Rachelle McCalla - Twin Threat Christmas

The dim light from the key-chain flashlight barely illuminated the stones, so Vanessa dropped to her knees, feeling each rock in turn, counting them off until she found the correct one. It didn’t want to budge, the soil having settled thick around it over the years.

Fighting back panic, Vanessa tugged hard on the rock with both hands, the flashlight beam playing crazily across the cabin until she had the stone rolled onto its side. She regained control of the keychain, aiming the meager light into the dirt.

She saw only bare ground.

“No. It has to be here.” She glanced back down the row of rocks, wondering if perhaps she’d chosen the wrong one, but this stone, with its knobby, handgrip-shaped protrusion, was the one. The only one.

She swept her fingers across the dirt, digging lightly, gently.

Something scraped her hand and she stopped, running her index finger along the stiff, buried something, flicking it upward with her fingernail.

The key!

She wiped it clean on her jeans as she rose and bounded up the shallow porch steps to the door. Thankfully, the knob looked familiar, not some new, shiny thing to replace the one that matched the key in her hand. Shaking slightly, it took her a moment to align it with the lock, to slide it inside, wrestle with the knob, hear the click and, finally, with a practiced shove of her hip, pop the door open wide.

Vanessa swiped her hand along the inside of the door frame, found the light switch and flipped it on. Even before her eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness, she saw the man standing across the room at the base of the stairs, facing her from behind the barrel of a gun.

TWO

Eric blinked at the sudden light and tried to get a decent look at the intruder. He wasn’t about to hurt anyone—he was pretty sure the old hunting shotgun wasn’t even loaded—but Debbi had told him to take it downstairs with him when she’d run to his room in fear after seeing headlights outside. Their cabin was deep on private property. No one else ought to be there, certainly not in the middle of the night.

Still half-asleep, his mind muddled by dreams tainted with the memories unearthed by that evening’s news story, he couldn’t help wondering if he was actually awake.

The face staring back at him from the doorway was the same one from his dreams, the same one from the newscast, familiar but completely impossible.

“Eric?”

He nodded, swallowed, couldn’t say the name that rose to his lips.

Vanessa was dead. Legally dead.

“Can you put the gun down?” The woman spoke with Vanessa’s voice, which for all the years that had passed was still the same, maybe a little tired, even frantic.

He lowered the hunting shotgun but didn’t let go. More awake now—quite shocked awake—he realized a number of things all at once.

This was the woman from the picture on the news, the woman who’d killed her husband just before dinnertime in a quiet Chicago suburb. She was dangerous. Her children were in danger. The reporter had called her Madison Nelson.

Should he let on that he knew who she was?

And why did she remind him so much of Vanessa, who was supposed to be dead? What was she doing here, in the cabin where he and Vanessa had spent so many happy times as children and teens?

Before he could sort it out, a voice echoed from outside the house.

“Mommy?”

The woman darted back out of the cabin.

Still unsure what was going on, Eric nonetheless realized the voice he’d heard probably belonged to one of Madison Nelson’s daughters—what were their names?

“It’s okay, Abby.”

Eric remembered the moment he overheard the woman soothing her daughter. Abby and Emma. And Sammy.

Abby had clambered half out of the Toyota Sequoia—the same vehicle featured in the news broadcast. Eric couldn’t see in the darkness, but he felt certain the front of the vehicle was probably banged up, at least a bit.

Abby clung to her mother, and the woman stroked her hair and held her close. “I’m right here. Mommy’s right here, honey. We’re at the place I told you about—the cabin.”

“The most wonderful place in the world?”

“That’s the one. It will look more welcoming once the sun rises. Let’s get you into bed.”

“With the kitten quilt? Did you find the kitten quilt?”

“I didn’t have time to look. We’ll see. Can you walk? I need to carry your sister.”

Eric listened, still unsure whether he was dreaming or what exactly was going on. The woman sounded like a loving parent, but weren’t most psychotic killers supposed to seem normal on the outside? More disturbing still, Eric felt sure that somehow, though this woman matched the description of Madison Nelson, she was Vanessa, who was supposed to be dead.

After all, she had a key to the cabin, and she knew about the kitten quilt.

Abby slid down from the high SUV and blinked up at him warily. “Who’s that?”

Eric looked at the woman—Vanessa? Could it be Vanessa? Or was she Madison now?

She cast him a brief, uncertain glance. “That’s my friend Eric. He’s okay.”

Something welled up inside him at the words and the reassurance that filled the little girl’s face. Even the girl looked a lot like Vanessa had looked when they were kids together, playing in the yard here at the cabin, chasing fireflies after dark.

What had happened? Eight years ago, one of his best friends had disappeared, and now this woman was here, knowing things Vanessa would know—acting and talking like Vanessa, even looking like her, aside from the blond hair and eight years of passing time.

When the little girl stumbled uncertainly after her mother, Eric held out his hand.

Abby looked up at him with eyes so much like Vanessa’s had been at that age, he couldn’t speak. But the little girl trustingly placed her hand in his, and he steadied her as they walked into the cabin.

“Debbi and I have the upstairs bedrooms,” Eric explained as they entered, as though this was a regular, planned visit, and he hadn’t just been pointing a gun at the woman.

“The downstairs bedroom just has one bed—”

“It’s a bunk bed now, the kind with a single on top and double below. Some buddies of mine sold it after college. I thought the cabin could use it.”

“Perfect. This way, girls.”

Eric let go of Abby’s hand as her mother led her toward the bedroom. Still not quite certain he wasn’t dreaming, he tried to assure himself he wasn’t doing anything illegal by offering hospitality to a murderer—after all, he didn’t know for a fact she’d murdered anyone, did he? Maybe it was self-defense? Maybe a lot of things had happened in the past eight years. All he knew was that he’d prayed for years that his friend would be safe, and now all of a sudden, here she was with little girls who needed a helping hand.

He wasn’t about to turn them away. Besides, even if she was a psychotic murderer, he ought to make sure her kids were safe. Shouldn’t he?

Eric bounded up the stairs to fetch the kitten quilt, which was usually kept folded at the foot of the bed in Debbi’s room. The beloved blanket from their childhood had come with the cabin, and even though it was a little juvenile for his twenty-five-year-old sister, it was too soft and delightful to get put away in a closet, unused.

His sister peeked at him from the doorway as he approached her room.

“It’s the Toyota Sequoia—I shined my high-beam flashlight out the window. The license plate matches the one on the news.” She followed him into her room, where her laptop sat on the end of the bed, open to a news page about the missing children and their murdering mother. “That’s Madison Nelson, isn’t it?”

“Shh. If it is, do you want her to know you know who she is?”