The Captive

by Fiona King Foster

  They climbed higher into the hills. Snow fell steadily, and the wind drove.

  Brooke tried to steel herself. Somewhere through the storm waited Edmund, Anita, Callum—all of them except Robin—along with the questions that had been held in temporary abeyance by the weather. Traitor. Brooke remembered Edmund’s hand around her throat, how she’d hung in his grip.

  She wasn’t a child anymore, running scared. She’d built her own life and her own family, on her own terms, since she left. As long as there was still any chance of recovering that life, she told herself, shivering, neither Edmund Holland nor anyone else was going to take it from her.

  When, after an hour, Emily’s horse turned off the road, Brooke didn’t recognize the driveway at first. The fence had fallen—rebar posts stood out of the snow, their barbed wire slouching down like cobwebs. No cameras, no defense. Just a rotted-out doghouse.

  Brooke followed her mother with an increasing sense of dissociation; it was the same and not the same. Like Emily, everything seemed to have shrunk. The driveway was shorter than Brooke remembered; much sooner than she expected, they emerged from the basswoods into the yard. Darkness and falling snow hid the buildings, so Brooke didn’t see the drive shed until it was right in front of her, gaping quiet and cold.

  Milo and Davey caught up to them as Emily dismounted. A motion-sensor light on the drive shed flicked on, illuminating whirling snow in front of the doorway.

  Brooke dropped down from the gelding and followed her mother into the building. The long, vaulted shed had once housed half a dozen vehicles; none remained. Emily led the draft horse to a rough stall that had been rigged at one end of the yawning space. Brooke watched with disbelief as her mother loosened the horse’s tackle, undid its girth strap, and removed the saddle. Emily had sneered when Brooke and Robin bought Star. Walking steak, she had called the foal. It was Emily who’d insisted on branding Star, like she was one of their diesel drums.

  A clatter of hooves announced Milo and Davey behind them.

  “This place is a dump,” Davey said, looking around the drive shed with distaste.

  Emily answered him with a flat look, clapping her gloves together to free them of snow.

  When no one else spoke, Davey grabbed the reins from Brooke and Milo and pulled his three horses into a sheltered corner, behind a row of rusted old gas cannisters. “Wait,” he said, suddenly rigid. “These drums are marked with an H. You’re Hollands.”

  “Yeah?” Brooke and Emily answered at the same time.

  Davey turned toward them, chest puffed out, mustache trembling. Brooke watched his face redden as he pieced it together. “This is all a drug war? Lorne’s dead over chalk?”

  “Cool it, Davey,” Brooke said. “What difference does it make now?”

  “Lorne was decent, if you even know what that means. His life mattered.”

  “I don’t know who the hell Lorne is,” Emily said, currying her horse down with a rubber brush. “But you want to watch your mouth if you plan to stay here.”

  “To hell with that. I’m finished with you people. I’m going after Cawley as soon as the snow stops,” Davey said. “Alone.”

  “We need your horses to find the kids,” Milo objected.

  “Forget it. I’ve done enough. Hell of a lot more than you deserve.”

  “I can pay you for the horses,” Emily said. She threw a dusty blanket over her horse and closed its stall.

  “Pay me with what?” Davey asked snidely. “It doesn’t look like chalk has made you too rich.”

  “I have better than cash,” Emily said, waving Davey quiet with one hand, the same simple gesture of authority that had kept four children in line. “You take the first watch and I’ll spell you off in a few hours. There’s a heater in the corner. Brooke, with me.” She didn’t address Milo. Brooke was aware that her mother had scarcely acknowledged him since they were introduced at the river.

  Brooke and Milo left Davey grumbling and followed Emily out of the drive shed. As they forded through shin-deep drifts toward the house, objects emerged unexpectedly from the darkness, confounding Brooke’s sense of direction. Past another pile of rusted diesel drums was the garden—so much closer than she remembered—and the weathered old scarecrow, still leaning, the folds of its faded shirt filling with snow. Brooke peered at it, stepping closer. Reaching out, she pulled the scarecrow’s stuffed body toward her. The pitchfork listed over and the fabric parted as easily as tissue, sending its stuffing of wood chips and softened newspaper down over the snow. Brooke unfolded the scrap of cloth in her hand. By the light from the drive shed, she could see what it was they’d stuck up there like a ghost: the old sovereign flag T-shirt that had been Edmund’s and then Robin’s, worn thin with wear. Brooke shoved the cloth in her pocket and moved past the fallen scarecrow toward the house, preparing to face her family.

  As the willow tree next to the house came into view, Brooke saw that it had withered, its fullness gone. And the house itself, she realized, feeling suddenly off balance, was impossibly small, beyond what memory could distort. Only the kitchen, and her parents’ bedroom above it, remained. Where the other half of the house should have been, there was nothing.

  “Mama,” Brooke said, stopping short. The snow in front of the door was bare and unbroken, the woodshed under the eaves nearly empty, the windows dark. “What happened to the house? Where is everyone?”

  “You don’t know?” Emily spoke lightly, but Brooke heard the dangerous edge underneath. Her mother said nothing else, but climbed the porch and pushed open the door, letting snow spill in over the threshold. A light came on inside the kitchen.

  Brooke looked at Milo beside her. “I think this was a mistake,” she said.

  “We’re here now,” he said, taking Brooke’s arm and drawing her forward. “Might as well go in.”

  Emily ignored them as she made a fire in the cookstove and then lifted a trapdoor to descend into the root cellar. Milo busied himself hanging his and Brooke’s wet things over the stove, casting curious glances around the room. Brooke, feeling unsteady, passed through the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the landing. The house had been built into the hillside, with the kitchen low on the slope, under the willow, and the other rooms above. From the broad landing where Brooke stood, the stairs split: one way led to her parents’ room over the kitchen; the other had led to a hallway and the rest of the house—her and her siblings’ bedrooms, the living room, the utility room—but now, on that side of the landing, the stairs ended in an opaque sheet of plastic that billowed and slapped in the wind, brushed by pelting snow. Brooke shivered in a draft.

  Emily emerged from the root cellar with a dusty jar of something orange, and bent gingerly to lower the trapdoor back into place.

  Emily was sixty, Brooke calculated. Her brown hair had gone grey, and then yellowed to the color Ash’s old eyes mistook for blond. Her face was lined and dappled by sunspots. She moved with the same strength and agility, though more slowly, as if bearing a greater weight than the quart jar of preserves in her hand. And there were the burns that had made Brooke so certain the woman at the Legion must be Delia. Shiny scrawls traversed Emily’s hands, forearms, and face, where they had never been before.

  “What happened?” Brooke asked again.

  Emily sat down at the table, wiping dust from the jar with her sleeve. “Here,” she said. “If you’re hungry.”

  “Where is everyone, Mama?” Brooke stayed where she was on the landing. “Where’s the rest of the house?”

  “They burned it,” Emily said. “Years ago.”

  “The Cawleys?”

  “Who else?” Emily unscrewed the metal ring on the preserves and pried up the rubber seal. “You know,” she said with a hollow laugh, “I’m still getting used to the idea you’re not dead. Robin saw Delia kill you.”

  “Wait.” Brooke’s heart banged in her chest. “Robin’s alive?”

  “There was no body when we went back to get you. Robin kept saying you could hav
e made it somehow, but you never came home, no word, nothing. And you would have come home, wouldn’t you?” Emily held Brooke’s eye with a hard look.

  “Where is he?” Brooke asked. Her heart kept hammering. He was alive. Robin was alive.

  “Gone,” Emily said, scraping the underside of the lid against the open jar. “Left for the city a few years ago. Took Anita’s kids with him, said it was for their own good. I haven’t heard from him since. Who’d have thought he’d be the one to survive? He was more help than I would have expected, I’ll say that. But he still left.”

  “What kids?” Brooke asked, confused.

  “Anita’s girl and boy. They’d be nine and ten now.”

  “Nine and ten,” Brooke echoed. “Then where’s Anita?”

  Emily sighed wearily. She set the jar down on the table and pushed it away from her. “It was a fucking mess, Brooke,” she said. “Delia should have quit the business after Frank Jr. died, but she wouldn’t. Kept on trying to fight. The feds got involved. Callum wanted to be done with it. He went after her. He thought he was paying them back for you, on top of it. You’d been gone years by then. Anyway, he didn’t make it. Died of gunshot wounds.”

  “But he was getting better,” Brooke said stupidly. Callum couldn’t be dead. Aaron fatherless so young. She lowered herself unsteadily to sit on the landing.

  “Anita ambushed the lot of them after that,” Emily continued. “She had a good plan, smart, caught them at their compound early in the morning and took down a bunch of them. I caught up with Angeline myself a few months later. Just luck; I saw her in town. That should have been the end of it. But then they came and burned this place. Anita died in the fire. She threw the kids out the window, but the roof fell in before she could jump. I tried to get to her, but Robin pulled me out.”

  “Anita?” Brooke asked, her voice barely audible.

  “Edmund went after Frank Jr. and Angeline’s sons with Aaron, the night of the fire. Aaron got hit. Edmund was trying to get him in the truck when Stephen Cawley shot your daddy clean in the head. Just like that. Aaron drove himself back here. Lived just long enough to tell me what happened.”

  “Not Aaron, Mama. Aaron was a toddler.”

  “He was eleven, and he idolized Edmund. He would have ridden into hell itself to stay near him.”

  Brooke couldn’t comprehend it. Edmund, Anita, Callum, a half-grown Aaron she’d never even known . . .

  She was reminded incongruously of the first time she’d driven Anita’s hatchback, an automatic transmission, after having learned on a standard: her foot plunging after a clutch that wasn’t there, hand swiping for a nonexistent gear shift.

  They were all gone.

  “Aaron shouldn’t have been there, Mama,” Brooke said. “He was eleven?”

  “Shut your traitor’s mouth, Brooke!” Emily whirled on her daughter. “You should have been there. If it had been you with Edmund that night instead of a goddamn child, he would have survived. Now I hear you had Stephen Cawley and you lost him? Why didn’t you shoot him?”

  Brooke wondered if she would have shot Cawley if she’d known how much his family had taken from her. She looked at Milo, standing next to the stove. He returned her gaze, and she saw there was sympathy in his eyes.

  “I’m not like that anymore,” Brooke said.

  “I can see that,” Emily said with disgust.

  Brooke hung her head.

  Green woods, gray mist. Nothing came.

  She felt footsteps on the stairs and then Milo was sitting next to her on the landing. He had something, she saw: the framed picture from the Warren. He had taken it down from its nail next to the stove. He handed it to her wordlessly.

  “Who’s this mutt you’ve dragged home, anyway?” Emily asked, watching Brooke and Milo beadily. “Your father wouldn’t have let one of them in the house.”

  “Oh, Mama,” Brooke said, feeling sick. Nothing had changed. The better part of their family murdered, and Emily would hold on to her hatred as if life depended on it. As if Milo was some kind of affront. As if killing Cawley would bring any of them back.

  “Is this you?” Milo asked Brooke, pointing at the image of her three-year-old self. He had tensed at Emily’s words but did nothing to acknowledge them.

  Brooke nodded, grateful and embarrassed.

  “You look like Holly at that age,” Milo said.

  “Holly.” Emily turned the name over in her mouth. “That’s one of your girls? I would have thought they’d come out dark. Ethnic genes usually show through.”

  “Stop it, Mama,” Brooke said, gripping the picture frame harder.

  “It’s a simple fact.”

  “Why do you even care?”

  “Your father would care.”

  “Well, he’s not here, is he?”

  “No,” Emily whispered, and Brooke was amazed to hear her mother’s voice thickened by tears. Emily had never cried, not once.

  “Holly looks like you, too, actually,” Milo said. A stiff, conciliatory offering that Emily didn’t deserve.

  “I’m sorry, Milo,” Brooke said. She handed the picture back to him. She couldn’t see the resemblance to Holly. “I thought I could keep them safe. I was trying to protect them, but I only put them in worse danger.”

  “Life is danger,” Emily said, with a sad smile, spinning the jar of preserves slowly on the table in front of her. “You think you can protect them, but you can’t. Trust me.”

  EMILY MADE HERSELF up blankets next to the stove, planning to switch with Davey halfway through the night. Brooke and Milo left her to her hateful thoughts and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. Out the upstairs window, Brooke could see a light still shining in the drive shed, where Davey kept watch.

  She climbed into the bed beside Milo. The blankets smelled like they always had: dust and wood chips and lavender soap.

  The loss of Callum and Anita and Aaron hurt like a hole in her chest. The revelation that Robin was alive was a deep and unexpected comfort, but even if she could tell him how sorry she was for leaving him behind, she felt certain he would never be able to forgive her—what could his life have been like here, without her, watching the rest of their family die?

  The only one she couldn’t find it in her to miss was Edmund. Knowing he was gone from the earth, relief dwarfed every other feeling. It was like a muscle loosening that she hadn’t realized was tensed all these years.

  She rolled toward Milo on the bed and felt him twist to look at her. She put her hand under his shirt, reaching up to the springy hair of his chest, needing his warmth, the smell of him, heat and salt, his soft touch.

  But the hand that grabbed hers through his shirt wasn’t soft. He held her like a spider in a tissue. She froze. Milo, who had loved her, had always forgiven her—he knew the truth now, and it must be sinking in, as she’d feared it would. You’re Hollands, Davey had said, as if even the name tasted foul.

  Brooke shrank back, but when she moved to withdraw her hand, Milo didn’t let go. He turned, sinking his face into her hair, his hand holding her injured shoulder still while he pulled himself against her, awkward with his own hurt arm. He kissed her, and there was roughness behind it, and feeling. Brooke could have cried with relief. Desire came, full and ready, and she let it, kissing him back, her good arm around his shoulders, hand running down to the small of his back, drawing him to her, turning to meet his body with hers, kicking the covers down.

  They held their voices in, each swallowing the other’s breath, desperate. If everything around them was absence and imbalance and mistakes, there was still this, touch speeding on desire, the heat explosive, somehow contained to the outline of their bodies.

  Brooke had expected to lie awake, eaten by images of Holly and Sal cold and alone for another night. With Milo’s warm hand on her chest, anchoring her to the earth, she felt fatigue overtaking her.

  On the edge of sleep, she heard Milo whisper, “I miss them so much, Brooke. I don’t think I can stand it.”

&n
bsp; “No,” she murmured. “Me neither.”

  Her dreams were dark, and she forgot them later.

  16

  Brooke couldn’t tell at first what had woken her. It was still night. Milo snored softly next to her. A golden-orange glow lit the window. As sleep thinned, Brooke became aware of a familiar smell. She struggled upright against leaden fatigue, hoping she was still dreaming.

  She staggered to the window, one leg asleep and caving under her.

  Outside, the drive shed was burning, flames rising fifty feet into the night sky.

  “Wake up,” Brooke croaked to Milo, searching for her clothes on the floor. “They’re here.”

  She pulled her pants on as she hurried downstairs. Davey was stretched out under blankets next to the stove. Brooke must have slept through the handoff with Emily; no guessing what time it was. She kicked him as she passed. “Get your gun,” she called, grabbing her rifle from the counter.

  Brooke threw open the kitchen door. Across the yard, the drive shed was engulfed in fire. There was a steady rushing sound, like water falling through a burst dam. A single figure moved against the glow—Emily.

  Brooke scanned the darkness around the fire, trying to figure out which direction the attack had come from. She could only see Emily, running with her shotgun, shouting something Brooke couldn’t hear.

  “Mama!” Brooke’s voice was lost under the roar of the fire.

  Tucking the rifle close against her right side, praying her shoulder would hold when she needed it, Brooke darted into the open toward Emily. Only when they were close enough to touch could Brooke make out her mother’s words.

  “Come and get us!” Emily screamed into the darkness. “You want us, come and get us, coward!”

  “Where are they, Mama? Which way?”

  “Brooke! You got your rifle? Good.” Emily’s face was streaked with tears, and her eyes were puffy. Brooke wondered if she’d tried to put the fire out and suffered the effects of smoke. But her clothes didn’t look burnt. More as if she’d simply been crying. Crying and crying for hours.