By Sinking815
August 15th, 2006
A/N: There's really no way to get around this, so take this as the official warning tag for this chapter: The following contains sensitive material and adult situations. Not anything graphic, but still not for the faint of heart. This would be where the "T" rating on this fic comes into play. So as always, please read (with that in mind) and reviews are still as welcome as ever.
To those of you who have dropped comments, I'd thought I'd also take a moment and thank you all sincerely for your kind words and dedication to this story. I've never been big on writing stories with commitment (yes, I am like Jack in that sense) but with all your support, it's made the road that much easier to travel. It is much appreciated.
Chapter 17: Truth
The two tickets on the desk were just another harsh reminder of why she was sitting in that chair, wrists bound together in cold steel handcuffs, cold and irritating against her skin. The fluorescent overheads seemed to exaggerate the bold font printed in tidy rows of the boarding passes making it scream her failure as if she weren't aware that her career as a fugitive had reached a dead-end.
OCEANIC AIRLINES Flight 815
Destination: LAX
She'd never flown that airline before, but then again, she'd never had a reason to fly. Her own two feet had served her well and even when they had failed, a rusty car with a muffled clunking whenever she hit the brake and a trunk full of salvaged license plates had stepped in to pick up the slack. That was, until he had started chasing her.
Edward Mars, US Marshal. Her best enemy and her worst friend. The man law enforcement had turned to when the lone sheriff of Cedar Rapids, Iowa realized he was sixteen hours too late to apprehend Katherine Austen for the murder of Wayne Jansen and the destruction of private property. The man who had come dangerously close to knowing the full truth behind her motive, but after three years of running, she had learned he backed off when she defensively denied that truth whenever it was voiced.
Several times, when she was behind the wheel watching her lastest haven disappear in the rearview mirrow, she wondered if he had been assigned to her by her father, the only man she had ever really considered her "Dad". She knew when she visited his office, he'd have to call her in, but in her moment of insecurity, in her first few moments as a criminal, he'd still been there for her to lean on, just as he always had been. Sometimes, as she drove the long and hostile highways, she could pretend she was five-years-old and he was taking her away from that small farmhouse, away from a situation no young girl should ever have to face, away from him.
Wayne Jansen. The name that made her blood boil, that made her insides twist, that made her nauseous, that made her dizzy, that had made her a murderer. Even though she had thought she'd taken care of the problem then, erasing him completely from the planet with the flick of a gas switch, the name still loomed over her like a personal thundercloud, the first black mark on her relatively spot-free life.
That name that was half the blood coursing through her veins and she despised him for everything he was and everything he had done and was going to do.
The Marshal had somehow learned of Wayne's love of alcohol and she remembered the look of arrogant satisfaction as he repeated her life history to the windshield wipers on that rainy night, the first time she had ever been caught. She remembered wanting to cry in rage and frustration at the way he rattled off painful memories like they were statistics to be analyzed for no better reason than to sound intelligent.
"Sounds like you got it all figured out," she'd retorted, hoping to silence him. She didn't want to hear anything but the rain pounding on the roof of the car or the road noise as they drove. She didn't want to hear it all over again.
But that was the thing about men of authority. When they were right—and she couldn't argue, he had his facts straight—they just never knew when to quit. And when she felt hounded and trapped, she resorted to desperate action, like swerving a car into a telephone pole.
"I do have you all figured out," he'd said.
He had been close. He had been closer than anyone had been to understanding her in a long time. But even he didn't know her well enough then to know that when she wanted to hide herself from prying eyes, she dug deep inside herself and lied through her teeth. Her mother had taught her how to do that.
"He come knocking on your door late at night?"Diane Jansen who used to have been Diane Austen and in her opinion, should have stayed that way. Her Ma, the best and worst role model a girl could have. She knew a part of that woman had rubbed off on her, both the good things and the bad. Tom used to laugh at her work ethic and joke about how similar she and her mother were, how their foreheads furrowed and their eyebrows scrunched when her mom scrubbed viciously at a stain marring the white surfaces of the diner counter or how she furiously worked her calculator for an answer to that night's Algebra assignment. He never laughed at their stubborn streaks however, that side of their characters that also made them good liars.
"He never touched me."
And that was the one moment of her life, she wished she could forget, could take the end of a No. 2 Eagle pencil and rub and rub until she'd ripped away all the paper that documented that stormy summer night. She'd never had nightmares about cops, or car wrecks, or the death of friends, or plane crashes. Her dreams were always haunted by him and the putrid smell of alcohol and thunder and lightning. She'd never forget how she couldn't look anyone in the eye the few days after, afraid they'd see her secret. She'd been fifteen-years-old.
There had been just enough malice in her voice to make the Marshal back off her secret and though she'd never admitted even that much to Tom, somehow he had always known that if he'd asked, she would've told him the same thing. Both had dropped the subject after that, the Marshal not realizing how close he'd been, Tom not knowing how to deal with the truth. Her mom never once suspected; she'd thought it was just the ups-and-downs of high school and offered an ear that was always refused to the point where she just stopped asking.
A few days later, the official first act of her criminal record had started. Living in a small town, where everyone knew everything about everyone, was at times a blessing and at times a curse. This had been one of those times when she wished she could have had the anonymity of the city girls in big towns whose faces were not recognized by the manager of the general store. The rotund grandmotherly lady who adored her since before she could remember had waved and smiled brightly and she had felt even more guilt at what she was about to do. That was the day she became accountable for an act of larceny, swiping the pregnancy test and bolting for the door.
It had been negative and she remembered how she had sat on the edge of the tub, the water running to muffle her sobs, crying with relief and crying for the future she had contemplated if it had read the other way. She had wiped her eyes, twisted her dry hair up in a towel and splashed her face with cold water, flushing the test down the toilet on her way out, when her mother had yelled up the stairs that her dinner wasn't going to wait for her another minute. That evening at dinner, she'd been back to "normal spirits" as her mother had said. She didn't dare look across the table at Wayne.
Kate sucked in a quivering breath, choking on a sob and glanced about the room. She could see them all avoiding her red and puffy eyes, could see Alex kicking at the dirt with her toe, could see Pickett and Tom exchange embarrassed looks, could see actual emotion in Bea's eyes, could see the slight gap between Henry's non-existent lips.
But what she saw most of all was the horror, the shock, the rage, the hurt, the sympathy in his hazel eyes. They stared at each other, one covered with fresh blood and sweat, the other drowning in flowing tears, until Kate couldn't see clearly anymore through her blurry vision and the only thing to be heard was her the sound of her painful recollections.