She said, “You with no shirt on, step out of the way, please.”
Sean staggered around the table and sat down unsteadily against the wall beside his father. Reynolds looked confused and terribly put upon.
“Honey, what are you doing?” Will said.
She shouldered the shotgun.
“I’m gonna kill that fat man.”
“No, Devlin—”
“Trust me, Dad, he has it coming.”
“In cold blood?”
“Yep.”
“Wait just a second.”
“Why are you so angry with me?” Reynolds asked.
“Remember that pregnant woman you raped this morning?”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“You told her you’d made eighty-four million dollars this year? That you could kill her if you wanted?”
“I think you’re mistaking me for—”
“I’m not mistaking you for anybody.”
Will said, “Devlin, this isn’t the way to handle this. You didn’t have a choice with Paul, but you do now.” He reached for the shotgun, saying, “Here, give me that,” but his voice was lost in the shattering report. Will watched, stunned, as his daughter struggled to pump the Mossberg again.
Reynolds was sitting on the floor in a puddle of himself, not making a peep, just staring at the shredded kimono and all that was leaking through it.
Devlin approached him with the Mossberg already shouldered, said, “I hope you go to hell,” and shot him in the face.
When her ears quit ringing, the only sound in the room was Sean’s whimpering.
Devlin looked back at her father, saw something like disappointment or disgust.
“Please don’t look at me like that, Dad.”
Will just shook his head, and for a moment Devlin thought he might cry.
“You wanna know why I’m never going to lose a wink of sleep over that?”
“Why?”
Devlin reached into her pocket and pulled out a key.
“Come with me. I’ll show you who I watched him rape.”
FIFTY-SIX
They locked Kalyn, Sean, and his father into separate rooms on the first floor of the south wing, and Will followed Devlin up the staircase to the fourth, where they stopped in front of the door to room 429.
“Here.” She handed her father the master key.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
“Just open it.”
Will slipped the key into the lock.
“I’m gonna wait out here,” Devlin said. “You’ll need this.” She handed him a lantern, and Will turned the key, pushed the door open.
The room was dark. Someone lay crying in bed. He set the lantern on the table, assumed it was a woman under the covers, one of the captives.
Will said, “Everything’s okay now. The people who’ve kept you here and the man who hurt you today are dead.”
The covers turned back.
Will’s wife sat up, and he lost his breath.
“Rachael?”
Firelit tears trailed down her cheeks.
He had dreamed of this a thousand times—what it would be like to hold his wife again, to wrap his arms around her. None of them had approached the sweetness or the pain of this moment, and he was crying because of her smell. “You smell like you,” he whispered.
“Is this real?” Rachael asked.
“I promise it is.”
“Where’s Devlin?”
“Outside in the hallway.”
“Tell her to come in.”
Will called their daughter, and Devlin came, climbed into bed between them. They sat in the low light of room 429, huddled together under the covers, Devlin rubbing her mother’s round belly and doing most of the talking, answering an endless stream of questions about school, boyfriends, her disease, their new life in Colorado, both parents in tears half the time, laughing the rest.
It had been over five years since they’d last been together. They talked and held one another and cried, all knowing in the back of their minds that they could sit on this bed for twenty years, for fifty, but it wouldn’t matter. There would be no real catching up, no recovery of lost time, no understanding of the damage the separation had caused. They were different people now—haunted, ridden with scars and nightmares. There was no going back to that stormy July night in Ajo, Arizona. That Innis family was gone, and they would have to find themselves and one another again, start over, and pray that somehow the pieces fit back together.
Despite the joy and the overriding hope, it wasn’t until this moment, sitting in this bed together on the fourth floor of this old lodge, that they each understood how much had been stolen from them, the incomprehensible arithmetic of what they had lost.
The Innises didn’t sleep that night. They walked together up and down the corridors, looking for the rooms where the rest of the women were kept.
It was the most gut-wrenching, emotional two hours of Will’s life, setting these prisoners free, telling them that the people who’d held them here and destroyed their lives were dead, incapable of ever hurting them again. Most of the women broke down, hysterical with relief. A handful had gone mad. One laughed at the news. One just sat on her bed and stared out the window, comatose. Kalyn’s sister, Lucy Dahl, didn’t say anything when they unlocked her door, just walked out without a word, and Will couldn’t yet bring himself to broach the topic of her sister. In the north wing, they found two women emaciated from starvation, so weak that Will had to carry them down into the library, each weighing less than eighty pounds, their hair thinned, their teeth falling out. A woman on the third floor had died in her sleep at least a month ago, and after seeing her, Will stepped into the alcove and knelt down in a corner and wept. So much pain here, so much ruin.
FIFTY-SEVEN
They pushed all the furniture into the lobby and brought in mattresses and blankets from the nearest rooms. Twenty-two women, half of them pregnant, crowded into the library as Will added logs to the fire and stoked up the blaze, the room of books warming, the fire shadows moving in endless patterns across the walls as the blizzard shrieked and snow piled up against the French doors. A woman who’d given birth that morning sat in a corner nursing her infant, mother and child wrapped in blankets.
Will stood in the open doorway, looking across the library, wall-to-wall with mattresses. Some of the women were already sleeping, wrapped in each other’s arms, others crying softly to themselves and rocking back and forth, as if not quite ready to give themselves over to this reality, afraid it would vanish from under their feet as it had so often before.