Page 47 of 15 Summers Later

After the meal, some kind of physical contest was always organized in the grass field. One month it might be soccer, another flag football, another baseball. Her favorite was water-balloon volleyball, played with teams of two who held a towel between them to bounce the balloon back across the net.

Sunday dinner was never a sedate affair here. She loved it and would invariably join in the fun.

This time, they were playing soccer and she was designated goalie. She did her best to keep the competitive players on the other team, mainly the children of Boyd’s son, as well as Nicole and Owen, from scoring against her.

She managed to successfully avoid her sister until people started to clean up the meal.

Somehow—she wasn’t sure exactly what happened or if some interfering busybody had orchestrated it to bring the two sisters together—they both ended up in the kitchen at the same time, with Ava washing the dishes and Madi drying and putting them away.

How many times in their lives had they done exactly this in their house in Oregon?

Fierce longing reached out and smacked her across the face. Before their mother died, when the four of them had been a loving and happy family, she used to love cleaning up with her family after the evening meal.

Her father would turn the radio on and Clint and Beth would dance around the kitchen while she and Ava giggled and blew bubbles at them from the dish soap.

Her father would in turn dance with each of them, patiently showing the steps as they moved around the kitchen.

The memory made her ache, thinking of his laughing gaze and how safe she always felt with him around.

She tried not to think about the time before Beth had been killed. It was too painful, remembering all those years when their home had been a place filled with love and laughter and peace.

Oh, she and Ava bickered like most other siblings close together in age. Sometimes they would fight about whose turn it was to clean their shared bathroom or who got to be the first one to read the latest book in a series they both loved. Sometimes they fought about who could pick the movie to watch for their weekly family movie nights. They bickered over clothes and toys and friends.

Despite those minor skirmishes, neither of them had ever doubted they were loved.

And then their mother died, a victim of a drunk driver, as she returned home late from a school board meeting.

They had all been devastated, as if the heart and soul had been ripped out of each of them. All three of them had walked around in a fog for months, their world shrinking down to work and school and home.

Without Beth, they were like a canoe caught in a snag on the river, spinning uselessly while the world moved on without them.

After six months, things started to slowly improve. Their father took more interest in life and began to do more than spend every moment in his room or out in his garage.

Neither she nor Ava had any idea that the thing bringing him out of his shell would become so destructive. He started obsessively participating in online forums their mother never would have condoned and spending nearly every weekend at gun shows or emergency preparedness seminars.

Somewhere in all of his fixations, he had connected with Roger and James Boyle and their loosely organized prepper group, the Ghost Lake Survival Coalition.

She had learned many years later from Leona that her father’s interest in doomsday prophecies began even before their mother’s death, that Beth had been so concerned about the direction his views had been heading that she had been contemplating divorce.

She and Ava had been oblivious to it, she supposed. Two girls more concerned with their favorite boy band breaking up than their father’s descent into fanaticism.

She pushed the dark thoughts away as she and Ava worked in silence at the sink, allowing the conversation of the other people cleaning the kitchen to eddy around them like swirls and rivulets on the river.

Finally, they were down to the last dish and Madi brought up the topic that had been bothering her all evening.

“Are you sick or something?” she asked, the question more blunt than she intended.

Ava gave her one quick surprised look, then diverted her gaze back to the sink where the last of the dishwater glugged down the drain.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you look even more like a pale urchin than usual and you hardly ate anything.”

Ava’s mouth firmed into a tight line. “Maybe I wasn’t hungry. It’s hard to work up much of an appetite, knowing you’re eating with people who are furious with you.”

“You saidpeople. Who else is furious with you? It seems to me that everybody else here is fine and dandy with you spilling the tea to the whole world. Tilly invited you to a family dinner, for heaven’s sake.”

“Okay. When you’re eating with your only sister, who hates you now.”

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