The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel) Page 4

  Like a prison yard, he thought, his muscles tensing as he watched for the telltale tipping point, that edge from where things would go bad. If the targeted victim allowed it.

  But the girl on the bleachers sensed them coming and glanced up slightly. She didn’t engage eye contact. Instead she stuffed her half-eaten sandwich back into the brown bag, closed her book, got up, and made her way at an even pace down the bleachers. She began to cross the grass, heading away from the blondes toward a gravel pathway that snaked up into a wooded knoll on the far side of the ball field.

  The cadre of blondes followed.

  His heart beat faster. On instinct Jeb surged up from the bench and moved quickly along the dirt track that ran along the outside edge of the field next to the swamp. He was acutely aware of legal jurisdiction: the Snowy Creek Resort Municipality owned and maintained these ball fields. The school district paid for the use of them. He was within his rights to be on them, yet he adhered to the path off the side.

  The dark-haired girl disappeared into the woods. The clutch of blondes halted under a large oak among a puddle of red-gold leaves, talking among themselves, casting backward glances toward the school building where yard monitors watched the younger children. One of the blondes lit a cigarette, passed it to another. Jeb judged them to be about ten, maybe eleven years old.

  He went quickly up the path into the woods, looking for the child he believed was his daughter. The path opened out onto a sidewalk. She was on the sidewalk, checking left, then right. She crossed the street and headed for a small convenience store at the end of the road.

  Jeb scanned the area. Cars were parked in driveways and along the curb. The old ski-style chalets looked empty. No one was outside. It was still shoulder season, the resort quiet during the week.

  He followed her. Compelled. Part of him knowing he shouldn’t do this. Yet he was physically incapable of breaking sight of his own daughter now that he’d finally seen her, as if in losing her around a corner now, he’d lose her forever. Another part of him wanted to be certain it was her.

  She was walking fast. He absorbed her totally, the shape of her thin body, her gait, how she carried her head, the tightness in her shoulders. Was she afraid of those girls? Grieving for Sophia and Peter, the only mother and father she’d ever known? Missing her old school, her friends, her home?

  Stumbling on paving that had been cracked by frost heave, she dropped her lunch bag. The book she’d been clutching fell open to the ground.

  Lightning fast, on pure gut instinct, Jeb moved in, scooping up the bag and the open book. Heart racing, he caught the name written inside the cover—Quinn MacLean.

  It was her.

  He glanced over his shoulder again to ensure no one was watching. “Hey,” he said, fighting to keep his voice light, normal. “You dropped something.” He handed both bag and book to her.

  She looked up at him, mouth tight, her features guarded.

  He smiled into her eyes, his heart thumping. They were his eyes. And his father’s. The same deep, indigo-blue Irish eyes. She had faint freckles over her nose. Jeb felt he might implode.

  “Thanks,” she muttered, taking the book and bag. Something inside him stilled in awe at the sound of his own child’s voice. His eyes filled. Burned.

  She turned, resumed walking, a little faster now.

  Desperate to hear another word or two, he caught up to her.

  “Schooled, huh?” he said, mentioning the title of the book as he matched her pace.

  She clutched the book tighter to her chest, walking faster.

  “My favorite character is Rain.”

  She stalled, glanced up, looking at him anew. “You’ve read it?

  Jeb smiled slightly. “I’ve had a lot of time to read a lot of books. Some good, some terrible. I liked that one, though.”

  She frowned as she regarded him, her gaze going to the tattoo on his neck. “You read books for eight-year-olds?”

  He swallowed. He’d read every single one of the books Sophia had told him Quinn was reading. He’d pinned her school art on his cell walls, even a medal he’d managed to persuade Sophia to leave with him. He knew his daughter’s favorite color, what she liked to eat, what her favorite TV shows were.

  He grinned. “Like I said, I had a lot of time.”

  Something relaxed in her, a light entering her eyes—ever so subtly—as curiosity began to edge out caution. His heart lifted.

  “We had to read it for class last year,” she said.

  “And you’re rereading it?”

  She nodded. “Why do you like Rain?” she said.

  “Because she marched to the beat of her own drum.”

  She eyed him, one brow lowering more than the other. “I like Cap.”

  “Why him?”

  She chewed her lip. “Because he had no mother and father and he had to move away from his home. He was different and they all laughed at him. But he was a hero. He changed everyone at the school. He saved the bus driver. They all started to like him.”

  Jeb’s stomach contracted. “Yeah,” he said, gently. “Cap’s a hero. He was all alone against the whole bunch and he never gave in.”

  Quinn’s eyes shone suddenly with emotion, and Jeb noticed a slight quiver in her lip.

  “Hey.” He started to walk. She fell in step. “I didn’t mean to upset you. About the book or anything.”

  She shook her head of dark curls. “It’s nothing.”

  “You heading home for lunch?”

  “I stay too far up the valley to go home for lunch.”

  “Really? Like way up toward the Wolf River?”

  “No, on Green Lake.”

  His heart kicked. The Salonens’ old place.

  “Your parents must like it out there on the lakefront,” he said. “It’s pretty. I knew some people who lived there once.”

  “My parents are dead.”

  The flat, emotionless delivery hit him like a plank. He stalled.

  “I’m staying with my aunt,” she said. “Just for a while.”

  “And then?”

  She gave a shrug and crossed a patch of emerald-green grass outside the small log-style convenience store. Three stairs led up to a narrow porch that ran the length of the building. A basket of purple and white flowers hung from the eaves, and a husky cross stretched out in a puddle of autumn sun outside the door.

  She clumped up the wooden stairs in her little Blundstones. The husky raised its head, fixing them with one milky-blue eye, one brown, before dropping his head back to the deck with a soft doggie sigh. It struck Jeb hard and sudden. These small things—the color of grass, the sigh of a dog in sunlight, flowers—so many things a man could miss and forget the pleasure of in prison. At one point he’d believed that he would never again experience something as simple and true as a dog’s contented sigh.

  Quinn pushed through the door of the small store. A bell chimed over her head. Jeb followed. The dude behind the counter barely glanced in their direction. He was busy texting on his phone. Jeb noticed a closed-circuit security camera. Instinctively he turned his face away.

  While he picked up a copy of the Snowy Creek Leader, Quinn found the candy she was looking for, including a stick of black licorice. She set her stash up on the counter, where the dude rang it in and bagged it. While Quinn was fiddling in her pocket for money, Jeb placed cash on the counter. The dude met his eyes, held a fraction, but no more than that. No flicker of recognition—why would there be? This kid would have been maybe ten years old when Merilee and Amy were taken. If he was even in town.

  “Thanks, mate,” the guy said, offering Jeb change. Australian accent. He was likely in the resort for a season or two. No fear of recognition at all. Jeb had to remind himself he was not here to hide. He was here to rattle cages, play with people’s heads.

  Quinn stared up at J
eb, surprise in her face.

  “Hey,” he said with a shrug as he tucked his paper under his arm. “I had some spare change.”

  She held his gaze, debating whether to accept this gift from a stranger. Then she smiled, a little shyly, and grabbed the bag of candy off the counter. “Thank you.”

  Jeb pushed open the door, letting her out.

  She skipped down the stairs, seemingly over her indecision about him. Perhaps it was a rebelliousness he knew all too well, to befriend a stranger with long hair, a leather jacket, a tattoo. Perhaps it was just a need for affection, friendship, in the face of her loss and displacement.

  She started back toward the school, biting into her stick of licorice.

  Jeb hesitated. He should back off now. There was still time. But after all these years, to finally see his own child, to hear her voice—it was a drug more potent than he could imagine, a thirst more voracious than he could quench. She glanced over her shoulder and threw him another shy smile. His heart nearly cracked. He started after her.

  Just to the field, he told himself. Just to make sure those girls had gone. Just until he’d seen her go safely back into that squat school building.

  Just one more . . . like his father with his drink . . .

  “I bet your aunt and uncle are pleased to have you staying with them,” he said. “Even if it’s just for a while.”

  “My aunt isn’t married.” She took another bite of licorice. “She was going to get married but her boyfriend dumped her after I came to live with them.”

  His heart tumbled over itself. Rachel’s single? “What was her boyfriend’s name?”

  She darted a look at him, suspicion flickering briefly through her dark-blue eyes. Yet something compelled her to speak. A quiet connection had been forged. Them against the world. “Trey. He doesn’t like me. He left because of me.”

  Pow. Emotions punched through him. Trey Somerland. Trey in the witness box. Trey kissing Rachel by the gravel pit bonfire. Trey touching Rachel . . . his hand up her sweater.

  Rachel and Trey, the reason for his anger that night. The reason it all started to go to hell.

  His voice came out thick. “That’s not why he left your aunt, surely.”

  She gave a dismissive shrug, biting more of her licorice as she started down the shadowed path into the woods.

  “So you and your aunt live alone, then, on Green Lake?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anyone else staying on the property? In . . . a boathouse maybe?”

  “Nah. Just an old dog that used to belong to my grandfather before he died.”

  Seppo Salonen was dead? Emotion washed through Jeb. That must be why Rachel was in his house on the lake. Alone with Quinn. His blood raced, giving him a headiness he couldn’t—didn’t want to—articulate. Suddenly he wanted the impossible.

  He wanted Rachel.

  Fuck, he wanted it all now, his desires coalescing into an iron ball of need, muddying the purity of his focus. He wanted to win it all back.

  They’d reached the end of the wooded path and come out onto the field. She stopped, looked up. “Thank you,” she said, openly, having made some decision in her mind about him. “For the candy and . . . stuff.”

  “Our secret, ’kay?”

  She studied him for a fraction, then nodded before turning and skipping across the grass toward the school. He watched her go on her skinny legs, hair shining in the sun.

  “Anytime,” he whispered to himself. “Anytime, Quinn.”

  He heard the school buzzer and he stood there in shadow, newspaper under his arm. His world utterly changed. This was what he’d come for.

  Yet caution whispered in the rustle of the breeze through the dry pines. One wrong step, one spark, and it could all go up in a blaze. He could lose it all, forever.

  He must not return to this school.

  He must not interact with her again until it was over.

  But as Jeb traversed the bottom edge of the field, making for his bike, he caught sight of the clutch of blondes coming out from behind the trunk of the large oak. Stubbing out a cigarette with bent heads and a whispered exchange, they began to cross over the field as a tight group, making a beeline for Quinn.

  Quinn saw them coming and moved faster. She was smaller. Younger.

  Jeb froze, watching as the group crested the grassy rise and crossed onto school property. The clutch of girls closed in, gathering tightly around Quinn, forcing her to stop.

  Shock rippled through Jeb as one of the girls grabbed the bag of candy from Quinn’s fist. Another snatched away the licorice stick, waving it in front of Quinn’s face, laughing as Quinn lunged to claim it back.

  One of the girls stuck out her boot and tripped Quinn. She sprawled down hard on the gravel, her book flying, pages blowing in the wind.

  Rage flared, sharp and instant. Almost blinding, an electrical charge kicking down familiar neural channels, overriding the logic center of his brain. Jeb moved like lightning over the ball fields. Neck muscles wire tight. Vision narrowing. Up the rise. Onto school property.

  One of the girls pointed and jeered at Quinn as she struggled onto her knees. Whatever the girl said froze his daughter. She held dead still for a heartbeat, as if trying to digest the words while staring at the blonde.

  “No!” Quinn screamed at the bullies. “It’s not true!”

  The girls laughed. Jeb recognized the switch in his child the moment before she balled her fists. Quinn lurched to her feet, lowered her head, and barreled straight into the blonde’s stomach, smacking the kid so hard she lifted off the ground and reeled backward, coming down hard into the dirt, hair flying.

  Quinn spun round like a little wildcat, ready for a charge at the others, but they turned and fled toward the school, screaming for a teacher. Quinn turned the full brunt of her rage back onto the fallen girl, raising her leg to kick her in the stomach. Jeb reached them just in time. He grabbed Quinn by her shoulders, jerking her back off her feet. The blonde, bleeding from her nose, scrabbled onto her hands and knees and crawled over the gravel before managing to stagger up into a wild run for the school building.

  Jeb set Quinn on her feet, spun her round to face him. He crouched down to her level, gripping her skinny shoulders tight. She was shaking in his hands. Her complexion was sheet white, tears tracking stains down her cheeks. But her eyes crackled with ferocity and she gritted her jaw.

  “Quinn—” he said quickly, quietly, watching over her shoulders as two female teachers burst out of the school doors and started running toward them. She seemed unfocused.

  Jeb shook her. “Quinn, look at me, listen to me.”

  Her pupils contracted slightly. She was breathing hard.

  “I understand, I really do, that need to hit back sometimes. But whatever they said to you, whatever names they called you, violence is not the answer. Never. You have to trust me on this. I’ve been there. I know. No matter what they say, violence does not work. It comes back to bite you.”

  Slowly her eyes refocused fully and she met his gaze. Tears pooled afresh. He ached to snatch her away right there—leave. Just him and her. Protect her . . . but Jeb hadn’t even been able to protect himself, shouldn’t even be associating himself with her. Fuck it to hell, he’d broken his first goal. He’d interacted with his child. And on school property.

  “Hey! You!” one of the teachers yelled. They were getting near, rushing over the gravel pathway, skirts and hair blowing in the wind.

  “Go,” he said urgently to her. “Just remember, be smart. Be better than them. Get them another way. Like Cap in that Korman book. And Quinn, just know this”—he couldn’t help it, didn’t even register before the words were out already—“I’ll always have your back. Got that? Always.”

  And with that he left her standing there. He moved fast, down the hill, past the bench where he’d sat
earlier, slipping into the grove of trees. He stopped in the shadows, where he belonged, and glanced back.

  The teachers had reached Quinn. One dropped to a crouch in front of her, talking to her. The other came to stand at edge of the knoll and stared in his direction, shading her eyes as her gaze searched the shadows.

  He stood stock-still. But inside his gut he was shaking.

  For the first time in his life he’d goddamn touched his own daughter, his own flesh and blood. He’d held her slight but strong little trembling shoulders in his own powerful hands, seen the flutter of her heart in the pulse of her neck. Heard the sound of her voice. Seen her smile.

  Witnessed her grit and determination.

  A raw, overriding need filled his chest so tightly and fully it hurt—a need to take charge, to claim her. Protect her. His child had no one else right now. No one who could so fully understand her.

  The teacher put her arm around Quinn, escorting her back to the school, bent over, talking.

  How this was going to unfold now terrified him. In his move to keep his child safe, to protect her, to stop her from harming others in self-defense, he’d just drawn her into a dangerous orbit, and that teacher on the edge of the knoll was just going to be the beginning of his troubles.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Our rose among the thorns,” Levi Banrock says as he curls his arm around my waist, edging me closer to his tall and athletic frame. I smile for the camera, and the big photographer from the Sun fires off several shots. I’m positioned between Levi on my right and the mayor and local First Nations chief on my left.

  “If you could all gather in just a bit tighter,” the photographer says. “I’d like to include the mural of Rachel behind you.” He’s referring to a giant stylized painting of me on the paneling between the soaring windows of Thunderbird Lodge. Through the windows is a breathtaking view of the ski runs that sweep all the way down to the village nestled in the valley far below.