Chapter Twenty-Five
She couldn’t feel her fingers.
Winnie tried raising her head to get a better idea of where she’d ended up, but all she saw was endless white.
Ice. Snow. Clouds. She curled her fingers into her palms, chasing some semblance of heat, and craned her chin up.
Wind blew a thin layer of snow directly into her face and shocked her into full consciousness. “No.”
She wasn’t here. This wasn’t real. Pressing onto all fours, she caught the sound of clinking metal. Her spine protested as she curved to see thick chains secured around her ankles, both sections attached to cinder blocks positioned about three feet away. And padlocked to keep her from getting free.
“It’s just a nightmare. You’re going to wake up.
This isn’t happening.” A sob burned at the back of her throat as her situation sank in.
It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks. Lila Mercer’s body had been disposed of in this same manner, and the killer—the woman who looked just like her—was going to send her out the same way.
Pieces of memory puzzled into place as she swiped at her face.
The attic. The evidence. The gun. It hadn’t been loaded, and the killer…
Pain shot through her right eye and stole her vision for a few seconds.
The killer had hit her. Hard enough to knock her unconscious, but that didn’t explain how a woman her size had managed to get Winnie out here.
Winnie clamped her teeth together to control the shivers wracking through her.
In vain. She’d been taken straight from her father’s house, dressed in nothing but her jeans and a thin blouse she’d put on after Adrial had left.
Her feet were bare without any give in the chain, her hands, neck and face exposed to the elements.
Palms slipping on the glossy wet surface of ice, she gauged the distance between her and the shore and tried to stand.
Too far. Coupled with the cinder blocks, there was no way she’d make it across the ice.
“You really can’t fault Arthur for his plan.
” The voice barely raised above the whistle of wind cutting through the pines, and Winnie turned to confront the killer positioned in her blind spot.
Still dressed in head-to-toe black, she’d forgone the mask.
Guess there wasn’t any point now. Winnie wasn’t leaving here alive.
“It has its merits. The chains, the blocks. They’ll take you straight to the bottom of lake, but Arthur made a mistake when he got rid of my mom’s body.
He didn’t take her out far enough. I don’t think we’ll have that same problem here. ”
“You’re Lila Mercer’s daughter? Is that what this is all about? You figured out my dad had something to do with her death, and you’ve decided to make his daughter pay the price? He’s dead. You killed him! Isn’t that punishment enough?”
“No!” The shout bounced off the surrounding mountains, and a faraway groan answered in reply.
Hard lines etched deep into her attacker’s face.
“It’ll never be enough because you knew what he’d done.
You knew he’d taken that evidence and made sure no one would solve her case.
You let him erase her. You pretended she didn’t exist and stood by doing nothing while my entire life fell apart.
” Shoulder-length blond hair streaked across the killer’s freckled face as she sauntered over the ice as though it couldn’t pull her under with one wrong step.
“But you have it all wrong. I’m not Lila Mercer’s daughter. Want to take another guess?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t. I swear. I only wanted to work the case to do something good for my dad, but I never knew…
” Winnie backed away at her approach, not wanting to risk too much weight in one area.
She spread her hands out to evenly distribute what she could, but there was no stopping what was coming.
No matter how hard she tried, there would be no happy ending here.
“You said… You said ‘our dad.’ Back in the attic. That’s why you look like me. Arthur was your dad.”
Her father wasn’t just a liar or a killer. He’d cheated on her mother. Had she known? Was that where the brightness in her eyes had gone after Winnie had been born? Had she known her husband wasn’t the man he’d presented himself as to their family, the community?
“Technically, you look like me since I’m older by about two months.” Her attacker smiled. “Daddy Dearest sure liked to play the field, didn’t he? Who knows how many others are out there? I wonder if he killed them when they wouldn’t get rid of their babies so his wife didn’t find out, too.”
Winnie’s mouth parted to say something—anything—to make this better, but there was no justifying her father’s actions.
All these years she’d given excuses for why he’d rejected her over and over, telling herself he was grieving for the love of his life, that he only felt whole working that damn case, that she wasn’t enough for him.
But it’d all been him. He was the failure.
He was the one who didn’t belong. “I’m—I’m sorry.
” Understanding clicked into place, and Winnie snapped her mouth shut.
“You’re not Lila Mercer’s daughter. You’re Lila Mercer. ”
“Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner.” The killer pointed at her with that wide smile that reminded Winnie of sociopaths mimicking others. Practiced.
“You were sixteen when she disappeared.” A crack sounded beneath Winnie’s feet, spidering from her heel and chasing across the ice toward the cinder blocks.
Her heart jumped into her throat, verging on panic, but if she could just get Lila to believe her, they might be able to walk away from this alive.
“The same age I was. How did they get it so wrong?”
“My mom was a nurse. That much was true. She got pregnant with me during a fling with a police officer who promised her the world, but he refused to leave his wife. So she broke up with him, only learning about me afterward. She never told him. She knew he’d demand for her to have an abortion to save his marriage and his precious image.
Bastard children don’t really make for good campaign material.
” Lila circled to the left, toward the cinder blocks, and the ice fractured in little lines from her added weight.
“I was handed around to neighbors and friends whenever she had a shift. She didn’t have the means to leave the town that’d judged her for being an unwed mother, so we stayed in that crappy little house at the edge of town for years.
Until one night, there was a knock on the door.
My mom was in the kitchen, so I answered it.
And found a BHPD officer staring at me like he’d seen a ghost. I think he knew then.
Who I was. What she’d done. I must’ve been a spitting image of you at that age, and if anyone were to put two and two together, he’d lose everything he’d built with his lies. ”
Winnie braced as another crack streaked between her feet. The ice was at a breaking point, heavier with Lila closing in.
“The officer left without saying anything. I didn’t even tell my mom about his visit.
I don’t know why he was there or what he wanted.
I just went back to watching TV, but that night, there was a break-in.
The intruder came through the back door.
She woke me up with a hand over my mouth, shushing me when I heard them inside.
She had a knife. I don’t know how she got it, but after she went into the living room I heard her scream.
Then a groan.” Lila’s gaze came back to Winnie.
A split second before she stomped one foot near the cinder blocks.
The ice splintered and protested, fractures barreling outward, and Winnie braced herself for the final fall.
“She called the police and filed a report. He’d left blood at the scene.
She’d somehow managed to stab him before he fled, but, as you can imagine, nothing came of it. ”
Winnie’s breath shuddered as she tried to back up, to put as much distance between her and the spreading cracks as possible.
But the cinder blocks were heavier than they looked.
The chains snapped around her ankles and nearly took her down.
Her skin felt too tight, her tongue too big for her mouth.
She was going to die out here. Die with the knowledge her father had deserved every ounce of pain Lila had most likely put him through, deserved every friend, neighbor, officer and his own damn daughter abandoning him so he could rot in this world alone and with a guilty conscience.
Arthur Hutton wasn’t the hero she’d believed.
He was nothing. Nothing. And she was going to die because of him.
She was going to lose her chance to tell Adrial she didn’t hate him, that all these years apart was like a piece of her soul had lived outside of her body and that she’d finally felt whole in his arms.
Winnie hadn’t fought for her father’s attention after her mother died or when the kids in high school took their turns humiliating her.
She hadn’t fought when her fiancé had left town, leaving her to pick up the pieces of the future they’d planned together.
She hadn’t fought to keep her husband after discovering the affair.
Life had kept happening to her, and she’d let it. But she was going to fight now.
“But one little stab wound wasn’t enough to stop him for coming for her.
I waited for her to come home from work for hours.
I called the clinic where she worked. No one had seen her since her shift ended, and I knew.
I knew something had happened and that it had something to do with the officer who’d shown up at our door and the break-in that same night.
We’d spent our entire lives just trying to survive, and that instinct told me I needed to get as far from the house as possible.
That she was never coming home. That he took her from me.
” Lila’s voice had taken on an animalistic sound, more predatory and unnerving.
She slammed her boot into the ice a second time, and one of the cinder blocks went under.
The chain jerked tight against Winnie’s ankle and swept her leg right out from under her.
She hit the ice. Hard. Clawing against the weight dragging her toward the fresh hole in the ice, she tried to breathe through the pain, but her fingers kept slipping.
Her body remembered what that water felt like, tensing up in all the wrong places.
She dug her opposite knee in, her screams lost as the wind cut across the lake. “No! Please! Don’t do this. Please!”
A pair of boots centered themselves in front of her face.
“Turns out BHPD did not have a reliable way to age remains twenty years ago. The technology wasn’t there, and forensic anthropology was being used to identify victims of mass genocide overseas.
Not so much in small towns with no resources and no future.
” Lila crouched, hovering over Winnie with her head positioned against the overcast sun like an angel of death coming to finish the job.
“Our neighbors watched me for her, but they weren’t our friends.
They didn’t know her like they knew me, but I’d left Black Hollow.
Got in the first car that’d stopped on the highway and kept on going, for weeks, so when reports of a woman with blond hair found in Hollow Lake started coming in, everyone assumed it was me.
And with her teeth and fingers missing, they couldn’t prove otherwise. ”
Winnie fought against the pull on her ankle, tears freezing on her face as the chains cut into her skin. Her toes skimmed the water’s surface. “Please.”
“Do you think she begged him for her life?” Lila stood, planting her boots mere inches from Winnie’s face. “Do you think he would’ve let me live, taken me in, raised me with you?”
She didn’t have an answer for that.
“I didn’t think so.” Lila Mercer kicked the last cinder block into the water.
And Winnie went under.