Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six(105)

Off in the distance, a little girl wades into Tearwater Lake, wailing for a mama who will never come.

“Wow,” says my dad. “We always called you kitten. But you’re the wolf.”

“Oh?”

“You really blew their house down.”

I look at them. They’re all broken pieces, just like me. Trying to make themselves fit.

“They deserved it,” I say. We all deserve what we get, don’t we?

“If you say so.”

He is all stardust and rain, fading into the night sky, then fading back in.

I watch him. He’s beautiful. He was a beautiful man with dark eyes and high cheekbones, a wide, laughing mouth. I wish I’d had his DNA in me. I wish I had been more like him, even though he was a broken piece, too.

And then, just as dawn breaks the horizon, I see him arrive, driving fast, then skidding to a stop.

And for a moment I feel a tug back to that ugly world I left behind.

Henry.

“My sister,” I hear him say. “She’s here. She needs help.”

It’s not long after that that they roll me out, too. The coroner’s assistant, a tiny, bespectacled redhead, opens the bag for him. Henry stares a moment. Then he drops to his knees and starts to weep. It’s not pretty. Men shouldn’t cry.

The young woman puts a hand on his shoulder.

“That’s her,” he says.

“I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry, too. But he’ll be okay. He’s one of the good ones. Some of us, maybe most of us, we turned out okay in spite of our biology. And the bad ones? Well, I’ve rooted them out. I’ve done my part. A kind of justice has been served.

Boris the pedophile committed suicide.

Marta the enabler had a tragic fall from a roof.

Brad the tech mogul who laundered money for drug dealers ran afoul of clients who ended the relationship the only way they knew how. Decapitation.

Mickey who raped a young girl and then denied it. And there’s more.

Mickey’s game at Red World was being investigated with the help of his brother-in-law, as a haven for bad men looking to groom and lure young girls and boys into sending nude photos of themselves for sale on the dark web. Mickey who embezzled money; the transfer that he made from his computer tonight the one action the Feds needed to take him down. Mickey who was a workplace predator, with at least six women waiting to come forward.

All of whom confessed on tape to Trina, his assistant.

There are others. I could go on.

Each project has been a subtle long game that had the desired result. Cleaning up the mess my father made.

This final one, it didn’t go as planned. To say the least.

But so it goes.

Now that my watch is over, I relinquish control.

“Want to go for a ride, kid?” says my dad.

The Indian gleams and rumbles. He loved that thing. He loved me, too, the best he could. None of us is perfect. Or even close.

“Yeah, Dad. Let’s ride.”





47


Hannah

That moment again. When it’s all over. Or is it just the eye of the storm? Anyway—it’s quiet now, with all the violence behind and ahead.

Here, they can breathe a moment and the sky seems clear, the immediate danger passed, no hint of what’s to come except for a thick and eerie stillness.

“They approached me back before Christmas,” says Bruce. “I really didn’t have a choice.”

Bruce is talking about the FBI and how he helped them investigate and arrest her brother for, among other things, money laundering for his investors, embezzlement, tax evasion.

There are also allegations that Red World was being used as a place for predators to groom and lure young kids playing the game into sending nude photos of themselves to sell on the dark web. That company officers knew about this and did nothing to stop it.

None of this jibes with the life she thought they had.

Her husband has been lying to her. She suspected as much. She might have preferred to discover he’d been cheating. That seems so simple now.

And that’s the least of it.

Henry, the stranger who arrived as the sun was rising, sits over by the kitchen island. He’s on the phone.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll be home soon and I’ll explain everything.”

He’s told Hannah things that she can’t believe, though on some level she knows they’re true. Catrina, Henry, Mako, and Joshua are all related by a sperm donor, someone who it turns out was a monster, a serial rapist and killer who sold his sperm for money. Catrina was on a mission to cleanse the gene pool. Henry was trying to stop her. Joshua was helping her, because she had learned that he was stealing money from his clients. Mako had no idea that the woman he’d hired as his assistant was his half sister.

Hannah’s life which felt rock solid, is built on quicksand.

But she is her parents’ child. This she knows. She, too, was conceived by sperm donor, it seems. Not the same sperm donor as Mako, but a stranger. She, too, has some half siblings looking for connections. But that door is closed. She canceled her Origins account as soon as she understood the truth. It didn’t matter to her that the man she called “Daddy” was not her biological father. He was everything she needed him to be. And she wants nothing more. Sophia is famous for saying: Family is not who you are, it’s what you do.