“You’re gonna need more than caffeine to get through this weekend.” Bennett grinned at Morgan from the driver’s seat as she lowered the Starbucks cup from her mouth.
She smiled back, trying to mask her nerves. They’d just pulled onto I-94, the beginning of a 190-mile stretch of highway between Black Harbor and Loomis, Wisconsin. The Reynoldses’ cabin overlooked a 2,400-acre body of fresh water named Lake Noquebay. It was remote. It was wooded. And according to Google, it was twenty degrees colder than even Black Harbor.
You Reynoldses like to settle on lakes, Morgan noted when Bennett emailed her the details last night.
Lol it’s where we dump all the bodies, he replied.
I’m sure it will be great, she typed back. I always wanted to do something like this.
Investigate your family. See what makes you people tick. Although it was our family, technically, wasn’t it? And she was one of the you people.
But Bennett didn’t need to know that. Suddenly, she felt her stomach drop as he sped up to get around a semi. She watched the yellow lines on the road zip by like lasers. Riding with Bennett felt like being in a space capsule. He weaved expertly in and out of traffic. The speedometer read 86 mph. At this rate, they would arrive within the hour. “Do you have a secret identity as a race car driver or something?” she asked.
“In my head, yeah.” He grinned, reminiscing. “My dad and I came up here a lot when I was young. He used to let me drive when we got farther north and the freeway quieted down. A secret he took to his grave, I’m sure. My mom would kill him to this day if she found out.”
A knife of silence sliced between them. Bennett looked suddenly sullen, as though the memory had taken something from him. He swallowed, and then: “I’m really glad you decided to come. Usually everyone’s paired up but me.”
“Really?” Morgan knit her brows. Bennett was handsome, with a full head of hair, a winning smile, and money in the bank. How was he as single as she was? “But Carlisle and David…” she pointed out.
“Are basically a couple,” he said, and Morgan was jarred with the memory of the two of them holding hands at the Christmas party. “Then there’s Blake and Cora, Mom and Don, and me. Sometimes Uncle Christopher shows up, but … he’s not exactly who I want to ring in the New Year with, if you catch my drift.”
Morgan forced a smile. “Well, you don’t have to resort to Christopher this year.”
“Yes, and thank you for that. Speaking of, what made you change your mind?”
“About…?” She was buying herself time. She knew what he was asking. He wanted to know why she’d emailed him yesterday to tell him: Plot twist. Turns out I can go up north with you after all. If the invitation is still open?
“You know,” said Bennett. “The plot twist.”
“Oh.” She looked away, touching her chin to her shoulder. A piece of hair fell over her face and he tucked it into her cap. The gesture was soft and sentimental, and wrong. But he didn’t know. And that made it a little heartbreaking, too. If they weren’t brother and sister … would she? Cocksure and charismatic, Bennett was the antithesis of herself. Morgan knew that if other women were to see her with him, their claws would come out. She had to admit she liked the thought, a little bit—that someone else could want something she had. Not that she really had him, but still. He didn’t know that.
And then there was Hudson. Moody, mercurial, and so damn unsure of himself. So like her. The two of them were more like siblings than she and Bennett and yet, when she was with him, they made a symmetry together she couldn’t explain. Everything felt at equilibrium.
He’d become less pathetic to her since she’d discovered Nan was the name of his dead wife and not his dead nana. Not that losing your grandmother wasn’t traumatic, but it was a little more expected than losing a spouse. Now that she knew that dark, depressing detail about him, it was impossible not to see it in everything he did and everything that surrounded him, from the peacock ornaments to the dusty wedding photo on the mantel.
“Hey.”
She raised her eyes to look up at Bennett. He should have been focusing on the road, but instead, he was focused on her. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Morgan shook the unsorted thoughts from her head, forcing them to scatter. “I’m sorry … for the plot twist.”
“You keep me on my toes. I love that about you.”
Love. She withered at the word.
Evergreens frosted in purest white snow drifted by. A winter wonderland. Sometimes it was easy to forget there was a whole beautiful world not far beyond Black Harbor. She couldn’t help but wonder who she might have become if she’d grown up here, just a few miles out of the city.
“So, do you still have that stellar brown-and-orange ski suit?” She recalled a photo of Bennett posing in a retro ski suit, no doubt a hand-me-down from someone who’d been alive in the 1970s. The photos, along with 479 others that she hadn’t torn to shreds, were all digitized and saved onto a crystal USB drive; the originals were separated into black photo-safe boxes in Bennett’s trunk. She was done with the Reynolds family after this weekend.
“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.” A corner of Bennett’s mouth lifted. “You know what’s crazy,” he said after a minute. “I feel like I’ve known you. You know there are some people you meet and you just feel this instant … connection?”
Every nerve in Morgan’s body twinged. “Déjà vu?” she suggested.
“Yeah, kind of. There’s just … this voice in my head that insists I’ve seen you before. I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy.”
“Or maybe we were snails together in another life.”
Bennett laughed. “Could be.” His eyes glittered as he scanned her from her combat boots to her stocking cap. She wondered what he was thinking, but then, she really didn’t have to wonder. Ever since the knee brush at the bar, the near kiss under the mistletoe, and not to mention the expensive new camera, Bennett Reynolds had made his intentions quite clear.
Just don’t fuck him, and you’ll be fine.
She bit her lip and stole a side-eyed glance at Bennett as he drove. There was no doubt in her mind he’d been looking forward to getting her alone and seeing what she was made of. And if Morgan was being honest with herself, she was, too.
It was only 4:00 P.M. when Bennett’s Porsche wound whisper-quiet down snaking, curling roads, and yet, the sky had darkened to the color of a bruise. The stars startled her. Morgan tilted her head, staring out her window at the millions of pinpricks. She’d never seen so many stars. Although perhaps she had when she’d come up here with Clive and Ava. Not that she would remember. Until the film roll she’d developed in Hudson’s basement four days ago, her life had always begun at the house on Winslow Street. Just her and Bern and the strangers who came to bargain their souls for a piece of hers.
Now she had none. Not a shred, or a molecule, or the most infinitesimal atom of one. It was how she could do the things she did. Or used to do.
“Here we are,” announced Bennett. He slowed before a grove of snow-laden pines. “Your home for the weekend.”
Home? She couldn’t see anything. But then his headlights shone on a gate—these people liked their gates—and a snowcapped rock stamped with The Reynolds Family, est. 1992. Bennett pressed a remote clipped to his visor and the gate swung aside like an arm beckoning them forward. The driveway wended through skeletons of birch and ash and cedar boughs. It might have been longer than their driveway in Black Harbor, though it was tough to gauge in unfamiliar territory. And in the dark.
“Is this where you take me to kill me?” Morgan asked, in jest of course, but a little curious. No one would ever find her in this sleepy, secluded town, if it could even be called as much.
She detected a shadow of a smile on Bennett’s face, and then he explained: “Believe it or not, this used to be a happening place. Some of these streets are all overgrown now.”
“In the 1800s?”
“Probably,” he laughed, coasting to a stop beside Cora’s Land Rover and Don’s Tesla. Morgan breathed a silent sigh of relief, taking solace in the fact that they wouldn’t be there alone. Not that it mattered. She was sure this place—like the Reynoldses’ actual home—was large enough to get lost in.
It was. What the Reynoldses had humbly dubbed their “cabin” was a multimillion-dollar lake house. Morgan said a silent R.I.P. to the hundreds of cedar trees that had died to build this lakeside mansion. Triplet peaks pierced the night sky. She recognized the A-frame structure from the negatives. How much larger it looked in real life, when she could step back and take in the whole picture. Snow dust fine as powder cocaine sifted off the banks and boughs, swirling and glittering around her. Before she could retrieve it from the back seat, Bennett slung her duffel bag over his shoulder and grabbed his roller case from the trunk. “I can—” Morgan started, but he waved her off.
“I got it,” he said.
“I’ll get the door,” she offered. In-ground lights illuminated a freshly snow-blown stone pathway, and Morgan wondered if the Reynolds family had landscapers up here, or if they drew fancy gold straws to decide who would take care of the walkway. She knocked twice and pushed the door open without waiting for an answer. A vast rotunda opened up before her. The sound of her boots on the hardwood floor echoed. A chandelier, made from antlers sawed off the skulls of twenty or more bucks, suspended from the ceiling’s zenith. Cedar beams crisscrossed above; overstuffed couches and chairs created a semicircle around a crackling fireplace. Across the room was a wall of windows that overlooked the lake. Here in the Reynoldses’ glass house, Morgan felt exposed, vulnerable, like an amoeba under a microscope.
Blake and Cora greeted them. Eleanor and Don followed in their wake, doling out one-armed hugs without letting go of their crystal stemware. Carlisle and David arrived together shortly after, and Morgan’s pulse quickened as she noticed David did not take his scarf off with his jacket. He kept it on over a tight black sweater, and when he caught her staring, she felt her cheeks burn.
They ate dinner—fancy shepherd’s pie with rosemary sprinkled on top, red wine, and a decadent Bailey’s cheesecake for dessert. Morgan wondered who made it. Perhaps there was kitchen staff off-site or down a separate wing. She didn’t think anyone in the family was a gourmet chef, and yet, she was learning that there was more to these people than meets the eye.
After dinner, when they all retired to sit near the fireplace, she watched each Reynolds character shed their skin. Blake had changed into pajamas, his T-shirt revealing fully inked sleeves on both arms. His pants were cinched at the ankles and the ends of tattoos poked out there, too. They must cover his entire body, she thought. Tendrils of ink climbed up past his collarbone creating wisps of ivy on his neck. Morgan wondered if that’s what the cashier had seen.
He sat on the sheepskin rug with Cora. The couple looked younger without their toddler, and Morgan saw, now, that the eldest Reynolds daughter had tattoos on the insides of her arms—a harp and a tree of life whose bowing branches gave it the illusion of a screaming skull.
David and Carlisle disappeared for a while, and when they came back in through the front door, they smelled like weed. Morgan inhaled deeply, hoping for a secondhand high.
Eleanor wore a silk robe tied over matching pajamas. The fabric clung to her, showing the sinewy muscles the woman was made of. She had the body of a swimmer, Morgan thought, with muscular shoulders and a long, triangular torso. Don stood behind her, swirling a glass of cognac. Without his glasses, he looked frighteningly plain. His IQ dropped at least twenty points, and Morgan saw him for the mooch Kole and Hudson had pegged him as. He’d hitched his wagon to Eleanor thirteen years ago—allegedly, although probably longer than that—and was now in her rustic-inspired mansion, drinking expensive liquor and smoking even more expensive cigars. Not bad for a former intramural basketball coach.
Cora clapped her hands together, demanding everyone’s attention. “Let’s play a game,” she announced.
The words raised Morgan’s hackles. She stood so close to Bennett that she felt his body heat more than she felt the fire, imagined sparks dancing off the staticky fibers of his sweater onto her. She knew there was more to this game than Cora was alluding to; just like the entire glass wall, the Reynoldses did nothing small. And then she felt the gentle caress of Bennett’s finger against the inside of her palm and she knew there would be only one objective in this weekend-long game: hunt or be hunted.