The Girl Who Survived(127)

Tate was struggling to get to his feet.

“Not a good idea,” Marlie warned, holding up a hand. “Just let me finish up here.” She wound the strip of cloth over his shoulder, tied it off as best as she could.

“Marlie Robinson?” he asked, his head seeming to clear a bit. Grimacing against pain, he leaned on his good elbow so that he could see Walter Robinson lying facedown and motionless in the falling snow. Then his gaze returned to the woman helping him. “You’ve been alive all this time?”

“Yes,” Marlie said, then, “You should lie down. Really.”

“I’m okay,” he insisted, and offered her a half smile before wincing. “I’ve been through worse.”

“I don’t think so,” Kara said, and took his hand, then seeing that Tate was going to pull through, asked her sister the question that had been plaguing her for decades. “Why? Why didn’t you come back?”

“He wouldn’t let me go,” Marlie said, still kneeling as she hitched her chin toward her father’s still form. Her lips twisted into a dark frown. “Not after what I’d seen.” Sighing, she leaned back on her heels to glance at her father. Her hair caught in the wind, billowing away from her face, exposing the scar beneath one eye. As if she felt Kara noticing it, Marlie touched the jagged line slicing her cheek. “This? Dad didn’t do it. No, this is compliments of Jonas.” She smiled bitterly. Her voice was as cold as the night, and her eyes seemed to deaden. “I made the mistake of getting in my stepbrother’s way.”

“But what happened? Why did you leave me?” Kara asked. Despite the bitter cold, despite the fact that Walter lay dead and Tate was injured, she had to know. “Why? In the attic? All alone?”

“I had to,” Marlie cut in, more than a little defensive. She rubbed her arms and avoided Kara’s gaze. Staring into the middle distance, to a place only she could see, she said quietly, “It was all I could think of at the time. I-I didn’t know what to do, but I had to save you. I’d seen Jonas kill Donner, because of Lacey. And just as he finished and caught sight of me, Dad—Walter—showed up.” Marlie stared into the trees and shuddered. “Oh, God. It was so twisted. Dad had come back to the house to have it out with Mom about custody of Donner and me.”

Marlie cast a dark glance at her father’s form as the wind raced across the lake, sharp and harsh, causing the snow to swirl and dance, the trees to shiver. Lost in her own vision of that horrible night, Marlie didn’t seem to notice. Her voice was low and without emotion. “Dad, he walked in . . . like the door was unlocked, I guess, and he caught Jonas in the act of slicing Donner’s throat. The blood spilling, Donner gurgling. That’s what he told me.”

Kara’s stomach lurched at the vision.

Now there was emotion in Marlie’s voice. “Dad completely lost it. Snapped at the sight of Jonas murdering his son.” Marlie shook her head. “He told me later that the whole world shifted at that moment, that he went back to his days in combat as a marine. He literally saw red and he reacted.”

“By killing everyone?” Kara said, disbelieving, her insides shredding as she remembered the ghastly, blood-soaked scene. Tears froze on her cheeks and somehow she was holding Tate’s hand, squeezing tight.

“That’s how he explained it to me.”

“But why . . . why?” Kara whispered. “Dad and Sam Junior and—”

“I know, I know. It’s all so horrible. Unthinkable.”

And she had lived with that incomprehensible gut-churning, mind-numbing knowledge for two decades, Kara realized.

Marlie let out a quiet sob and the sound was snatched by the wind. Then she stared down at her father’s still form. “He told me that he killed Sam Junior instinctively, because Junior was a witness. And then the beast was unleashed. That’s how he said it. ‘The beast was unleashed.’ Like it was with him all the time. He just kept it tethered.” She shook her head, as if she were denying her father his excuse for the savagery, the brutality. She said grimly, her voice almost a whisper, “He killed Mom and your dad because he hated them, hated Mom for cheating on him and hated Sam Senior for stealing not just his wife but his kids, too.”

Kara imagined the horrid scene, of Walter murdering Sam Juniosr, then climbing the stairs with his bloody sword to finish his deadly mission. “But why didn’t they wake up?” Kara asked. She imagined screaming and yelling, the crash of the Christmas tree as it was knocked over, the splintering of wood when the mantel was hacked in a wild swing of the deadly blade.

Marlie rolled her eyes to the heavens, snow falling on her upturned and disfigured face. “That was my fault,” she admitted, a tear sliding from one eye. “I drugged them. So they wouldn’t wake up for a long time. I was supposed to meet Chad and we were going to run away. I knew where Sam Senior kept some extra cash—a lot of it. I’d seen him stash it away. So the plan was to grab the money and take off. By the time Mom and Sam woke up the next morning, we would be long gone. So . . . so, you see. I did my part, too. I contributed to the murders. I was . . . complicit.”

Stunned, trying to grasp it all, to understand, Kara shook her head. “You were just a teenager, a girl in love.”

“An idiot,” Marlie admitted, and her voice held more than an edge of self-loathing. “Don’t ever fall in love, Kara,” she advised, though Kara was sill gripping Tate’s hand. “Look what it did to our family. To my parents. To yours. To Jonas. I’m telling you, it’s a bad, bad idea.”