Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

that allows a desperate mother to pick up a car crushing her child.
    “Nick! Take that out of her mouth right now! Jenna can’t breathe!”
    He dropped his cigarette. “Jesus. Where did that come from?” He winced at the increased volume of Emily’s voicethe “mom” voice that women can summon when they needed it. “All right. I’ll get her some air. She’s gonna die anyway, but you don’t have to yell at me.”
    He loosened the gag and Jenna coughed.
    “You don’t have to yell, you know. I can hear all right.”
    Emily detected the tiniest fracture in the teenager’s practiced veneer and she went for it.
    “Yelling? Did your parents yell at you?”
    He blinked. “No shit. Every chance they got”
    “How did it make you feel?”
    “Like I was worthless.”
    Chipping away. Making him feel something. If not for denna, for himself. Good.
    “You aren’t worthless. You know it. Didn’t Jenna see it in you? See your worth? Your talent?”
    Nick’s eyes were downcast. “I don’t want to talk anymore,” he said. “You’re not some school counselor trying to make me happy. My dad’s coming. My real dad. We’re getting out of here” He sat down next to Jenna, her pale, pasty skin now alarmed her mother even more.
    “Please,” Emily said, “let my daughter go”
    “Shut up. That’s not the plan.”
    “What is the plan, Nick? I wasn’t aware of a plan.”
    He shot her his best FU look. His eyes were cold, his stare hard. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” He allowed a brief smile come to his lips. “You’re gonna die. Just like Kristi Cooper. You’re gonna die because no one can find you”
    “You know about Kristi?”
    “I know what my dad tells me”
    “Which dad?”
    “The one that matters, Dylan Walker.”
    “Don’t you know he killed all those people? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
    “You killed someone”
    He was referring to Tuttle, of course, maybe even Kristi Cooper. But Emily didn’t go there. She couldn’t. She had to keep him talking so that just maybe she could find a way to talk them out of the bunker. To daylight. To freedom. To safety. The wind sent another blast of air against the bunker’s openings. It sounded like the whistle of a train, the rolling of the tracks.
    “I never meant to kill anyone”
    “Good for you. I never killed anyone”
    “Not even Bonnie.”
    “Dad took care of her.”
    `But she was your biological mother.”
    “She was a breeder and that’s all. She was stupid, too. My dad tried to get rid of her for years. I would have killed her, but instead, I just helped clean up the mess. Dad never liked working alone.”
    Emily was reeling. It was as if all that Dylan Walker had done was now being revealed by his biological son, a son no one knew about.
    “There were others, too. Bonnie took care of them. Just like she did to the Martins. Other mistakes he made that he wanted cleaned up”
    “What others?” It struck a nerve that he now had referred to his family by its surname. His split from them was so complete. Emily wondered if he held any emotion for Peg, Mark, or Donovan.
    “What happened to your family,” she asked, hesitating, before shifting her words, “to the Martins?”
    He looked downward. A trickle of feeling? Emily studied him through the murky light of the bunker. What was he thinking? What was he feeling?
    “It was planned,” he said. “Everything. But the storm. The storm wasn’t planned.”
    Jenna was wide awake, listening to Nick Martin spin a slightly different and darker version of what had happened in the hours before the tornado. She listened without moving a muscle while her mother surreptitiously struggled to break free. Jenna knew she’d been played. It had been a setup from the beginning. Nick hadn’t just come home to find them dead.
    Nick had known what he was going to find.
    “Okay,” he continued, “I didn’t know that Donny was going to be home”
    As she fought her binding, Emily’s eyes beamed through the darkness at Nick. It was as if she willed his attention to hold on her face only, not her hands. “But your mom called him to come home,” she said.
    “No. Peg didn’t call him. Bonnie did. Dylan, Dad, said that Bonnie really messed up. She came to get me. Take me out of Cherrystone. My dad was important. Famous. She was my birthmother, but the Martins didn’t want anything to do with her.”
    He called his parents by their names, Emily thought, no longer Mona and Dad. It was