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Would he want to relive the terror of that night?
Would he want to remember the trial where her testimony put her brother behind bars for what should have been life?
Would he want to face said brother?
Hell no.
But he wasn’t about to give up. If he put her through her own private hell again, well, as they used to say,Dem’s da breaks.
A story was a story.
Besides which, it was more than just a story to him.
This one cut close to the bone, seeing as his father had given his life to save the freaked-out only child of Samuel and Zelda McIntyre.
Tate figured Kara owed him.
Big time.
He remembered her as a kid, all gangly arms and legs, mussed hair, and even then showing an attitude through the innocence of childhood. She’d snuck up on him once, watching from the shadows of the tree line as he’d been skipping stones across the water.
He’d caught her eye. “Wanna try?” he’d asked, and expected her to run like a frightened fawn into the underbrush. Instead, she’d stepped from the umbra, grabbed a smooth round stone, hauled her arm back, released with a flip of her wrist and sent the rock sailing, bouncing easily over the silvery surface. Ten firm skips, water rippling in circles from the spots where the stone had bounced. With a startled series of quacks and wild splash, two wood ducks flapped out of the water and took off into the high, thin summer clouds.
“You’re pretty good,” he’d said, unable to hide his surprise.
“Well, what is it?” She’d cocked an insolent eyebrow. “Pretty or good?”
“What?”
“I’m pretty,” she’d asserted. “AndI’m good. Better than you.”
Damn.
After drilling him with a stark, knowing stare, she’d taken off, leaving him speechless. She’d been what—seven or eight at the time? Precocious. Older than her years because of all of her older half siblings. Probably had known things no seven-year-old should. Even before witnessing the aftermath of the slaughter of her family.
Now, he walked to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of beer from the old refrigerator, cracked it open and looked around the living area, left as it had been years before, his father’s presence still evident. A family picture still hung over the mantel and nearby the antlers of a deer he’d shot with a bow, and in the short hallway leading to the bedrooms, a framed military shadow box with a collection of Edmund Tate’s patches, badges, ribbons and medals from his years in the Marine Corps. A true hero, Wesley thought as he headed out to the back porch, where the floorboards were rotting and the brisk winter air cut like a knife. This was the very porch his father had stood on all those years ago. Edmund had been smoking a cigarette when he’d heard the commotion at the neighboring house, gone over to investigate, and found a freaked-out little girl in the middle of the carnage of a family slaughter.
Wesley had been eleven at the time, old enough to be fascinated by the horror, young enough to blame the victim and, like everyone else, vulnerable to feel the loss of a father dying while helping others. Edmund Tate had been off-duty. Yet he’d sacrificed his life for the girl, running onto the ice as it cracked and gave way beneath his weight. Edmund had been able to save her, dragging her kicking, screaming, and choking from the freezing water before having a damned heart attack and collapsing on the snowy shore.
Thinking of it now, Tate’s jaw turned rock hard, his eyes narrowing, the anger that had been with him for twenty years festering. He’d never gotten to say goodbye to his dad. Edmund had barely spoken a word before coding in the ambulance as it screamed its way to the nearest hospital, where Edmund Tate had been pronounced DOA, one more victim of the bloody massacre.
Even today in what seemed a lifetime later, Wesley felt his own heart twist and his jaw set. He’d been robbed of the father he remembered all too clearly. Edmund had been a big man, overweight and a smoker, but only forty-seven years old when he’d taken that fateful plunge into the icy water.
Tate’s hands clenched over the bottle. He stared at the ice-covered lake, its smooth surface stretching for half a mile, though tonight the view was cloaked by falling snow. The houses on the far shore were indiscernible, no lights from windows piercing the whispering veil.
He tipped up his bottle and took a long swallow, a cold wind rattling the trees and swirling the icy flakes.
That damned lake.
He’d loved coming here as a kid with his parents and younger sister. It had been a sanctuary, a haven away from the city, a place to explore in times when their small family had bonded and his father’s work was miles away. He’d fished from the old dock, hunted in the surrounding woods, played one-on-one at the rusted hoop planted in the sparse gravel. How many times had the old man let him win?
Of course, that was before the night that had changed everything, he thought, shivering in his stockinged feet. His love for this place had soured, the sanctuary turning to a hated place—heaven turning into hell in the space of a heartbeat.
“Nothing in life is fair,” his mother had reminded him when he’d complained. “He died doing what he loved—protecting others.” Of course Selma Tate had been devastated, too, hiding her bitterness from her children, standing proudly in the icy rain at her husband’s burial, and forcing a smile she didn’t feel when she was presented with a flag as Edmund had served in the marines before becoming a cop and marrying his high school sweetheart.
But, late at night, Wes had heard her crying in her room, over the sound of the country music she played loudly. He, lying on the top bunk in his bedroom, had been able to make out her sobs through the thin walls and hollow-core doors of their condominium.
He rubbed the back of his neck and turned toward the McIntyre estate, but he saw only dark forest looming through the swirling snow. During the day, part of the roof of the big house was visible between the tops of the firs and pines, and when the sun was setting, one could catch the glimmer of fading sunlight on the old panes of the window cut into the top floor, the attic where Kara had sworn she’d been locked.
But tonight it was dark.
Lost in shadows.
While the snow fell softly, an opaque veil hiding the rotting shingles and cracked glass.
God, he hated that place.
He didn’t doubt that Kara McIntyre felt the same.