Sergeant's Christmas Siege

by Megan Crane

  Kate, also named Holiday and gainfully employed for years now, gazed back at her cousin. “The name hasn’t gotten in my way. Not that I’m aware of.”

  Her cousin sneered. “Yeah, well, we don’t all get to ride that whistle-­blower glory, do we?”

  “It seems to me that you’ve walked away from relation­ships, kids, spouses, jobs, and cities when things got tough. But that’s your business, Will. You can conduct your personal life any way you want. What worries me is the stuff that makes you a danger to others.”

  “A danger to others?” William scoffed. “What is this? You’re not satisfied with putting an entire generation of our family behind bars—­now you want to start in on the next?”

  “That all depends,” Kate replied. “Is the next generation law-­abiding? Or is it chock-­full of criminals like our parents?”

  “That probably depends on what you mean by law-­abiding.”

  “No one cares if you smoke weed, buddy,” Templeton drawled from where he stood.

  “Oh, I get this now,” William said. He flicked his gaze to Templeton, then dismissed him, turning that glare back on Kate. “You don’t actually have anything on me. You’re just afraid.”

  “Do I look afraid?” Kate asked. She sounded genuinely curious. “Because I haven’t been afraid in a long time. Not since I left the compound and discovered that there really was a whole different world out here.”

  William only rolled his eyes. “I’m not your guy. I’m not interested in you or anyone else I used to be related to. You can all go to hell together, as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I’ll light the match.”

  “There’s that wholesome, tender Christmas spirit,” Kate murmured. “It never disappoints.”

  “You got to go off and make yourself over into some kind of hero, didn’t you?” William asked. “That’s real nice for you. But I didn’t get that option. I bet no one asks you if you’re any relation to that Holiday. And why would they? You don’t look like them. I might as well be freaking Samuel Lee Holiday himself. I’m his spitting image.”

  “I don’t remember Daddy having a tattoo like that one all over your neck. What is that, anyway? A rat?”

  “It’s a wolverine.” Will bared his teeth. “You always were the funny one, weren’t you?”

  The way he said that made Templeton suspect that there had been consequences for being the “funny one.” Possibly consequences simply for distinguishing herself from the rest, if he knew his messed-­up, dysfunctional families.

  And the prospect of a young Kate suffering said consequences made Templeton feel a good deal more grim about the whole situation.

  Come on now, an inner voice chided him. No one gets as tough or as good as she is without a little suffering. You should know.

  “Of course they ask me if I’m related to him,” Kate replied, her voice as deliberate as if she were talking to a possibly inebriated perpetrator. The fact that this was her family member appeared to have no effect on her at all. “I have the same name you do. And it might surprise you to learn that, given my profession, people are far more interested in my links to known criminals than they might be otherwise. They tend to bring it up. A lot.”

  Templeton had brought it up himself not long ago. Though he didn’t jump in to share that information with whiny cousin Will.

  “Let me dig out my violin,” William threw at her. “The difference is, you did this. You made it all happen. I don’t remember asking you to make me a pariah.”

  “I’m glad you brought up memory,” Kate said, as if she were musing over the whole thing. As if this were one of those cheerful family moments Templeton had never seen outside of the Family Circus cartoons in the paper, that he sometimes read in sheer disbelief. “Because I don’t remember doing anything to you, Will. I thought we were friends as well as cousins. I asked you to go with me that day. You refused. How is that on me?”

  William shook his head. He rubbed one hand over his face. Then he stood, and Templeton moved with him to keep him in his sights. And, more important, to make sure the guy knew that Templeton was ready to take him down if he breathed funny.

  But William’s attention was on Kate. He let out a hollow kind of laugh. “No,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t go with you. But I wanted to.”

  “You should have.”

  Templeton cut his gaze to Kate, who sounded less like a cop then. The least like a cop in all the time he’d known her, in fact.

  “I’ve had to live with that,” William threw back at her. “And don’t tell me I should have testified.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Her cousin shook his head as if this all caused him pain. Or distaste. Or maybe both.

  “I thought I could hold on to the family. I wanted to hold on to something. You don’t know what it was like when they came. That raid. The way they stormed in and took us all away . . .” He shook his head again, but this time like he was trying to shake the memory out. “But there was nothing to hold on to. They all thought I was a traitor, just like you. We had ideas. They would have made us answer for that sooner or later.”

  “Sooner, not later,” Kate said softly. “Why do you think I left?”

  Her cousin blinked. “They weren’t going to put you through the ritual. I would have heard.”

  “It was coming. They’d discussed it. My father was pretending to be the holdout vote.”

  William swayed a little on his feet.

  “I’m missing the subtext here,” Templeton belted out into the sudden tension in the room, and was gratified when both Kate and William shifted their positions, like he’d succeeded in breaking that chain with the past. “What ritual are you talking about?”

  “The ritual was a favorite practice, doled out to traitors.” Kate smiled at Templeton. It went nowhere near her eyes. “In case you’re wondering why my father was transferred back here from his stint in federal prison for the mail fraud and the tax evasion to do his life sentences for murder, it wasn’t only for the troopers he shot during the raid. It was the ritual. It was his way of rooting out a traitor, because a traitor was an offense to the bountiful land that gave us all we should need.”

  “Any man, woman, or child who could withstand nature’s fury could prove beyond any reasonable doubt that they weren’t actually a traitor,” William intoned.

  Kate was still smiling at Templeton. “You know how cold it gets up here in winter. Guess how many traitors lived through the night when they were forced to stay outside? Naked?”

  Templeton thought of fifteen-­year-­old Kate and muttered a curse.

  “Exactly,” William said sourly. “That many.”

  “And it was all, always, my father’s idea. But he was really, really good at getting other people to convince him to do what he wanted to do in the first place.” Kate shifted her gaze back to William. “A master manipulator to the end.”

  “There is no end,” William said, his voice rough. He swallowed hard enough to make his Adam’s apple bob. “They all still love him the way they always did. They’re never going to see the light. And that means I get it from both sides. No one who knows who my family is wants anything to do with me. And no one in the family wants anything to do with me, either.”

  If anything, Kate’s smile got wider. “Let me guess. That’s all my fault, too.”

  “I know it’s not your fault, Katie. Believe me, I know. But I blame you anyway.”

  And the look on William’s face then tore at Templeton. Because he was terribly afraid that he knew what that felt like. A terrible yearning mixed with sorrow, bound up in anger that had nowhere to go.

  He’d had similar feelings about his own father his whole life.

  Templeton didn’t like recognizing it on another man’s face. He didn’t like admitting he knew what it was. And he couldn’t decide if he felt empathetic or if what he r
eally wanted to do was punch William—­hard—­until that awful look went away.

  And what did that make him?

  “Someone left a dead body in my seaplane,” Kate said quietly. And her voice was different—­harder, maybe—­but Templeton was too busy looking into a mirror he wanted to deny existed to glance over at her. “And then someone broke into my apartment in Juneau. Maybe the same someone. Only that time, it looks like they were waiting for me to come home, presumably so we could throw a little Christmas party. Or who knows, perform the ritual after all. And yes, it seems pretty clear that they were waiting for me specifically, because I wasn’t the woman who walked in on them. Do you know anything about any of that?”

  “You think I have access to dead bodies?” William blinked. Then a mottled sort of color washed over his face, making his neck tattoo stand out even more. “Oh, wait, you think I’d murder someone? Then come at you in your own apartment? All these years later, that’s what you think of me?”

  “You’re either like them or you’re not, William,” Kate said, and she sounded tough again. Giving no quarter, no matter that this had to be eating away at her. If Templeton was seeing his own ghosts in this room, what was she seeing? “I have no idea what the years have done to you inside. Only you do. But you either know information that could help me or you don’t, and that’s why I’m here.”

  William’s fists curled at his sides, but even as Templeton clocked it and shifted to a higher gear, he could tell that the other man was fighting himself. He wasn’t about to swing at his cousin. Which meant Templeton didn’t get the opportunity to show him why that would be a terrible idea. William swallowed hard. Again. Like it hurt him.

  “I told you. They don’t want any part of me.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t hear things.”

  “I hear things,” William admitted. Grudgingly. “And last I heard, Liberty and Russ went back. To Nenana.”

  Kate was too still. It was the first time since they’d gotten here that Templeton thought her cousin had really made it under her skin. “Not the compound.”

  “No. Not that far out.”

  “I thought they were in Palmer.”

  “Now they’re farming. Kind of. Living off the land, but within driving distance of supplies.”

  “Will.”

  But that was all Kate said. Just her cousin’s name.

  “I don’t know,” he said, begrudgingly. “I haven’t gone looking, and I’m not sure you should, either, without an invitation.”

  “Is it starting again?” Kate asked softly. “Has it already started?”

  “You know everything I know.”

  She made an impatient noise. “Are you really telling me that it could be happening again, right now, and you’re sitting up here an hour away doing absolutely nothing to stop it? Again?”

  It was that again that was the hit. It made her cousin flinch.

  And Templeton watched as that same expression moved over the other man’s face once again. Loss. Pain. Maybe it was grief, simple as that.

  Though nothing about it looked simple to Templeton.

  “You look like you’re doing well, Katie,” her cousin said, his voice rough. “It’s nice that one of us is. I’m sure that once I think about it, once you’re gone again, I’ll be real glad about that. But tonight I want you to go back where you came from. And stay there.”

  Fourteen

  Templeton was quiet as they trudged back out to the SUV. He spoke only when he called in to update Jonas, who was running point on the two or three Alaska Force cases that were still active at this time of year.

  Dirtbags don’t take a vacation, Templeton had told her when Kate had asked him directly why they didn’t go dark over the holidays the way it seemed the rest of the world did. Neither do we.

  A sentiment she’d appreciated, since the Troopers certainly didn’t take time off during the drunkest, darkest part of the year. Even if Kate had been personally ordered to take a step back at present.

  But she appreciated it even more that he didn’t say anything to Kate directly as he drove back down the short, ­snow-packed drive toward the road, leaving Will and all Kate’s bad memories behind them.

  She tried pretending she was grateful. That she was pleased he was giving her the space to sort it all out in her own head.

  But when he pulled out of her cousin’s drive and paused there to look both ways through the falling snow at the edge of the tree line, grateful was not the word that came to mind. If she didn’t know better—­if it wasn’t ridiculous—­Kate would have said that she was actually in something of a fury.

  Kate had no right. She knew that. Templeton wasn’t her friend. He wasn’t even really a colleague. They had common interests, that was all, and he didn’t have to pretend that they had any sort of closeness—­she refused to use the word intimacy—­just because there had been some nudity. All hers.

  And she hated the fact that it mattered to her. That he was treating her differently, suddenly, and it bothered her. That anything he did bothered her.

  She wrestled with herself for another long moment or two because the kind of disconnection that she could feel between them now was what she had always wanted from her working relationships. No banter, no invites to family cookouts in the summer, no disrobing in log cabins.

  Why should she feel hollow that she’d finally gotten what she wanted?

  “If you’re waiting for me to offer some commentary about your family,” Templeton said as he drove along the road, leaving Will firmly behind them, “or judge you in some way because of what you got away from, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”

  And Kate didn’t understand how that hollow sensation could turn so quickly into a sort of aching heat instead.

  “Will was the cousin I was closest to, growing up,” Kate heard herself say, which was astonishing because she was sure she’d intended to say something very dry about strategy. Or their next move. Something very deliberately impersonal. “Looking back, I guess I could have tried to stay in touch with him. Or the others. We were all kids, after all. But when no one reached out to me after the trials, I thought that was what they wanted.”

  She didn’t know where that came from, either. She’d kept tabs on every last member of her family. Distantly. She’d always assumed that if they’d really wanted, they could have kept track of what she was doing, too. And it wasn’t a secret that she’d become a trooper. The news­papers had run big stories when she’d graduated from the academy, dredging up all the Holiday family history.

  Then again, perhaps Kate was being unkind. According to every movie she’d ever seen that addressed the topic, family wasn’t meant to judge such things. Family was meant to be accepting, no matter what. No matter the different life choices relatives made, everyone was supposed to gather together for cheery meals and act like they loved one another. Particularly at Christmas.

  That hadn’t exactly been one of her father’s preferred manifestos.

  “Your cousin is a grown man, Kate,” Templeton said. And when did she start thinking of his low, deep voice as comforting? When have you thought of anything as comforting? she asked herself. “Perfectly capable of reaching out if that’s what he wanted.”

  “That goes both ways.”

  “Sure. You and I can sit here and come up with a thousand scenarios about how he should have done this and you should have done that. And maybe that’s all true. But it also means that if he’s not to blame, neither are you.”

  Kate stared out into the darkness, Templeton’s headlights picking up the snow coming down and the trees rising high on each side of the road, while her heart kicked at her as if she were running for her life. “I didn’t ask you to forgive me.”

  “And here I am, doing it anyway.”

  Kate opened her mouth to say something rash, along the lines of Tha
t’s what you do, isn’t it? You ignore what I say and do what you want anyway.

  But she didn’t. Sanity reasserted itself, or more likely, she accepted that the real, honest truth was that she liked that about him. She liked that he seemed to know exactly how wicked she wanted him, no matter what she might say to the contrary.

  That kind of contradiction felt a whole lot like a deep, smoky gray sort of area, and Kate had no idea what to do with it. She wasn’t supposed to feel things like that. She was black and white, right or wrong, all the way through.

  Though she didn’t feel like that at all when Temple­ton was around.

  “It’s dark,” Kate said instead. “But it’s not that late. We could be down in Nenana by dinnertime.”

  “You think that’s the right move?”

  “You don’t?”

  Behind the wheel, Templeton slid a look her way. “That wasn’t a loaded question. I’m not afraid of a little brainstorming. You know the people in question better than I do.”

  Kate thought about her cousins. Liberty had been the next oldest girl, eighteen months younger than Will, her brother. Kate’s memories of her were patchy, threaded through with her feelings about her father and her own growing realization that the Holiday family wasn’t the force of good her father claimed it was. She remembered being jealous of Will and Liberty’s father, Uncle Joseph, who had always seemed so much kinder and more approachable than her own father. But she’d also always thought that Liberty too closely resembled her mother, the pinch-­faced Aunt Darlene.

  Their cousin Russ was a wild card. Six years younger than Kate and the son of yet another Holiday brother, he’d been her responsibility in her role as oldest girl and therefore caretaker of the younger kids. It was hard to imagine chubby little Russ as a grown man, filled with opinions and capable of barricading himself in another place like the compound. By choice.

  She said as much to Templeton, and for a long moment there was nothing but the sound of their tires against the snowy road and the thwack of the wipers against the windshield.