Brynn

 

I don’t know where I am. I just know that I’m not in bed, because it’s hard and cold. If I was in bed, Cassidy would be keeping me warm.

I blink my eyes open and try to orient myself, but I have no idea what I’m looking at. Pushing myself into a sitting position, I realize that I’m fully dressed, outdoors, on a bench, beside a red brick building.

Where the hell am I?

As I twist my head to look around, it throbs like crazy, and I wince, pressing my fingers to my temples.

What happened?

The last thing I remember is crying myself to sleep after our fight—our terrible fight in the kitchen when I pressured Cassidy to imagine a life with me, and he rejected me without exception, then left me hurting and alone on the floor.

A sob rises in my throat, but I swallow it back. My head aches and my eyes burn. I have no idea where I am, but hysterics won’t help me figure it out.

I reach for my wrist and find it wrapped carefully with an Ace bandage, my braided bracelet moved to my other wrist. Did Cassidy do that while I was sleeping? Did he bring me to town to have it checked out? Surely not. He treated my stab wounds himself. Where is he?

“Cass?” I call weakly, looking around at the parking lot behind me. There are only three cars parked and no ATV.

I look up at the sky, noting that the sun is on the rise. I’m guessing it’s about six o’clock. The world is still waking up.

“Cassidy?” I call again, standing up.

This is when I realize I have shoes on.

I haven’t worn shoes in weeks, so the hiking boots I wore to hike Katahdin feel heavy and confining on my feet. I didn’t even realize that Cassidy had saved them, but feeling them on my feet feels wrong, feels like bad news that I don’t want to hear.

I scan the parking area for Cassidy’s ATV because there’s no other way I could have gotten here. But I don’t see him. I don’t hear the quad’s motor nearby either.

Looking down, I realize there is a note pinned to my shirt, and I unpin it, holding it up.

Sweet Brynn. This was the only way. You asked if I love you, and the answer is yes. So much that I have to let you go. You will always be my treasure, and I will never, ever forget you. But you are better off without me, I promise. For both our sakes, please don’t come looking for me. Cass. P.S. Your wrist is sprained. Ice it when you wake up.

I inhale sharply, my fingers shaking as I read and reread the short message, its stark and horrible meaning sinking in. I stare at the beautiful, ruthless letters that have severed my life from his. He loves me, but he has gone to drastic measures to keep us apart, and it rips my heart in two.

He’s left me here.

He’s gone.

My stomach clenches and my knees weaken, forcing me back down on the bench. I lean forward on my knees, afraid I’m going to be sick.

“Miss? Miss? I just seen you out here. Can I help you?”

Turning to look behind me, I see a glass door being held open by a portly, uniformed officer.

“Miss? Are you okay?”

No. No, I am not okay. Not at all.

“I don’t . . . I don’t know. Where am I?”

“You’re in Millinocket, Maine. At the police station,” he says, gesturing to the words on the door. “Why don’t you come on in? I have a pot of hot coffee brewin’.”

“No. I have to find . . .”

Who? Cassidy? No, Brynn. Cassidy’s gone. No matter how much he claims to love you, it wasn’t enough to want a future with you.

“Miss, you don’t look too good. What’s your name?”

“Brynn Cadogan.”

“Brynn Elizabeth Cadogan?”

I nod, distracted from the pain in my heart by the fact that this person knows my middle name.

“Well, good Lord,” he says, opening the door a little wider. “We been lookin’ everywhere for you.”

“For me?”

“Ayuh, miss. For you.”

I tilt my head to the side and walk into the small police department, watching as he opens a leaf in the countertop and rounds the counter to sit behind the desk. “Brynn Cadogan. Yore parents been sick ’bout you. They been stayin’ over at the Ferguson Lake Lodge on Route 11. Been up that mountain ’bout a hundred times lookin’ for you, don’t you know.”

“My parents?” I gasp. “They’re . . . here?”

“Ayuh. At the Ferguson Lake Lodge.”

“How long have they been here?”

“Two weeks? Three, maybe? Don’t know exactly, but we see Colin ’n’ Jenny least every other day. They come by lookin’ for leads.” The officer cocks his head. “If you don’t mind my askin’, what in sam hell happened to you?”

I place my palms on the reception desk between us, my fingers white and rigid. “I was hiking Katahdin a few weeks ago. I was attacked. In an AT lean-to.”

“Yep.” He nods, like he knows, unaccountably, that this is so. “On June 19”

“That’s right.” I rub my forehead, the bruising headache getting worse and my stomach still roiling, though I haven’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday. “I was, um . . . a little bit west of the Chimney Pond-Saddle merge when a man named . . . um, named Wayne attacked me.”

“Huh,” he murmurs, squinting his eyes and pursing his lips like something isn’t quite adding up. “You say his name was . . . Wayne?”

“Yes. Wayne. He . . . he stabbed me.”

I hear the front door open behind me, and the officer I’m speaking to makes eye contact with someone over my shoulder. “Mornin’, Marty. I think you’re gonna want to hear this.”

Hee-uh this.

Another officer, dressed in street clothes and slightly younger than the first, opens the leaf in the counter and faces me. He looks me over, his brown eyes keen, before nodding slowly.

“Brynn Elizabeth Cadogan,” he says, staring at my face.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where you been?”

The first officer clears his throat and nods. “Go ahead and tell Marty what you just told me.”

“I was attacked on the . . . the, uh, Saddle Trail. A little ways up from the Chimney Pond merge. I had s-skinned my knee and wanted to bandage it up. I stopped in at a lean-to, and . . . and . . .”

The relentless rain.

Wayne’s smile.

Want me to take a look-see at your kneesie?

It all comes rushing back, and the room spins so I clench my eyes shut.

“Take your time,” says Marty. “Lou, get her a cup of water, eh?”

I take a deep, shaking breath and open my eyes. “There was a man there. Named W-Wayne. He . . . he threw me against the wall . . . and he . . .” My hand falls to my hip. “. . . he stabbed me. He s-stabbed me six times.”

Marty tilts his head to the side, then rubs his chin. “Wayne, you say.”

“Wayne.” I nod, twisting the braided bracelet that Cassidy gave to me. “He said his name was Wayne.”

“Huh.” Marty is perched on the side of Lou’s desk with a cup of coffee in one hand and a laptop bag on his other shoulder. He points to a nondescript gray metal desk a few feet behind him. “I think we better sit down to sort this out. Come with me, miss?”

He opens the leaf in the counter, and I follow him to his desk. He gestures to a beat-up, padded chair, and I sit down, gratefully taking the cup of water that Lou offers. I take a sip, letting the coolness sluice down my throat, and suddenly my eyes fill with tears.

Cassidy brought me here.

He left me here.

He is gone and believes I am better off without him even though he loves me . . . even after I told him I loved him. Even though we love each other, he isn’t willing to give us a chance.

A sudden pain in my chest makes me cover my heart with my palm. I whimper softly, and I think I’m going to be sick. I close my eyes, leaning my chin on my chest.

“Just breathe a minute, miss,” says Marty. “I’ll get some fresh air in here.”

I hear the sound of a window opening, and suddenly the sounds of humanity fill the room—the hum of a car engine, the footfalls of a jogger, the buzz of a cell phone.

I am so far from Cassidy now.

He has abandoned me here.

I am all alone.

Yore parents been sick ’bout you. They been stayin’ over at the Ferguson Lake Lodge on Route 11.

As tears roll down my face, I am overwhelmed with a longing to see my parents.

“I want my mom and dad.”

“Of course. But first, Miss Cadogan, we really need to hear your story,” says Marty, sitting back down at the desk. “Do you think you could just tell me what happened out there?”

I take a deep breath and look up. “And then I can go see them?”

“After we get your statement, I’ll drive you over there myself.” He clicks the top of a pen and positions it over a notepad. “Let’s go back to that day. You were hikin’ the AT . . .”

“Not the AT. J-just Katahdin.”

“Alone.”

“No.” I shake my head. “With a group, at first. Two girls from Williams. They turned back because of the rain.”

“But you kept goin’.”

I gulp, remembering the girls trying to get me to go back with them. At the time, I was determined to keep walking for Jem. And if I hadn’t, I never would have met Cass.

My broken heart weeps. Will I ever see Cass again?

“Miss Cadogan? You kept walkin’ . . . and then what?”

“The rain was coming down hard, and I slipped. I skinned my knee.”

“Then what? Take your time.”

“We had . . . we had met a man named Wayne at Roaring Brook. He was . . . aggressive with us. Called us names. He was . . .” You’re just tourists in my dreams. I shake my head. “He was off. We knew he was off from the start. Something wasn’t right about him, and we sensed it. He wanted to hike with us, but we said no and he got angry. And then these guys from . . . from, um . . . um . . .”

“Bennington College?” asks Marty.

My neck jerks up, and I search his face. “Yeah. Bennington. How did you . . .?”

“We’ve talked to them a few times. Them and the girls. They were the last to see you that day.” He grimaces. “You skinned your knee. What happened next?”

“I saw the lean-to through the rain, so I walked over to it, thinking I could patch up my knee and wait out the storm. But . . . but Wayne . . . Wayne was . . .”

Well, if it ain’t Grandmaw.

My heart is racing like crazy.

“I . . . oh, God . . .” I sob, the events of that terrible day closing in around me.

“Slow down, now,” says Marty. “Easy. Breathe in.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, opening them as I exhale.

“That’s right,” says Marty. “Now back to this . . . Wayne.”

“Yes. Wayne. He drank some . . . um, some tea and alcohol. S-scotch, I think. He was still angry that we didn’t let him walk with us. He threw me against th-the wall, and . . . and . . .”

“And he stabbed you.”

My hand has moved to my hip, and I slide up my shirt a little, looking down at two of the pink scars that are still healing. “Six times.”

“All we ever found was your backpack. Nothin’ else,” says Marty. “How’d you fight him off?”

“I didn’t.” I was dying.

“How’d you get away?” asked Lou, who is standing behind Marty, staring at me intently.

“I was saved,” I whisper, bowing my head as tears stream down my cheeks.

“By who?”

I look up at the officers and gulp over the lump in my throat. “A man named . . . Cassidy Porter.”

Marty and Lou snap their necks around to face each other so fast, I’m surprised I don’t hear twin cracking sounds.

“Porter?” confirms Lou, eyeing me like I’ve said something completely crazy.

I nod. “Cassidy Porter.”

Marty clears his throat, leaning away from me, his face a mixture of disbelief and confusion. He looks down at his notepad, then back up at me, tapping his pen between his fingers. “Let me be sure I got this straight. You say you were attacked by a guy named Wayne and rescued by a guy called Cassidy Porter.”

“Yes,” I whisper, looking at Marty’s stunned expression.

“Miss Cadogan,” says Marty, rubbing his chin before dropping the pen on his notepad and looking back up at me. “That’s impossible.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“You can’t be,” he says evenly.

“I . . . I am. A man named Wayne attacked me. A man named Cass—”

“Miss Cadogan, Cassidy Porter is dead.”

With those four words, all the air is sucked out of the room, and I am like a fish on the carpet, flip-flopping like crazy, trying to breathe.

“Calm down, now. Miss Cadogan. Breathe deep.”

Marty is pushing the cup of water into my hands, and I raise it to my mouth with a shaking hand, taking a messy sip.

“What are you talking about?” I rasp, my voice breathy and breaking. “That’s . . . that’s . . . no! No, no, no! I was just with him! Just last night. What do you—”

“Slow down.” Marty holds a hand up, turning slightly to Lou. “We got a blanket back there? I think she’s in shock.”

“I’m not in shock! Cassidy Porter is not dead! He’s . . . he’s . . .”

Marty backs his chair away from the desk and rolls it over to me until we are almost knee to knee. His voice is gentle. “You’ve been through a tough time.”

“Cassidy Porter isn’t dead,” I sob, circling my thumb and forefinger around the bracelet he gave to me.

But honestly? I can’t account for the time between falling asleep last night and waking up here. Something could have happened to him. Maybe that’s how I ended up here.

“He is,” says Marty. “I can say that with one hundred percent certainty.”

My heart drops like it’s made of lead.

“This happened last night?” I shake my head as more tears blur my vision. “What happened to him? Oh, my God. Please, no. Please, please, no. I don’t understand!”

Lou returns with the blanket and puts it around my shoulders. Although I didn’t want it, I pull it around myself. My hands are shaking and my mind is racing.

“Please . . . tell me.” I beg, looking up at Marty.

Marty nods, sliding a folder from a mesh basket to his desktop and opening it. His fingers trace neatly typed details, finally stopping at a paragraph midpage. “You were reported missing on June 25. Your parents received a call from an anonymous source who left them a voice message saying you had been injured but you were okay. With no other information, they were understandably concerned. They reported you missing and arrived here on June 26 to look for you.”

I don’t care about any of this. I need to know what happened to Cass.

“Cassidy Porter! What happened to Cass?” I sob.

 “Just follow me here, Miss Cadogan,” says Marty. He drops his eyes back to the typed page. “We found a man in the lean-to you’re talking about. He was found dead on the morning of June 20th, reported by a couple of early-morning hikers. He was found on his stomach, and there was a knife through his heart. He’d been dead for about eighteen hours by the time we recovered his body. We found your backpack nearby and your, well, a good concentration of your blood in one corner of the lean-to. What we found was a match to your parents, so we know you were attacked there. But a week of bloodhounds searching the mountain turned up nothing. You were in the wind.”

“Because Cassidy carried me home on his back.”

“Cassidy,” Marty mumbles, shaking his head. “Well, I don’t know about that. What I do know is that the dead man didn’t have any ID on him, so we ran a DNA test to see if there were any matches in the system.” He pauses, and I brace myself because I can sense that something terrible is coming. “There was one parental match, with a 99.9 percent certainty. The man who attacked you . . . the dead man you keep callin’ Wayne . . . was born Cassidy Porter, the only son of Paul Isaac Porter.”

My mind flashes back.

Paul and Cass. Father-Son Cookout. 1995.

“You know who he was? Paul Isaac Porter?”

“Paul,” I say. “Cassidy’s father.”

“Er, um, yes.” Marty is staring at me like he’s afraid my head might explode. “But he was also—”

“Wait. So you’re saying . . .” I clear my throat. “You’re saying that Wayne, the man who attacked me . . .” My aching brain is desperately trying to keep up. “You’re saying that Wayne’s real name was Cassidy Porter?”

Marty nods slowly. “Yes. I am sayin’ that I am positive, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the man who attacked you in a lean-to on June 19, and died in that lean-to on June 19, was born Cassidy Porter. His DNA was a match to Paul Isaac Porter, who only had one son, Cassidy, born at Millinocket General Hospital on Sunday, April 15, 1990.”

“But . . . that makes no sense! I was saved by a man named Cassidy Porter.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” says Marty, flipping through the file until he comes to a DNA test, “unless there are two Cassidy Porters, which feels mighty unlikely. The man who attacked you had a birth record on file. The DNA match was definitive. Father was Paul Isaac Porter.” Marty flips through a few pages in the file and stops at the results of an official DNA test. “And just to be absolutely certain of his identity, we compared the DNA to his only living relative, a great-uncle on his mother’s side named, uh . . . Lou, you remember the uncle’s name . . .?”

“Name of Bert Cleary,” says Lou, over his shoulder. He’s sitting back at the reception desk, listening to our conversation.

“Right. Bert Cleary. Lives over in, uh, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. Matched up perfect. Rosemary Cleary was his mama; Paul Isaac Porter was his daddy. Just like on his birth certificate. Open-and-shut case. The man who attacked you, who died in that lean-to, was Cassidy Porter.”

“Why did he call himself Wayne?”

Marty shrugs. “Maybe an alias? I don’t know, miss.” He pauses, staring at me with narrowed eyes, his voice level but heavy. “Miss Cadogan, have you ever heard of Paul Isaac Porter? I mean, aside from his being Cassidy Porter’s daddy?”

I shake my head, a sixth sense telling me that I am about to hear something very bad.

He looks sorry for a minute, then pulls a black-and-white photograph of a man from the back of the folder. He spins it to face me, and I recognize the face immediately as the same man from the photo of Cass and his dad at the father-son cookout. Hair slicked to the side. Heavy black-rimmed glasses. Shirt buttoned all the way to the top.

A few seconds ago, I wondered if there were two totally different Cassidy Porters who coincidentally lived in this area of Maine—one who attacked me and one who saved me. But now I know that’s not probable, because this man is connected to one by DNA and the other by a photo I’ve seen with my own eyes. It’s all somehow connected, though I haven’t the slightest idea how to unravel it.

“Miss Cadogan?”

“I recognize him,” I murmur.

Marty sighs heavily. “Ain’t no good way to say this, I guess, but that man right there, Paul Isaac Porter, was a convicted serial killer. Killed over a dozen women. Arrested in 1998. Tried and convicted back in 1999. Killed in a prison fight in 2000 while awaiting execution.”

“You’re . . . you’re saying . . .”

“Cassidy Porter’s father was a serial killer.”

My entire motherfucking universe spins out of control as my feeble, overworked, aching mind tries to process what the fuck is going on here, what the actual, ever loving fuck is being said to me.

Paul Isaac Porter was a convicted serial killer. Killed over a dozen women.

Cassidy Porter’s father was a serial killer.

My stomach heaves, surprising us all by emptying its meager contents onto Officer Marty’s shoes. I retch and sputter, my tears falling endlessly as I vomit water and bile onto the police station floor.

“Christ, Lou! Get the mop! She’s sick!”

I feel a hand on my shoulder, and a moment later someone puts an ice pack on the back of my neck. A mop appears by my feet, sopping up the mess, and another cup of cold water is shoved into my hands. I drink cautiously to get rid of the taste in my mouth, then take a handful of tissues from Lou to wipe my face.

When I look up at Lou and Marty, I find them staring down at me with concern.

“You, uh . . . you okay, now?” asks Lou with a kindly grimace.

My shoulders are still shaking from the retching and crying. My head is still throbbing, and I can’t begin to process the information I’ve been given. Cassidy’s father was a serial killer. And Cassidy isn’t Cassidy. Then who . . . who . . .

It’s too much.

All I want is a hot shower and to fall asleep wrapped up in my mother’s arms.

“I need my mom,” I sob. “Please.”

“Yeah. Of course,” says Marty. He turns to Lou, throwing him a set of keys. “Will you bring my car around to the front?” Lou hustles off, and Marty looks at me. “It’ll just be a minute.”

“Thank you.”

He sits down across from me again. “To be honest, it wasn’t such a huge surprise that the son of a serial killer would get into some trouble of his own. We heard from the Bennington and Williams kids that Cassidy Porter was harassing hikers that day down at Roaring Brook. We figured he got into it with someone on the AT and ended up falling on his own knife.”

“No,” I whisper, recalling Cassidy’s retelling of what happened after I blacked out. “He was thrown.”

“Thrown?”

I nod slowly. “Cassid—” I look up at Marty and blink twice. “I mean, the man who saved me . . . he . . . he caught my attacker stabbing me and threw him off my body. Wayne, uh, the dead man . . .” I cannot bear to call him Cassidy. “. . . must have landed on his knife.”

“Hmm. Well, no other prints on the knife but his, so you’re probably right. It’s a closed case now. He attacked you. Fell on his knife. Thrown. Whatever. Ask me, he got what was comin’ to him. Just glad that other fella come along when he did. He’s a hero for saving you.”

That other fella. A hero.

Cassidy. My Cass.

Except he isn’t my Cass. His name might not be Cassidy at all. I have no idea who he is, and I wonder if he even knows who he is.

I look up at Marty.

“Who saved me?” I ask in a whisper, more to myself, maybe, than to him.

Marty shuts the folder on his desk and picks up his pen again, holding it over the notepad for a moment before drawing a large question mark.

“I think we’ve got a bit of a mystery there. You say that the man who attacked you was called Wayne, and that Cassidy Porter saved you. Only that’s scientifically impossible. I can’t rightly say who saved you, or why in the world he goes by the name of Cassidy Porter.” He shrugs. “Just count your lucky stars he found you when he did.”

I gulp, staring up at him, letting tears of exhaustion, confusion, and sorrow slide down my face.

“I guess you have a guardian angel,” he says, giving me a kind smile as Lou returns to tell us that the car is waiting.

I follow Marty through the station, to the waiting car, letting him open the rear door, and slump into the back seat as I look out the window. More useless tears stream from my eyes.

I have a beautiful, nameless guardian angel hero whom I love.

Who left me here.

Who doesn’t know who he really is.

Who is as lost to himself as he is to me.