CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Into the Storm
I do not know how long I stood at that window before the side door banged open again, only that it felt like the longest stretch of time I had lived through since the night Everett Boyle had failed to wake, and that Deloris's grip on my arm had gone from fierce to a piece of it closer to painful without either of us noticing.
It was Gil who came through first, snow caked thick across his shoulders, his breath coming ragged, and behind him, a moment later, Denny, half dragging, half supporting a third figure between them, a man I had never laid eyes on properly before that instant, though I understood at once, with a cold certainty that settled through me whole, exactly who he had to be.
"Sam," I said, before anything else, my voice cracking on the single syllable. "Where's Sam."
"Right behind us," Gil said, quick, breathless. "He's fine, Josie. Winded and half frozen and madder than I've seen him in years, but fine."
And then he was there, filling the doorway, snow melting fast off his coat onto the pavilion floor, and I crossed the room before I'd decided to move at all and threw my arms around him, feeling the cold radiating off his clothes and the warmth of him still underneath it, alive and steady and entire.
"I'm all right," he said into my hair, low, his own arms tight around me. "I promise you, Josie, I'm all right. It looked worse than it was."
"It sounded plenty bad from in here," I managed, pulling back just far enough to look at him truly, taking in the split at his eyebrow already beginning to swell, the raw look of his knuckles where he'd caught himself against something hard in the dark.
"He came at me first," Sam said, soft, glancing toward the man Denny had by then settled, not gently, into a folding chair near the stove.
"Caught him rounding the shed with a crowbar in his hand, already working at the padlock, and when I called out he swung wide rather than talk his way out of it.
Denny's the one who actually put him down.
I mostly just got in the way of the crowbar. "
I looked properly, then, at the man in the chair, and felt something in my chest go very still and very cold.
He was perhaps sixty, silver haired under a soaked wool cap, his face pale and pinched with cold and some part of it else besides, a kind of hunted, cornered exhaustion that sat strangely on features that had clearly, once, worn a great deal of easy confidence.
His coat was fine, expensive even, fully unsuited to the weather he'd chosen to drive out into, and his hands, cuffed now in front of him with a length of rope Denny had produced from somewhere, trembled with cold or fear or both.
"Curtis Pratt," Deloris said, from just behind me, her voice flat and terrible in its steadiness. "After twenty five years."
The man's head came up at that, and something moved across his face, a flicker of recognition, or perhaps only the dawning understanding of precisely how thoroughly the night had gone wrong for him.
"I don't know you," he said, though his voice shook badly enough that the words came out considerably less certain than he'd plainly intended them.
"No," Deloris said. "You wouldn't. I was seven years old the last time anyone in my family had any dealings with the Pratts, and I don't imagine you kept a photograph."
Marion had already crossed the room, her nursing instincts overriding whatever fear or fury she might otherwise have felt, and knelt to check the cut over Sam's eye with brisk, practiced hands, tutting softly at the state of it, while Reagan did the same for the raw scrape along Denny's jaw, and I noticed, in the strange, adrenaline bright clarity of that moment, that the whole pavilion had come fully awake by then, thirty some people gathered in loose, watchful clusters around the edges of the room, the Pruitt children held close by Grady and their mother, Otis standing near Deloris with his hand hovering just short of her shoulder, Nina and Jared close together near the stove, Walt planted like an old oak near the door with his arms crossed, plainly ready to plant himself between Curtis Pratt and anyone else in the building who might need it.
"You're trespassing," Walt said, low and hard, in a voice I had rarely heard him use.
"On my property, in the middle of the night, with a crowbar aimed at a shed holding a dead man and my daughter's evidence both.
I'd like to hear you explain that plainly, before the sheriff gets the chance to hear it from you instead. "
Curtis Pratt said nothing at first, his eyes darting around the crowded room, cataloguing, I understood with a small, sick lurch, exactly how thoroughly cornered he had become, how many witnesses now stood between him and whatever quiet, deniable escape he might once have imagined for himself.
"I got lost," he tried finally, weak. "In the storm. I saw the shed and thought there might be shelter."
"With a crowbar," Sam said, flat, settling into the chair across from him despite Marion's protest that he ought to sit still and let her finish with his eyebrow.
"Mr. Pratt, I've spent the better part of a year building a case against you that I was fully prepared to take months yet to finish thoroughly.
You just handed me the last piece of it yourself, driving up here in the dead of a second storm front with no headlights, making straight for the one building on this property holding evidence you clearly already knew existed. Nobody gets lost that specifically."
"You don't know what you think you know," Pratt said, and something in his voice had shifted, the fear still present but threaded now with a thin, brittle defiance, the sound of a man who had spent decades getting his own way and had not yet fully absorbed that this particular night was not going to bend to him the way so many others plainly had.
"I know Idella Marsh wrote to a friend for twenty years, naming you directly," Sam said, hushed and terribly steady.
"I know you drove three counties in a blizzard to destroy that evidence before it reached the sheriff's hands.
I know a dead man's own cautious testimony sits locked in that shed you were trying to break into, and I know, Mr. Pratt, that a man doesn't take a risk like tonight's unless he already understands, somewhere underneath whatever he's telling himself, just how much trouble he's actually in. "
Pratt's jaw worked, and for a moment I thought he might argue further, might summon whatever remained of the confidence that had clearly carried him through decades of getting away with things, and then, all at once, a piece of it in him seemed to simply give way, his shoulders dropping, his eyes going somewhere distant and tired that had nothing left of defiance in it at all.
"I want a lawyer," he said, low. "Before I say another word to any of you."
"You'll have one," Sam said, unbothered.
"The moment the roads clear enough to bring one out here, which, given the way this second front's been behaving, might be a day or two yet.
Until then, you'll sit right there, warm and dry and entirely unharmed, because that's how we do things at Wren Lake, whatever you might have been expecting when you drove up that road tonight. "
I watched Deloris a moment longer, standing very still near the edge of the gathered crowd, her eyes fixed on the man who had, however indirectly, taken her father from her a quarter century before, and saw something complicated moving across her face, not quite triumph, not quite grief, something closer to a long, exhausted exhale eventually being permitted after twenty five years of holding her breath.
"It's really him," she said, quiet, to no one in certain. "After everything. It's really him, sitting right there."
"It's really him," I confirmed, and reached for her hand again, steadier this time than it had been at the window.
It was Theo, of all people, small and solemn in his pajamas with his notebook clutched tight against his chest, who finally broke the strange, suspended tension that had settled over the room, stepping forward with the particular grave seriousness he brought to anything he considered proper detective business.
"Are you Curtis Pratt?" he asked, looking the man dead in the eye with none of the fear the adults around him were plainly still working through.
Pratt looked down at him, startled, some flicker of confusion crossing his tired face at being addressed so directly by a child. "Yes," he said at last, short.
"Good," Theo said, and turned back toward Sam, totally satisfied.
"That's confirmed. I'm writing it down." And he did, right there in the crowded, snow blown pavilion at nearly two in the morning, while a defeated man sat cuffed by a rope in a folding chair and thirty some relieved, exhausted people slowly began, one by one, to remember how to breathe properly again.
Sylvie had reached Gil by then, her hands framing his cold face with a fierceness that surprised me a little, given how newly declared whatever sat between them still was.
"Don't you ever do that again," she said, low and shaking, "walking out into a storm after an armed man without so much as a word to me first."
"I'll try to give you better notice next time," Gil said, dry despite the exhaustion plain in his voice, though I noticed he didn't pull away from her hands, and some part of it in the way he leaned into her touch told me plainly that whatever careful, unhurried thing had been building between them all week had just taken a rather large, sudden step forward, forced along by fear the way important things sometimes were.
Outside, the storm had begun, at last, to lose some of its worst fury, the wind dropping from a full howl to something merely fierce, and I thought, standing in the middle of that crowded, adrenaline soaked room with Sam's arm still tight around my shoulders, that whatever else this long night had cost us, it had also, finally, after two full books of deliberate, patient searching, delivered Curtis Pratt directly into our hands, cold and defeated and entirely, undeniably caught.
"It's over," I said, still, mostly to myself, and felt Sam press a tired kiss to the top of my head.
"Almost," he said. "We've still got a great deal of truth left to untangle before it's fully, fully over, Josie. But yes. This part, at least, is eventually, blessedly over."