The Twice Lost

about the consequences. It was just . . .

It was just too sad.

Killing Peter would be too sad, too senseless.

“I should rip your throat out,” Andrew said to the twitching mass under his knee, but his voice didn’t have much conviction. “I should throw your dirtbag of a corpse off the same damn cliff where you left my little girl after you tried to rape her. I should . . .” There was a rivulet of blood dribbling from Peter’s swollen lips, pooling on the green linoleum. At least, Andrew thought, he’d accomplished that much before punking out.

Andrew got up heavily, walked to the cabinets, and picked out a can of chili. He started poking through the drawers for a can opener. Behind him Peter made slobbery noises and spat out his teeth. Andrew didn’t bother turning around.

“Andrew . . .” The tone wasn’t what Andrew would have expected. It was high and soft.

Andrew still didn’t look back. “Yeah?”

“She’s . . . really alive? Luce is really . . . she’s really alive? You’re not shitting me?”

“I just saw her. About four-five weeks ago, now.” He dumped the chili into a pot and fired up a burner, flicking the match into the sink. “She was a lot less dead than I am, for sure.”

The slobbery noise got louder. “Where the hell is she, then?” Peter’s voice kept getting higher, whinier. “Little girl just ran off and made me think . . . Didn’t even call. Is she coming home?”

“Is that what you call this dump? I’d bleed you like a pig before I’d let you get anywhere near her, Peter. No damn way you’ll ever see her again. You don’t even deserve a chance to apologize to her, you hear me?” He wasn’t about to explain why Luce wasn’t coming back. It was enough to know that the words hurt Peter more than the beating did.

Even without turning to look Andrew knew his brother was sobbing on the floor. He stood at the window eating his chili from the pan and watching the distant roil of the waves. A film of Peter’s blood clung to his knuckles, sticky and red.

Luce was out there. Somewhere. But how was he supposed to find her?

* * *

He slept in Luce’s old bed that night in her tiny room with books heaped on the dresser and postcards from cities they’d traveled to together tacked around the bed. High on the wall were two photos: a snapshot of Alyssa holding a three-year-old Luce on her lap, a big white sunhat casting a slanting shadow across both their faces. The photo next to it was much more recent, an official school portrait that Andrew guessed had been taken not long after his boat wrecked. In it Luce appeared unsmiling and scared, her eyes wide and otherworldly, wearing a navy sweater that was getting too small for her. She looked lovely and horribly vulnerable, and he ached to hold her and tell her that everything would somehow be okay.

Alyssa was dead. That was understandable, natural, even if it ripped his heart to think about it. But the way he’d lost Luce, on the other hand . . . that was too surreal, too impossible. There was just no coming to terms with something that made so little sense.

He woke up to a silent house. Peter must have actually gone in to work, then, even with his busted face. Everyone would just figure he’d had a nasty fall while he was drunk. Apart from the endless hiss of the waves there was no sound at all. After a minute Andrew pulled himself out of bed, stretched and moaned. If he wasn’t going to kill Peter, then he also wasn’t going to be spending the next twenty years locked up. Looked like he’d have to think of something else to do, if rotting in prison was off the table.

He’d clear out after breakfast. Leave Peter a note and never come back. For all he knew Luce could be anywhere along the continent’s west coast, so there was no reason to stay put.

The photos of Luce and Alyssa almost hummed to him; he could feel their nearness, hear a wisp of their mingled voices. He pulled both pictures off the wall and slipped them into his backpack, then got dressed in the old clothes people on the islands had been kind enough to give him when he’d shown up wrapped in filthy sealskins. They’d been awfully good to him, the mad, tattered castaway who’d insisted at first—until he got his head together, anyway—that he’d been brought there by his daughter, Luce, and that she was a mermaid.

Andrew stumbled out into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, stepping over the blotch of crusted blood on the linoleum. He’d been knocking through the cupboards for a few minutes before he noticed the dark silhouette floating on the door’s sunlit curtain. Somebody was standing there, dead still, watching him through the gap. Andrew swung around and saw a sliver of a tan-skinned, thickset man, his neat silver hair like a glaze in the pale daylight.

Once the man saw Andrew looking he knocked as if he’d just arrived. But Andrew was sure the guy had been standing there for a while.

“Yeah? Help you with something?” Andrew didn’t try to keep the annoyance out of his voice as he opened the door.

“Peter Korchak?” The man on the step had warm, sympathetic brown eyes, but his mouth was tense.

“That would be my brother, actually. Want me to tell him you were looking for him?”

“Your brother.” The tan-skinned man stared for a moment as if he weren’t sure whether or not to believe it. “And your name is?”

“You’re the one on the outside of the door. That means you might want to think about introducing yourself before you go asking me anything.”

In reply the man folded back his coat. His badge gleamed in the pallid day. “Ben Ellison. FBI.”

“All right.” That didn’t make too much sense unless Peter had gone and turned criminal. But there it was. “And I’m Andrew.”

Ben Ellison made a conspicuous effort to stay calm. “Do you have any identification?”

“No.” Andrew stared for a second. “Peter can vouch for me, I guess, if you’ve got some reason you need to know. What’s your business here?”

“My understanding is that Andrew Korchak was lost at sea. More than two years ago. But if that’s really who you are . . .”

“That’s who I am. I didn’t stay lost, is all.” He felt tired, and even though he’d washed his hand the night before, he suddenly noticed lines of dried blood still clinging in the grooves of his knuckles. “What’s your business?”

“Then I expect you would know who this is?”

A photo. Zoomed in until it was very close and grainy so that it only showed her face glancing back over her shoulder. The background was bright and blurry, but it looked like shining water. Her cheek was marred, and Andrew’s breath caught as he noticed the notch torn from her ear. “Where did you get this?”

“So you do recognize her?”

Andrew couldn’t stand it. He pivoted on his heel and walked to the counter, leaning with his head hanging down, his shoulders heaving. He’d failed to protect Luce again. And for some reason this FBI bastard was asking questions about her, and that might mean . . .

“Mr. Korchak?”

That might mean he knew . . .

“This photo was taken just a few days ago. I’d like to discuss the situation with you, Mr. Korchak, if that would be all right.” Ben Ellison stepped over the threshold and approached. The kettle was whistling out a piercing, horrible note.

“What do you want with her? Look, whatever you’re thinking . . . Luce is still a little girl . . .” His arms were crossed on the counter, leaning heavily, but he was painfully aware that Ben Ellison must have noticed how he was shaking.

“You know, you don’t seem at all surprised. To find out that Luce is still alive.”

Oh. Right. He was supposed to think that Luce had killed herself. It was too late to pretend, though. “I knew she wasn’t dead, is why.”

There was a pause. Andrew looked up to watch Ben Ellison’s face, to observe the thoughts churning just behind his eyes. The guy seemed pretty smart, actually. “And would knowing Luce is alive be somehow connected?