Jake beat his way through the near impenetrable growth of juniper, impervious to it even when it tore his flesh. Reaching the foot of the slope, he paused to get his bearings. The outline of the house, the east side of it, rose in front of him. There were three windows, all of them dark. Boarded up, Jake thought, from the inside. A feeling of dread uncoiled in his gut. The air, heavy with the silence of desertion, was broken only by the drone of cicadas, the stir of a fitful breeze. His pulse wouldn’t settle. It was like an unfleshed bone, tapping his chest.
Staying low, he left the relative protection of the juniper thicket, heading toward the back corner of the house, taking a quick look around it. The truck—the white pickup with a camper top, the one he’d seen on the park security footage, the truck Karen had stolen—was parked steps away. Its bumpers glimmered in the lingering twilight. Jake withdrew, flattening his back against the house wall, trying to think.
He felt for his phone, but it wasn’t on him. He’d tossed it into the passenger seat, left it in the cab of his pickup.
Because he was one smart cookie, wasn’t he?
Jesus.
You idiot!
He risked another longer, more thorough look, and he almost shouted out loud when he caught sight of Karen, sitting on the back stoop. Light from a source he couldn’t see picked out her huddled form. He recoiled, hard enough that his head slammed into the stone wall. Behind his closed eyes, he saw pinpricks of light. His heart heaved in his chest. Where was Zoe? That was the million-dollar question, and there was only one way to find out.
“Karen?” It was a moment before she looked his way, and something in her posture warned him to take care. As he walked toward her, he held his hands up, palms out, a gesture that said No worries. Stepping closer now, he saw that the source of the light was a pair of camp lanterns sitting on the step behind her.
She peered up at him. “Jake? Are you really here?”
“I came for Zoe. Where is she?”
“Gone.”
“Gone?” Jake took another step.
“Don’t come any closer.” Karen reached for something beside her.
Jake’s heart paused when he saw that it was a gun, a pistol. The Glock Clint had mentioned?
She waved it at him, a warning.
He did the thing with his hands again and hoped she didn’t see how badly shaken he was. “Where is Zoe?” he asked again.
“Gilly took her away.”
Thank God—that was his thought—if it was true, if Gilly had gotten Zoe out. “Where did they go?”
“There.” Karen gestured with the gun toward the dark wall of underbrush and trees that encroached from the side of the house opposite him. “I told her not to go in those woods, that there were snakes in there and God knew what else.”
Jake looked, but he couldn’t see farther than a couple of feet. Zoe’s name, and Gilly’s, were hot in his mouth, but if he yelled for them, he was liable to get a bullet in his head, and what use would he be to them dead? He looked at Karen. “Are they all right—Zoe and Gilly? You didn’t hurt them?”
“Of course not. I’m not like you, Jake. I don’t hurt people.” She raised the gun muzzle casually to her temple.
“Whoa.” He took a step. “Don’t,” he said, taking another step.
“Why not?” She held his gaze, waiting for his answer, lowering the weapon when he couldn’t supply one. “Zoe’s fine. Gilly, too,” she said. “Sleepy. From the morphine. But probably even that’s wearing off now.”
“You gave Zoe morphine?”
“I bought her some new clothes, took her to the lake. We waded in the water. She loved it.”
“Have you been doping her this whole time?”
“Just to make it easier on her. Don’t worry. I’m an RN. I know how to gauge the dose.”
“That supposed to comfort me?” Jake went toward the tree line. He shouted for her now. “Zoe? Can you hear me?” At a noise from behind him, he wheeled.
Karen was holding the gun, looking down the barrel at him. She kept his gaze, and his head emptied of thought. The moment held. There wasn’t language for what passed between them, a history of old love that had ended in anger and sadness, her accusation, his bitter shame. But now, with the jerk of her hand, she raised the gun to her own head again, pressing it to the place above her right ear, and before Jake could react, she pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Tears brimmed her eyes, tracked her cheeks. Slowly, she lowered the gun, laid it in her lap, brushed her face. “I can’t even get killing myself right.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Jesus, Karen.” Jake’s words came on the rough gust of his breath. “Why are you doing this?”
She didn’t look at him, didn’t answer.
“You want to give it to me?” Jake took a couple of steps but stopped when he saw her fingers close over the gun’s grip. Who knew if there were bullets in the other chambers?
“When I saw you earlier at the school, you remembered, didn’t you?” She raised her gaze.
“Of course—”
“I don’t mean it was like I was just some old girl you used to know.” She interrupted, sharply annoyed now. “Your heart, your gut, your skin remembered how we used to touch, how we loved each other. I know. I felt it when you took my hand. Don’t—” Her voice broke on a half sob. “Don’t shame me more by denying it.”
“No,” he said, and there was a part of him that knew it was the truth. But his desire for her—that odd current he’d felt ricochet between them—it was only memory, a boy’s memory, and he wasn’t that boy anymore.
“I’ve been waiting six months for this—for you to see me.”
“Six months?” Jake was at sea.
“Did you know Mama and Daddy were dead? Last January, in a car wreck. Both of them gone. Poof. Like that.”
“I heard about it, and I’m sorry.” Jake was barely aware when he took a step toward Karen and then another. She didn’t seem to notice either.
“You know, one of the last things Mama told me before she cut me out of her life was that I needed to get a grip and move on. That’s what she and Daddy were doing, and if they could, so could I. I really tried after I met Roger. Tried to be a good wife and nurse. Tried to have a life and not mind that we had no children. But there was always this place inside me, this empty lonely place, where you used to be, and Cassie. Remember Cassie?”
He shook his head, unsure, and yet somehow certain of what she’d say next, frightened of it, wishing he could stop her. He glanced to his right, in the direction he’d come from. His truck was up on the ridge. Clint would see it, maybe come down the same way.
“She was our little girl, Jake.” Karen’s voice slipped and caught. “She was the baby we made. I never got a chance to tell you the way I wanted to, just you and me. I was going to on prom night. I had this made. I was going to put it around your neck, make you guess what it meant. I had it all planned.”
Jake watched as Karen pulled a slender chain with a locket attached to it from the collar of her hoodie. She fumbled to open it, and meeting his gaze, her eyes filled with fresh tears. Her fingers trembled as she extended it toward him, a gesture that begged him to come closer.
“It’s engraved with her initials, and this is us, see?”
The insanity and panic were gone for the moment, eclipsed by anguish, a mother’s grief. Jake felt overcome by it—the sense of what had been lost all those years ago. He went to Karen, bent over the tiny locket, touched his fingertip to the image.
“I cut our faces out of that pep rally photo in our annual. Remember it?”
Jake did remember. The picture had been of a larger group of their friends, taken in the gym, in the fall of their senior year, before she’d gotten pregnant. That had happened the following February, although for Jake the scare hadn’t turned real until after they graduated. It had been in late March or April when Karen had told him about her missed periods, that she was worried, but
he’d blown it off. By then he’d begun to feel there was something not right with her, something too intense in her devotion. He’d wanted out of the relationship, and he’d tried telling her that it was over. He’d insisted their prom date would be their last. After watching her tear up her corsage on prom night, he’d figured she’d finally gotten the message. Karen hadn’t returned to school after that weekend. Jake hadn’t seen her again until sometime in June or July, when she came to his house with her parents to inform him and his parents that she was having his baby. Karen’s folks had insisted on a wedding. His mom and dad had been equally adamant against the idea. It wasn’t the Dark Ages, they’d said. There were other more sensible options for a couple so young.
“I was eighteen,” Jake said softly now. “You were seventeen.”
“We were old enough to make her.” Karen jerked the locket away, shoving it inside her hoodie, eyes flashing, incensed. “She was born in the state hospital, Jake.”
“We—my folks didn’t want to press charges. That was the DA—”
“You let your baby be born in a nuthouse, and she died there—”
“No.” Jake extended his arms, turned up his palms.
Karen slapped them away. “She died, Jake, our little girl, because of you. Because you didn’t want her.”
“That’s what you meant. What you said when you called, what you wrote in your note, that I didn’t want her, didn’t deserve her . . .” Jake trailed off, seeing it now, that Karen couldn’t have known there had once been a time when he hadn’t wanted Zoe either.
“Cassie.” Karen’s voice broke on her name. “How could you not want Cassie?”
Jake sat beside her, taking her into his embrace, despite how she fought it, beating against his arm uselessly with her fist. It galled him that he felt pity for her, but he held her until she grew quiet. He felt the press of her face against his chest. The dampness of her tears soaked his shirt there.
“Why didn’t you come, Jake?” Her voice was muffled, hoarse.
“My folks—”
“Your folks were meddling assholes.”
“Your psychiatrist agreed with them that we shouldn’t see each other.”
Karen’s head came up. She looked at him wide-eyed. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, I felt horrible. I still feel horrible.”
“Cassie would be twenty-one.”
A beat.
“I couldn’t have any more babies after that.”
Jake looked off into the sky, heart tight, throat constricted.
“Now that you don’t have Zoe, you feel how I have felt all these years, don’t you? Like someone ripped out your heart.”
It was the eerie remoteness in Karen’s voice that stalled Jake’s breath and brought down his glance. The emotion, the intimacy of moments ago, had vanished. He watched as if in a trance as she picked up the gun that had somehow slipped from her lap to the step below them by her feet unnoticed, at least by him. She pointed it away from herself, sighting down the barrel, talking away, as if they were involved in the most ordinary of conversations.
“It’s what I wanted, for you to know how it felt. So I took Zoe.”
“What about Gilly?”
“What about her? She was in the way, trying to start something with you and Zoe. All wanting to be Zoe’s mama. Gilly lost a baby, too, and I’m sorry for her, but she’s got no more right to raise Zoe than you do. But you—you don’t deserve even to be happy after what you did. There’s not a day that’s gone by that I haven’t thought how Cassie might have lived if only she’d been born in a real hospital. I’ve torn myself apart thinking about it. But thanks to you, she wasn’t. Thanks to you, she never had a chance.” Karen swiped her cheeks, shoved her hair off her face. She still held the Glock loosely in her free hand.
Jake was thinking—wondering if he were to grab for it—
She raised it suddenly to his eye level. “Something happened today at the school.” She declared this as if it were an ultimatum. “We both felt it. Don’t say you didn’t. We could still do it, you, me, and Zoe. We could still be the little family that we planned.”
Her gaze was locked with his, and Jake saw any normalcy she’d managed to recapture was gone. Her eyes were alight with something spectral, unhinged. Her tone was different—edgy, truculent, somehow wild. It made him afraid to move, to speak. He looked toward the ridge. Where in the hell was Clint?
“I still love you, Jake.” Karen brought the gun barrel closer to his face. “I love you with everything that’s in me. But I hate you, too. I hate you just as hard.”
“I understand,” he said softly. “But if you shoot me, you know the police will arrest you. They’ll send you to prison, or back to the hospital. You don’t want that, do you?”
She held his gaze, and the moment lingered, brittle, frozen. If there was a sound even of breath, Jake wasn’t aware of it. Karen moved first, dropping her glance, lowering the gun. Jake started to breathe but then she brought the Glock up again, thrusting it at him.
“You do it,” she said. “You make it work. Mercy killing,” she added.
He shook his head.
“Please, I can’t do it anymore. Can’t fight. Fight all gone.” Her voice trembled.
“Hush.” He put his arm around her again, hooked the crown of her head with his chin. She was smaller than he remembered. She felt fragile, the way a bird might feel if he were to hold it in his hands.
“Do you remember the fox we found in the woods here?” she asked.
“The one with the broken leg?”
“Yes. He was crying, and you told him to hush. You were so calm and gentle. He let you pick him up. I was so scared he would bite you, but you talked to him. We named him McTavish. Do you remember?”
He did. He’d ridden shotgun in Karen’s dad’s truck with the fox on his lap, and Karen had driven to Hester Blankenship’s house, a few miles away. Hester was the local certified wildlife handler. She’d set McTavish’s leg, kept him in her barn until the limb mended, then released him back into the woods. Jake remembered that months later she’d told him McTavish still came by on occasion looking for cantaloupe, the treat she’d fed him while he’d been with her.
“If only you had loved me, stayed by me.”
“We were kids,” Jake said.
He would never quite remember the sequence of what followed after that, whether he first saw Clint coming around the corner of the house, or saw his chance to grab the gun. It was almost as if the two things coincided, followed by the crack of a single shot, a tiny flare of light, then everything went dark.
26
It was dark. Darker still in the thicket of trees where Gilly sought cover. She couldn’t run any farther, and she collapsed at the base of an oak tree, pulling herself close to the trunk with Zoe in her lap, comforting the child when she whimpered, murmuring nonsense. “Ssh, ssh, it’s okay. We’re okay.”
She had no idea if it was true, or if Zoe could even hear her. Her own ears were still ringing from the gunshot Liz had fired, the one Gilly had waited to feel tear into her back, the one she had feared would go right through her to hit Zoe. Lightheaded and breathless, still buzzing from the waning effect of the morphine, Gilly balanced her cheek on the crown of Zoe’s head, rocking her slightly, fighting tears and a hard tide of panic. But there was jubilation, too, a silvery thread of joy, at having rescued this small treasure she held in her arms.
Please help us. She offered the prayer even as she listened for the noise of pursuit above the thud of her pulse, the whish of the wind. But in the oncoming night, there was no other sound, not the song of birds, nor the chirr of insects, nor the fall of human feet. Gilly held her breath, listening harder. Nothing. It didn’t seem likely Liz would let them go. But neither did it seem likely that Gilly should be sitting here now, still alive. Tucking her chin, leaning slightly away, she looked down at Zoe sucking her thumb, pulling on it for all she was worth, eyes open, breath coming in short pants. She was
so quiet. Lifting Zoe’s chin, Gilly found her gaze. “Are you okay?” she asked softly.
Zoe took her thumb from her mouth. “Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s been looking for you every minute.”
“The bad lady let me talk to him on her phone. He said he was coming. Does he know I’m here?”
“You’ll see him soon, I promise.” How fervently Gilly wanted this to be the truth.
“Is the bad lady gone?”
“I don’t think she knows where we are.”
Zoe leaned back in Gilly’s embrace. “How did you know she took me here?”
Her query caught Gilly off guard, but she was too weary to make up a story in any case. “I had a dream,” she said.
“A magic dream?”
“Yes. It showed me where to find you.”
“Did you tell Daddy?”
“He’ll know.” Gilly said what she believed, that by now Captain Mackie would have told Jake about her dream and somehow they’d figure out the location.
Zoe aimed her thumb at her mouth again, then shook her head. “Daddy will be mad,” she said to it.
“Why?”
“Only babies suck their thumb. I’m not a baby anymore.”
“He won’t mind. These are special circumstances.”
Zoe poked her thumb in her mouth again and laid her cheek against Gilly’s chest. Her other arm was hooked around Gilly’s neck, and her legs were fastened around Gilly’s waist. It was hard to say which of them was holding on to the other one tightest. They were stuck together, a foul-smelling and sweaty mess. Gilly looked back in the direction they’d come from. She’d run maybe fifty or sixty yards before she’d dropped down here. She and Zoe were both scratched and bloody from the juniper. There was only more of it, whole packed scrubby brakes, going away from the house, but to go back in the direction they’d come from would be suicide. Even if the keys were in the cab of the truck, it was parked in plain view. Gilly had looked at it when she’d run out of the house. Its bumpers had gleamed in the light from the porch. Liz might have missed her first shot, but Gilly doubted she’d miss the second time.
What Lies Below: A Novel Page 27