laugh.
As Molly grew quiet, Thomas turned on the SUV’s lights. They cut a broad path through the gathering darkness, and to his left he saw a herd of white-tailed deer grazing. The light was poor, but he thought they were all does, the females who’d managed to survive the most recent season of hunting.
Thomas failed to see the sport in it when the hunter had a high-powered rifle, scopes that practically sighted the gun, a four-wheeler to cover ground, and walkie-talkies to conspire with his buddies. There wasn’t much sport in killing an animal whose only defense was flight.
“You look like you could spit nails,” she commented. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I was thinking about hunters.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to try to understand how your mind works.” She sat up taller. “Where are you taking me?”
“I have a friend who has a cabin. It’s a bit primitive, but you’ll be warm and safe.”
“Can’t you just let us out of the car? We’re a thousand miles from nowhere. I haven’t seen another car for the last hour. If you let Familiar and me out, it’ll take us two days to walk back to civilization.”
He considered it. “No.”
“Why not? You say you don’t intend to hurt us.”
“Something bad could happen to you.”
She raised her hands in disgust. “Something other than being taken hostage by an escaped murderer?”
“I’m not a murderer. I’m falsely charged. And I don’t consider this a dangerous situation because I won’t hurt you.”
“I’m supposed to take your word for that.”
“Look.” He was getting annoyed. “You don’t have any choice but to take my word. There are wild animals in these woods. Normally they avoid humans, but it would be my luck that I would put you out and a mountain lion would eat you. Now let me drive. It’s dark. The road has gotten narrow. I haven’t been back here in the past five years, and I don’t want to get lost. We have only a quarter tank of gas.”
Those words silenced her, and Thomas’s thoughts turned to the real danger of their situation. If they ran out of gas up in this area, they might wait around for days before anyone happened along. February wasn’t a big camping month and though the weather was mild now, a blizzard could pass through and they could easily freeze to death.
They wound higher into the hills, and Thomas had the sense that they’d entered a tunnel of trees. No stars were visible through the thick canopy of limbs. During the day it was beautiful. At night it felt a bit claustrophobic.
“Have you thought far enough ahead to figure out what you’re going to do?” she asked. “You’re free, but you don’t have a life. You can’t go back to your home. You can’t go to your job. What are you going to do?”
He didn’t have a specific plan, but he had an answer. “I’m going to prove my innocence. And I’m going to find Kate, if she’s alive. I’ve been sitting in that jail cell since Anna was killed. I haven’t had a chance to look for Kate. Now I will.”
Her voice was softer. “Do you believe she’s alive?”
As much as he wanted to lie to her, he had to tell the truth. “I don’t know. I want to believe she’s okay, but the sheriff has everyone convinced that she’s dead. He must have found something at the scene to make him so sure.”
“Has anyone talked to Darwin?” she asked.
He shook his head. “He wouldn’t talk to me. We had a heated set-to at my arraignment. I accused him of killing Anna and he screamed at me and accused me of killing his wife and baby. It was high drama on his part.”
“He was acting?”
“Darwin hardly knows me, but I think he knows I didn’t hurt Anna or Kate. We had words a few months ago after he’d hit Anna and she came to my house. He wanted to say we were having an affair, but I straightened him out.” His hands tightened on the wheel as he remembered. “I wanted to punch his lights out, but I couldn’t. I might’ve had a moment’s satisfaction, but Anna would have lost the only safe place she had to go.”
“You said high drama. Why would he accuse you of killing her?”
“He didn’t want the cops looking at him. I was the perfect scapegoat, and he played it to the hilt. How well do you know him?”
“The first time I met him was at the wedding.” Molly cleared her throat. “He was crude and awful. I guess I wanted my sister to have that fairy-tale love story—the prince on a white horse who would rescue her and love her and take care of her. Darwin was about as far from that as anyone can get. He married Anna for her inheritance. And when he went through all of her money, he started hitting her.”
“He’s a real charmer.”
“How often did you see Anna? Thomas, you have to tell me the truth. I have to know the facts if I’m going to figure out what happened to Katie.”
Thomas knew she was asking how often her sister received a beating at the hands of her husband. Earlier he’d tried to protect her from the truth about her sister’s abuse, but now he felt he had to tell her. “Anna came by sporadically, either when she was really happy or really scared.”
The dash light of the SUV gave Molly’s face a soft illumination, and he saw the tear trace down her cheek. She was hearing some hard things, but if she wanted to find Katie, she would have to hear a lot more.
He kept his gaze on the road as he talked. “About once a week Anna would come over because she was afraid. Either he’d already hit her or he’d threatened to hit her.”
“When she was pregnant…”
“Toward the end he just slapped her. He had some restraint. He never took it far enough to break a bone or do any permanent damage. It was more about bullying Anna, about breaking her down. The emotional pain was far worse than the physical.”
Now Molly’s tears flowed in earnest. He slowed the vehicle, but she waved him on. “I’m okay,” she said. “I just wish she’d called me. I suspected she was unhappy, but whenever I spoke to her, she said she was happy and for me to mind my own business.”
“It was so important to her for you to believe she was a success. That she’d made the right choice.” Thomas thought about the conversations he’d had with Anna. “She felt like a failure. She was the college dropout, the one who couldn’t get it right. She knew she’d worried your mom a lot. After your mother died, she felt like she had to prove to you that she was smart and strong and able to manage her own life.”
“You see how well that went.”
“There was nothing you could have done. Honestly. I tried. I begged her to leave Darwin, to take Kate and start over fresh. I offered her money, contacts, whatever she needed. She wouldn’t go.”
“She was hardheaded like that.”
“Anna looked up to you. She talked all the time about her sister,
