“What is it?” Eric asked as she rose from her seat. Clare shook her head, punching in the number Hughes had mentioned. She returned to the front entry, slipping on her shoes as the number rang in northern Minnesota.
It was picked up a second later, the same gruff voice on the message answering. “Sheriff Hughes.”
“Sheriff, this is Clare Murdock calling you back,” she said, stepping onto the porch.
“Ms. Murdock, thank you for the quick reply. I’m calling in regard to an incident we’re dealing with here. Just to be clear, you are the Clare Murdock formerly known as Clare Kinley, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Your father was Simon Kinley?”
She struggled for a moment. “That’s correct. What is this about?”
“Well, to be honest I’m not one hundred percent sure yet, but I’ll do my best to explain it as well as I can.” The line went completely quiet and she was sure the call had dropped when Hughes spoke again. “Two nights ago one of our deputies was notified of a potential trespassing. When he arrived at the property the complainant was administering first aid to an unconscious, injured woman. From what the owner of the property could tell us, the woman had wandered into their yard and begun knocking on the windows and doors. It was only after the homeowner had placed the call to us that they noticed the woman’s clothes were bloody. When they opened the door, she collapsed. The deputy called for an ambulance, which took her to the hospital where she was treated for multiple stab wounds.”
It felt like there was a steel band drawing tighter and tighter around Clare’s skull. She rubbed absently at her temples. “I’m not following what this has to do with me.”
Hughes cleared his throat. “Well, I don’t know any other way to put this since I’m aware of your history here, so I’ll just say it. The woman regained consciousness early this morning and started asking for you. It took us until now to track down your whereabouts and contact info.”
Clare shook her head and blinked. “What? What do you mean, asking for me? How does she know my name?”
A long pause again. “She’s asking for you because she claims her name is Shanna Kinley. She says she’s your sister.”
Chapter Ten
They sat at the dining table, Eric’s partially eaten breakfast along with her own full plate between them.
Clare stared at the plate and utensils as if they would become something else. She didn’t trust anything now; nothing seemed to be what it was. The idea that the reality around her was thin and could be punctured, scraped away to reveal something different underneath, was disturbingly potent.
“It’s a mistake. It has to be,” Eric repeated. “Some kind of mix-up.”
She’d told herself the same thing since getting off the phone with Hughes, that it was some kind of sick joke. “Why, though? Why would she say she was Shanna?”
“To get attention. To cause problems. Who knows? You remember watching that documentary about the guy who impersonated the boy who’d been abducted and went missing for fifteen years? Put the family through hell thinking they’d finally found their son and brother?”
“Yeah, I remember.” She reached out and nudged her fork, clinking it against her plate. “I just don’t understand. The sheriff said she was approximately the right age and—”
“Wait, wait. Shanna’s gone, honey. She’s dead. You’re not actually entertaining this idea, are you?”
“No, of course not.” She crossed her arms, tightening them across her middle as if to snuff out the tiny, but undeniable, spark of hope she felt deep inside. “It’s just . . .”
“Just what?”
“It was eighteen years ago. I was a kid. I still don’t remember exactly what happened. After I was found they asked me how many people there were at the Refuge. I tried counting them all, and I think I remembered everyone, but I could have been off by one or two people. We had quite a few join within those last months, and several left right near the end.” She paused, gathering herself. “They might have thought everyone was accounted for, but my number may have been wrong. The fire was so hot there was barely anything left of the bodies. Besides a couple people they had DNA records for, there was no way to identify everyone.”
“So you’re saying you think she might’ve gotten out like you did?”
“She could have.”
He was quiet for a while. “So where has she been all this time?”
“I don’t know. The sheriff said there was condensed scar tissue around her wrists and ankles, like she she’d been bound over and over.” She paused for a moment, trying to gather herself, gather the courage. “There are things . . . I’ve never told you before,” she started. The words were immense. Stones rolling aside from a cave mouth leading down into darkness. “Things that happened when I was young. I’ve told you some, but not everything, and I’m sorry.”
He frowned. “I did look into it a little after we started dating. Read up on the internet.” There was a hint of guilt in his voice.
“I knew you did, how could you not? But that’s the issue, I was the only one in the cult to survive, and I was a minor at the time. I didn’t talk with anyone in depth about what happened. It was only later in therapy I started digging deeper. And even then I didn’t tell everything. Not even to Lia.”
She rocked slightly in place and Eric squeezed her hand before rising and moving to the kitchen. A minute later he returned with a glass of whiskey on the rocks for each of them.
Clare took a generous drink and set the glass down. They both sat quietly, the house seeming to hold its breath. “I want to tell you now. Some of this you know, but there are details I didn’t think mattered before.” Clare paused and continued, “My father was mentally ill, undiagnosed schizophrenia most likely. He saw things, spoke to people who weren’t there, did things that made no sense. His parents were wealthy. So wealthy they didn’t see the need to get him help. Instead they hired tutors who taught him about anything he wanted—religion, Greek mythology, history, philosophy. They thought if they indulged his ‘eccentricity,’ he would eventually come around. Money-logic, in other words.” She paused, taking another deep drink. The booze was working, smoothing out her frayed nerves. “He got worse and left home when he was nineteen, taking a lot of their money with him. He used it to buy a plat of land in Minnesota about an hour south of the Canadian border. It was surrounded by state property, literally in the middle of nowhere. He called it the Refuge.”
“That’s where he started the cult,” Eric said gently.
Clare nodded. “He and my mother and a half dozen other impressionable and lost kids he’d met over the years. They built houses and a worship hall, stocked supplies, started recruiting more members in the closest towns. They’d wait outside homeless shelters and family crisis centers offering help. A place to sleep, food, acceptance. In the first year a handful of people grew to twenty. I was born that fall.” She stopped again, looking around the room. Was it darker than it had been a few seconds ago? Clare turned on an overhead fixture and the light heartened her. “My mom left three months after I was born. I don’t know what spurred her. Maybe they had a falling out, my father never said. The way he put it was she’d lost her faith, lost her spirit. He said she ran away in the night and left me behind. I was never able to track down where she went. She must’ve changed her name, became someone else. And as much as it hurt that she’d abandoned me, I always pictured her in some city, living a new life, maybe with a new family. And instead of making me feel sad, it made me happy. Later, when I was forming a plan to escape with Shanna, I thought it was her independence, her courage I had inside me. Most people wouldn’t say it takes courage to run away, but in a cult it does.”