by Andrew Hart
I nodded at Nadine, not daring to speak, and together we pulled, me with both hands, her with just her left. The drawstring moved six inches, nine, but wouldn’t go all the way. I held it as long as I could but couldn’t get it closer to the latching mechanism, and released it, panting, tears running down my face.
The bedroom door was shouldered open. It sounded like it was inches away. He burst in.
“Hiding under the bed, Nadine?” he speculated.
“Again,” whispered Nadine.
I didn’t think I could, but I tried. I felt his presence like a shadow, dark and eclipsing, squeezing me out of my life, swallowing up my children.
“Pull,” I said.
The drawstring moved up, struggled, surged another inch, and latched. I snatched an arrow from the quiver and slammed it in place. I glanced at Nadine, but she had crumpled on the tiles. I fumbled for the safety catch, and in that instant two shots rang out. The bathroom door juddered and split. The door of the shower stall opposite exploded in a million shards of glass, stinging and slicing like grit and razors, and then he was in.
For a split second, his eyes flashed around the room, finding his target, and in that endless fraction of a moment, I lifted the heavy bow and fired.
Chapter Sixty
Nadine had been broken long before Carl’s bullet shattered her arm. She knew that. She had thought herself beyond healing, beyond even the will to want it. She was broken and always would be.
Then there was the arrow, a shaft of carbon with rubbery flights sculpted like feathers and a hard steel tip. It hit him on the left side of his chest, sliding in under the stock of the rifle he was going to use to butcher the family who had taken her in, the family she had lied to over and over. She saw the surprise on his face, the indignation, and before the rage could come back into his eyes, she moved.
He wasn’t dead. He was stunned and momentarily incapacitated, but he would be up again. He would always be up again.
He had slumped against the wall, his eyes wide. The arrow had gone deep, almost through, and for a moment, he looked at it, baffled, stupid, as if wondering how it had gotten there, outraged that these women had shot him. Nadine kicked him hard between the legs, kicked the rifle away from his clutching hands, and drew the pistol from his waistband.
She was conscious of Anna grabbing her screaming daughters and pushing past her, out into the bedroom and downstairs, but she could only see him and the gun in her hand as she pressed it to his neck.
She swallowed up his rage and made it hers. She was fury, justice, vengeance, death itself. The gun gave her power.
Nadine stood there for a long moment, feeling the pistol in her hand like a question mark, decisions fighting for attention in her head, the past—her past—lining up in front of her where she could see it, yelling at her, telling her what she was and what she was not.
And then there was Anna at her elbow, coming back for her, reaching out and putting her hand on the gun with pressure that was so gentle, it was almost a caress. They took the guns with them, Anna’s arm around Nadine’s broad shoulders, out and down to where the girls were waiting at the splintered front door, then out to where the wounded policeman was leaning across the hood of his car, waving them toward him with a ragged, bandaged hand, his handgun ready.
Even as she ran, Nadine twisted her face back toward the house where Carl lay sprawled but still breathing, still alive.
Chapter Sixty-One
The pain had knocked him down, but Carl Jennings was used to pain. It was hot and savage, but the arrow had not hit his heart, and though he knew he was bleeding heavily, he felt only a shortness of breath. He tried to get to his feet but found that the motion rolled him so that the arrow shaft brushed the ground, sending another bolt of agony through his chest.
It was going to have to come out.
He grasped it with both hands, braced himself, and pulled, roaring like a wounded lion. The crossbow bolt was slick with blood, but it moved. For a second, the surge of pain and nausea threatened to send him spinning into unconsciousness, but he fought for control, breathed, and dragged it free. The arrowhead was smooth and rounded, a target arrow rather than a hunting piece with the triangle razor-edged tip designed to stay in place.
Lucky for him. Not for them.
The arrow would leave a straight hole that might become infected and may have done other damage he couldn’t see, but it wasn’t like what a bullet would do. He was bleeding heavily, but he figured that if he could get out, he’d live.
Get out. Go back the way he came, through the backyard, and across the creek. If he could get back to the car before the police closed the roads, he was as good as free.
He could come back for Nadine another day. And the Kleins. It was the Jap bitch who had shot him, after all.
So he rolled to his knees, blood pattering onto the fancy tiled floor, and then he was up and staggering. There was no sign of life in the bedroom or in the hallway. At the foot of the stairs, the front door hung open. They’d gone.
Carl grasped the handrail and shambled down the stairs as fast as he dared. There was still only one car out front, its lights going, but he thought he could hear distant sirens. He didn’t have long.
He made for the basement steps, conscious that his breathing was getting shallower as he forced his body to work. The pain on his left side wasn’t constant but sharpened with each breath. For the first time since the evening had begun, Carl felt a spike of panic. This wasn’t just blood loss and pain. The arrow had done something else.
He half fell down the last steps, leaving bloody handprints on the blue walls and misjudging his steps as his head seemed to fill with fog and anxiety. But the cops were at the front. He still had time.
He barreled out of the basement door and into the cold night. The sirens were louder now, closer, but the backyard was still, dark and empty. He made for the steps down from the deck, but his lungs felt tighter than ever, no matter how hard he gulped the frigid air. He couldn’t get enough. He was panting, sucking in the night.
Something’s wrong . . .
His feet fumbled on the steps, and this time he did go down, tumbling painfully into the grass at the bottom. It was harder to get up now. He couldn’t stand tall but loped, apelike, doubled over, his breathing ragged, painful and uneven.
The lyrics from “Born in the U.S.A.” cycled through his head. The chorus, at least. He only knew the chorus. But it worked like a battle cry and gave him focus, energy.
He rolled over the fence into the weeds, then slipped and fell down the slick bank into the creek. The landing was silty and wet, but it drove the air from his lungs anyway. The blackout that he sensed was hunting him almost had its way at last. Another agonizing gathering of his waning strength, another half crawl, this time through the chilly water to the other side, and then the rearing, stamping pain as he fought to haul himself up the north bank.
Carl Jennings’s scattered mind fought to find something to hold on to, some sliver of hope. If he could get to the road, to the car, if he could sit and stem the bleeding, he could force himself to drive. He had to stay awake, to keep breathing.
But that was hard. His chest felt like something huge was straddling him, crushing him down into the weeds. Perhaps if he rested for a moment, got his breath back, he could make the final push to the car.
Dimly, he realized there was sound coming from the tall dry grass only yards from where he had collapsed, panting. It was the sound of movement, stealthy and careful.
Can’t be the cops, he thought wildly. Not yet. Not here.
And in truth, it didn’t sound like people. It certainly didn’t smell like them. He was processing this vaguely, that strange animal musk, when the first wolfish head poked watchfully through the weeds, its hard eyes fixed on him. Then another and another, muzzles wet, jaws lolling. They were brown, bat-eared, and lean as foxes, but their eyes were steady and appraising. He could sense their hunger.
Carl tried to rai
se a hand to fend them off, but then the first coyote was tugging at the flesh of his leg, and as he tried to kick, sit up, and lash out, he succeeded only in rolling onto his back and exposing his throat, so that his dying cries were lost to the eerie chorus of their howling.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Anna
Two months later
Mary Beth and Kurt moved out without speaking to us again. I guess there are some things you can’t unsay. I tried not to care, and a part of me was genuinely glad not to have to face them after all that had passed between us, but it still made me sad. I didn’t feel responsible, but it was impossible not to feel that something I had thought was basically good about our move to Charlotte had turned out to have been tarnished from the start.
Strange that I thought of it at all, really, given all the other things that had happened.
Carl Jennings’s body was found in the early hours of the morning after the attack. Cause of death was cited as blood loss and severe damage to his airway inflicted by wild animals, pursuant to a tension pneumothorax, the lower lobe of his left lung having been perforated by an arrow fired from a crossbow and subsequently removed, aggravating the injury. This was relayed to me not by Officer Randall, who was now considered a witness as well as a victim, but by the homicide detective who led the case. His name was Neale. I listened and said nothing. I had already told him that it was me who’d fired the crossbow, though Nadine and I, in a curious moment of desperate solidarity, had loaded it together. There were no secrets to keep about what had happened that night, or in the months leading up to it.
Still, I had never killed a man before, and though Neale tried to suggest that I still hadn’t, I knew differently.
Nadine was arrested for her various offenses, mostly connected to identity theft, though there might yet be charges emerging for wasting hospital time and resources. It seemed unlikely that her namesake—the real Oaklynn Durst—would press charges, given that Nadine hadn’t actually stolen anything from her but her name. Nadine was also keeping no secrets, and the police seemed to think that she would get away with a suspended sentence, given the duress she had been under. As her personal history came out, it even seemed possible that she might not be prohibited from working in child services. I didn’t know if they could mandate therapy, but she had voluntarily registered for a course of treatment, though whether she was curable was anyone’s guess.
“They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step,” she said with a wan smile when I went to visit her.
We sold her book at auction a month after the case hit the headlines. She is in the process of revising it, making the protagonist a woman and, at my suggestion, not an accountant but a nanny. Whether she’ll see jail time or not is unclear, but if she does, she’ll come out to a healthy nest egg and publishers lining up to see if she has more than one book in her. At first, I was wary of capitalizing on such a painful and personal experience, but as Josh observed, we’d already lived through the crap. If someone wanted to give us money as a result, who were we to argue? Actually, the acclaim I felt was coming for the book might do as much for Nadine as any therapist could. The more I talked to her, the more I saw how rarely she had ever been praised for anything other than helping other people, being the giver of care. That she was about to earn something for herself for once seemed long overdue.
This is not to say that we were suddenly bosom friends. I was still wary of her, alert to the distance and calculation I had recognized in her from the book’s original incarnation, and though I felt sorry for her, I worried that some kinds of damage could not be completely undone. I believed her when she said she had come to love my daughters and would never have hurt them, but she had, if nothing else, used them to her own ends, and I wouldn’t forget that in a hurry. If she stayed out of prison, we would stay in touch, and she would be allowed to see the girls—which they all wanted—but I would watch. I had been a half second away from losing them. I would not take such a chance again.
As for me, I felt that I had emerged from the moon’s shadow and stepped back into my own life. I hugged my kids, loved my husband, did my work, and felt, I suppose, a kind of happiness I had not experienced before—a simple contentment that came from the way things were, not from what might yet be. But if the events two months ago had taught me anything, it’s that I cannot know the hearts of people. The man in the grocery store who chats to my daughters might want people like me gone from this country and is prepared to do his part to make that happen. They know to hide their swastikas. Some of them don’t even know they have them.
I do.
I’ve seen them. I cannot know their hearts, but I have learned the kind of wary and watchful distance that is, at its core, untrusting and, for all its defiance, fearful, and not just for my life or that of my family. I fear for the people we have become, the country we live in, and the future we are permitting to evolve. So I hold on to what I value all the tighter, grip it closer to me, and in spite of all the fear, that is also an act of defiance, faith, and even love. It is, I continue to believe as I sit down with my daughters to read together, the one thing that might save us.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Doctors Darin Kennedy and Phaenarete Osako; Janine Spendlove; Shellie Kingaby Hyser, Kerra Bolton, and Stacey Glick; as well as to Alicia Clancy and all at Lake Union.
About the Author
Andrew Hart is one of the pseudonyms of New York Times bestselling and award-winning author A.J. Hartley. His twenty novels straddle multiple genres for adults and younger readers, and they have been translated into dozens of languages worldwide. As Andrew James Hartley, he is also the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. His website is www.ajhartley.net.