by Kara Thomas
The snap of a twig beneath feet behind us; Mike was standing, coming toward us.
“You.” He nodded to me. “Walk with me.”
“Why?”
Mike looked from me to Jesse. “Because I don’t fuckin’ trust him.”
Jesse stared at me, pleading. Anger surged through me. What did he expect me to say? What was I supposed to do with a gun pointed at me?
Finally, Jesse turned away from me, continued on the trail, between Amos and me and Mike. I felt my entire being crack in half.
Even if this worked, even if Jesse and I got away, it wouldn’t matter; I had already lost him.
* * *
—
Amos and Mike had left the Camry parked in an overlook half a mile from the parking lot. The chill in the mountain air nipped at my arms. The backseat of the Camry was filled with Walmart bags of essentials that I’d snuck into my cart while picking up camping supplies. Uncooked pasta, trail mix, toothbrushes, three-dollar packages of white men’s T-shirts and underwear. A starter kit for our new life. Amos would be able to bring us more food and provisions under the guise of a trip to Vermont in a few weeks to visit friends.
The farmhouse was waiting for us; Amos had already made the trip to Timsbury to secure it. Almost all our money—Jesse’s money, mostly—was already gone, spent on the shitty old car and one month’s rent.
When Amos was close enough to hear me whisper, I said, “The ransom call is too risky. What if Claire saw Mike’s face?”
Amos’s jaw, dotted with golden stubble, set. “You think Mike’s gonna be cool with it if I say ‘Hey, just kidding about that ten grand I promised’?”
I knew Amos was thinking about his own cut of the money. Forty-five grand. Peanuts, in comparison with what he stood to inherit someday if he’d managed to not commit to pissing Marian off as if it were a full-time job.
“You might still get the money someday,” I said softly. “Maybe if you apologized.”
Amos snorted, shook his head. “She doesn’t make fake threats, Kat. That’s why we’re here.”
“Can we speed this up?” Mike said from his post as sentry at the back of the Camry.
Amos looked at me, maybe as if he were considering hugging me, even though we’d never hugged once in our lives. Instead, he nodded to Jesse, alone in the car, his forehead resting on the steering wheel.
“Be careful,” Amos said.
“Of Jesse?” I asked. “Why?”
Amos considered this for a beat before shrugging. “Guy obviously loves being a hero.”
* * *
—
We arrived at the farmhouse just before dawn. It would be weeks, maybe months, before it would be safe enough for Amos to come by with the burner phones and fake identification he promised.
The plan was to stay in Timsbury for a year, until it was safe for us to venture into the world as new people. Until Amos found convincing Canadian passports that would get us across the northern border.
That was the plan, until Amos turned up on the front porch of the farmhouse, banging on the door like his life depended on it.
“Mike’s dead,” he shouted through the door. “I can’t go home. They’re gonna talk to the guys Mike worked with and figure out I brought my car in and he knew me.”
The next morning, we found out that the FBI was searching for our bodies.
Before Mike called my grandmother’s house and met my father at the quarry, he’d tossed Jesse’s wallet, my bloodied bandana, and the knife into Blackstone Quarry. When my father handed the money over to Mike Dorsey, Mike would tell him Jesse and I were at the quarry, tied to a tree.
We don’t know where that part of the plan went wrong. Maybe Mike’s answer wasn’t good enough for my father; maybe he refused to turn over the money until he saw me, had confirmation I was alive. The FBI thinks my father jumped in front of Mike’s car, banged on the windshield to stop him from driving off.
It didn’t matter what happened. Mike was dead. My father was as good as dead.
And, almost everyone agreed, Jesse and I were probably dead as well.
I think about something I read about myself, often.
Kat Marcotte could do anything. A quote from my volleyball coach to People magazine, in a story they ran in the weeks after the quarry crash.
She’s right, I thought, folding the magazine and replacing it on the shelf at the grocery store I ventured to once a week. I did it. We did. I escaped.
But even Kat Marcotte can’t come back from the dead.
CLAIRE
NOW
When I wake, I’m being carried up a set of stairs. My feet collide with the bannister as Amos pivots sharply. The sound of a door hinge squealing, and then I’m falling, hitting the firm surface of a mattress. My skull feels like it’s been split open.
I roll onto my side, groaning.
“Don’t try to get up,” Amos says.
I follow his voice; Amos is at the end of the bed, the gun in his hand pointed at me. I know it’s Amos. I’d never forget his voice, but he still doesn’t look like Amos—a full beard covers his face, and his hair is in a greasy bun at the nape of his neck.
A voice, soft from the corner of the room: “You really hurt her.”
A dark-haired woman steps into view. We stare at each other for a bit before she sits at the foot of the bed opposite Amos.
I know it’s her, but my brain is telling me it can’t possibly be her. This girl’s face is leaner, her freckles faded. Her hair is cut in a blunt bob, the ends jagged as if she’d done it herself.
I don’t know what to say—I thought you were dead doesn’t even scratch the surface of what is going on in my mind right now.
“How did you know we were here?” Kat asks quietly.
How did you know we were here? As if I’ve shown up to a party uninvited, as if everyone hasn’t spent the past six months thinking Kat Marcotte is dead.
I lie back, my skull pulsing on the pillow below it.
Kat scoots closer to me, the bed creaking beneath her weight.
“Amos,” she says. “Go get her ice.”
“What?” Amos asks.
“Ice. For her head.”
Amos stands. The suddenness of the motion makes me flinch. He leaves the room, shutting the door behind him.
Kat sits at the edge of the bed. “Does anyone else know you’re here?”
“My roommate,” I lie.
“What’s your roommate’s name?”
“Alexis,” I say. “I told her I was coming here.”
We just stare at each other for a beat; I wait for the falling sensation, to be yanked out of the nightmare and wake up in my bed in a cold sweat, thinking, What a wild-ass dream.
“I thought you were dead,” I whisper. “Everyone thinks you’re dead.”
Kat averts her eyes, says nothing. What is there to say?
Anger floods me, the past six months coming back in a gut punch. Everything I’ve lost—my privacy, my friends, my happiness—and everything I risked to find out what happened to her.
My life was torn apart while she was doing what? Playing house in the woods with her cousin?
Why? How?
And where the fuck is Jesse?
My voice trembles when I finally collect it and say, “Is Jesse alive?”
“Of course he is,” Kat says. She stands, her expression darkening. She moves to the other side of the doorway, her hand lingering on the knob.
“We both know he’s the only reason you’ve come all this way,” she says, slamming the door shut so hard my brain rattles inside my skull.
KAT
NOW
Obviously, I have been imagining a situation like this for months—everything grinding to a halt because someone has figured out we’re ali
ve. In my head, it’s the woman who works at the country store, the one whose eyes linger on me sometimes as if there’s something she’d like to ask me.
Six months—we made it six months without anyone finding us or recognizing us. I have worked my goddamn ass off so we can stay here undetected—I’ve memorized every business in town with a security camera so we can avoid having our likenesses captured.
How? How? How?
It obviously was not me, because I do not make mistakes.
It sounds arrogant, but it’s not a quality I would wish on anyone. I don’t make mistakes because I can’t. Shoes left in the hall? I’d be hearing about my thoughtlessness for a week. Didn’t hear my father when he said dinner was ready? My laptop would be thrown into the wall, the essay I’d been working on lost to the ether.
I did not make a mistake here. Yes, I let Claire turn around. But I never looked back—I left nothing behind to explain how she wound up in Timsbury, New York.
Amos is waiting in the hall, listening, obviously ignoring my directive to get Claire ice. I grab him by the arm and shove him through the doorway to his bedroom. “How did she find us?”
Amos scowls, crosses to his dresser. “Why are you asking me?”
“Because you screwed up,” I snap.
“Bold of you to assume it was me.” He swaps his gun for a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniels from his dresser and unscrews the top.
“So you’re saying it was either me or Jesse?”
“I’m saying I don’t know what the fuck happened.” Amos plops down on his bed. The room smells of wet skunk, an unwashed pile of clothes in the corner and a string of empty liquor bottles lined up on the windowsill.
Amos has been drinking more than usual the past few months. At first, I thought it was the guilt of what happened to Mike and my father driving him to numb himself. But then, he started disappearing for a day or two at a time, only to return with more cash and more booze. I shook him down and got him to admit he’d been making the trip to Burlington to sell to some of his old contacts.
He swore he was being careful, that none of them even knew his real name, that they were the type of people who would never talk to the police. Amos was known only as “Devin,” the name on his fake driver’s license. Thanks to Devin and his connections in Burlington, we have an assortment of fake IDs, and more cash flowing in, even if most of it goes to the liquor store in town.
I drag my hands down my face. “What are we going to do?”
“I mean, it’s obvious,” Amos says. “We have to kill her.”
“Be serious, Amos,” I snap.
Amos’s eyebrows knit together. He frowns, not breaking my gaze. It makes my stomach drop.
“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”
Amos’s eyebrows shoot up. “Then we just let her go and wait for the cops to roll in?”
“I can try to talk to her,” I say. “She doesn’t know anything.”
Amos lowers the bottle of booze from his mouth. “What do you mean?”
I sit on the edge of Amos’s bed. “I never told her about my dad.”
“Okay.” Amos blinks at me. He opens his top drawer and begins to paw through the contents. “So let me get this straight. Mike almost killed her, you made her think you were dead, and she has no idea why. Yet you think if we let her go she’s going to keep what happened here a secret?”
“Nothing would have happened if you hadn’t hit her with a shovel.”
“She’d already found us!” Amos drops his voice. “Do you want to go to prison? Because once we get caught and your teary Dateline special is over, we’re going down for extorting Marian. Maybe manslaughter, if they can pin what happened to Mike and your father on us.”
I drop my hands from my face and look at Amos. “What? We didn’t make Mike run my dad over.”
Amos snorts. “Felony murder rule, look it up.”
The word murder sets off a snare of fear in me. With nothing to do over the past six months, I have had a lot of time to replay what happened on the mountain, to picture the aggrieved way Mike glanced at Amos when he said that Claire was alive.
I’d assumed Amos had been the one to convince Mike not to kill Claire after they encountered her on the trail; Amos had said Mike had panicked when he saw her cowering behind the rock, had decided to run after her after she took off, terrified and screaming.
But sometimes I wonder if the look Mike gave Amos was more reproachful; as if he’d had to convince Amos to leave Claire alive. After all, Amos had been the one who sounded so worried that Claire might have recognized his voice—so worried, in fact, he made the completely dumbass move of going to the lake house to talk to Claire, to see for himself what she remembered—
“You’re not touching her,” I say.
From his dresser drawer, Amos produces something that looks like a nicotine patch. He holds it up for me between two fingers. “You know what this is?”
“I don’t feel like playing guessing games, Amos.”
“It’s a fentanyl patch.” Amos sticks it in my face. “Get some booze in her, slip this on while she’s passed out, and bam, overdose.”
I swallow, my eyes on the Saran Wrapped square of plastic. “No.”
Amos’s eyes, bloodshot, oscillate like he didn’t even hear me. “We can ditch her car and body near her school. Who wouldn’t believe she was so fucked up over what happened to her that she decided to, you know—”
“No.”
Amos slaps the fentanyl patch on the top of his dresser so hard that the mirror on the wall above it rattles. “Then what do we do, Kat? Keep her locked in that room forever like Elizabeth Smart or some shit?”
“Amos. I’ll figure something out.” That pulsing behind my eye is back, right below my eyebrow scar.
“You’d better figure it out before Jesse gets home,” Amos says, before crossing through the doorway, leaving me alone in his room. “Once he knows she’s here, he’s gonna absolutely lose it.”
CLAIRE
NOW
They are arguing outside my door. I catch a single phrase—screwed up—before their voices fade out of earshot.
Where are they going? Panic zips through me as I scramble off the bed. I pause, hand on the doorknob. There are two of them, plus a gun. My keys and phone are in my coat, which did not make it into the bedroom with me. I have no idea where they put my stuff or my boots. I could not outrun Kat Marcotte on a good day, let alone after a shovel whack to the skull.
A punch of disorientation nearly knocks me back onto the bed. It’s Kat in the next room. Kat took my keys and phone and any means of escaping this house.
My best friend, who was always coming to my rescue when I was drunk and needed a ride home or on the verge of being picked last for kickball in gym. The girl in the next room is not Kat, and she is definitely not my friend right now.
Something primal rises in me, stomping out my instinct to survive, escape.
I ball my hand into a fist and bang on the wall separating me from Kat’s and Amos’s panicked murmuring. The voices on the other side quiet; I bang again, harder. “Kat!” I scream. “Don’t fucking hide from me—”
The bedroom door slams open, jolting me backward.
“What the hell are you doing?” Amos shouts, bursting into the room.
I look at his empty hands. A single thought cracks through my brain: no gun.
I charge at him, knock him into the dresser. Amos’s arms fly up, reaching for me. I’m stepping over him when Kat shouts my name.
She blocks my escape through the doorway. When she grabs my arm, something snaps in me.
I want to hurt her. I grab a handful of her hair and pull until she’s struggling beneath me like a cat. Amos darts out of the room and I know I should run but I can’t break my grip on Kat’s hair—
�
�Claire— Ow, stop!”
She’s clawing at me; I yank her hair until she falls to her knees, smashing her face into the edge of the dresser. Kat cries out in pain as Amos snarls: “Don’t. Move.”
The barrel of a gun is inches from my face.
“Now”—he pants at Kat—“can we restrain her?”
“What the hell is going on?”
The voice makes all the fight leave my body. I release Kat and stare at Jesse.
He doesn’t cross the threshold into the bedroom. He stares at Kat, her bloody face, before his gaze sweeps downward, coming to rest on me.
His lips part. A tear leaks from my eye, but I don’t move to wipe it away.
Jesse crouches at my side. “Hey. Are you okay?”
Hey? I shrug Jesse’s hand off my shoulder. “Do I look okay?”
Jesse stares at Amos, murder in his eyes. “What is wrong with you? Put that down.”
Next to me, Kat speaks. “I think she broke my nose.”
“I didn’t break anything,” I say.
Jesse gapes at Kat. “What the hell happened?”
Kat wipes a smear of blood from her upper lip with her thumb. “Can we talk about this not in front of her?”
“No. You can talk about it right here.” My voice is adrenaline warbled.
“Claire, how did you find us?” Jesse asks.
Kat sits on the edge of the bed. She wipes her nose with the collar of her shirt. “Amos, I’m guessing.”
“Yes,” I say. “Amos.”
From where he’s leaning against the wall, Amos says, “I don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.”
The look on Jesse’s face says he has a lot of things he would like to call Amos. Decides he’d better not as long as Amos is still holding the gun.
“Jesse, Amos,” Kat says. “Can we please talk in private?”
Jesse is still looking at me. He hesitates before standing up. My gaze moves to the window.
“Hey.” Amos points at me. “That’s a thirty-foot drop. Don’t get any stupid ideas.”