He kicks the stem of the pump with the heel of his cowboy boot. One, two, three times. Then he ratchets up the lever and pumps. Water starts gushing out, brown at first, then clear. “There we go,” he says to himself. He cups some of it with the hand that’s not operating the pump, laps it, splashes it onto his face. He’s grinning. For one moment—one confusing moment—with the morning sun on his face, witnessing his sheer joy at striking water—I can see the boy he must have been.
I look away. “Okay, fine,” I say. “Why not chain me up instead?”
He squats to pick up his tools. He sends me a look of pure bafflement. “Because I don’t care about you.”
Maxine and I are alone. Finally.
He unlocked her and allowed me to take her to the outhouse. More evidence that wherever the hell we are is not in use: the outhouse didn’t even smell bad. It only smelled like earth.
He reshackled her right after, though he did it with this weird tenderness, almost reverence. Watching him murmur something to her while he brushed her hair off her forehead with his palm, only to have him chain her to the cot again, was the eeriest thing I’ve ever seen.
And then he made a big show of adding a latch and a hasp to the outside of the cabin and grabbing a padlock from his truck—the keys always hooked to his belt—and locking the door to this prison. From the outside.
“I’ve got some hunting to do,” he said. “Don’t want you ladies to get hurt by a stray bullet.”
I’m slumped on the floor by Max’s cot. She’s more alert. Her face is still a study in defeat—mouth turned down, eyes empty—but at least she’s fully awake.
She sits up as much as the chain will allow. “When are they coming for me?”
I tell her to keep her voice down. I’m not convinced our captor isn’t eavesdropping from the outside. I don’t have the heart to tell her that no one knows where we are.
“Are they looking for me?” she asks.
“Of course,” I whisper. “Like crazy. Shelby knew there was something wrong the first time you didn’t answer her.”
A wan smile. But it’s quickly replaced by panic. “The boys. Are they okay?”
“They’re fine. It’s a big adventure for them. Shelby won’t worry them.”
“What about Ezra?”
“Thanks to Ezra,” I say, “your face is probably on every electric pole in Austin by now.”
She starts to cry.
“Max,” I whisper, “you have to pretend.”
“Pretend what?” she says with surprise, her eyes glassy.
“Pretend … pretend you … you like him.”
The tears stop. She sets her jaw, a gesture I know so well. “Never.”
“That’s the only way we can get out of here,” I say.
She turns to look at me, a movement that appears painful. “You know we’re never getting out of here, right?”
“You can’t say that!” I forget the need for quiet. I go on, more subdued. “You can’t give up hope.”
Her listless gaze swings to the far wall, to the wooden peg where three carved wooden crosses hang on cords. What I hoped she hasn’t seen, what used to be mounded on the floor directly under the hanging crosses, what I shoved beneath the cot while she slept, were a pair of lilac Skechers—one minus its laces—that I know aren’t hers (two sizes too small); a tiny beaded purse (empty except for a desiccated tube of Burt’s Bees pink grapefruit lip balm); and neon green earbuds knotted in several places. I assume the shirt I’m wearing used to live there too.
“You signed your death sentence when you showed up,” Max says.
Am I fated to get murdered by Tyler all over again?
She frowns. “Remind me, what’s your name?”
“Max, it’s me, Harper.”
She shakes her head fiercely. “You’re not. You can’t be. I won’t let you be.”
She rolls onto her side and closes her eyes.
And because we’re alone and because I haven’t slept in what feels like three lifetimes, I heave my body onto the other cot and do the same.
When I wake up, my palms are strangely hot, as if I had been holding them over a campfire. Max is sleeping. We’re still alone. Judging by the diffuse light at the lone window, it’s late afternoon. I sit up, groggy, achy, heartsick and headsick.
Other than the soft sound of my sister breathing, the cabin is quiet. I don’t even hear birds out there. I smell cool earth, old wood, musty bedding.
Slowly, I sit up. It takes me a moment to notice that there’s something strewn on the floor where there wasn’t before. It’s the stuff I shoved under the cot to hide from Max. The purse, the shoes, the earbuds. It takes me another moment to see something on the floor along the edge of the wall where a chunk of wood planking is missing and the dirt underneath is revealed.
Letters?
I blink fast, try to clear my vision. I breathe fast, try to clear my head.
There’s a scratch in the dirt after the u, but if it’s a letter, I can’t make it out. Mu?h. I’m guessing it’s trying to be a c. Much. There’s a line near the h, which could be anything or nothing, and that’s where the lip balm lies. As if it’s a pen and the writer set it down to take a break.
It couldn’t have been Max. She’s still chained up. And I can’t imagine sleeping through the beast barging in. So it had to have been me. Me, but not really.
I look at my hands, pale in the weak light except for crescents of dirt under my fingernails, shadows of dirt on my fingertips. I bring my hands up to my nose, inhale. Cool earth. The kind under my feet.
If this is a message, what am I supposed to do with it?
30
HARPER
“There’s got to be a way,” I mutter as I knock on walls, kick at the place the rough-hewn beams meet the floor, poke at the door hinges. Most of the floor, except for the part where “I” scrawled a message in the dirt, is made up of splintery warped planks. Even if my energy held out and even if he didn’t catch me in the process, how could I tunnel, with my bare hands, through the hard-packed earth to the other side? But being alone with my sister emboldens me, even though every time I say “hope” aloud Maxine shoots it through with so many arrows I can’t recognize what it was before the slaying.
The words from my sleeping mind are no help.
Now that water is plentiful, I drink enough of it. I force Max to drink too. Before he left to hunt, he tossed me a stale granola bar and tried to feed Max a single-serving-size applesauce, which she refused like a rebellious baby bird. I open a fresh container and get Max to eat that undefiled one. It doesn’t take much convincing. Clearly she’s hungry. I nibble a bite of the granola bar and put the rest aside. In case there isn’t more food coming, I’ll save this for my sister.
I search for a weak place in the iron bedrail or the chain tight around Max’s wrist. She sighs, lolls her hand in its cruel bracelet. “You tried that already. A dozen times at least. Why don’t you cut my hand off and be done with it?”
“The sharpest thing he leaves us alone with is your teeth. So unless you plan to gnaw on your own wrist …”
She makes a noise in her throat, a distant cousin to a laugh. I’ve never wanted to hug a sound before. And then the sound turns. She’s crying again.
“Max, we’ll get out of here.”
“The boys can’t grow up with a broken mother and two dead sisters.” “He’s not gonna kill us.” I have no doubt he’ll kill me once my usefulness is over, but he prizes Max. “He thinks he loves you.”
“He’s batshit crazy,” she says.
“Yes. Which is why we need to use that. We can’t come at him with logic.”
“I never thought I could kill before now,” she says with a sharp inhalation. “You know?”
“Max, did he … did he …”
“Did he rape me?” she finishes.
I nod.
“No. He’s probably waiting ’til we’re married.” She winces.
There’s a noise at the
door. Max pretends to be asleep. Sucking all the light from the room, the beast is back.
He drops a box to the floor. I don’t dare point out the obvious, that he didn’t manage to kill anything.
“There might be some food in there,” he says.
I look through it. There’s a small bag of Sun Chips, a package of three links of jalapeno beef jerky, a Chock full o’Nuts can containing a dusting of ground coffee, a few peanuts and lots of papery peanut skins.
“Not much,” I say. For all the boxes he hauled in the truck … he’s a psycho and a shitty camper. “Why don’t we go on a food run?”
He snorts. “Yeah, right.”
I plunk the coffee can back in the box. “This won’t get us far.”
“Look what I ended up with the last time I went to town.” He skewers me with his stare. “Besides, they’re probably looking for her by now. And that means they’re looking for me.”
“But if we’re really caref—”
“You stuck to me like a tick.”
He steps right up to me, daring me to occupy the same space. I step back. Again. And again. Until the wall has my back.
He smells of sun and sweat. His knife is out before I realize he’s going for it. I squeeze myself rigid. He brings the knife up to the top of my head and parts my hair with the tip.
“And you know what you’re supposed to do with a fat, happy tick,” he says. “Pop it so the blood drains out.”
“Leave her be.” It’s Max. Her raspy voice seems to surprise him. He hides his knife, turns to her.
“Hey, Maxine,” he says, all syrup. “You’re awake. You feelin’ better?”
Her head’s off the pillow, then her shoulders.
“I wasn’t doing anything with her,” he says. “You know I only see you.”
“You’re fucking sick. You won’t get away with this.”
I glower at Max, flash her a shut-up hand signal.
“Me?” Using the flat of his knife, he gestures toward his chest. “I’m fucking sick? You can’t even get out of bed.”
Max, I want to scream, there are shoes under your cot and a shirt on my back that prove how dangerous he is. I implore the crosses on the wall: help us, why don’t you?
“Me,” I say to him, putting my body in front of the weapon. “She’s talking about me. I’m the sick one. She thinks I’m trying to come between you two. While you were gone I told her she was lucky to have you.”
He’s facing me, his back to Max. I can see her biting back her fury.
“Help me with the boxes,” he says to me, sheathing his knife and nodding toward the door.
Once we’re outside, he stops short and says, “Prove it.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Prove your words.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I know exactly what he means.
He punctuates his words with stages of undoing: belt unbuckling, jeans unbuttoning, fly unzipping. “You … think … Max … is so … lucky …” His hands clamp my shoulders and press down hard. My body folds, my knees slam into the earth. He’s a pillar of salt looming above me, making sure the sun can’t reach me here. He grunts. “Then fucking prove it.”
The birds go right on praising the day.
His hands cup the back of my head like a preacher bestowing a blessing. Until they push.
This time, prayer is not what he wants from me.
31
MAXINE
Chris doesn’t sleep in the cabin with us tonight. On one hand, I’m relieved. But that relief is overshadowed by the hopelessness of being locked away. What if he never comes back? Would we just starve to death? Die of thirst when our water runs out?
The girl hasn’t looked so good all day. I mean, you’d think she’s the one who has been chained to a bed for a couple of days. It’s dark in here now, so I can’t see her clearly. But I assume she still looks terrible. I hear the water in the bottle glug, hear her swallow.
“You want some?” she asks.
“No thanks.”
I hear a screech owl outside. The murmur of doves in between screeches. I worry about the doves.
In the darkness, she’s made of shadow and breeze. “Max, we have to learn how to manipulate him. You have to cooperate.”
I scoff. “Cooperating got me chained to a cot in the middle of nowhere.”
She comes closer. “We’ll figure it out.”
My brain feels clear, but considering the bleakness of the situation, I think I’d rather be drugged. “You know we’re not getting out of here alive, right?”
“You can’t say that,” she says. I notice that’s not exactly disagreeing.
She squeezes my shoulder. Without thinking, I stiffen. She backs away.
“I wouldn’t care if it was just me,” I say. I wonder if I mean that. I think I do. “I could accept that I got myself into this. But my brothers …”
I hear her settle on the other cot. I can smell the mustiness the movement stirs up.
“Max?”
I have to keep reminding myself of her name. Linnea. It’s pretty. Prettier than mine. “Yeah?”
“Remember when Mom used to tell us the story of the Beast and the Dragon?”
“Yeah.” I feel my face smile. “Until I started having nightmares.”
“I was so mad at you for that,” she says. There’s a long pause. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I was mad at myself too,” I say. “Hated the nightmares, loved the story.”
Mom made the whole thing up and would add to it each night, after a day working as a prosecutor and then later, a public defender, roles she said the world saw as polar opposites, but to her weren’t really all that different, not where it mattered.
“The Beast and the Dragon” was the saga of creatures who loved each other but couldn’t admit it. So they ended up locked in fierce competition, trying to find—and exploit—the other’s weak spot. The stories grounded me and thrilled me … and scared me. Sometimes I’d have nightmares that were far more frightening than anything in Mom’s stories, nightmares of the scaly dragon shredding the beast with his claws and then sobbing over the unrecognizable body.
The owl screeches again. He’s circling.
I never told my mother what my nightmares were about when she’d rush into my room. I didn’t want to give her a reason to stop spinning the stories. But she figured it out on her own. And maybe that’s why she never gave the Beast and the Dragon to Race and Will. It was mine and Harper’s.
“‘The Beast and the Dragon hated each other for precisely four hundred lifetimes,’” Linnea says now.
“‘And on the four hundred and first,’” I say, “‘they realized they didn’t have enough hate left to get them through four hundred more.’”
“‘So the Beast gave the Dragon his thick fur and his sharp claws, and the Dragon gave the Beast his glittery scales and his fiery breath, and the Beast became the Dragon and the Dragon became the Beast.’”
I gasp. Just when I think I have no more tears left in my head, I start to cry.
“Max? What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong is that for a few seconds, I had forgotten that my sister was dead. I had forgotten that I don’t believe the unbelievable. I had forgotten that I am the prisoner of a madman, that I am without hope, soon to be forgotten myself. And forgetting felt like home.
32
HARPER
“Let’s go,” he says, barging into the cabin.
“What?” I stand up too fast. I’m light-headed. I have to lean against the wall to get the spinning to stop. Through the open door, it looks like high noon outside. In the cabin with its one small window hazy with cobwebs and grime, it’s always some version of night. “Where?”
“You and me,” he says, pointing to me, “are gonna get some food.”
“Take me,” Max says. She’s on the cot, her arm twisted so that she can be on her side.
He ignores her.
“Let m
e use your phone at least,” she says. “Please.”
“I told you, there’s no signal out here.”
“Then let me go with you.” She flops onto her back. “Please. I need to call home.” A small yellow butterfly wings its way through the open door, whittles a choppy circle in the air, and heads back out into the sunshine. Max watches it go.
The noise he makes in his throat says it all. I want to take his knife and carve out the noise, leave him gasping and rattling. The force of the image, the lure of it, makes me more unknown to myself than the scar down my chest.
“I’ll call for you,” I offer. “I’ll check on the boys.”
“The goddamned boys are fine!” he shouts. “You baby them too much. They’re gonna grow up weak.”
“They’re kids!” Max says, her eyes sparking. “They lost their sister. Taking care of them isn’t babying them!”
“If you’re not worrying about them, you’re worrying about what happened to your sister. I’m so sick of it!” He grabs a fistful of his hair. There’s spittle on his bottom lip. This is what crazed looks like.
I hold my hands out like I can stay the flood. “Okay, guys, let’s take it down a notch.”
His voice is a wire stretched to snapping. “You stay out of this. It doesn’t concern you.”
Other than I’m the sister you killed, motherfucker.
“So was it all lies?” Max says. “Henry, the Jonathan e-mail?”
“A year’s long enough,” he says. “You needed to move on. That e-mail was the best thing for you!”
Her scowl digs in so deep it looks like stone. “You targeted me at the grief group, made up a sob story about a cousin like a brother.”
“Max!” I warn.
“And so what if I did?” he says to her. “Stories never hurt anybody. Besides, there’s got to be a Henry somewhere. I know what’s good for you. That was good for you.”
“Good for me?” she screeches. “Good for me? You’re a mur—”
“Maxine!” I yell. What is she doing?
“All that matters is that we’re together.” He spits a disgusting glob of phlegm onto the floor near her cot. “We’re meant to be.”
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