Page 13 of The Chain House

“And with Beth Hawthorne being one of the survivors from the cult murders back then … and she’s suddenly missing now, like a day before he’s set to be executed?”

“I’ll ask him,” Sam said.

“Pinkie promise.”

He stuck out his right pinkie and she playfully swatted it away.

“Kidding,” she said. “But seriously. Make that one of your questions.”

He took a big swallow of beer, suddenly feeling the need to be tipsy. “It’s gonna be a long project. The doc. There’s a lot I haven’t covered yet. I don’t even know if I’m ready for this.”

She turned toward him quickly. “You need help?” And then, “I think I can help. Okay, so I’d really like to help with this, Sam.”

“The interview or the doc?”

“The doc,” she said. “But both, now, I guess.”

He did, he desperately needed help, but so far, he’d done it all on his own.

Unlike her, though, he wasn’t good at reading people, and right now he couldn’t see her angle on this. “Jennifer … why are you really here?”

She shrugged, watched the pool again. “So, in your doc, you haven’t gotten to the part where the four children were found inside the closet of Sal’s house … on the Freedom Ranch.”

“No … I know about them, of course, and they’re on my list to hunt down, but no, not yet. Why?”

“I’ll save you the trouble of hunting one of them down.”

“How?”

She looked at him like he was dense. “I was one of them, Sam. I was one of the four children locked inside that closet.”

CHAPTER5

Before

THE LITTLE GIRL didn’t understand why it was called the Freedom Ranch.

She knew what it meant to be free. Birds were free. They could fly over the treetops. The deer and raccoons and squirrels were free. They could run through the woods and nobody hunted them down. Therefore the birds and the animals, aside from those that got hunted and cooked in the Kitchen House, all had their freedom.

She just didn’t know what it felt like to be free anymore. Because even though she was only six and had only been here for a month, she knew the rules, and one of the biggest ones was that nobody was allowed to leave the Freedom Ranch.

Nobody could leave The Collective.

She knew what a prisoner was, and if you weren’t free, you were a prisoner of something.

A prisoner of someone.

And she wasn’t too young to know who that someone was—the man who lived in the main house. The man with the beard and long hair who she thought looked like Jesus and who her mother—wherever she was—thought looked like Jared Leto, the lead singer from her favorite band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.

The man with the cold blue eyes who called himself the Breaker of Chains.

The man who once told the four kids that demons lived in the woods, and to never enter them. And that the ranch was like a beehive, and they were all bees, and that bees always return to their hive.

He was the only male on the ranch with facial hair, the girl noticed, to which Markie, one of the three boys on the ranch, explained: He’s the only one allowed to, because he makes the rules. Markie was only five and had big ears, but he seemed to know things, so she’d buddied up to him on day one. And she’d buddied up even more after he and Iris and Peter told her that anyone who goes into the woods, unless it’s with a gun to hunt, never comes back. That had made her instantly sad and scared, and she’d decided right then not to tell them why she’d brought the woods up in the first place. Her mother had disappeared into the trees on their second night on the Freedom Ranch, and she’d never come back. Which meant maybe there were demons out there. The girl had knelt on her bed and watched out the window as her mother sprinted into the woods that night, her bright red hair trailing like fire flames, and then gone. Nobody had seen her since, although her mother’s parting words were still fresh in the girl’s ear, as clear as if they’d been whispered last night and not a month ago.

I think we made a mistake coming here, Jennifer, her mother had whispered, after sneaking into the children’s barracks in the middle of the night. She was crying softly and looking over her shoulder every few seconds, and completely terrified of something, or someone, or all of it. I think we made a mistake, she said again, kissing her daughter’s forehead and smoothing her hair back with a hand that shook so much the girl thought it might fall off.

And also thinking: It wasn’t my idea to come here, Mom.