Gun Shy

  I hear movement downstairs and leave the milk cartons, spying a box I know I can use. My mother’s wedding dress from when she married my father, something I thought Damon would have insisted she throw out after he moved in. It’s heart-shaped, and I take the lid off gently, mindful that my bloody fingerprints are now all over it. I’m a part of this, now. I am an accomplice. I am complicit.

  Better to be an accomplice than to be dead, I suppose.

  Inside is a smaller box, identical heart-shaped cardboard, among the stiff old silk. I take the smaller box out and lay it on the floor beside Jennifer, mindful to keep it away from the blood pooled beneath her body. This box contains my mother’s veil; the most beautiful French lace, material she found at a thrift store and sewed herself while I grew in her belly. I take Jennifer’s tiny baby from her chest and place it in the pile of lace, covering it as best I can, before replacing the lid.

  “Cassie!” Ray’s voice cuts through the buzz in my ears. I leave the heart-shaped box and follow the sound of my name downstairs to the bathroom beside my bedroom.

  It’s easier to cope with the sheer volume of blood upstairs, in the dark; here, it is lit up in Technicolor. Damon is sitting in the bottom of the bath, his face in his hands. He did not shed a single tear when my mother died, apart from the few fake ones he squeezed out at her funeral, but here, in the wake of Jennifer and her baby — he sobs like a broken child. Ray hears me enter the small space and steps back, his bloody hand immediately fishing a cigarette from his jeans pocket and lighting up.

  “Come on, brother,” Ray says quietly.

  Damon is shaking violently; covered in the blood of his child’s life and death, in the bottom of the empty bath. I look to Ray; he gestures with the cigarette in Damon’s general direction. There are no words exchanged but his meaning is clear — fix that.

  So I do what comes via instinct; I undress Damon as best I can, blood-slicked fingers fumbling with the buttons on his uniform, the tan stained a red so dark it’s almost black. I get his socks off, his shirt, his boxer briefs, and the key from around his neck that hangs on a thin chain. I’ve never seen it before, but I don’t have time to study it. I set it all beside the bath in a pile, and then I turn the faucet on, warm water shooting down and slowly, ever-so-slowly washing Jennifer’s blood from his skin.

  I scrub the red from his body as if he’s a child muddied from playing in the rain instead of a murderer bloodied from keeping a girl tied up in his attic. His blue eyes stare at the wall at the end of the bath, unfocused, unseeing. He is somewhere else. When he’s finally clean, I shut off the water and wrap a towel around his shoulders.

  I can’t breathe properly. My chest hurts. I have too many questions. The blood is gone and I need something to drink. Maybe I’ll tip a bottle of bleach down my throat and end it all before something like this happens to me.

  I stand on shaking legs and walk toward the hallway. As I’m about to step out of the bathroom, Ray stands in the doorway, his bulk blocking my path. He looks me up and down, fixing his eyes on mine. The message is clear: You’re not going anywhere.

  Ray smokes. Damon stares. I stand between the two brothers, biting the insides of my cheeks until I taste blood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CASSIE

  If I thought watching Jennifer Thomas die was bad, it’s nothing compared to how I feel when we bury her in the yard.

  Damon is sitting at the kitchen table where Ray can both dig and keep an eye on him at the same time, numbed into a semi-calm state by whatever pills Ray tipped into his mouth before he dragged me out here and handed me a shovel. We’ve been digging for what feels like hours in the spot under the huge chestnut tree that flanks the back of the house.

  Jennifer’s body is wrapped in plastic sheeting. Her baby is inside the heart-shaped box. I have blisters all over my hands from digging.

  Ray and I work silently, the smell of his cigarette smoke turning my already delicate stomach. I want to throw up every time I look at Jennifer, her bare feet sticking out of the sheeting like a bad joke.

  We’re maybe four feet deep in black dirt when Ray stops and leans on his shovel, lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of his old one. I think about asking for one, but I can’t speak.

  “He hasn’t said a damn word,” Ray says, looking up into the house at Damon, still mute and staring into space.

  “He’s in shock,” I reply.

  “He needs to see a doctor.”

  I made a sound at the back of my throat. “Jennifer needed to see a doctor.”

  Something flashes in Ray’s eyes. I don’t even see his hand go to his hip; there’s just his hand on the back of my neck, and the cold barrel of a gun digging into my throat.

  “You don’t ever talk to me like that, do you understand?”

  I try to nod but it makes the gun barrel dig in harder.

  “Do. You. Understand?” Ray repeats.

  “Yes,” I whimper.

  “Don’t give me a reason to put you in this hole and bury you alive, Cassie.”

  “I won’t.”

  He lets go of me and I put my free hand to my throat, massaging the spot where the gun was.

  “My brother’s pretty shaken up by this.” No shit, asshole. I look at the shovel in my hand and wonder if I could bring it up and smash Ray’s temple in before he could get off a shot. Probably not. And if I try, and fail, I’ll be dead in this hole and under four feet of dirt before sunrise, with Jennifer and her baby as my eternal company.

  “All right, this is deep enough,” Ray says, changing tact. He takes my shovel and his and throws them out of the hole. He motions for me to get out of the way and I do, hoisting myself back onto firm ground as he rolls Jennifer into the hole. He picks up the heart-shaped box next, making a move to toss it in, but I stop him at the last second.

  “Let me,” I say quietly, taking the box from him. I slide down into the hole on my ass, the box in my hands, and place it as gently as possible in the middle of the plastic-wrapped lump that used to be Jennifer. I stand, and as I turn around Ray is sitting on the edge of this makeshift grave, the barrel of his gun just touching my forehead and did I just dig my own fucking grave?

  “We already did this,” I say. “If you’re going to shoot me, just do it.”

  Nobody says anything for a moment. I see his finger on the trigger, my eyes crossed and aching as I try to focus. I wonder if I’d feel the bullet rip through my skull and bed into my brain. Maybe for just a millisecond? Or would it be a loud noise and then: Lights out.

  Finally, Ray laughs. “You are a stone cold bitch,” he remarks, lowering the gun and handing me a shovel.

  I am so fucking grateful that I can’t see Jennifer’s face as I pile dirt on top of her until she disappears into the earth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CASSIE

  There are things you think you know about a person, about a place, about life.

  And some of those things will remain true. But others are lies we tell ourselves, constructs designed to keep us safe.

  But I’m not safe anymore.

  I never really was.

  I’m complacent. That’s the thing that has kept me here all these years, with Mom down the hall and Damon in my bed. Complacency is the drug I swallowed the night Leo went to prison. Complacency is the price I have paid for the illusion of my own survival.

  Ray spends the rest of the night at our house, pinning me with his watchful eyes like a butterfly collector might pin dead butterflies to the wall, kept behind glass, frozen in flight.

  When he leaves the next morning, I am surprised. Surprised that, in the end, he didn’t kill me. I know he wants to. For once, it seems, I can be grateful that Damon loves me to the brink of insanity. Ray tried to convince Damon that they’d be better off killing me, too, but Damon refused. What a lucky girl I am. What a good stepdaddy I have.

  Ray leaves.

  I am alone with Damon.

  Finally, he tells me what happened
in the attic with Jennifer Thomas.

  Sitting at the same kitchen table where he watched us bury her, Damon tells me the truth. At least, his version of it.

  “Jennifer was pregnant,” he says, looking anywhere but at me. His eyes are red.

  “With your baby,” I add.

  Damon nods.

  I don’t even bother asking what a forty-year-old man is doing screwing a sixteen-year-old girl, let alone getting her pregnant. I’ve lived this life already. I was eighteen, not sixteen, but I take my birth control as religiously as a priest takes confession.

  Seems Jennifer was not so zealous. Jennifer got pregnant.

  “Jennifer wanted an abortion,” he says. “She wanted to kill our baby. I promised her I would take care of things. Of everything. She didn’t even have to stick around once it was born.” He takes a deep breath. “I would have done anything.”

  I’m unimpressed. “And so you took her, and you tied her up and you locked her in a box in the goddamned attic.”

  He slams his fist on the table.

  Now Jennifer is dead, their baby, too, and the whole town is still searching for her. There’s still the stains of blood on the attic floor to scrub out, and I still need to find a way to figure out who the hell that missing boy on all those milk cartons was. Neither Damon nor Ray has asked me about whether I saw them, too fixated on Jennifer. Their ignorance is my ammunition.

  One week later, when my smashed phone is finally replaced, I lock myself in the staff bathroom at work and Google Daniel Collins.

  No wonder I didn’t recognize him from the milk carton. The photo was so grainy, it was barely distinguishable. The color version is much easier to decipher.

  The eyes. Lazulite blue, the color of the ocean in places you’d rather be. Daniel Collins, missing age ten, presumed dead, but a body was never found. Daniel Collins, found in my house, in my bed, in my nightmares. Daniel Collins — he goes by Damon King, now.

  The most heartbreaking part of all? His mother never stopped searching for him. She lived three hours away from us, across the border in a little town in California. She had the same blue eyes as her missing son. She’s dead now. The obituary, dated two months ago, says she died of a broken heart.

  I go back to work the following day as if nothing has happened. As if there isn’t a teenage girl buried next to my house, the freshly dug soil of her final resting place visible from my bedroom, her voice crying out to me when I try to fall asleep.

  Ray returns to Reno, after promising he will come back and kill me if I tell anybody about Jennifer and the attic.

  Damon goes back to work and pretends to search for the girl he had stashed away the entire time.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CASSIE

  There is an empty grave in Lone Pine, California, for Daniel Collins.

  I would know; I’ve spent every waking moment searching for anything and everything related to the boy on the milk carton. I know the time he was born, his mother’s maiden name, the first place he went to school.

  I know where his mother placed a headstone, ten years after he disappeared. Right beside his father, her late husband, who died of a heart attack less than twelve months after Daniel was taken from the front of his house. His mother rests there now, in the family plot that bears Daniel’s name but is missing his remains.

  I have no money, no car, no freedom — and yet, I have this burning desire to go to Lone Pine, California and see the place where Daniel Collins grew up. It’s only three hours away. I could be there and back before Damon even notices I’m gone.

  I think of the handful of people I know. Damon’s out, obviously. I doubt Deputy Chris would do something for me without telling Damon all about it. I don’t even know if Pike’s still in town, but either way, when he did see me he wasn’t exactly enthused. And Amanda; well, she’s far too busy, running a diner and working weekends at the hospital. She would ask too many questions. And I need her to cover my shift at the diner anyway.

  This is the thing about living with a madman, being kept away from the world you were once a part of.

  The people you love become strangers, ghosts of a time long gone, and though you might still pass each other on the street, there’s nothing really there anymore.

  There is one person, though, who said he’d do anything in the world to make up to me what he did. I’m betting he’s the same person who wouldn’t tell a soul.

  Damon makes things infinitely more difficult for me with his paranoia that I’m suddenly going to disappear into thin air. A legitimate worry, I suppose, when you kidnap your stepdaughter’s co-worker after knocking her up and said co-worker ends up dead and buried in your yard. His solution? He visits the diner every chance he gets, right on cue. He’s never absent for more than three hours, and my drive will take at least six. Somehow or another, he’s going to find out that I’m gone. I just need to get where I’m going before he catches me.

  He comes into the diner at ten a.m., stands at the back of the restaurant with Amanda and chats, casting glances my way every so often. He makes her laugh and I almost puke. He’s way too good at this charade.

  After he finally leaves, back to his office just feet away, I go back to work. Fifteen minutes later, on my break, instead of sitting in the staff room or making myself vomit in the bathroom, I beg off the rest of my shift and tell Amanda I’m getting a ride home to sleep. Then, before she can try to mother me, I take two Styrofoam cups of coffee, slip out of the diner’s rear fire escape, and trudge through dirty snow to the old garage where Leo works.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  LEO

  Every time someone approaches the garage, I’m convinced it’s the cops, here to haul my ass off for killing Hal Carter. There’s nothing quite like having your entire body slid under a car, waiting for some bastard to grab your ankles and yank you out so he can cuff you.

  Especially when the particular bastard who would be arresting me is Damon King. I can just imagine the goddamn gloating he’d do, carting me off to lockup on a murder charge. I’d be put away for real this time. It’s anxiety like that that makes you want to drown in a case of fucking beer.

  Old Lawrence isn’t around much.

  The cold messes with his arthritis, and now that I’m back and on minimum wage, he can spend more time eating pie at the diner and playing bowls with his old-timer friends.

  It doesn’t bother me; I like being alone. But I make sure, whenever I get under a car now, I lock the doors first.

  So when I hear her voice in the garage on a day when all of the doors should be locked — Leo? — I nearly piss my pants. Instead, I try to sit up, purely on reflex, and smash my face into the chassis I’m working on.

  I wheel myself out from under the car, my face fucking throbbing. It’s probably a good thing I smacked myself because otherwise my dick would be throbbing in my pants at the sight of Cassandra Carlino, standing in the middle of my garage, with two cups of coffee.

  Is this a fucking dream? What’s happening right now? I can feel the blood rising to my cheeks.

  “Sorry if I scared you,” Cassie says.

  I wave her apology away, flustered. What is she doing here? Why is she talking to me? “It’s fine. How’d you get in?”

  She gestures to the back door with one coffee-laden hand. “It was open.”

  Great. I’m fucking losing my mind here and I left the back door open.

  She holds one of the coffee cups out to me and I take it awkwardly, not sure what to do. We stare at each other for a long moment, soaking each other in. I saw her at the diner, yeah, but everything was so rushed and I’d clearly scared the living piss out of her by appearing after eight years, in the middle of her workplace, covered in prison tattoos.

  “Do you need help with your car?” I ask finally.

  “I don’t have a car,” she says slowly.

  “Oh.” What the fuck is even happening right now?

  “Is this a bad time?” she asks, her eyebrows gathe
ring into a frown. “You’re bleeding.” She puts her hand to her cheek, and I mirror her action, my fingers coming away wet with blood. Great. “Here,” she says, setting her coffee down on the workbench and producing a tissue from her purse. She steps closer, erasing the void between us as she reaches up and presses the tissue against my cheek.

  I can’t fucking breathe. All I can smell is her perfume — oranges and flowers — all I can see is the tiny worry lines at the edge of her green eyes, the ones that weren’t there when she was seventeen and I went away. I left behind a girl, and now that I’m back, that girl is gone. She’s a woman now, with pain in her eyes that I put there.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” I blurt out before I can think. “I wanted to go to the funeral, but I didn’t think—”

  “It was a good idea to stay away,” Cassie cuts me off. “From the funeral, I mean.”

  She’s still pressing the tissue to my face. Without even thinking, I bring my hand up, letting my fingers curl around her wrist. I’m not sure if I’m taking hold of her because I want to get her hand away from me or keep it there. Her skin is cold from the chill outside, but I’m on fire just having her in my presence.

  “I need something,” she says, her voice breaking ever so softly. Somebody else wouldn’t even notice, but I know Cassandra Carlino.

  “Anything,” I say. She tugs her hand away and I let her wrist go, wiping my face with the tissue. I watch as she walks over to the first-aid cabinet hanging from the wall; it’s been there forever, but I’m surprised she remembers. I hold my breath as she opens the cabinet and takes out a multi-pack of Band-Aids, tipping a pile into her palm and selecting one before coming back to me.