Ties That Bind (9 page)

What would her father do?

The tree was larger now, with more branches and leaves, reaching skyward. Large, bumpy roots cratered the ground around her, as well. This tree had a life of its own, perhaps the one it had taken from her sister.

Sam turned away and fought the urge to run, prickles of fear running down her spine as she tensed, watching for the branches of the tree to reach out and grab her, pull her in, and destroy her, like they had Callie.

She gave in to her fear and ran like a child, around the side of the house and to the front driveway, stopping short at the last square of pavement next to where she had parked her car. There, etched in the aging concrete, were the familiar names and handprints she had seen many times before.

“Susanna, Amelia, Callie, Samantha.” Next to each name was the print, Sam’s so small it seemed impossible she had ever been that young, that fragile. She bent down and placed her hand palm down onto the print, her long fingers engulfing it and obscuring it from view, although she could still feel the grooves and ridges beneath her fingers.

Missed me, missed me, now you gotta kiss me. Red rover, red rover, send Sammy right over. We’re waiting.

Sam shook off the childish voice in her head.
Who was waiting?
It had been so long ago, so many years, and so much agony. This was a wound that time would not heal, unlike the claims of so many proverbs. Instead, every year seemed to make the pain worse, the ache stronger. How could her family grieve, mourn, and then walk away with her mother perpetually frozen and gone? They had lost two members of the family that day.

Both Sam’s mother and Callie, gone forever. Looking back over the house, along the roofline, Sam could see the long branches of the tree as they reached up, like spindly, spidery arms, poking upward and waving gently in the summer breeze, as if they were taunting her.

I’m still here, and I’m still growing.

A shiver racked through her spine, and goose bumps rose on her arms. The warm, sultry August evening seemed to darken.

It’s a tree, Sam. Just a tree.

She turned to her car again, and the uncanny sense that someone was watching her, something real and live, and evil, washed over her along with another wave of chills.

“Quit creeping yourself out, Sam,” she admonished herself, and jumped into her car, starting it up and zooming away.

She laughed wildly as she drove down the street. It was still light, the summer sky not even giving a hint of the darker blue that would lead to night. How could she be so afraid of a tree?

*   *   *

After Sam got home, she found herself restless, so she decided to numb her mind with work. She sat and stared at the computer screen, the copy of the DVD in her hard drive, playing the slide show of the three dead teens, over and over. The CSI techs at the Smithland sheriff’s office had made the copy for her and kept the original. The pictures were not beautiful. Death was most often violent and messy. Bodily fluids, bile, contorted body shapes, smells that seemed to emanate even from the pictures. And whoever took them had seen that. There could be little doubt the pictures were real.

Sam was looking for clues. What clues she didn’t know; so far, all she had managed to do was sicken herself.

She stopped the frame on each teenager, looking closely for something, anything, that might lead her in the right direction.

Sam wore only a pair of men’s boxer shorts and a thin white tank top, with spaghetti straps that kept falling down over her thin shoulders. She would push them up again and again, and they would just keep falling. If she would just take the time to tighten them, it wouldn’t happen. But she didn’t want to bother.

The desk was an old hand-me-down from her younger self. She’d taken it from her room at her parents’ house. It had moved with her, first to Salt Lake City and then back to Kanesville. It was the one thing she clung to, because she could remember her mother standing beside her as she labored over learning to write her letters. “No, Sammy, that’s an
E.
Remember the
F
only has two horizontal lines.”

One of the few good memories.
The desk often made her melancholy and yet tied her to something she needed desperately to have a connection with.

Tonight, with work on her mind, she was paying little attention to the desk—or the past.

There were no words in the presentation, no names, no clues, nothing that said,
Look here,
aside from the bloodred
VENGEANCE
that followed each slide.

The cordless phone on the desk rang, and she picked it up from the base. The caller ID notified her it was an “unknown” caller, but she always answered her phone. She didn’t know who she was waiting to hear from. Maybe Callie? Maybe her mother? More than once a hapless telemarketer had hung up on Sam, undoubtedly hating their job after she let them have it.

She answered absently, “Montgomery.”

“I think you have a serial killer on your hands, Sam.” The voice was Gage’s and the anger that immediately surged over her came from the past, but she fought to tamp it down, not let it roil around in her stomach and heart. She’d fought off thinking about him every day since she’d left Salt Lake.

And now he was right here in the middle of her case.

“Really?” she answered, more than a trace of sarcasm lacing her words.

“Don’t be smart. It doesn’t suit. And you wasted a perfectly good cup of coffee.”

His word usage betrayed his background, which was a little bit of Georgia farm boy mixed in with suburban Utah Mormon. He’d spent time as an Army Ranger, stationed for a while in Fort Benning, Georgia, and from time to time the years there sautéed his words with southern spice, as though he were a born-and-bred southerner. But he shared her roots. Utah Mormon pioneer stock.

“It suits just fine, Gage. And I’m not stupid.”

“I know you aren’t, Samantha,” he said, his voice a harsh, sexy drawl. “I’m sorry if you think I’m trying to take over your case. I’m not. But I know enough about this kind of stuff to help you. All you have to do is let me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Well, you don’t really have a choice.”

“So why act like you are here for me, huh, Gage? Why pretend? Anyways, right now, it’s Sunday night, and I don’t have to work with you until tomorrow morning.

“So right now I’ll say good night. See you tomorrow.”

Sam clicked the off button on the phone and then slammed it into the base for good measure.

She’d never been good at men or relationships. She did okay with the sex part. Something about her skinny body, gangly arms and legs, and smooth, pale Nordic complexion seemed to appeal to men.

But bonding, mating, forging long-term contacts—those things were all foreign to her. Did someone teach these things to girls? All the girls who ended up with nice, successful, handsome husbands seemed to know how to do it. They must have had mothers who taught them to wear lipstick and comb their hair and giggle when a man said something he thought was witty—even if it wasn’t. The one boy she had thought loved her—Paul—had walked away without a backward glance, leaving to serve a mission for the Church while she was still aching from a loss she couldn’t come close to understanding.

Her mother had been one step away from being a corpse. Sam grew up learning how to fight and defend, passionate and ardent but not at all refined. Maybe that was why she was good at the sex thing.

She’d had her share of lovers, but none she’d allowed to get emotionally close or put down roots anywhere near her. Sex was easy. She’d learned the pain and dangers of love early on in life.

And then there was Gage, a man she had found herself inextricably drawn to on a difficult case. He affected her in ways she couldn’t explain yet had never been her lover or even her friend. He hadn’t been a one-night stand or a friend with benefits. Instead, there was just that incredible pull—gravity. They’d never consummated a relationship that bordered on cinder hot. Maybe that was why he could still crawl under her skin and set her nerve endings on fire.

The bond they’d formed during those very dark days had been irretrievably broken when he’d shown her just how disparate they really were, telling their chief that she was too close to the case and more of a detriment than a help. Stood up in front of their boss and claimed her unfit to remain in the undercover position.

He’d betrayed her.

Sam closed her eyes and let herself drift back to a time when the fireworks between her and Gage were of a different sort. She wanted to fight it, but his return to her life had triggered too many feelings and emotions. Maybe if she just let herself remember, it would get out of her system quicker.
He
would get out of her system.

Her mind wandered back to the night he first cooked for her, in his house in Farmington.

“Oh, you’re good,” Sam had said, watching as he expertly sautéed mushrooms in a pan, never missing a beat as he checked on the steaming asparagus. Outside, steaks were grilling, and he kept leaving to check on them, finally coming in with two perfectly done medium-rare fillets. He dished out the plates, scooping out the mushrooms over the top of the steaks and adding a steaming heap of asparagus, which he topped with a pat of butter.

“Oh yeah, you’re good,” Sam said again, cutting into a steak that practically fell apart with her fork.

“Sammy?” He drew in close, picking up his wineglass, and she picked up hers. Their arms intertwined, and they both took a sip.

“I am only good at two things. Killing people and making love.” He gave her a wicked grin, and she felt her stomach flutter and moisture pool in places she didn’t know could react to a sexually charged statement like the one he had just uttered. Although she wasn’t quite sure how to take the “killing” statement. She knew he’d been in the Army and, after his enlistment ended, he came to work for the Salt Lake City Police Department. She wasn’t sure why he had decided not to reenlist for another tour of active duty, except she suspected his “good at killing” statement probably had something to do with that. She wanted to know more. She wanted to dig deeper. Instinct told her to wait.

“That’s not true,” she said softly. “You’re an excellent cook. This is the best steak I’ve ever eaten.”

“All part of the lovemaking.”

*   *   *

The phone rang again, knocking Sam out of her reverie. She shook her head briskly as though she could dislodge the daydream, memories past. She didn’t
need
him. She didn’t
want
him. She picked it up, clicking the on button.

Harsh, jagged breathing.

“Hello?” Sam said into the phone, staring hypnotically at the electrically lit square face of her caller ID unit. “Hello?” This time her voice was quiet, a ragged whisper. “Mom, is that you?”

The caller ID lit up brightly with her parents’ phone number.

ELEVEN

Whitney Marcusen abruptly found herself wide awake, sitting upright in her bed, slapping at the spiders whose prickly, sticky little feet had been marching across her skin. Beads of sweat poured from her forehead, and moisture pooled between her breasts and under her arms.

She could still feel the light pinpricks and see the spiders that had crawled from Jeremiah’s sightless eyes and over his body to attack her as she lay frozen underneath him, their bodies still conjoined in post-coital limbo. She’d wanted to scream, “I’m not dead. I’m not dead!” but no words would come from her mouth. But as the fog of sleep left her, the spiders faded away into the cobwebs left from the dream. Her body moved, tears poured down her face, and grief and despair—her constant companions for the past few days—took their place.

Jeremiah. A sob escaped from her throat and she clapped a clammy hand to her mouth, trying to keep the noises inside, to keep her mother and father from hearing. They would want to comfort her. They would think this was ordinary grief, the kind a high-school girl felt for her first crush.

The wave of nausea that roiled up from her stomach told the real story.

The noises she could keep inside. The vomit she could not. She ran to the bathroom connected to her bedroom and heaved up all of dinner—not much really. Her appetite was sparse before, and now, with Jeremiah gone, it was nonexistent.

After the nausea passed, she moved to the sink and turned on the cold water, cupping her hand under the faucet and bringing the water to her mouth. She swished it around, then spit it out, and reached for her toothbrush, wanting to rid herself of the foul taste.

In the mirror she saw someone she didn’t recognize—a young brunette girl with a pixielike pretty face and big, warm brown eyes. Her exterior didn’t show what was going on inside: what was growing inside.

A sharp rap at the door made her jump.

“Whitney, are you okay?”

“Yes, Mom. I just … I had to go to the bathroom. I’m just washing my hands, and then I remembered I hadn’t brushed my teeth.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No, Mom. I’m just going to do this, then go back to bed. Sorry I woke you.”

“All right, hon.”

Whitney heard the hesitation in her mother’s voice, knew she wanted to say more but was treading carefully.

Finally Whitney heard: “Good night. I love you.” Her mother’s footsteps shuffled away, and a bit of tension left Whitney’s body.

“Night. Love you.”

“Love you.” Jeremiah had said those words to her, at least four times. Every time he had pushed his way inside her body and made those strange grunting noises and cooed foreign phrases to her. Things like, “Feels good, huh, babe?” and, “Let me show you what a real man feels like.” Like she would know any different? He was her first. She was thinking he would be her last.

But she was only seventeen. Seventeen, and knocked up, and the father was dead. He couldn’t be her last. She couldn’t be pregnant. He couldn’t have killed himself.

Whitney turned away from the sink and clasped her hand to her mouth again, trying to keep more sobs of despair inside her. Maybe, if she filled up with enough despair, the baby would have no room and have to leave and Whitney could pretend it had never happened.