The Wolf in His Arms (The Runes Trilogy) (4 page)

Alec
rubbed her shoulder, and pulled her to his chest to comfort her. “You have
nothing to apologize for, Mom. I love you.”

Ilene
gathered herself after a few moments. She took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and
her mouth turned up in an embarrassed smile. “I cry so easily.”

“We
have a lot of reasons to cry.”

“That
we do.” She agreed and stood. She cleared her throat. “A mobile came in a box
for you. When you were a baby.”

Alec
felt a surge of excitement, and then a flash of the house on fire, of
everything from his childhood being burned to ash entered his mind. “Destroyed
in the fire?”

Ilene
shook her head. “No. It wasn’t at the house. You never used it. I couldn’t hang
it over your crib. It seemed poisoned. It’s at your grandmother’s house. I
stored it there.” She looked Alec in the eyes. “Something about it told me not
to throw it away.”

“Can we
get it?”

“Thursday
morning?”

“Sure.”

“You
know, I did throw it away. Without even opening the box. Then I retrieved it.
When I opened it, I knew, without a doubt, who had sent it. I knew. And I knew
throwing it away would change nothing.”

Alec
stood, hugging her again. “You did the right thing.”

Jenna
Nichols tied her tennis shoe in the morning darkness, wincing when she dropped
her second shoe, and her husband, Darrin, stirred on the bed. She sat on the
edge of the bed, motionless for just a moment, and then, certain he was asleep,
hurried from the bedroom. She eased the door closed behind her. A nightlight in
the bathroom at the end of the hall offered enough light to see.

On her
way to the stairwell, Jenna stopped at the nursery to peep in on Sable, her
one-year-old daughter. She was sound asleep.

Jenna
strapped her heart rate monitor to her arm and headed into the cold, pre-dawn
morning air. Her suburban Chicago subdivision was completely still, no dogs
barked, no cars were backing out of the driveways, no children laughed. The
quiet was complete. Above her, a few stars twinkled in the last of the night
sky.

After
stretching at the edge of her drive, Jenna turned on her monitor, popped her
earphones in her ears, and began a quick warm-up stride down the sidewalk. She
followed the sidewalk to the edge of the subdivision, and once there, turned
onto a wooded jogging trail. The trail was dark, but she knew it well.
Intermittent light from lampposts and houses broke through the bare limbs,
offering her enough light not to fall. She flipped the light on in her dog
walking hat as an added safety measure and began her stride.
Hump day
, she thought resolutely.

Jenna
sucked cold air into her lungs as she hurried through the woods, knowing she
had only 45 minutes to run and cool down—and she wanted to get at least six
miles in as she prepared for her first half-marathon. The music thumped in her
ears, and she tried not to think about her day and only focus on the run. She
loved this quiet time, before Darrin was rushing around for work, before Sable
was up, before she was running to daycare and then work. This time was a
precious, daily ritual that she loved.

Jenna
turned as the trail merged with a state park trail into darker woods. Some
mornings she took their dog, Petey, but the small terrier slowed her down,
often almost tripped her, and she figured what protection did he really offer
anyway? She consciously checked for her pepper spray and realized she’d
forgotten it. She pushed the dark thoughts out of her mind and concentrated on
her breathing.

She had
just reached mile three, and the twenty-four minute mark, when a loud
noise—muffled by the music, broke her stride. Ignore it, she told herself and
resumed her pace. She would turn around in another half mile—and she was
determined to make it.

A few
minutes later, Jenna turned at the three-and-a-half mile mark and jogged back
down the trail toward home. She picked up her pace. Her goal was to make the
three miles back at a better time. Jenna reached the three-mile marker and cast
her eyes side-to-side, the odd noise still lingering in her mind. As she
passed, the song on her iPod faded out, and she heard the noise again. She
stopped suddenly and pulled the earphones from her ears. The music sounded
distant and tinny as a new song started.

“Hello,”
Jenna called as she peered into the woods just off the trail. The small light
on her dog-walking cap lit up the trees and branches, leaving gaping canyons of
darkness in the deeper woods. “Hello?” She repeated, certain she had heard a
woman—in distress.

She
heard the noise again, not quite a cry, or a whimper. Jenna trembled. “Do you
need help?”

She
reached in her pocket, realizing she’d left her cell phone with her pepper
spray. Her jaw tightened and every fiber of her being told her to run, come
back with help. She fought the urge, thinking that minutes mattered when
someone was injured. She took a step into the woods, listening. Snow dusted the
brown leaves on the forest floor. Twigs beat against trunks in the breeze with
a distracting tapping.

The
February air suddenly felt bitter against her sweaty skin and damp clothes. A
violent shiver shook her. She told herself that she had imagined the noise. She
started to turn for the trail. Again, the soft cry of distress stopped her.

Jenna
took another step into the woods. She rounded another tree.

Her
scream sent sleeping birds into the dark air, their calls echoing across the
forest. Jenna stumbled back, her eyes wide, disbelieving that she had found
someone so badly injured. A woman, around her own age sprawled across the leaves,
blood soaking her tattered clothes. Her skin was stained in bloody smears.
Great gashes covered her arms, legs, and across her chest to her neck, where
blood flowed heavily onto the ground and puddled around her. Jenna fought the
urge to flee and fell to her knees. “I’ll help,” she whispered.

The
woman muttered.

Jenna
shook her head, not understanding, thinking the woman was in shock. Jenna
grabbed a piece of the woman’s shirt and pressed it to her neck, trying to stop
the blood.

The
woman muttered again.

“What?”
Jenna asked.

“Run,”
the woman whispered.

Jenna
heard a branch snap behind her.

Ilene
turned off the car and immediately felt the cold radiating through the glass
into the warm bubble. She tightened her scarf, and before opening the door, she
looked at herself in the rearview mirror. She could only see her eyes, but she
felt that they told everything. Dark circles hung under them like shadowy
moons, and the lines around her eyes had deepened. She felt that in the last nine
months, she had aged a decade.

With a
portentous sigh, she threw the door open and braced against the February air.
The air clutched her face with its cold hands and she shivered. The morning sun
did little to cut through the gray clouds that blanketed the sky. She scanned
the cemetery. She was alone. She passed rows of headstones, her footfalls
crackling the ice-crusted snow.

When
she reached Adam’s tombstone, she sat in the snow, ignoring the chill from the
ground. She rested her gloved hand on the cold marble and the corners of her
mouth turned up in a faint, weary smile. She said little on her Wednesdays with
Adam, but the time could be spent nowhere else. Sometimes she whispered his
name or voiced memories, but more often, she enjoyed the solitude and the
imagined company he kept her. She could see him as a child, often with Alec.
Some memories were stolen clips from home videos, but others were straight from
her mind, moments not captured on film or video, only in her heart.

She
felt sadness clinging to her, like the ice on the top of Adam’s tombstone, and
she stood to dispel it. She tried to make this spot a place for reflecting on
her many, many treasured memories. The ache overtook her, and she turned from
Adam’s headstone as if ashamed as tears rolled over her cheeks. She looked
across the cemetery.

The
cemetery where the family had their plots was old and wooded. A small river cut
through the cemetery and the land rolled in gentle hills, lending a park-like
quality. Dogwoods and magnolias, she recognized among the trees. She pictured
the barren branches burdened with pink and white blooms, adding to the beauty
of the cemetery in the spring.

Ilene
wiped her hand across her cheeks and scanned the rows of stones, the nearly two
hundred years of loved ones laid to rest. Monuments and mausoleums built for
the loved ones of the city founders dotted the cemetery. Even in winter, green
ivy clung to many of them.

Ilene
turned back to Adam. “I love you, son,” she whispered through her tears. “I
miss you so much.” She sat back to the ground. She placed her arm on the
tombstone and then rested her head on her arm, allowing the tears she had been
fighting.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Sitting
in her car at the edge of the cemetery, Carmen Salazar lowered the binoculars
she held to her eyes as Ilene began to cry at the headstone of her son.

A pang
of guilt shot through Carmen for intruding on this private moment between
mother and son. She imagined her own grief if she lost her daughter, Mona.

She
admitted to herself, over the last six months, the family had done nothing out
of the ordinary. They seemed like nothing more than a grieving family. She
leaned back in her seat, stretching her back. Carmen looked at herself in the
rearview mirror. She wondered if she should see a therapist. Perhaps the
missing persons cases—that day under the barn—had affected her more than she
let on.
Isn’t my behavior obsessive?
She wondered.
Trailing a grieving mother
to the graveyard? Following a young woman to the gym? Spying on to two young
men in love?

With
the engine off, the car was cold. Carmen rubbed her hands together and blew
into them. She hated the sneaking around, spying on a family that had already
suffered so much loss. But she couldn’t help but feel that they knew more than
they told, that there was more to what happened to them than the official
story. She watched as Ilene stood and walked toward her car to leave.

Carmen
wanted to stop, to tell herself that she had seen nothing so far, because there
was nothing to see. Yet her instincts told her to hold on a bit longer. To
watch more closely.

Because
something was about to surface. She could feel the approach of the inevitable
in her chest.

Collin Stalinski
knew this time he was in trouble.

The
police had caught him, literally, red handed. He had been in the middle of
spray-painting the side of a building when the police cruiser shined its giant
search lamp on him.

Boom. Spotlight.

Of
course, he ran.

He
listened as the judge read the list of charges: vandalism, defacing public
property, resisting arrest, fleeing the scene of a crime. This judge had been
lenient on him before, but Collin knew this time was different. His signature
style—his graffiti art—was recognizable and now could be traced to him for
dozens of murals he’d painted all over the city. Yes, this time he was in
trouble. No probation. No slap on the wrist.

“Mr. Stalinski,”
the judge began. “This is not your first time in my courtroom.” Her words fell
stern, without emotion. She looked down at the papers before her. “Given your
academic achievements, I’m inclined not to send you to juvenile detention.”

Collin
felt his heart soar.

“However...”

And
then fall.

“I feel
that you need some motivation to place your considerable abilities to good use.
You need direction. I sentence you to three months at Cornerstone Boys
Reformatory School.” She smiled. “I think there’s hope for you yet.” She
slammed the gavel down.

Collin
looked back at his mother; her eyes filled with tears, her face shattered with
disappointment, failure. “Mom,” he said as the bailiff placed his hand on Collin’s
shoulder to direct him away.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Cornerstone
Boys Reformatory School loomed like a cathedral on a river bank in the outer
suburban sprawl of Detroit. The sky and water behind the school blazed red as
the prison transport bus arrived, and Collin prepared to step off the bus. He
looked at the dark silhouette of the four story building and shivered. Part of
him was glad he had been shipped outside the city where no one would see his
wrists chained, see the rough company he was in.

Cornerstone
was built as a Catholic boys’ school, closed due to finances, and taken over by
the state as a reformatory. The program was endowed by a philanthropist who
hoped “to reform the self-esteem and therefore public value” of the adolescent
boys sentenced there. He and the three other young men on the transport
shuffled down the walkway to the building. The Spanish Mission style, orange
brick building looked like it belonged on a hillside in California. Collin
looked up to the headstone over the doorway. Carved in the stone were the words
“Enter shackled. Leave unfettered.”