The Good Girl

  She says that she sees excerpts of what may have happened: cans of soup lying on the countertops, though they are no longer there. She hears the sound of water running from a faucet, and the ruckus of heavy shoes on the hardwood floors, though the rest of us remain still, watching Mia like a hawk, our backs pressed against the log wall.

  “I hear rainfall on the cabin’s roof,” she says, “and see Canoe scurry from room to room.” Her eyes follow an imaginary path from the family room to the bedroom, as if, in that moment she actually sees the cat, though we all know he is tucked safely away with Ayanna and her son.

  And then she says that she hears the sound of her name. “Mia?” I ask, my voice barely audible, but she shakes her head. No.

  “Chloe,” she reminds me, her hand settling on an earlobe, her body pacified for the first time in a long time and she smiles.

  But the smile doesn’t last long.

  Colin

  Christmas Eve

  Ma always told me I have ears like a bat. I can hear anything. I don’t know what the sound is, but it forces me from my seat. I flip off the light and the cabin goes black. Chloe starts to stir in the bedroom. Her eyes fight through the darkness. She calls my name. When I don’t answer right away, she calls again. This time she’s scared.

  I peel the curtains back from the window. The faint glow of the moon helps me see. There must be a half dozen of them: police cars, with twice as many cops.

  “Shit.”

  I let the curtain drop. I run through the cabin.

  “Chloe. Chloe,” I snap. She jumps from the bed. The adrenaline rushes through her body as she fights off sleep. I pull her from the bedroom to a windowless section of the hall.

  She’s coming to. She grips my hand, her nails digging into the skin. I can feel her hands shake. “What’s wrong?” she asks. Her voice trembles. Tears fall from her eyes. She knows what’s wrong.

  “They’re here,” I say.

  “Oh, my God,” she wails. “We have to run!” She slides away from me and into the bathroom. She thinks we’ll get out the window, somehow, and escape. She thinks we can run.

  “It won’t work,” I tell her. The window is jammed shut. It’ll never open. She tries anyway. I put my hands on her, lure her away from the window. My voice is calm. “There’s nowhere to go. You can’t run.”

  “Then we’ll fight,” she says. She pushes past me. I try to avoid the windows, though I bet the blackness in the cabin makes us invisible. But I do it anyway.

  She’s crying that she doesn’t want to die. I try to tell her it’s the cops. The damn cops, I want to say, but she can’t hear a word I’m saying. She keeps saying over and over again that she doesn’t want to die. The tears run from her eyes.

  She thinks it’s Dalmar.

  I can’t think straight. I peer out the window, and I tell her that there’s nowhere to go. We can’t fight. There’s too many of them. It’ll never work. It will only make things worse.

  But she finds the gun in the drawer. She knows how to shoot it. She grasps it in her shaking hands. She attaches the magazine.

  “Chloe,” I say softly. My voice is a whisper. “It won’t do any good.”

  But she sets her finger on the trigger anyway. She puts her left hand and right hand together. She holds firmly, like I told her to. She leaves no space between her hands and the grip.

  “Chloe,” I say. “It’s through.”

  “Please,” she cries. “We have to fight. We can’t let it end this way.” She’s crazed, wild and demented. Hysterical. But for some strange reason I’m calm.

  Maybe because I knew all along that sooner or later it would come to this.

  A moment passes between us. I watch her eyes. They’re crushed and defeated. She’s crying. Her nose runs. I don’t know how much time passes. Ten seconds. Ten minutes.

  “I’ll do it myself,” she says then, incensed. She’s pissed that I won’t do it for her. I watch the way the gun shudders in her hands. She can’t do this. And if she tries, she’ll get herself killed. And then under her breath, she says, “But your aim...”

  She lets the words hang in the air. I read her expression: hopelessness. Desperation.

  “Never mind,” she says after time passes. “I’ll do it myself.”

  But I don’t let her. I nod. “Okay,” I say. I reach out and take the gun from her hands.

  I can’t let it end like this. Not with her begging me to save her life. And me refusing.

  Floodlights pour into the cabin. They blind us. We’re standing before the window, completely exposed. I stand with the gun in my hands. My eyes are composed though hers are wide with fear. The light makes her jump and she falls into me. I step before her to hide her from view. I raise a hand to shield the light.

  The hand with the gun.

  Gabe

  Christmas Eve

  Hammill calls to say his guys have been made.

  “What do you mean?” I snap.

  “He heard us.”

  “You get a good look?” I ask.

  “It’s him, all right,” he says. “It’s Thatcher.”

  “No one shoots,” I say. “No one moves until I get there. You hear?” He says okay, but deep down I know he doesn’t give a shit.

  “I need him alive,” I say, but he doesn’t hear. There’s a lot of commotion on the other end of the line. Hammill sounds like he’s a mile away. He says he’s got his best sniper here. Sniper?

  “No one shoots,” I say over and over again. Getting my hands on Thatcher is only half the job; finding out who hired him the other. “Hold your fire. Tell your guys to hold their fire.”

  But Hammill’s too busy listening to the sound of his own voice, he doesn’t hear me. He says it’s dark in there. But they’ve got night vision. They got a visual on the girl. She looks terrified. There’s a pause, then Hammill says, “There’s a gun,” and I feel my heart drop.

  “No one shoots,” I say as I make out the cabin, buried in the midst of trees. There are a gazillion cop cars parked outside. No wonder Thatcher heard.

  “He’s got the girl.”

  I skid up the drive, throwing the car into Park when it becomes apparent I’m not going to get any farther in this snow. “I’m here!” I’m screaming into the phone. My feet sink in the snow.

  “He’s got the gun.”

  I drop my phone and keep running. I see them, lined behind their vehicles, every single one of them waiting for a shot. “No one shoots,” I say when the distinct sound of gunfire stops me in my tracks.

  Eve

  After

  I’m not sure what I had expected to happen upon our return to the cabin. At the airport, I had listed for Gabe all of the worst-case scenarios I could possibly conceive in my mind: that Mia would remember nothing, that weeks of therapy would be undone, that this would throw Mia over the edge.

  We’re all watching Mia as she eyes the inside of the tiny cabin, a shanty in the middle of the Minnesota woods. Mia gives the place a once-over. It doesn’t take long for her memories to come flooding back, and as Gabe asks for the umpteenth time, “Mia, do you remember anything?” we realize that we should be careful what we ask for.

  The sound that emerges from my daughter is one I’ve never heard before, a sound akin to an animal dying. Mia falls to her knees in the middle of the room. She is screaming, an incomprehensible language I’ve never heard before. She is sobbing, a wild outburst I never knew my Mia was capable of, and I, too, begin to cry. “Mia. Honey,” I murmur, wanting to gather her in my arms and hold her.

  But Dr. Rhodes warns me to be careful. She holds a hand out, refusing to let me console Mia. Gabe leans in close and whispers to the doctor and me that this, this spot on the floor where Mia has collapsed in hysteria, is where, less than a month ago, a bl
oody corpse had been.

  Mia turns to Gabe with anguish in her pretty blue eyes, barking, “You killed him. You killed him,” over and over and over again. She’s crying, delirious, saying that she sees the blood, pouring from his lifeless body, seeping into the cracks of the floors. She sees the cat running away, tracking bloody footprints across the room.

  She hears the shot piercing through the silent room—and she jumps, reliving the moment right then and there, hearing the breaking glass as it shattered to the ground.

  She says that she sees him fall. She sees his limbs become flaccid, and plummet to the ground. She remembers that his eyes failed, his body jerked in ways beyond his control. There was blood on her hands, her clothes. “There’s blood everywhere,” she sobs desperately, groping at the ground. Dr. Rhodes says that Mia is experiencing an episode of psychosis. I push the doctor’s hands away from me, wanting nothing more than to soothe my daughter. I am making my way to her, to Mia, when Gabe reaches for my arm and stops me.

  “Everywhere. Red blood everywhere. Wake up!” Mia smacks her hands against the ground and then pulls her knees into herself and begins to rock, furiously. “Wake up! Oh, God, please wake up. Don’t leave me.”

  Gabe

  Christmas Eve

  I’m not the first one into the cabin. I spot Hammill’s fat face in the crowd. I grab him by the collar and ask what the fuck that was all about. On a normal day he could kick my ass if he wanted to. But this isn’t a normal day; today I’m a man possessed.

  “He was gonna kill her.”

  He claims Thatcher didn’t leave them a choice.

  “Or so you say.”

  “This isn’t your jurisdiction, asshole.”

  Some wannabe—looking no more than nineteen, maybe twenty years old—comes from the cabin and says, “Bastard’s dead,” and Hammill responds with a thumbs-up. Someone claps. This is apparently the sniper, a kid too stupid to know better. I remember when I was nineteen. The only thing in the world I wanted was to get my hands on a gun. Now the very thought of using it scares the shit out of me.

  “What’s your problem, Hoffman?”

  “I needed him alive.”

  They’re all making their way inside. An ambulance makes its way through the snow, sirens blaring. I watch the red and blue, red and blue, screaming through the dark night. EMTs unload, trying their damndest to steer a stretcher through the snow.

  Hammill follows his guys in. They all hike up the stairs and into the cabin. There’s a floodlight illuminating the inside until someone has the common sense to flip on a lamp. I hold my breath.

  I’ve never met Mia Dennett before in my life. I doubt that she’s ever heard my name. She doesn’t have a clue that for three months now, she’s been the only thought on my mind, the face I see when I wake up in the morning, the face I see when I go to bed.

  She emerges from the cabin, marshaled by Hammill, his grip tight enough she might as well be cuffed. She’s covered in blood, her hands and clothing, even her hair. It stains the strands of blond hair red. Her skin is a frightening white, translucent in the obnoxious glow of the floodlight, which no one has the courtesy to turn off. She’s a ghost, a phantom, with an empty expression on her face; the lights are on but no one’s home. Tears freeze to her cheeks as she slips down the stairs and Hammill jerks her back to her feet.

  “Me first,” Hammill vows as he leads Mia away from me. Her eyes graze over my face. What I see in her is Eve, thirty years ago, before James Dennett, before Grace and Mia, before me.

  Son of a bitch.

  I’d kick his fucking ass if I wasn’t so worried about frightening Mia. I don’t like the way he touches her.

  Inside I find the corpse of Colin Thatcher sprawled awkwardly across the floor. Once or twice as a street cop, I helped pull a stiff from a wreck. There’s nothing like it in the world. The feel of dead flesh: hard and cold the instant the soul leaves it. The eyes, whether open or closed, lose their life. His eyes are open. His flesh is cold. There’s more blood than I’ve ever seen. I force the lids down and say, “It’s nice to finally meet you, Colin Thatcher.”

  I think of Kathryn Thatcher in that shitty nursing home. I see the look on her deteriorating face when I break the news.

  Hammill’s guys have already gotten to work: crime scene photos, fingerprinting, gathering evidence.

  I don’t know what to make of the place. It’s an inadequate living, at best. The place reeks. I don’t know what I had expected. A medieval head crusher and knee splitter? Chains and flails? Handcuffs, if nothing more? What I see is an ugly little place with a gosh-darn Christmas tree. My own apartment is more dreadful than this.

  “Check this out,” someone says, letting a parka drop to the floor. I stand, my legs cramping. Into the Formica someone has carved the words We Were Here. “What do you make of it?”

  I let my fingers run over the words. “I don’t know.”

  Hammill comes into the cabin. His voice is loud enough to wake the dead. “She’s all yours,” he says to me as he gives Thatcher a little kick—just in case.

  “What’d she say?” I ask for conversation’s sake. I don’t really give a shit what she told him.

  “See for yourself,” he says. There’s something in his tone that perks my interest. He shows off this arrogant smile—I know something you don’t know—and adds, “It’s good.”

  I lean over Colin Thatcher for a last look. He lies dead-as-a-doorknob on the wooden floors. “What did you do?” I ask discreetly, then head outside.

  She’s sitting in the back of the open ambulance, being attended to by an EMT. They’ve got a wool blanket wrapped around her. They’re trying to make sure none of that blood is hers. The ambulance is quiet now, the lights and siren silenced. There’s the sound of people talking, someone laughing.

  I saunter up to her. She’s staring off into space, letting the EMT take a look, though she flinches with every touch.

  “It’s cold out here,” I say, getting her attention. Her hair is long, falling over her face and clouding her eyes. There’s an indistinguishable look on her; I don’t know what it means. Dried—frozen?—blood clings to her skin. Her nose runs. I pull a handkerchief from my pocket and set it in her hand.

  I’ve never cared this much about someone I didn’t know.

  “You must be exhausted. This has been quite an ordeal. We’ll get you home. Soon. I promise. I know someone who can’t wait to hear your voice.

  “I’m Detective Gabe Hoffman. We’ve been looking for you.”

  I find it impossible to believe this is the first time we’ve met. Seems to me I know her more than I know half my friends.

  Her eyes lift up to mine for a split second, and then find their way to an empty body bag that’s heading in. “You don’t need to look,” I say.

  But it isn’t the body bag, per se. It’s the space. She’s looking off into space. The vicinity is crowded with people who come and go. They’re mostly men, only one woman. They mention Christmas plans in passing: church and dinner with in-laws; staying up late to assemble some toy the wife bought online. All in the line of duty.

  Any other case I’d be slapping high fives for a job well done. But this isn’t any other case.

  “Detective Hammill asked you some questions. I have questions, too, but they can wait. I know this hasn’t been...easy...for you.”

  It crosses my mind to stroke her hair or pat her hand, some simple gesture that might bring her to life. Her eyes are lost. She rests her head on bent knees and doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t cry. None of this surprises me; she’s a woman in shock.

  “I know this has been a nightmare for you. For your family. So many people have been worried. We’ll have you home in time for Christmas. I promise,” I say. “I’ll bring you there myself.” As soon as I’m given the okay, Mia and I will
make the long drive home, where Eve will be waiting with open arms in front of their home. But first we’ll need to stop by the local hospital for a full examination. I’m hoping reporters haven’t caught on to this, that they won’t be lining the hospital parking lot with video cameras and microphones and a whole slew of questions.

  She doesn’t say a word.

  I consider calling Eve on my phone and letting Mia be the one to deliver the good news. I dive my hands into my pockets; where the hell is my phone? Oh, well. Probably too much, too soon. She isn’t ready. But Eve waits on pins and needles for my call. Soon.

  “What happened?” her soft voice finally asks.

  Of course, I think. It all happened so quickly. She’s struggling to make sense of it all.

  “They got him,” I say. “It’s all over.”

  “All over.” She lets the words slip from her tongue and fall to the snow.

  Her eyes do a 360. She takes in the view as if this is the first time she’s seen it. Is it possible that this is the first time she’s been let outdoors?

  “Where am I?” she whispers.

  I exchange a look with the EMT, who shrugs. Well, hell, I think, this is more up your alley than mine. I get the bad guys. You take care of the good.

  “Mia,” I say. I hear a cell phone ring in the distance. Sounds a hell of a lot like mine. “Mia,” I begin again.

  She looks addled the second time I say her name. I say it a third time because I can’t think of any words to come after it. What happened? Where am I? These are the questions I planned to ask her.

  “That’s not my name,” she says in a low voice.

  The EMT is packing his things. He wants her checked out by a doctor, but for now she’s okay. There are signs of malnutrition. Wounds healing. But nothing of immediate concern.

  I swallow. “Sure it is. You’re Mia Dennett. Don’t you remember?”