The Captive

by Fiona King Foster

  Carefully, carefully, leaning against the granite with her fingertips, shaping her body so as not to slip and make a mark, Brooke edged her way along until she was well off her original trail. She dropped down into a recently trampled turkey run. A dozen or more birds had passed this way. She kept to their corridor of flattened snow, shuffling her steps roughly, hoping to disguise the direction of her passage from anyone who happened upon her boot prints among the turkeys’ scratches.

  She hadn’t gone far when she became aware of far-off hoofbeats—a rhythm barely perceptible as sound, more felt through the soles of her feet than heard. She ducked into the crotch of a forked cedar and brought the barrel of her rifle up against her cheek, listening. In stillness, she was instantly colder. She tried to control her shivering enough that she could hear.

  The horse was coming at a walk from the east. Wrong direction for Delia; it must be Cawley. He had left the swamp and was coming back around for her. Strange that he would announce his presence so plainly and give her the chance at a shot.

  But the hoofbeats did not seem to get closer. He was passing north of her, some distance into the bush. She must have stumbled on him in the act of doubling back, before he knew her position.

  Fearful of a trap but unwilling to let Cawley get out of reach, Brooke moved as quickly and silently as she could to intercept.

  The bush here was healthy spruce and cedar; the snow had barely penetrated and the floor was clear of underbrush. Brooke advanced half-crouched toward the hoofbeats, slipping from one tree to the next like a shadow.

  Suddenly, a heavy shape separated itself from the upper branches of a cedar to her left, falling and stumbling through the air until, as it came even with Brooke’s head, it unfolded awkward wings and caught lift—a wild turkey, brown and bronze, the size of a piglet; as it ascended, the turkey flushed another from its roost, the two of them beating the air loudly, gaining their clumsy elevation. Brooke listened under their huffing for the sound of the horse and heard nothing. The rider had stopped.

  She sank against the tree closest to her and hooked an index finger around the rifle trigger. No mercy now; things had gone too far wrong. If there had ever been another choice, Lorne had taken it from her. She had to be ready to kill Stephen Cawley this time.

  A woman’s voice spoke before Brooke could move. “I’ll give you one chance, whoever you are, to come out with your hands up.”

  Brooke recognized the sheriff’s weary tone.

  “Maxwell?” she called out, surprised.

  “Step out with your hands over your head. If I see a gun barrel, it’s over.”

  Brooke gripped the rifle at its neck and lifted it overhead as she walked toward the voice. She could see Maxwell now, astride a dark chestnut horse that carried heavy saddlebags across its rump.

  “It’s just me,” Brooke said.

  “Place your gun on the ground and lie down over there,” Maxwell said. “Over against the stump there.”

  “Why? What are you—” Brooke was twenty feet from the horse now and finally realized what she was looking at. It wasn’t saddlebags slung over the chestnut’s back. It was Lorne.

  “This is your last warning, Mom.”

  “I tried to warn him,” Brooke said. Maxwell still had the gun aimed at her. “Cawley’s got his horse, and his revolver.”

  “Lorne was my nephew, not that it matters to you. He was a good person.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Brooke said, realizing what the sheriff was saying. “Cawley stole his gun and shot him with it.”

  “That man was tied.”

  “I don’t know how he got loose. I wasn’t there. Lorne came and found us and took him off me for the bounty,” Brooke said, failing to keep the bitterness from her voice. “Is that the kind of good person he was?”

  “Shut your mouth and lay your rifle down, right now.”

  “My kids—”

  “Now!”

  “They’re alone out there!” Brooke shouted. “Cawley shot Milo!”

  “Enough,” Maxwell said, leveling her gun. “I warned you.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Brooke said, leaning forward to lay the rifle down. “This is dangerous. I’m telling you, Cawley’s out there and he’s armed. Please, Sheriff.”

  Maxwell swung down from her horse, cracked Brooke’s rifle, and emptied it of cartridges.

  “Over there by the stump and face down, with your hands behind your back.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Goddamn it.” Maxwell came at Brooke, shoving her hard in the chest, throwing her to the ground. “Just do what I tell you.”

  “My kids are out there, Sheriff!”

  “Get over,” Maxwell said, a hard scowl on her face. She stuck a boot under Brooke’s ribs and tried to flip her onto her front, but Brooke twisted away.

  “I swear, I’m not the one who killed your nephew.”

  “Quit flipping around if you don’t want to get shot. I’m arresting you and taking you back to town.”

  Brooke turned slowly onto her stomach and put her hands behind her back.

  “They’re in danger,” she tried again. “You don’t understand.”

  Maxwell collected Brooke’s rifle and strapped it with her own gun to the saddle. Then she approached, pulling old metal handcuffs out of a pocket. Brooke scanned the trees for Cawley. This was when he would attack, if he was watching—neither of them armed, one distracted and the other face down on the ground.

  Brooke waited for her moment. She felt cold metal as Maxwell worked the first cuff around her left wrist, cinching it slowly. The sheriff was clumsy with the cuffs, as if she hadn’t used them before. Tugging the second cuff toward Brooke’s right wrist, she fumbled. Brooke moved fast, yanking her arms free and twisting under Maxwell to punch her in the ribs.

  The sheriff’s thick coat absorbed most of the hit. She grabbed the open cuff trailing from Brooke’s left wrist and tried again to bring it around her right. Brooke kicked the sheriff’s leg and pulled away, launching herself toward the horse. It shied out of Brooke’s reach, and she felt Maxwell’s full weight come down on her back.

  “Let me go!” Brooke shouted, her face pressed into cedar needles and snow. Her chin ground painfully against the earth.

  Maxwell drove her knee into the small of Brooke’s back, preventing her from getting up. She gripped Brooke’s uncuffed wrist and wrenched it toward the other one.

  Brooke’s right shoulder, weakened by its old injury, resisted for a brief moment. She felt it going, and then came the sickening pain. She screamed, vomit rising in her throat.

  “What now?” Maxwell asked.

  “You pulled my arm out of the socket,” Brooke gasped.

  “Pain in the ass,” Maxwell said, dropping Brooke’s dislocated arm without cuffing it. She hiked up her parka and removed the leather belt from her pants.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Breathe,” Maxwell said, kneeling behind Brooke. “No more goddamn screaming.”

  Brooke breathed. With one expert motion, the sheriff pulled the shoulder forward, up, and back, setting it back in the joint.

  Brooke was astonished. She had learned to set her shoulder herself, when she’d pulled it in the past, but it had never gone in that easily.

  “Hold that,” Maxwell said. Brooke obeyed, using her left hand to brace the numb and throbbing right shoulder while Maxwell ran her belt around Brooke’s chest and strapped the injured arm firmly in place. It was more stable than a sling, Brooke realized; her right arm wouldn’t move at all this way.

  “Now get up,” Maxwell said.

  “Give me a minute.”

  “I said get up if you don’t want me hauling on that arm again.”

  Brooke struggled to her knees and stood. The handcuffs still trailed from her left wrist. “I can’t mount like this.”

  “You’re not riding.” Maxwell ran a rope through the empty cuff and tied it to her saddle horn. Then she climbed atop her horse, careful not
to kick Lorne’s limp body, and took up the reins.

  The rope running from the saddle horn was short. As Maxwell started north, Brooke had no choice but to trot alongside.

  Next to her, Lorne’s booted feet jerked unnervingly as his body was rocked by the horse’s rolling flanks. Brooke jogged to keep up, pain radiating through her shoulder with every step.

  They left the forest. Out in the open, the landscape was empty and dull under muted noon light. They passed no one, and saw no tracks.

  IN TOWN, Sheriff Maxwell led Brooke back to the central square, where she dismounted in front of the Legion. Brooke swayed on her feet, sapped from keeping up with Maxwell, her empty stomach cramping, fatigue graying everything, the cold penetrating deep into her bones. Only the throbbing in her shoulder—so severe now that each pulse felt like an electric shock—and her unrelenting terror about what was happening in the forest kept her from sleeping where she stood.

  Maxwell climbed the Legion steps and knocked on the door. A man of about sixty answered. He was husky and red-faced, with an iron-gray walrus mustache. Taking in the heap on Maxwell’s horse, the man held his stomach and appeared to shrink into his hulking frame, as if suddenly ill. The sheriff put a steadying hand on his arm. Brooke noticed that they had the same build, the same sloping shoulders and high, wide hips; their faces were similarly broad through the brow and cheekbones, stretched-looking, like pit bulls. A brother, Brooke thought. The deputy’s father.

  Maxwell and the man spoke. Brooke couldn’t make out what they said. They embraced, the man shaking with suppressed sobs. Maxwell beat the man’s back sharply a few times until he straightened and separated from her. His gaze fell on Brooke, hard and hateful. Her apprehension quickened. A town this size wouldn’t keep a jail. They’d deal with their problems some other way.

  The man descended the steps, unhooked her rope from the saddle horn, and let it fall to the snowy street.

  “Come on.” Maxwell was holding the door of the Legion open, gesturing for Brooke to come. As she climbed the steps, she expected any moment to feel a blow from behind, but none came. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw that the man had gathered up the horse’s reins and was leading it, with its rocking cargo, out of the square.

  Inside, the Legion hall was an open space with tables and chairs, a bar, and a staircase leading up to the second floor. Maxwell led Brooke to the bottom of the stairs and closed the empty handcuff around the handrail bracket.

  “You have no right to do this,” Brooke said. “I need my gun back. My kids are in danger.”

  Maxwell gave no sign of having heard her. She clattered around behind the bar and came back with a freezer bag of ice, which she laid between Brooke’s injured shoulder and her coat. Then she left, locking the door behind her.

  Brooke shivered violently now. The numbing ice eased some of the pain in her shoulder, but the rest of her was turning numb too; she had no feeling in her feet, and her hands were the blue-gray of a corpse, her thoughts sluggish. The early stages of hypothermia. She stamped her feet, trying to keep blood circulating.

  Do something.

  The handcuffs were steel. The handrail bracket was steel. The screws that anchored the bracket were stripped. She was chained like a dog to the wall.

  She heard a high, thin whine, and realized it was her own voice: a pathetic animal sound escaping her throat.

  “Stop,” she snapped at herself. “Stop it.”

  She shivered. She stamped her feet. She waited.

  BROOKE DIDN’T KNOW how much time had passed when she heard voices, footsteps, and a key in the lock. The windows were brighter. The sky must have cleared. The ice on her shoulder had melted and leaked out of its limp bag, soaking her coat and shirt.

  The doors opened; against the double rectangle of light, Brooke saw Maxwell’s tall form and another—slighter, so familiar.

  “Milo,” Brooke rasped, looking past him for Holly and Sal.

  Maxwell and Milo came farther into the room and the doors swung closed behind them. They were alone. Milo met Brooke’s eyes and looked away. He didn’t have the girls.

  “He came to my house,” the sheriff said. “Looking for you.”

  “Let us go,” Brooke said. “Please. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  The sheriff pulled a chair away from one of the tables and settled Milo into it. Brooke saw now that another set of handcuffs hung from the wrist of his unshot arm. On the other side, the sleeve of his jacket had been removed and the wound bandaged neatly. “Can you reach down, here?” Maxwell asked as she straightened Milo’s good arm and cuffed his wrist to the chair’s chrome frame.

  “At least look for the kids,” Brooke begged. “We saw them in the forest. They’ve been out there for hours.”

  “I’ll tell you the same thing I told your husband: your family is not my concern. My job is to protect this town. Right now that means finding whoever’s to blame for what happened to Lorne.”

  “Cawley killed him,” Brooke said, seizing on finding and whoever. In the forest, Maxwell had been certain that Brooke was responsible. “It was Cawley, and he’s still out there.”

  “Does she ever shut up?” Maxwell asked Milo. She jingled the keys in her pocket as she headed for the door.

  “They’re children!” Brooke shouted.

  The sheriff left, locking the door. Her footsteps echoed on the porch stairs outside and then faded across the square, into silence.

  “I looked,” Milo said. His voice was reedy, as if he’d shouted himself hoarse. “You didn’t come back, so I looked, but I couldn’t find them, just a trail. I followed it to town. I thought you must have them.”

  The pressure was building in Brooke’s throat and she feared that awful sound would escape again. She needed to feel nothing. She tried to summon green trees, soft mist, but the calm place would not come.

  “What happened, Brooke?” Milo asked. Gently. He could still be gentle with her.

  She stared at the dusty floor, the chairs with their chrome legs blooming rust, the walls. Stale old pictures, plaques, and posters. Military portraits of long-dead legionnaires. The sovereign flag. Younger versions of Sheriff Maxwell and her brother laying a giant wreath. Memorials. Trophies.

  “Brooke?”

  The picture of the Warren River standoff wasn’t among these relics. Maxwell had made it plain the Hollands were out of favor here, as everywhere. Brooke thought of Edmund expounding at the kitchen table, shouting above the refinery, banging his steering wheel. All his posturing, his theories, his blame. All for nothing.

  “Brooke.” Milo’s voice was more insistent now. “Look at me.”

  She looked at Milo. She tried to feel the warmth of him across the cold room and only shivered harder. There was no more avoiding it.

  She took a deep breath and told him.

  12

  Brooke had always led Milo to believe that her bad shoulder was the result of a childhood fall. Now she explained that the accident had in fact happened just days before she arrived in Buxton, still healing and intending to stay no more than a season.

  “Well, accident. I was thrown in front of a truck.”

  “What?” Milo said. “Who threw you in front of a truck?”

  “My dad,” Brooke answered simply.

  After Delia survived Brooke and Anita’s attack, she and Frank Jr. had stepped up their assault, taking the opportunity to recover some of their one-time territory. Callum was finally out of bed but could barely drive, let alone fight, and Anita was running the lab, so it had fallen to Brooke to keep the dealers in line. Twice, she had been shot at from passing trucks—the second time in broad daylight, right in town, where there was a ban on anyone other than militia volunteers carrying weapons.

  Then, in the dregs of summer, Jay brought the news that Shaw Station had finally dropped the charge against Edmund. He was set to be released at one o’clock the next day. It was late in the evening when Jay arrived at the house, and by rare chance they w
ere all there, eating an exhausted meal in the kitchen.

  “Everyone goes,” Emily said, laying her hands flat on the table. “He should see all of you when he comes through the door. Robin, you too. Everyone.”

  “It’s too risky to all be in the same place,” Brooke objected, glancing at Robin. Her anxiety had grown with each day that her brother didn’t leave for the city. Now she worried they were out of time. “The Cawleys will try something.”

  “All the more reason,” Emily said. “Let them fucking try.”

  “Rob and I can go on Star, then,” Brooke offered, seizing on an idea. “So you have room for Daddy on the way home.”

  They’d lost two vehicles at the soap factory—Anita’s shot-up hatchback abandoned and Edmund’s truck still missing its windshield—leaving only Callum’s truck. In the excuse to travel separately, Brooke saw an opening. That night, after Emily was in bed, she cornered Robin.

  “It’s got to be tomorrow,” she said. “It’ll only be harder once he’s back.”

  “I know,” Robin said, sounding younger than his fifteen years. “Can’t you come too?” he asked again.

  “Rob, what would I do in the city?”

  “Anything,” he said, grasping her arm. “You can do anything.”

  “You can e-mail me,” Brooke said, squeezing his hand. Part of her wished he would go, just so she could stop bracing herself for the loss of him. “Tell me everything I’m missing.”

  In a backpack small enough not to invite questions, they stuffed clothes, a toothbrush, an old phone Robin could use to reach out to the kitsch dealer for help getting settled. His birth certificate was lost, if it had ever existed, and they couldn’t ask Emily, so they packed the only official proof of Robin’s existence they could find: a first grade report card from his last year of school. They tucked his money into a flat leather bag that would fit under his clothes.