Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(25)

She knows the cold is coming. Severe cold that will blacken fingers and make teeth chatter so violently they shatter. The weathermen love to talk about Fargo, a place where you can hurl a glass of water into the air and watch it vanish, leave out a banana overnight and use it to hammer a nail into a plank of wood.

She can’t stay here long. Every day she climbs out the window of the Seahorse Inn and wanders the town—and every day the grass grows browner, the tree branches grow barer, until they appear skinned, their leaves clattering along the streets. She has bought a black knit cap from Walmart to fight the deepening chill. Her mind circles around the letter as her body circles stores and neighborhoods, and more than once her steps slow, nearly stop, as if a hard wind is trying to blow her back the way she came.

But what if she does go home? What waits for her there? She imagines walking through her darkened house, fingering the bullet holes in the walls, stepping around the puddles of blood dried into the linoleum. She imagines opening closets full of clothes no one will ever wear, bringing her parents’ pillows to her face to smell them, finding their hairs curled up in a brush.

Or not. Maybe they aren’t dead. Maybe they were only injured. Maybe the semiautomatics were shot in warning, into the ceiling, chunks of drywall snowing around them. Maybe, if she found a pay phone and dialed 911 and gave herself up, maybe then she would see them, as soon as tomorrow. They would clutch each other in a holding area, tiles white and lit with fluorescent bulbs, the three of them laughing and crying with relief at the mix-up—because they hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t done anything. Right?

Or she could visit her nana. In the Sleepy Hollow Assisted Living Center. The Tall Man wouldn’t have bothered her, with one side of her face appearing melted, her words a mushy slur. And though the two of them had never gotten along, she was family—there was comfort in that—and maybe Nana knew something. Claire imagines the curl of a beckoning finger as the old woman leaned forward in her wheelchair to whisper a secret.

Or maybe she should go south, like the geese she sees cutting across the sky in the shape of spearheads, where she could walk barefoot on the beach and waitress at a restaurant with tiki torches flaming in the beer garden. Or maybe she should consult her horoscope, flip a coin, sit in the back pew of a church and pray. She can’t make up her mind, can’t trust herself, her mind like the sky, muddled up into a soupy gray cloud from which competing thoughts rain.

It takes her a long time to drop the quarter in the pay phone and dial her landline, but it takes only one ring for an automated voice to tell her this number is no longer in service. She hangs up, stares at the phone, then sinks another quarter into the slot and dials her father’s cell. After two rings, someone answers but says nothing. She can hear the person’s breath.

“Hello?” she says. “Mom? Dad?”

The breathing continues. Then comes the staticky pop of saliva as a mouth opens into a smile. The voice that speaks to her—a crisp baritone—isn’t one she recognizes, though it recognizes her. “Where are you, Claire?” it says.

The Tall Man. Who else could it be except him?

“Tell me where you are,” he says.

She slams down the phone with such force that it rings like a hammer striking an anvil.



Her nose burns and drips, her feet ache, and her fingers feel numb at the tips when she returns to the Seahorse Inn. She doesn’t understand what he wants from her. She doesn’t know whether he can find her now, whether the pay phone came up on the cell as unlisted, whether he can trace its origin. She doesn’t know whether she should leave immediately, but she knows she must leave.

When she drops through the window, she freezes in a half crouch. From somewhere in the room comes a rustling. And then silence. Her eyes adjust and distinguish in the gray light the black shapes of the desk, the chair, the bed. The beer cans are long gone, hurled into the woods. Her first instinct is to retreat, but she is too tired to leap again from a window into the black square of the night. And if she did, what then? Where would she run to this time?

She steps slowly forward, flat-footed, trying to distribute her weight, hoping the floor won’t creak beneath her. It takes her a minute to make her way around the bed, where the shadows pool, black and impenetrable.

She keeps a flashlight—a plastic two-dollar cheapie the size of a pen—in her pocket. She withdraws it now to click on and scare away the shadows. Nothing.

Then she hears it—a series of scrapes and clicks—the sound a skeleton might make if animated. The bathroom. Its door is open. Maybe from the wind, which funnels constantly into the room, fluttering the curtains, or maybe not.

As a child, maybe five or six or seven, she was once so afraid of the dark, so certain a pale-faced creature with long, bony fingers hid in her closet, that she wet herself rather than use the bathroom. She feels something similar—a bladder-bursting pressure—when she looks at the open bathroom door and imagines the possibilities that might lie concealed in the wedge of darkness. The Tall Man in his black suit. A mossy-toothed drifter with jigsaw tattoos covering his face. The ghosts of her parents, their arms encircling her like a cold mist.

Her voice is rusty when she says, “Come out of there.”

As if in response the wind dies out, and in the silence that follows she can hear a faint clicking. She has no gun, only the ability to let the wolf turn over inside her, which feels impossible to someone in her condition, half-alive with grief and exhaustion.