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The storm had arrived.
My mother’s eyes glittered with excitement as she pulled on her slicker. She took hold of my arm and dragged me across the kitchen toward the back door. My terror found its voice as I dug in my heels. “Let go. I don’t want to—”
“Your father warned you, but you wouldn’t listen. Now you’re going to see just what you’re making him do.” She opened the back door and shoved me to my knees at the bottom of the steps. By the time I stood up, she was beside me again, her nails biting into my skin.
It was twenty yards to the barn, lit only by the flashes from the sky. I lost my balance, sliding in the mud, but her forward momentum kept me upright. As water soaked my clothes and turned my dingy sneakers brown, I thought, She’ll punish me for this tomorrow. “How did you get your shoes so dirty? You are so stupid. You do it just to cause me trouble.”
Maybe I was stupid. Just ahead, behind big wooden doors, my father waited with his next victim, and I worried about shoes? He intended to force me to watch his sick game to the end, and all I could think about was my own problems?
God wasn’t a name heard often in our house, and when it was used, it was a curse rather than a prayer. I didn’t know how to pray, beyond what my grandmother had taught me when I was five. Those were the only words I could put in coherent order. Now I lay me down to sleep.
The door was just ahead. I wanted to stop. To break and run. To hide under my bed and hope that this time when they moved on—they always moved on after every victim—they would forget to take me with them. If I made myself small enough and quiet enough, if I pretended I was invisible, if I prayed…
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If they made me watch this tonight, I wasn’t sure I would still have a soul come morning. Some things were just too fragile to survive.
If I should die before I wake…
My mother had to let go of me to shove open the wide heavy doors, spilling out yellow light into the storm. He was in there, but I didn’t see him right away. I tried not to see anything, but I didn’t have a choice. She was there, hands tied above her head, in the middle of the large space. Her mouth was taped; her eyes were huge and fearful and her breathing was a pained gasp that hurt me to hear. She knew I’d gotten her into this, and she looked at me as if I could save her.
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save myself. All I could do was pray the Lord my soul to take. And hers. Right now. A lightning strike, a funnel cloud swooping out of the sky to carry us away.
Because the real storm was yet to come.
—Excerpt, The Unlucky Ones by Jane Gama
“Chief, Lois is looking for us.”
Sam looked up as Ben Little Bear strode out of Judge Watson’s second-floor courtroom. The hearing he’d appeared for had already started; Ben should have been on the stand the past five minutes. Instead, he was heading for the stairs and obviously had no doubt that Sam would follow.
“What’s up?” Only an emergency could get an officer off Judge Watson’s stand, and the old coot had a different definition of the word than everyone else did.
Their boots clunked on the marble stairs, the noise bouncing off the high ceiling and echoing off the walls. The Cedar County Courthouse was more than a hundred years old, built at a time when marble and stone and intricate woodwork had been within a small city’s reach. It was one of the beauties of Cedar Creek architecture.
Ben reached the first floor before glancing back. “We have another murder. That makes three in four years. Two in five days.”
Sam’s gut tightened. Cedar Creek’s violent crime mostly ran along the lines of burglaries, robberies, drug deals gone bad, assaults and domestic disputes. It was enough to keep the department busy, but not enough to overly worry the town council or the residents.
“That’s not all.” Ben pushed one of the heavy doors open, then held it for Sam. “Guess who was there when the body was found.”
Sam hated statements like that. If the answers weren’t obvious, no one would say them in the first place. Adjusting his hat against the glaring sun, he matched his stride to Ben’s as they headed for the police department, a minute’s walk away across the town square.
