The Girl Who Survived(81)

“He said, ‘If I ever find out you were fucking someone else, I’ll take an axe to him first and you next. That way you can watch him die before you go to hell.’ ”

Kara’s skin crawled. Did Jonas really utter that ugly, blood-chilling threat? Or had Lacey been lying? At the time everyone believed the calm, wide-eyed girl who’d sat so still and straight in the witness box.

Biting her lip while still tracing the letters of Lacey’s name, Kara tried to recall her brother as he had been before the night all the members of her family were so brutally slaughtered. He’d been a hothead, for sure. Angry. Even Natalie, his own mother, had said he was a mixture of “piss and vinegar sprinkled with way too many raging teenage hormones.”

Kara had definitely seen Jonas with the sword earlier that day. She remembered spying on him through the open door to his room. In jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, he swung the old, heavy weapon easily. An athlete by nature, he’d practiced his martial arts moves for as long as Kara could remember. So there he was slashing through the air, spinning, and hopping onto the unmade bed in his bare feet. From atop the mattress he jabbed determinedly, his face twisted in a seething fury as if he were slaying an invisible enemy.

An angry, troubled teen who a jury had decided was an enraged killer, an eighteen-year-old hyped up on adrenaline and testosterone who had sliced his own brothers, father, and stepmother to ribbons. As she had a thousand times before, Kara thought back to that night, to the jagged pieces of that horrid blood-soaked puzzle that, try as she might, she couldn’t force together.

Why had Marlie woken her? Had she been afraid the killer would come looking for her younger sister? How did she know? Was Marlie somehow a part of the attack? Why had she disappeared? What happened to her?

Was there an intruder, as Jonas had insisted?

If so, who?

Why hadn’t the police found him? Wouldn’t there be something, a trace of hair or skin or blood that DNA testing could have proven did not belong to a member of they? She remembered the smeared blood on the walls, the fire hissing and glowing red,, its flames reflecting on the dark pools of blood, several Christmas stockings on the floor as the machete had sliced through the mantel and sent the red-and-green socks flying.

But most of all she remembered her brothers, blood-soaked and still, mouths gaping open, eyes fixed as they’d fallen, their bodies splayed garishly over Mama’s Persian carpet. Only Jonas had moved, been alive, able to focus on her in a moment of heart-stopping clarity. She’d been rooted to the floorboards of the hallway, her heart hammering, terror gripping her as her mind screamed, No, no, no!

Blood-spattered and weak, he’d risen slowly up on an elbow. “Get help . . . Run!” he’d rasped weakly just as a blast of frigid wind had ripped into the room, sending the flames in the grate crackling as a huge, shadowy figure loomed in the doorway.

“Find anything interesting?” Tate’s voice startled her.

She jumped, coffee sloshing from her cup onto the desk and legal pad as the horrid memory withered and died. “Crap!” Frantically she searched for something to wipe up the mess.

“Got it!” Tate snapped paper towels from a spindle, crossed the room in three long strides and dabbed quickly at sodden, stained paper.

“Sorry.”

“No worries.”

She saw he was holding a big paper bag in his other hand as he mopped the desktop.

The scribbled notes on the top page bled into each other.

“Oh, geez!”

“Just my thoughts,” he said, glancing at the ruined pages. “Everything’s on computer. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” He glanced up as he tossed the sodden towel into a nearby trash can. “Lucky for you I’ve got a photographic memory.”

“Seriously?” That stopped her.

“No.” He offered a hint of a smile. “I wish. It would sure make things easier.”

“So you’re a liar,” she said, arching an eyebrow.

“Only when I have to be.” He opened the bag, then withdrew two sandwiches. “I was just trying to make you feel better.”

“You didn’t.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. “Then go ahead: Feel bad. But in the meantime, come on, let’s eat. I don’t know about you, but as I said, I’m starved.” He cleared a spot at the far end of the table. “It’s not exactly five-star, but it’ll have to do. Tuna or BLT?”

“Tuna.” Her stomach rumbled as she unwrapped the sandwich and tried to remember the last time she’d had a meal. Cheese, crackers and a bottle of wine last night? A splash of Baileys for breakfast? Not that she’d had any time to eat, but it was little wonder that a simple deli sandwich made her mouth water and tasted divine. Even the accompanying dill pickle almost made her sigh.

Rhapsody, of course, had wandered over to the table, her nose aloft, her brown eyes soft and pleading. Kara shook her head, but she caught Tate tearing off a bit of bacon and offering it to the dog.

Rhapsody snapped the morsel into her mouth and swallowed.

“That’s a definite no-no,” she said, wiping her fingers. “Feeding from the table.”

He grinned. “You know me, always breaking the rules.”

She flashed back to him as a youth. Floppy hair and gawky build. Shy smile and teeth that seemed too big for his face; eyes, above a freckled nose, squinting against the summer sun; a boy who’d been a bit of a rebel, she’d heard, though he hadn’t held a candle to Jonas.