Chapter 13
Our father’s demise, a tragic consequence of our rescue, adds another layer of complexity to my tangled web of emotions. In saving us, we lost him. The dichotomy of relief and grief is a bitter pill to swallow. I grapple with the notion that the man who inflicted so much pain upon us met his end in the chaos he created. It’s a paradox that leaves me questioning the nature of justice and the price we pay for deliverance.
—Ghost Lake by Ava Howell Brooks
Okay. That was weird.
A few seconds earlier, Ava had hurried past her without a word. She looked through the glass sliding door to see Ava rushing into the half bath off the mudroom.
Madi only had time for a fleeting impression of pinched features and pale skin before the door closed behind Ava.
Her sister seemed genuinely ill. The first time Madi had seen her since she came to town, Ava had seemed more than simply uncomfortable about finding herself in Madi’s presence.
Once, in that miserable time they spent in the mountains, Ava had come down with a severe pneumonia, probably from the grim cold and rough conditions. She had hidden it from everyone as best she could, her face turning red in the effort it took her not to cough, until it became impossible to hide.
After her condition continued to worsen, their father—in a rare show of parental concern—had insisted on using some of the Coalition’s carefully hoarded supply of antibiotics. They had likely saved her life.
During their escape, Madi remembered, Ava had sprained her wrist falling down a slope in the dark. Madi hadn’t known until she was recovering in the hospital and her sister had shown up wearing a sling. She must have been in incredible pain, but she had never said a thing.
What was wrong with her now that left her so pale and shaky?
She didn’t care, she told herself. She knew her own words for a lie, especially when she couldn’t resist making her way over to Luke, now helping his stepfather, Boyd, and brother, Owen, at the grill.
“Hey,” he said with a smile that suddenly left her feeling wobbly inside. “Thanks for bringing Sierra.”
“Sorry we took so long. She was a great help to me today.”
“I’m glad.”
“I saw you were talking to Ava when we arrived,” she said, striving for a casual tone. “What happened that made her rush off like that?”
He frowned, looking in the direction Ava had fled. “I’m not exactly sure. She suddenly turned a little green and excused herself.”
“Do you think something is wrong with her?”
“I’m a veterinarian, remember? Most of my patients have a few more legs and a lot more fur.”
She made a face at him, barely refraining from sticking out her tongue.
He pulled a long, foil-wrapped packet off the grill with long metal tongs and set it on a serving platter, then repeated the process with a second packet. “The salmon is ready. Want to take it over to the table? Owen can carry the chicken over in a minute.”
“Or you can,” his younger brother said, lifting his beer laconically.
“Or I can,” Luke agreed.
She took the platter, grateful as always that Luke never hesitated to ask her to do things. He didn’t seem to care that she sometimes struggled with balance issues because of her leg or that her hand didn’t work as well as she would like.
He simply assumed she could handle any task he set before her, whether that was crossing the patio with a platter of salmon or handling a reluctant puppy on its way for shots.
There in his mother’s backyard, she suddenly realized his unswerving faith in her was one of the single most important things in her life.
As she carried the platter to the serving table, she remembered the day before, when he had looked at her with that expression that made her toes tingle.
She hadn’t stopped thinking about that expression, trying to analyze it from every possible angle.
Ultimately, Madi had decided sometime in the wee hours of the night that she must have imagined the whole thing. Luke didn’t think about her in that way. To him, she was no different from Nicole. He considered her a younger sister he could tease and provoke.
As she was arranging the platter with a few of the other items, Ava came out of the house, wiping at her mouth with a paper towel and sipping from the water bottle she had brought along.
Her sister did look pale. At least Madi thought so. But what did she know? Prior to her sister’s return to Emerald Creek a few days ago, Madi hadn’t seen her in person for about a year.
What if she had some incurable disease and didn’t want to share her diagnosis with Madi because of the discord between them?
She was angry with her sister, but she didn’t want something to happen to her. If she lost Ava, she and Leona wouldn’t have much family left.
Leona had one remaining son, who had never married and lived in California. Her father had two brothers in Massachusetts, scions of a highbrow Bostonian family, but Clint hadn’t had a relationship with them since he defied his family’s wishes and enlisted in the Marines.
Madi didn’t really know what had caused a rift between him and his family. Maybe his outspokenness and strong opinions, his independence and individualism philosophies.
What would they be thinking about Ava’s book? She couldn’t imagine Clint Howell came out looking very good in the book. How could he, when he had been the one to drag them into the whole mess in the first place?
What did the Bostonian Howells think about their family name being thrown out to the world for public scorn?
Her sister moved to a bench seat in the shade, near the pond, where she chatted with one of Luke’s aunts.
Tilly made a sound to draw everyone’s attention.
“The boys are almost done grilling. The salmon and chicken are ready and I understand the burgers are almost there.” She looked at the table, bulging with dishes. “It looks like we have all of the side dishes out. Boyd, will you say grace? And then you can all help yourselves.”
As she listened with half an ear to the blessing over the food, she peeked out from under her lids to see Ava with her eyes closed and her mouth moving silently.
What did her sister pray for?
Probably more book sales.
Madi frowned darkly, her anger resurfacing. She knew it wasn’t fair, especially during a contemplative moment, but she couldn’t seem to help her feelings.
Despite her overwhelming awareness of her sister’s presence, a Sunday gathering at the Gentry-Walker home was always fun.
She sat at one of the tables set up under the covered porch and chatted with Nicole and also Boyd’s youngest son and daughter-in-law, Brent and Samantha Walker, who lived on a ranch across the valley.
After the meal, some kind of physical contest was always organized in the grass field. One month it might be soccer, another flag football, another baseball. Her favorite was water-balloon volleyball, played with teams of two who held a towel between them to bounce the balloon back across the net.
Sunday dinner was never a sedate affair here. She loved it and would invariably join in the fun.
This time, they were playing soccer and she was designated goalie. She did her best to keep the competitive players on the other team, mainly the children of Boyd’s son, as well as Nicole and Owen, from scoring against her.
She managed to successfully avoid her sister until people started to clean up the meal.
Somehow—she wasn’t sure exactly what happened or if some interfering busybody had orchestrated it to bring the two sisters together—they both ended up in the kitchen at the same time, with Ava washing the dishes and Madi drying and putting them away.
How many times in their lives had they done exactly this in their house in Oregon?
Fierce longing reached out and smacked her across the face. Before their mother died, when the four of them had been a loving and happy family, she used to love cleaning up with her family after the evening meal.
Her father would turn the radio on and Clint and Beth would dance around the kitchen while she and Ava giggled and blew bubbles at them from the dish soap.
Her father would in turn dance with each of them, patiently showing the steps as they moved around the kitchen.
The memory made her ache, thinking of his laughing gaze and how safe she always felt with him around.
She tried not to think about the time before Beth had been killed. It was too painful, remembering all those years when their home had been a place filled with love and laughter and peace.
Oh, she and Ava bickered like most other siblings close together in age. Sometimes they would fight about whose turn it was to clean their shared bathroom or who got to be the first one to read the latest book in a series they both loved. Sometimes they fought about who could pick the movie to watch for their weekly family movie nights. They bickered over clothes and toys and friends.
Despite those minor skirmishes, neither of them had ever doubted they were loved.
And then their mother died, a victim of a drunk driver, as she returned home late from a school board meeting.
They had all been devastated, as if the heart and soul had been ripped out of each of them. All three of them had walked around in a fog for months, their world shrinking down to work and school and home.
Without Beth, they were like a canoe caught in a snag on the river, spinning uselessly while the world moved on without them.
After six months, things started to slowly improve. Their father took more interest in life and began to do more than spend every moment in his room or out in his garage.
Neither she nor Ava had any idea that the thing bringing him out of his shell would become so destructive. He started obsessively participating in online forums their mother never would have condoned and spending nearly every weekend at gun shows or emergency preparedness seminars.
Somewhere in all of his fixations, he had connected with Roger and James Boyle and their loosely organized prepper group, the Ghost Lake Survival Coalition.
She had learned many years later from Leona that her father’s interest in doomsday prophecies began even before their mother’s death, that Beth had been so concerned about the direction his views had been heading that she had been contemplating divorce.
She and Ava had been oblivious to it, she supposed. Two girls more concerned with their favorite boy band breaking up than their father’s descent into fanaticism.
She pushed the dark thoughts away as she and Ava worked in silence at the sink, allowing the conversation of the other people cleaning the kitchen to eddy around them like swirls and rivulets on the river.
Finally, they were down to the last dish and Madi brought up the topic that had been bothering her all evening.
“Are you sick or something?” she asked, the question more blunt than she intended.
Ava gave her one quick surprised look, then diverted her gaze back to the sink where the last of the dishwater glugged down the drain.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you look even more like a pale urchin than usual and you hardly ate anything.”
Ava’s mouth firmed into a tight line. “Maybe I wasn’t hungry. It’s hard to work up much of an appetite, knowing you’re eating with people who are furious with you.”
“You said people. Who else is furious with you? It seems to me that everybody else here is fine and dandy with you spilling the tea to the whole world. Tilly invited you to a family dinner, for heaven’s sake.”
“Okay. When you’re eating with your only sister, who hates you now.”
Madi sighed, feeling small. “I don’t hate you. I’m not very happy with you but I don’t hate you. There’s a difference.”
“At least that’s something,” Ava muttered.
“So, are you sick?”
Ava swallowed and Madi didn’t miss the way she avoided her gaze. “No. I think I must have caught a stomach bug a few weeks ago and I can’t seem to shake it. That’s all.”
Madi knew something else was going on. Ava was a lousy liar. She just didn’t know what questions to ask that might persuade her sister to tell her the truth.
“How long are you staying?”
“I still haven’t decided. I don’t have to be back to school until August.”
“What are you going to do while you’re here?” she asked.
Ava shrugged. “I don’t know. Help Grandma in her garden, I guess. I worked at her stall at the farmers market yesterday, mostly handling the payments. I understand Grandma gives all the proceeds to you for the animal rescue.”
She winced. Whenever Leona donated her weekly proceeds, Madi always felt like she was bilking an old lady out of her pocket change. “I keep telling her she doesn’t have to do that, that she can use it on herself or the garden, but she insists.”
“Every little bit helps, I suppose.”
“It does. The whole community has really rallied around the Emerald Creek Animal Rescue.”
“You’re filling a need.”
They lapsed into silence. She could see Ava was about to excuse herself. Later, she wasn’t sure exactly what made her speak up. Maybe a yearning for those joy-filled cleanup parties in their Oregon home instead of this stilted awkwardness.
“We’re always looking for volunteers to help out at the sanctuary.”
“Volunteers?” Ava’s eyes widened with shock, but the expression was quickly followed by one of interest.
Madi immediately regretted saying anything. “Right. Our pigpen can always use a good cleaning.”
Ava puffed out a breath. “Oh, sign me up for that one.”
“For your information, our pigs are adorable and very clean. But if you don’t want to do that, you could play with the animals or help us with feedings or work in the office.”
“I could maybe do that.”
“You can sign up online. You should be prepared, though. We don’t let just anybody volunteer. You have to go through our rigorous application process.”
“To clean a pigpen.”
“That’s right.”
“Good to know. I’ll keep my fingers crossed I can make the cut. Will you excuse me, please?”
Ava set down the dishcloth and turned away from the kitchen, hurrying toward the half bath by the mudroom again. Madi watched her go, frowning. After a pause, she thought she heard the sound of retching, but the water was running loudly and she couldn’t be sure.
She didn’t really expect Ava to volunteer at the clinic. Her sister was allergic to cats and had a grave fear of dogs.
Cynophobia, it was called.
Madi knew where it came from.
Once at the camp, Ava had been attacked by the poor dogs that had been turned into feral weapons by the Coalition. She had been bitten several times, wounds that had taken weeks to heal.
Her sister had thrown her body over Madi’s to keep the dogs away from her. The memory burned.
Ava had done everything she could to protect Madi. She knew her older sister had slipped food to her, had nursed her through illness and fear, had adopted a cheery, optimistic attitude, though Madi knew how much that must have cost her when things looked so grim.
Madi also knew she was the reason Ava had finally agreed to the increasingly harsh demands that she marry a man thirty years her senior.
We need to bring forth the next generation of fighters. You and your children will carry on the battle after we are gone. You believe in the cause, don’t you?
She could still hear the swelling tones of Roger Boyle, as if he were standing beside her.
She hated remembering any of it.
She also hated that for the life of her, she couldn’t understand the dichotomy of Ava’s actions.
The sister willing to endure the horror of being married to a man she both feared and loathed, the beloved sister she had been certain would have died to protect her, seemed so very different from the woman who could spill all that hate and ugliness to the world.
Madi wasn’t sure she would ever be able to reconcile the two in her mind.