He doesn’t do anything.
I say his name again. His real name, the one his mother gave him. “Daniel?”
I look at his hands; they’re trembling. Damon King— Daniel Collins — doesn’t move a goddamn inch.
I grab those hands, pulling them, jolting him out of his daydream and toward me. Though the table separates us, I kneel on my chair, draping my top half across the table so our noses are almost touching.
His blue eyes to my green, and that’s how we stay for a long moment, while I imagine the horrors of his childhood, the events that created the monster.
I whisper my secret, his secret, a handful of murmured words that tear everything apart. “I know who you are. And I know what you did.”
I push back, getting off my chair and getting the fuck out of the kitchen before his violent tendencies kick in. I go up to the attic, the heavy bolt removed, something that took me all of five minutes to pry off while Damon showered earlier. The laptop is up there already, part of my plan, and I’ve moved the stacks of milk cartons so all the photos face out.
“Come back here!” Damon yells, barreling up the stairs. There he is. The little boy I glimpsed in the kitchen is gone, and the man full of darkness and rage is back.
I bring up the video search on my computer again and hit play, turning the volume to max. I set the laptop on the closed pine box that housed Jennifer; Damon’s mother’s voice fills the room; his real mother, the one who birthed him and nursed him and sent him off to school. The one who tended an empty grave that bore his name, the one who waited for thirty years for him to come home, and then died of a broken heart when he never, ever did.
Damon rounds the corner, coming through the doorway, charging at me until he sees the milk cartons, the face on the video. Daniel was such a loving boy, his mother says, her devastation ringing clear in the same attic where Damon’s own child lived and died for the briefest of moments. I fix my gaze at the bloodstain on the floor, the one beside the now-empty box where Jennifer bled out because I can’t bear to look at Adelie Collins as she talks about her missing son.
“What is this?” He’s horrified, tears pooling in his eyes.
“It’s your mother,” I say. “Don’t you remember her, Damon? Daniel?”
“Stop it.”
I turn the volume higher.
Daniel was such a beautiful boy. His eyes, they were so blue.
Damon grabs the laptop and throws it at the ground as hard as he can. It shatters into a million tiny pieces, and the sound of his mother’s anguished voice is gone, replaced by an ugly silence that promises terrible things.
I think about Leo. About how, by doing this, I’m protecting him from every evil thing Damon has planned for him. For both of us.
“I’m going to beat the shit out of you,” Damon says, his eyes blazing.
I nod. “Yeah,” I say, my voice resigned. “I thought you might say that.”
A weird look passes over Damon’s face. He steps to the side, holding onto the pine box for balance. He stumbles.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him. “Cat got your tongue?”
He rights himself. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
A fine sheen of sweat has broken out on his forehead. “You don’t look fine,” I say. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”
He stumbles again, his eyes sparking with recognition. “You…. Cunt,” he manages, before falling to his knees. “What the fuck did you give me?” He swipes madly behind his back, probably looking for the gun in his waistband, but it’s not there anymore. It’s in my hand.
I start to laugh as he sways on his hands and knees in front of me. “Just a little bit of the medicine you’ve been giving me all these years, Daddy-O.”
He lunges for me drunkenly, but I step back, away from his foolish grip.
“You,” Damon hisses. I’m so fucking proud. He grabs my ankle and tugs. I don’t think so.
“Watch it,” I say, kicking him in the face with my Doc Marten boot. Blood explodes from his nose as he goes down, hard. “Don’t make me fall and hurt myself. What if I die? You don’t want another Jennifer to bury, do you, fucker?”
“Cassie….”
“Shhhh,” I whisper. I imagine my words circling around in his addled mind as the last bit of light fades from his vision, but Damon’s a big boy, and he’s not going down with just a handful of ground-up Percocet. He gets up on one arm and drags himself closer to me again, within grabbing territory. He’s fast with his hands, but I’m faster. I raise the gun in my hand and smash the butt into Damon’s face, sending him to the floor in a limp pile. Before he can move, I take his own police-issued cuffs and cuff his hands behind his back, as tight as the metal links will go around his wrists.
I roll him over and he’s still conscious, but barely. His blood-spattered face is clammy and warm, his eyes struggling to focus on me as they roll around in his head. I sit on his chest, the gun in one hand, his half-empty cup of coffee in the other. I press the gun into his cheek, forcing his mouth open, and tip the rest of the drugged coffee into his open mouth. He starts to thrash his head to each side, but I’m quicker, and I’m not drugged to the eyeballs. I slap my hand over his mouth and lean in real close, so our noses are almost touching.
“Swallow, bitch,” I whisper.
He chokes and splutters, but he swallows the rest of my coffee cocktail. I wonder if I gave him enough to sedate him. Maybe it will kill him. I have five morphine-filled syringes hidden in my mother’s room if I need to take him down again.
“Cass,” he slurs, and I’m equal parts disturbed and fucking impressed that drugs and a pistol whip haven’t knocked him out yet.
“I always wondered how you got there so fast,” I say. “I was fifty feet away from the creek when they crashed, and you were there within seconds of me getting to that car.”
His eyes roll and flutter; it won’t be long now. “Cassie, what did you give me.” More urgent. More desperate. I wish I could freeze time so that I could press my lips to his and taste his despair the way he has tasted mine all these years. I bet it tastes like orange lifesavers and cotton candy. I bet it tastes like a bright red candy apple that sick old men use to lure ten-year-old boys into vans and whisk them away from their mothers.
“I hope you enjoyed ruining my life, motherfucker,” I say to him. “Because I’m about to end yours.”
I am a girl with a coal-black heart beating inside my chest and a murderer underneath me. The first one I can’t do anything about, but the second I can.
Because there’s no other way around this: Damon has to die for what he’s done to us, and nobody can ever know it was me.
I curl my hands underneath his arms and drag him into the now-open pine box where he stuffed Jennifer, his dead weight backbreaking. I drop him in the middle of the box, and his head makes a thick sound as it connects with the wood.
I gather my supplies; plastic sheeting, rubber gloves, Leo’s hunting knife, Damon’s gun.
You’re not gun shy, are you?
I look down at the man who ruined my life and I feel nothing. Nothing except the first butterflies of excitement. Of relief. Because this is the part where I take my life back. This is the moment when I grab the wheel and correct course.
This is where Damon King – Daniel Collins – says his final goodbye.
ONE YEAR LATER
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
LEO
Spring came early this year. All the flowers in the garden are blossoming. Cassie is blossoming, with a baby. Our baby.
Yeah. We’re having a baby. It still sounds weird when I say it. Good weird. I never thought I’d see the day. Cassie, literally barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen of her house, our house.
It’s strange to think how much has changed in one year.
Since Damon lost his shit and went on emergency stress leave, right after Cassie’s suicide attempt, everything has changed. I haven’t seen or heard from the guy since the day I found Cassie in the
bath, bleeding and drugged from her almost-suicide. Cassie says he still calls and writes her periodically. Sounds like the guy just couldn’t take it anymore, handed in his badge and gun and high-tailed it out of town. Which I didn’t believe at first. Didn’t think he’d ever let Cassie out of his house, out of his sight, out of his clutches.
She was all he had, but now she’s mine, and if he ever comes back, he can’t have her, because she belongs to me.
I keep waiting for him to come back. But it’s been a year now, a year since that night when Cassie ran down to my place in the freezing snow and told me he’d gone for good, that we could finally be together. My parole is almost finished, I’ve got the girl, and now she’s having my child.
We didn’t plan that. About three months after Damon left, as the twin scars on Cassie’s wrists has just started to fade a little, two other lines showed up. Not planned, not ideal, but probably the best thing that had happened for either of us since we were kids. Now she’s nine months pregnant and she should let me cook while she rests, but she insists.
“You want bacon?” Cassie asks, breaking me out of my thoughts as she holds a pan above the dining table. The engraved key she always wears on a chain around her neck glints against her skin, the word Nomad etched into it, an ironic thing for a girl who’s never been anywhere further than Lone Pine, California.
“Do I want bacon,” I echo, pinching her ass. She squeals, dropping a pile of burnt pig slices on my plate, her baby belly brushing against my arm as she heads back to the sink with the empty pan. She sits next to me, her plate looking much healthier than mine, covered in slices of avocado and scrambled eggs and broccoli. Mine looks like a heart attack in comparison, but I’m sure I’ll be working it all off straight after we’re done.
Sure enough, we don’t even make it five minutes before Cassie’s sitting in my lap, her food untouched. “You know,” I say in between her fevered kisses. “If you want my bacon, you could just take it off my plate.”
She laughs, her fingers making quick work of my zipper and boxers. I sink my fingers into her round ass cheeks as she pulls her panties to the side and slides down on me, her eyes rolling back as I sink into her. She’s fucking insatiable now that she’s past the morning sickness, and she’s finally got some weight on her. She looks healthy, instead of gaunt. Her cheeks are rosy instead of pale. And she wants sex all the damn time, so much that I can barely keep up with her. Not that I’m complaining. We have all those years I was gone to make up for. And I fully intend on making it up to her.
After we’re done, with the food and the fucking, I wash up the dishes while Cassie showers. She heads downstairs a few minutes later in an oversized striped sweater and leggings, her hair in a loose knot atop her head.
“You coming?” she asks.
“Coming where?” I ask.
“The midwife appointment,” Cassie says breathlessly. “She’s going to do that stretch and sweep thing, see if we can’t get this baby out. The sex obviously isn’t working.”
“Maybe we’re not trying hard enough,” I reply.
She looks stressed. “I’m having this baby at home,” she says stubbornly. “I’m already three days overdue. If I go much more, they’ll induce me in the hospital and that’s not going to happen.”
I dry my hands on a kitchen towel, heading over to the bottom of the stairs where my pregnant-to-bursting girlfriend is fighting back tears. The fucking hormones, man. I love this girl, but she’s psychotic with the hormones.
“I asked Pike to help me fix the fence this morning,” I say, putting my hands on her belly as I lean down to kiss her forehead. “He’ll be over in a minute.”
She looks like she might murder me, or fall on the floor in a pile of tears. Murder would be easier for me.
“The fence is a quick fix,” I say. “Half an hour, tops. Why don’t I just meet you there? They always make you wait for hours, anyway.”
She weighs her options silently as I watch her face. “C’mon,” I say to her. “You were right. You don’t want the induction unless it’s the absolute last resort.” I rub her back. “I promise I’ll be there before they get all up in your business.”
She chews on her lip. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. But you’ll meet me there, won’t you?”
“I promise,” I say, kissing her again.
She drives off in the new pickup she bought with her mom’s insurance money, a cruel twist of fate that something I did paid for that car. It makes my skin crawl every time I think about it, so I try not to think about it. Cassie says she forgives me. I’m not so sure I forgive myself.
But I have to keep my shit together, and keep sober, and work my ass off because I’m going to be a father in the next week, Cassie’s induction date looming on the calendar like Christmas.
I’m just about to call Pike and ask where the fuck he is when there’s a knock at the door. I open it, expecting Pike, but there’s a very somber looking Chris McCallister standing on the porch instead, looking all official-like in his tan-colored police uniform.
“Chris,” I say, opening the door wider. “Come in, man. How are you?”
“Thanks,” he says, taking off his hat and side-stepping past me. We end up in the kitchen.
“You want coffee?” I ask. “Pot’s still hot.”
He declines, hovering awkwardly on the other side of the counter. I pour one for myself and wonder where Pike is. “Everything okay?” I ask.
Chris puts his hat down on the counter and pulls a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolding it. The air between us develops a heaviness.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, my tone sharp this time.
Chris pushes the piece of paper over to me. “Your last drug test was positive,” he says, unable to meet my gaze. “I haven’t told Sheriff Anderson yet.”
Sheriff Anderson was brought in to replace Damon after he high-tailed it out of town with his fishing rods, a backpack of clothes, and a harried phone call citing extreme stress as the reason for his sudden departure. Sheriff Anderson is exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to be installed in a town like ours — ruddy-faced from drinking, generally useless, and counting down the days until his retirement.
I grab the paper, scanning the words. A lot of it is police speak and codes that I don’t understand, but the words POSITIVE FOR OPIATES stand out against everything.
“This is a mistake,” I say, rage creeping up my chest. “I haven’t taken anything. I don’t even take fucking aspirin!”
I slam my coffee cup down on the counter, and coffee splashes over the sheet of paper. A weird desperation bubbles underneath my skin, like acid eating it away, layer by layer.
“I caught it before it was sent off,” Chris says. “I know Cassie’s about to pop any day now. It must be stressful. Anyone would understand if you felt like you needed something to take the edge off.”
I stare at Chris like he’s fucking stupid. “I. Didn’t. Take. Anything.”
Chris clears his throat. “Well, I’m here to tell you to definitely not take anything in the next week. Like I said, I caught this early. We’ll retest in a week.”
I nod.
“I’ll lose my job if anyone finds out about this,” Chris adds. “I only did this because Cassie’s been through enough shit. She doesn’t need you back in prison while she’s about to give birth.”
“Thanks, man. I appreciate that.” I’m trying to be grateful, but I’m fucking raging. I definitely didn’t take anything. I don’t need to take anything, ironically, for the first time in years. I have Cassie.
“I’m telling you, man, it’s a false positive,” I insist. “Tell me again all the shit that can cause opiates to show up on a test.”
Chris shrugs. “I mean, there are all sorts of things that can give a false positive. Cold and flu tablets. Does Cassie use poppy seeds when she bakes? They show up as opiates if you eat enough of ‘em.”
“Like I said, I don’t take anything. Poppy seeds? Maybe. Shit. I’ll ask her wh
en she gets home.”
Chris looks unconvinced. “You’d have to eat bags of poppy seeds to get a result that high.”
I can see it in his face; he doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’ve sunk back to the lows of my family. And nothing I say is going to change his mind.
“If you really didn’t take anything, you might want to check who you’ve been hanging out with. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen someone slip their friend something in a beer. Your brother?”
“I don’t drink beer!” I exclaim. “I don’t drink anything! I’m a boring fucking mechanic who’s about to be a father. And my brother would never do that, not in a million fucking years. The test is wrong.”
Chris takes the piece of paper back, folds it and slides it into his pocket. He pinches his hat between his fingers and sticks it back on his head, a silent gesture that says, ‘We’re done here.’ “Next week,” he says. “I won’t be able to hide that one if it’s positive. And if you tell anyone I hid this for you, I’ll fuck you up, Bentley.”
I lean against the sink and bite on the insides of my cheeks, waiting for the front door to close as Chris shows himself out. I listen for the sound of his engine, the crunch of gravel where the driveway meets the road, and then I search for fucking poppy seeds.
I don’t find them.
But I do find something else. Packets and packets of pills, very powerful sedatives, hidden under a floorboard in our bedroom. I turn one of the packets over, skimming all of the words, looking for the ingredients. I find the name of the drug – the opiate – and all the blood in my veins turns to ice as I carefully put the pills back, and the floorboard, and get the hell out.
Something is wrong.
Something is very, very wrong.
PIKE SPEEDS like a hell demon with me in the passenger seat, but I’m still late to the appointment. Cassie is already trying to shimmy up the bed as a midwife sticks her fingers up her.
I hold her hand as the midwife finishes fingering my girlfriend and snaps off her latex gloves, tossing them in the trash as she says words like “membranes” and “breaking waters.” It’s all so primal, this baby-birthing business. It’s all so messy.