Chapter Thirty-Two
An Unmarked Trail in the State Forest
Cal was working through a million different things. Mainly, what the hell Everly thought he was doing, but also what might be hiding in the recesses of his own brain.
Would Cal ever be free of the things he’d repressed?
Surely Sam had seen them come out the back. Surely she’d alerted emergency services. Gone into the cabin and let Jill out of being tied up. At least he could be proud of the fact Jill hadn’t been hurt.
Yeah, he did okay when push came to shove.
But now they were in the midst of another push and shove, and he had to figure out how to end this. Get Glenda safe.
Get him safe, because he wasn’t after dying today. Not when he’d come so far. Not when so much still seemed to elude him. Who else was getting away with terrible things because he didn’t remember?
Cal was losing track of how much time elapsed. Hiking up, up, up. His hands tied in front of him—and not exactly loose. Glenda hadn’t given him much leeway.
He watched her. She’d grabbed a sturdy-looking stick on the way out of her back yard. She leaned on it as they hiked.
Because Everly had said she knew where they were going.
She was looking healthier, sturdier than she had last year when he’d first come home, but he still didn’t think she was going to survive whatever it was that Everly had in mind.
He didn’t bother to look behind him at Everly. The gun would be pointed at him. If he could get Everly close enough, maybe he could use his body to knock the gun out of his grasp, but it was a risk. Especially with his hands tied.
He tried to think of ways to de-escalate, but whatever had come over him in the cabin seemed to desert him now. The impulse to be a pain in the ass was too great.
“So, what’s the plan, Mr. Everly? Hike us to death?”
“Always thought you were so smart.” Mr. Everly made a bitter sort of noise that some might have considered a laugh.
“You never realized just how pathetic you were,” Everly continued. “It was always so easy to lead you by the nose. Just a few compliments, tell you what you wanted to hear, and you’ve always gone along.”
Cal didn’t know what he was even referring to, but it certainly put all that support and mentorship from high school in a completely different and infantilizing light.
“I really don’t know how you ended up having a successful enough career,” Everly continued. “Anyone who knows you well enough knows just what buttons to push to get exactly what they want. You make it so obvious.”
It hurt when it shouldn’t. He was a grown man. He was smart, damn it. He’d gotten this far. Still, the idea that Mr. Everly had just been … jerking him around with compliments when he’d been a fucked-up teen grated.
“So you like screwing with kids. Got it.”
He didn’t look back at Everly, but he heard an irritated sort of grunt. If there were points to be scored, he’d count it as one.
A few steps ahead of him, Glenda stumbled over a loose rock. Cal lunged forward to grab her before she fell.
“Don’t go hurting yourselves now. We’re almost there,” Everly said, almost cheerfully. “Although, come to think of it, an injury might work.” He made a kind of humming noise like he was thinking it over.
Cal looked down at Everly. They were a little above on higher ground. He could just leap on the guy and see what happened.
As if she could read his thoughts, Glenda’s hold on him tightened.
“They’ll be so busy looking for you, they won’t find me. But if I leave one of you behind, incapacitated … no one will ever find me.”
“Why do you need to run, Everly? What did you do? Kill Charles or something?”
Everly smirked. “Like I said. Not nearly as smart as you think you are. Is he, Glenda?”
Cal glanced over at the woman. Her expression was completely blank. She neither agreed nor disagreed, but Everly clearly wasn’t happy with that response to his question.
He took a step forward. “I don’t know why you had to go and ruin things, Glenda. Everything was good. Fine. Then you had to start talking. I was going to let that go. I was. But then you got private investigators involved. Detectives and Cal showing up at my door. You told me he didn’t remember.”
“He doesn’t,” Glenda muttered irritably. Her cheeks were red. Her breath was huffing in and out like she wasn’t handling the exertion very well. But that was the first thing he’d said that really seemed to piss her off. “I didn’t tell anyone anything. You’re the one breaking our deal.”
Deal? Glenda and Mr. Everly had some kind of deal?
“And you.” Mr. Everly looked at him with a sneer. “If you’d taken that first threat to heart and gone back to Texas, everything could have died down.”
The threat had been made to make him run? “Clearly you don’t know me at all,” Cal returned.
Mr. Everly snorted. “Doesn’t matter. The two of you made your own bed. Now you’ll lie in it. You’re the ones who are making it end like this.”
End. Cal didn’t like the sound of that, or the way the man with the gun was looking a little too intently at Glenda with the gun pointed in her direction.
So Cal tried to pull the focus back to him. “Secrets never stay buried, and the truth is hardly ever the end,” Cal offered, earning himself a glare from both people.
Mr. Everly studied them both. “You know, I only need one of you alive for this first phase. One of you dead here might even work in my favor. It’ll slow everyone down.
Deal with a body before they keep going on.
I’ll disappear by then, that’s for sure.
Leave Glenda somewhere she’ll never be found. Yeah, I like that.”
Cal stilled. The gun was pointed directly at his heart, and he found himself with no smart words to Everly’s very clear threat.
“Enough death.” Glenda’s creepy rasp, as always, did something to him.
Unlocked all that was locked up tight. Almost like she was the center of it all.
He’d blamed his father for all his mental issues—but maybe Glenda was actually the demon in his story.
Fucked-up thought, but he could see it now. His mother’s face. Eyes glazed over with pain. His own pain throbbing from somewhere … somewhere…
Mr. Harrington is going to get you out, she whispered to him, pulling him by the arm that didn’t hurt. Walking through the mud, just like this. Blue sky. Mountains.
But he didn’t remember Mr. Harrington. Couldn’t picture the man if he tried. He couldn’t even picture himself hiking with Mr. Everly, because he’d never done that.
He’d been with his mother, though. They’d both been in pain. Walking in pain. Then Glenda had taken him … where had she taken him?
“I really can’t believe you were telling the truth about him not seeing anything, Glenda.
” Everly pointed at Cal with the gun. “You get that yet? She saved you. Said you didn’t remember.
You didn’t see anything.” Mr. Everly laughed.
“I didn’t believe it. So I watched you. Kept you under my wing, didn’t I?
You never acted like you knew, like you remembered. ”
Because he didn’t. Cal didn’t have any clue what Everly was talking about. Even with the snippets of memory, there was just a big, fat blank where any explanation should be.
“Surprised you ever managed to do anything with a memory like that.”
“He wasn’t there,” Glenda rasped. “Just let him go. This is ours.”
But that wasn’t true, was it? Yes, he only remembered darkness, but he could hear things in those memories—whispers, Glenda’s voice, the gunshot—but he didn’t see anything.
His head pounded, that old wave of nausea that hadn’t plagued him in a while.
Still, he didn’t see any of the things he could hear in his memory. He felt stifled. Stuck in the dark.
Cal was starting to put it together that it wasn’t because he didn’t remember, it was because Glenda had been telling Everly the truth all these years.
Whatever Cal had been around to witness, he hadn’t actually seen. Because someone had hidden him away—in the dark, where he could only hear muffled sounds of what was happening outside.
“Turn around, Cal. Get her up there. We’ll decide how to go on from there.”
Cal found himself compelled to follow Everly’s instruction. He helped Glenda up the rest of the incline, holding her when loose rocks tried to take out both their footing.
When they reached the end of the incline, a kind of flat part in the rocks, the nausea nearly won.
There was a crevice in the rock wall. A cave opening. He knew, because he’d been there. He’d been in that cave.
And Glenda and Mr. Everly had been right out here.
*
Glenda Harrington had never considered herself the perfect woman. She’d never even considered herself a particularly good woman.
Life was hard so she had to be hard to face it. She’d learned that young and kept it with her the whole of her life.
But no matter how hard she’d been, how much of that inner toughness her father had taught her as a girl that she’d relied on, the world had beaten her.
Time and again.
She’d lost babies. She’d lost her husband. She’d failed at saving everyone. Everyone.
It never seemed to stop. Losing her voice had helped. She’d been left alone for full years. A ghost story to anyone who was curious.
No one had ever known what had been held over her head. No one had ever known all the secrets she held tight to her chest. The deal she had made to protect the people she loved.
Jill thought the truth would set them free. Glenda was certain the truth would end everything.
It always did.
She’d told the truth about her mother with another man—and never saw the woman who’d birthed her ever again. Daddy had barred her from their house. Maybe rightfully so, but it hadn’t made it any easier growing up in a house full of men without a mother.
She’d told the truth about the boss at the factory who’d liked to put his hands where they didn’t belong. She’d lost that job while Gerald had been off fighting for his life.
She’d told the truth to that doctor about Gerald’s nightmares, his shakes, his waves of anger. They’d committed him for nearly a year before she’d been able to tell Gerald what he needed to do to convince everyone he was okay.
Because he hadn’t been okay in that hospital, but he’d been okay at home. Okay, except when he went hunting with those two assholes. She hadn’t been the least bit sorry to find out that Charles Hayes had died.
But the way it had happened…
Well, that was when she’d stopped telling the truth. First, to keep her husband safe. Then when he’d died.
The truth had died with him. She hadn’t just made that deal with Daryl Everly. She’d made it with herself about everything. For Gerald. For her son.
And yes, for herself.
She was not an unselfish woman. If she were, she would have sent Jill away the moment that girl had shown up in her hospital room three years ago. She would have moved to Boston like her son wanted and left all this behind.
But all this was who she was, and the truth was she’d liked having her granddaughter here. She’d liked it more than she’d been smart. She’d thought the secrets would protect them. The silence would protect them.
Secrets and finding her words slowly taken from her by some unknown force inside her own mind had been good enough for these twenty-five-some years.
Maybe it hadn’t kept Marie alive forever, but longer.
Long enough to get those boys old enough, strong enough to survive everything Benjamin Bennet would do to them.
Maybe it had somehow stolen her voice in ways she couldn’t explain even to herself, but she’d found it when it had mattered most to finally punish Benjamin Bennet.
With the truth.
She shoved that thought away. The truth wasn’t for her. Maybe Gerald was gone, but she wouldn’t let Everly ruin Gerald’s name with whatever he was up to. She wouldn’t ruin his memory because of this man.
She’d rather die. At least then Daryl Everly would finally get what he deserved. She had no doubt Cal Bennet or one of his brothers would make sure of it.
Because if Daryl killed her, he’d finally pay.
She hadn’t been able to make him pay for killing Gerald—even if he claimed it was self-defense—without revealing Gerald’s secrets.
And Gerald had already been dead.
But she wasn’t. Cal Bennet wasn’t.
Glenda opened her mouth to tell Everly to leave Cal, to keep going with her. Cal still didn’t know enough to implicate anyone, and even if he did, Everly’s plan seemed to be to disappear. So, they’d let him.
But that tightness in her chest took its hold. Even opening her mouth, she couldn’t force out a word, just a kind of strangled noise. Her grip on Cal tightened.
“I don’t know who you’re trying to protect, Glenda,” Cal whispered. “But this isn’t the way to do it.”
Cal didn’t understand. She’d been meant to protect him. She’d promised Marie.
Instead, she’d watched Gerald be shot. She’d had to leave Cal to suffer. She’d tried to protect him in the aftermath—convince Daryl he’d seen nothing, because he’d been secreted away in that cave. Done what she could in the background to try to help Marie.
But someone always suffered in pursuit of the truth. Someone always suffered at the hands of more powerful men.
In her silence, she’d done her level best to protect what she could. Jill was tied up to a chair in the cabin—not ideal, but safe.
If they just let her handle this, all would be fine. Maybe, she’d be gone at the end of it. But if she believed in some kind of afterlife—a big if—at the end of all this she’d be back with her Gerald.
That seemed too fanciful a thought for someone who had disappointed anyone and everyone.
Particularly this good man holding her up.
She wanted to tell him to run, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate. Nothing would cooperate.
“So, let’s see which one of you ends up dead,” Everly said, curling his finger around the trigger of his gun.
Glenda tried to speak, move, but all that happened was that she felt the boy move to block her body with his.
Glenda didn’t have a chance to so much as resist before a shot exploded around them.