Chapter 20

Tessa came to as she was being dragged from the cab of the truck. Her left temple ached with a vicious throb, and when she fluttered her eyes open, even the gray light of dawn seared her retinas.

Dazed and disoriented, she stumbled at another rough tug on her wrist and blinked down at the coarse-haired, masculine hand clamped around it. She twisted her arm and gasped when the hand tightened bruisingly hard. Shaking her head, Tessa squinted up just as an image—a memory? A hallucination?—flickered behind her eyes.

It couldn’t be. She thought she’d seen … but that didn’t make sense.

Another stumble brought Tessa’s weight down wrong on her ankle. The stabbing pain made her whimper but it also cleared her head.

She was outside. There were maritime pines all around, growing shorter and shorter like the ones at the water’s edge, and she could hear the shush-shush of the ocean close by. A big barrel of a man with iron-gray hair straggling down to his shoulders was pulling her along behind him, his hand rough and callused around her sore wrist.

Panic rolled through her, only heightened by the wild memory emblazoned on her brain, because Tessa thought, she couldn’t tell, it had been so many years and so many miles since she’d seen him, but she was almost certain that the man who’d pulled her off the street and driven her here was …

“Dad!” she gasped when he turned his head, exposing the sharp, bladelike profile that had frightened her when she was little.

Abe Mulligan glared back at her, steely eyes dark under his bushy, graying brows. “Hurry up, Terri, quit dragging your feet. We need to go.”

There was an edge in his gruff voice and a wildness in his eyes that scared adult Tessa as much as his scowl had scared her younger self. “Where are we going? What are you doing here?”

She kept putting up resistance, trying to pull free of him, but her father held her arm tightly and muscled her forward inexorably. “I’m here to get you. You need to come home, so Naomi will finally come home.”

Naomi. Tessa’s mother. Pulse thundering louder than the waves against the shoreline, Tessa said, “Dad, please, stop and talk to me. What happened to Mom? Where did she go?”

But her father didn’t stop. He just kept hauling her through the dew-damp cord grass, not even seeming to notice the thorny shrubs that scratched at his arms and whipped toward Tessa’s face. “Naomi will come back to the community when you’re back home. She only left because you did, it was all your fault. It was never the same after you left. I looked for you for a long time, to make her come home, but I didn’t know where you went. And then Harry Cartwright brought me a newspaper from town with your picture in it, from winning some contest, and I knew what I had to do.”

Tessa’s breath left her as her head spun. Her father had been looking for her? And not for a happy family reunion, no matter what he said about her mother. Hysterical laughter bubbled up her throat at the irony of the fact that one of the proudest moments of her new life—winning that blue ribbon at the county fair for her scone recipe—had led to this painful, shambling run through the woods in the grip of a nightmare version of her father.

Her father had always been a hard man, rigid and uncompromising, but the man who stopped dead and loomed over her now was something else altogether. Years of loneliness, resentment, and hatred glittered in his accusing glare. She shrank back, old and instinctive fears kicking in.

“You’re living wrong,” her father said fiercely. “We taught you better. You know better. But here you are, living this decadent, wasteful, immoral modern life and probably loving every minute of it.”

“Tell me more about Mom.” Tessa couldn’t allow herself to get drawn off topic. “When did she leave? Did she know I wrote to her? Did you tell her about my letters?”

“Bragging about your new life.” He sneered, jerking her harshly into motion again so that she was forced to scramble after him. They came to the edge of the tall cord grass and started slip-sliding down the gravelly dirt that became sandier the closer they got to the water.

At the water’s edge lay a small boat with an outboard motor. All at once, Tessa realized that her father wasn’t just dragging her around with no goal—he was trying to get her to the boat. He was trying to take her off the island, and back to the commune with him so that her mother would come home again, and that was a crazy plan.

As in, it was the plan of a crazy person who wasn’t thinking or behaving rationally. Which meant her father, who had always been unpredictable in terms of his moods, was scarier than he’d ever been before.

And Johnny was long gone by now. Tessa was on her own.

Struggling against the chill of that thought and the drag on her aching arm, Tessa tried again, but this time she tried playing along. “Please, Father. Let go, and I’ll come with you. I’d love to see the house, and be there when Mom comes home.”

He paused, suspicion in every line of his haggard face. It hurt Tessa’s heart to look at him. Abe Mulligan wasn’t a kind man, but he was her father. And he looked at least twenty years older than he should. Life on the commune was hard, but Tessa didn’t think that was what had aged him.

“No,” he decided gruffly, retightening his hold even when Tessa winced. “You’re lying. They taught you to lie out here, away from the community. But I know you don’t want to go back, or you would’ve come to see me sometime in the last eight years.”

“I didn’t think I’d be welcome,” Tessa explained, desperation seeping into her tone as they reached the boat.

“Get in.”

He threw her arm toward the boat, nearly jerking her off her feet. Tessa caught herself against the side of the small craft and gagged on the scent of rotting fish guts. “Where did you find this thing? Are you sure it’s seaworthy?”

“It’ll do,” her father said tersely. “Get in. Now.”

Looking up at him where he stood by the back of the boat, ready to shove it into the water and push away from the shore, Tessa experienced a moment of disbelief. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t be serious. She had to snap him out of it.

“Daddy, no. I know you don’t approve but this is my life now, and I’m happy here. I’m not going with you, and I’m sorry, but it sounds to me as if Mom left a long time ago. If she’s been gone that long, maybe something happened to her, or maybe there was more than one reason she left—but either way, I don’t think she’s coming back. Even if you drag me home.”

A frightening anger built and built in her father’s eyes as she spoke, the lines of his big, farmer’s body going tense with rage. “Your mother is coming home, even if I have to hold you hostage there forever to make her come.”

Chilled by the certainty in his voice, Tessa burrowed her hands into her jacket pockets and discovered he hadn’t taken her cell phone while she was out cold. It took everything she had not to allow her sudden hope to register on her face as her fingers moved over the familiar buttons. She could dial 911 without looking, she was pretty sure, so long as her father didn’t notice what she was doing.

Keep him talking. “Why would you do that to me? What did I ever do that was so awful, except be determined to survive my childhood?”

“You deserve to be punished for destroying our family!” He pointed at her, accusatory finger trembling with rage. “Now get in the damn boat, before I knock you out and throw you in like a sack of cornmeal.”

That couldn’t happen. She needed to be awake and aware to assist with her own rescue. Stepping gingerly over the side of the boat, Tessa picked her way among the stained tarps and dirty, tangled ropes and netting to huddle on the bench seat stretched across the middle of the boat. “Fine, you win. I’ll go with you. Just don’t hurt me.”

She stealthily removed her hand from her pocket, praying that the line was open and Ivy Dawson, the dispatcher, could hear them through the layers of fabric.

“Can you at least tell me where you’re taking me?” she said a little loudly.

“I told you,” her father grunted, shoving the beached boat into deeper water with a splash. “Home. To the community.”

“Are we going to take this boat the whole way?”

“Living in the world has made you stupid, girl.” Abe climbed into the boat, kicking aside a red plastic fuel container and planting himself by the outboard motor. “Or maybe you worked too hard to forget where you came from. The community is inland. We’re using this boat to get back to the mainland; from there we’ll drive.”

He sounded proud of his plans, and for the first time, Tessa thought about what a stretch all of this must be for him. When she was a kid, he’d refused to drive even the few miles into the nearest small town. He’d tilled the earth with a hand plow, choosing backbreaking labor over the convenience of modern farming techniques and modern farming equipment. He hated to leave home, and he hated being forced to use modern technology even more.

Yet somehow, he’d gotten himself all the way here from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to kidnap his own daughter. If nothing else, that told her how determined he was to see this through.

“This boat is so small,” Tessa said, thinking furiously about how to give more clues to the sheriff’s department. “I hope we don’t have far to go in it. But I’m sure you thought of that.”

Abe scowled at her, but underneath, Tessa thought he seemed pleased. “I couldn’t stash the boat at the docks—too many nosy people—but we’re not that far up the coast from it.”

Tessa’s heart pounded in her ears, loud enough to nearly drown out the roar of the motor. “So we’re on the western side of the island, heading toward Winter Harbor on the mainland,” she yelled, struggling to be heard as their speed increased and the wind seemed to tear the words from her lips and scatter them.

She had no idea if any of that got through to the sheriff’s department. Her father hadn’t seemed to hear her—all his attention was focused on the distant Virginia shore and the continuation of his plans to win back his wife. Or to blackmail her into coming home, whichever worked. Grimacing, Tessa glanced over his shoulder toward Sanctuary Island.

They must be about a thousand feet out already, and the island was growing smaller and smaller behind them. Tessa felt jittery and her head still throbbed with a deep ache, but she had to choose her moment.

Could she afford to wait and hope for the sheriff to show up and save her? Or should she jump ship now and swim for it before they got any deeper into the open water of the Atlantic Ocean? If she jumped, what would stop her father from turning the boat around and coming to scoop her back up? And the water splashing up the sides of the boat to wet her hands was extremely cold—how long could she last in that temperature?

As she sat in an agony of indecision, she saw the glimmer of red and blue lights flashing through the trees at the shoreline behind them. Her heart gave a great thump and Tessa gripped the sides of the boat with chilled fingers. It was the sheriff. It had to be. Her phone call must have gone through!

In that case, she had to try. Now. She’d have backup once she was close enough to signal for help and let them know where she was. And she was a decent swimmer. She could stay afloat long enough for someone to get to her, even if she couldn’t make it all the way to shore.

Ignoring the insistent dizziness and the pounding headache, Tessa cast a wary look at her father. He seemed to have forgotten about her already, lost in his fantasy of reuniting with his wife. For a moment, Tessa let herself experience the full weight of crushing sadness that she would never be the son her father had always wanted—and he would never be the loving father she’d longed for.

Then she forced herself to wobble up to a half crouch, holding on to the side of the boat, and said a quick prayer. Then she took a deep breath and dove into the water.