The Marsh King's Daughter(4)

My heart stops. I can’t see. Can’t breathe. Can’t hear anything over the blood rushing in my ears. I slow the truck and pull carefully onto the shoulder. My hand shakes as I reach to turn the radio off.

Jacob Holbrook has escaped from prison. The Marsh King. My father.

And I’m the one who put him in prison in the first place.





2





I pull back onto the pavement in a spray of gravel. I doubt anyone is patrolling this section of highway in view of everything that’s happening thirty miles to the south, and even if someone is, getting stopped for speeding is now the least of my concerns. I have to get home, have to have eyes on both of my daughters, have to know that they’re with me and they’re safe. According to the news alert, my father is heading away from my house and into the wildlife refuge. Only I know he’s not. The Jacob Holbrook I know would never be that obvious. I’ll bet any amount of money that after a couple of miles, the searchers are going to lose his trail, if they haven’t already. My father can pass through the marsh like a spirit walker. He wouldn’t lay down a trail for searchers to follow unless he wanted them to follow it. If my father wants the people who are looking for him to think he’s in the wildlife refuge, then they’re not going to find him in the marsh.

I clench the wheel. I picture my father lurking in the trees as Iris gets off the bus and starts up our driveway, and I press down harder on the pedal. I see him jumping out and grabbing her the moment the driver pulls away, the way he used to leap out of the bushes when I came out of the outhouse, to frighten me. My fear for Iris’s safety isn’t logical. According to the news alert, my father escaped between four and four fifteen, and it’s now four forty-five; there’s no way he could travel thirty miles on foot in half an hour. But that doesn’t make my fear any less real.

My father and I haven’t spoken in fifteen years. Odds are he doesn’t know I changed my last name when I turned eighteen because I’d had all I could stand of being known only for the circumstances in which I grew up. Or that when his parents passed away eight years ago, they willed this property to me. Or that I used the bulk of the inheritance to have the house where he grew up razed and brought in the double-wide. Or that I’m living here now with my husband and two young daughters. My father’s granddaughters.

But he might. After today, anything is possible. Because today my father escaped from prison.

—

I’M ONE MINUTE LATE. Definitely not more than two. I’m trapped behind Iris’s school bus with the still-shrieking Mari. Mari has worked herself into such a state, I doubt she remembers what set her off. I can’t pull around the bus and into our driveway because the stop sign is extended and the red lights are flashing. Never mind that mine is the only other vehicle on the highway and that’s my daughter the driver is delivering. As if I might accidentally run over my own child.

Iris climbs off the bus. I can see by the dejected way she trudges up our empty driveway that she thinks I’ve forgotten to get home in time for her again. “Look, Mari.” I point. “There’s our house. There’s Sissy. Shh. We’re almost there.”

Mari follows my finger, and when she sees her sister, just like that, she shuts up. She hiccups. Smiles. “Iris!” Not “I-I” or “I-sis” or “Sissy” or even “I-wis,” but “Iris,” plain as day. Go figure.

At last the driver decides that Iris is far enough from the highway to turn off the caution lights and the door hisses shut. The second the bus starts moving, I swing around and pull into our driveway. Iris’s shoulders straighten. She waves, beams. Mommy is home and her world is back on its axis. I wish I could say the same for mine.

I shut off the engine and go around to the passenger side to strap Mari into her sandals. As soon as her feet touch down, she takes off across the front yard.

“Mommy!” Iris runs up and wraps her arms around my legs. “I thought you were gone.” She says this not as an accusation but as a statement of fact. This is not the first time I’ve let my daughter down. I wish I could promise it will be the last.

“It’s okay.” I squeeze her shoulder and pat the top of her head. Stephen is always telling me I should hug our daughters more, but physical contact is difficult for me. The psychiatrist the court assigned to me after my mother and I were recovered said I had trust issues and made me do trust exercises, like closing my eyes and crossing my arms over my chest and falling backward with nothing to catch me but her promise. When I resisted, she said I was being belligerent. But I didn’t have trust issues. I just thought her exercises were stupid.

Iris releases me and runs after her sister into the house. The house isn’t locked. It never is. The downstaters who own the big summer homes on the bluff overlooking the bay keep their places locked and shuttered, but the rest of us never bother. If a thief had a choice between an empty, isolated mansion filled with expensive electronics and a double-wide that sits within sight of the highway, we all know which one he’d pick.

But now I lock the door to the house and head for the side yard to make sure Rambo has food and water. Rambo runs along the line we strung for him between two jack pines and wags his tail when he sees me. He doesn’t bark because I taught him not to. Rambo is a Plott hound, a brindled black and tan with floppy ears and a tail like a whip. I used to bring Rambo bear hunting with me and a couple other hunters and their dogs every fall, but I had to retire him two winters ago after a bear wandered into our backyard and he decided to take it on alone. A forty-five-pound dog and a five-hundred-pound black bear aren’t an even match, no matter what the dog thinks. Most people don’t notice at first that Rambo has only three legs, but with a twenty-five percent handicap, I’m not about to put him back in the field. After he started running deer last winter out of boredom, we had to start keeping him tied. Around here, a dog with a reputation for harassing deer can be shot on sight.