“They’re coming to kill me,” he said.
She stared at him. Started to say something and then stopped, took a breath, and finally said, “Who?”
“I don’t know their names. But there are two of them. They’ve come a long way.”
He could see that she was trying to decide whether to believe him. Wondering if he was some sort of crazy kid who’d imagined a wild story. Why wouldn’t she think that? The truth was harder to believe.
“You think I’m making it up.”
“No,” she said, and maybe she wasn’t lying. “Who’s coming? And why? Tell me why.”
“I can’t.”
“If I’m in danger because you’re here, I at least need to understand it.”
She was right, and he felt bad refusing to tell her the truth. If they were close-and he knew they were, they had to be-then she was in danger too. It wasn’t just him.
“I think they killed his wife,” he whispered. “Or hurt her really bad. Burned his house down, all because of me.”
“Hang on,” the woman said. “Hang on. A house fire? I heard a house-fire call earlier tonight. You were there?”
For the first time, it was clear that she was absolutely willing to believe him. Or at least to listen. The fire had convinced her. Fire had that kind of power.
“I wasn’t there,” he said. “But…I’m not supposed to tell anybody anything. I’m not supposed to trust anyone. They made me promise that.”
“Connor, you can trust me. And I need to know.”
He looked away and said, “I saw a murder. They brought me up here to hide me. I guess they didn’t do a very good job.”
She looked at the door and for a minute he thought she was going to walk out of it, just leave him here and not look back. He wouldn’t have blamed her. Instead, she took a deep breath and said, “Where did you see a murder?”
“Indiana. I’m supposed to be a witness. People thought I was safe here, but…but I think they found me.”
“Who are they? Not their names, but…”
She didn’t know how to phrase the question, but he knew how to answer it.
“They’re evil,” he said. “That’s all they are. They were dressed like police, but the people they killed were police. They kill people for money, and it doesn’t even…it doesn’t even stress them out. I watched them do it. They were relaxed the whole time. People don’t matter to them.”
He told her all of it. All the important stuff. The plan his parents had agreed to, the way he was supposed to pretend to be a bad kid, the way he was supposed to fit in with the group and hide in the wilderness and there would be no cell phones to trace or cameras to spot him; he would be off the grid, that was the whole point. He told her about Ethan and the way he’d woken them all in the night and how they’d been walking back down the Pilot Creek trail when he turned off his headlamp and let them go on. When he was finished, he added, “I’m sorry it had to be you.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry you had to be here. I don’t want anyone getting hurt because of me.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Nobody will get hurt. We’ll figure it out.”
It seemed like she was trying to convince herself, not him, and that was fine, because Jace didn’t believe it.
“We can see them coming,” she said. “If they’re really out there, and they head up here, we can see them coming for a long ways.”
He looked at the windows and nodded. “I guess we’ll know when they get here, at least.”
“You’re sure they’re coming?” she said.
“I’m sure.”
“How long did it take you to get here?”
“A little more than an hour.”
“So they could be here any minute.”
“I don’t know. They weren’t with us. If they were, I’d be dead by now.”
“I think we should leave,” she said. “If we can get back to the road, then we can-”
“It’s a long walk to the road.”
“Yes, it is. Seven miles. But we can do it. We’ll be fine.”
“You can stay here,” Jace told her. “I’ll run for it. You don’t need to try to make it with me. Or I can stay and you can run.”
She said, “Let’s stick together. Whatever we decide, let’s both do the same thing.”
He nodded. He didn’t want to see her get hurt because of him, but he didn’t want to be alone either. “What’s your name?” he said.
“Hannah. Hannah Faber.”
“I’m sorry, Hannah. I really am. But they’re very good. They found me even when I was off the grid. If you had said anything on the radio, I know they would have been here. They would have heard it, somehow. They hear it all.”
“Well,” she said, bending to pick up a broken fragment of the face of the radio, “that doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore, does it?”
“No.”
“Okay. You’ve taken care of one problem. But now we need to figure out how to take care of the rest. Any ideas?”
He was silent for a minute, and then he said, “I had an escape route.”
“Pardon?”
“We all did. Ethan makes us plot one before we set out. This time it was going into Cooke City. But not using the trail. If we’re going to leave, we probably shouldn’t use the trail. That’s what they’ll take to find me.”
“Fantastic,” Hannah Faber told him. “Just you and me and the wilderness? No, let’s wait here. Nobody knows where you are. You’ve seen to that, thanks to your work on the radio. But eventually, they’re going to notice that I’m off the air. And when they do, they’ll send help.”
“So we just wait?”
“Right. We wait it out where we can see people coming a long time before they get here. That’s the best thing about this place.” She was pacing and nodding to herself the way you did when you were trying to talk yourself into being brave. Jace recognized the behavior. He’d done it on the quarry ledges.
“We can just wait here, like it’s a fortress,” she said. “It’ll be like the Alamo.”
“Everybody died at the Alamo,” Jace said.
She stood with her back to the window and looked at him as the world of shadows gave way to daylight behind her.
“Probably because they had no damn radio,” she said.
20
Allison’s face was all but hidden from him. Bandages covered the skin he’d touched with his lips countless times. Only her closed eyes were visible, and her mouth, dark with swelling and laced with black stitches. Hand and forearm wrapped in heavy gauze. Ethan touched her unbandaged hand and said her name, soft as a prayer. Her eyes opened and found his.
“Baby,” she said. The word came clumsily from her broken mouth.
“I’m here.”
“I did the best I could,” she said. “Maybe not so good. But the best I could.”
What was left of her hair had been cut down to jagged clumps by the nurses. The rest had burned away. He used to run his hands through it before she slept, or when she was sick, or anytime a comforting gesture seemed in order. One was in order now but he knew better than to touch.
“You did amazing,” he said, and his words came out clumsily too. That was no good. One of them should be able to speak. “I’m so sorry. It’s on me. They came because of-”
“No,” she said. “They came because of her.”
“I made a mistake. Should never have agreed to it.”
“She made the mistake. You were just part of it.”
He wasn’t ready to blame Jamie Bennett just yet. He couldn’t say that he was ready to forgive her either. She rushes, and she makes mistakes, Allison had said. Not wrong, that assessment. Not wrong at all. The one hundred percent guarantee that the men would not get to her witness, her promise that if they even moved toward Montana, she’d know about it? So much for that. Ethan hadn’t heard a word. He wondered for the first time if she was still alive.