The Captive Read online

  Dedication

  To Etan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for The Captive

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The auction was interrupted in the middle of dry goods: buckwheat flour, pea flour, an exorbitant lot of coconut flour.

  “Holly would kill for that,” Milo said, twitching their bidding card.

  “Don’t,” Brooke warned him. They still had to pay for sugar—fifty pounds of it, at least, for the fall preserves—and anyway, their daughter’s passion for exotic ingredients was only her latest mutiny. “You already promised her a phone battery.”

  Milo shrugged amiably and lowered the card.

  The kids were alone at the farm, a few hours’ ride away. They had wanted to come, of course. Holly, especially, strained against their isolation, living hours outside town. But the four of them couldn’t all ride. A hard-rot blight had turned half of their last cranberry crop to dry, cotton-filled beads, forcing Brooke to sell two horses for cash. They were down to just her old mare, Star, whom Brooke and Milo had ridden together from home that morning, leaving at dawn and planning to stay overnight.

  Brooke couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had been away from the farm together; it would have been when Milo’s mother was still alive to watch the kids. But Holly was thirteen now, old enough to be left in charge, and Sal, at eight, was no longer the thumb-sucking baby sister she had been. They would be fine for one night.

  Brooke and Milo’s getaway, if a supply run to Buxton could be counted as such, had been enjoyable so far. People kept finding Milo in the auction crowd—friends, former students, people he’d known for years—gripping his arm and embracing him. Brooke knew the pleasure Milo took in his hometown, and she was happy for him, though she kept her own greetings brief; she had never stopped being a stranger here.

  On the platform at the front of the parking lot, the auctioneer, a lanky, freckled grandmother, palmed her megaphone, sending a rough, amplified crackle through the air. Someone was climbing the platform, Brooke saw. She took in the symbol on the man’s open windbreaker; it was rare for a marshal to travel this far, two hundred miles from the federal border and the city beyond.

  The marshal leaned in and spoke to the auctioneer. There was another crackle from the speakers.

  “Pause for a warrant,” the auctioneer announced briefly. She handed her megaphone to the marshal and folded herself into a chair, sipping bottled water.

  The energy in the crowd shifted, damped by a current of unease. Buxton had come through secession gentler than most—it was farming country, logging country, and the fight had been distant—still, they held no more esteem for federal authority than anyone did this side of the border.

  For a minute, the marshal looked out over the crowd without speaking. Just to make them uncomfortable, Brooke thought. Even now—thirty years since the rural territories seceded, twenty-five since their hard-won sovereign government dissolved—the feds still acted like they had power. That smug tightness around the mouth. Not just the man’s windbreaker, but his T-shirt and ball cap both bore the crest of the federal government.

  “Do they make undies, too?” someone called out, to a skim of laughter.

  The marshal sighed and lifted a paper, reading his text into the megaphone slowly, as if to children.

  “Addressed to residents of the unincorporated village known historically as Buxton: A fugitive is believed to be in your area. Local households are warned this man may try to obtain a vehicle or horse. He is dangerous and possibly armed. He is wanted on numerous charges, including trafficking, assault, destruction of federal property, and the murder of a federal narcotics officer.”

  Conversation around Brooke and Milo began to resume. The feds had no jurisdiction in the ceded territories, but they claimed the right to prosecute offenses against themselves. Everyone in the parking lot knew this marshal wasn’t here out of concern for local households. Federal property had been damaged and a federal officer killed; that was all.

  “There’s a bounty,” the marshal said, no longer reading from his paper. “We’re offering five hundred dollars for information leading to capture, five thousand for safe delivery.”

  A few more jeers from the crowd—it was classic of the feds to throw money at a problem rather than solve it themselves. Still, Brooke couldn’t help picturing what a sum like that could do for them. Five thousand dollars was more than the farm made in a good year.

  The territories had always been poor by city standards. But then, if you went by city standards—if you believed the TV shows set here—people like Brooke and Milo were fighting it out in some kind of apocalyptic wasteland.

  Copies of the warrant were lowered into the crowd. As Brooke took a sheet and passed the rest on, the marshal spoke the fugitive’s name aloud for the first time. The syllables echoed across the parking lot, amplified and fractured by the megaphone; Brooke felt a momentary impulse to bat them away from her ears like pests. She glanced down to check the warrant paper in her hand, hoping she’d misheard, knowing she hadn’t. The name was spelled out in clear black letters: Stephen Cawley.

  The page was dominated by the fugitive’s face: fair-haired, blue-eyed, a scar from his lip to his chin. On charges of Murder, the paper warned. Felony Escape, Traffic of Controlled Substances, Incitement to Violence, Destruction of Federal Property. Last known address: Shaw Station.

  The noise of the auction receded. Brooke’s hands tingled and her pulse beat forcefully in her temples. She noticed she wasn’t breathing, drew in a jagged lungful of air.

  A memory of pain. Darkness. Her own voice, screaming: Run!

  Holly and Sal were at the farm, alone and unprotected. Brooke pictured them as they’d been that morning when she and Milo left for town: Sal’s slack, sleepy hug, Holly arguing right up to the last about being left behind to watch her little sister.

  Brooke and Star could be there in an hour, if they rode hard.

  The thought of Star introduced a new fear: the horse’s brand was old and faint but unmistakable, enough to expose them to anyone who came looking.

  Brooke laid a hand on Milo’s sleeve to get his attention, and he broke off the conversation he was having with someone on his other side.

  “I have to go,” Brooke said.

  “What is it?” Milo asked, concerned.

  “Two hundred on sugar,” she said, already turning away. “Max.”

  She hurried through the crowd to the public stables. Star was drowsing in her stall. Brooke reached over the gate and grazed the mare’s velvet-soft muzzle with her fingers. Star blinked and pushed Brooke’s hand gently, steaming damp breath into the palm.

  Brooke ran her hand down Star’s neck to the shoulder, where the old brand showed through her half-grown winter coat: two thin vertical lines, bisected by a hook. It had been done flat-faced and superficially, just enough to prevent the hair follicles from regrowing, back when Star was a foal. Covering it would require more aggressive scarring.

  “I have to do someth
ing, girl.” Brooke pulled her hand away, hoping Star could not sense the anxiety in her touch. It had to be done, and fast. The harness shop in town was unscrupulous about off-auction horse trades.

  Star was the only thing Brooke had taken with her fifteen years ago, the closest thing she had to a friend. She would tell Milo simply that the mare’s years were starting to tell; Star was pushing eighteen, and it made sense to sell her while they could still get something.

  It had never felt good to lie to Milo, but Brooke knew he wouldn’t question her; he was accustomed to her reticence. And now wasn’t the time for her to offer up any more complicated explanation. She had to go.

  She would tell him she was sorry about their overnight, but she didn’t want the girls left alone with a fugitive on the loose. That wasn’t unreasonable—the Cawleys were notorious, even here.

  Brooke removed her scarf and looped it around Star’s neck, knotting the fabric behind the horse’s ears. She poured oats into the improvised feed bag. As Star munched, Brooke backed the horse into the corner of the stall where the gate hinged. She unlatched the gate and roped it across the mare’s chest, wedging her in so she couldn’t move. Then she rummaged through a heap of implements leaning against the stable wall until she found what she was looking for: two long-handled claw cultivators with iron tines.

  There was a fire burning in the small woodstove. She opened the door and propped one of the claws over the coals.

  Brooke took the other claw over to the stall and touched it to Star’s brand. Star brought her head up, watched Brooke’s face, and then returned to her oats. Brooke withdrew the cold iron for a moment, then placed it on the brand again. She did this four times, until the horse took no more notice of the metal and kept eating.

  Brooke moved swiftly to the stove. She had to be quick if she expected to get the proceeds into Milo’s hands before the auction reached livestock. Anything under ten years old, she’d tell him, that could pull machinery and be trusted with the kids. He could meet her at home with the new horse, the sugar, and the rest of their supplies. Brooke didn’t intend to wait. The weekly truck carrying tar sands workers up the mountain road left in the afternoon, and she planned to be on it. Its route traveled right past the farm, and the driver would make room if she paid.

  The claw in the stove was hot. Near its iron collar, the wooden handle was charred and glowing, not yet burned through. Brooke lifted it and hurried back to Star.

  “I’m sorry, girl,” she whispered, as she threaded the hot tines between the planks of the stall to cover Star’s brand. Star flinched and tried to heave herself away, but she was wedged in tight by the roped gate. Brooke pressed the searing metal, sizzling and smoking, into Star’s shoulder for five seconds, and then it was over.

  She was no one’s, now.

  1

  Brooke felt her way downstairs, sock feet sliding over the worn steps. The days were short this time of year, the mornings dark. Holly and Sal hadn’t even stirred when Brooke knocked for them to come down to breakfast. Asleep, or pretending to be. Brooke herself had been sleeping poorly since the auction. At night, she lay agitated for hours before she finally passed out, exhausted, only to be shocked awake by every creak of the walls, every knock of the branches outside.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Brooke swept her gaze over the living room, lit faintly by the glow of a lamp from the kitchen. Shapes long faded with familiarity—desk, bookshelf, sofa, toy box—had become sharp again these past few days, liable to strangeness. Brooke jerked the rug straight with a toe as she passed. She pulled Sal’s boot from where it poked out of a crease in the sofa and laid it with its mate on the floor.

  In the kitchen, Milo was hunched at the table in his bathrobe, coffee mug hanging at a slant. He’d set out a bowl of chia pudding for her, a spoon.

  Brooke glanced quickly at the door: still locked, its glass panes shining black.

  “Thanks.” She pulled out a chair across from Milo.

  “Mm,” he answered with a crooked smile. Hair sticking up on one side, cheek still creased with sleep.

  Milo didn’t ask why she’d started locking the door after all these years, its mechanism so seized up from disuse that she’d had to drench it in oil before it would slide, just as he didn’t ask what had possessed her to sell their last horse so suddenly, mere days before the cranberry harvest. It was four days since the auction, where the money Brooke left Milo had not been enough for a new horse—he had come hobbling home from where a friend dropped him at the road, carrying a hundred pounds of supplies—and still, he didn’t ask.

  He knew something was wrong; of course he did. Brooke could feel it in the care he took with her, the small affectionate gestures, the way he laid out her breakfast. She knew when she was being managed. But Milo had long ago learned there were things Brooke kept to herself, and he seemed content to trust her.

  From the first, Milo had been open-hearted and untroubled in a way Brooke couldn’t imagine. There was something about him, a frequency, a hum, something electric. Whatever it was, all he had to do was touch her and the alarm in her blood went quiet.

  She wished he would touch her now.

  She opened her mouth for the hundredth time to say what she should have said at the auction, and long before that. Again, words fled. She picked up her spoon and ate the pudding. She would tell him. She would. Just not this morning.

  “I’m going to check the bogs,” Brooke said instead. “The girls could clean out the rinsing shed. Get it ready for the harvest.”

  “I don’t mind doing that,” Milo said. “They’ve got enough as it is.”

  Milo had always been quick to spare Holly and Sal from chores. They were just kids, he often reminded Brooke; they should have fun. Brooke didn’t argue today. She rose from the table and stirred extra water into the pot of chia so it wouldn’t dry out before the girls woke.

  As Brooke moved past Milo to get her coat, he took her hand and held the palm against his lips.

  Brooke stilled. The effect, no longer a surprise, was still a comfort, as if the dial had been turned down on radio static.

  Down, but not quite off.

  “I’ll be back in a couple hours,” she said, brushing Milo’s cheek with her thumb. He let her go.

  On the porch, Brooke locked the door behind her and peered south, into darkness, listening. The land was silent, save for small, sudden scraps of sound, quickly hidden—mice and other night creatures, hungry and running.

  Coming down the steps, she felt a whisper-thin rime of ice under her boots. The cranberries needed a few more cold nights to fully ripen, but the frost had held off late this year, and now winter threatened to descend before they could be harvested.

  It was being right up against the northern mountains the way they were. The season could flip like a blade. People in town thought Brooke and Milo were crazy, living alone and unprotected so far out. Milo had had one of the best jobs in Buxton, teaching in the community school; he’d had his mother and his friends; yet he’d given it all up to buy a failing cranberry farm when Brooke told him she wanted to move farther from town. She’d hoped they would be hidden here. Their nearest neighbors were halfway to Buxton, at the farthest edge of tillable soil, a full day’s walk.

  Maybe people in town were right. No one could see them here, but neither would anyone know if they were in trouble.

  Brooke followed the path downhill to the cranberry bogs that grew in the silty runoff of a mountain creek. Crisscrossed by a maze of irrigation ditches, the bogs stretched a mile wide—pink in spring, green in summer, blood red in fall. In the winter, when the bogs flooded and froze, the girls could skate above the hibernating vines. This time of year, the bushes were tangled and impassable. One thing in Brooke’s favor: anyone coming from the south would have slow going.

  The sky had begun to pale. Brooke climbed the dike that surrounded the cranberry bogs and surveyed the red-blushed plants in the dawn light. The foothills were quiet. There came the first fluting
call of a thrush.

  Brooke told herself she’d done the best she could. She’d acted quickly to sell Star, the last thread tying her to the past. She’d kept her family hidden. There was nothing else she could do, short of uprooting Milo and the girls completely—and how would she explain that? Where could she take them? Horseless, with not enough cash to last a season, their only choice was to carry on. Harvest the berries and make enough money from the fall preserves to replace Star.

  Brooke would stay vigilant. She wouldn’t let her guard down again.

  The day of the auction, cursing her complacency, Brooke had run flat out from the end of their driveway and come hammering up the porch stairs to find Holly lying on the kitchen floor, eyes wide and staring. For one terrible moment, Brooke had thought she was too late.

  Then she noticed the book in Holly’s hand, the faraway expression on her daughter’s face.

  “Mom!” Holly sat up as Brooke stumbled into the room, kneeling awkwardly to wrap her arms around her daughter.

  Once Brooke’s breath returned to her, she told Holly that she’d come back from town early because there was too much to do at home, that Dad could handle the shopping alone. Sal, appearing from the living room at the sound of Brooke’s voice, was thrilled to have her mother home, and dragged Brooke straightaway into the hive of blankets she’d constructed around the sofa, detailing her fort’s many elaborate features.

  That night, after Brooke combed and braided Sal’s hair and tucked her into bed, she went to Holly’s room. Her elder daughter was propped up on a pillow, reading. The book was one she’d read before, probably several times.

  “Read out loud for a bit?” Brooke asked, lying across Holly’s feet. Holly rolled her eyes but complied.

  “Half a daikon radish. One cup sugar snap peas. One cup edamame beans. Two cups Napa cabbage. One ripe avocado. One small red onion. One carrot. A one-inch piece of fresh ginger.”

  Brooke closed her eyes, listening. Holly’s voice trailed off.

  “Why’d you stop?”

  “I thought you fell asleep.”