Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(32)

What would have been a growl, against the pressure of his chokehold, escapes as a plaintive mewl. He stabs her again and again, so many times—knife, knife, knife—far more than necessary, her body limp in his lap. She doesn’t reassume her human form. Not like in the fairy tales. She dies a beast and a beast she remains.

He feels faint. The room seems so cold and her body so warm. He could fall asleep with her draped over him like this. But he doesn’t. He shoves her aside and stands with great difficulty and fights the gray wings beating at the edge of his vision. He tries not to look at his ruined arm when he retrieves the towel from the floor and makes a tourniquet of it. Roses of blood bloom immediately through the cotton.

There are no windows. There is only one way out. And only one way in. It takes him a while, but he drags the bureau against the door. He remembers how severely the old woman stared at him, and he knows Choko did not act alone. He needs help. His hand is trembling and slick with blood, but somehow he manages to retrieve the handheld from his jacket pocket and call Buffalo, telling him what happened, telling him to hurry.





Chapter 12



PATRICK SPENDS several days planning his escape—figuring out which stairs creak, spritzing the door hinges with WD-40, backing his Jeep into his parking spot and testing how easily it rolls in neutral—and then his mother tells him she’s going out of town. The National Association of Realtors. They’re having a conference in Portland this weekend.

He is so thrilled he doesn’t sigh or roll his eyes when she asks him to join her this afternoon to freshen up a house. “It will be fun,” she says. He is lying on the couch, reading the newspaper, some article about the ongoing investigation into the death of a local rancher and city council member. The ground around the corpse was a mess of coyote tracks, but the game warden claims it was highly unusual and even beyond reason to believe coyotes capable of such behavior.

The couch is leather. So is the matching armchair next to it. The living room looks like something out of a Pottery Barn catalogue. Wool carpet. Wrought-iron lamps. Dark-wooded end tables. His mother does all right.

She finishes clipping on an earring and then roughs her hair with a pick. A silver stripe flares at her left temple and curls all the way to the base of her neck, through hair that is otherwise thick and black. She hides her age well, the wrinkles fanning from her eyes caked with a layer of foundation. “So you’ll come?” she says.

“I guess.”

Her cheeks dimple when she smiles. Like his. These past few weeks, he’s spent a lot of time studying her, trying to figure out how they match up. He’s a lot like his father—that’s what people say—same hawkish nose and high forehead, same square-tipped fingers and huge hands dangling from thin wrists like shovel heads. But he belongs to them both.

She pokes him with the pick on her way out of the living room—gives his cheek a little bite with it—and he swats it away with a “Quit.”

She’s trying—he’ll give her that—trying to make him feel welcome. And he tries to reciprocate, to make himself available, answering her incessant questions, sitting at the kitchen table to do his homework, joining her when she watches the stupid television show about the horny doctors.

He’s not looking for drama. His life needs the volume turned down, not up. He knows a lot of crybabies in his situation would probably lock themselves in their rooms and eventually throw a damp-eyed fit about how Mommy abandoned them. Whenever he feels tense and ready to shatter a dish against the wall, he remembers his father, who demanded he not feel sorry for himself.

Still, there are little things that bother him. The way she uses her hands when she speaks, pointing and pinching and swinging and flapping. The way she’s always losing lids—the milk, the mustard, the oatmeal—everything in the house uncapped. The way she programs the thermostat. All of August she kept the air-conditioning at seventy-four—and now that the weather has turned cold she keeps the heat at sixty-seven. “Jesus,” he says. “Wouldn’t it make sense to negotiate between the seasons, keep it at seventy year-round?”

And she’s a bit of a freak when it comes to messes. She’ll pull a shirt right off him if it’s wrinkled. She’ll scoop up a dish the moment he drops it on the counter and rinse it off to set in the dishwasher. And he could tell, when she put down the money on the used Jeep, how disgusted she was by it. “Are you sure?” she said, too many times, pointing out the other cars in the lot, all of them sedans, only going along with his insistence on the run-down Wrangler because she would do anything right then to make him happy.

She drives a white Camry so clean the sky streams across its hood like water. The interior still smells new, despite the car being a few years old, so different from his father’s pickup, with the dust coughing from the vents and the French fries moldering under the seats. Before they left, she grabbed a vented carrier from the garage and set it in the backseat. Inside sits a calico cat that paws and bites at the caged door and hisses when Patrick turns around. “What’s with the cat?” he says, and his mother says, “It’s for a friend. They were giving them away at the gas station.”

They drive through Old Mountain, a place that has transformed from mill town to luxury outpost for Californians looking for a second home or a place to retire. His mother tells him they came for the skiing, the fly-fishing and mountain biking and horseback riding. “Fifteen years ago, when I first moved here,” she says, “fifteen thousand people. Now? Two hundred fifty thousand in the metro.” Making it one of the fastest-growing communities in the country and creating fault-line abrasion between the old and the new.