The hit makes the trees blur into a dark mass. Darkness crowds the edges of her vision. The sky goes sideways and she can’t hear anything over the ringing of her ears.
She comes toon the ground, cold and damp seeping through her jacket. He’s standing over her, something clutched in his palm. A rock. She touches a finger to her face to assess the damage and eventhe slightest pressure makes her cry out. Her fingers come away slicked with blood.
She tries to stand but everything goes dim. He grabs her as she staggers, binds her hands behind her back, her ankles, and at the knees with the bungee cords she’s seen him use to load their kayaks on the van, lets her fall to the ground again.
The trees multiply and blur before her eyes, the woods becoming infinite. She screams again, and the effort makes her feel like a firework has gone off inside her skull.
Once she’s bound, Damien pauses to take a packet of tissues from his pocket, the same ones she’s seen him use for his daughter’s runny noses, and stanches the blood from her one good punch. Her mouth feels like it’s filled with pebbles, she’s nauseous, and the pain in her head rings through her whole body, but she wants to keep him talking for as long as possible. Wants to buy herself time, even as she feels the chill coming off the water. Tendrils of it creeping along her hairline, down her neck. Even as she feels the truth in her bones: There is no way out.
It takes a long time to put the words in order, to gather the strength to get the sentences out. “So… you’re going to kill me? Is that really a smart move?”
“Are you kidding? Do you know how easily we can explain this? Dad is going to tell everyone you told him the job was getting to you, that you couldn’t take the pressure. You were underperforming on the drug issues here, your attitude rubbed everyone the wrong way. You weren’t able to come to grips with the disappearance of your mother. It was all too much.” He pats her side, takes her cell phone, her car keys, tosses them into the water, where they disappear with a quickness that makes her throat tighten. “No one will even know to look for you here. Jenna got away, but she knows better than to show her face here again.”
Her stomach drops. “What do you mean, shegot away?”
“Doesn’t matter. She won’t dare come back now.”
Jenna, alive? The thought helps her blink away the pain for a moment. Jenna is out there somewhere, free.
He crouches behind her, heaves her upright. She struggles against him, but her vision is still off, black circles dancing in front of her eyes. She tries to drive an elbow into his abdomen and the effort sends a bolt of pain through her skull.
“Why are you doing this? Why are you covering for Luke? I’ve watched your child. Washed your wife’s hair when she was too weak to do it herself. You’re going to kill me? Tell me the truth.”
“Some of us wouldn’t arrest our own family. Some of us have more loyalty than that. You might not like what they do, but you belong to each other.”
“You knew about Annabelle’s pregnancy. The baby—”
“I have nothing to do with what happened to that baby. That’s all just proof that the Riley girls were fucked up without any help from us. But she was after Luke. Sabrina was. Making all kinds of threats, trying to blackmail him. Luke was worried.”
He goes quiet for a moment, stares into the water.
“You know my dad never said anything about me joining him in the department. Right? Always Luke. The firstborn son, all that shit. I was too soft. I liked to be alone in the woods, liked to read. No one cared what happened to me. So I wanted to show them I could look out for the family. Luke was the screwup. Not me.”
“Where is she, Damien? Where is Sabrina? What did you do to her?”
His voice is calm, cool, the same tone he might use across the dinner table or in his living room, and it’s more frightening than if he were angry. “This is where they used to meet. Wasn’t hard to get her out here again, when she thought he wanted to see her. Well, at least it wasn’t once I got her in the truck.”
The broken bracelet. She must have fought with everything she had. Had he hit her too, the way he did Callie? Was she bound? Is that why Damien’s movements feel so practiced, so sure? And all the while Sabrina must have been thinking about Annabelle waiting in the house, needing her.
He brings Callie to the water, stands her at the edge. His hands are tight on her shoulders and she grimaces at the thought that hewill be the last person to touch her. She looks past him, into that unlikely, beautiful, depthless blue, and knows that’s where they’ll find Sabrina. If anyone ever knows to search. How long does it take to drown, in water this cold, limbs bound? She could hold her breath a minute at most. Then her burning lungs would be forced to inhale water. Another minute before the airways would close up, the body trying to protect itself, a last-ditch instinct. Then, nothing. The brain, heart, and lungs all going still.
Above them a pair of birds startles from a tree, the dark arrows of their bodies reflected across the surface of the sinkhole. Damien turns his head upward, follows their path.
She has one more chance. “Don’t do this. Don’t do it to your wife. To your daughter.”
She hears him swallow. She presses on. “Things can still be different, Damien,” she says, as softly as she can.
“There’s no other way. I told them about the notebook. Jane left it out one day. I recognized the charm, the tree, the water. I said there was nothing tying any of that to me, to Luke, but they said it was only a matter of time before you caught on.”
Theymeaning Frank and Luke. The family she thought she always wanted.
She’s getting woozier by the minute and her eyes are getting heavy. Each blink lasts a little longer, and she feels the pull of darkness, of rest. She lets her eyes sit closed for a second when a voice reaches her.Let her go.
She’s sure she’s imagining it in her delirium, summoned it from her mind: Jane’s voice coming through the trees.
But then she hears it again, closer. Real.
“Let her go.”
