“Trapped,” she spat, anger radiating from her as she stared at her father’s motionless form.
“With Walter?”
She nodded, her lips compressed.
Kara found her feet and reeled forward, dropping to her knees at Tate’s side. She felt for his pulse and found it. Thank God. “Help me,” she said to Marlie, and though the whole scene was surreal, she saw that Tate was coming around, his eyes blinking against the snowfall.
Please. Please. Please. Please let him live, please don’t take him. Not Tate. Please. She sent up her tiny, heartfelt prayers to a God she sometimes hadn’t believed existed.
She bit off her gloves, then with frozen fingers unzipped his jacket and tore open his shirt, finding the wound, high in his shoulder. “Wesley,” she whispered, forcing him to focus on her. “God . . . are you okay?” Her voice caught.
“What the hell happened?” he asked, blinking and wan, ’til he focused on her and a ghost of a smile touched his lips as his gaze locked with Kara’s.
“You’ve been shot. Walter Robinson was chasing me and you . . .” Her throat closed. “You saved my life.” Tears filled her eyes and she bit her lip, overwhelmed by emotion. He was alive, but bleeding.
“Let me,” Marlie offered, kneeling next to them as the wind rattled through the frozen branches and snow continued to fall. “I know how. I’m good at this. He”—she shot a glance at her father lying still in the snow—“he taught me. We couldn’t go to any hospital, of course, and he’d been a medic when he served in the military. So . . .” She worked fast, tearing a strip of cloth from Tate’s shirt to bind his wound and stop the bleeding, while Kara, her head finally clear, called 9-1-1. Her teeth chattered, her head pounded, but she was able to rattle off the address. “Just hurry. Walter and Jonas are dead, another wounded!”
Tate was struggling to get to his feet.
“Not a good idea,” Marlie warned, holding up a hand. “Just let me finish up here.” She wound the strip of cloth over his shoulder, tied it off as best as she could.
“Marlie Robinson?” he asked, his head seeming to clear a bit. Grimacing against pain, he leaned on his good elbow so that he could see Walter Robinson lying facedown and motionless in the falling snow. Then his gaze returned to the woman helping him. “You’ve been alive all this time?”
“Yes,” Marlie said, then, “You should lie down. Really.”
“I’m okay,” he insisted, and offered her a half smile before wincing. “I’ve been through worse.”
“I don’t think so,” Kara said, and took his hand, then seeing that Tate was going to pull through, asked her sister the question that had been plaguing her for decades. “Why? Why didn’t you come back?”
“He wouldn’t let me go,” Marlie said, still kneeling as she hitched her chin toward her father’s still form. Her lips twisted into a dark frown. “Not after what I’d seen.” Sighing, she leaned back on her heels to glance at her father. Her hair caught in the wind, billowing away from her face, exposing the scar beneath one eye. As if she felt Kara noticing it, Marlie touched the jagged line slicing her cheek. “This? Dad didn’t do it. No, this is compliments of Jonas.” She smiled bitterly. Her voice was as cold as the night, and her eyes seemed to deaden. “I made the mistake of getting in my stepbrother’s way.”
“But what happened? Why did you leave me?” Kara asked. Despite the bitter cold, despite the fact that Walter lay dead and Tate was injured, she had to know. “Why? In the attic? All alone?”
“I had to,” Marlie cut in, more than a little defensive. She rubbed her arms and avoided Kara’s gaze. Staring into the middle distance, to a place only she could see, she said quietly, “It was all I could think of at the time. I-I didn’t know what to do, but I had to save you. I’d seen Jonas kill Donner, because of Lacey. And just as he finished and caught sight of me, Dad—Walter—showed up.” Marlie stared into the trees and shuddered. “Oh, God. It was so twisted. Dad had come back to the house to have it out with Mom about custody of Donner and me.”
Marlie cast a dark glance at her father’s form as the wind raced across the lake, sharp and harsh, causing the snow to swirl and dance, the trees to shiver. Lost in her own vision of that horrible night, Marlie didn’t seem to notice. Her voice was low and without emotion. “Dad, he walked in . . . like the door was unlocked, I guess, and he caught Jonas in the act of slicing Donner’s throat. The blood spilling, Donner gurgling. That’s what he told me.”