Kin

She turned in the seat and glared at him. “What?”

“I said no.”

“I don’t care. I said I want to go, and you don’t get to tell me I can’t.”

“Jesus, Claire… why would you want to go back? If what we uncovered is true, then these guys have been snatching people and murdering them for years. You might be the only person who ever lived to tell the tale.”

“A tale nobody believed,” she said flatly.

“I believed it. But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say is that I can take care of this. I’m going to. There’s no need for you to be there to see it. When it’s over, I’ll come see you, and we can talk. I’ll tell you everything. But for now you need to stay here where you’re safe.”

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Safe? Here? Finch…” She gestured at the world outside the car. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter where I go. Here, back there, France, the North Pole, it doesn’t matter. I’ll never be safe again. You could build a castle around me and seal it up and I’d still be what I am. And what I am is scared. What I’m afraid of…” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat, then looked at him with fiery resolve. “What I’m afraid of isn’t out there. It’s in here,” she said, tapping a forefinger against her temple. “And no matter where I run, it’ll follow me, whether you kill those men or not.”

“Why do you want to come if it won’t change anything for you?”

“I’m alive and I shouldn’t be,” she said sadly. “And I don’t know how long I’ll be able to last with that voice telling me I should be with my friends, but in that time I’d like to see those men, and those children, understand what they did to us. To feel the pain and the fear they were so fucking eager to inflict on us. “ Her eyes shimmered with tears. “I want to know they’re dead. Maybe it will change things, maybe it won’t, but I need to be there. I need to see the world put back on its axis, things put right, even if I don’t belong in it anymore.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“You still have people, Claire.”

“Who? You?”

“No. Your Mom, and Kara. You still have people who care about you and who’ll protect you. The rest of us have been left with nothing.”

She looked squarely at him. “Do you blame me?”

“What?”

“For what happened? Do you blame me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course not. You didn’t make it happen.”

“But does it make you mad that I lived and Danny didn’t?”

He avoided her eyes for a moment. The truth was, in the beginning, he had been mad at her. He might even have hated her a little for being the sole survivor, questioned fate as to why she had been chosen above the others. But it had been a passing thing, the hate quickly redirected to the proper target, where it deepened, grew potent, became rage.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said to his silence and he quickly drew her close.

“No,” he said. “I’m not mad that you survived. Not mad at you. I blame them because that’s where the blame belongs.”

Head resting against his shoulder, she asked, “Do you think it will go away when you’ve killed them? The pain?”

“No,” he answered truthfully. “I don’t think that’ll ever go away. Not fully. Not after what you’ve gone through.”

“I wasn’t talking about me.”

He smiled tightly, her hair tickling his chin. “I don’t suppose it’ll go away for either of us.”

“Then why bother?”

“Because it’s how it needs to be.”

She pulled away from him, folded her arms. “So can I come?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’m spoiled for reasons, Claire. Firstly, forget about those fucking lunatics down there for a minute. What do you think Kara will do if she finds out I’ve taken you back?”

“Who cares?”

“I care, and you will too because she’ll have the cops on our asses so fast we won’t even see their lights before I’m in jail and you’re back under house arrest. Christ, you know as well as I do that Kara wouldn’t stand for it. She’d make my life a living hell.”

Though she shook her head, Finch could see in her face that she knew he was right. “Plus,” he went on, “You’ve been through enough bad shit. You don’t need to be put back in harm’s way after escaping it once just to see more bad shit.”

She fell silent, almost sulking, but he understood her feelings. They were the same as his own. Behind all the pain in Claire’s face, he recognized the fear, the grief, and the kind of stark, utter hatred that could only be sated by vengeance.

“Did you bring your phone?”

Quietly, she nodded, and slid it out of her jeans pocket, then handed it over. Finch inspected the cell phone. A slim, silver Nokia. Nothing much different from the kind of phones most of the kids were carrying around these days. “Keep it,” she said.

“I don’t need it. Just the number. I have a friend who will know if we can use it to trace the signal to whoever answered it, or at least to where they were when they answered it. Danny’s phone needs to be on, I guess, for us to have any hope of tracking it. If it isn’t…” He shrugged.

“You didn’t need to see me for that. I called you. You already have my number.”

“I wanted to see you.” When she said nothing, he nudged her shoulder. “Hey.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, all right? I know why you need this. And I can’t stop you going alone. You just can’t come with me.”

A moment more of silence, then she cracked the door and stepped out of the car. She had grown so thin since Alabama he could see her shoulder blades pressing like incipient wings against the thin blue plastic of her raincoat. “Then who needs you,” she said and slammed it shut before he could say anything further.

In the rearview, he watched her—a nineteen-year-old girl once pretty and vibrant, now bitter and prematurely aged—as she walked back to where he knew her sister was waiting.

-27-

“Hello Miss Daltry, and isn’t it a fine morning?” the pawnbroker said cheerfully, his pudgy face molded around a large thick-lipped smile. Louise resisted the urge to look over her shoulder at the urban snowscape framed by the grimy storefront window behind her. It was a horrible day in almost every conceivable way, and as a result she had little tolerance for people like Rag Truman, who felt compelled to find the upside of everything and would probably keep on smiling even if he looked down at himself and realized he was on fire.

She hurried to the counter—a glass cabinet marred by greasy fingerprints, within which gold and silver jewelry on black velvet cushions sat next to nickel-plated revolvers, an assortment of cell phones, lighters, hunting knives, men’s ties and women’s silk scarves. Behind Rag was a blue steel door with a card reader to the left. A small red light showed that it was securely locked. A faded sign read: PRIVATE. All around were high metal shelves, packed with treasures for the undiscerning eye. There was so much of it in the musty room, it made Louise claustrophobic, but she acknowledged that a lot of that might not be the size of pawn shop, rather the feeling that a net was rapidly being cinched tight around her.