The color was coming back to Annie’s face, two pink patches rising on her wet cheeks, but she offered no comment.
“When Gary came down the stairs, he flipped on the light and caught me down there. He thought the whole setup was intended for him, but it wasn’t, Annie. I swear it wasn’t meant for him.”
Annie remained silent, but something new was dawning in her eyes. A realization. A question that he would have to answer.
“Ask me,” he said, almost shouting as the cold rain worked its way past his inner T-shirt and bit into his shoulders. “Just ask me, Annie.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Who was it for?”
The snake skin was splitting, but it did not hurt.
“Me.”
Daniel held nothing back as he told her the rest of the story, about how, in a moment of desperation, he had given up on his plan to run away and decided on another way out. The “easy” way out, as he’d thought of it back then. A puddle of water in the basement. A handful of live wires. A bare foot.
It would be so much faster than the attempted escape that he’d been planning for months. So much easier. And it came with a one hundred percent guarantee, whereas his odds of making it to the boathouse and surviving for the rest of his life without being recognized were slim at best. He’d just end up back in the house with Gary, and then it would be worse than before.
The prospect was unbearable, and he’d weighed it all out, finally deciding that suicide was the path that made the most sense. But before he’d gone through with it, his stepfather, drunk and reeking of whiskey, had found him down there and assumed the worst.
“He came charging across the room like a bull and slipped in the water. He knocked himself out. I don’t know why, but seeing him on the ground like that brought me back to my senses. So, to make sure he didn’t stop me, I tied him up and left him down there. My hands were shaking so bad, I barely managed to get duct tape around his wrists and ankles and over his mouth. Then I waited until the sun came up, and I woke my mom to have her drive me to the school for the Scout trip up to St. Helens.”
The truth was, he told Annie, that he’d never know for sure if he would actually have gone through with running away if he hadn’t tied Gary up and known what was waiting for him at home after the trip. He came to believe later that Gary’s drunken intervention was some twist of fate or providence, some kink in the fabric of his destiny that meant he was supposed to go.
He’d never stopped believing that—even during that first year in the boathouse when he was starving and scrounging and hiding awaywhile his story faded slowly out of the public eye. He had struggled, but at least he was free. And eventually, when enough time had passed and he worked up the courage, he went down to the county clerk’s office with his face half hidden under the brim of a hat pulled low, Daniel Barela’s driver’s license in hand, and enough cash to pay the fee to file a claim on the clearing. The clerk had barely batted an eye, and Daniel was shocked when a letter arrived in the boathouse’s battered mailbox telling him the claim had been accepted.
After that, he’d bought as manyNO TRESPASSINGsigns as he could afford and posted them in every direction, and when he ran out of money a few weeks later, he’d started taking odd jobs around town as a freelance electrician and handyman. He was young, but he did good work, and folks in town began recommending him.
He was still bitter thinking about it, but work was the one thing he owed his stepfather for. Gary was a contractor. He’d built the Redmond house from the ground up, and Daniel, fascinated by the process, had paid attention as his stepfather wired the electricity.
And then, a stroke of good fortune when a client noticed his drawing pad and offered to buy the first charcoal sketch he’d done of the mountain. That had opened up another small source of income, and over time his meager savings grew.
Somewhere in the middle of the story, they had reached the southern shore, and the canoe sat half beached, Annie resting over solid ground and Daniel still in the water as the rain lightened.
“Why haven’t you gone back?” Annie asked, completely soaked where she sat. “Now that you’re an adult, and he can’t hurt you anymore, you could at least let your mother know that you’re still alive. Don’t you think she deserves that?”
Daniel shook his head, droplets flying. “All of Redmond saw that press conference. Not just saw it, they believed it. Gary’s a hero in that town, a special ops veteran, and they all think I tried to kill him. He knows how to fool people, Annie… how to win them to his side. He’s one way in private, but around other people he knows how to keep a lidon it. He’s really good at hiding who he is, and he’s not the forgive-and-forget type. Going back now could land me in prison. Honestly, these last seven years, it feels like I’ve just been waiting with my breath held for him to track me down. To somehow find me and take revenge for what he thinks I did to him.” Daniel shook his head again. “And then there’s all the other laws I broke. I committed fraud and ran away from a federal manhunt. And besides that, what would I be going back to? It’s not like he’s holding my mom hostage. I miss her every day, but she chose him, and she chose to stay with him even after he turned violent against me.”
Annie nodded, slowly.
Overhead, a single sunbeam pierced the clouds, bathing the tips of the nearest pines in filmy light.
“Say something,” Daniel prompted when Annie made no move to speak or leave the canoe.
For another half minute, she gazed at him, her jaw working back and forth in the damp quiet, and then she spoke at last, in a voice he hoped he’d never hear again.
“It breaks my heart that you went through all of that, and I can’t imagine everything it took just to survive… but you lie to me again, and this is over.”
Chapter 21DANIEL
The second day of summer broke misty and mild, and Daniel stepped out onto the dock with a mug of strong black coffee in his hands.
Closing his eyes, he pulled in a deep breath of cool air scented with pine and lake water, then took a quick glance at his watch, and another at the empty road beyond the open gate.
Jake was late, and he was never late.
He’d called the night before and confirmed eight thirty on the nose, he’d be there, ready to fish. Something important must have come up.
Daniel loaded the tackle box and the rods into the skiff, where they’d be ready to go, then took a seat on the dock to work on a half-finished sketch of Annie while he waited.
