by Ellery Kane
“And when we get there?”
In the flashlight’s glow, I watched his eyes until he looked away. “I don’t know.”
“You’re going to kill him?” It’s not a question if you already know the answer. But I made it sound like one anyway.
“Don’t you want him dead? He took Ginny, remember?” I did remember, of course. And I figured the world was probably better off without Cutthroat Cullen. But the way Levi’s eyes shone when he said it—so determined, so decided—it made me think of Snip and those one-way tickets to hell.
“I don’t want you to be the one to do it.”
The gravel road narrowed just wide enough for a single car. From one side, the redwoods bore witness. They saw what we saw and everything we didn’t. In the other direction, bare dirt that unnerved me even more. Because in the pitch black, it seemed to promise a fall into oblivion. “Are you absolutely sure we’re going in the right direction?”
Levi nodded and shone the light on our path. A set of footprints in the dirt. Most likely my mother’s. But in the dark cave of my mind, they belonged to Cutthroat, one of those shadows flitting just beyond my view. Up ahead of us, a mailbox, barely standing on its post, marked the entrance to another road. I imagined someone like my mother taking the curve too fast and dead-ending into it. “How did you find this place?” Even my whisper was too loud.
“My sister.” He put a finger to his lips. “We’re getting close.” And then, he did the unthinkable. The flashlight clicked, and the night swallowed the last pinprick of light. I lost my bearings until Levi’s hand closed around my wrist and pulled me closer to him. “Give it a second,” he said. “Let your eyes adjust. Then we’ll head around the back of the cabin.”
I blinked. Then blinked again and waited as the vast nothingness took the form of Levi’s shoulder. His arm. The hand not holding mine. His gun. And the vague outline of everything beyond him. “I’m okay,” I mouthed. Even though I wasn’t.
Stargazing with Ginny was like this. The complete and essential absence of light a necessary evil. Enigmatic even, if we were being brave. But the night always caught up with us after the coyotes started yelping. Their cries built to a feverish din until a single howl sent us scampering inside every time, collapsing in laughter once we knew we were safe. A lone howl. That’s how the scream came. The one I recognized as Ginny’s. And I wished I had somewhere to run to. Instead, I clung to Levi like a grounding rod, the air around me electric.
“C’mon.” He pulled me along behind him to where the road disappeared into tall, weedy grass that concealed a landscape of junk leftover from another lifetime. We skirted a makeshift ravine—the bed of a pickup truck, half-filled with rainwater—and a towering mountain of tires as we ran, nearing the back of the cabin. The porch light flickered last gasp, off and on and off again. That was my firefly. And it was dying. It sputtered once, twice, illuminating the broken front window—I saw!—and then, it went dark.
I opened my mouth to unleash my own howl, but Levi clamped it shut with his hand and snatched me out of view. His heart thudded against my back. Or maybe that was mine. Between ragged breaths, I tried to make sense of what I’d seen. But it was just fragments of red and terror and people I loved. They didn’t fit together. Didn’t belong together. And yet, I couldn’t shake them.
“Was that Ginny?” Levi spoke so softly, the words barely stirred the air by my ear—and until he repeated them, I thought they might’ve been my own, uttered only inside my head. I started to tell him, to find the voice caught in my throat. But the porch light began to buzz again with a dim glow, giving him the answer before I could say it. Yes.
“Please.” Ginny squealed like a rabbit clamped between sharp teeth. The broken glass distorted her face, blurring the sharp edges of her panic. But she was bleeding. That much I could see. A thin line of it ran down her neck. So red it looked unreal. Cullen held her effortlessly, pinned in front of him with his forearm. In his other hand, the knife he’d promised my mother.
“Let her go, Clive. She’s done nothing to you. Nothing.” Her back to the window, I couldn’t see my mother’s face. But I’d never heard her speak that way. As if she could coax an animal—a wild one she knew by name. “We can talk about this. Just you and me. We can go somewhere.”
Cullen’s sudden laughter raised the hair on the back of my neck. The laugh of a doomed man. And I thought of Snip’s warning. Guilty men can be desperate too, and this one cackled like he had nothing to lose. “Talk? With you? Where did that ever get me?”
Levi positioned us alongside the window, the front door at our backs. His gun raised, he angled for an opening. But it was useless. I could see Ginny’s purpose. Both pawn and shield. There was no clear shot from here. “I thought you said she had a gun,” Levi murmured as a quick scan of my mother’s hands came up empty. I shrugged.
“So you don’t want to talk. I understand.” My mother beguiled him again, her voice more snake charmer than psychologist. “Why did you go through all this trouble to get me here then? What do you need from me, Clive?”
“It’s not what I need. It’s what I want.” Cullen squeezed Ginny’s neck in the crook of his elbow. “What you owe me.”
“You’re hurt. I know I hurt—” Cullen’s bitter guffaw interrupted my mother. Undeterred, she began again, more gently this time. “I hurt you. But you don’t have to do this.”
“Hurt me? Hurt me? Hurt me?” With every repetition, Cullen’s voice raised until it threatened to blow out what was left of the fractured window. His grip tightened, Ginny’s face straining with the effort of breathing. “You did the one thing you knew would break me. And it turned me. Back. Into this. Into a monster.” He punctuated each phrase with a forceful wring of Ginny’s throat. “You betrayed me, Clare. Worse than any of the others.” The others. I wasn’t sure what it meant. Only that my mother’s shoulders slumped when he said it. And Ginny gasped for air.
“Do something,” I hissed. “She can’t breathe.”
“Stay put,” he said, dropping the duffel bag at my feet. “I’ll go in through the back.” Levi disappeared around the corner of the house before I could stop him. Now that he was gone, I felt acutely aware of myself. The creak of the wooden slats beneath my sneakers. The rise and fall of my chest. The delicate sound of my swallow. I leaned against the window frame trying to quiet it all.
My mother stepped toward Cullen, her arms outstretched. A gesture that seemed familiar to her. To Cullen. “I had no choice, Clive. Please forgive me. Please.” He paused and, for a moment, the lines etched in his forehead softened. His hold on Ginny loosened, and she sucked in a panicked breath. My mother must have noticed too. The spell he was under. She took another step and another. Until her hands were close enough to touch him. “It wasn’t only me I had to look out for,” she said.
And like the clean snap of a stem, the spell broke in two. On one side, my mother still reaching, plaintive. On the other, Cullen, turned to stone. His face hard and cold as marble, he pressed the knife firm against the wound on Ginny’s neck, and the bleeding started up again. “Imagine my surprise when that hoity-toity bitch, McKinnon, dropped your little bomb on me after you vanished. She relished every minute of that. Tells me I have a daughter. That we have a daughter.”
No. No. No. The crack in the window widened like the gash on Ginny’s neck. So wide I could fall in. And my head was spinning, spinning, spinning. I reached for Levi, arms flailing, before I remembered he’d gone. And the porch light’s insistent buzz became the swarm of flies from my nightmare. A black cloud, a thousand prickly legs sticky with Ginny’s blood, and I floundered in the middle of it.
I stumbled back.
Maybe I was still dreaming. The kind of dream that jerks you awake just before you tumble into the void. Maybe I would wake up too.
If I let myself fall.
19
DEAR OLD DAD
Not asleep. Not a dream. Real, I thought. Real, because my palms ached beneath me, sore fro
m where I landed. Real, because the porch light spotlighted me in a ghostly glow that sent me scrambling for the shadows like the mice in my mother’s barn. Real, because Cutthroat Cullen heard me scream. “Get up, Samantha.” And he knew my name. “Time to meet dear old dad.”
I staggered to my feet, afraid to look at him. To see him register my presence, measure me up. To follow the blood trail down Ginny’s neck to her shirt where it blossomed like a rose. But worse, to see my mother’s eyes, sinking stones of agate, meet mine in seeming confirmation. Cullen, my father? Real.
“Come inside.” He beckoned to me, blade in hand, as my mother shrieked at the window. So wild, so do-or-die, I could barely make out the one word she repeated again and again. RUN!
I listened, but my legs refused to obey. Logs of lead, they fixed me in place as if I’d just run an hour’s worth of liners, the way Coach Crowley sometimes got even with us for a disappointing game.
“Don’t be like your mother. Don’t play games with me.” Statue Samantha heard, saw. Did nothing. “If you won’t come in, I’m coming out. As soon as I get rid of this baggage.” He wound one hand around Ginny’s hair and pulled her head back, exposing the smooth valley beneath her trembling chin. Her tears came without sound or effort. She resembled the girl in the field, peaceful at a distance.
“Let Ginny go, and I’ll do what you ask.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It belonged to Statue Samantha and came from a place inside that was frozen solid. “Take me instead. I’m the one you wanted anyway.” I stuttered to a start, my legs barely working again, and turned the doorknob.
A protest wheezed from Ginny’s mouth. My mother gasped my name in disbelief. But Cullen only laughed as I came inside. As if we were in the middle of father-daughter day at school and I’d cracked the funniest joke he’d ever heard. I searched his face, trying to find something of myself there. A curve, a line, anything familiar. There were the eyes, of course. Blue like mine. But his sky was different. Too perfect to be believed. Mixed-up somehow. The kind of sky that unsettles people at a funeral. Disrespectful in its utter blueness.
“Ginny, Ginny, Ginny. Everyone is so concerned about you. And to think, you wouldn’t even be here if that pendejo Guzman could follow orders.”
“You were working with him?” My mother got the words out. Barely. They seemed to scratch in her throat like tumbleweeds.
“I wouldn’t say that. He worked for me. He didn’t have a choice.” Cullen postured with his knife, then threw back his head, cackling. “The EME working for me—ain’t that a hoot? And he thought I was going to let him live. Like I said, pendejo. If you want something done right, do it yourself. Isn’t that what they say, Dr. Keely?”
I waited for my mother’s entreaties. A clever comeback. Words to soothe the savage beast. But she didn’t say any of those things. Instead, she raised the gun tucked carefully into the waistband of her jeans and pointed it at him. Half of his mouth curled in a sneer, and I understood why her hands shook. “You’re right, Clive. I’ll do it myself before you hurt anyone else.”
“Go ahead. I dare you.” Nostrils flaring, he charged toward her, dragging Ginny along for the ride until there was no space between his skull and the muzzle. I heard my mother’s breath catch in her throat, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure if she was going to kill him or kiss him. Then he spit words from his mouth like something rotten. “Do it. One to the head. Put me out of my misery. You already stuck me in the back, so what does it matter? And to think, I loved you.”
“Loved? Is that what you told the woman you just dumped in the Bay? You don’t mean loved, Clive. You mean controlled. I was nothing but a puppet to you. Just like her. You pulled the strings, and I danced. So if you want to talk about betrayal—”
Cullen pushed his forehead against the gun, butting it like a bull. “If that’s what you think of me, do it now, before I tell our precious daughter all about you. Do it.” My mother stopped speaking, the indignation sucked out of her. As she stroked Ginny’s face, she looked at me. Ginny’s tears were dry now—her eyes vacant. She was the girl in the field, already dead. “I’ll tell her how you begged for it. How you wanted me. This is all your fault, Clare.”
My mother kept her focus on me—“Close your eyes,” she said—and pulled the trigger.
Close your eyes. She’d told me that before. Two years ago, summer, when the cow she’d called Boots went off alone in the corner of the pasture, and we’d found her lying on her side, bloated and glassy-eyed. One shot in the air to scatter the buzzards, she raised the rifle then stopped. Close your eyes, Samantha. I’d never told her that I’d kept them open, that I’d watched Boots’ head open like a flower, that I’d seen her body seize once and go still. Because I didn’t know why.
This time, I listened. Squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could, and I didn’t stop squeezing until I heard a dead man speak.
“Do you really think I’d be stupid enough to give you a working gun?” Cullen stepped away from my mother. She pulled the trigger again and again. Nothing. Each empty click broke something inside me. “To leave the firing pin in? Jesus, Clare. I didn’t go through hell to let you win.”
“It’s a good thing I’m here then.” Levi. Finally. “And my gun actually works. So you may want to rethink your strategy.”
“And why would I do that?” He chuckled to himself. “Who’s this loser? Another one of your conquests, Dr. Keely?”
Levi fired once, the bullet making a clean hole in the wall over Cullen’s shoulder. Ginny let loose a yowl, cut short by Cullen’s hand. He clamped down hard on her mouth until she stopped struggling.
“Levi! What are you doing?” I yelled over the ring in my ears. “You’ll shoot Ginny.”
“He’s going to kill her anyway. Aren’t you, Cutthroat? This is just a game to you. Pieces you move around on a chessboard.”
“Do I know you?” Cullen asked.
Levi fired another shot. “Levi Beckett. Son of James Dumas. The man you hung twenty years ago. Made it look like a suicide. Ring any bells?”
“Seriously? You’ve been drinking a little too much of the conspiracy Kool-Aid. Next you’ll be telling me I shot JFK. Or I’m a member of the Illuminati. I didn’t hang your dad. As far as I recall, he offed himself over some broad. Helluva stupid reason if you ask me.”
Levi lunged for Cullen, knocked him back. But Ginny was his lifeline, and he wasn’t letting go. He fell against the wall, scooting down the length of it with Ginny on his lap like a rag doll. “I’ll make you regret that.” He poised the steel tip at her cheek and ran it across her skin like the blade of a skate on ice. She didn’t cry out. Didn’t squirm. I felt sick at the sight of the metal point momentarily disappearing in her flesh, but I couldn’t look away. Ginny’s eyes met mine.
“I’m sorry, Sam.” She didn’t have enough breath to finish the sentence, so my name came out more of a soundless squeak. “This was a bad idea.”
“It’s not your fault. I agreed to go along with your half-baked plan. Since when did they ever end well?” The part of her that was still alive, still Ginny, managed a small smile. It sent the blood in a new direction, marking her face like a twisted clown.
“Shut up.” Cullen raised the knife again, and I started toward Ginny until my mother stopped me. She snatched me back and pushed me toward Levi.
“I’ll do what I should’ve done in the first place. I’ll help you get away,” she told him. “Just take me instead.”
“Mom, have you lost your mind?” She didn’t answer me. Her silence, a resounding yes.
“Now you’re getting it, Clare. Always as smart as you were beautiful.” Cullen sprang up, pulling Ginny to her feet, and pointed outside with the urgency of someone who had a plan. Someone who got exactly what he wanted. And it wasn’t me. “Start walking,” he told my mother. And she did. Like he was the puppet master after all, holding all the strings.
It happened the way Boots died. The way our point guard broke her jaw. The way Levi kissed
me. With no happening at all. It was just done. There wasn’t even time to shut my eyes. Levi raised his gun and fired at Ginny. She slumped toward the floor, buoyed by Cullen’s arms.
Exposed, Cullen dropped her in the doorway, stepped over her, as he barreled toward my mother. I willed her to run, to fight, to do anything but stand there. A Bellwether deer. That’s what she was. The one I’d seen in my rearview mirror after clipping her flank. Soft doe eyes darting, legs wobbly. Resigned to her fate—whatever it might be—she didn’t move.
Levi’s second shot skittered off the doorframe. His third came too late. Cullen ducked around the door and crashed into my mother, the Bellwether deer frozen in his path. He held her as tight as a lover and dragged her, backpedaling toward the darkest space between the trees where the night had no end. My heart stopped and started with each pop of the gun as Levi chased after them. But when the gun fell silent, it was worse. And worse still, when the sound of an engine rumbled across the grassy field louder and louder—high beams casting a blinding light that reached to the road and beyond—then soft again like distant thunder. Levi fired one last-ditch shot at the black truck that most certainly belonged to Cutthroat’s last victim, and a wail came to life inside me, pushed its way up my throat. It was ready to be born.
20
A HUNCH
“You shot me.” Ginny wasn’t the girl in my field after all. Not dead. Very much alive. And bleeding profusely from a coin-sized hole in the side seam of her jeans, where Levi had put a bullet.
“He’s a cop.” Like that explained everything. With a nod of confirmation, Levi leaned down to inspect her leg.
“I saved you,” he said. “It looks like a flesh wound. No major damage.”
“You shot me,” she repeated. And I wondered if she could say anything else.
