No Place Safe: A Psychological Thriller with a Gripping Twist

  No Place Safe

  A Psychological Thriller With A Gripping Twist

  Ramona Light

  No Place Safe

  © 2022 by Ramona Light

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems, without express written permission by the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and places are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. None of the characters in the book are based on actual persons. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely and unintentionally coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Also By Ramona Light

  Prologue

  The rabbit was so white it morphed with the seemingly endless sheets of snow that covered everything visible until it all met the pale blue sky on the horizon. Through her small office window, Magnolia could see the shapes of the tall snow-covered spruce running along the foot of the mountains, like an extra line of enforcement that locked the residents of the tiny town of Rudder Point in for all eternity. Of course, that was a melodramatic way of looking at things, but when winter began its shift in Alaska and daylight became nothing more than the preshow, that was how it could feel.

  Magnolia supposed it was different for the people who were born and raised in such a place, but she had been living in Rudder Point for seven years now, and seeing the sun setting a couple of hours after she had eaten her lunch still made her feel claustrophobic. She knew it was irrational—she was a 42-year-old woman and a qualified psychiatrist, for God’s sake—but still, she was also human, and human beings had irrational thoughts and fears. Hell, if they didn’t, her profession would be obsolete.

  But for now, the sun was starting to come out, and in the thick, powdery snow, the white rabbit she had been watching outside twitched its nose and hopped, once, twice, three times.

  Her office was one-quarter of a small, nondescript one-story building slap-bang in the middle of town. Two of the other “office spaces” were empty, the faded paper signs tacked to their doors declaring that they were available for rent. Magnolia had seen those signs every Monday to Friday for the last five years. The only other occupied room belonged to a man named Hank LeCross, a retired author who now bought and sold rare books. Magnolia believed he owned the only business in Rudder Point that saw less action than hers.

  Magnolia shifted in her swivel chair and readjusted her glasses. Even though she was in her early forties, the creamy skin of her face had refused to wrinkle. At least, not much. She was a slim woman—always had been—yet she was far from obsessive about what she ate. Her childhood, spent mostly in foster homes for the early part until Sheldon and Marie Harris adopted her at the age of 12, had been tough. The few pictures she possessed of herself before then showed a shy little girl who bordered on malnourished.

  She didn’t look back on this stage of her life with anger, at least not consciously, and instead tried to be grateful that the two strangers she would come to know as Mom and Dad had been kind enough to take her in and share their love and their home. In contrast to her childhood, the teen period had been some of the best of her life, and young Lyla (she had been Lyla then, of course) had found herself attending the same school for a few years, which was something alien yet wonderful to her. Stability had never been something she’d experienced, and it had felt natural. Her weight had begun to improve, and soon she was merely slim instead of painfully skinny.

  And then her parents were gone, just like that. The thread of Lyla’s life had picked up where it had left off, and as her 16th birthday rolled around, she had been placed in foster care once more. Of course, by then, she was a homeowner—Sheldon and Marie had kindly left her the small bungalow on the outskirts of New York—but had to remain dependent for another couple of years before she could legally move in on her own.

  Magnolia took her glasses off and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. Thinking about the crash that had taken her parents away was pointless, and she knew such thoughts were destructive. Sure, it was a terrible time in the aftermath, but when she remembered those four years living with the Harris’s, there was so much happiness to focus on. Sheldon and Marie had been good to her in life and in death, and without them, Magnolia didn’t dare think where she might have ended up.

  The thing was, whenever Magnolia reminisced about her childhood, she did so with feelings of self-pity and anger, and they were things she didn’t want in her life. She often believed the sole reason she got into psychiatry had been done in an attempt to eradicate such negative and damaging emotions from the world.

  “Like the world’s most mundane superhero,” she whispered to the empty office and laughed.

  When she shook her head slowly, her extra-long brown bangs swung loosely in front of her vision for a moment until she tucked them behind her ears. The only salon in town was situated in the only mall in town, and even then, calling it a mall was a stretch. Magnolia had gone there last week, and the chubby middle-aged woman who ran the place, Franny Wilde, had done a better job (as she always did, to be fair) of styling her hair than some of the more upmarket salons she had been to in New York. Magnolia had gone for a ‘bob’ hairstyle a few years back and kept it ever since, and she had to admit it suited her.

  Apart from times during the first 12 years of her life when her face had been sallow and sunken, Magnolia had always had plump cheeks. It was strange, as no other part of her was the same, and up until she met Nicolas in the summer of 2005—

  Peter, she scolded herself—I have to remember to call him Peter.

  —she had always hated them. The man she would fall in love with and marry soon after always told her they were her best feature.

  After grabbing her phone off the blotter on her desk and checking the time—10:45—Magnolia slipped her glasses back on and returned her gaze to the window and the white world outside. Her patient wasn’t due for another 15 minutes, and Wallace Olafson was tardy to a fault. If she saw his blue Ford crunching into the building’s shared parking lot before 11:05, she would eat her hat.

  The rabbit was either gone or so still she couldn’t spot it. Her eyes strained against the endless, gleaming whiteness, but nothing moved except for the fresh flakes that had started to fall. The sun was fully out now, and everything outside had taken on an electric sharpness. To her left, she could just make out the roof of the town’s mall. Only a thin horizontal black line showed through the snow, and then the lower floor of the building was swallowed up by the hills.

  Rudder Point Mall had been the thing that had brought home Magnoli
a’s dire situation when she and her family had moved north seven years before. Everything had been a blur then, of course. The lake house, the trial, everything; it had all happened so fast none of them had really understood what was happening. But seeing that building, with its meager five stores and fried chicken joint, had been the real hammer blow. She had thought getting used to the weather would have been the hardest part—or even the name change—but it had been the Rudder Point Mall that had brought reality home. It made no sense that such a minor aspect would be the tipping point, but the human psyche worked in strange and phenomenal ways.

  Then their first winter had kicked in, and with it came the darkness and the biting cold. Soon there was claustrophobia and boredom, and suddenly the pathetic building the locals thought of as a mall seemed insignificant in the grand scheme of things. New York was gone, dead to them all, and it was never coming back. Their current life was all that remained, and during the early days, when she would call her son Kevin instead of Colin or her daughter Sarah instead of Sally, Magnolia would feel her chest tighten as the guilt of everything would threaten to crush her. How had she let this happen to her family? Why hadn’t she done more to stop it?

  Of course, thinking that way was as devastating as allowing self-pity and anger toward her childhood to creep in. The things that happened back then were unavoidable, and when a man in a suit from the FBI tells you that you need to move to Alaska for the safety of your family, you move to Alaska. Magnolia could handle all of that if it were just her and Peter, but her son had only been six when it happened, and Sarah—Sally, it’s Sally now—had been getting ready to start high school. Her kids had spent seven years now away from friends and family (thankfully, there wasn’t much of the latter) they would never see again, and that was what hurt the most.

  Suddenly, the perfectly smooth snow outside puffed, and the two beady black eyes she had been looking for appeared. The rabbit had moved now and was at least 30 yards from where she had seen it last. Magnolia leaned forward in her chair and squinted her green eyes against the brilliant white once more. As she did, Wallace Olafson’s truck appeared on the crest of the hill. Magnolia checked the clock on her phone, saw it was 11:04, and shook her head with a wry smile.

  The old man, who had lived in Rudder Point for the 64 years he had been alive, had introduced himself six months ago with the words, “I think this psychiatry stuff is nonsense.” He had actually started to make some progress in the past few weeks, though, and Magnolia had reveled in that always wonderful feeling of having made a breakthrough with a patient. Like any of the locals she had seen in her time here, getting them to realize she wasn’t some charlatan trying to look into their wet dreams was the hardest part. Rudder Point was mainly a hardened fishing town, and the 3,451 people that grew up there were suspicious of out-of-towners. Especially those with some fancy degree from Columbia University.

  Wallace’s Ford disappeared for a moment as he rounded the bend below the hill, and Magnolia found herself searching the blankets of snow for the rabbit once more. Apart from Mr. Olafson, Magnolia only had six other patients, and that was a whole lot more than she’d had in her first two years of practicing here. Of the seven, only four had signed up voluntarily, with the rest getting sent there by the courts due to minor offenses such as driving under the influence or petty crime. Wallace Olafson was one of the latter and only recently had admitted that alcohol may just be a problem in his life.

  Just then, the rabbit shifted, and Magnolia saw a small puff of powder as its ears shot up. Suddenly it seemed far more alert than it had been previously, and she could almost feel the tension in the air outside. There was a tightness to it, and she felt her whole body tense along with the animal. When the black dot appeared on the white blanket of snow and circled, Magnolia had to resist an urge to open the window and shriek a warning. It would make no difference, she knew, but still, as she watched the dot grow in size, a choking sense of impending doom settled on her.

  Her heart was beating far too fast, and she could feel the walls of her tiny office closing in. Magnolia was a woman of science, and she knew nature had to take its course, but what she was seeing outside felt far too relevant. Why this was so, she couldn’t have explained, but something about the shadow on the snow—that circling, growing shadow—felt all too close to home.

  When the rabbit made a sudden break for cover, Magnolia had a moment when she actually believed it might make it. Then the unmistakable form of the bald eagle swooped into view, and when its vice-like talons snapped shut on the white rabbit’s neck, she was sure she heard the tiny bones inside it snap. Of course, that was impossible, but still, at that moment, it felt all too real.

  As the eagle took off without breaking its arc, a small spray of red mist peppered the snow beneath, leaving nothing but tiny dots where a rabbit had just been. Breathing far heavier than she knew she rationally should be, Magnolia spun around in her chair and rested her elbows on the desk. With her head in her hands, she closed her eyes and took five heavy breaths.

  When she opened her eyes again, the walls were where they always had been. The tension in her chest relaxed a little, and she tried to push the image of the blood out of her mind. There was a lot of wildlife in Rudder Point, and what she had seen just now was all a part of how the world worked. Magnolia knew this, knew it with every fiber of her being, but something about the circling and the tightening of the noose had stuck like a fishbone in her throat.

  When four meaty knuckles knocked on her office door, Magnolia gasped. Then she stood up, straightened her beige skirt, and walked across the room.

  Wallace smiled when she opened the door, and seeing the unmistakable clearness in his otherwise weathered face calmed her. He looked healthier than she had ever seen him, and the burgeoning peace trying to settle in him was almost tangible. He still had a long way to go, but there was a definite improvement in the man who stood before her.

  “Sorry I’m late, Dr. Hendricks,” Wallace said, as he did at the beginning of each of their bi-weekly sessions.

  Behind him, the room that sat between the four offices was empty, as it always was. Four foldout chairs ran around a worn coffee table that was adorned with dogeared magazines from three years ago. Over Wallace’s shoulder, Magnolia could see the closed door to Hank LeCross’s bookstore. To her left and right, the faded AVAILABLE FOR RENT signs tacked to the other two doors continued to stand guard.

  “That’s okay, Wallace,” Magnolia replied, returning his smile. She didn’t have another patient until two, so they could run the session on for a few extra minutes to make up the time. “Why don’t you come in, and we’ll have a chat?”

  Even with his undeniable progress, Wallace Olafson still leaned his head in and scanned the office with something bordering on suspicion. His thick gray hair was shaggy, and he towered over the small doctor holding the door open for him. Both of his eyebrows—which looked like strips of carpet—creased for a moment. Then his face lit up a little, and he smiled again.

  “Sounds good, Dr. Hendricks.” He shook the snow off his thick parka, removed it, and hung it on the hanger on the wall outside. As he stepped past her, Magnolia could get the faint hint of fish from his thick, Aran sweater.

  Once he was seated, Magnolia closed the door and walked back to her desk. Outside, fresh snow had already covered the tiny droplets of blood, and only the endless sheets of white and Wallace’s Ford could be seen. That truck would soon blend in with the rest, as everything always seemed to in Rudder Point. In the end, everything succumbed to the conditions.

  “So,” Magnolia chimed, leaning back in her chair and linking her hands over her lap. “How have you been, Wallace?”

  Chapter 1

  Winters in Rudder Point were always a struggle. Apart from the heavy snow that seemed never to want to leave, only having five hours or so of daylight was mentally hard to take. Peter Hendricks supposed the people who had lived here their whole lives saw it differently, being that they basica
lly knew no other way of life, but for those who moved here from another state, the drawn-out darkness was probably the most challenging part.

  But then again, Peter reconsidered; when summer rolled around each year, and there were 15 hours of daylight, that wasn’t much fun either. Sleep became fragmented, and there was always an underlying feeling of disorientation. Of course, Peter had found sleep pretty hard to come by in the past couple of years, regardless of the time of day. Ever since the New York courts decided Lenny Benzini had served enough of his—

  “Order comin’ in, Pete,” Winnie Jacobs called, leaning in through the pass and clipping a handwritten order ticket into the holder.

  The drone of chit-chat and cutlery scraping on plates came back to Peter in a flood of noise. Beside him, young Vince Mayfield—the only other cook hired during the quieter winter period—smiled nervously and nodded to the ticket Winnie had just pinned up.

  “Sorry,” Peter said, chuckling. “I was daydreaming.”

  The smell of bacon and eggs was everywhere, and not for the first time, Peter looked down at his crisp Winnie’s Diner T-shirt and navy apron and wondered how he got here. In truth, he knew exactly how he and his family came to be in the tiny coastal town of Rudder Point, but there were many moments just like this one when it felt more like a strange dream than reality.

  Working in a small side-of-the-road diner hadn’t exactly been Peter’s dream. None of it had. But now that he was here, he knew he had to make the most of it. He had Sally and Colin’s happiness to think about and, of course, Magnolia’s too. Even though it had been seven years, he still felt it strange calling his family by those names, but his wife, who was a wonderful psychiatrist, had told them all when they’d first arrived that referring to each other’s old identities—even in thought—should not be done. This, she told them, was the safest way, as using their past names in any form could lead to bad habits and slipups. They were here in Alaska to stay, and they would forever be known as Peter, Magnolia, Colin, and Sally. That was it, and they needed to accept it.