She pulled herself up to her full height and crossed her arms. “I’m gonna go get it.”
“You’re too chicken.”
“Am not.”
“Are too. That’s what Eddie tells me. He told me you said you’d let him touch your privates and then got scared.”
“She’s a chicken,” Eddie said.
“Big fat stupid liar,” she yelled as her hands landed on her boney hips. The next thing she knew she was marching across the ice, stomping her feet as she got closer to the slingshot.
She was near the end of the dock before she heard the crack.
They hadn’t been standing by the beach the dock stretched out from. Instead, they’d been at a bend that faced the dock from the side. The water was deep by the rock cut where they’d been standing, and she’d forgotten that along the shore, the ice was starting to break apart.
It was spring.
The split-second hesitation was all the boys needed, though. “Bawk bawk baaawwwwwk. Scruffy is a chicken. Scruffy is a chicken.”
The singsong way they chanted made her cheeks burn. She stepped forward and looked down.
Each milligram of water had felt like a frozen pin poking into her skin as she plunged through the ice into the lake.
She didn’t know how to swim.
She was going to die.
She wasn’t thinking about being wet from head to toe. She wasn’t thinking about the weight of her boots pulling her down or the way her hair was starting to turn hard as it stuck to her forehead. She wasn’t even thinking about Bobby and Eddie, laughing at her from the shore.
She was thinking about the fact that she was cold.
As she felt herself slipping farther down into the water, what scared Jenny wasn’t that she was going to die; it was the fact that she was so cold, she couldn’t possibly be on her way to hell.
She’d never see her mother again. I don’t know anyone in heaven! That’s what had been going through her mind as everything went black.
The darkness that reached out from behind her eyes and swallowed her was soothing. Everything was quiet, and she had no sense of time passing or her body being lifted from the lake, wrapped in a blanket and transported to the hospital. Blissful oblivion, until the moment a speck of light dropped into the black pool that covered her eyes. The ripples of light spread out from the point of impact, slowly pushing back the mask of darkness that had enveloped her, and with the light came color and sound as the hospital room came into focus.
“Were you born without a brain?” was the first thing her mother barked at Jenny when she opened her eyes. She didn’t remember what had happened and she didn’t ask, but her ma told her Mr. Zimmerman had been at the dock and managed to pull her out of the lake.
The boys. The teasing. Her marching across the ice…
“Ma…Singsot?”
“What?”
“Did,” Jenny pushed the words out, “he find my slingshot?”
“Forget the damn slingshot. Why do I waste my time carin’ about a kid who’ll jump off a cliff when her friends tell her to? If you’re gonna do somethin’ stupid and get yourself killed, why don’t you do it soon and save me the goddamn cost of feedin’ and clothin’ you, huh?”
Not long after that, back when she still thought Ma loved her, she’d dropped a plate in the kitchen. It had shattered into a hundred pieces and as she swept it up she’d said, “Maybe one day I’ll learn, if you keep reminding me.”
Her way of apologizing before she got into trouble.
“What good’s it, wastin’ words on a lost cause?” her ma had said.
That was the moment when Jenny knew she was hopeless. Even her mother thought so, and if her ma had given up on her, she wouldn’t have much chance with anyone else. She was on her own. She’d been that way since she was eleven, though it felt more like she’d been that way her whole life.
When she was seven and thought she was going to die, she hadn’t called out for help or waved her arms around or tried to crawl out on the ice or prayed to God.
She wasn’t praying now either.
Jenny couldn’t see properly. It wasn’t a soothing calm of darkness she was swathed in this time. Instead, it felt like a heavy blanket that you can’t breathe through, that you try to push off but can’t unravel yourself from.
It wasn’t like being wrapped in a sheet of black this time. It was more like having a thousand fireflies flitting in front of your face. The lights swirled and blurred, but as hard as she tried, she couldn’t focus.
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
She couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.
When she’d felt the blow on the back of her head and tasted the blood in her mouth, she hadn’t found blissful oblivion this time. She could still hear voices, but she couldn’t make out the words. Rough hands on her skin lifted her and pulled her and pushed her down, and she could feel the way her body bounced off a rough carpet, followed by an incessant hum.
She was moving but not being carried. By what and to where she could only guess.
That was the closest she came to a sense of calm. The fireflies had gone away. There was a dull ache in the back of her head, and she knew her body wanted to move, but she couldn’t make it.
When the hum and sway stopped, Jenny heard a crunching sound, and then a slow, steady creak and the sting of cool air jabbing into her was matched by a brightness that pushed its way through the black.
Everything beyond the light was shadow.
Sandpaper paws yanked her upward and hauled her toward the circle of white. Her feet smacked something hard, and she heard the shhhhhhh of them as she was dragged.
The ground. Her feet must be rubbing against the ground as the rough hands pulled her.
Car. She must have been in a car.
Where would they take her? Did it even matter? She couldn’t see properly, and she’d been around long enough to know that traitors didn’t get second chances. It didn’t even matter if you were innocent. A hesitation was a sign of weakness when it came to discipline.
Jenny pushed harder to try to clear her head of the whorls of light and darkness obscuring her vision with hazy impressions as the hands released her and she crumpled into a heap.
A blur of brown. A tree? No, she wasn’t outside. It wasn’t a bumpy patch of cold earth beneath her but something hard. Level. A hard floor. Something else rose in front of her. A chair leg. And another.
Where was she?
“Never did like me much, did ya, Scruffy?”
A leering blob with a halo of fireflies circling around it. Jenny tried to blink, squint, but her eyes weren’t working properly.
“Jesus, how much packing tape did you use on her face?” A different voice, still familiar.
“Let’s get on with this.” The gravelly voice that matched the coarse skin squeezing her arms.
“Still don’t see why we’re doin’ this here.” Nervous. Anxious. Familiar. Not as deep or strong as the others and filled with fear.
“It’s the only place she’s seen ’em.” The first voice. The one who’d called her Scruffy. “If it’s gone and she’s gone, it’s a dead end.”
“Come on, guys. We gotta get outta here.” The gravelly voice again, also familiar. “Whatever this is about, figure out who wears the pants.”
Rough hands pulled her up again, and she could feel the hot breath on her skin, the smell of eggs filling her nostrils. “Do it,” the person holding her said.
She could hear footsteps moving away.
Then she was free of the tight grip and for a moment almost felt as though she was floating. Something was wrong with her legs. She’d figured out that much when she felt herself falling, feet sliding out one way as her head bounced against the hardness.
When it hit the floor the second time she felt the pool of wetness. Warm. Sticky. Rippling out in her distorted line of sight, like a dark pool of paint spilled on the floor.
The glug-glug-glug of more liquid pouring aga
inst something hard seemed to surround her for a moment before everything went silent. In the distance a door slammed, then another door that was quieter.
The car door. Outside. They were leaving?
No. A thud-thud-thud grew louder, and she could feel the hardness under her ear quiver with each step.
He didn’t say anything this time. She heard a sound she knew better than her mother’s voice, better than anything. Come Easter or Thanksgiving there was never enough money for a chocolate bunny or a pumpkin pie, but Ma would scrimp every last cent to make sure she still had her pack a day.
The strike of a match.
Followed by a whoosh, and as the tump-tump-tump against the floor faded, a wave of reddish-orange light danced before her, accompanied by the acrid smell of smoke.
The heat surged through her as the wave grew and burned above her and behind her, the crackling encircling her as the fire zipped along the gasoline trail.
When will you ever learn? Don’t you ever use your head?
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes.
Jenny tried to wriggle toward the gap in the dancing light, but even as she inched her body forward, she could feel the wall of warmth drawing closer as it prepared to drag her from one hell to another.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
As he released his breath, a cloud of white rose slowly in front of him, followed by a sharp pang as the icy air rushed into his mouth and chilled his lungs.
It was a good pain, the kind that told you what you needed to know to survive. Summer sun could lull you into complacency, make you drowsy and wrap you in a warm blanket that would help put you to sleep while it roasted your skin, but breathing in the sharp cold of the early morning air felt like how he imagined having a form of sadistic acupuncture performed on the back of your throat would feel.
A hundred reminders that it was not yet spring, that the weather could turn in the blink of an eye.
That the mountain winters could be cruel and unforgiving.
No snow had fallen this April, which was both a blessing and a curse. In snow, they might find tracks, but the officers scouring the wilderness in search of Hank Jeffers risked leaving trails of their own, possibly alerting him to their positions.
Hank Kurtis Jeffers: armed and considered extremely dangerous.
And out there somewhere. While other officers formed roadblocks and followed up on alleged sightings in places as far away as Calgary and Seattle, Constable Craig Nolan found himself on foot, searching the bush in the outskirts of Kelowna, carrying a shotgun, only a few miles from the scene of the crime.
Trying to forget what little he remembered about Jeffers. Thinking about the last manhunt he’d been on.
The search for Lisa Harrington.
That memory connected to others that he’d rather remained buried, so the reminder of the cold, of his current assignment, was welcome. Not just because it kept him alert, but because it helped keep his mind off other things.
He let out a deep breath. It was going on four months now, but if he closed his eyes, he’d swear he traveled through time and space and was right back to that moment, when it wasn’t too late to undo the damage…
The futility of a case wasn’t new to him. When he’d been shot and his partner killed, the senselessness hadn’t weighed on him as heavily as it usually did. Ash had gotten him through it.
And when they finally called off the search for Lisa and the blame game began, it was Ash who compounded the hollowness growing within him.
Lisa Harrington. Maybe it was to fill some gaping hole within her, maybe because she thought the pure love of a child would save her from her own destructive behavior, or maybe just for the welfare checks and baby bonuses and tax breaks she could manipulate from the system. For reasons he could only guess at and might never fully understand, Lisa had abducted a child, raised her, then murdered her. That much he was certain of, even if it hadn’t been proven in a court of law, even if Lisa had never confessed.
He’d been guilty of letting his own prejudices cloud his judgment, of inferring emotions because of labels. A mother always loves her child…right?
As though he hadn’t been in this job long enough to know that you couldn’t make those kinds of assumptions. As though his own mother didn’t prove otherwise.
In the process of getting involved with that old case and reviewing the investigation, he’d allowed himself to doubt the kind of man his father was. Craig’s doubts created new wounds and ripped old ones open. He’d been left carrying demons of guilt he wasn’t sure he could ever exorcise.
He couldn’t hope for the forgiveness of others when he couldn’t forgive himself.
Now, for the second day in a row, he joined the search for Hank Jeffers. A man who’d allegedly murdered his estranged wife and three children.
Something else Craig couldn’t forgive himself for.
If he’d seen it coming, if he’d looked harder years ago, he might have found a way stop it…If only he’d known what the man was really capable of.
Maybe he didn’t want to get to the point where he could understand these people. Maybe understanding them would humanize them, when it was easier to think of them as monsters.
And maybe he didn’t want to understand them because if he could, it would mean he wasn’t so different from them, that he wasn’t better than them.
Or maybe he didn’t want to understand because that would provide excuses for his mother. Maybe he would begin to understand her. He might find his grip on his hatred slipping as he started to see things through her eyes.
Just a useless sack of shit, a waste of skin.
He stopped cold and choked on his breath.
“Y’okay?”
Craig forced a cough. He didn’t trust himself to speak. It had been so long since he’d heard the voice that had cut through his thoughts that he’d almost convinced himself he’d forgotten it.
Almost.
Another part of his past he wished he could exorcise permanently.
This job had taken him close to his childhood home, where his mother still lived—what had undoubtedly caused the resurrection of the voice he’d just heard—and that was bad enough. Worse still, this case had dredged up memories about the failed manhunt for Lisa Harrington. And it had taken him closer to the assignment he was on when he’d first met Tain and Ash, both geographically and emotionally. With men being pulled from detachments and reassigned to help with the manhunt, it was possible to cross paths with someone else he’d worked with during that investigation.
It had been hard enough facing Tain and Ash again at first. What was it, eight or nine months ago now? He’d concealed it well, the same way he’d buried all the ghosts deep within himself.
He’d almost believed he was bottomless until the day came when there were too many for him to hold at bay.
Ever since he’d been given his orders and had climbed into his Rodeo to make the drive from the last temporary assignment he’d been on, farther north, he’d been trying to push thoughts of Lisa Harrington, Ashlyn and everything that had happened since he’d first worked with her and Tain from of his mind.
Trying. Failing.
“You don’t look so good.”
Craig forced himself to focus on the man speaking to him. “I’m fine. Fighting off a bit of a spring cold.”
Constable Stanley MacDougall—known as Mac—grinned. “Spring? Never pegged you as an optimist.”
“Okay, chalk it up to too much fresh air.”
“Yeah, man, I know what you’re sayin’.” Mac slapped Craig on the shoulder twice and then moved out in front, into the lead. “How this sonofabitch is surviving out here without freezin’ his balls off is beyond me.”
“We don’t even know he’s out here.”
“You haven’t heard?”
Craig had heard and knew exactly what Mac was referring to. “Excrement doesn’t mean much, not that close to the road. If you had a nickel for every time someon
e pulled over and answered the call of nature, you’d be golfing in Hawaii right now.”
The grin slipped from Mac’s face in a heartbeat, and he looked totally serious, as though he was Craig’s dad and had just caught him sneaking in after curfew. “I would not. Get it right. I’d be on a beach with a hot babe in Mexico.” The grin was back in place. “Maybe two hot babes.”
How long had it been since he’d had a partner who would crack jokes with him, even on a serious case? Not since he’d been reunited with Tain and Ash.
He knew some guys had to keep the laughs rolling. It was how they coped. Grinning ear to ear, taking every opportunity for a cheap joke in public while they were crying their eyes out behind closed doors later or losing themselves in a bottle. That was Mac. Craig knew morbid humor was typical with medical examiners and anyone who worked homicide, but there was a line that Mac kept crossing, and it told Craig that Mac wasn’t handling it well.
He was trying too hard to make it seem like he was in control.
“…takes a shit in the woods without toilet paper when it’s still freezing out half the time, and it wasn’t that far from town. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
“You have a point.” He’d missed part of what Mac had said, but he’d read the reports. There were possible explanations for finding feces in the woods this time of year, but a lot of reasons to be suspicious too.
Especially that close to town.
He fought to keep his shoulders from rising with the shiver of his body. An icy finger had just traced a path down his spine, and he stopped walking and stood still, trying to listen.
It took Mac at least a minute to realize Craig wasn’t following him, and when he turned back to look at Craig, all hints of amusement were gone.
“You hear something?”
His heart, thudding in his chest.
The sound of the last words his father had said to him before he’d left.
The sound of Ash’s voice, her smile never more than a heartbeat away if he allowed himself to close his eyes…
The reason he wasn’t sleeping.
Had he heard something else? All there was now was the softest trickle of wind through the branches. Without leaves to rustle it was barely noticeable. The woods were still.
Lullaby for the Nameless (Nolan, Hart & Tain Thrillers) Page 32