She whipped around. A blocky, compact figure was stalking towards her, dark eyes pinned to hers. Her heartbeat tripped.
Zach Caruso, Sheriff of Hillsborough County.
She slipped a hand inside her bag. Touched the gun like a talisman.
Caruso halted in front of her, his solid bulk blocking her path. ‘You sure being here is such a good idea?’
‘I’m just looking at the fireworks, Zach. Like everybody else.’
His eyes were watchful. ‘Ethan didn’t mention you’d be along.’
‘Ethan doesn’t know.’
Fireworks exploded overhead, spotlighting Caruso in the dark. His expression was hard and flat with suspicion. He had to be in his fifties, over twenty years Jodie’s senior, but his hair was still thick and dark. That and the high-bridged nose spoke of Italian lineage, but the accent was pure, abrasive Boston.
His eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe I should let him know. You don’t look too good.’
‘I’m okay.’
Jodie knew how she looked: rail-thin in jeans and T-shirt; skin stretched taut, bare of makeup; up-slanted eyes dull and vacant; straight dark hair unkempt and shoved back behind her ears. Her world had been annihilated. Made desolate. Her appearance was nothing.
Caruso stepped closer. ‘You had a chance to reconsider things since this morning?’
Jodie felt her jaw clench as she recalled their earlier encounter, when she’d made the mistake of thinking that the law might be on her side.
Caruso went on. ‘You were overwrought, I can understand that. After all you’ve been through.’ The sympathy was a mismatch for the guarded look on his face. ‘Ethan says you’re trying to work through it together. I told him, if I can help, he just has to ask.’
‘I’m sure he’s glad to know you’ve got his back.’
‘You got to understand, making groundless accusations is rash. People can get hurt.’
His closeness was suffocating. Jodie touched her bag.
‘I’m not here to make trouble, Zach. There’s just something I need to give to Ethan.’
Caruso shot her a wary look. Jodie made her face bland, breezed on.
‘He’s catching a ten-thirty flight after the fireworks.’
‘I know. He told me.’
‘Did he tell you he forgot his passport?’
His gaze dug into hers, looking for the lie. The explosions paused overhead, and a mosquito whined next to Jodie’s ear. Caruso’s stare was unblinking.
‘Not like Ethan to screw up on details,’ he said. ‘Usually has everything under control.’
‘I guess everyone slips up once in a while.’
Caruso dropped his eyes to her bag. She groped for a distraction, gestured at the lake.
‘You’re a little way off your turf, aren’t you, Zach?’
He darted a look out across the water that geographically resided in Cheshire County, close neighbour to his own jurisdiction. He shrugged.
‘Doesn’t hurt to broaden your horizons, does it?’
Jodie eyed the crowd, a new batch of voters for Caruso to get his hooks into. Whatever scheme he was cooking, Ethan was probably involved. She used to wonder what kind of backscratching they had in place to make Ethan align with such a crook. But none of that mattered any more.
Caruso held out a hand. ‘Why don’t I take him his passport? You get on home, get some rest.’
She gripped her bag, her heart rate climbing. ‘Thanks, but I want to do it myself.’
She edged away, sidestepping his bulk.
‘I want a chance to say goodbye.’
Jodie hiked along the lakefront. By now, she’d combed most of the northern shore, and she still hadn’t found Ethan.
She checked her watch. He was scheduled to leave for the airport any time now. Maybe he’d already gone.
A rush of dizziness flooded her head. Her encounter with Caruso had left her shaky, but worse was the thought that she’d missed her chance. That Ethan had slipped away. She blundered onwards along the embankment.
The weight of the gun dragged at her bag. She’d only used it once before, six months earlier. Her first time ever handling a firearm.
She’d been alone in the house, finishing up another painting for the gallery. She could still recall the graveyard silence of the rooms, deadened further by the waist-high snowdrifts outside. Jodie shivered.
When she’d first come to New Hampshire five years earlier, Ethan’s house had charmed her. The Irish place names had charmed her too, lulling her with a false sense of the familiar: Kilkenny, Antrim, Dublin Lake.
She’d never had a home of her own. She’d grown up on the move in Irish foster care, twelve moves in all over eighteen years, to places where nothing was ever really hers. And each time, she was told she’d be safe with the next family. She wasn’t.
But Ethan had seemed safe. He’d wooed her with an old-fashioned attentiveness, and his secluded Colonial home had reinforced the gallant image. Maybe she’d finally found a home.
But the truth was, it was all a fake.
Fireworks burst into bloom overhead, brilliant red chrysanthemums of light. Jodie stumbled through the cheering crowds, out of whack with normal life.
She flashed again on Ethan’s house in the backwoods: six miles from the nearest town; no neighbours, no boundaries; the garden blending without warning into dark, dense forest. Not forest like she knew it, but vast, primeval hinterland that besieged three sides of the house.
Incarceration.
She could still hear Ethan’s voice echoing in the banquet-sized rooms.
‘If Mommy wants to work, it means she doesn’t love you, Abby.’
‘It’s Mommy’s fault you don’t have any brothers or sisters.’
‘If Mommy leaves, we can’t be a happy family any more.’
Jodie’s throat closed over. She clenched her fingers around the gun in her bag, re-living the day she’d last fired it, six months earlier.
She’d been painting for three hours straight, her spine crunching with the backache she always got from standing for too long. She stepped back from the easel to eye her work, a vigorous landscape of the local Contoocook River. Like all the paintings she sold, it offered plenty of wild, improbable colour but almost nothing of herself.
She wiped her hands on a turps-soaked rag, stirring up a pungent, piney scent. Then she selected a fine rigger brush and signed the canvas: Jodie Garrett.
She eyed her signature with misgiving. Another battleground with Ethan. She still used her maiden name, signing her work with it the way she’d done ever since she was a child. Ethan railed at her to switch to his, as though the other was some kind of veiled threat; some act of defiance.
Maybe it was.
She tossed the brush aside, got ready to clean up. Then an eerie screech tore through the silence.
Raucous, inhuman.
Jodie raced to the window. Stopped dead when she saw the malevolent forest animal skulking in her back yard.
Black as the devil against the snow. Dense, glossy pelt, humpbacked like a rodent, haunches high and round. Maybe four feet long from nose to bushy tail, about the size of a family dog.
A