Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

Once you cross the line, you can't go back.

'What about Regan Conrad?' Maggie asked.

Kasey's face flushed with anger. 'Regan and I planned the whole thing, but she couldn't keep her mouth shut. I realized she had lied to me all along. This wasn't about me and my baby. It was about her hating the Glenns. She started taunting Valerie, and I knew she would ruin everything. Serena told us that night at dinner that she was getting a search warrant. If she did, she'd find records about me and Regan and our son. So I had to take care of Regan first. I pulled my file so no one would find it. I assumed Nieman would get the blame for that murder, too, but I never thought he'd be watching me. He must have seen me go in, and then he stole the body. To drive me crazy.'

Maggie stared at her as if she were seeing her for the first time. 'Kasey, what happened to you?'

Kasey eyed her with regret. Her heart hardened, the way it had time after time in the past year. 'Just imagine watching your little boy slowly waste away. Day after day, night after night, and all he does is get worse, and there's nothing you can do. You just have to watch him die. And you're alone. No God. No mercy. All you can do is blame yourself and tell yourself what a worthless excuse for a mother you are. You try living through eleven months of hell…' she began to shout, ' and then you tell me why Valerie Glenn should have Callie, and I should have fucking nothing nothing nothing. '

She slammed her fist repeatedly on the concrete. The rats scampered in fear. She breathed hard in the aftermath, and the room was silent except for the sound of her breath and the ceaseless dripping of water overhead.

Then, in another room, she thought she heard a noise again. Her eyes narrowed. Her imagination ran wild.

'I'm sorry,' Maggie murmured.

Kasey shrugged. She was anxious to get away from this place. 'Don't patronize me.'

'What happens now?'

'You know what I have to do. I wish there was another way. I've gone too far to go back now.'

'You can't expect to escape. They'll figure it out. They'll find out about Callie and about everything else.'

'It's too late now,' Kasey told her. 'Believe me, I never wanted you in the middle of this. It was between me and him. But now I have no choice.'

'Kasey, you're not like him. If you kill me, you're no better than he was.'

'You're right. I'm not.'

Kasey picked up the gun, which was still warm. Tiredly, she pushed herself to her feet against the concrete pillar. She jiggled the flashlight again and watched the beam flicker. She went over to Nieman's body and dug a hand in his pocket and found his keys. Her escape route. When she turned back to Maggie, her hand trembled. She knew what she had to do, but she didn't want to do it. She was in a corner with nowhere to go. In the last week, she had killed three times. This was just one more murder. The last. And then she was finally free.

Six feet away, Maggie struggled, squirming to get free. 'Don't do this,' she told her. 'Kasey, I know you, this is not who you are. Don't do this.'

Kasey realized that no one knew who she really was. Not Bruce. Not Regan. Not Maggie. The man on the floor, the man who had chased her, the man she had killed, had boasted that he understood her. He had claimed to be able to see into her head. Claimed that they were kindred spirits. The terrible irony was that he was right. In the end, he had known her better than anyone.

'I'm sorry,' she said.

She raised the gun and pointed it at Maggie's head. She took a step closer.

Then she froze. The noise was real and unmistakable this time, not the product of her wild fear. She heard the echo of footsteps on glass, getting closer. Someone else was in the building.

'Stop ,' said a voice from the darkness across the ruined space.

Serena's Mustang was a cocoon of perfect silence. Just her and Callie. In the mirror, she could see the little girl sleeping in the car seat she had taken from Bruce Kennedy's Escort. She slept the way an angel sleeps, in peace and innocence, unaware of anything that had happened to her. That was the bliss of being so young. She would never remember Kasey lifting her out of her crib or getting lost in the fog, never remember being left alone in the back of the car as Kasey chased Susan Krauss through the woods. She would never remember the days spent in a strange house. In her sleep, she had probably already forgotten and was dreaming of being back home in Valerie's arms.

That was the sad part of being so young. She wouldn't remember her mother's tears of joy at their reunion. The cry of relief and exultation. The never-ending embrace. She would never know that she had once been gone, and now she was back.

Serena drove slowly. She told herself that the roads were lonely and dark in the middle of the night, and she didn't want to take any risk in the snow. It was too easy to hit a deer. Too easy to skid off the road. The reality was that she didn't want the drive to end. For one hour, Callie was totally within her care, almost as if she were her own, and she realized that Valerie had been right all along. Without kids, Serena couldn't understand the desperation of loss or the depth of responsibility. Now, for a brief moment, she did understand. She would have thrown herself in front of a bullet for Callie.

She wished she could hold this moment in a kind of suspended animation, until she passed the responsibility for the little girl back to Valerie. Tomorrow would be different, when the press surrounded the house, and photographers shot pictures for magazine covers, and champagne flowed in the war room in Grand Rapids. Tomorrow would be filled with noise and elation.

Tomorrow would be her first day to confront the new world. Her own new world. Alone.

Tonight was for her and Callie.

'You can read all about it when you're older,' she told Callie, who slept calmly and didn't hear a word.

She wondered at what age a girl would want to learn more about being kidnapped as a child. Fifteen? Eighteen? Maybe never. Maybe Valerie would try to keep it a secret, but Serena knew there were no secrets about that kind of experience. It would seep into Callie's consciousness as she grew older, something people talked about but that she didn't understand, something that made her different. Someday she'd want to know more.

It wouldn't be easy. It wouldn't be happy. The ending was happy, but everything else about the time in between would have been better kept as secrets. When do you choose to read that the father you lived with was the principal suspect in your disappearance, a man that everyone in the world assumed had murdered you and buried your body? When do you want to read about him wishing you had never been born?

When does your mother tell you that this man was not your father at all? When do you begin to think you're alive not because of love, but because your mother was so lonely she turned to comfort with another man? When do you realize that no one is innocent and understand what betrayal is all about?

Not now. Not for a long time.

'I hope you never blame yourself,' Serena told Callie in the back seat. 'I know it's easy to do. The mind is a funny thing. Something happens and you have no control over it all, and somehow you still think it's your fault.' She smiled as she looked in the mirror and added, 'If you ever feel that way, call me, OK? I'll come back and talk to you. I'll tell you how you rescued your mother long before she ever rescued you.'

She passed the turn-off that led through the dirt roads to the

Sago Cemetery, and she shivered. That was how fate worked. Two children were born on the same night; one lived, one died. It wasn't fair.

'You're almost home, Callie,' she said.