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.
Will said, “Could I have your attention for a minute, please? My daughter and I are going to get some food from the kitchen, since we haven’t eaten all day. Is anyone hungry?” No one spoke or raised a hand. “Tomorrow, if this storm has let up, a bush pilot is supposed to land on a nearby lake at three in the afternoon. I’m going to head out early and try to reach him, fly back to Fairbanks and get help. Try to find a big seaplane to fly to this inner lake. Hopefully, come tomorrow evening, you’ll all be back in civilization, with your families en route.”
A half hour later, Devlin sat on the hearth before the fire, eating beef stew and buttered biscuits.
When she finished her late supper, she crawled under the covers next to her mother. She could feel the warmth of the fire through the blanket, the room dark, quiet, filled with the respirations of women sleeping, the crack and hiss of the flames devouring the wood, a slumber party like Devlin could never have imagined. She was asleep within a minute.
Rachael lay on her side, facing her husband, his face awash in firelight. She thought for sure he’d aged more than five years, his features harder, leaner, not a hint of the baby fat that had once smoothed his jawline, given him those boyish good looks she’d fallen for in college. She even thought she saw strands of silver.
Will opened his eyes. Rachael smiled.
“Are you warm?” he whispered. She nodded, the child in her belly active. She wanted to take Will’s hand, let him feel the tiny thrusts of the baby’s knees and elbow. “You’ve got that deep-thinking look on your face,” he said.
“It’s going to be difficult.”
“What?”
“Reintegrating, coming together again. I’m not sure how I’ll make it on the outside. I feel like I’m being released after a twenty-year prison sentence. Like I won’t know what to do with myself. How to be a mother again. A wife.”
“We’ll make it work, Rachael.”
“You say that, but . . . you don’t realize—”
“I don’t care how hard it is.”
“You say that now.”
“I mean it now. I’ll mean it later.”
“I want you to feel something.” She took his wrist and pressed the palm of his hand against the side of her stomach.
“Kicking,” Will said.
“Yeah. It’s his busy time. Usually wakes me up doing this in the middle of the night.”
“You know it’s a he?”
“Not for certain, but I’ve gotten good at telling. Feels like boy energy.”
“How many have you had since you’ve been here?”
“This is my fourth.”
“What happened to the others?”
“They sold them.”
“Jesus. How far along are you?”
“Six and a half months. I’m going to keep him.”
“Why would you—”
“I’ve had three of my babies taken away from me—a week after birth. I think they must sell them. I tried not to get attached, fought it. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t know what they came from. All they knew was that I was their mother, and I loved every one of them, and I still do. I want to keep this one. Raise him. Might be the only good thing about any of this. I know this is difficult for you. I’ve been damaged beyond repair in your eyes.”