Crimson River (The Edens)

“Dad!” Vera gasped when we walked into their shelter. Home. Hut. Whatever the fuck I was supposed to call this place. “Oh my God.”

“I’m fine.” Cormac held up a hand streaked with blood. The bleeding had stopped and he’d done his best to wipe his nose and face clean outside before resetting the bone I’d broken, but he still looked like shit. “I, um . . . tripped.”

“You tripped?” Vera looked between us.

Cormac didn’t trip.

“Yeah,” he muttered, going to a small bowl positioned against the wall. It was full of fresh water. They must have a supply somewhere close. He picked up a dingy cloth that had seen better days, then washed his face clean. But even with the blood gone, his skin was pink and swollen.

I’d hit him with everything I had, and tomorrow, his eyes would be as black as Lyla’s had been the day we’d met. It served the asshole right. My knuckles were beginning to ache, but damn, that had felt good.

Lyla moved to my side, positioning herself as far away from Cormac as the cramped space would allow.

I put my arm around her shoulders, pinning her close, as I surveyed the single room.

Against the back wall were two bedrolls. They each rested on a wooden platform that lifted the blankets about a foot off the ground. The cots, similar to the shelter’s walls, were made from neatly cut and trimmed branches about three to four inches thick. They were held together with parachute cord. No doubt something Vera had bought during her trips into various towns.

The knots keeping the branches together were familiar and clean.

In our years together on the force, Cormac had taught me a lot, but the one area where I’d always had more knowledge was with tying knots. Square. Bowline. Prusik. Double fisherman’s. I had the Scouts to thank for that skill. As a kid, I’d practiced tying knots for hours and hours. Then I’d taught Cormac.

Then he’d used those knots to make this home for his daughter. He’d built a place to keep her from the world. From me.

“Time to explain,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

Cormac folded the bloody rag and set it aside. He looked to Vera, arching his eyebrows.

A silent conversation passed between them. They’d had that before too, like they could read each other’s thoughts.

Whatever passed between them made her shake her head. “I’ll get fresh water for dinner.”

She grabbed a flashlight from a small, handmade shelf beside her bedroll, then went outside.

Cormac watched Vera leave, then exhaled. When he looked up, it wasn’t at me, but Lyla. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. Vera doesn’t know.”

Lyla stiffened. “And I’m guessing you’d like to keep it that way?”

“I don’t have many secrets from my daughter. She knows who I am. You’re welcome to tell her.”

“Why didn’t you?” Lyla asked.

He swallowed hard. “I’m not exactly proud—”

“That you tried to kill me.”

“I had no intention of killing you. I panicked. I came down lower than usual to hunt. We’ve been stocking up for winter, and it’s been stressful. When you walked up on me like that . . . not many people can sneak up on me. And besides Vera, I haven’t seen another person in a long time. Needed to make sure you’d stay quiet long enough for me to get the hell out of there.” Cormac juddered and a strange, faraway look flashed over his face. It was almost like he couldn’t believe what he’d done. “I got spooked.”

“So you choked me until I nearly passed out and left me beside a gut pile, where any other predator could have come along and finished the job you’d started.”

She wasn’t going to make this easy on him. Good for you, Blue.

“I watched you get up,” he said. “I made sure you were okay. Then I followed you back to your car.”

Lyla’s eyes narrowed. “How do I know that’s true?”

“You drive a navy-blue Honda.”

“Oh,” she muttered.

So Cormac had hurt her, then followed her to make sure she was okay. That was something, I guess. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to thank him, but maybe I shouldn’t have hit him quite so hard.

Nah. He deserved to be punched again for what he’d done.

To all of us.

Lyla blew out a long breath and went quiet. Apparently she was done talking about the river. Time to move on to a different discussion.

“Should we wait for Vera?” I jerked my chin at the door.

Cormac walked to his bedroll and sat down on its end, leaning his elbows on his knees. “She won’t talk about it. Four years and I still don’t know everything that happened that night.”

“What?” Four years and she hadn’t spoken about it. “Why?”

“I used to ask. I’d beg her to tell me. She’d just stop talking entirely. After a while, I decided it didn’t really matter. Hadley and Elsie are gone.” His voice cracked. “I wasn’t going to risk losing Vera too.”

So he didn’t know what had happened? What the fuck was happening? What about Norah? The evidence was indisputable. He’d killed her, right? Why was Vera the only one who knew what had happened?

“You might want to sit down.” Cormac gestured to the packed dirt floor. “Vera won’t come back inside until we’re done talking. I’ll be quick because I don’t want her outside in the dark alone too long. But there’s a lot that happened. A lot I never told you.”

No shit. I kept that comment to myself and took a seat on the floor. This would probably be the spot where we’d sleep tonight. I’d take the ground and let Lyla sleep on my chest. There was no way I’d risk taking her down the mountain, not on such a steep climb after nightfall.

Lyla claimed the space beside me, her body tucked close. Then we waited, both watching as Cormac stared at the door, like he wanted to be anywhere but this hut.

“Best way to do this is to start at the beginning. The very beginning,” he said. “Did I ever tell you that Norah and I met in a bar?”

“Yes.” Once. “You were there with friends. She was alone. You took one look at her and ditched your crowd. Then you proposed the next day.”

He huffed. “Not exactly how it happened. That was the story she invented for the girls. The real truth was that I was there with friends. She was alone. I went to the men’s bathroom and found her passed out in a stall with a heroin needle stuck in her arm.”

I flinched so violently Lyla gasped. “What the fuck?”

“I didn’t propose the next day,” Cormac said, dragging a palm over his stubbled cheek. He had more gray hair now than years ago. The white strands blended with the red. “I went to visit her in the hospital I took her to from the bar. Day after that, went back again. I told her that once she got out of rehab to call me. I’d buy her a cookies-and-cream milkshake from my favorite diner.”

His voice was flat. Dead. Nothing akin to the way he used to talk about his wife.

The love of his life.

This man had loved Norah with every fiber of his being. How could he talk about her without a hint of emotion?

“She got clean. And when she left rehab, she found me. I bought her that milkshake.” His jaw clenched like he was holding back a curse.

“We took it slow,” he said. “Or, we’d planned to take it slow. Until we got pregnant with Vera. That changed everything. Norah and I got married. She stayed home with the baby while I worked. And for a while, everything was perfect. Too fucking perfect, I guess. When Vera was about nine months old, I came home to find Norah passed out drunk in the bathtub. Vera was in her crib, dirty diaper, screaming. Starving. Because her mother had decided instead of eating a normal breakfast, she’d down a liter of vodka instead.”

This was a joke. This had to be a joke, right? A lie? Except I knew Cormac. Even after four years of hating him, I knew this was the truth. “You never told me any of this.”

“No one really knew. It all happened when we were living in Alaska. Norah promised it would never happen again. She said it was postpartum depression. That and the long, dark winters. So we got her on some medication. I started searching for jobs in the lower forty-eight. Landed in Idaho.”

Cormac was ten years older than me, and I’d always looked up to him like a brother. Clearly, a brother I knew fuck all about. It was like he’d had this whole other life that he’d never shared.

“Norah was better after we moved. Normal seasons, sunshine, helped. Being away from her family helped. They were as toxic as those drugs she’d been hooked on when I’d found her. But there’s a reason I waited so long to have more kids. I needed to make sure Norah was solid. Stable.”

Norah had been solid. She had been stable. She’d loved her daughters. She’d doted on them just like the rest of us. The most I’d ever seen her drink were a couple glasses of red wine with the occasional dinner. Maybe a beer if we were all out on the boat in the heat of summer.

She’d been a good mother. She’d always made sure the girls brushed their teeth and did their homework. She’d braided their hair and made them eat at least two bites of vegetables before they could have a treat.

My world was tipping upside down again, like I was living in an hourglass and couldn’t figure out which way the sand was flowing. Who was the bad guy here?

Cormac? Norah?

Everything I’d thought, everything I’d believed, was bullshit. I’d been living in a world of smoke and mirrors.

These people I’d loved had omitted so much of the truth. I wasn’t sure what to think. I couldn’t trust them. I couldn’t trust my own memories.

Lyla’s hand slipped into mine.

One touch. The dizzying thoughts stopped. The frustration ebbed.

I looked down into those dazzling blue eyes and found steady.

Lyla held my hand, and I held hers. And we listened as Cormac continued to repaint the past with ugly colors.

“I watched her like a hawk after the twins were born. I rarely left her alone. If I was working, I’d have friends just randomly pop by. I’d call constantly. She was . . . great. Happy. We were great. We were happy.” Cormac tossed out a hand. “Hell, why am I telling you this? You were there.”

“Yeah.” I’d been there. I’d witnessed this great happiness.

Until it had all gone up in flames.

“When my parents died, I used my inheritance to buy the place on the lake. Bought the boat because she wanted to teach the girls how to waterski. She got into scrapbooking because she was worried we wouldn’t remember what the girls were like when they were little. Everything was good.” Cormac closed his eyes. “That fucking bitch made me believe everything was good.”

I jerked. Never, not once, had I heard Cormac call Norah a bitch. Even if they’d been in a squabble, he’d never tarnished her name.

“The girls were busy,” he said. “I was busy. We had an activity every night. Basketball. Softball. Swimming. Hadley wanted to take acting lessons. Elsie decided she wanted to write a book.” Cormac’s eyes flooded and he sniffled, wiping away a tear. “It still hurts . . . to say their names.”

Which was why I’d rarely spoken them myself.

He took a minute, breathing through the pain. There sat a father missing two beautiful daughters. Mourning two beautiful daughters.

Not a killer.

He hadn’t killed them.

I’d believed he had, for four years. Maybe. Or maybe deep down, the reason I’d been so determined to find him was because I’d known in my soul he wouldn’t have murdered the girls.

He sucked in a sharp breath, pulling himself together.

“A friend of Norah’s from high school came to visit us in Idaho. I never knew the guy. He was in her life before I met her. Honestly, I didn’t think much about it. They met up once for lunch, then he was gone. Guess that lunch was all it took.”

“Took for what?”

“Took for her to spiral.”

No. No way. We would have seen it.

Cormac met my gaze, those sad eyes boring into mine. “You’re thinking we should have noticed, right? If she was drinking or using, we should have seen the signs?”

“We should have.”

“I should have.” He slapped his chest, so hard it made Lyla jump. “I should have seen it. And I didn’t have a fucking clue. Not until I came home that night. Not until I found her drunk. High. Alone.”

Cormac buried his face in his hands, like if he physically shut out the world, he could make it go away, he could stop talking about that night.

Lyla’s grip on my hand tightened as she peered at the door, like she could see Vera through the branches.

Vera had been there with Norah that night. With Hadley and Elsie. And whatever happened had likely scarred her for life.

Cormac hung his head, the tears uncatchable as they dripped to the dirt. “I kissed the girls that morning before they got on the bus, but I didn’t tell them I loved them. Should have told them I loved them. But I was in a hurry, so I just kissed their heads and shuffled them out the door. Then I went to work.”

With me.

He’d come to work with me.

“Normal day.” He sniffled. “That thunderstorm had rolled in, but otherwise, just a normal day.”

“Yeah.” It had been a normal day. The last normal day.

“I had that meeting at the school after work, remember? All the volunteer coaches had to go in and do their concussion training. It was an off night for once. The girls didn’t have anything. I texted Norah that I’d bring home a pizza for dinner after the meeting.”

There’d been a pizza at their house—the crime scene. Half pepperoni, half veggie.

It had been on the coffee table in the living room, not the kitchen. The box had been unopened, the food untouched. Like he’d gotten distracted, so the pizza had been set aside.

“She was out of her mind.” Cormac lowered his voice, either because it was hard to voice or because he worried Vera was within earshot. “She kept mumbling about swimming lessons. How the girls needed more swimming lessons. How they couldn’t go out on the boat again until they had more practice swimming.”

What the fuck? The girls had been great swimmers, especially Vera. She’d been on the high school’s swim team. There weren’t many summer weekends when Cormac and I hadn’t taken the girls tubing or waterskiing.

“I got spooked,” he said.

It was the same thing he’d told Lyla. Was that why he’d choked her at the river? Because it had reminded him too much of Norah? Maybe he’d been thinking about his wife in that moment. Maybe he’d been thinking about his daughters, and when Lyla had surprised him, he’d snapped.

“I kept asking Norah what she was talking about,” he said. “I got close enough and smelled the booze. Saw how glassy her eyes were. She didn’t even recognize me. She thought I was a lifeguard. She asked me if I could go get her kids from the pool because it was time for dinner.”

They didn’t have a pool.

Just the lake.

“I went outside. I screamed and screamed and screamed for the girls. The boat had been run up on the shore, not tied to the dock. The waves, they were . . .” A sob broke free from his mouth. “My girls were good swimmers. But not that good. Not in that kind of storm.”

The hut was still for a few long minutes. The only sound came from Cormac as he cried and swiped at his tears.

“I went back inside and slapped her. I slapped her so fucking hard, Vance. Just so she’d snap out of it. Tell me what had happened.”

The autopsy had shown an injury to her cheek. The cause of death, strangulation. There’d been alcohol in her bloodstream, but we’d all assumed she’d had one too many glasses of wine from the open bottle in the kitchen. There’d been no note of drugs. Though depending on what she’d been on, some substances like LSD metabolized quickly. Still, would the medical examiner have even thought to test for narcotics?

Small town. Well-known family. Tragic incident. Not a single person, including me, had thought to investigate Norah.

Not when Cormac had run and cemented his guilt in our minds.

“She said she took them out for swimming lessons.” Cormac looked at the door.

My gaze tracked his.

Outside was the only person who knew what had happened on that boat.

“I killed her.”

I whipped back to face him. There was no remorse in his voice. Just fact.

“She drowned them. She drowned my little girls.” His eyes blazed behind more tears. “So I killed her.”

This was why he’d run. All the evidence that had pointed to him was true. He’d killed Norah.

That fucking bitch.

Four years, I’d blamed Cormac for their deaths. I guess I’d get the next forty to hate Norah for it instead.

Lyla swiped at her own cheek, catching a few tears for kids she’d never known. I loved her for that too. She leaned deeper into my side, a silent hug, then held tight to my hand while we waited for Cormac to dry his face.

“Sorry.” He shook his head, sitting taller. “I’ve never talked about this.”

“Not with Vera?” I asked.

“No. We don’t . . . it’s easier.”

Easier if they didn’t mention that night. Easier if they didn’t speak Hadley’s or Elsie’s names.

“I had the girls cremated,” I blurted.

Norah and Cormac’s will had requested they be buried in plots they’d purchased at a cemetery. But there hadn’t been any specific wishes for the girls. Parents didn’t plan for their children’s deaths. There hadn’t been two open spaces beside Norah in the cemetery, just the one for Cormac. And I hadn’t wanted to separate the twins.

A blessing now that I knew the truth. So I’d had them cremated.

“Remember that trail we found ages ago, the one that led to that meadow with all the wildflowers?”

Cormac nodded.

“I took their ashes there.” It had been the hardest day of my life.

He put a hand over his heart, like he was trying to keep it from breaking. “I knew you’d take care of them.”

While he’d been taking care of Vera.

“How did you find Vera?” I asked.

“After Norah, I took the boat out. I didn’t have a damn clue where to look. It was dark. Pouring rain. Waves crashing over the hull. Stayed out until I was sure I’d drown with them. I only came back to shore because I needed more gas. Then there she was, lying on the dock. Soaking wet. Numb. She made it back. Her sisters didn’t.”

Lyla leaned into my arm, muffling the sound of her own crying in the sleeve of my coat.

Oh, God. My throat closed. My nose burned. My own eyes blurred with tears, one cascading down my cheek.

What horror had Vera survived? How scared had the twins been before they’d been pulled under?

I pinched the bridge of my nose, breathing from my mouth as my heart broke for what felt like the thousandth time.

Hadley and Elsie were gone. Killed by their mother, not father. And goddamn it, I missed them.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fucking fair.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Me too.”

“Why’d you run?”

Cormac shrugged. “It was either run or go to prison. I wasn’t leaving Vera, not after that.”

So he’d found a way for them to stay together.

“Vera said you’re leaving Montana,” Lyla said.

Cormac nodded. “We can’t stay. If Vance found me, it’s only a matter of time before someone else stumbles upon us. We’ve been here too long anyway.”

My stomach knotted at the idea of him taking her away. Of disappearing again.

“Where will you go?”

“The goal was always to get to Canada, but a couple years ago, we were coming through this area and Vera got sick. Found this place. She didn’t want to leave.”

“I still don’t want to leave.” Vera pushed through the door, arms crossed over her chest.

How long had she been listening?

“It’s not up for debate.” Cormac stood, his hair nearly brushing the shelter’s roof. He’d made this home just tall enough that he could walk without bumping his head.

“I’m not going this time,” she said. “Not again.”

“And what will you do? Live here? Alone?”

Vera sighed, dropping her chin. “You could stay.”

He crossed the space, pulling her into his arms. “You know why I can’t.”

No, he couldn’t stay. And this wasn’t a life for a twenty-one-year-old young woman. She deserved more.

She deserved the world.

“She can come with me.” I shoved to my feet, helping Lyla to hers. Maybe Cormac couldn’t stay. Maybe he was okay living a life off the grid. But that wasn’t a life for Vera.

“What?” Cormac whirled, a glare on his face.

“You really want this to be her life?” I circled a finger in the air.

His glare flicked to the roof he’d put over their heads. Then it vanished, faster than I could blink. He’d probably thought about this already. He’d likely looked into the future and known something would eventually have to give.

This was not the life he’d wanted for his daughter.

He faced her, giving her a sad smile. But when he spoke, his voice was firm. Absolute. “You’re going with Vance.”

Maybe he’d expected Vera to argue.

But she whispered, “Okay.”