“No,” she says, her voice hardening. “It was not.”
“You also suggested, less than an hour ago, that you have the kind of job experience that seems a little inconsistent with motherhood. And when I tried to find hints of you online as a comic book artist, I came up blank. Was anything you told me the truth?”
“All of it was.”
I look at her. “Like hell. You—”
“Let’s start with this.” She pushes aside a branch. “According to my intake record, I’m thirty-five. That may also be what I told you. I’m forty-two. I’m just blessed—or cursed—with the kind of face that can pass for younger. I think you know what that’s like. So I’ve had time to do more than you might imagine.”
She pauses and assesses a fork before swinging left. “In books and movies, people always say ‘I’m special ops.’ So let’s go with that. I was, as they call it, special ops. I won’t go into more detail. I can’t, as you might imagine. It gave me a unique skill set. In my early thirties, I decided to get out. I quit, as amicably as one quits that sort of work, and I focused on my art. Yes, I was a comic book artist, but without my real name and very, very deep digging, you wouldn’t find me. It’s the kind of career where you don’t make a name for yourself unless you’re at the top of your game, and I definitely was not. I made more of my income inking than drawing.”
“Inking?”
“Someone higher up the food chain did the art, and I filled in the colors. Bet you never even knew that was a job, huh? It is, and it paid decently, mostly because artists want to draw, not color between someone else’s lines. That’s where I met Mike, as we’ll call him. We started as friends, and that’s really what we always were. Really good friends with really good benefits. But he wanted a baby. Him, not me. I didn’t figure I was mommy material with my background. I wanted give him a baby, though, so I got pregnant, and we got married—in that order.”
She stops. Looks around, as if wondering how she got here. Then, with a shake of her head, she backtracks and finds a broken tree and turns right, heading off the path.
“The marriage ended,” she says. “Quickly. Yet while I wasn’t cut out to be a wife, I was a damned fine parent. My daughter was . . .” Her voice catches. “Everything. People talk about miracle babies, and she was—not for any trouble with her birth, but because she changed my life. Although Mike and I split, we co-parented and remained friends.”
She finds the spot and stops there, gesturing at it while still talking. “It might sound as if I left my former life behind and effortlessly moved on. I didn’t. Anders has said he saw things, as a soldier, that he didn’t agree with. So did I. It gets in your head. I drank to get it out. I remember you asked once if Anders and I ever hooked up. We haven’t. I wouldn’t, because I’m afraid I’d be one of those lovers who says yes to a hookup while hoping for a relationship. I’d be even more afraid of getting a relationship. I see too much of my past in him and his drinking, and it scares the shit out of me. Like him, I never graduated to full-blown alcoholic. Just the consumer of a troubling amount of alcohol. I didn’t drink when I was pregnant or breast feeding, though. I went cold turkey then. After Mike and I split, I never drank when she was over. Then came the day . . .”
She hunkers onto a fallen log, lacing her hands. “It was late afternoon. I’d drank three glasses of wine while I worked. It was Mike’s week with Polly. I got a call from him. He was tied up at work in an emergency meeting and the daycare needed her picked up ASAP. Could I do it?”
Her shoulders hunch. “I could have said no. I could have admitted I’d been drinking. I could have called a cab. But one thing about drinking is that it blows your judgment to hell. Three glasses in four hours meant I wasn’t even legally intoxicated. I’d be careful. I’d drive slow. On the way back, there was this truck in front of us, with a load the driver hadn’t secured. It hit a bump and pipes flew off, and I saw them coming and I . . . I reacted too slowly. It might have still been fine except . . .” Her voice goes to a whisper. “Polly wanted the top down. I had a convertible, and she loved riding with the top down and . . .”
Her arms squeeze her legs, her gaze on the ground. “I have seen things in my job, Casey. What I saw that day . . .” Her voice drops to the faintest whisper. “I never see the rest anymore. All I ever see is her. All that matters is her. It is the only truly unforgivable thing I have ever done.”
She pauses for a moment and then continues. “Mike lost his daughter, and he lost his mind. I don’t blame him—I did, too. But he had a target for his grief and rage. Me. He just . . . He could not cope, and everything that I turned inward, he turned on me. All the blame. All the hate. He became a man I’d never seen before. He told people—family, friends—that I’d never wanted a child. That’s true, but he twisted it to sound as if I might have somehow done this on purpose.”
She takes deep breaths, eyes closed, and in her face, I see the woman I saw that time in the cave, when she found Abbygail’s arm. I remember her scream, and that look, and I remember thinking there must be trauma in her past. Now I know there was. And I don’t even want to imagine what she saw that day with her daughter.
She continues. “I couldn’t go to Polly’s funeral. I didn’t dare—after what he was saying, it would be like spitting on her grave. He told everyone about my drinking. Made it sound so much worse. I tested well below the legal limit after the accident, but he told them I was a chronic alcoholic and he pretended I’d hidden it from him. Even that wasn’t enough. He went to my very conservative, very religious grandparents and told them about my girlfriends. Told them I was bisexual. Which, yes, I am, but there was no reason for me to tell them. So when I needed my family most . . .”
She takes more deep breaths. “He was in so much pain. I know that, and I forgive him. At the time, though, it felt like I’d been hit by a truck, and Mike just kept backing up and running over me. I snapped. I wanted to be gone. To not exist. It felt like the only answer. I decided to kill myself. The question was how to do it. I needed a foolproof plan. The only thing that could make my situation worse would be to fail, to be found alive and have people to think that it’d been a weak and desperate cry for help. Like Paul—swallow a few pills, knowing it’s not enough to kill yourself.”
She pauses. “That’s not fair. I don’t know Paul’s situation, and I shouldn’t judge it. I wanted to kill myself, and I delayed while I perfected the method. During that delay, my grandmother swooped in and snatched me away.”
“The one Mike talked to?”
She shakes her head. “That’s my dad’s family. This is mom’s. My Gran and Gramps—Dad’s parents—were stereotypical grandparents. They lived in the country, and I’d spend a month there every summer, learning to garden and bake cookies. Nan was different. Our summer vacations were a week in Paris or New York. I was in awe of her, and no matter how warm and kind she was, I always felt a distance between us. She was the sort of woman I wanted to be, and that’s intimidating. When Polly died, she was overseas. She flew back, assessed the situation, and had me kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped?”
A soft laugh. “Yep. She knew me, better than I ever imagined, and she knew exactly how to handle the situation. Like a tactical maneuver. Scoop me up, take me to a mountain retreat—a secure mountain retreat—and give me a month of support and tough love. Like a detox center for a life that’s gone toxic.”
“Your grandmother did that?”
A small laugh. “She didn’t actually kidnap me. She was eighty-two. But she stayed with me at that mountain retreat, giving me that love and support. She knew me, and she knew what I needed.” Her voice falls again as she looks around. “She always knew what I needed, even when I wasn’t sure myself.”
“She got you here, I’m guessing.”
“She brought me here.”
“Émilie.”
Her chin jerks up. Then her lips curve in a small smile. “You’re quick.”
“I’m a detective.”
>
She chuckles under her breath. “True. I was never good at that part. Show me a target and tell me what to do, and I can figure out how to proceed. Just don’t ask me to pick a target. Don’t ask me to decide guilt or innocence. I used to tell myself that makes it easier. I am the weapon. Nothing more. That works until you realize you’re not made of metal. You have a brain, and you can’t help using it. You wonder. You question. Then it seems it’d be better to be in your shoes, where you evaluate and decide. Except then it’s a choice, like with Val. You chose to shoot her. I acted on orders. Brady and Val were both guilty. My conscience is clean—I did as I was told. Yours is troubled—you made a choice.”
“Is this your way of not answering the question about Émilie?”
Petra laughs again. “You weren’t asking, Casey. You were stating a fact. Showing off a little, but I’ll give you that. You earned it. Yes, Émilie is my grandmother. She told me about Rockton. Told me more about it. I should say I’d always known it existed—it’s family history. She asked if I wanted to come and return to my old life. To be her agent on the ground. It was my decision. My choice. There are no illusions between us. I’ve killed before. I will do it again, for the right reason. I feel no guilt over Brady. She understands that. If I’m a hard-assed bitch, I come by it honestly. The hardness, that is. The toughness. The clean, clear-cut decision making, where the greater good stands above pointless moral gavel-gazing. Brady was a murderer and a threat. I took him out. My only regret is that you saw me, and it ruined the best friendship I’ve had in a very long time.”
She looks up at me. “Émilie is the best of Rockton. She is its heart and its brain. But her health is failing, and others are taking advantage. That’s why I’m coming to you with this. For Rockton. It’s what she’d want.”
I nod. It’s all I can do. I need time to process all this. When silence falls, she shakes it off and rises from the log. Then she crouches and tugs a handful of moss from a knot in the fallen tree. She sticks her hand into the hole and pulls out a gun. When I go for mine, she lifts her free hand.
“It isn’t loaded,” she says. “I’m just taking it out to show you that this is the cache. It’s one of several we’ve used since I got here. There’s an extra gun and ammo. There was a vial, with the drugs. There are a few other things. They have the caches, and when they need me to use something from them, I get my orders. Presumably, if I took something like ammo, they’ll refill it, though last week was the first time I discharged my weapon.”
“You’ve had it, though. In Rockton.”
She nods. “In a safe place, in case I ever needed to use it in an emergency.”
“And the vial you removed?”
“Discarded immediately afterward. My orders were to destroy it. I followed my orders. That’s what I was taught, and it’s what I’ve done here, because I’ve had no reason not to, until now.”
“Is there more of that drug in there?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.” She reaches into the hollow tree, up to her shoulder. She removes a rucksack and ammo, a field knife, a rifle and scope. She points at the rifle. “Never used. I’m hoping Val confessed to being your sniper.”
“She did.”
But the council knew this was here. That Petra had access to a rifle. Yet they brushed off my concern. When I ask Petra if anyone contacted her to see if she might have done it, she says no. So they knew it could have been her, trying to take down Brady, and they didn’t care.
“That’s it,” she says when she’s finished emptying the cache. She starts going through the rucksack. “I’ve emptied this before, and I didn’t see a vial.”
As she checks the rucksack, I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. It’s fast, and that has me moving equally fast, spinning, gun coming from my holster.
Petra snaps up onto her feet, her gaze following mine. When she sees nothing, she doesn’t ask what I spotted, she just keeps looking.
The forest has gone still.
Petra looks at me. I’m still gazing about, seeing her only in the corner of my eye. She drops and reaches for the gun. I do look then. She’s on one knee, still scanning the trees, her hand reaching blindly to where she’d laid the weapon.
Another flash of movement. This one’s to my left, and I was sure the other came from my right. I lower my hand and extend out two fingers. Telling Petra I spotted two potential threats. Ammo rattles. Petra’s gun clicks as she opens it.
A figure runs at me from the right, on the other side of the fallen log. I spin, my gun pointed. The man keeps running. One look at mud-spiked hair and a mud-smeared face and a makeshift knife, and I know it’s a hostile.
FORTY-FOUR
“What the hell?” Petra whispers.
I fire a warning shot over the man’s head. He doesn’t even slow.
“Stop!” I say.
He doesn’t care. I know he won’t, but I have to say it. I have to hope it’ll make a difference. Thick bush slows his headlong charge. I leap onto the fallen log, and when he’s close enough, I kick. My foot connects with his gut. He staggers back. I manage to keep my balance as pain stabs through my bad leg.
A scream sounds behind me. I glance over my shoulder to make sure Petra’s handling that. She is. She has her gun loaded, and she’s braced, waiting.
My hostile charges again. I kick again, hard enough that I know my foot is doing some damage. He only howls and comes back for a third kick. That one puts him down.
I leap on him before he can bounce up, which I know he will, no matter how badly he’s hurt. I knock the knife from his hand, and as I pin him, a shot sounds behind me.
“Don’t shoot—” I begin, but obviously it’s too late.
One shot. That’s all it took. One shot from a professional. The other hostile is already down, and I can see it’s a woman and my heart goes cold. Then I notice her dark blond hair and exhale in relief. It’s not Maryanne.
The man beneath me bucks. I flip and pin him, but he doesn’t care. Just like . . .
Just like Roy.
I inhale sharply, and it’s not just because this man’s actions remind me of Roy. He reminds me of Roy. When he’d charged, I’d had a split-second flash of memory, too quick for me to pursue under the circumstances. The spiked hair, obviously, looks like Roy’s. But it was more than that. It was his face, his expression, blind rage. Now the man reacts as Roy did, writhing and howling, and twisting his arm has no effect. It’s like when I hit him in the stomach. He doesn’t care. There’s no handy sedative here. I don’t have my cuffs, either.
I can hit him on the head, but that’s as likely to do brain damage as it is to knock him out. I’m wrestling with him, and Petra’s there, shouting for him to stop, pressing her gun right to his head.
“Goddamn you, stop!” she says. “What the hell is he on? He . . .”
She trails off, and she meets my gaze, and I know she’s thinking exactly what I just did.
What is he on?
What indeed.
“Shoot him.”
At first, I think that’s Petra talking. It’s a woman’s voice. The words make no sense, though, considering she’s the one holding the gun. I think maybe it’s a question. Then I look up to see her gaze fixed to the side as a woman steps through the trees.
It’s Maryanne. She holds a knife and as she approaches, she bends to pick up our attacker’s blade. Petra makes a move to stop her.
“Don’t,” I say to Petra. “She’s okay.”
Maryanne pockets the second knife. She comes closer, and she’s shaking, her own blade trembling in her grip.
“Shoot him,” she whispers.
I shake my head. “We’re going to try to help him.”
Even as I say the words, I think “We are?” Is that even possible? Is it wise? But what is the alternative? He isn’t going to let us walk away. That’s what Maryanne means. We can’t scare him off. We can’t injure him and hope he slinks away to nurse his wounds. The guy beneath me is like a
killing-machine movie cyborg. He’ll just keep coming. He isn’t a cyborg, though. He’s a person, and we cannot keep killing hostiles every time they attack us.
“We need to—” I begin, and then the man bites me.
This is my fault. Caught up in my thoughts, I give him the opportunity to bite, and when he does, I jump, more surprise than pain. The moment my weight shifts, he’s ready, and he fights like the cornered beast he is.
He bites and twists and kicks and hits. I try to pin him. Petra tries to pin him. Then Maryanne is on him, stabbing. Blood flies before I even realize what she’s doing. I grab at her, but she is as frenzied as he is. She howls and stabs, her face a mask of rage even as tears stream down her face.
“No!” she shouts between howls. “No, no, no!” Her cries punctuate each stab.
Finally, I haul her off him. It’s too late. The hostile lies on the ground, his chest blood-soaked, more blood bubbling at his lips. Petra takes Maryanne—or tries to, but in the handoff, Maryanne squirms free, leaping to her feet, and Petra leaves her alone as I check the hostile. I’m assessing injuries as he breathes his last.
“He’s gone,” I say.
“Good,” Maryanne whispers, and in her tear-streaked face, I see a rage and a satisfaction that confirms what I suspected from that frenzied attack—she’s had encounters with this man before.
I sit on my haunches and look up at her. “Maryanne, we—”
“Warned you,” she says. “You didn’t listen.”
“You warned me about him? I know, you said to shoot—”
“Not him. All.” She looks around. “They’re watching now. Always watching.”
She means the hostiles are watching us. That’s what she meant with that skull she gave me for Dalton. A warning. Rockton has gone decades rarely interacting with the hostiles, and then we slaughtered a hunting party of them. Killed them because they attacked us, and we tried to avoid even that—it’s Val who finished off the injured—but to them, it was a slaughter. They won’t hide in the forest anymore. They’re watching. They’re waiting. They’re attacking. I look at the two bodies. And now we’ve attacked back.
Watcher in the Woods: A Rockton Novel Page 32