No Bad Deed

by Heather Chavez

  The road ended. With only my tiny scissors for a weapon, I started climbing toward the house at the top of the hill.

  44

  I didn’t make it to the house. When I turned the corner, another structure drew my interest. A cinder-block creamery with pine slats blinding its windows, the rotted planks of its roof slumped in resignation.

  My attention shifted from the creamery to its neighbor, a storage shed. The shed held my interest longer. Old, abandoned. The hard-packed dirt around it held more polish than the building that sprang from it.

  It was the kind of place that might hold piles of burlap sacks. Like the one in that texted image of an unconscious Sam.

  With the moon pushing away the sun, the cornflower sky deepened to indigo. I kept to the darkness beneath the oaks. As I approached the shed, burrs breached the barrier of my jeans, sticking to my socks. I tried the door. Locked.

  Frustrated but not surprised, I planted my feet, palmed my scissors, then threw my shoulder against the door. My body took most of the jolt. I slammed against it a second time. The frame crackled, split. A third strike and I was in, brushing aside cobwebs that laced the entrance.

  My shoulder throbbed as I stood in the threshold, surveying the shed—apparently once used for the storage of empty feed sacks. Fading light seeped in through the four small windows high in the rafters, filtered through clouds of dust and spiderwebbing.

  Carver’s earlier words, from our meeting at the hospital, tortured me now: I placed him on a pile of feed sacks and watched as he rolled, facedown, on the burlap.

  Thinking of Sam that way—unconscious on his stomach, arms splayed useless to his sides—brought a sudden and dagger-sharp clarity. I worked to draw breath. Images flipped through my head in quick succession: Sam’s arm draped across his lover. Daryl drugged with my kids beside him. Sam battered atop burlap. The images blurred, until Sam’s arm became indistinguishable from Daryl’s, the fabric of Daryl’s sofa melting into a pile of feed sacks—a horror show inside my brain that I studied with new intensity.

  I had been so focused on the woman in the photo with Sam and the possible ways the image might have been manipulated. But now I saw what I had missed before—in the picture of Sam and the woman, there had been no tension in his shoulders or in his arms. He had been posed in profile, the bruised side of his face hidden against his lover’s chest.

  The sound of a man clearing his throat made me jump, and I rammed my already aching shoulder into an industrial vacuum, mounted to a beam overhead.

  “Finally, your timing doesn’t suck,” he said.

  I immediately recognized the voice. It was the same one that had threatened me and my children.

  The scissors clenched in my fist, I moved toward the voice and found Carver in the corner, mostly hidden by a stack of boxes. In his current condition, Carver posed no threat: he squirmed against ropes that bound his ankles and wrists.

  “Care to untie me?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Through the windows near the rafters, the rising moon cut through spiderwebbed glass and cast pale bands across Carver’s face. His lip was swollen, and the ropy scar along his jaw had been scraped raw. Bits of gravel pebbled one cheek.

  In my search for Carver, I had pictured him a thousand ways, but I had never pictured him helpless. Still, I couldn’t discount him as a suspect solely because of his bindings. Criminals turned on one another all the time. Look at Ernie, who had shared all he knew for a few fake painkillers.

  It was also a mistake to think of Carver as helpless.

  “Where’s Leo?”

  He grinned, smug despite his compromised condition. “Shouldn’t a mom know where her kids are?”

  “Do you know where your child is?”

  “You know about that?”

  My intake of breath was sudden and sharp. So what Red told me about the baby was true, and Carver knew about it. I hadn’t expected that. “My father, Red, worked here as a contractor.”

  “I knew Red, or of him.” His words careful. “Through Natalie.”

  “He was here the night Natalie gave birth. To your child.”

  “And he didn’t try to save her?”

  Her. So the baby had been a girl.

  Even as this fact registered, anger flared that he would blame Red. “As the father, wasn’t it your job to protect your child?” I immediately recognized my hypocrisy: an hour earlier, I had blamed Red for the same thing. And who was I to judge, when I had so completely failed my own son? “What happened to her?”

  “Growing up here, I’m guessing terrible things.” For a moment, Carver’s eyes went soft, his face slack. “Did you know that whenever Natalie did something her mom didn’t like, Dee would throw her in a box? And she really hated her daughter getting knocked up. Usually, Dee would let her out after a day or two, but that last time, she planted her in the ground and walked away.”

  The casual way he said this made me want to stab him in an eye with my scissors. Left eye or right, I didn’t care.

  “You knew about the abuse and did nothing?” I asked. Even if Dee killed Natalie, Carver deserved every year he had served at San Quentin.

  Carver’s chest inflated, his shoulders spread, and I was reminded again of the beast he had been on the trail. “I didn’t know any of this back then. Until recently, I thought Natalie had miscarried, and it was Ernie who told me about the box. But Red—he was here that night. He could’ve prevented all this shit from happening.”

  My hands tightened around the scissors so that the tip gouged my palm. I was done talking to him about his child. I wanted to find mine. “Where’s my son? And my husband?”

  “Probably dead.”

  I jammed my scissors into his foot, and he screamed. “What the—?”

  “What did you do to my son?”

  “I’m not part of that. I’m only here because that asshole Damon drugged me.” His face darkened. “You stabbed me in the foot.”

  “You’re lucky it wasn’t your carotid artery.” Which it might have been if not for the information I still needed. “Why would Damon drug you?”

  He grimaced and raised his foot, angling it toward the shaft of moonlight so he could study it.

  I sighed, impatient. “I barely nicked your toe.”

  Carver lowered his foot to the ground. “You know the story: Guy meets girl. Guy realizes girl’s trying to fuck up his life. Guy tries to kill girl.” He paused and tried on a smirk, but it wouldn’t hold. “Then girl gets her friend to stab guy in the neck with a needle and toss him in some crappy shed.”

  My skin turned cold, and I rubbed my arms for warmth. Not because of the way the psychopath tied up at my feet scowled at me, but because of how long it had taken me to make the connection. What do you know? Daryl had asked me. He would’ve been disappointed it had taken me so long to learn that lesson.

  “So it’s not just Damon,” I said. “Brooklyn’s involved in Leo’s abduction too?”

  “You still don’t get it. She’s not just involved. She’s planned everything. Damon’s just some guy she’s manipulating, just like she manipulated me. You, too, and your husband. That night on the trail when you fucked everything up—nothing about that night was an accident.”

  “I know. You ran Brooklyn off the road.”

  “She ran me off the road. She knew where you’d be, and when. She had a tracker on your car, right?” He must’ve read my doubt, because he sneered. “Of course she had a tracker on your car. She had one on mine too.” The grin was back, and it was polar. “But her timing was off. I don’t think she planned how close I’d come to killing her.”

  Carver’s expression shifted then, a mix of hostility and confusion. “But I still haven’t figured out why—why would my own daughter want to kill me?”

  I easily came up with reasons. Because you let her mother die. Because you never looked for her. Because you’re an asshole.

  “You mean like you tried to kill her?”

  “T
hat was before I knew she was my daughter, and after everything she did.”

  “And now that you know she’s your daughter, you aren’t still planning to kill her?”

  Carver remained silent, but I read the answer in his face.

  I considered him and the ropes that bound him. If he set after Damon and Brooklyn, he would serve as one hell of a distraction.

  He noticed me studying the ropes and nearly growled, “Untie me.” My eyes dropped to his hands. They were clenched, as they had been the night we met.

  “Because you asked so nicely, or because you tried to kill me?”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill you. I just wanted you to let Brooklyn die.” When Carver saw I was making no attempt to free him, he leaned back against the wall. “Back at the hospital, I lied.”

  “I’m not surprised. About what?”

  “I never brought Sam here.”

  I studied his face, but I no longer trusted myself to recognize deception. “I don’t understand.”

  Carver licked at the cut on his lip as he squirmed against his bindings. “When Brooklyn and Damon ambushed Sam, I heard the tail end of their conversation. Damon mentioned dumping Sam here.”

  “But the blood on the back seat.”

  “Damon and I had a disagreement.”

  “Sam’s keys?”

  “He dropped them when those two ambushed him, and I took them. I needed a car.” Carver’s tongue darted across his laceration again, the same way a snake would flick its tongue to taste the air. “Do you know how my wife died?”

  “She was poisoned.”

  He lifted his shoulders and squirmed against the ropes that bound his wrists. “That was Brooklyn. She poisoned my wife’s tea and watched as I served her. Up until that point, we both thought Brooklyn was a friend. Invited her into our home. First, she posted some stuff online that got me fired. Then she emptied our bank account. Killed our cat and posed it on our bed as if it were sleeping. Then—Anne.”

  His entire body convulsed at the memory. “Each day, I’d find a note with a number. 3. 2. 1. That last day, on the bottom of the box of tea, Brooklyn had written a single word in Sharpie: Today.”

  At that, I felt as if I had been hollowed out with a dull knife and then scraped raw. Part of me had wanted to believe the threat was idle, that Sam and Leo would be allowed to live.

  “And then—” Carver’s voice caught in his throat. He cleared it and started again, “And then, Brooklyn knelt down and told my wife it was my idea, that I’d wanted Anne dead. I don’t care if she’s my daughter. For making that lie my wife’s last memory, I am going to kill her.”

  Then Carver slipped the rope from his wrists, and I realized how foolish I had been.

  45

  Carver grabbed me and wrapped his arm around my neck. I struggled, but he was twice my size. He laughed darkly at the scissors still in my hand, put them in his own back pocket, beyond my reach, then dragged me from the shed.

  He attempted to calm me. “Even if you stabbed me in the foot, I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “Unless you keep struggling.”

  I clamped down on his arm with my teeth. He flinched, but he didn’t release me, instead squeezing harder. The impression my teeth had made reddened with his effort. His arm spasmed on my throat and I felt his grip loosen slightly, a change in pressure that would have been imperceptible if it hadn’t been my own neck he was choking. I’m not even sure Carver realized he was holding back. When the stars pricked my eyes, I released all the tension in my body. Though instinct screamed to fight, I let him lay my limp body, almost gingerly, on the ground.

  I let Carver go and opened my eyes only when I could no longer hear his footsteps. Even then, I lay there for another minute. In the past hour, I had learned so many things—about my father, about Carver, about the woman who had targeted my family—but I hadn’t found answers for the only questions that mattered: Where was Sam? Where was our son? I wouldn’t, couldn’t, accept Carver’s theory that they were dead.

  My breath quickened when I finally stood. I patted my pocket for my phone but remembered it was gone. When I turned, intending to search for anything I might use as a weapon, I froze.

  Carver was walking back toward me, and he wasn’t alone. Damon walked behind him, shorter than Carver, but wider. Damon’s head reflected the moon, the same light illuminating purpled lumps on his face and his swollen lip. Before Damon had taken down Carver with that needle to the neck, it looked like Carver had gotten some punches in.

  At first, I thought I had gotten it wrong, that Carver had been working with Damon all along. Then I saw the gun Damon held in his right hand.

  Even with the bruising, I recognized Damon as the man who had answered Helen’s door and likely the man who had shielded most of his face with a baseball cap when he pushed Audrey from that white sedan.

  Though Damon’s gun wasn’t trained on me, it would take only a fraction of a second for that to change. I stood as still as I was able.

  “You’re early, Cassie,” he said. “We weren’t quite ready for you.”

  I tried to read in the bumpy patchwork of his face how deep his commitment was to Brooklyn’s cause. “Why are you doing this?”

  Damon’s eyes darted between my face and Carver’s, and the hand that held the gun jerked. I recognized the desperation in his expression: he was bracing himself to carry out whatever horrible demand had been made of him.

  “I’m doing this because I’m her friend, and she asked me to.”

  Damon’s arm went rigid, the gun’s barrel arcing so it pointed at Carver’s chest. Carver’s face settled into cast concrete, and his eyes stilled. All cockiness gone.

  “She wanted more time with you, Carver. But with Cassie here now, it’s too risky to leave you both alive.”

  I shook my head and Carver opened his mouth to speak, as if our objections had any power over bullets, but Damon stepped forward and lifted the barrel another couple of inches, now aligned with Carver’s temple. He fired, point-blank, three times. Carver’s mouth went slack, death consuming whatever he had been about to say.

  Damon gestured with his gun toward the house. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Inside the house, a stone fireplace stretched two stories to a redwood-beamed ceiling, a chandelier of oil-rubbed bronze and a string of exposed bulbs hanging there. The two wings of the second story were connected by a catwalk that looked out over the living room, all in white linen and crimson leather.

  I noticed all of this, but only until I noticed my son, propped and unconscious on the sofa, Brooklyn behind him with a revolver. Once I saw Leo, I noticed nothing else. Brooklyn lifted her gun to aim it at Leo’s head.

  I could have charged had the weapon been pointed at me. A few quick strides and I could’ve been there. I would’ve taken a bullet, probably more than one since the man behind me had a gun, too, but I doubted Brooklyn would have acted with enough speed to also shoot Leo. But with the gun locked on my son’s head, I dared not move. All it would take was a quiver of Brooklyn’s finger and the blast that followed would end me as certainly as if the weapon had been pointed in my direction.

  Bruises still mottled Brooklyn’s face, a mirror image of Damon’s injuries. Made sense. They’d been caused by the same man. But in our earlier meeting, she had exaggerated the injuries to her arm. She was having no problem holding her gun.

  Brooklyn squinted, her head tilted as she studied me. The corner of her lip curled, not quite a smile but close, and then, her eyes still on me, she asked Damon, “You took care of Sam, right?”

  I caught my breath. No. I forced all my will into that denial, as if it could become a tangible thing capable of holding me up.

  “Yeah, I took care of Sam.”

  I flashed to Carver’s rage that night on the trail. Then, he had been an animal, beyond reason or thought. Brooklyn had deconstructed Carver’s life, piece by piece, until all that remained was a husk empty of all but that limbic center of his brain that sho
uted, Avenge.

  The thought hit me with such force, I nearly stumbled, I will save Leo and then kill everyone else in this room.

  I shook off the thought. That’s not who I was. I wasn’t a killer. I saved lives, I didn’t take them. I tried on the reassurance but realized it no longer fit, like a hand-me-down coat I wore despite the way its weight tugged on my shoulders or its wool scratched my skin.

  “Have to say I’m surprised you got here so quickly. The speed you had to be driving, you’re lucky you didn’t get pulled over.” Brooklyn smiled, but there was a hint of impatience there. “Ten minutes earlier, we wouldn’t even have had time to kill your husband.”

  My muscles tightened as I scanned the room for weapons. For options. On the coffee table, I noticed a pack of gum, a wrapper beside it. The strip of foiled paper had been neatly folded into the shape of a heart. It brought me back to that last morning with Sam and the origami dog I had at first believed was from him. It suddenly occurred to me that Brooklyn had taken more care with that wrapper than she had with my husband.

  “Don’t forget, Sam’s death is on you. Earlier tonight, I gave you a choice, and you chose the kids. Still, Cassie, you did call the police, and that decision has to have consequences, too, right? So who dies here: you, or your son?”

  As easy a decision as I could ever make. “I’d gladly trade my life for my son’s.” The obvious question hung between us: What prevented Brooklyn from killing us both?

  The night I’d met Brooklyn, for the first time in years, I had thought of the attack on a college classmate, and how I’d failed her. She had survived that night, but she hadn’t survived the aftermath. A few years after Dirk pushed her from that balcony, she’d walked into the ocean and drowned. She hadn’t intended to kill herself. After the attack, despite physical therapy, her body had been too weak to fight the current.

  I suddenly remembered the dead girl’s name. Stephanie. That night on the trail, I had thought by saving Brooklyn, I could atone for not doing more to help Stephanie. I thought I could make up for those fights I’d picked in high school and the hell I’d put my dad through. For not being there for Sam. But the truth was I should have let Brooklyn die. I should have saved Stephanie, but I should have let Carver have Brooklyn.