Chapter 20 Daniel
Padding barefoot and bleary-eyed to the front of the boathouse, Daniel was greeted by wide puddles on the dock and a gloomy morning in the clearing beyond. The leaves and boughs drooped with moisture and thick fog rolled across the surface of the lake.
A heavy sigh passed his lips as he walked to the kitchen to start breakfast. It was less than ideal weather for what he and Annie had planned for today, but they’d figure out a way to make it work.
After a bowl of canned hash and eggs, Daniel donned a hooded sweatshirt and stepped outside to wait, leaning against the boathouse in the shelter of the awning as cold raindrops fell at his feet.
A few minutes before nine, the rumble of the Jeep’s engine rose above the patter, and Daniel stepped forward as Annie rolled into the clearing, smiling behind the sweeping windshield wipers. Instantly, his worries about the weather vanished. Annie was a trooper.
She laughed up at the sky as she stepped out of the Jeep, then ran for Daniel, who wrapped her in his arms before they made a dash for the shelter of the thick firs on the lake’s western shore.
“You sure you’re up for this?” he asked as they approached a tarp-covered heap on the ground, and she nodded, brushing away the drops that had gathered in her hair. Daniel slid away the tarp that covered the canoe and folded it in a sloppy square, leaving it on the ground.
“Blessing in disguise,” Annie said. “If we capsize, we’ll be drenched anyway, so it won’t matter.”
She laughed again and Daniel’s heart soared with the sound; his favorite in the world. This woman was a bubble in a bottle. No matter which way life tipped her, she would always find her way to the top. To joy.
“So, it’s finished?” She nodded down at the narrow boat.
“Not quite.” Daniel moved behind it. “I still need to sand and seal the inside, but she’s seaworthy. Or ‘lakeworthy,’ anyway. Should get us across to the south shore and back so we can check the traps. Come on, I’ll push, you pull.”
Daniel crouched behind the canoe and pressed his shoulder against the wooden bow as Annie tugged on the stern.
Despite its weight, it moved with surprising agility over the slick earth and slid easily into the lake.
Daniel climbed in first and helped Annie aboard, then gripped the new wooden paddle he’d purchased in town and gently shoved the canoe away from the shore and into open water.
“It’s a little different than the skiff,” he said, stating the obvious as they teetered side to side.
The canoe was long and narrow, and round underneath.
Logs were built to roll, and though he’d done a fair bit of chiseling to steady it, it would be a miracle if they made it across the lake without tipping at least once.
Slowly, Daniel paddled forward, trying to get a feel for the craft as it wavered in the water. With each slight wobble, Annie threw her arms out comically, then gripped the sides, laughing in that infectious sort of way that drew out his own rumbling chuckle.
Daniel could no longer ignore the startling suspicion that he was falling in love with this woman.
She was all the adolescent crushes he’d missed out on rolled into one, and though his days and nights and thoughts and dreams were saturated with her, it never felt like enough.
He was falling for her goodness, her light, her laughter, and most of all for the way she made him believe that there could be more to his life than lonely isolation.
He’d been afraid for seven years. Afraid of people in town finding out who he was.
Afraid of going to prison, or worse, of having to face down his past in Redmond.
But Annie made him believe he didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
She was the first person who made him feel safe enough to show his true self—when he told her his story, and she didn’t run.
After several strokes, Daniel got the hang of the canoe and paddled swiftly, slicing through the rain-puckered water in a determined rhythm.
Yes, his fear was lessening, but it wasn’t falling off in pieces. It was like a snake skin; overtight and constricting as he wriggled slowly out, toward the sweet, open air on the other side. It was happening in small steps, and he was determined to keep taking them.
Annie had gone quiet as she watched the drops dancing on the surface around them, and Daniel felt a certain stab of conviction. Yes. Steps forward. He needed to come clean to Annie about the lie he’d told her.
Daniel paddled for a few more strokes as the guilt slowly inflated inside him. It had to be done. Perhaps he should tell her now. Being out in the rain was as good a time as any to come clean.
His paddling slowed, blade dragging in the water.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
The urgency in his voice brought Annie’s eyes to his face in concern.
“About what?” she asked, nearly shouting over rain that was thickening now, here in the middle of the lake, turning the surface percussive around them.
Daniel swallowed with difficulty and started paddling again. “About the attempted murder part of the story. Remember that night by the fire when I said Gary lied to the press and made it all up?”
Annie nodded.
“That wasn’t… that wasn’t entirely true.”
A sharp pain twisted in Daniel’s chest as he watched the color drain from her face.
The rain fell hard between them, streaking her cheeks and falling in drops from her jaw unnoticed as she stared mutely.
“You better tell me what you’re talking about,” she said above the torrent. “I swear, Daniel, you better tell me right now.”
Daniel nodded, sweeping the wet hair away from his eyes with a soaked sleeve.
“I know. I wanted to tell you before, but it’s… it’s hard to talk about.”
It was worse than hard. It was like tearing open an old wound that had never fully healed and exposing it to salt air. It felt impossible.
Annie said nothing, only stared with her mouth set, her hair dark with rain and plastered to her head and shoulders.
“The night before I ran away, I was down in the basement.” He hated how loud the words had to come out to be heard over the downpour. “I pulled out some of the wires in the walls and severed them, then dumped a bottle of water on the floor to make a puddle.”
The memory was coming up now in one acid gush, like vomit, and even as Daniel dipped the paddle into the water, he felt himself back there in the cellar, terrified in the dark.
“The human body is a conductor. Step a bare foot into water and touch wires with enough voltage running through them, it’ll kill a grown man. Fairly quickly, too.”
The color was coming back to Annie’s face, two pink patches rising on her wet cheeks, but she offered no comment.
“When Gary came down the stairs, he flipped on the light and caught me down there. He thought the whole setup was intended for him, but it wasn’t, Annie. I swear it wasn’t meant for him.”
Annie remained silent, but something new was dawning in her eyes. A realization. A question that he would have to answer.
“Ask me,” he said, almost shouting as the cold rain worked its way past his inner T-shirt and bit into his shoulders. “Just ask me, Annie.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Who was it for?”
The snake skin was splitting, but it did not hurt.
“Me.”
Daniel held nothing back as he told her the rest of the story, about how, in a moment of desperation, he had given up on his plan to run away and decided on another way out. The “easy” way out, as he’d thought of it back then. A puddle of water in the basement. A handful of live wires. A bare foot.
It would be so much faster than the attempted escape that he’d been planning for months.
So much easier. And it came with a one hundred percent guarantee, whereas his odds of making it to the boathouse and surviving for the rest of his life without being recognized were slim at best. He’d just end up back in the house with Gary, and then it would be worse than before.
The prospect was unbearable, and he’d weighed it all out, finally deciding that suicide was the path that made the most sense. But before he’d gone through with it, his stepfather, drunk and reeking of whiskey, had found him down there and assumed the worst.
“He came charging across the room like a bull and slipped in the water. He knocked himself out. I don’t know why, but seeing him on the ground like that brought me back to my senses.
So, to make sure he didn’t stop me, I tied him up and left him down there.
My hands were shaking so bad, I barely managed to get duct tape around his wrists and ankles and over his mouth.
Then I waited until the sun came up, and I woke my mom to have her drive me to the school for the Scout trip up to St. Helens. ”
The truth was, he told Annie, that he’d never know for sure if he would actually have gone through with running away if he hadn’t tied Gary up and known what was waiting for him at home after the trip.
He came to believe later that Gary’s drunken intervention was some twist of fate or providence, some kink in the fabric of his destiny that meant he was supposed to go.
He’d never stopped believing that—even during that first year in the boathouse when he was starving and scrounging and hiding away while his story faded slowly out of the public eye.
He had struggled, but at least he was free.
And eventually, when enough time had passed and he worked up the courage, he went down to the county clerk’s office with his face half hidden under the brim of a hat pulled low, Daniel Barela’s driver’s license in hand, and enough cash to pay the fee to file a claim on the clearing.
The clerk had barely batted an eye, and Daniel was shocked when a letter arrived in the boathouse’s battered mailbox telling him the claim had been accepted.
After that, he’d bought as many NO TRESPASSING signs as he could afford and posted them in every direction, and when he ran out of money a few weeks later, he’d started taking odd jobs around town as a freelance electrician and handyman.
He was young, but he did good work, and folks in town began recommending him.
He was still bitter thinking about it, but work was the one thing he owed his stepfather for. Gary was a contractor. He’d built the Redmond house from the ground up, and Daniel, fascinated by the process, had paid attention as his stepfather wired the electricity.
And then, a stroke of good fortune when a client noticed his drawing pad and offered to buy the first charcoal sketch he’d done of the mountain. That had opened up another small source of income, and over time his meager savings grew.
Somewhere in the middle of the story, they had reached the southern shore, and the canoe sat half beached, Annie resting over solid ground and Daniel still in the water as the rain lightened.
“Why haven’t you gone back?” Annie asked, completely soaked where she sat. “Now that you’re an adult, and he can’t hurt you anymore, you could at least let your mother know that you’re still alive. Don’t you think she deserves that?”
Daniel shook his head, droplets flying. “All of Redmond saw that press conference. Not just saw it, they believed it. Gary’s a hero in that town, a special ops veteran, and they all think I tried to kill him.
He knows how to fool people, Annie… how to win them to his side.
He’s one way in private, but around other people he knows how to keep a lid on it.
He’s really good at hiding who he is, and he’s not the forgive-and-forget type.
Going back now could land me in prison. Honestly, these last seven years, it feels like I’ve just been waiting with my breath held for him to track me down.
To somehow find me and take revenge for what he thinks I did to him.
” Daniel shook his head again. “And then there’s all the other laws I broke.
I committed fraud and ran away from a federal manhunt.
And besides that, what would I be going back to?
It’s not like he’s holding my mom hostage.
I miss her every day, but she chose him, and she chose to stay with him even after he turned violent against me. ”
Annie nodded, slowly.
Overhead, a single sunbeam pierced the clouds, bathing the tips of the nearest pines in filmy light.
“Say something,” Daniel prompted when Annie made no move to speak or leave the canoe.
For another half minute, she gazed at him, her jaw working back and forth in the damp quiet, and then she spoke at last, in a voice he hoped he’d never hear again.
“It breaks my heart that you went through all of that, and I can’t imagine everything it took just to survive… but you lie to me again, and this is over.”