The Girl Who Survived(14)

She stared at the photograph, skimmed the article, then as the spots dried on her pajamas, tossed the newspaper into the trash.

She didn’t need to read about the Cold Lake Massacre.

She’d had the bad luck to live through it.

*

“Son of a bitch!” Wesley Tate threw his cell phone onto the chair across the room. He’d called the number he’d gotten for Kara McIntyre three times, each getting a toneless voice mail response asking him to leave his number. He had twice. But no more. There had to be another way to get through to her.

Get a grip, he told himself and walked to the window of the cabin to stare through the trees to the lake, iced over as it had been all those years ago.

So Kara McIntyre was avoiding him. So what?

It wasn’t exactly a news flash.

She’d been avoiding him, and practically cutting herself off from the whole damned world all of her life.

And now, just because her brother was being released from the two decades of incarceration, would she suddenly open up? Grant him an interview?

“You’re dreaming.”

Not that he blamed her.

The horror of that night hadn’t been washed away over the years.

He, himself, had been a part of it.

He imagined his father standing about where he was when he’d heard or seen something that had caught his attention. What had spurred Edmund Tate from his porch that night? The screaming from the house a hundred yards through the woods? An unfamiliar car rolling into the driveway? A movement in the shadows, someone stalking the nearby mansion?

If Kara knew anything, even if there was something locked in her subconscious, he had no way of asking her. She wasn’t about to open up to him. And he couldn’t really blame her.

Would he want his whole life turned inside out and upside down after living through the terror of the Cold Lake Massacre, a tragedy that had involved every member of her family?

Would he want to relive the terror of that night?

Would he want to remember the trial where her testimony put her brother behind bars for what should have been life?

Would he want to face said brother?

Hell no.

But he wasn’t about to give up. If he put her through her own private hell again, well, as they used to say, Dem’s da breaks.

A story was a story.

Besides which, it was more than just a story to him.

This one cut close to the bone seeing as his father had given his life to save the freaked-out only child of Samuel and Zelda McIntyre.

Tate figured Kara owed him.

Big time.

He remembered her as a kid, all gangly arms and legs, mussed hair, and even then showing an attitude through the innocence of childhood. She’d snuck up on him once, watching from the shadows of the tree line as he’d been skipping stones across the water.

He’d caught her eye. “Wanna try?” he’d asked, and expected her to run like a frightened fawn into the underbrush. Instead, she’d stepped from the umber, grabbed a smooth round stone, hauled her arm back, released with a flip of her wrist and sent the rock sailing, bouncing easily over the silvery surface. Ten firm skips, water rippling in circles from the spots where the stone had bounced. With a startled series of quacks and wild splash, two wood ducks flapped out of the water and took off into the high, thin summer clouds.

“You’re pretty good,” he’d said, unable to hide his surprise.

“Well, what is it?” She’d cocked an insolent eyebrow. “Pretty or good?”

“What?”

“I’m pretty,” she’d asserted. “And I’m good. Better than you.”

Damn.

After drilling him with a stark, knowing stare, she’d taken off, leaving him speechless. She’d been what—seven or eight at the time? Precocious. Older than her years because of all of her older half siblings. Probably had known things no seven-year-old should. Even before witnessing the aftermath of the slaughter of her family.

Now, he walked to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of beer from the old refrigerator, cracked it open and looked around the living area, left as it had been years before, his father’s presence still evident. A family picture still hung over the mantel and nearby the antlers of a deer he’d shot with a bow, and on the short hallway leading to the bedrooms, a framed military shadow box with a collection of Edmund Tate’s patches, badges, ribbons, and medals from his years in the Marine Corps. A true hero, Wesley thought as he headed out to the back porch, where the floorboards were rotting and the brisk winter air cut like a knife. This was the very porch his father had stood on all those years ago. Edmund had been smoking a cigarette when he’d heard the commotion at the neighboring house, gone over to investigate, and found a freaked-out little girl in the middle of the carnage of a family slaughter.

Wesley had been eleven at the time, old enough to be fascinated by the horror, young enough to blame the victim and, like everyone else, vulnerable to feel the loss of a father dying while helping others. Edmund Tate had been off-duty. Yet he’d sacrificed his life for the girl, running onto the ice as it cracked and gave way beneath his weight. Edmund had been able to save her, dragging her kicking, screaming, and choking from the freezing water before having a damned heart attack and collapsing on the snowy shore.

Thinking of it now, Tate’s jaw turned rock hard, his eyes narrowing, the anger that had been with him for twenty years festering. He’d never gotten to say goodbye to his dad. Edmund had barely spoken a word before coding in the ambulance as it screamed its way to the nearest hospital, where Edmund Tate had been pronounced DOA, one more victim of the bloody massacre.