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“Please don’t hate me, Gus. I love you.”
Fuck. If he wasn’t dead, he was clearly dying. He tried to say her name, but he couldn’t make a sound. She looked up. God—her eyes: terrified, desperate. What had happened?
She slipped something under his pillow. “I don’t think there’s any other way, Gus.”
Something beeped.
A man’s face above his now—speaking to him like he was a toddler, telling him he was in the hospital. More beeping, the man started shouting at him. And he couldn’t see Theo anymore.
Mac Etheridge had lost count of the hours, of the days. The terrorism charges had been unexpected. But the endless rotating interrogation was easier to bear than not knowing what was happening outside. Had Gus survived? Had they arrested Theo? He’d asked, of course, but they’d said nothing aside from implying that that information might be exchanged for a confession.
They were using the deliveries of materials to his house as evidence of some sort. Perhaps bombs could be made out of cement? They knew, of course, about the Ponderosa. The authorities had been aware of the mad Etheridges for years. But they also knew that his family was obsessed with surviving an apocalypse, not starting one. He rubbed his face. What if the feds had decided to search the Ponderosa? God, what would his mother do then? It might be the very incursion his mother feared, and the response could be disaster.
He’d been eventually allowed one phone call. He’d called Bernie, asked her to make sure Horse was all right, and to get him a lawyer. She’d told him that his U.S. assets and bank accounts had been frozen, that Gus was in surgery again, that she had no news of Theo, and that Mac’s brothers were being questioned.
Mac shook his head as he thought about it. Zeke would be all right, but Sam and Caleb were idiots and likely to get them all executed by accident. He knew the terrorism allegations complicated matters.
“Mac, there’s more.”
Mac braced himself.
“A man’s come forward after seeing Gus’s picture in the news. He’s spoken to the media. He says that twelve years ago Gus Benton attempted to kill him, that he stabbed him.”
“What? Gus would have been a kid.”
“Jacob Curtis says he was sixteen. Apparently they all lived in the same commune on the east coast of Tasmania. According to Curtis, Theo was infatuated with him, would follow him around asking questions—that sort of thing. Gus was apparently a very jealous big brother. Curtis was talking to Theo one day and Gus attacked.”
“Bernie, I need you to find out everything you can about Curtis.”
“Already on it. He’s forty-two, a bit of a drifter, but he can verify that he was living in Tasmania twelve years ago…arrived in the States last year. I can’t find any Tasmanian hospital admission record but he’s lifting his shirt to display his scar whenever there’s a camera or a checkbook around. There’s no record of a police report into the incident. Curtis claims he was too frightened of retribution to go the police, but he does have an old photo of himself with Theo.”
Mac cursed. “The police?”
“Are looking into it, but aside from the photo, there’s no evidence and no witnesses. Gus is not in any condition to be questioned.”
“What does Theo say?”
“I don’t know where she is, Mac.”
“What?” Mac had assumed Theo was at Gus’s side. Why wasn’t she? What could possibly keep her from Gus? Mac cursed, frustrated, worried, and exhausted from keeping his anger in check. He was thinking about Theo more often than he expected. He tried to direct it to the sequence of events that had led to their current situation, the things that didn’t make sense, the people who seemed to have an interest. But, more often than not, his contemplation of crimes and suspects and motives was interrupted with a memory of her smile, the way she called that giant mutt “Horsey” to annoy Gus, that kiss…especially that kiss. God, the timing.
Gus Benton was well aware of his sister’s absence. Initially it had been through a fog of anesthesia and pain, tubes, and drips, so that he did not have the strength or clarity to focus on it.
The Australian Embassy had contacted Paul and Beth Benton to inform them of Gus’s condition, and to have the appropriate authorities question them about the claims of Jacob Curtis, but, having both been arrested at various protests and demonstrations over the years, the couple had been denied entry into America. Gus was secretly glad. He didn’t need to have his parents to worry about at the moment.
He’d been forced out of Crane, Hayes and Benton while he was still unconscious. The vindictive bastards had sacked Jacqui as well. She might have been mad at him if he hadn’t been shot.
As it was, she was his only visitor aside from the police. She gave him the heads-up on Curtis while everybody else believed he was still too ill to comprehend, tentatively, in case the news had an adverse effect on the equally tentative grip he seemed to have on life.
The information had, however, had the opposite effect and he’d rallied. Perhaps it was the healing impact of fury, but he improved. Slowly his condition moved from critical to serious to stable, and he began to ask questions.
The police were allowed to question him when he was no longer critical, which they did multiple times. Gus was surprised they didn’t arrest him, but he supposed it was not like he could go anywhere. They probably wanted to save the time that would start running when the arrest was made for when he could physically leave.
Jacob Curtis’s allegations were put to him. Gus was well enough to realize that Curtis could not possibly sustain an action for an unreported, unwitnessed attack, twelve years after the fact and in a different criminal jurisdiction. Not unless Theo testified against him, which he knew she would not. He presumed the Kansas PD’s interest in Curtis was to establish some pattern of violence that fit their current theory that he’d murdered Dan Murdoch because of the writer’s relationship with Theo. His alibi for that day was not foolproof.
They questioned him extensively on the whereabouts of Theo, his relationship with her, what he allowed her to do. Because of the medication, perhaps, it took him a little while to understand the line of their inquiries.
“Theo is not afraid of me, George,” he said, laughing bitterly when it dawned. “I was not keeping her prisoner, and she does not have some kind of weird Stockholm Syndrome. She’s my kid sister. Her mistake was to get involved with a man who clearly had some serious and dangerous enemies.”
