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“But what happened? Why did you leave me?” Kara asked. Despite the bitter cold, despite the fact that Walter lay dead and Tate was injured, she had to know. “Why? In the attic? All alone?”
“I had to,” Marlie cut in, more than a little defensive. She rubbed her arms and avoided Kara’s gaze. Staring into the middle distance, to a place only she could see, she said quietly, “It was all I could think of at the time. I-I didn’t know what to do, but I had to save you. I’d seen Jonas kill Donner, because of Lacey. And just as he finished and caught sight of me, Dad—Walter—showed up.” Marlie stared into the trees and shuddered. “Oh, God. It was so twisted. Dad had come back to the house to have it out with Mom about custody of Donner and me.”
Marlie cast a dark glance at her father’s form as the wind raced across the lake, sharp and harsh, causing the snow to swirl and dance, the trees to shiver. Lost in her own vision of that horrible night, Marlie didn’t seem to notice. Her voice was low and without emotion. “Dad, he walked in . . . like the door was unlocked, I guess, and he caught Jonas in the act of slicing Donner’s throat. The blood spilling, Donner gurgling. That’s what he told me.”
Kara’s stomach lurched at the vision.
Now there was emotion in Marlie’s voice. “Dad completely lost it. Snapped at the sight of Jonas murdering his son.” Marlie shook her head. “He told me later that the whole world shifted at that moment, that he went back to his days in combat as a marine. He literally saw red and he reacted.”
“By killing everyone?” Kara said, disbelieving, her insides shredding as she remembered the ghastly, blood-soaked scene. Tears froze on her cheeks and somehow she was holding Tate’s hand, squeezing tight.
“That’s how he explained it to me.”
“But why . . . why?” Kara whispered. “Dad and Sam Junior and—”
“I know, I know. It’s all so horrible. Unthinkable.”
And she had lived with that incomprehensible gut-churning, mind-numbing knowledge for two decades, Kara realized.
Marlie let out a quiet sob and the sound was snatched by the wind. Then she stared down at her father’s still form. “He told me that he killed Sam Junior instinctively, because Junior was a witness. And then the beast was unleashed. That’s how he said it. ‘The beast was unleashed.’ Like it was with him all the time. He just kept it tethered.” She shook her head, as if she were denying her father his excuse for the savagery, the brutality. She said grimly, her voice almost a whisper, “He killed Mom and your dad because he hated them, hated Mom for cheating on him and hated Sam Senior for stealing not just his wife but his kids, too.”
Kara imagined the horrid scene, of Walter murdering Sam Junior, then climbing the stairs with his bloody sword to finish his deadly mission. “But why didn’t they wake up?” Kara asked. She imagined screaming and yelling, the crash of the Christmas tree as it was knocked over, the splintering of wood when the mantel was hacked in a wild swing of the deadly blade.
Marlie rolled her eyes to the heavens, snow falling on her upturned and disfigured face. “That was my fault,” she admitted, a tear sliding from one eye. “I drugged them. So they wouldn’t wake up for a long time. I was supposed to meet Chad and we were going to run away. I knew where Sam Senior kept some extra cash—a lot of it. I’d seen him stash it away. So the plan was to grab the money and take off. By the time Mom and Sam woke up the next morning, we would be long gone. So . . . so, you see. I did my part, too. I contributed to the murders. I was . . . complicit.”
Stunned, trying to grasp it all, to understand, Kara shook her head. “You were just a teenager, a girl in love.”
“An idiot,” Marlie admitted, and her voice held more than an edge of self-loathing. “Don’t ever fall in love, Kara,” she advised, though Kara was still gripping Tate’s hand. “Look what it did to our family. To my parents. To yours. To Jonas. I’m telling you, it’s a bad, bad idea.”
Kara felt Tate squeeze her hand and far away, over the rush of the winter wind, she heard the welcome sound of distant sirens. “So you . . . you were the one who called me, who texted me?”
“Yes.” Marlie nodded and finally met the questions in her sister’s eyes.
“But you said, ‘She’s alive.’”
“I know. She is alive. Marlie is alive.”
“But that’s you,” Kara pointed out.
“Oh . . . yeah. Right.” She sighed. “I’ve been going by a different name for twenty years. Hailey. Hailey Brown. Posing as Walter’s niece if anyone ever asked. No one did, much. I didn’t see many people. I wasn’t allowed and truthfully”—again she motioned to her disfigured face while the sirens shrieked ever louder—“I didn’t want to. Until I knew that Jonas was being released. That was what set Dad off. He went out of his mind! Beside himself. So agitated, he left me at the house in Seaside. Locked me up for the first time in years. Until Jonas was set free, Dad had believed I wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t expose him.” She sniffed and her jaw slid to one side as she glanced at the man who had sired her, abducted her, held her prisoner and made her a part of his sick, twisted life. “Unfortunately,” she went on, “he was right. For the most part. However, I had my own secrets. In the last couple of years, I found his keys, made a copy and had stashed away one of his burner phones and siphoned off some of the household cash. So, when the time came if he ever locked me away again, I’d be ready. And I was. When he flipped out over Jonas, I couldn’t just sit there. And . . . and I didn’t have the nerve to call the police, or admit to who I was so that I would be tracked down and have to deal with the cops, so I took the chicken-shit way out, remained Hailey and tried to warn you.” She shrugged and snorted, her face a mask of guilt and embarrassment. “That didn’t work so well.”
“But you could have left anytime you wanted?”
“In the last few years? Yeah.” She nodded, then her features grew hard, her scar more pronounced. “But where would I go? My family other than Dad was gone, and I couldn’t risk contacting Chad or you without telling the police and turning in my own father. I know it sounds lame,” she admitted, a tear tracking down her cheek, “but I was laid up for a while when I was healing and Dad took care of me.”
“He locked you away!”
“He . . . he was all I had,” she said, her voice cracking.
Kara let go of Tate’s hand. Grabbed her sister’s shoulder. “Damn it, Marlie. You could have contacted me!”
She sniffed. “Don’t swear,” she said, shaking her head, fighting against a wash of tears that spilled from her eyes.
“But—”
“You were a child, Kara!” Marlie snapped. “I couldn’t.” With trembling fingers, she brushed the tears and snowflakes from her face. “In my mind Marlie Robinson is dead.” She gave a sad little laugh and pushed Kara’s hand from her shoulder. Then added coldly, “And so is Hailey Brown.”
“But you’ll always be Marlie to me,” Kara argued.