It was also a mistake to think of Carver as helpless.
“Where’s Leo?”
He grinned, smug despite his compromised condition. “Shouldn’t a mom know where her kids are?”
“Do you know where your child is?”
“You know about that?”
My intake of breath was sudden and sharp. So what Red told me about the baby was true, and Carver knew about it. I hadn’t expected that. “My father, Red, worked here as a contractor.”
“I knew Red, or of him.” His words careful. “Through Natalie.”
“He was here the night Natalie gave birth. To your child.”
“And he didn’t try to save her?”
Her. So the baby had been a girl.
Even as this fact registered, anger flared that he would blame Red. “As the father, wasn’t it your job to protect your child?” I immediately recognized my hypocrisy: an hour earlier, I had blamed Red for the same thing. And who was I to judge, when I had so completely failed my own son? “What happened to her?”
“Growing up here, I’m guessing terrible things.” For a moment, Carver’s eyes went soft, his face slack. “Did you know that whenever Natalie did something her mom didn’t like, Dee would throw her in a box? And she really hated her daughter getting knocked up. Usually, Dee would let her out after a day or two, but that last time, she planted her in the ground and walked away.”
The casual way he said this made me want to stab him in an eye with my scissors. Left eye or right, I didn’t care.
“You knew about the abuse and did nothing?” I asked. Even if Dee killed Natalie, Carver deserved every year he had served at San Quentin.
Carver’s chest inflated, his shoulders spread, and I was reminded again of the beast he had been on the trail. “I didn’t know any of this back then. Until recently, I thought Natalie had miscarried, and it was Ernie who told me about the box. But Red—he was here that night. He could’ve prevented all this shit from happening.”
My hands tightened around the scissors so that the tip gouged my palm. I was done talking to him about his child. I wanted to find mine. “Where’s my son? And my husband?”
“Probably dead.”
I jammed my scissors into his foot, and he screamed. “What the—?”
“What did you do to my son?”
“I’m not part of that. I’m only here because that asshole Damon drugged me.” His face darkened. “You stabbed me in the foot.”
“You’re lucky it wasn’t your carotid artery.” Which it might have been if not for the information I still needed. “Why would Damon drug you?”
He grimaced and raised his foot, angling it toward the shaft of moonlight so he could study it.
I sighed, impatient. “I barely nicked your toe.”
Carver lowered his foot to the ground. “You know the story: Guy meets girl. Guy realizes girl’s trying to fuck up his life. Guy tries to kill girl.” He paused and tried on a smirk, but it wouldn’t hold. “Then girl gets her friend to stab guy in the neck with a needle and toss him in some crappy shed.”
My skin turned cold, and I rubbed my arms for warmth. Not because of the way the psychopath tied up at my feet scowled at me, but because of how long it had taken me to make the connection. What do you know? Daryl had asked me. He would’ve been disappointed it had taken me so long to learn that lesson.
“So it’s not just Damon,” I said. “Brooklyn’s involved in Leo’s abduction too?”
“You still don’t get it. She’s not just involved. She’s planned everything. Damon’s just some guy she’s manipulating, just like she manipulated me. You, too, and your husband. That night on the trail when you fucked everything up—nothing about that night was an accident.”
“I know. You ran Brooklyn off the road.”
“She ran me off the road. She knew where you’d be, and when. She had a tracker on your car, right?” He must’ve read my doubt, because he sneered. “Of course she had a tracker on your car. She had one on mine too.” The grin was back, and it was polar. “But her timing was off. I don’t think she planned how close I’d come to killing her.”
Carver’s expression shifted then, a mix of hostility and confusion. “But I still haven’t figured out why—why would my own daughter want to kill me?”
I easily came up with reasons. Because you let her mother die. Because you never looked for her. Because you’re an asshole.
“You mean like you tried to kill her?”
“That was before I knew she was my daughter, and after everything she did.”
“And now that you know she’s your daughter, you aren’t still planning to kill her?”
Carver remained silent, but I read the answer in his face.
I considered him and the ropes that bound him. If he set after Damon and Brooklyn, he would serve as one hell of a distraction.
He noticed me studying the ropes and nearly growled, “Untie me.” My eyes dropped to his hands. They were clenched, as they had been the night we met.
“Because you asked so nicely, or because you tried to kill me?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill you. I just wanted you to let Brooklyn die.” When Carver saw I was making no attempt to free him, he leaned back against the wall. “Back at the hospital, I lied.”
“I’m not surprised. About what?”
“I never brought Sam here.”
I studied his face, but I no longer trusted myself to recognize deception. “I don’t understand.”
Carver licked at the cut on his lip as he squirmed against his bindings. “When Brooklyn and Damon ambushed Sam, I heard the tail end of their conversation. Damon mentioned dumping Sam here.”
“But the blood on the back seat.”
“Damon and I had a disagreement.”
“Sam’s keys?”
“He dropped them when those two ambushed him, and I took them. I needed a car.” Carver’s tongue darted across his laceration again, the same way a snake would flick its tongue to taste the air. “Do you know how my wife died?”
“She was poisoned.”
He lifted his shoulders and squirmed against the ropes that bound his wrists. “That was Brooklyn. She poisoned my wife’s tea and watched as I served her. Up until that point, we both thought Brooklyn was a friend. Invited her into our home. First, she posted some stuff online that got me fired. Then she emptied our bank account. Killed our cat and posed it on our bed as if it were sleeping. Then—Anne.”
His entire body convulsed at the memory. “Each day, I’d find a note with a number. 3. 2. 1. That last day, on the bottom of the box of tea, Brooklyn had written a single word in Sharpie: Today.”
At that, I felt as if I had been hollowed out with a dull knife and then scraped raw. Part of me had wanted to believe the threat was idle, that Sam and Leo would be allowed to live.
“And then—” Carver’s voice caught in his throat. He cleared it and started again, “And then, Brooklyn knelt down and told my wife it was my idea, that I’d wanted Anne dead. I don’t care if she’s my daughter. For making that lie my wife’s last memory, I am going to kill her.”