The Girl Who Survived(9)

Kara paid in cash and ignored the curious look the cashier cast as she handed back change and bagged the bottles.

Damn. The woman was trying to place her.

Kara loved her anonymity.

Which, she knew, was about to be shattered.

As if to reinforce her thoughts, she noticed a newspaper on a nearby rack. The headline screamed: KILLER IN COLD LAKE MASSACRE TO BE RELEASED. And in smaller letters: JONAS MCINTYRE TO BE SET FREE.

Kara’s stomach soured. Bile rose up her throat.

As the next customer, a sixtysomething woman in a long red coat and matching beret set her bottles of wine on the counter, Kara grabbed the top copy in the stack of papers and said, “I’ll take this, too.” She dropped a five on the counter.

“Wait a second,” the patron said in a snooty, put-upon voice, her lips, the exact shade of her coat, turning into a tight frown. “I was next.”

“You were. But I was here first. Merry Christmas.” As the woman gaped at her insolence, Kara told the cashier, “Put the change in there,” and pointed to a jar for donations to a local dog rescue.

“Well, I never!” the customer said.

“I’m sure you never did.” Kara tucked the newspaper under her arm, leaving the woman in the beret glaring after her.

Not smart, Kara. Remember: You want to blend into the shadows. Remain anonymous. “Yeah, right.”

Bottles clinking in the bag, she hurried outside, where night had fallen, darkness settling in, streetlamps glowing while snow began to fall again.

She checked the back, then dropped the bag on the passenger seat and pulled out of the lot, the woman in the beret sending her a dark look as she slipped behind the wheel of a white Mercedes.

Once more, with a little less speed, Kara melded into the traffic streaming out of the downtown area. Stop and go. Brake lights and headlights even though it was only four in the afternoon, evening closing in quickly this time of year. The newspaper, unfolded on the passenger seat, mocking her with its headlines and picture of the mountain cabin where she’d spent winter vacations sprawled across the front page of the Register. Well, if you could call a three-storied house built by a famous architect a hundred years earlier a “cabin.” Her parents had. Ornate and grand, ordered to specific design by her great-great-grandfather, the “cabin” still stood, rotting and rusting, a FOR SALE sign still in place, she assumed, though there were no takers for the rambling old home where an entire family had been slaughtered. The tragedy had earned its own names: the Cold Lake Massacre or The McIntyre Massacre, each one equally chilling to her.

As she slowed for a red light, Kara’s cell rang again and she saw only a local number. No name. No caller ID. “Forget it.”

Since the announcement of Jonas’s imminent release, she’d been besieged by reporters calling her, and she refused to talk to them. Even that irritating Wesley Tate. No, make that especially Wesley Tate. He was too clever. Too charming. Too good-looking and too close to the story.

His father, an off-duty cop, had saved Kara from drowning. And he’d died in the process. Again, she felt more than a modicum of guilt. She probably owed his son some of her time, to tell him her side of the story.

But no. Not a good idea. No matter how close Tate was to the story, how emotional it might be to him, he was first and foremost a reporter, a male reporter.

And Kara was definitely in her man-hating mode right now. Because of Brad Jones, whom she’d kicked to the curb just two weeks earlier.

Brad, like the few boyfriends she’d had before him, had proved to be more interested in her because of her brush with infamy than as Kara as a woman. And, of course, there was her inheritance, what was left of it, the portion Auntie Fai hadn’t had a chance to squander.

“Big surprise.” She switched on the radio to chase away any lingering regrets over Brad and heard, of course, Christmas music. Worse yet, the strains of “Silent Night” filled the car.

“. . . yon Virgin, tender and mild—”

“Nope. Don’t think so.” God, where was “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” when you needed it? She clicked off the radio, then drove the next hour in relative silence until she passed the WELCOME TO WHIMSTICK sign, which announced that the population was just over twelve thousand.

Kara skirted the main section of town, easing through side streets and alleys until she finally turned down the quiet street where her home was located. She barely knew any of her neighbors, just the way she wanted it. Three doors down, just below the crest of a small hill, she pulled into her drive. Thankfully there were no news vans or reporters clustered on the snow-covered street. But just wait. That would happen. The second Jonas McIntyre was a free man.

With a touch of her finger to the remote, the garage door started rolling upward and before it was completely open, she drove inside. She hit the button again, closing the garage tight. Less than a minute later she was in the house, turning on lights, adjusting the heat, and being greeted by Rhapsody, her rescue dog who was a probably a little terrier, probably some Labrador retriever, and certainly some pit bull, but that was all just a best guess. Until she did a canine DNA test on the dog, Kara would never know. And she wasn’t about to put out money to unlock the secrets of Rhapsody’s mottled lineage. Who cared? All Kara knew was that this shaggy, fifty-pound mutt with her wise gold eyes loved Kara as no one else had since she was a child.