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CHAPTER 4
Oh. God.
Kara’s knees went weak.
The reporter was speaking and Kara tried to concentrate. “That’s right, Elliot, we just learned that Jonas McIntyre walked out of this prison earlier this afternoon. He’d been originally scheduled to be released later this week, and we don’t yet know why the date was changed but—”
The rest of the report was a blur.
Kara stared at the screen, not seeing the news desk or reporter or even the prison, not hearing the report. Instead, she was caught in the web of images of that frigid, horrid night. Her mind spun to what she did remember: the red and blue lights of the police vehicles strobing to reflect on the snow. Jonas, bloody and unconscious on a stretcher, being carried to an ambulance. Her own chattering teeth, wet hair and near-frozen skin as she was wrapped in a towel by a woman police officer. Cops—dozens of them surrounding the house. Yellow tape, one end flapping beneath the low-hanging branches of a snow-laden fir.
She’d been in shock but unhurt, a doctor in the ER had said to a kind, heavy-set woman from Child Services who wore a hand-knit stocking cap and smelled of lavender. Aunt Faiza had rushed into the police station, her face red. She tried not to cry but had failed miserably. Shaking and sobbing, she’d held a numb and silent Kara tight.
Now Kara blinked, realizing tears had drizzled down her cheeks. Angrily, she swiped them away.
Jonas was free?
How had she not known?
Why hadn’t someone contacted her?
Oh, right? How many calls did you refuse to answer and delete?
Absently she took a swallow from her glass. Saw that her hand was shaking, the wine sloshing wildly.
Calm down. So he’s out. So what?
You don’t think he’s a killer, do you?
She bit her lip.
Oh, Kara. Have you been lying to yourself all this time?
“Shut up!” she said, and stood, spilling some of the Merlot as she walked to the sink and poured the reminder of the wine down the drain.
She glanced out the window, to the dark night beyond, and saw not only the flickering images of the TV in the glass, but her own stark reflection, her face pale as death, her eyes large and sunken, her cheeks hollow.
Who was she kidding?
Not Aunt Faiza. Not Dr. Zhou. Not even herself, if she were truthful. She was the same terrified girl who had been locked in the attic twenty years earlier, the girl who had witnessed the bloody aftermath of her family’s slaughter.
Though Jonas had been the one on trial, Kara had felt as if she, too, were being judged.
It had been long ago, and yet close enough that she felt as if she could reach out and touch it. As if it had been just yesterday.
At eight years old, she’d sat on the hard chair in the witness stand, a waif of a girl. Terrified. Afraid she would say the wrong thing. She’d been coached and was smart, “older than her years,” Auntie Fai had said, but still . . .
The judge, a dark-skinned woman in black robes and rimless glasses, had been seated high above her, sharp eyes assessing as the attorneys asked questions she barely understood, but knew the answers, had been primed with the right way to respond. They had approached her, had smiled, had outwardly appeared to be friendly, as if they were just curious, but she’d known better. Instinctively. Had sensed a darker purpose in their questions. She remembered forcing herself to meet their gazes, to appear calm while her fingers, as if of their own accord, had rubbed together endlessly.
It had seemed to go on forever.
Now, two decades later, Kara tried to shake off the feeling of being trapped that had been with her on that witness stand, to put it behind her and concentrate on the television screen. As an adult, she knew a lot more about what had happened and understood that she, a shell-shocked eight-year-old, had been manipulated, played by the prosecutors, by the defense attorneys, by her aunt. By every damned one.
She reached for her empty glass in the sink, thought better of it, and walked back to the TV area. She backed up the program, starting over again, with the reporter standing at the gates of the prison.
Mesmerized, she watched as the jacketed reporter on the screen was wrapping up and signing off. “Back to you, Elliot,” she said, snowflakes collecting in her hair as the prison loomed behind her.
Kara’s stomach twisted.