in front of their cabins. Others were cooking in large pots or boiling laundry over open fires. All of them had long hair piled onto the tops of their heads. No highlights or color in sight. No make-up. They wore simple, white, long-sleeved dresses with high collars. No jewelry except for gold wedding bands.

  No faces that were not white.

  “Sweetpea!” Dash scooped up the little girl with his good arm. He held her on his hip as he walked ahead of Sara. “Where is my kiss?”

  The girl pecked him on the cheek like a bird.

  “Daddy!” another little girl screamed. Then another. In all, five more girls ran toward Dash and threw their arms around his waist. Their ages ranged from the five-year-old in his arms to a teen who couldn’t be more than fifteen. They wore the same long, white dresses. The younger girls kept their hair down, but the fifteen-year-old wore hers in a bun like the older women. She gave Sara a wary glance as she wrapped her arms around Dash’s waist.

  Six children in total, all calling him father. Two were clearly twins, but the rest either belonged to different women or to a single mother who had been pregnant or nursing for sixteen of the last twenty years of her life.

  “Sir?” a young, clean-cut man called from the other side of the clearing. The juxtaposition was jarring. Like the sentry, he was dressed in all black, a rifle over his shoulder. Unlike the sentry, he was barely out of his teens. He could’ve been a Boy Scout or a school shooter. He told Dash, “The team is back from the mission, brother.”

  Mission?

  “All right, my little ladies.” Dash extricated himself from his children. They all dutifully lined up to give him a kiss on the cheek. The older girl was the only one who didn’t seem happy about it. She gave Sara another wary glance. It was hard to tell whether she was being protective of her father or just embarrassed the way teenage girls were always embarrassed.

  Dash told Sara, “Dr. Earnshaw, please excuse me. My wife will be with you momentarily.”

  Her eyes followed him as he walked up a steep hill. In the light of day, she thought Dash was older than she’d initially guessed, probably mid-forties. He had one of those baby-faces that made his age hard to pin down. Actually, everything about him was hard to pin down. His relentless pleasantness made him inscrutable. Of all human emotions, anger was the fastest and most direct way to communicate emotion. Sara did not want to be on the receiving end of Dash’s true feelings if he ever exploded.

  “I’m hungry!” one of the little girls announced. There was much giggling as the children trundled off like kittens, falling over themselves, tripping, pushing and pawing—except for the oldest one, who offered another wary glance as she stomped off toward the cooking area.

  Sara tried to catch her eye, but the teenager was having none of it. She watched the little girls instead. They were spinning in circles, trying to make themselves dizzy. They made Sara think of her niece, which made her think of her sister, which made her consider the dominoes that had probably started to fall since she’d last seen her mother standing in the street holding Bella’s shotgun. Tessa would be flying in from South Africa. Eddie would’ve immediately driven up from Grant County. Bella would be too high-strung to host them at her house. They would all end up at Sara’s apartment, which meant that Will would become displaced.

  Sara felt her earlier weepiness return.

  Her parents would overwhelm him. He would worry about saying the wrong thing, which would make him say even more wrong things, then Cathy would snap at him and Eddie would try to smooth it over with a bad pun, but Will didn’t understand puns because dyslexia was a language-processing disorder, so instead of smiling or even laughing to break the tension, Will would tilt his head to the side and give that puzzled look, which would make her father wonder what was wrong with him, and Sara’s only hope was that Tessa’s flights wouldn’t take more than twenty-four hours because her sister was the only person on earth who could rescue Will from their parents.

  Sara blinked away tears. She tried to fill her brain with practical information. Will would come for her. She knew that as a fact. He would need to know what he was dealing with in order to work out a plan.

  She scanned the woods. Sara hadn’t noticed before, but there were at least six armed men sitting in deer stands up in the trees. What were they guarding? Surely not Sara. Were they trying to keep people out or hold them in? Inside the clearing, Sara counted eight adult women and thirteen children from the ages of three to fifteen. There were eight cabins and a long, low bunkhouse that sat at twelve o�
��clock. Dash had disappeared over the top of the hill. She assumed there were more cabins, more men, women and children, and likely even more guards.

  Why?

  Her attention was pulled away from the question by a child screeching in delight. They were playing hide-and-seek. Dash’s youngest girl covered her eyes and started counting. The rest of the girls scattered off into the forest or down cleared paths. Five meandering lanes spoked off the clearing. The tree canopy was thick, shadowing the cabins. A helicopter or plane might fly overhead without noticing the Camp. Sara wondered if the buildings were part of a former homesteader settlement. The area looked untouched. Many of the trees had thick trunks, indicating old growth.

  Based on her time in the van, Sara made the educated guess that she was still in Georgia. Eddie Linton had dragged his family on many camping trips into the mountains, but that didn’t help narrow down her location. If anything, it expanded Sara’s sense of isolation. The Chattahoochee National Forest was comprised of almost 800,000 acres and spanned eighteen counties. Two thousand miles of roads and trails. Ten wilderness areas. Springer Mountain in Blue Ridge was the starting point for the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, which ended at the tip of the country in Maine.

  Coyotes and foxes roamed the area. Venomous snakes hid under rocks and alongside the water. Black bears moved higher into the range during the summer months, foraging for fruits and berries.

  Sara watched two children picking apples from a tree.

  “I’m Gwen.” The woman who walked up to Sara was probably in her early thirties, but she looked worn past her years. Her face was drawn. There was no color in her skin. Even her eyes had taken on a depleted dullness. “I’ve been told you’re a doctor.”

  “Sara.” Sara offered her hand.

  Gwen looked confused, as if she’d forgotten how to meet another person. She reached out tentatively. Like Sara, she was sweating. Her palms were calloused from work.

  Sara asked, “You’ve had a measles outbreak?”

  “Yes.” She wiped her hands on her apron as she started to walk. She was leading Sara toward the long bunkhouse in the distance. As they got closer, Sara could see that solar panels were on the roof. There was an outdoor shower, a sink basin.

  Gwen said, “The outbreak started six weeks ago. We tried to quarantine, but it kept getting worse.”

  Sara was not surprised. Measles was one of the most contagious diseases known to man, carried on sneezes, coughs, breaths. Simply being in a room for up to two hours after an infected person had left still put you at risk of catching the disease. Which was why it was critically important to vaccinate as many healthy children as possible.

  Sara asked, “How many were infected?”

  Gwen’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Two adults. Nineteen children. Eleven are still quarantined. We lost—we lost two of our little angels.”

  Sara tried to tamp down her anger. Two children dead by a disease that had been successfully eradicated from the United States almost two decades ago. “You’re sure it’s measles and not German measles?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m a nurse. I know the difference between rubeola and rubella.”

  Sara pressed together her lips so that she would not explode.

  Gwen had not missed her reaction. She said, “We’re a closed community.”

  “One of those infected adults brought in measles from somewhere.” Sara told herself to stop, but she couldn’t. “Your husband and his men were in Atlanta yesterday. They murdered dozens of people, police officers among them, and set off two bombs.” Sara watched the woman’s face. Gwen did not register surprise or even shame, so Sara drilled down into the medical implications. “There are thousands of international visitors in the city every day. Any one of your people could’ve brought back whooping cough, mumps, rotavirus, pneumococcal disease, Hib.”

  Gwen’s chin tucked to her chest. She wiped her hands on her apron again.

  Sara asked, “Where is Michelle?”

  “I understand the appendix ruptured before they could remove it. I gave her 400 mgs Moxifloxacin PO and re-sutured the incision.”

  Sara let out a long breath. The bloody surgical bandage on Michelle’s lower abdomen finally made sense. “She needs five days of that, minimum. Push fluids. Keep her on clear liquids and bed rest.”

  “I will.”

  “Why did they bring her here? What was she supposed to do?”

  Gwen kept her head down. She held out her arm, indicating the bunkhouse. “This way.”

  Sara walked ahead of her. She wasn’t finished needling this woman for information. “Clearly, you know quarantine protocols. You can provide supportive care. You obviously have access to antibiotics. Why did they abduct Michelle?”

  Gwen stared at her feet as if she needed to concentrate on her steps. She was stooped, cowered just as much as Michelle. Her hands went to her apron again. She kept wringing them into the cloth.

  In the distance, Sara heard children laughing—not the ones from the clearing, but to the northeast, in the direction Dash had taken moments ago. She assumed that the second part of the Camp was where they were keeping the uninfected. Questions filled Sara’s mind—How many people were here on the mountain? Why did they take Michelle to Atlanta when there were dozens of hospitals that were closer? Why did they set off those bombs? Why was it so important to keep Michelle alive? What did they really want from Sara?

  “Here.” Gwen had stopped at the sink outside the bunkhouse.

  Sara washed her hands with lye soap. The water was hot. She scrubbed at her arms, around her neck and face.

  Gwen said, “We could give you clean clothes.”

  “No thank you.” Sara was not going to dress like a Victorian toddler. “How many adults here are vaccinated?”

  Gwen saw through her query. “We have twelve unvaccinated men, two women.”

  “And the others?”

  “They’re staying at the main Camp.”

  Sara had been right about the uninfected part of the compound. She thought about Dash letting his children kiss him on the face before heading up the path. If any of them were infected, he could carry the virus to the other side.

  Gwen said, “My girl, Adriel. She’s still in quarantine.”

  “You have seven children?” Sara was struck incredulous. The woman was barely into her thirties. No wonder she looked so depleted.

  Gwen only offered, “God is good.”

  Sara took a towel from the pile over the sink to dry her hands. The material was linen, not terrycloth. There were no tags. The seam looked hand-sewn. Was the Camp some type of religious cult? Those types of organizations didn’t tend to blow things up. They drank poison or picketed funerals.

  Sara asked, “Does your religion forbid vaccination?”

  Gwen shook her head. “You have two children?”

  Sara had to catch herself before she responded. “Yes, two girls.”

  A thin smile tightened Gwen’s mouth. “Dash told me that your husband died in the line of duty. It seems like lately, the world is filled with widows.”

  Sara wasn’t going to bond with this woman. “Do Vale and Carter have wives who live up here, too?”

  The smile turned into an angry, straight line. “They were not among us. They were mercenaries.”

  “Mercenaries fight in wars.”

  “We are at war.” She handed Sara a surgical mask. “We must use whatever resources we have available. Cyrus was a pagan, but he restored the world to order.”

  Sara had spent a lifetime listening to her mother’s Bible stories. “King Cyrus also encouraged tolerance and compassion. Can you say the same about your husband?”

  “We will blow the trumpet from the mountain,” Gwen said. “‘I form the light and bring darkness. I make peace and deliver evil.’ So saith the Lord.”

  Sara tied the surgical mask behind her head so that the woman could not read her expression. She wasn’t against religion so much as the people who sought to use it as a weapo
n. One of the things that had drawn Sara to medicine was the immutability of facts. The atomic number for helium would always be two. The triple point of water was indisputably the basis of the definition for the kelvin. You didn’t need faith to believe either of these things. You just needed math.

  She walked up the stairs. The door made a sucking sound when she opened it. The scent of disinfectant stung her eyes. The bunkhouse was long and narrow, cooled with two portable air conditioning units that hummed softly in the corners. A large medicine cabinet was stocked with rubbing alcohol, swabs, hypodermics and Ziploc bags filled with various colored pills. IV fluid was stored in overflowing coolers.

  Three women were tending to the patients, rubbing them down with cold cloths. Their demeanor seemed to change as Gwen walked over to the medicine cabinet, her feet heavy across the wooden floor. Their hands moved faster. They quickly moved to the next patient. Furtive glances were exchanged. Sara reminded herself to pay attention to these subtle shifts. These women were afraid of Gwen, which meant that Gwen had given them good reason.

  Sara’s gaze went around the room as Gwen laid equipment on a rolling cart. She counted twenty cots. Only eleven were occupied. White sheets draped over small bodies, pale faces blending in with white pillowcases. Every part of Sara keyed into their suffering. Coughing, sneezing, shaking, crying. The worst were the ones who were not moving at all. She was enveloped by sadness.

  “We have these—” Gwen indicated the cart, which held gloves, a stethoscope, an otoscope for looking at the ear canal and tympanic membrane, and an ophthalmoscope for examining the retina and eye.

  A child in the corner was racked by a sudden fit of coughing. One of the women ran to her, holding a bucket under her mouth. Another little girl started to quietly sob. This set off the rest of the children. They were all so miserable, so sick, so desperate for help.

  Sara wiped away tears with the back of her hand, asking Gwen, “Tell me where to start.”

  “Benjamin.” Gwen led her over to a young boy lying beneath a window. The glass had been covered with a white sheet to keep the heat at bay.