“Would you like to go outside?” Clare asked. “Is this all too much?” She motioned to the room. Slowly Shanna nodded.
They made their way downstairs, Clare offering her arm partway to the lobby. Shanna took it without a word and a warmth buffeted her heart. Wilt was seated in one of the overstuffed chairs before the hearth reading a magazine when they approached and told him of their plan. He said he’d wander along behind them. “Won’t even know I’m there.”
On instinct, Clare turned left out the front doors and led them around the side of the hotel to the overgrown and tree-studded rear lot. She’d spied a narrow trail running between the two properties earlier and they took it now. Judging by the general direction she thought it might encounter the river at some point. She hoped it would.
Shanna’s tension appeared to ease the moment they stepped onto the trail. The tightness of her grip on Clare’s arm lessened and she walked without their hips and legs actually brushing with each step. Clare stole glances at her from time to time. In profile Shanna resembled their father, the sharpness of his features prominent in her own, and Clare wondered how she’d ever second-guessed their relation.
Shanna glanced at her. “Why are you looking at me?”
“Because I’m so glad you’re here.”
The path narrowed to the point where they had to walk single file to edge past the reaching branches of trees before it widened out and joined another, more beaten trail looping across a clearing. At the end of the clearing the land dipped away and the river appeared as a great sweeping curve of water rushing over a series of miniature falls. Someone had erected a half attempt at a fence and they paused near it, looking out over the drop. Wilt, good to his word, ambled a hundred yards to their left, inspecting a row of pines jutting from the soft soil near the riverbank.
Shanna breathed in deeply, closing her eyes. “This is better. I’m sorry. The room is very nice, but all of a sudden it was really small. It’s all so different.”
“I understand.”
“He used to take me outside. I can’t remember if I told you that. He would tie a rope here,” Shanna touched her stomach. “And let me walk beside him. He’d let me help weed the garden in the summer and collect the vegetables in the fall. We’d go on walks, but never far. He said it was dangerous out in the woods.”
“And it was, for him, if you’d gotten free. And you did,” Clare said, squeezing her hand. “You fought and got free, and that rope is gone.”
“I can still feel it. Just like the ones around my wrists.” Clare didn’t know what to say so she hugged her instead. When she released her, there was a sheen of moisture in Shanna’s eyes. “I named him Hector. My son. I remember Father reciting the Iliad and saying Hector never wanted the war that came to him, but he was brave and fought anyway.”
Clare’s throat tightened and she had to fight back her own tears. “We’ll find him. I promise.”
“I know the odds of him being . . . being alive aren’t good. But I need to know. I have to.”
Clare thought of telling her what she was planning on doing once night had fallen, and struck it down. Shanna would want to come. Would insist on it. She was drawn back from her thoughts as Shanna spoke again.
“I’ve read about beautiful things,” she said slowly. “My books talked about love and caring. About good over evil. But is that how the world really is? Or is it like the ropes?” She touched one of her wrists.
Clare opened her mouth to reply, to ensure her there was beauty to witness—the kindness of strangers, friends and their trust, sunrises that shrunk worries and problems to their relative size. But her eyes fell on her sister’s scarred wrists and when she closed her hands she could feel her own wounds, healed but forever present.
In the end she wasn’t able to say anything.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They hadn’t spoken since leaving the riverbank, its swirls and eddies mirroring Clare’s mind.
With every step they took retracing their path, she tried summoning words of comfort and assertion that the world wasn’t all Shanna had experienced. Wasn’t even what she herself had gone through. Not completely. She’d found a semblance of stability in her life, albeit one that swayed from time to time under gusts of anxiety and full-blown hurricanes of panic. But there was always light after the storms. Eric was the greater source of the illumination—a glow in his easy and quiet manner she’d held onto for years. She’d always been half afraid of the love she felt for him, sure at some point it would go away, while at the same time terrified of what it would mean if it didn’t. She wanted to comfort her sister and tell her someday what she’d gone through wouldn’t define her, but felt too hypocritical to say anything of the sort. For now all she could offer was a shoulder of support, and what she would attempt after the sun fell below the horizon.
Now, with the uppermost angles of the hotel’s roof coming into view, she recalled something Shanna had said in the SUV before she’d ventured into the woods with Adam.
“What did you mean earlier when you said Rainier isn’t a person anymore?”
Shanna’s pace slowed and Clare matched it. She waited, letting her take her time. Dimly she was aware of Wilt farther down the path pausing as well to give them privacy.
“Before, when you asked if I’d ever heard anything or hallucinated, I said no. But that wasn’t really the truth. I don’t . . .” Shanna started, and grimaced. “I don’t know if it was real.”
“What?”
“It was a while ago, I don’t know how long. It was raining, I remember that. A thunderstorm. That’s what woke me, thunder. Normally it was always dark at night; Harold didn’t like wasting candles. But that night, when the thunder faded away, I could see the room, and I could hear something too.” Even though it was still daylight and an armed sheriff’s deputy stood only fifty yards away, Clare felt a creeping sense of unease. She resisted the urge to glance around at the brush hemming the path in. “Harold was in the farthest corner, and he was kneeling and rocking back and forth. He was talking, whispering. And that’s when I heard it.”
“What?” Clare’s mouth was dry.
“The other voice. Something was whispering to him, or with him. I couldn’t tell. Then it went dark, like someone had blown the candle out, but Harold didn’t do it because he was still talking. When it was dark again it felt like . . .” Shanna’s voice trailed off and she looked away.
“What did it feel like?”
“Like there was someone else in the room with us.”
A breeze came up, coursing through the trees, and it didn’t take much of Clare’s imagination to hear a voice within the branches. “What happened then?”
“I pretended to sleep and I heard Harold get into bed. After a while I fell asleep for real, but I was afraid. I thought that whoever he’d been talking to was still there, watching me to see if I was faking or not.”
Clare felt like she’d been injected with some paralytic venom. Her thoughts kept returning her to the basement, to their father speaking to the pit in the floor, to the voice saying her name as she fled up the stairs.