Then Carver slipped the rope from his wrists, and I realized how foolish I had been.
45
Carver grabbed me and wrapped his arm around my neck. I struggled, but he was twice my size. He laughed darkly at the scissors still in my hand, put them in his own back pocket, beyond my reach, then dragged me from the shed.
He attempted to calm me. “Even if you stabbed me in the foot, I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “Unless you keep struggling.”
I clamped down on his arm with my teeth. He flinched, but he didn’t release me, instead squeezing harder. The impression my teeth had made reddened with his effort. His arm spasmed on my throat and I felt his grip loosen slightly, a change in pressure that would have been imperceptible if it hadn’t been my own neck he was choking. I’m not even sure Carver realized he was holding back. When the stars pricked my eyes, I released all the tension in my body. Though instinct screamed to fight, I let him lay my limp body, almost gingerly, on the ground.
I let Carver go and opened my eyes only when I could no longer hear his footsteps. Even then, I lay there for another minute. In the past hour, I had learned so many things—about my father, about Carver, about the woman who had targeted my family—but I hadn’t found answers for the only questions that mattered: Where was Sam? Where was our son? I wouldn’t, couldn’t, accept Carver’s theory that they were dead.
My breath quickened when I finally stood. I patted my pocket for my phone but remembered it was gone. When I turned, intending to search for anything I might use as a weapon, I froze.
Carver was walking back toward me, and he wasn’t alone. Damon walked behind him, shorter than Carver, but wider. Damon’s head reflected the moon, the same light illuminating purpled lumps on his face and his swollen lip. Before Damon had taken down Carver with that needle to the neck, it looked like Carver had gotten some punches in.
At first, I thought I had gotten it wrong, that Carver had been working with Damon all along. Then I saw the gun Damon held in his right hand.
Even with the bruising, I recognized Damon as the man who had answered Helen’s door and likely the man who had shielded most of his face with a baseball cap when he pushed Audrey from that white sedan.
Though Damon’s gun wasn’t trained on me, it would take only a fraction of a second for that to change. I stood as still as I was able.
“You’re early, Cassie,” he said. “We weren’t quite ready for you.”
I tried to read in the bumpy patchwork of his face how deep his commitment was to Brooklyn’s cause. “Why are you doing this?”
Damon’s eyes darted between my face and Carver’s, and the hand that held the gun jerked. I recognized the desperation in his expression: he was bracing himself to carry out whatever horrible demand had been made of him.
“I’m doing this because I’m her friend, and she asked me to.”
Damon’s arm went rigid, the gun’s barrel arcing so it pointed at Carver’s chest. Carver’s face settled into cast concrete, and his eyes stilled. All cockiness gone.
“She wanted more time with you, Carver. But with Cassie here now, it’s too risky to leave you both alive.”
I shook my head and Carver opened his mouth to speak, as if our objections had any power over bullets, but Damon stepped forward and lifted the barrel another couple of inches, now aligned with Carver’s temple. He fired, point-blank, three times. Carver’s mouth went slack, death consuming whatever he had been about to say.
Damon gestured with his gun toward the house. “Let’s get this over with.”
Inside the house, a stone fireplace stretched two stories to a redwood-beamed ceiling, a chandelier of oil-rubbed bronze and a string of exposed bulbs hanging there. The two wings of the second story were connected by a catwalk that looked out over the living room, all in white linen and crimson leather.
I noticed all of this, but only until I noticed my son, propped and unconscious on the sofa, Brooklyn behind him with a revolver. Once I saw Leo, I noticed nothing else. Brooklyn lifted her gun to aim it at Leo’s head.
I could have charged had the weapon been pointed at me. A few quick strides and I could’ve been there. I would’ve taken a bullet, probably more than one since the man behind me had a gun, too, but I doubted Brooklyn would have acted with enough speed to also shoot Leo. But with the gun locked on my son’s head, I dared not move. All it would take was a quiver of Brooklyn’s finger and the blast that followed would end me as certainly as if the weapon had been pointed in my direction.
Bruises still mottled Brooklyn’s face, a mirror image of Damon’s injuries. Made sense. They’d been caused by the same man. But in our earlier meeting, she had exaggerated the injuries to her arm. She was having no problem holding her gun.
Brooklyn squinted, her head tilted as she studied me. The corner of her lip curled, not quite a smile but close, and then, her eyes still on me, she asked Damon, “You took care of Sam, right?”
I caught my breath. No. I forced all my will into that denial, as if it could become a tangible thing capable of holding me up.
“Yeah, I took care of Sam.”
I flashed to Carver’s rage that night on the trail. Then, he had been an animal, beyond reason or thought. Brooklyn had deconstructed Carver’s life, piece by piece, until all that remained was a husk empty of all but that limbic center of his brain that shouted, Avenge.
The thought hit me with such force, I nearly stumbled, I will save Leo and then kill everyone else in this room.
I shook off the thought. That’s not who I was. I wasn’t a killer. I saved lives, I didn’t take them. I tried on the reassurance but realized it no longer fit, like a hand-me-down coat I wore despite the way its weight tugged on my shoulders or its wool scratched my skin.
“Have to say I’m surprised you got here so quickly. The speed you had to be driving, you’re lucky you didn’t get pulled over.” Brooklyn smiled, but there was a hint of impatience there. “Ten minutes earlier, we wouldn’t even have had time to kill your husband.”
My muscles tightened as I scanned the room for weapons. For options. On the coffee table, I noticed a pack of gum, a wrapper beside it. The strip of foiled paper had been neatly folded into the shape of a heart. It brought me back to that last morning with Sam and the origami dog I had at first believed was from him. It suddenly occurred to me that Brooklyn had taken more care with that wrapper than she had with my husband.
“Don’t forget, Sam’s death is on you. Earlier tonight, I gave you a choice, and you chose the kids. Still, Cassie, you did call the police, and that decision has to have consequences, too, right? So who dies here: you, or your son?”
As easy a decision as I could ever make. “I’d gladly trade my life for my son’s.” The obvious question hung between us: What prevented Brooklyn from killing us both?
The night I’d met Brooklyn, for the first time in years, I had thought of the attack on a college classmate, and how I’d failed her. She had survived that night, but she hadn’t survived the aftermath. A few years after Dirk pushed her from that balcony, she’d walked into the ocean and drowned. She hadn’t intended to kill herself. After the attack, despite physical therapy, her body had been too weak to fight the current.