Aftershocks (11 page)

“Ex-fiancé. But no, I didn’t.” She poured soap into the filling basin and watched the bubbles forming.

“Why not?”

It was none of his business. Not that part of it, anyway.

When she didn’t answer, he said, “Do you realize that Pat and Freddie probably want you for this, not Olivia?”

An odd note in his voice made her look up at him, and the look in his eyes swept her back. Instead of warm salt air, the breeze carried the heavier scent of lake water. The light went from golden to twilight green. And Grant became everything that was good in her world. For a moment, she drowned in the depth of love in his eyes, the dragging swirl of desperation that almost made her change her mind. How could they live without each other?

And then she blinked, and eighteen-year-old Grant disappeared. If there had been any emotion there, anything showing that he felt similarly to how he had ten years ago, it was gone. One eyebrow lifted as he waited for her to answer his question.

“Of course I realize that. Why do you think I’m doing this?” She dropped the silverware into the sink and added the stack of plates. “But he’s not going to get me.”

“Not if I can help it,” Grant muttered. He stuck the frying pan into the water and tugged her elbow. “Let that stuff soak.”

She dried her hands and rejoined him at the table. He’d grabbed a pad and pen. “Start at the beginning. Did you see the totems?”

Zoe started to speak, but found her throat clogged. She hadn’t talked about this since she finished therapy. She nodded instead.

“Do you remember what they look like?”

“Kind of. It was sixteen years ago!” she protested when he grimaced. “And memorizing the details wasn’t exactly my priority at the time.”

“Whatever you can remember.” He pushed the pad over. “Want a pencil?”

“No, this is fine.” She accepted the felt-tip pen and hovered it over the pad, trying to picture the small golden idols. “They were all different, but…” She started sketching the basic rectangular shape, with a wide base and cap and an animal near the top. One had been cat-like, maybe a mountain lion. Another had been a bear. The carvings on the bottom half had seemed artistic, but the one at the top was a symbol.

“Why do you call them totems?” Grant asked her, watching the pen stroke across the paper.

She shrugged. “That’s what they called them. Why?”

“Totems are symbolic. Usually relating to ancestry. They represent unity for a group, like a tribe or clan.”

“Well, that fits what I remember.” She described them as she drew, jotting notes alongside the picture as memory built on memory. She’d retained more than she thought she had, given her state of mind back then and the elapsed time. Not to mention all her efforts to pretend none of it had ever happened.

Her pen faltered and she lifted it with a sigh.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s just…I worked so hard to get past all this. I went to therapy for ten years. When my parents’ guilt and pain made me repress my own feelings, the therapist made me vent them to her. When I finally felt like it was over enough to look ahead, like I had enough control of my own life, I set it aside. I made sure it wouldn’t hold me back from getting what I wanted.” A wave of shock went over her at the words. She couldn’t believe she had said that to him. “Grant, I—”

“It’s okay.” But he didn’t look like it was okay. For a man with a classic poker face, he was having trouble hiding what the words had done to him.

“It’s not okay. Shit, Grant, I didn’t mean…I meant…I didn’t mean you,” she finished with a whisper. It didn’t matter what she said. The truth was, at the time, it
had
meant him.

The breeze shifted, and she could swear it carried the scent of dead fish through the sliding screen door and out the window on the other side of the shack.

“I know what you meant,” Grant finally said. “And now, despite all your hard work and careful planning, here you are. Right back in the thick of it.”

Zoe hated his bitterness, barely heard beneath the words of understanding. She stood and went to the doorway to look out on the beach.

“This probably wasn’t a good idea,” she murmured, mainly because she had to. Her fingers found the delicate chain around her neck, the sand dollar charm that was usually tucked under her shirt. Kell had never asked her where it came from, why she never took it off. Now, she wished he had.

“Depends on your perspective.”

He’d shoved back whatever he was feeling, because any hint of emotion was gone from his voice. Zoe half turned back to him. “And your perspective is?”

“The right one.” He picked up the pen from where it lay on the table and tossed it onto the pad. “Come back here and finish drawing.”

She went back to the table and sat to study the picture. “I don’t know. I think this is as close as I can get.”

He studied the sketch. “And there were four of them?”

“Yep. About ten inches tall, I guess? Narrow enough to wrap my hand around. Not very big.”

He sat back again. “Tell me what you did with them the day you escaped.”

“You know what I did.”

“It was almost sixteen years ago. Tell me again.”

She rubbed her eyes and dredged up that awful day. “Jordie showed up with them at two in the morning. The whooping and hollering woke me up, and the guy who usually sat in my room while I slept must have gone out to see what was going on. I peeked out the curtain over my doorway and watched for a little while. They passed around the totems, toasting them and Jordie. They drank. A lot. Probably did drugs, too, but I stopped watching. Then—” Her throat closed. Grant knew what had happened then. She didn’t have to say it.

Jordie had come through, after he’d been threatened with his younger brother’s death, after he’d had to watch them cut off Grant’s earlobe. He’d snuck Grant out a few hours after that, when everyone was asleep, to take him home. He’d whispered apologies to Zoe that he couldn’t take her, too. She hadn’t really understood until later. He’d been able to sneak Grant out because they didn’t care about him. He’d been blindfolded the entire time he was at the house, and she’d heard Pat saying they could pick him up again at any time. They didn’t need him. He was just motivation.

But they did need her.

Jordie was supposed to get the totems from someone within two days. He did it, and they “celebrated” by torturing him. When the memories surged, her brain attached images to them based on the sounds she remembered, sounds she didn’t really understand at the time. The reality had to be even more horrifying. But she and Grant hadn’t talked about that part, not in detail, and if he didn’t know, she couldn’t tell him. There was no reason to.

“It took hours, but eventually they fell asleep. I knew things were about to get much worse.” From the moment Freddie had grabbed Zoe from the grocery store parking lot, she and Pat had acted like she was their daughter. At first they’d hit her when she didn’t do something they wanted, and she figured out pretty quickly that to humor them, to pretend to go along, would keep her safe until she could escape. But then they’d added more and more members to their gang. They’d moved from ramshackle cabin to abandoned house to tent city in the woods, keeping her disoriented and off balance, so that she didn’t know where to run if she did manage to get away. And they’d kept a guard on her at all times, usually a big guy or someone really scary, who acted like he’d go off any minute and start killing everyone.

Remembering how many nights she’d lain helpless, inert, terrified, still angered her. Her last therapist had told her she was reviewing that time with the perspective of an adult, and she had to forgive herself for not doing what she couldn’t have done. Zoe understood that, even agreed with it, but she couldn’t banish the ugly glide of disgust and resentment that she’d never managed to find the right combination of opportunity and courage.

Not until that night. After they got the totems, they’d all been jubilant and relaxed. The person with the key was meeting them in a rail yard that evening, and then they’d have everything they’d been working toward for a year.

“I hoped they’d leave me at the cabin, but they dragged me to the rail yard and left me and the totems in a little room in the old station building, with one of their biggest, meanest guys outside the door. But they got sloppy and didn’t notice there was another door behind a row of file cabinets. It took a while, but I managed to shift them just enough to get through to the door and get out. I took the bag of totems with me.”

“What was outside that door?”

She closed her eyes, calling up the squealing brakes, the chugs and clatters of moving steel. All she could see was the strip of gravel in front of her, the dark cavern behind a half-open door, her one chance to get rid of the hateful things.

“A freight train. It was moving slowly, but I have no idea in which direction. I threw the totems into an open car.”

Her moistened palms slipped across the top of the table. The wooden chair was solid under her legs. But her breathing was harsh and shallow, and her heart pounded in her ears, blocking out any possible sounds of pursuit. She couldn’t see anything but the giant metal canyon she ran in. “The door was open on another train going in the opposite direction, so I got on it.”

A warm hand settled on top of hers, doing more to ground her in two seconds than everything else she’d tried. Slowly, the rail yard faded and the orange glow of the lowering sun filled the shack. She eased her breathing and forced her shoulders to ease down. Grant was watching it happen, his gaze steady with patience.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “Hard to go back there and not get stuck.”

He nodded and withdrew his hand. “Unfortunately, what you did is going to make them damned near impossible to track down. Even if we can determine the train they were on, they could have wound up anywhere along the line.”

“I know.” She slumped, bowing under the weight of possibilities. It could take years to explore them all. And she had less than two weeks.

“Have you done any research on them?”

Another unwelcome wave of heat washed over her. This one was shame. “No, I haven’t. I mean, I have what Henricksen found, but it’s vague and mostly comes from the interviews they did back then. I didn’t even think about—” She pressed her lips together, refusing to overapologize. “I haven’t had time.”

Grant nodded. “We could track down Pat and Freddie’s gang members, the ones who aren’t still working for them. Find out what they know and remember.”

“Yeah,” she said slowly, “but I don’t know who they are or if Henricksen will give me a list or anything. He can only do so much.”

“I can get it. Tracking people down is time-consuming, though. That might not be the most expedient path. But first, we need the history. We need to know exactly what we’re going after and why it’s so important.”

“It was like a bedtime story to Pat. He told me the legend of the totems over and over again.”

“I know the story. Jordie told me before he died.”

“Oh.” She twisted her fingers together. That had to be the last time he saw him. Even when she and Grant were together, during those high-school summers, he didn’t talk much about all that. One of Pat’s gang had grabbed him after school. He’d been so freaked out he couldn’t remember, later, all the details. Just that they’d used him to get Jordie to do what they wanted, Jordie had caved, somehow gotten Grant out and home, and then died anyway.

Why had Jordie told Grant the legend? Was it to distract him from everything else? Jordie was several years older than Grant, so they hadn’t been close, but she knew they’d loved each other.

Grant cleared his throat. Pointedly. “That’s not the part we need. We don’t know what details in Pat’s version are real and what are legend.”

“I’m pretty sure the part about immortality is legend,” she joked. Grant just stared at her, unamused. “What? You can’t tell me you think we should take that part seriously?”

“I don’t think we should discount anything. And you’re the one who pointed out that what Pat believes matters the most.”

There was something he wasn’t saying, but he rose and started cleaning up the rest of the stuff from their dinner, so Zoe joined him.

“But you think there’s a logical reason that’s part of the story, right? Not that they can actually all be brought together to make the holder immortal. Like a vampire or something. Right?”

“Right.”

He sounded amused, and she scowled at him.

“Something in that sentence had to be right,” he said.

Zoe rolled her eyes and backhanded his upper arm, then had to pretend to bobble the glasses she held to hide her surprise. The man was rock solid. Not tight and wiry like he’d been back when they were barely not-teenagers. Not even “mmm, muscles” as one would imagine just to look at him. But very, very hard.

And, of course, that made her think of the possibility that he was hard all over.

And that made her knees weak.

History
, she reminded herself. That was all it was. All it was ever going to be.

She thought of the sand dollar, and shivered.

* * *

Forty-caliber ammunition. Lines of sight. Uzbekistan. Orange alert. Wheels up. Paid-up life insurance. Beach bunnies.