Sniper's Pride

by Megan Crane

  If Mariah lived, she could do what she wanted with her life. She wouldn’t have to wait tables in her uncle’s dinky roadside diner in the middle of nowhere the way she’d been doing when David found her on that fateful hunting trip. And she wouldn’t have to play the society princess role she’d never quite managed to pull off to anyone’s satisfaction in David’s snooty circles, where everyone’s great-grandparents had known each other and they all had clear opinions about uppity backwoods tramps like her.

  If Mariah lived, she could find out who the hell Mariah McKenna really was.

  Assuming, of course, that there was anyone in there, locked away behind all her bad decisions.

  You told me not to marry him, Mama, she acknowledged inside her head. It was the only way she talked to her mother these days. Another scar she carried around and pretended wasn’t there. You begged me to think twice, but I was sure I knew better.

  If her mother were here now, Mariah knew what she would say in that smoker’s voice Mariah had always secretly thought sounded like velvet. Think, baby girl. You didn’t use much of your brain hopping into this mess, but you sure could use it to get yourself out.

  Panic kicked at her, and for a minute she couldn’t tell if it was another anaphylactic episode. Mariah laid her hand against her throat and told herself that she was fine. That she was alive and could breathe. She told herself that a few times, then a few more, until her heart rate slowed down again.

  She decided it was nervous energy, and she would deal with it the only way she could. By doing something. She pulled one of her bags from under the bed, settling for the one she knew she could carry no matter what. The one she knew she could pick up and actually run with if she had to. And then Mariah took her time packing, letting her mind wander from the task at hand to all those videos she’d watched online about how to pack a carry-on bag for a monthlong trip. Or three months. Or an indefinite amount of time. It had been one more way she’d tried her best to fit in with the effortlessly languid set of people she knew during her marriage. Women who seemed to be able to trot off to Europe for a month with either the contents of their entire house or nothing more than a handbag, a single black dress, and a few scarves.

  David had mocked her, of course, though she’d convinced herself it was good-natured teasing at the time. Sure it was.

  Maybe you can watch a video on how to make a baby, he had said once, smiling at her across the bedroom as if he’d been whispering sweet nothings in her ear.

  The cruelty of it took her breath away now, the same as it had then. This time, however, she didn’t have to hide it. She blinked away the moisture in her eyes, then threw the shirt she’d been folding to the side because her hand was shaking.

  Had she really tried to tell herself he hadn’t meant that? She knew better now. But she’d spent years excusing everything and anything David did.

  Because she’d been the one who’d been broken, not him.

  David had kept up his end of the bargain. He’d swept Mariah away from that abandoned backwoods town and he’d showered her with everything his life had to offer. He’d paid to give her a makeover. To make her teeth extra shiny. He’d found her a stylist and hired a voice coach so she could transform herself into the sort of swan who belonged on his arm. Or at the very least, so she wouldn’t embarrass him.

  All she’d ever been expected to do was give him a baby.

  Looking back, it was easy to see how David’s behavior had worsened with every passing month she didn’t get pregnant. Less Prince Charming, more resentful spouse. And increasingly vicious.

  When she’d walked in on him and one of the maids, he hadn’t even been apologetic.

  Why should I bother to give you fidelity when you can’t do the one thing you low-class, white trash, trailer park girls are any good at?

  She would hate herself forever for not leaving immediately that first time. For staying in that house and sleeping in that bed for months afterward. For telling herself that it was a slip, that was all. That they could work through it.

  As if she hadn’t seen the hateful way David had looked at her.

  She had. Of course she had.

  The charming man she’d fallen in love with had never existed. David could pull out the smiles and the manners when he liked. But it only lasted as long as he got his way.

  The trouble was, Mariah had turned thirty. And despite years of trying, they hadn’t ever had so much as a pregnancy scare. She’d found David with the first maid the week after her birthday. But it had taken her months to leave.

  He never bothered to pull out his charm for her again, and she’d spent more agonizing months than she cared to recall imagining she could fix something he didn’t care was broken.

  In the end, after the second time she’d caught him in their bed with another woman employed in their household, Mariah had been faced with a choice. She could look the other way, as she knew many wives in their social circle chose to do. She could figure out a way to keep what she liked about life as Mrs. David Lanier and ignore the rest. It was a dance she’d seen performed in front of her for years, from David’s parents right on down.

  But the part of her that had been sleeping for a decade had woken up. That scrappy, tenacious McKenna part of her that she’d locked away. McKennas had rough and tumble stamped onto their stubborn, ornery bones. They fought hard, loved foolishly, and didn’t take much notice of anyone else’s opinions on how they went about it or what kinds of messes they made along the way.

  Roll over and play dead long enough, her grandmother used to say, and pretty soon you won’t be playing.

  Mariah had decided she’d played enough. And maybe it had taken months of humiliation, but she’d left.

  And she would live through this, too, by God.

  “I should watch a video on what Mama would do to a man who treated her like this,” Mariah muttered to herself, aware as she spoke that her accent didn’t slip no matter how angry she got.

  The idea of a video made her laugh a little. She already knew what her mother would do in this kind of situation. Country folks weren’t society folks, and McKennas were a whole different level still. Back in the day, Rose Ellen had reacted to Mariah’s father’s infidelities by throwing his drunk, cheating butt out. She’d never let him back in.

  That was when it came to her.

  It wasn’t the family legend of her mother tossing her naked father out of the house at gunpoint, then all his belongings after him, though that was one of Mariah’s most tender childhood memories. It had to do with all those videos she’d watched so obsessively over the past ten years. Her own private version of higher education.

  And then it clicked. Just the trickle of a memory of one of those late nights she’d sat up, pretending not to wonder where her husband was—or who he might be with, which was better than when she hadn’t needed to wonder because he’d made sure she knew. She’d clicked through video after video on her phone, careful to leave all the lights out in the bedroom so she could pretend she was sleeping and David’s spies could report back to him accordingly.

  She’d found herself watching an unhinged conspiracy theorist ranting about satanic signs he alone had found in a children’s television program. Maybe she’d found a little comfort in the fact that there were people out there a whole lot crazier than a lonely Buckhead trophy wife whose husband openly hated her. She might have been the one staying in a marriage gone bad, but at least she wasn’t broadcasting her every paranoid notion with a video camera.

  But the man had said something interesting at the end of his garbled insistence that the end was nigh, and in puppet form. He’d mentioned a group of superhero-like men off in the wilderness somewhere. Like the A-Team, Mariah had thought at the time. But not illegal. Or faked for television.

  Mariah cracked open her laptop now and got to work. It took a while for her to find her way back to th
at odd video. And yet another long while to try to figure out whether anything in that video was real.

  But eventually she found her way to a stark, minimalist website that had a name emblazoned across the top of the page. Alaska Force. And a choice between a telephone number and an email address. Nothing more.

  Mariah didn’t overthink it. She typed out an email, short and sweet.

  My husband is trying to kill me. He’s already come close twice, and if he gets a third try, he’ll succeed. I know he will.

  Help me.

  Two

  As soon as she hit send, Mariah felt silly.

  When was she going to learn? There was no use believing in things that might as well be magic. Fairy tales were fairy tales, whether she was telling herself lies about Prince Charming in a backcountry diner or larger-than-life, military-trained superheroes who could save a damsel in distress.

  Even if such men existed, why would they save her?

  “You got yourself into this mess,” she told herself sternly, the way she knew her own mother would. With absolutely no sympathy, only that hard certainty that Mariah was going to figure it out herself. Because she had to. “You’re going to have to find a way to get yourself out.”

  Mariah sat there in front of her laptop, clicking around aimlessly until she found herself on a crafting blog, frowning with great concern over something called mindful making. One more thing she wasn’t doing, apparently. She concentrated on her breathing. On the fact she could breathe. She reminded herself that she was alive, and that was what mattered.

  It could have been hours or mere minutes. She couldn’t tell. But when her email beeped to indicate an incoming message, she jumped like she’d been shot. Her heart clattered, the way it kept doing, as if her natural state these days was panic. When her airway didn’t close up tight as a fist—panic wasn’t anaphylactic shock—she took a few more deep breaths and made herself click over to her email, certain she would find yet another mailer from some clothing company.

  But it wasn’t one of the approximately nine thousand online catalogs that were emailed to her daily, urging her to buy more stuff. It was an email from that same address she’d written to earlier. It was direct. To the point.

  Almost terse.

  Get to Juneau, Alaska, in time to catch the Friday morning ferry to Grizzly Harbor.

  If you are not on the Friday ferry, consider this offer rescinded. Further communications will be ignored.

  If you can’t leave your current situation unassisted, advise us and we will consider options.

  Mariah could hear her heart drumming in her temples and the same kick in her throat, her gut, even her feet—but she knew it wasn’t panic or shellfish this time. It felt a lot more like relief. Possibly even hope.

  No wonder she didn’t recognize it. It had been a long, long time since she’d felt anything similar.

  I’ll be there, she typed in reply, hoping no one could read her giddiness through the screen.

  So much giddiness, in fact, that she had to sit there a moment, in case moving too fast made her dizzy.

  When she shut her laptop, she felt that same, drumming sense of purpose she’d felt when the McKenna spirit in her had dusted itself off and marched her straight out of that house she’d shared with David and the staff he apparently sampled at will.

  Mariah had been out of the hospital for a total of five hours when she left her apartment again.

  She tried to convince herself she was on an adventure. Not a life-or-death race toward the unknown thanks to a random email. Not because she was afraid she would die before the week was out, accidentally eating something dressed up with essence of crab, or eating nothing at all out of fear and starving herself to death.

  Whatever waited for her on the other side of that email didn’t matter, because it wouldn’t be David.

  Mariah could handle pretty much anything but another dose of David.

  She raced downstairs, ignoring how terrible she felt, and got into her car. She checked the back and then tossed her bag on the passenger seat beside her. And then she drove, making her way through the typical Atlanta traffic until she hit I-85. She pointed the car north and east, heading for the coast.

  You might feel lethargic, the doctor had told her. It was a whole lot more like being run over by a very heavy truck. Twice. But she could drive her car, so she did.

  David had always mocked the thrillers she liked to read, but Mariah put them to good use that day. She deliberately laid a trail. She drove through the Georgia countryside up into South Carolina, then continued straight into Virginia, filling up her car along the way and buying snacks she knew no one could have doctored. She continued out to the coast, and some ten hours after she’d gotten that email, locked herself in a motel room with a lurid green carpet and a view of the Virginia Beach Boardwalk. And the ocean beyond it, which she could hear but not see.

  She paid for three days on her credit card but left the next morning, after she’d fallen asleep exhausted and woken up too many times with her heart pounding, certain that someone was in the room with her. Before she climbed back into her car, she took her coffee down to the water’s edge and stuck her feet in the ocean. She might not have felt quite like herself just yet, but she was out of Atlanta.

  Whatever else happened, she’d made it out in one piece. And for the moment, anyway, with her cell phone firmly switched off, no one on earth knew where she was.

  She drove back inland, then turned north, leaving a trail of receipts along the I-95 corridor from Richmond through Baltimore, then on into New Jersey. She crossed the bridge over the Hudson River, sneaking glimpses of New York City standing proud in the spring sunshine, then drove on to Connecticut. She stopped in a town called Fairfield that she’d located on the map the night before, found another hotel, then settled in for the night.

  She ordered room service, deliberately. She went online and bought a plane ticket for the following evening, from New York to Athens, Greece, because she’d always wanted to see Greece. The following morning, she bought a one-way Metro-North train ticket back down to New York City.

  But she didn’t get on the train. Instead, she got in the car again and drove up the coast to Providence, Rhode Island. She stayed over that night in a motel on the outskirts of the city that took cash and didn’t ask for ID. She took out the cash maximum from ATM machines every day—because she was sure David would cut her off at any moment, the way he liked to. And she needed more time to access the accounts he didn’t know about, which she hadn’t set up with a debit card. Early on Thursday morning, she drove her car to a different hotel in the center of Providence and left it there.

  Then she got on a bus to Boston Logan Airport. She bought herself a ticket to Juneau, Alaska, with her cash, and boarded it a little before noon.

  Mariah was feeling pretty pleased with herself by the time she landed in Juneau that night.

  Spring in Atlanta had already been warm. All the flowers in bloom and temperatures in the seventies. Mariah had only taken clothes appropriate for that same kind of weather, in case whoever would be breaking in to her apartment would take stock of her wardrobe and be able to figure out where she was headed by what she took with her. Luckily, she’d had a layover in Seattle, and she’d outfitted herself there for whatever spring looked like so much farther north.

  Friday morning, as she found her way to the only ferry that headed to Grizzly Harbor—a village on an island out in the moody Alaskan sea—it was cold. Crisp and clean and almost unbelievably beautiful, but cold.

  Colder than Mariah had ever been in her life, though she tried to wrap the woolly things she’d bought in Seattle around her twice to combat it.

  The chill in the air was sharp and sweet, and it slapped her awake.

  It felt like hope.

  When she finally boarded the ferry, she took a seat near a window
and tried to take it all in. She’d spent the better part of the last week on interstate highways or in motels nearby. She’d seen a lot of truck stops. Grimy fast food restaurant bathrooms with that cloying, astringent smell to mask the more unpleasant smells beneath. More construction than should have been possible, all kinds of traffic choking the different eastern cities, and, apart from the glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean she’d had here and there, there had been tarmac, concrete, and steel as far as the eye could see.

  Alaska was like an antidote.

  There were mountains everywhere, some draped in white with a comforting canopy of dark green pines and imposing rock faces. Some pasted across the horizon, so stark and white she’d assumed they were clouds at first. Everywhere she looked, mountains sloped down into the mysterious blue inlets and sounds, beckoning and beautiful.

  It had been downright cold outside at the ferry terminal, despite the sun. In the course of the ride across the water, with stops at tiny Alaskan villages bristling with the masts of boats and the hint of wood smoke, there was rain. Then fog. Then more sun when Mariah least expected it, doing its best to burn the fog away.

  When the ferry finally reached Grizzly Harbor, Mariah moved to the outer deck with some of the other passengers, smiling her apologies when a woman with a young boy bumped into her at the railing. She felt the wind on her face, a sharp slap that left salt behind. The water below the ferry boat looked dark in the fog, and she could smell the rich scent of ocean life. It was the same as it had been in Virginia Beach—only deeper. Wilder and unspoiled by high-rises and too many people.

  David had taken her to exotic places—or, at least, they had been exotic to a girl from the middle of nowhere, who’d gone nowhere and seen nothing. New York City. Paris. A yacht on the Caribbean.

  But she’d never seen anything quite like Grizzly Harbor. The spring sunshine danced in and around the clouds, lighting up the hardy fishing village, which clung to the steep sides of another imposing mountain. All the buildings clustered together there, above the water’s edge, were painted in different bright colors, most of them peeling and weathered—though that in no way took away from their appeal. There were boats at the docks, pleasure boats and fishing vessels alike. Mariah had never given Alaska a whole lot of thought, but she discovered it looked exactly the way she’d imagined it would. All it needed was a moose cantering down from the woods or a bear roaring up on one of the narrow streets, and the image would be complete.