Dead Secret. Ava McCarthy

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      The weight of the gun dragged at her bag. She’d only used it once before, six months earlier. Her first time ever handling a firearm.

      She’d been alone in the house, finishing up another painting for the gallery. She could still recall the graveyard silence of the rooms, deadened further by the waist-high snowdrifts outside. Jodie shivered.

      When she’d first come to New Hampshire five years earlier, Ethan’s house had charmed her. The Irish place names had charmed her too, lulling her with a false sense of the familiar: Kilkenny, Antrim, Dublin Lake.

      She’d never had a home of her own. She’d grown up on the move in Irish foster care, twelve moves in all over eighteen years, to places where nothing was ever really hers. And each time, she was told she’d be safe with the next family. She wasn’t.

      But Ethan had seemed safe. He’d wooed her with an old-fashioned attentiveness, and his secluded Colonial home had reinforced the gallant image. Maybe she’d finally found a home.

      But the truth was, it was all a fake.

      Fireworks burst into bloom overhead, brilliant red chrysanthemums of light. Jodie stumbled through the cheering crowds, out of whack with normal life.

      She flashed again on Ethan’s house in the backwoods: six miles from the nearest town; no neighbours, no boundaries; the garden blending without warning into dark, dense forest. Not forest like she knew it, but vast, primeval hinterland that besieged three sides of the house.

      Incarceration.

      She could still hear Ethan’s voice echoing in the banquet-sized rooms.

      ‘If Mommy wants to work, it means she doesn’t love you, Abby.’

      ‘It’s Mommy’s fault you don’t have any brothers or sisters.’

      ‘If Mommy leaves, we can’t be a happy family any more.’

      Jodie’s throat closed over. She clenched her fingers around the gun in her bag, re-living the day she’d last fired it, six months earlier.

      She’d been painting for three hours straight, her spine crunching with the backache she always got from standing for too long. She stepped back from the easel to eye her work, a vigorous landscape of the local Contoocook River. Like all the paintings she sold, it offered plenty of wild, improbable colour but almost nothing of herself.

      She wiped her hands on a turps-soaked rag, stirring up a pungent, piney scent. Then she selected a fine rigger brush and signed the canvas: Jodie Garrett.

      She eyed her signature with misgiving. Another battleground with Ethan. She still used her maiden name, signing her work with it the way she’d done ever since she was a child. Ethan railed at her to switch to his, as though the other was some kind of veiled threat; some act of defiance.

      Maybe it was.

      She tossed the brush aside, got ready to clean up. Then an eerie screech tore through the silence.

      Raucous, inhuman.

      Jodie raced to the window. Stopped dead when she saw the malevolent forest animal skulking in her back yard.

      Black as the devil against the snow. Dense, glossy pelt, humpbacked like a rodent, haunches high and round. Maybe four feet long from nose to bushy tail, about the size of a family dog.

      A giant fisher cat.

      That was the local name, though there was nothing feline about it. A gigantic member of the weasel family, to Jodie it was furtive and diabolical-looking.

      The fisher froze, its eyes trained high on the birch tree by the back door. Jodie’s stomach lurched. Abby’s cat, Badger, was clinging to one of the branches.

      Jodie yelled, and pounded on the glass. The fisher ignored her, twitched its tail. Then it streaked up the tree and wrestled Badger to the ground.

      The fisher’s high-pitched shrieks were blood-curdling. Badger yowled, staggered free. Jodie cried out, bolted to the study. Couldn’t bear to think of Abby’s face if her beloved cat was killed.

      She wrenched open drawers, scrabbled for keys, unlocked the cabinet where Ethan kept his gun. Loading it with shaking fingers, praying she was doing it right, she sprinted to the back porch.

      The fisher had a jaw-lock on Badger’s neck, and was thrashing him against the snow. The cat emitted a keening sound. Jodie fired into the air, but the fisher ignored her. By now Badger was silent, his throat ripped open. She took aim this time, fired at the fisher, knowing it was too late. Kept on firing, round after round in a frenzy of bullets, until the fisher lay still over Badger’s limp body.

      That night, Abby was inconsolable. The cat had been her ally in the silent house, his robust crankiness a match for her own wilful, tomboy spirit. Jodie sat on the bed, rocking her on her lap. Ethan glared at Jodie, his eyes full of dark reproach. Eyes that looked so much like Abby’s.

      ‘You let the cat outside? What the hell were you thinking? You know those goddamn fishers attack pets around here.’

      Jodie stared in disbelief. From the start, she’d wanted to safeguard Badger in the house. It was Ethan who’d insisted the cat be allowed to roam; who’d scoffed at her caution, dismissing the threat of fishers as old wives’ tales. After all, he’d argued, it was his home country, he should damn well know.

      His eyes challenged her to contradict him, the faint sneer betraying his certainty that no one would believe her if she did. Her gut turned cold as she realized something else: Ethan had wanted something bad to happen to Badger.

      Dazed, she watched him lift Abby into his arms, watched his head bend to hers, the two so alike. Same dark hair, same strong brows; same stubborn set to the mouth. Ethan kissed Abby’s plump, damp cheek.

      ‘It’s Mommy’s fault poor old Badger is dead.’

      A fireball of colour exploded over the lake.

      The flash defined a knot of spectators on the shore, and Jodie’s heart double-thudded. Backlit in their midst was Ethan’s sculpted profile.

      She edged forward. He was less than two hundred yards away. Close enough to make out the faint Van Dyke beard, its thin vertical line carefully etched from lower lip to chin. As a beard, it was barely there; just a whispered suggestion of maleness, pirate-style.

      A pulse hammered high in her throat. Behind Ethan, Dublin Lake seemed on fire, the blazing sky twinned in the water like paint pressed from a centrefold. A dramatic backdrop to Ethan’s buccaneer looks, as though he’d staged it with that in mind. Then again, maybe he had.

      She inched closer, eyeing his group of companions. They were mostly men, their body language proclaiming Ethan as the dominant figure. She saw it all the time; that potent sway he had over people.

      She watched as one of the men leaned in to make a comment, saw the other low-rankers all peek at Ethan, gauging his reaction before committing to theirs. Jodie noticed Ethan appeared a head taller than the rest, and guessed it was no accident he’d ended up on higher ground than they had.

      Power and control: his motivation for everything.

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