The Marsh King's Daughter(52)

The next day my father asked if I had learned my lesson. I told him I had. I don’t think the lesson I learned was the one he wanted to teach me.





19





The prints in the road spell out a message that’s impossible to miss: I’m going to your house. Catch me—stop me—save them—if you can.

I unlock the truck. Fill my pockets with as many rounds of ammunition as they will hold and take the Ruger from the rack over the window. Check the Magnum, adjust the knife at my belt. My father has two handguns and the knife he took from the old man’s cabin. I have my handgun, my rifle, and the Bowie I’ve carried since I was a child. I’m calling us even.

I can’t be sure if my father knows I have a family, just as I can’t prove he knows I’m living on the property where he grew up. But I have to assume that he does. I can think of any number of ways he could have found out. Prisoners can’t access the Internet, but my father has a lawyer. Lawyers have access to tax records, property records, marriage and birth and death certificates. My father could have pumped his lawyer for information about the people living on his parents’ property without the lawyer even realizing my father was manipulating him. Maybe the lawyer staked out my house on some innocuous pretext at my father’s request. If the lawyer saw me and happened to mention my tattoos when he reported back, my father would have known right away that this was me. I wonder—not for the first time—if I should have had the tattoos removed entirely, no matter how long and expensive the process. I can see now that I also should have changed my first name as well as my last. But how could I have known that nine years in the future these things would put my family in danger? I wasn’t running from the law, or from organized crime, or hiding out like in a witness protection program. I was just an eighteen-year-old looking to make a fresh start.

There’s another possibility as to how my father knows where I’m living, much more sinister and devious than the first. It’s possible I’m living on his parents’ property because my father put me there. Maybe his parents originally named him in their will, but he let the inheritance go to me so he could track me. I suppose it’s possible I’m giving my father too much credit. But if my father plotted his escape in such a way that I would be forced to come looking for him on his terms, then I’m willing to admit I underestimated him. I won’t do it again.

I check my phone. Still no signal. I send Stephen a text warning him to clear out, praying the text will go through, and turn west. Away from the trail my father expects me to follow. There’s no question I could track my father if I wanted to. A person moving through the woods always leaves evidence behind, no matter how expertly they hide their trail. Twigs get broken. Dirt gets displaced. Grass bruises when it’s stepped on. Moss crushes underfoot. Gravel gets pressed into the ground. Boots pick up material from the ground, which then gets transferred to other surfaces: grains of sand on a fallen log, bits of moss on an otherwise bare rock. What’s more, my father is traveling with my dog. Unless he’s carrying Rambo in his arms or on his shoulders, my three-legged canine is going to leave a trail that’s impossible to miss.

But even if the rain weren’t rapidly washing away all evidence of my father’s trail, I’m not going to track him. If all I do is follow where he leads, I’ve already lost. I have to get out ahead of him. My father doesn’t know my girls aren’t home, but I know my husband is. We’re less than five miles from my house. I’ve hunted this area often and know it well. Between this road and my house are two small creeks, a beaver pond, and a steep gully with a fair-sized stream at the bottom that my father will have to cross. The high ground is mostly second-growth aspen and scrub pine without a lot of cover, which means he’ll have to stick to the low ground as much as possible. At the rate the rain is coming down, the creeks are quickly turning into torrents. If my father is going to make it across the stream at the bottom of the gully before it becomes a raging river, he’s going to have to move fast.

My father knows all of this as well as I do from when he roamed these woods as a boy. What he doesn’t know—what he can’t possibly know unless he’s somehow seen a recent satellite image of the area, which I have to doubt—is that between here and my house is a section of forest that was clear-cut three or four years ago. He also doesn’t know about the rough road the loggers left behind that leads almost all the way to the wetland behind my house.

This is his first mistake.

I set off at a light jog. My father has at most a fifteen-minute head start. If I average five miles an hour to his three, I can get out ahead of him and cut him off. I picture him making his way through the underbrush, hiking up and down hills and wading through creeks while I’m barely breaking a sweat. Working so hard to hide his trail and I’m not even following it. He has no idea I’m about to get the better of him again. He can’t imagine any outcome other than the one he’s planned because in his universe, in which he’s the sun and the rest of us orbit around him, things can only happen in the way that he decrees.

But I’m no longer the adoring child he used to manipulate and control. Thinking so is his second mistake.

I will find him, and I will stop him. I put him in prison once; I can do it again.

—

I PULL MY PHONE from my jacket pocket without breaking stride and check the time. Half an hour. It feels a lot longer. I estimate I’m halfway to my house. It could be more, but it’s possibly less. It’s hard to tell where I am exactly because the trees I normally would have used as landmarks are gone. The jack pines on the ridge to my right are nothing remarkable, certainly nothing I can use to gauge my progress, just the scrub the loggers couldn’t be bothered to cut.