Unleashed Read online

  Turbulence made the plane stutter and she sucked in her breath. Clinging to the armrests, she struggled not to see the ground thousands of feet below her. Fall here, and no net on earth could save her. The pilot announced their descent; she was so afraid she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She wanted to scream. Her heart thundered.

  When the tires finally bumped on the tarmac, she opened her eyes and stared out at … very little. A tiny airport. Minuscule. Beyond, an open field. Banjo Land.

  There had been an equipment failure of their aircraft, and their departure from LAX had been delayed by three hours. Instead of arriving in Arkansas around two-thirty, the plane got there at five-thirty, and shadows were beginning to lengthen. Back home, the sun would still be blazing against the brilliant blue Pacific Ocean for hours and hours.

  Everyone got up. The Wolf Man was still going on about his retreat and the ebook lady was nodding. Inching along, Katelyn reached up toward the compartment where she’d stowed her bag. Since she was only five three, it was a stretch. A tall guy wearing a University of Arkansas T-shirt hoisted it down to her and she thanked him. He gave her a look—her face was probably swollen from crying—and she ducked her head.

  She dug into the bag and found her iPhone. She turned it on. A text had come in from Kimi: CM WHEN U LAND. CM meant “call me.” She flipped over to her phone function. No service. She tried to text anyway. It wouldn’t go through.

  “Are you kidding me?” she murmured.

  Then she walked down a metal gangway pushed up to the airplane door. The air was boiling hot and muggy, and her ponytail drooped like a wet paintbrush. She followed the other passengers across the tarmac, eventually making her way into the terminal, and looked around for her grandfather. But no familiar face greeted her.

  He knew she was coming that day, right? Did he realize that her flight hadn’t been canceled, only delayed?

  She went with the others to the baggage claim. There was one carousel. Just one. A dozen black bags circled like crows, decorated with bows and colorful pieces of duct tape so their owners could tell them apart. A woman in a Tinker Bell T-shirt grabbed a suitcase tagged with a smiling Mickey Mouse. Most of these people had likely gone to California on vacation. They’d gone to see the ocean, Hollywood, and the theme parks.

  Still no grandfather.

  So where was he? Had he given up and gone back to the mountains?

  I don’t want to be here.

  Her vision blurred as she stood holding her purple overnight bag. She tightly squeezed the bear, damp and stained dark with fresh tears.

  Then she saw the Wolf Man with his prey, the polite Southern lady with the e-reader. They were standing strangely close together while they scanned the conveyer belt for their stuff, and the woman was laughing at something he was saying. Were they hooking up? Katelyn was incredulous.

  Her father’s weathered leather suitcase appeared on the carousel. The light caught the little brass rectangle with his initials—SKM—Sean Kevin McBride. She adjusted her overnight bag on her shoulder and tucked the bear under her arm, preparing to make her move. When the suitcase circled within reach, she grabbed it, grunting as she heaved with all her strength to swing it free.

  Once she had it clear, she turned around, and jerked, hard.

  She hadn’t seen him in almost five years, but Mordecai McBride hadn’t changed at all. He was over six feet tall, with pale green eyes, close-cut gray hair, and deep frown lines that made his mouth sag. Inside a leather jacket, his shoulders looked broad and a blue chambray shirt stretched across a barrel chest. He was sixty, but he didn’t look it.

  Her throat tightened. She was mad at him. He was her only living relative—or at least, the only one she knew—and he hadn’t even come to her mother’s funeral.

  Their eyes met. Something began to show in his face; then it hardened and became expressionless. He nodded and took the suitcase from her hand, swinging it easily from two fingers as he turned and walked away.

  She hurried to keep up with him as he strode through the crowd. Around her she could see relatives and friends greeting each other, smiling and hugging. Her grandfather hadn’t even spoken to her. She clutched the bear even tighter.

  The McBride airport limo service was a battered old truck. Parts of it were still red, but the elements had worn the paint away, revealing sections of gunmetal gray and rust. There wasn’t room in the cab for her large suitcase, so her grandfather heaved it into the truck bed and began covering it with a tarp. Katelyn climbed into the passenger seat and, pressing the bear against her chest, arranged the overnight bag on her lap and then tried to text Kimi again.

  No service.

  When her grandfather got behind the wheel, he glanced at the bear, then at her. He probably thought she was too old to have stuffed animals, but she couldn’t care less what he thought.

  He started the engine. Then he sat there for a moment. She tensed, waiting.

  “Things go okay with your mama’s … arrangements?”

  They were the first words he had spoken to her, and they stunned her. She wanted him to ask her how she was, how the flight had been, tell her what the weather had been like that day. Something to ease them both into a conversation. But she also wanted him to care about her mother and acknowledge that he hadn’t come to her funeral.

  “Yes. She was buried six days ago,” she managed to reply. Then, without thinking, she added, “You should have been there.”

  There was a beat. He backed out of the parking space and turned on the windshield wipers as drizzle dotted the glass. Clouds rushed across the darkening sky. Treetops bent over the truck, red painting the leaves like flames.

  “Couldn’t get away.”

  “You’re retired,” she said accusingly before she could stop herself.

  He glanced at her, then back at the road. “Just ’cuz I’m retired doesn’t mean I don’t have responsibilities.”

  It hurt. But I’m your responsibility, she wanted to say.

  He turned his head again. “I had to get things ready for you.”

  Things? What things? Was he implying that she was inconveniencing him? If he hadn’t wanted her to come, she could have stayed in L.A. If he didn’t care about her, why had he made her come live with him? Just to make her life miserable?

  They drove past a huge warehouse, brown weedy fields, and some apartments and houses that didn’t look much different from sections of L.A. She spotted a fast-food place called Las Fajitas and thought about asking him to stop. She hadn’t been able to eat anything on the plane, and she was light-headed with hunger, if not actually hungry. But to make the request, she would have to speak to him again, and she wasn’t sure she could force herself to do it. How was she going to make it through an entire school year?

  She turned back to look at him. His jaw was clenched and his hands gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles looked like they were going to pop through the skin.

  He said tersely, “I want to be home before dark.”

  Why? she wanted to ask him. What does it matter? Maybe the headlights on his old truck didn’t work.

  She looked back through the passenger-side window and caught a flash of lightning; then the sky opened up and rain poured down. The sky shrank into a thick layer of gray clouds, and the truck scuttled beneath it like an insect, scooting past open fields bordered by batches of leafy trees and ferns. She saw a broken-down mobile home, several huge piles of split logs, and a run-down shack with a hand-lettered sign in the window that read LIQUOR BAIT. Pools of water sparkled with lightning.

  She debated asking him if it would be all right if she listened to her music. But since they weren’t speaking, it didn’t seem to matter. She popped in her earbuds and was soon listening to an old Lady Gaga song Kimi had insisted on adding to her mix. It was too happy and catchy, but she let it play anyway.

  They reached a metal bridge. Churning water rushed beneath it, as gray as the clouds. A river. She remembered that Arkansas was landlocked
, and for a moment a deep panic shuddered through her as she imagined herself on a map of the United States, trapped inside the box of land. She had always lived near the ocean and she had always found comfort in staring out to sea, meditating on her future. Many times her thoughts would turn to her father’s murder. Gunned down, no witnesses, nothing from forensics. The homicide of Sean McBride was an ice-cold case, but he had worked for the district attorney’s office, and everybody took his death personally.

  The first thing she saw on the other side of the bridge after they crossed it was a white wooden sign with DANGER written on it in black letters. There was something else she couldn’t make out; the writing was cracked, peeling with age. A red splotch in the lower right looked a little like a bear paw, but it was hard to tell in the rain.

  She pulled out one of her earbuds and turned to her grandfather. She was going to ask if there were any bears in the area, but before she could, a strange, low moan made her jump. It came from outside the truck—or so she guessed—and maybe it was a cow; only it wasn’t so much a moan as an echo of a moan. Or maybe a howl. It sounded … sad. For a weird moment she thought maybe she’d made the sound herself.

  “What was that?” she asked. “A bear?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  The moan sounded again, low and sad and maybe desperate. Like how I feel.

  “There,” she said. “You must have heard that. What is it?”

  The windshield wipers kept time in the silence. Finally he said, “The wind.”

  There were no more moans, but just the same, Katelyn was unnerved by her grandfather’s response. There was no way that was just the wind. She put her earbuds back in and turned to stare out the window again.

  Waving in the storm, the trees were pretty, their scarlet branches flickering like flames. Raindrops on the windshield acted like magnifying glasses, creating dollops of color. As they drove, the trees began to press in thick and close on either side of the road, branches arching overhead. The road was steep, and her head began to bob as she dozed.

  Suddenly she felt eyes on her. She shifted in her seat to find her grandfather staring straight at her. He said something, but she couldn’t make it out.

  She took out her left earbud. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t understand that.”

  He frowned. “And I don’t understand you at all.”

  Startled, she took out the other earbud but let the music keep playing.

  “Me? What’s there to understand?”

  “Miz Brandao said you wanted me to find a gym for you.”

  “And?” she asked quickly, brightening at the ray of hope. “Did you find one?”

  “There’s a Y. You’d have to drive.”

  She didn’t know why driving would be a problem. She was from Southern California. Everyone drove everywhere.

  “And they have gymnastics?” she asked carefully, trying to figure out what he was saying.

  He nodded slowly. “Mostly for little kids. Your mama said that you’d given up ballet for the monkey bars.”

  Her stomach contracted, as if he had punched her in the gut. When had he spoken to her mother? And was he making fun of her? Monkey bars?

  “I still take ballet classes,” she said. “Didn’t Ms. Brandao also mention I’ll need a dance studio to go to?”

  “Found a yoga place,” he said. “And the Y’s got tai chi.”

  Katelyn suddenly realized he had no idea what her life in California was like. Had been like. Ballet was not yoga or tai chi. What had she been thinking, agreeing to come live with this old man and his beat-up truck and his cabin? Was she insane?

  Kimi was right. She shouldn’t have caved so fast. She should have made some demands, set some conditions.

  “Look,” she said, “I know this isn’t the big city. I—I know …”

  But what did she know? This man was a stranger. He didn’t know what she was like. How could he? He’d never come to visit. Never called except at Christmas, and now her mother was dead and he hadn’t even bothered to fly out for her funeral.

  “I need ballet,” she said fiercely. “And gymnastics, but not for little kids. I’m in training for—for a life as a performer. And if I don’t have a place to work out, I might as well give up now.”

  He just looked at her. She could nearly hear his thoughts: Okay. Give up.

  She stared back at him, speechless. She wanted to cry or scream or throw herself from the car. But of course none of those things would prove to anyone that she was old enough to take care of herself.

  She remembered the last time they had come to visit her grandfather, how hard she had giggled at thinking of her dad growing up in the middle of nowhere. He had still been alive and it had been their last family trip.

  Hot tears stung her eyes as lightning flashed overhead, illuminating the gloom of the woods. She clenched her hands, reliving how hard it had been after her dad had died. She’d gotten through because she’d had her mom and they’d held each other as they cried and kept each other strong each time the police told them there was nothing new.

  “You’re a senior this year, right?”

  Without looking back at him, Katelyn brushed away her tears. “Yeah. School started four weeks ago. I’m going to miss everything. Prom. Graduation. Everything.”

  “We’ve got those things here.”

  Was he actually trying to make her feel better?

  “It’s not the same,” she said, stricken.

  “Sure it is. I figure high school, graduating, all that, are the same anywhere you go. Lots of kids scared of their own shadows struggling to survive. It’s just like the mountains. Just like life.”

  She had forgotten that side of him. Blunt and practical, a hunter who lived like Daniel Boone. It was hard to believe that for years he’d been a philosophy professor. Her dad had never had much use for philosophy, and said philosophers were all people with too much time on their hands if they could waste it debating the existence of good and evil or the meaning of life.

  Sean McBride had faced good and evil every day. He had spent his life prosecuting criminals until the day one of them killed him. She didn’t care what anyone said; evil was real. She knew what it could do.

  Did her grandfather really know how scared she was?

  “Lots of … professional kids in L.A. don’t even go to school,” she said. “They don’t have time. Because they have to focus.”

  He went silent again. Then he said slowly, “That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”

  “No, it’s not.” She could hear the desperation in her voice. She felt like she was losing everything. It had been a mistake to come. “It’s the life of an artist. Mom—”

  “Got married,” he interjected. “To a man with a real job. How long do ballerinas last? Midthirties?”

  “She opened the dance studio,” Katelyn shot back.

  “And that was a big success.” He blinked and pulled in his chin, as if he’d surprised himself, and turned his attention back to the road.

  She frowned. What did he mean by that? The studio had done okay. Or so her mom had always told her. Did her grandfather know otherwise?

  “Mom loved being a dancer,” she insisted.

  “It’s from living out there in La-La Land,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard what she’d said. “Kids thinking they’re going to become movie stars. Like winning the lottery. The average person has a better chance of being struck by lightning—”

  “I’m from L.A.” Her voice was icy. “And I have friends who are making it.” That wasn’t exactly true, but he didn’t need to know that. “Kids do become movie stars.”

  “One in a million, and the rest park cars. You need some normalcy.” He frowned, sighed, and said again, “Normalcy.”

  She realized she’d miscalculated how to approach him. Rather than impress on him how vital it was for her to stick to her game plan, she had convinced him that she needed to give it up. “You have to
let me go home,” she begged.

  Thunder rumbled, and he stopped the truck abruptly. The rain hit the windshield like pellets. The tinny music from her earbuds squawked merrily away.

  “Katelyn,” he said, “you are home.”

  2

  This can’t be happening, Katelyn thought. Her grandfather handed her the keys to his front door, then went to retrieve her suitcase. The sun had begun to set, and she barely took notice of the illuminated exterior of the rustic two-story log cabin as she dashed from the truck up a staircase made of planks, to a door with an oval of frosted glass. Her hands were shaking too badly to insert the key into the lock. She was blind with tears.

  His footfalls echoed on the wood as he came up behind her, took the key ring from her, and opened the door. He stepped back to let her in first. Her throat was so tight she was afraid she was going to choke.

  She crossed the threshold, and her lips parted in shock. Interspersed with oil paintings of mountain landscapes, animal heads hung on the varnished wood walls. Deer, elk. Stuffed ducks with green-and-chocolate-brown plumage, creatures that had been beautiful in life, were displayed as trophies along the top of a polished wooden cabinet. Katelyn thought she might throw up. She was a vegetarian and she and Kimi had been active in animal rights causes. To her, her grandfather’s living room was a chamber of horrors. Why hadn’t she remembered it from when she was little?

  “Let me show you around,” he said.

  “My room,” she managed to say. “I just want to lie down.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. Follow me.”

  On the right side of the modest-sized living area, a steep wooden staircase passed more heads, a rifle on a rack, and what appeared to be a stained-glass window. Her grandfather carried her suitcase while she wrapped her arms around her stuffed bear and eased the purple overnight bag onto her shoulder again. She hated climbing the stairs so close to the blank, staring glass eyes and averted her gaze to the window. The stained-glass window was a red-and-white shield with a yellow rose in the center of a trio of fish. Beneath it in black letters was their name, MCBRIDE. Lightning flashed behind it, giving the red the appearance of blood.