Page 51 of At Midnight Comes the Cry
“I paid every penny for that shit! Hard work! Long hours on the road, while you sat here getting fat and playing house! You don’t get that stuff. Let the goddamn lawyer and your friend here set you up. Bitch.”
“Cal… please! I’m sorry!”
He turned his back on her and crossed his arms. “You be off my property before thepolicecome, or I’m claiming trespassing and theft on you.” He whirled around and stared at Clare. “All of you!”
“Tiny.” Clare kept her voice low and calm. “We need to leave.”
The woman flung herself on Cal instead, trying to wrap herself around him. He wrestled out of her hold and twisted her arms behind her back. Tiny shrieked.
Clare set her teeth and backed out of the door. There was nothing she could do to help Tiny with the infant weighing her down. As shecrossed the deck, step by exacting step, Cal marched his wife out the door. When they were halfway to the ramp, Cal gave her a hard push. Tiny fell sprawling onto the wooden flooring, snow scattering around her as she skidded toward Clare.
“Get out andstay out!” Cal slammed the door behind him.
“Yíxin!” Clare needed another pair of hands. Tiny was rumping up from where she had fallen like a baby attempting to crawl. “Yíxin!”
The lawyer brushed past her. “I got the car running.” She twisted her hands in the shoulders of Tiny’s coat and hauled the other woman off the deck. She turned toward Clare, her face saying,Now what?
Clare stepped forward and pushed Rose into her mother’s chest. Despite her distress, Tiny wrapped her arms around the baby. Clare moved even closer, trapping the child between the two of them, staring directly into Tiny’s reddened eyes. “Tiny.” She took a deep breath, and the other woman copied her. “We can fix this. We will fix this. But right now, we have to go. Your daughter might be in danger, and we need to go. Just for now.”
Tiny jerked her head in a nod.
Clare stepped back. “Yíxin, grab the diaper bag.” It was sitting where Cal had thrown it, slowly whitening under the snow. Clare took Tiny’s hand in hers and led her down the ramp to where, as promised, the car was running.
“I don’t have a car seat,” Tiny whispered.
“It’ll be okay for a little while. Go ahead and get in.” Clare shut the door on the woman and child.
Yíxin came up beside her and took her briefcase from Clare’s shoulder. “You okay to drive?”
“I have to be, don’t I?”
The lawyer glanced at the tree-shrouded drive, blurred by the fast-falling snow. “I can give it a shot.”
Clare took a deep breath. “No. Sorry. I’m just feeling a little shaky.”
“Really? You were so calm!”
Clare smiled sideways. “I fake calm really, really well.” She opened the driver’s door. “Let’s get out of here before he remembers that gun in the bedroom.”
14.
Of course, it started to snow. Hadley sat back against a shaggy evergreen, in the perfect spot for surveilling the militia encampment. She’d layered some pine straw beneath her and topped it with the stadium seat she’d gotten last fall as part of the Millers Kill track team fundraiser. She’d done one year of Girl Scouts in her peripatetic childhood, and they’d made something like it at a meeting. What was it called? Sit-along? Sit-around? The troop was going to take theirs camping that summer, but by the end of the school year, her mother had met yet another guy and they were off to Oregon. Hadley had always been so mad she’d missed that trip. Well, she was making up for it now.
Her perch was surprisingly comfortable, which was why her heart sank when the first flakes began drifting down. She would be well protected beneath the tree’s drooping limbs—but if it started to pick up, there was no way she would still be able to see the camp. Heavy snowfall was worse than fog for visibility. And, unlike the chief, she had no confidence in her ability to crawl a lot closer and stay hidden.
Hadley pulled her cap farther down and jiggled the branches above her. Snow showered her and her backpack. She brushed herself off. Better. If it stayed light, she’d be okay. And having to clear off the spruce boughs would at least give her something to break the monotony of watching nothing happen in the part of the campsite she could see. The most exciting moment so far had been when the guy on kitchen duty walked to the edge of the clearing and tossed a basin of sudsy water into the trees. She reminded herself boring was good. It wasn’t like she could call on her radio and have the rest of the MKPD show up.
She unsnapped the side pocket of her backpack and dug out a granola bar. She wondered where Paul was. He should have made it back to where they’d left his uncle’s truck by now, but driving it out was going to be a bear. No pun intended. Even he had said he didn’t know how the older man had gotten his truck so far off-road. Part of her wanted the ranger to get off the mountain and back to civilization as quickly as he could, and part of her wanted to keep the rest of theworld away as long as possible, to up their chances of hauling Flynn out of the stupid mess he’d gotten himself into. Part of her just wanted the ranger back here, with her, with his wood lore and his chill demeanor and his rifle. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Maybe after she’d finished tearing a strip off Flynn, she’d ask Paul out. She snapped off a piece of the granola bar with a satisfiedcrunch.
Noise from the camp. And men moving. Crap. She shoved the rest of her snack in her pocket and leaned forward. She was too far away to hear anything distinctly, but something had gotten them stirring. A whole cluster of them appeared from what must be the far side of the camp, and holy God, there was Flynn’s red hair, visible even through the thickening snowfall, and she tried to count the men around him against the chief’s estimate of their numbers and one of them shoved another forward—
—and it was the chief.
For a breath, everything stopped. Snow hung motionless, sound vanished, the men surrounding the chief froze. Another breath, and the world sped up again. A handful of guys broke away and headed for their tents in response to an order she couldn’t see or hear. When they came back in heavy parkas, carrying rifles, she knew what the directive had been. They disappeared toward the far side of the camp, where they must have found Van Alstyne. Looking for fellow travelers. Looking for her.
The plan was to keep eyes on, in case the militia broke camp and moved, but she couldn’t stay here. Hadley had no doubt they’d work their way around the whole site and then keep searching to the trip wire or beyond. She wiggled out of her hide, folding her seat pad and scattering the pine straw. She moved behind the tree, shoving the seat in her pack and shrugging it onto her shoulders. Guilt turned her back toward the campsite—was she really just going to walk away and leave the chief there? Alone and unprotected?
For God’s sake,she could hear the chief say.Don’t be a hero.
