A Dark Lure (11 page)

“Cole McDonough! My good Lord!”

He swung around at the sound of a voice from his childhood. “Mrs. Carrick,” he said with a smile. “You’re still here. And you haven’t changed a day.”

“Of course I’m still here. And I’m Adele to you now, young lad,” she said with a smile, clutching a basket of folded laundry against her chest. “Why,
look
at you.” She came forward, as if she might set the basket down and give him a hug, but she restrained herself. Mrs. Carrick wasn’t a hugger—never had been.

“I
. . .
had no idea you were coming. Does your father know?”

“Not yet. Where is he?”

She looked a little flustered. “He took a late nap today. He wasn’t feeling well. I was about to go wake him for supper.”

“Let me do that.”

“Uh . . . perhaps you should wait until he’s dressed and comes down. I imagine he’d like to be in fighting form when he sees you.”

“I imagine he would.”

Her face reddened suddenly. “I mean—”

Cole smiled. “He still in the same room?”

“Yes, the one at the end of the hall on the third floor.”

He took the stairs, two at a time.

Tori turned over another page, filled with a voyeuristic salaciousness, her heart beating faster as she read more of her mother’s work.

In the early days of that winter she sometimes heard choppers thudding behind the low cloud. That was the most devastating, hearing them searching for her, knowing her family and friends were worried.

She knew there would be search dogs, too. Big groups of volunteers on ground teams. She wondered if they’d found her fallen basket of berries, seen signs of her scuffle when he’d put the sack over her head. She doubted it. She’d told no one where she’d been headed that afternoon. And a snowstorm had blown in that night. The snow hadn’t let up for days afterward. Any whisper of a trace would’ve been buried deep under that first thick, smooth blanket of the season.

Then one day came silence—they’d stopped looking. It was her new reality. Deadening winter silence. Darkness. If she’d thought that hearing them search was the worst, it wasn’t. It was this. They’d given up on her. And aloneness was suddenly suffocating.

A light died inside her during those first days of silence. She went numb to his abuse, to the things she glimpsed through the cracks in the chinking of the shed where she was chained and roped to the wall. She knew she wasn’t the first he’d kept in there, on that pile of stinking bearskins and burlap sacks. There’d been at least one other. She’d seen her gutted body hanging on the hook outside the neighboring shed. The body had red hair. He took it down after a freeze, and she heard chopping and thudding and, once, the sound of a saw. She wondered if the body on the hook was the redheaded forestry worker who’d gone missing last fall.

She wondered if there would be another woman taken next fall. If he’d kill her before that, and hang her on that hook, too.

As the daylight grew shorter, she tried to figure out whether it was Christmas yet. She tried to imagine how Ethan was handling things, how her mother and father, her friends were doing. Did they go into the store and speak about her in soft, sorrowful tones?

Occasionally over the months she heard a small bush plane up high. She’d listen and scream inside her heart for help, pray for some miracle.

And then something did happen.

She became certain that she was carrying a child. Ethan and she had been trying for almost a year to get pregnant, and she’d undergone fertility treatments. Before she was taken she’d skipped a period. She’d felt changes in her body. She’d made a doctor’s appointment to have it confirmed. An appointment she’d been forced to miss. But now she had proof. Her belly was rounding, going hard. Her breasts were swelling, becoming tender, her nipples darkening. This dawning realization changed everything. She had part of Ethan with her.

She was no longer alone.

She had a beating little heart inside her belly. A baby—their baby. And by God she was going to live. She would do whatever it took in the Lord’s or the devil’s name to survive now. She would kill that bastard. She would be a master of restraint while he fucked and hurt her—because when she fought him and screamed, he got off on it, and just hurt her more. She would wait for exactly the right moment.

She would not end up on that meat hook . . .

Tori lifted the manuscript page and placed it upside down on the growing stack of others already read. Rain ticked against the windowpane. Wind gusted.

She knew it wouldn’t be long before he noticed her belly growing. She needed a plan for that . . .

So engrossed was Tori, so ensnared by her mother’s fictional world, that she didn’t register fully the sound of a vehicle entering the driveway. The front door downstairs banged, and her father’s boots clattered up the stairs.

She froze.

“Tori!” Her dad’s voice boomed down the hallway. “Where are you?”

She quickly scrambled to gather up the pages. They fluttered to the floor.

The door to her mother’s office swung open and her father loomed in the doorway. A range of emotions raced across his face as his gaze dropped to the manuscript in her hands, the loose pages on the carpet.

“What the—” He strode in.

Tori shrank back on the bench, hiding the rest of the manuscript with her body. His face reddened. His eyes turned bright. He didn’t look right. His neck muscles corded, and his hands fisted like hams. Suddenly, for the first time in her entire life, she felt afraid of her dad.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing in here!” He snatched a handful of pages off the floor, glared at them.

“I miss her,” she snapped. “I wanted to be with her things!”

“What
is
this?” He lunged for the rest of the manuscript behind her.

She yanked it out of his reach. “No!”

He swung up his hand. His face was twisted, dark red. His eyes gleamed with moisture.

She cringed back against the window. “Please
. . .
don’t hit me, Dad!”

It was as if her words pulled a plug out of him. His mouth opened, and his features went slack. He lowered his hand slowly and stared at her in silence for several beats, as if refocusing. Then, deflated, he sank onto the bench beside her. He bent forward, scrubbed his hands hard over his face.

“Jesus
. . .
I’m so sorry, Tori. Please, just give me that manuscript. You have no right to be in here, in her office.”

But Tori scooted farther back, pressing herself between the corner of the wall and the bay window. She curled herself into a ball over the pages. “It’s mine,” she said. “Mom dedicated it to me. It says so right on the front page. ‘For my dear Tori, a story for the day you are ready. I
. . .
I
. . .
’
”
She choked on the next words.
“
‘I will always love you.
’
”

Surprise chased over his face. Then worry entered his eyes, and his features steeled with fresh determination. “She meant it, Tori.
One day
—not yet, not now.”

“Why?”
she screamed. “Why not
now
?”

He reached for the pages again. She jerked them away as his hand closed on the corner of the dedication page. It tore. A jagged line right through their hearts. They stared at each other in pulsing, electric, palpating silence. This tangible metaphor of their lives ripped in their hands, their little nuclear family, rent apart by the two people who loved Melody the most.

Her dad swallowed.

“I
hate
you!”

“Tori,” he said quietly, darkly. “This was something that your mother was working on. It’s not ready yet. She was going to finish it, and let you read it when you were older.”

“She’s not going to finish it now, is she?”

They both stared at each other. Wind gusted and raindrops plopped against the dark window. Branches brushed and scratched at the eaves.

“It’s
. . .
adult material,” he said. “There’s violence.”

“I read adult books. I’ve read Mom’s others. I got them from the library. I read
sex.”
She spat the word at him, shaking inside. “What do you think? I’m almost twelve. I know thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds from school who
have
sex. Julia Borsos did it with Harlan. Did you know that? Did
you know that’s why I punched her face and burned her books, because I hate her guts because Harlan was
my
boyfriend. And she took him away because she’s a slut, and she can do that. And I wouldn’t. Do you think I don’t understand the mechanics of sex? And death—I was there when Mom died. She died in
my
hands. I
. . .
I couldn’t pull her out. I felt her struggling to live
. . .
it
. . .
was my fault.” Her eyes burned, and a tear trickled down her cheek.

He blanched. Another squall of raindrops beat against the window.

“You need to give me those pages, kiddo,” he said, his voice going thick, his own eyes filling with emotion.

He took them gently out of her hands. She let him. She had to. She was worried about enraging him again. In that terrible moment when she’d thought he might strike her, she’d glimpsed in his face the same tightness, the same hot glitter, the same black, blinding rage that had consumed her when she’d found out about Julia and Harlan. A terrible, frightening sort of violence that had turned her into an animal over which she’d had no control.

“Thank you.”

“I really do hate
you,” she whispered. Tears washing softly down her face now. “You were going to hit me.”

He reached out with his arm. “Come here.”

He put his arm around her shoulders, tried to gather her against himself like he used to when she was little. She pulled away, squirmed, but his grip tightened. He forced her into a great big bear hug, and he would not let go. His familiar dad smell wrapped around her, stirring warm childhood memories. And in a few beats she felt her muscles give. A sob racked through her body.

He stroked her hair, rocking her gently as she sobbed. And sobbed. Until she was dry. Then she just leaned into her dad’s body, feeling like she used to when she was a child, when she’d needed her dad. When he could stop all the evil in her world. When she would race into his arms when he came home, and he’d lift her all the way up to the ceiling and spin her around and around in laughing circles.

She felt a wetness against her brow. And with shock Tori realized her big cop dad, the detective who hunted down killers and stuck them in prison, the man who’d protected her all her life, was crying. Hurt. Vulnerable.

Inside Tori went dead still.

That was perhaps the most terrifyingly alone feeling of all—realizing her dad was not invincible. That he was as lost as she was.

And he was sick.

There was something terribly wrong with him. She’d heard him talking to Aunt Lou on the phone, and she was too afraid to ask him, to make it real, to let him know that she’d eavesdropped.

“I miss her too, sweetie. God, I miss her too.”

She bit her lip hard.

He moved hair back from her face, looked deep into her eyes.

“I’m going to take you away, okay?” he whispered. “Just me and you. We’re going to go away for the Thanksgiving weekend. We can eat someone else’s turkey dinner. Make some new holiday memories. We can stay longer than the weekend if we want, not worry about school. Spend some time together again. Get away from the city, out of this rain. We’ll leave tomorrow, okay, at first light? I’ll have the truck and camper ready.” He cleared his throat. “Come, let’s get you some dinner and into bed. Early start tomorrow. I’ll clean up here.”

“Where are we going?”

“A place called Broken Bar Ranch,” he murmured against her hair.