Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(3)

Him means her father, of course. I give her a slight, hopefully reassuring smile. “No news yet,” I say. “He’s probably a long way from here. He’s a hunted man. Most of the prisoners who escaped with him have already been caught. He’ll be back behind bars soon.”

“You don’t believe that.”

I don’t. I don’t want to lie to my daughter, so I just change the subject. “You need to go back to sleep, sweetheart. We’re moving early in the morning.”

“It is the morning. Where are we going?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Is this how it’s going to be?” Her voice is quietly fierce this time. “God, Mom, all you do is run. We can’t just let him do this to us! Not again. I don’t want to run. I want to fight.”

She did. Of course she did. She was a brave kid who’d been forced to face ugly truths about her dad when she was just ten, and it wasn’t surprising that she’s still angry at her core.

She’s also right.

I turn toward her, and she twists to look me in the face. I hold her gaze as I say, “We are going to fight. But tomorrow you’re going to go somewhere safe, so I can be free to do what has to be done—and before you argue with me, I need you to stay with your brother and make sure he’s protected. That’s your job, Lanny. That’s your fight. All right?”

“All right? You’re dumping us off on somebody else now? No, it’s not okay! Please tell me it’s not Grandma.”

“I thought you loved your grandmother.”

“I do. As Grandma. Not to stay with. You want us to be safe? She can’t protect us. She can’t protect anybody.”

“I’m going to make certain she doesn’t have to. Meanwhile, your father will be watching me, because finding me is his top priority.” I pray that to be true. It’s a huge gamble, but there is a very limited circle of people I can trust to look after my kids. My first instinct is to take them to my mother, but I also have to admit it: my daughter is right. My mom is not a fighter. Not like us. And this is an entirely different level of danger.

I don’t tell her yet, because I need to think it over, but Javier Esparza and Kezia Claremont have offered to guard my kids if I need them. They’re a formidable couple. Javier is a retired marine and runs a gun range; Kezia’s a police officer, tough and smart and capable.

The drawback is, they live outside of Norton, and relatively close to Stillhouse Lake. That beautiful, remote place started out for me as a refuge, a sanctuary, but it turned into a trap, and now I don’t know that I can ever feel safe there again. We certainly can’t go back to our lakeside house; we’d be easy targets.

Javier’s place, though, isn’t at the lake. It’s a remote, fortified cabin, and I intuitively believe that Melvin, and Absalom, would look everywhere but the place we’d just fled.

“Are you leaving us with Sam?” Lanny asks.

“No, because Sam’s coming with me,” I tell her. I haven’t asked him yet, but I know he will; he wants to find Melvin Royal as desperately as I do, for just as personal a reason. “Sam and I are going to find your father and stop him before he hurts anyone else. Before he can even think of hurting you and your brother.” I give her time to think about it, and then I say, “I need you to help me, Lanny. This is the best option we have, other than running and hiding again. I don’t want to do that any more than you do. Please believe that.”

She looks away and, with studied indifference, shrugs. “Sure. Whatever. You still make us do it.” All the running we’ve done before has been necessary. It had been the right thing to do at the time. But I understand how terribly hard it has been on my kids to live in constant vigilance.

“I’m so sorry, honey.”

“I know,” she finally says, and having made that pronouncement, she gives me a quick, unexpected hug and goes back into the motel room.

I stay out there for a while in the cold, thinking, and then I dial Sam Cade’s phone number and say, “I’m outside.”

It only takes him about a minute to step out on the narrow second-floor walkway beside me; his room is right next to ours. Like me, he is fully dressed. Ready for a fight. He leans on the railing right where Lanny stood and says, “I don’t suppose this is a booty call.”

“Funny,” I say, casting him a sideways look. We aren’t lovers. Not that we aren’t, in some ways, intimate; I think that eventually we might circle around to it, but neither of us seems to be in a hurry to get there. We have baggage, God knows. Ex-wife of a serial killer, constantly under threat from Melvin’s groupies, his allies, the baying hounds of Internet vigilantes.

And Sam? Sam is the brother of one of my ex-husband’s victims. Melvin’s last victim. I can still see that poor young woman’s body strung up by a wire noose. Tortured and murdered for pure, sadistic pleasure.

We’re complicated. When I first met Sam, I’d believed he was a friendly stranger, no connection to my old life. Finding out that he had deliberately tracked me, stalked me, in hopes of finding evidence I’d been complicit in my husband’s crimes . . . that had nearly broken everything.

He knows now that I’m not guilty, and never was, but there are still deep cracks between us, and I don’t know how to fill them, or if I should. Sam likes me. I like Sam. In another life, without the rancid shadow of Melvin Royal between us, I think we could have been happy together.