“Later. He’s fine. He’ll be . . .”
Fine. He’ll be fine.
Brent is not fine. Brent is dead, and I don’t want to lay him to rest because it feels like acknowledgment. Feels like acceptance. Feels, too, like I’m stalling when I need to be acting.
“We need to—” I stop myself.
Find Jacob. Warn Jacob. That’s what I want to say, and that’s where I must draw the line. I can’t remind Dalton his brother is in danger, as if he doesn’t know that, as if he’s not holding himself back from running out to find him.
It has been twelve hours. Another hour won’t matter. Not for finding Jacob. Not for examining the crime scene.
For Brent, though . . .
“We made a promise,” Dalton says, his voice low.
“I . . . I . . .”
I look over at Brent’s body. And I burst into tears, and Dalton’s arms go around me, holding me tight as I sob against him.
We lay Brent’s body to rest, the way he wanted it, on an open platform, with him wearing his Canadiens jersey, a reminder of the season he’d played for the team, fifty years ago.
Afterward, I examine the crime scene. That’s what Dalton insists on for the next step. Jacob can wait—the crime scene could be disturbed.
Storm easily tracks Brent back to where he’d been shot. Blood and trampled grasses mark the exact spot, as do the grouse Brent shot. There’s a bow and arrows there, and I remember he was new to bow shooting, having finally agreed to let Jacob teach him.
Too old for this, he’d said, learning new tricks at my age. But it saves on ammo.
Dalton said he could bring more ammunition with his trades, but Brent had blustered that he needed the other items more. Which was a lie. He wanted to learn something new. Wanted to challenge himself.
Dalton takes the grouse. When we first met, I’d have been horrified by that. Stealing from the dead? Now I know better. It is a sign of respect. Brent killed these birds, and his efforts should not go to waste. Nor should the lives of those birds. We’ll eat them, and we’ll remember where they came from.
Dalton takes the bows and arrows, too.
“Jacob made these,” he says. “I’ll give them back when we catch up to him.”
Not when we find him. Certainly not if. There’s very little chance Jacob is in any danger, and it really is just a matter of catching up to him. I know that. Dalton knows that. Feeling it, though, is another matter.
Brent said he got my gun away from Brady, and he’s right. It’s there, hidden in the grass.
I see nothing at the crime scene to contradict Brent’s version of events. Not that he’d deliberately mislead us, but maybe he misunderstood. Maybe I’ll find something that proves the gunshot wasn’t an accidental discharge.
“What would prove that?” Dalton says when I admit what I’m hunting for.
“I have no idea. But I want it.”
He wisely says nothing and just lets me keep scouring.
“Brady is still culpable,” I say. “He held Brent at gunpoint. Whatever happens after that, it’s still murder, even if it’s second-degree.”
“It is.”
“And he ground his fist in the injury. I don’t care how desperate he was to find Jacob. That’s sadistic.”
“It is.”
I crouch and stare at the bloodied ground.
“You want proof he’s exactly what his stepfather says,” Dalton says. “Proof Brady is more than what he claims—a desperate man driven to desperate measures.”
“Yes.”
I want justification for my rage. I do want to see Brady gutshot for this. Gutshot and left in the forest. And that scares me. It’s the sort of thing Mathias would do, and I tiptoe around the truth of what Mathias is, alternately repelled and . . . Not attracted. Definitely not. But there’s part of me that thinks of what he does and nods in satisfaction. I could not do it, but it doesn’t horrify me nearly as much as it should.
“I should have come out last night,” Dalton says.
I look up at him, as I stay crouched.
“I decided not to come see him last night. I waited until morning.”
I rise and walk to him. “Doesn’t matter. This happened at twilight. We wouldn’t have made it here before Brent got shot.”
Dalton says nothing, and I know that will weigh on him. Like my poor choices with Val weigh on me. We haven’t discussed that yet. It’s not time. Not time for this either, as he pats Storm and then peers into the forest.
“Should see if she can find Brady’s trail.”
She can’t. The blood seems too much for her. It’s upsetting or confusing, and she grows increasingly anxious until I release her from the task.
Next we try to “catch up” with Jacob, while continuing to search for Brady and Val. We put up the markers, telling Jacob we need to speak to him. There’s no way to warn him otherwise. Despite Dalton’s best efforts, Jacob is functionally illiterate. Their parents taught them the language of the forest, the one they needed to know. I get the sense that Dalton had learned how to read and write before he came to Rockton, but presumably he sought that teaching from his parents and Jacob had not.
We head to the cabin Tyrone Cypher has been using as a base. There’s no sign of him. We leave a note, though I’m not sure that will do any good either. Cypher can read; he just might choose not to.
Back in Rockton, there’s been no word from the council. Petra and Diana have been taking turns with the radio. We aren’t even sure how often they make contact with Val. Maybe, with us being pissed off over our unwanted prisoner, they’ll just wait until we call and hope we don’t.
The search for Brady and Val didn’t stop while we were off with Brent. We join that, and by the time we return home, it’s after nine at night. Dalton and I are exhausted. We have one more task, though. Kenny has been in the cell over twenty-four hours, as Dalton lets him stew. We need to talk to him, as much as we’re both dreading it.
Kenny was the first true Rockton resident I’d met. My first taste of what to expect in this town. I’d spent time with Dalton, in my admission interviews and then over twelve hours of travel together, yet I had no idea what to make of him. There was so much about Dalton that reminded me of the worst kind of cops—swaggering through life, a bully with a badge. He seemed to fit that slot . . . and then he’d do something to pop him out of it. That was uncomfortable.
I’d met Anders, briefly, and he seemed more my kind of colleague, competent and personable. But after maybe five minutes in Rockton, they’d both had to rush off to an emergency, and I’d made my way to town alone.
Go in the back door of the station. Stay there. Anyone comes in, tell them we’ll be back.
Those were Dalton’s orders, which seemed a little disconcerting, as if the locals were wolves who might pick me off while the alpha was away.
It was Kenny who came into the station. As I discovered later, a bunch of the militia guys had drawn straws to see who got to introduce himself to the “new girl” first. That’s what I’d been to them. Not their new superior officer. Not the new detective. A new woman in town. An addition to Rockton’s meager dating pool.
Kenny had exactly two minutes with me before Isabel showed up and shooed him off. I remember her asking if I could guess what he’d done in his former life. Given the size of his biceps and the perfume of sawdust, I’d guessed carpenter or construction worker. High school math teacher, she said.
When he arrived eighteen months ago, he’d never have worked up the courage to talk to you. People come here, and it’s a clean slate. A chance to be whoever they want for a while.