by Kara Thomas
Footsteps on the snow outside. Kat, probably. My heart climbs up my throat as I move to the window, but there’s nothing. No porch light, no streetlamps.
I sit back in bed, panic flooding through my veins. The nearest house is easily half a mile away.
I startle as Amos steps in the room, a half-drunk bottle of whiskey tucked under his arm. He assumes his spot on the chest in the corner, holding something out to me. A small square, shrink-wrapped, the size of a postage stamp.
“Pain patch,” he says. “For your head.”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” Amos slips the patch back in his pocket, lifts the bottle to his mouth.
“Kat’s home,” I say. “Where did she go?”
Amos swallows, considers the bottle in his hand. “I’ll answer one question for every shot you take with me.”
“I think you’re overestimating how badly I want answers.”
“I’m a little hurt, Claire. I thought you and I were growing close.”
“You didn’t leak the thing I told you about the hiker to the press, did you?”
“No.” Amos takes another swig of whiskey. “The point was never for everyone to think you were involved. That was all Marian—she thought you were lying to protect Jesse. Everyone did. She thought if you started to get dragged, you couldn’t handle the heat and you’d fess up.”
“But you did tell your grandma what I told you out on the lake. That I remembered the guy from the trail and thought it was the same guy I saw at the bar.”
“Only because I had to.”
“Why?”
Amos tilts the bottle to me. I yank it from his hand, take a sip, my eyes on the wolfish grin spreading across his face.
“Marian is not a dumb woman,” Amos says. “After a few days, when the searchers still hadn’t found any bodies on the mountain, my aunt Beth raised the possibility that maybe they were kidnapped. That’s when Marian sat me down and grilled me. She wanted to know what I knew about her fight with Kat a few weeks before they went missing.”
“When she told Kat to break up with Jesse or she couldn’t go to BC?”
Amos nods to the bottle, still in my hand. “Another question, another shot.”
“It’s not a new question. It’s a clarification question.”
Amos grabs the bottle back. “Yes. It hadn’t escaped my grandmother that Kat mysteriously disappeared with her boyfriend after she gave her that ultimatum. I needed Marian off of my ass, so I fed her what you told me, plus that bullshit story about the hikers getting robbed. It had the intended effect. She actually started to believe that something bad had happened to Kat.”
“You made up the story about those girls getting robbed on Bobcat Mountain?”
Amos shrugs. “Without you as a witness to the fake kidnapping, we needed a way to seed the idea Jesse and Kat were taken.”
I pull my knees to my chest, against the steady drumbeat of my heart. They used me. They didn’t care what happened to me, as long as they got away. I was collateral damage. Acceptable loss.
The door creaks open, and Kat’s voice emerges from the dark in the hall. “Get out, Amos.”
“I’m comfortable right here,” Amos says as Kat steps into the room. The fire in her eyes from this afternoon is gone, as if whatever she was doing the past few hours sucked the life out of her.
When she sees the whiskey bottle in my hands, she goes still. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” Amos says at the same moment Kat reaches out and snatches the bottle from me. Her hands tremble around the neck of the bottle. “Don’t take anything he gives you.”
The fear in Kat’s eyes twists my gut, despite the fact that I’d kept a careful eye on Amos as he opened the whiskey and he’s been drinking it too. I think of the pain patch he offered me, my heart picking up speed.
Kat turns on her heels, shoves the Jack Daniels back at Amos, remembering herself. “Jesse says you won’t eat anything. You’ll get sick if you keep drinking on an empty stomach.”
“I love everyone’s concern for my well-being right now,” I say. “I don’t think the shovel smack did any additional brain damage, by the way.”
“Sorry,” Amos says around another swig from the bottle.
Kat perches at the edge of the bed. “You really don’t remember anything that happened on the mountain?”
I pull my knees up to my chest, which has gone hollow. It always does when I think about Bobcat Mountain, about those missing hours. Grim resignation spreads through me. What’s the point of pretending anymore? If they’re not going to let me go, I at least have to find out what really happened on the mountain. “I don’t even remember waking up that day.”
“So you don’t know why you never made it back to the lake house?”
My throat muscles tighten. “I remember Paul Santangelo, the hiker who saw me. But I don’t remember speaking to him or why I tried to get away from him.”
I’ve had six months to puzzle over my actions. The only explanation is that I was scared. I was lost and alone, and I didn’t trust a creepy man who offered to help me.
“I must have gotten even farther from the right trail when I tried to hide from him,” I say. “When it got dark I probably gave up and waited for help.”
But help never came. I squeeze my eyes shut against the pressure of tears, the full weight of their betrayal hitting me. I was alone and terrified and instead of helping me they let Mike Dorsey attack me and leave me for dead.
Agent Novak was right. Having an answer doesn’t help.
Kat is still studying me when I’m done wiping my eyes. I struggle to find my voice. “Why did I leave the campsite?”
She thinks a beat. “You were pissed off at me.”
“Why?”
Under the dull glow of the bedside lamp, Kat’s cheeks redden. “Why does it matter?”
In the corner, Amos has gone still, the bottle raised halfway to his lips, listening. Kat must never have told him why I left the campsite.
She’s ashamed of whatever she did, or said.
I swallow. “Did Jesse tell you he and I talked on the dock the night before?”
“No.” The flatness in her tone suggests that she knows, anyway. Maybe she saw us, or maybe she realized in the morning that something had happened, when I couldn’t look Jesse in the eye. Nothing gets by Kat Marcotte.
“Is Jesse the reason I was pissed off at you?”
“Yes.”
Kat tilts her head back against the headboard and closes her eyes. I’m jolted back through the past ten years, remembering the hundreds of times we’ve done this before, on her bed or mine. Quizzing each other the night before a bio exam, or deciding what movie to put on as background noise while we talked for hours about anything, everything.
All that time, I never knew what was going on in her head. Was our entire friendship a lie? Does it mean our friendship wasn’t real if the whole time she was hiding things from me, making me more dependent on her, pushing me further away from Jesse?
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about your dad?” I ask.
Kat opens her eyes. “Would you have believed it?”
“How can you even ask that?”
“Do you know how many people didn’t believe it?” Kat’s hand moves to the sliver of a white scar that bisects the corner of her eyebrow. “One of my teachers alerted the air force after she saw this. I was finally scared enough to admit that my father did it. They sent someone to the house to check on us, everything was perfect. My mom told them it was her fault, that she’d dropped a plate and it was a freak accident.”
“Emma didn’t back you up?”
“I’m the one who taught her to do what they said. Never argue with them, or their version of what happened, in our house.” Kat picks at a pill of
fleece on the blanket. “So many times, I wanted to tell you, just so someone knew. But I knew you wouldn’t be able to keep it to yourself. You’d want to help and get your parents involved.”
“You could have stayed with us,” I say. “You know my parents would have taken you in a heartbeat.”
“They would never, ever let me go without a fight. Even if my parents somehow accepted it, Marian wouldn’t have.”
“Does she know what he did to you?” I ask.
Kat’s expression darkens. “Why do you think she pays for Emma to go to boarding school? She knows exactly who he was and she would have died herself to protect the truth.”
I find myself glancing over at Amos for confirmation. He nods, somber.
I slump lower against the headboard, listening for Kat’s breathing next to mine. “I’m trying really hard to understand why you felt like this was the only answer,” I say.
Kat hugs her legs to her body, resting her chin on her knees. “You can’t. Unless you had to get a dislocated shoulder popped back in at the ER on your seventh birthday, you’ll never understand.”
“You had other options. But you wanted everyone to think you were dead.”
“Not everyone,” she says, her voice a church-confessional whisper. “Just my family.”
“What about me?” I ask. I hate how much I care about the answer—how desperately I need to know if the girl I thought was my friend is still in the body next to me. “Losing you guys made me lose my mind, Kat.”
My throat seals with the memory of it. The shrinks, the medication adjustments, the sobbing in front of strangers in group therapy sessions—all because I thought I’d never have an answer.
And now that I do, of course it isn’t good enough.
“I’m sorry for what we did to you.” Kat’s eyes are glassy. “But I’m not sorry for what I did to them. I’m happy they think I’m dead. I hope every day for the rest of their lives they wonder if it’s their fault.”
I don’t know what she wants me to say. That I understand, even if I don’t forgive her? That I’d do the same thing if I’d been in her shoes? I settle on: “I think this is the most honest I’ve ever seen you.”
Kat shrugs. “Thanks, I guess.”
“It’s not a compliment.” I pull the bedspread over me and face the wall. “I want you to leave.”
“And I’m not leaving you alone with Amos,” Kat says.
I keep my eyes trained on the wall, on the water stain marring the textured paint. “I’d rather be alone with him the rest of the night than spend a single second longer with you.”
I feel Kat stand up from the bed and hear the door open.
“That was cold,” Amos says from the corner when the door clicks behind Kat.
“Whatever.” I sit up. “Give it to me,” I say, gesturing to the Jack.
Amos stands, comes toward me tentatively. I can tell by his gait how drunk he is, even though his voice is smooth, controlled.
Amos climbs onto the bed so he’s sitting next to me. “I knew you and I would eventually wind up like this again, Claire.”
“And why is that?” I ask.
“I can tell you’re like me,” Amos says. “You’ve got that sad puppy look in your eyes—afraid to be alone with your thoughts for one second because if you are, you’ll remember how meaningless and shitty everything is.”
“You’ve got me all figured out,” I say.
“It’s an only-child thing, I guess. The difference between me and you is that you think relationships are the answer.” Amos takes a long draw of whiskey, smacks his lips. “I’ve figured out there’s nothing that can make the loneliness go away. You can only numb it.”
Maybe what happened on the mountain didn’t change me. Maybe I’m the person I was always becoming.
Maybe Amos is right, and my future only holds more loneliness. Maybe all that’s left to do is embrace it. Numb it.
When Amos is done with his long swig, he passes the bottle to me. I hesitate, my fingers around the neck, before I lift it to my lips and drink.
KAT
NOW
I’m pacing downstairs, cleaning. Disinfecting the countertops, combing every corner for strands of my hair, a hidden surface that one of us may have touched. A futile attempt to remove all traces of us from this house.
Futile because Claire did what the FBI, somehow, could not. She found the phone, she found Zoe-Grace. She found us.
If we leave this house, we will have to run forever.
I pause at the foot of the stairs. It’s quiet in the second-story bedrooms.
Too quiet.
I drop my spray bottle and bound up the stairs, two steps at a time. Throw the door open at the same time Claire is yanking it from the other side—
I take in the scene before me.
Amos, on the bed, unmoving.
Claire, lower lip trembling, hair wild.
I swallow bile, look from her to Amos’s body. Body.
“Is he—”
Claire stumbles past me, vomits on the hallway floor. I rush over to Amos, grab his wrist. He’s still warm, but his veins are too quiet—
I turn to Claire, who is now watching me, a hand over her mouth.
“Go,” I say. “Your keys and phone are on the kitchen counter.”
“Kat—”
“Claire. You need to get out of here. Go.”
* * *
—
Jesse’s face is white as he gets into the driver’s seat of the Camry. We are so far north we’re practically at the Canadian border; thick flakes have covered the windshield in the few minutes I’ve been in the passenger seat.
I drove Amos’s BMW, his body laid out in the backseat. Together, Jesse and I managed to get him behind the wheel of his car. I wiped frozen tears from my cheeks as Jesse put the car in neutral, pushed it down the embankment, toward the hidden lake that is exactly where the GPS promised.
I closed my eyes at the last minute, so I didn’t see the BMW disappear. In my head, the crack of the lake’s icy surface plays on a loop.
Next to me, Jesse says nothing, blinks away the flakes gathered on his eyelashes.
I grab his gloved hand. “Amos is dead. It’s only his prints on his gun—we can say he was keeping us hostage—we could get out of this.”
“And Claire?”
“She was never there.”
Jesse grabs my hand back.
“Kat, your family’s money is not going to save us from this.”
I flinch; after everything, it’s the first time he’s brought up Marian’s wealth.
“I can’t go back there,” Jesse says quietly.
“Why?” I ask. “Do you think I’ll turn on you or something? I would never do that.”
“It’s not that.” Jesse grips my hand. “If we go back, we can never be together.”
I’m still grasping for the words when Jesse speaks again. His voice is flat. “That doesn’t even matter to you anymore, does it?”
“Take whatever money we have left,” I say. “It’ll last longer if it’s just you. You can get away, Jesse.”
“That’s really what you want?” Jesse’s voice floods with emotion. “To never see me again?”
“If it’s what we have to do to get away—” The look on his face stops me, my words frosting in the air between us. He knows, of course. He must have known for a while, that if I had an out, I would take it.
“Did you ever love me?” Jesse asks.
I squeeze my eyes shut against the sting of the cold. After a beat, Jesse rests a gloved hand on the side of my face. “Kat?”
Even if I gave him the honest answer—Yes, as much as someone like me can love another person—it wouldn’t be enough for him. Because he gave up everything for me. Even if we stayed together, sta
rted a life somewhere, how do you ever repay someone who has already proven they would give you the world?
I lean into his hand, his glove cold against my cheek. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. And I really mean it.
* * *
—
I’m in an overheated room at the Timsbury police precinct, a Styrofoam cup of tea on the table in front of me. It’s too strong to drink, even though I’m still shivering. The police obeyed my wish not to go to the hospital. A paramedic came to take my blood pressure and pulse, and a female cop keeps checking in on me to dump vending machine snacks on the table and ask if I need more tea. I think she really just wants to gawk at me—Katherine Marcotte, alive, in her precinct!
I said I would only speak to the FBI, not the local police. The nearest FBI field office is in the Hudson Valley, four hours away, but I heard the officer on the phone say something about two agents driving up from Long Island.
If that’s true, and I don’t have to speak to anyone else until they get here, Jesse has more than enough time to retrieve his things and the money from the farmhouse, and get out of the state.
The clock over the door in my holding room says it has been six and a half hours since I arrived; the sound of voices outside the room makes my pulse go still. I recognize the voice of the officer who keeps checking on me, and two new voices.
A swift knock before the door cracks open, and a man steps in, flanked by a woman.
“Katherine?” the woman asks. Her head is cocked slightly as she takes me in, looking for evidence this is all a hoax.
I nod, silent.
“I’m Nicole Cummings, a special agent with the FBI,” she says. “This is my partner, Bill Novak.”
It takes me a moment to absorb this. She is young and black; he’s older and white. She’s tall and slim; he’s squat and beefy. They’re the type of people you’d see chatting next to each other on the bus and think, I wonder if they have a single thing in common.
“What’s this about you not wanting to see your family?” Cummings asks, sliding into the chair across from me, setting a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup on the table.