‘There’s two of them. They’re following our tracks back to Harry’s house.’
I still couldn’t move. Lucas watched from the shadows, eyes trained on the neighboring property.
‘It doesn’t look like Harry’s answering his door. They’re walking around his house, too.’ A pause. Waiting. ‘Now they’re back in the driveway. They’re looking at the cars. One of them is wiping snow off the back of ours.’
‘They’re running the license plate.’ I covered my face, trying to steady my breath. If Butch hadn’t come home and reported his car missing yet, there wouldn’t be an immediate link. We might have a few hours, a day tops, before they put the pieces together and got a warrant. They’d find me, arrest me, and send me where I’d been heading before Congdon had stepped in all those years ago and postponed the inevitable. At least my mother would never know. She’d never have to witness what her daughter had become.
‘They’re coming back now. One of them is on the phone.’
I wiped my leaking eyes, fighting for control. Lucas, fixated on the threat outside, kept narrating the policemen’s progress in a low whisper. One was taking a photo. The other came back to a ground floor window and tried peering inside again. Turning away from the bouncing flashlight beam, I caught a glimpse of something under the bed, an object that – in one swift moment – wiped every tremor from my body and left behind a piercing calm.
The police car’s engine fired to life in the driveway on the other side of the house.
‘Go check, make sure they’re both leaving together.’
Lucas obeyed without question, creeping silently across the carpet and down the stairs. As soon as his head disappeared below the floor of the loft, I reached underneath the bed and pulled out the gun.
We hurried back to Harry’s house, this time pulling pine branches behind us to obliterate our tracks. Lucas kept a cautious distance from me. We’d spoken little since the cops left and then only logistics: when it was safe to come out, how long we’d have until they’d be back, our next steps. The magnitude of what just happened in the cabin haunted his every look, but the police hunt snapped us back to the present danger.
‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should go alone,’ he said as we made our way through the trees.
‘I’m coming.’
‘But you’re still hur—’
‘I’m coming.’ Gaze forward, I felt the weight of the gun bumping my hip with every step, the missing gun from the boathouse, the one I’d desperately been searching for the day I’d come here with Derek and Rex. I finally found it. My mind raced with reasons it had been moved, and every version circled back to the same basic motivation; she’d felt scared and wanted to protect herself. A decade later, the gun lay unused under her bed and her body was rotting wherever Josiah Blackthorn had dumped it.
As we approached the house Harry appeared in the woods coming up from the lake, carrying strings of charred, brown fish. He waved them at us. ‘How’s about some smoked trout chowder?’
‘The police were here, Harry.’ I glanced down the hill, gauging the distance of his fish house to the main cabin. It was possible he hadn’t heard them, especially since they’d walked over instead of driving.
He didn’t comment on it, didn’t even seem interested that the police had been here. Instead he pulled open the cabin door and let it thwack against the siding. ‘Come on, you can chop some onions.’
The pain started getting the better of me as we helped Harry prepare dinner, so I changed the bandage and took half a pill. I didn’t want to be foggy or jeopardize the absolute clarity the gun had given me, but I also couldn’t be crumpled in pain on the couch while Lucas disappeared into the wilderness, either. He might suspect enough to never emerge again.
I peeked around the blanket hanging over the front window every ninety seconds and stopped cold whenever I heard an engine in the distance.
‘We go tonight, after Harry’s asleep,’ I murmured as we set the table, my attention deliberately focused on laying spoons one by one at each chair.
Lucas paused, holding chipped mugs of water. He wanted me to look at him, to let him in, but I couldn’t. Finally, after I took the water out of his hands and finished the place settings, he whispered. ‘I don’t know where we are, in relation to him.’
That turned out to be no problem. Harry was happy to produce a tattered old Boundary Waters map as we ate chowder, pointing out his favorite fishing spots. Lucas studied our location and let his eyes move over the terrain, jumping from lake to lake, finding our route. He nodded almost imperceptibly after handing it back, while I stirred the congealing contents of my bowl. The food was good, but I had no appetite, no interest in anything besides the comfort of metal against my ankle. The gun, which I’d transferred to my boot in the bathroom, had absorbed so much body heat that now it was warming me.
After dinner, we moved to the couch – Harry relaxing on one side while Lucas and I sat rigidly on the other. Harry flipped the TV on and we watched a reality show that I absorbed absolutely nothing from, instead watching the clock with obsessive focus, and waiting for Harry to get tired. As soon as the show ended, the local news came on.
My entire body jumped as Lucas’s face filled the screen.
‘Still no word tonight in the missing persons case of Lucas Blackthorn. Blackthorn, who was rescued from the Boundary Waters after being presumed dead for the last ten years, was kidnapped from Congdon Psychiatric Facility where he had been recuperating since his now famous return to society.
‘Authorities believe this woman’ – my Congdon badge picture flashed on the screen, complete with extra spiky maroon hair and deadpan eyes – ‘is responsible for removing the patient in the middle of the night, injuring a guard and destroying some hospital property in the process.’
The screen flipped to the news anchor, but both our pictures hovered over her shoulder, refusing to fade away. ‘A substantial reward is being offered for any information that can lead to Lucas Blackthorn’s recovery. Please call this number at the bottom of the screen or contact your local authorities.’
They moved to the next story, which was the weather. They always opened with the weather. Why hadn’t they opened with the freaking weather? I could have reacted then – made Harry change the station before it was too late.
I felt Lucas looking at me, but my eyes were glued to Harry. He’d sat motionless through the whole thing, legs sprawled, fingers linked across his flannel shirt. Another story passed, then another. I kept waiting for him to say something, but he was like a statue – Hermit in Repose – and no hint of what he was thinking crossed his face. At the first commercial break, Harry finally broke his position and sat up tall, reaching his arms toward the ceiling in an exaggerated stretch. Was I crazy or was he refusing to make eye contact with us?
‘Well, I’m to bed.’
‘Harry—’ I started, not knowing what should come next.
He stood up and nodded vaguely toward us as we sat frozen on the couch, waiting for him to make a move.
‘Get some rest, Maya. You need your energy.’
I couldn’t tell if he was offering to protect us or trying to get out of the room so he could make that call, the call that would send us tumbling into the bowels of the world, Lucas back to the Congdon and me to prison.
‘Harry, it’s not what it looks like.’
He chuckled, flipping the TV off. To hear us better from his room? ‘Looks like a couple of nervous kids in trouble. I could have told you that when you staggered in here yesterday. Rest up, okay?’
And then he was gone, shuffling to his bedroom at the end of the hall. He shut the door, but his light stayed on.
I turned to Lucas, who looked as unsure as I felt. ‘We have to go. Now.’
26