Scott Knolls
Charlotte and Queenie had been hard on the scent trail, barking with the excitement of the hunt, but after the shots had sounded, their howling had increased and the boys knew that they were going to be moving faster. Danny couldn’t be far off.
Scott and Skeeter hadn’t spoken much in the last hour or so because there wasn’t much left to say. They had decided on what they intended to do, and there wasn’t any turning back.
But Scott was having doubts, thoughts creeping out from where they were supposed to stay hidden. All the quiet had him rehashing ancient history. Tammy would be turning seven years old next month. Every year on her birthday, Scott would end up thinking about the party they should be having for his daughter, watching her tearing open presents, blowing out candles on a big birthday cake, running around with other young’uns. Seven years old. Hard to believe that his own flesh and blood was out there somewhere, living with a family that wasn’t her own or in some kind of institution. He wondered what she looked like now. He wondered what kind of girl she was growing up to be. Probably losing her baby teeth and playing with dolls and pretending she was a princess or some other make-believe character. She was a kid now. A kid who didn’t know who her real mother and father were. Although he and his wife didn’t ever talk about Tammy—never, not a single word—they were both saddled with the guilt of what they had done.
I abandoned my own baby.
How do you live with something like that? You don’t. Not really. He and Paula had just been going through the motions for the last six years.
As one year led to the next, Scott thought about Tammy less and less, but now the thing with Danny got him to thinking about her again. Danny and his daughter were similar in many ways—both had mental limitations, and both were unwanted and treated differently from everybody else. Wasn’t their fault they turned out the way they did. Scott never paid Danny much attention around town, but the fact was, Danny lived on his own, and even though he might be quiet and kept to himself, he seemed happy enough. The question that popped into Scott’s head while he was hiking through the woods with his brother was the one that he couldn’t find an answer to: Were they so different?
I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I wish I could take it back.
Scott looked over at Skeeter and wanted to speak up about something else that nagged at him—that maybe Danny didn’t do it. Scott didn’t get the chance.
Skeeter saw it first. He saw someone loping along in the woods. Staggering, really. A big figure stumbling through the brush.
“On your left,” Skeeter whispered to his brother.
Scott looked in the direction his brother was motioning and saw someone large and hulking lurching among the trees. They both moved in the same direction with their rifles brought up on the ready. They worked their way through some thick brush, trying their best to make as little noise as possible. When they got within a hundred feet, they saw a large man from the back, partially obscured by low-hanging limbs covered with snow. The man stumbled forward, dropped to the ground, then struggled back to his feet.
Scott shouldered his rifle, got the target in his scope, right in the middle of the broad shoulders. His finger wrapped around the trigger’s cold steel.
“I got ’im,” Scott whispered to his brother.
