Chapter Twenty-Eight

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Eddie and I slid the dresser against the bedroom door again. Rose wasn’t home, but she could be here any minute.

He was sweaty after his run, but I didn’t care. After the phone call with my mother, I needed him. I met him halfway across the living room when he came through the door, put my hands on his damp shoulders, kissed him, and said, “Eddie Carter,” in his ear. He was happy to oblige.

Afterward, we lay catching our breath in the twisted sheets. Eddie had a dazed expression on his face that made me smile.

“Okay,” he said at last. “That was like a real honeymoon.”

I stared at the ceiling and said nothing.

“We should probably shower.” His voice was lazy. “I’m so goddamned tired.”

My heart was thumping in my chest, and it wasn’t only because of what we’d just done. I felt raw, exposed. Panicked. The money being gone, then the conversation with my mother, had shaken something loose in me. I hated it, and I couldn’t stop it.

I was so good at not thinking about the things I didn’t want to think about. Except right now, I wasn’t.

Tell him, I thought. Tell him.

If I told him, I’d lose everything. I didn’t have much, but I wasn’t willing to risk it. Not yet. Not now. I had worked too hard for it. It mattered. Eddie mattered. This marriage mattered, and I wasn’t used to having something in my grip that I didn’t want to let go of. Something I wasn’t willing to leave behind.

“Do you ever wonder about your parents?” I asked into the quiet. “Your real ones?”

Eddie’s voice was slurring. He was drifting off into sleep. “I used to. Not so much anymore.”

“Do you ever wonder if you’re like them? If being like them is inevitable, even if you don’t know who they are?”

“That’s an intense question,” Eddie said, but of course, he answered. “Yeah, I’ve wondered that. I don’t even know if I look like either of my parents. I don’t have a picture of my mother, and I don’t remember my father at all.” He rubbed his forehead slowly. “Maybe one of them was a genius. Or a psychopath, you know? Maybe that’s why there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I would be like this, even if I hadn’t gone overseas.”

I was quiet, staring at the ceiling. My eyes were dry as sand.

“It was getting better for a while,” Eddie went on, his voice quiet. “But lately . . .” He trailed off.

“Lately what?”

“It isn’t getting worse, exactly. It’s changing. I don’t see the stuff I used to see. I see different things—or at least, I think I do. The nightmares have stopped, but sometimes I feel like I’m dreaming.”

“Dreaming?” I asked.

“Dreaming everything,” Eddie said. “That I’m here, living this life, with you. Like I woke up and I was just here one day, and I don’t know how I got here. Logically, I know that I came home, I met you, we got married. But I get confused. The police kept asking me why I made the turn and ended up in Coldlake Falls, and I don’t have an answer for them. I don’t know, because I don’t really remember. I honestly don’t know how I got here.”

My heart was still beating in my throat. Because I didn’t remember, either. I had dozed off when we made the turn onto Atticus Line. Or had I? Did I remember that, or was it the story I told myself? What did I really remember for sure?

I was here, with this man, and I didn’t know how I got here, either. How well did we even know each other? We had met less than six months ago. I had changed so much since we met. How much had he changed, too?

“The memories I have of my mother,” Eddie said, “maybe I dreamed those, too. I remember her holding my hand at a playground, urging me to climb the ladder to the slide. I remember the feel of her hand in mine, the way I never wanted to let it go. I had no way to tell her that I just wanted to hold her hand, more than I wanted to play with the other kids, more than I wanted just about anything. I wanted to be wherever she was and hold her hand. And she thought I wanted to slide down the slide, like any other kid. So eventually, I did.” He paused. “Maybe that memory isn’t real. Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“I know you think it makes you crazy, but to me it sounds nice,” I said. “I don’t dream.”

He shifted next to me. “What do you mean? Sure you do. Everyone does.”

“Not me. I wish I did. I remember everything.” I blinked at the ceiling, thinking about my mother, the years of our life together. If that were a dream, I would gladly wake up, but it wasn’t. I remembered every gritty detail, every exhausted late night on the road, every cheap apartment, every time I ate a candy bar for breakfast. I remembered the face of every man my mother dated, no matter how briefly. The facts of my life were relentless, unending, and none of them would leave my head, even for a minute, to leave room for a nicer dream.

I remembered the churning fear in my gut that one day I’d come home and my mother would be gone. Then it had actually happened, and I remembered that, too.

So, yes, I remembered everything. Until I met Eddie, and for the first time my life slipped by me like water. Until we’d made the turn onto Atticus Line, which I didn’t remember at all.

“What brought this on?” Eddie asked me. “The question about my parents? It was the conversation with Carla, right? About Shannon leaving her son.”

I was supposed to be the calm one, the one that soothed Eddie through his panic attacks. I wasn’t supposed to quietly fall apart while he lay next to me. “It’s a coincidence,” I said. “The fact that she left her son, like your mother left you. Carla said he went into the foster system. It has to be a coincidence, right?”

“I know,” Eddie said. “As soon as she started talking, I wondered . . . I guess that’s how my mind works, how it’ll always work. Always looking for clues. I remember living out in the country—I don’t remember Midland. Even being there today, it wasn’t familiar to me.” He stared at the ceiling, thinking. “The math doesn’t add up. Shannon had a baby, not an eight-year-old in 1976. That was some other kid. Not me.”

His hand moved across the bed and took mine. Maybe it was supposed to be a gesture to comfort me, but it felt like a gesture to comfort himself. To reassure himself that I was still there.

“There’s nothing wrong with wondering,” I said.

He squeezed my hand. “I guess you think about the same things since your mother died. Wondering how things could have been different if she’d lived.”

I closed my eyes. They stung with guilt. “I don’t want to think about my mother,” I whispered.

“But you do think about her.” He sounded so certain. “You always will. You went through a lot with her.”

“Eddie.”

“I’m going to have a nap.” His thumb moved over the back of my hand, stroking it. “Then we’ll talk about it some more.”

When he had drifted off, I got up, showered, and dressed. When I came out of the bedroom I found Rose sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, a magazine open and unread in her hands. She stared at me hard.

“Don’t give me that look,” I said. “We’re married.”

“I have to wash your sheets, missy,” she said.

“Fine.” I grabbed a glass from the cupboard to pour myself some water. “I’ll wash them myself. Weren’t you married to your precious Robbie for years?”

“You leave Robbie out of this. Where were you both this morning?”

This morning? It felt like a long time ago. “Midland,” I said, taking the cheap plastic ice cube tray out of the freezer and twisting it so the cubes would pop up. “We had a lead that the Lost Girl might be from there. We found out there’s a missing girl from Midland named Shannon Haller.”

“That hitchhiker from the seventies?” Rose said. “That’s what you’re up to? You’re not going to get anywhere. Robbie never did.”

I put my glass down on the counter. “Robbie investigated the hitchhiker murders?”

Rose made a sniffing sound that eloquently told me I was an idiot. “Of course not. I told you, they wouldn’t make him detective because he was Black. He was a beat cop. They give detective jobs to men like Quentin. Didn’t mean that Robbie didn’t know what was going on, though. It’s hard to miss a bunch of murders happening in your town. He had his own questions.”

“And what did he think the answers were?”

“If you think you’re going to solve it, you’re not,” Rose said without answering my question. “We don’t have a crazed killer running around Coldlake Falls. We have irresponsible kids who hitchhike to Hunter Beach and back, and sometimes they get in trouble.”

I sifted her words in my head. “So you think it’s random, but Robbie thought there was a killer.”

“He had to knock on doors and ask questions,” Rose said. “That’s what beat cops do. No one knew those kids, and none of them had family here. I always told him—they’re just kids who had bad luck.”

I pulled up the chair next to her and sat down. “And he never agreed with you.”

Rose put the magazine down and adjusted her glasses. “He said that those kids were perfect victims,” she told me, reluctantly. “Old enough to have left home by their own choice. They were on the outs with their families, or they’d told everyone they were going on a trip, so no one expected them to come home. Hitchhiking on a remote road, sometimes at night. Robbie said it was the perfect setup for someone who’s hunting.”

Hunting.It made sense, except that you’d have to drive Atticus Line every night for years, looking for a hitchhiker. Who did that? Wouldn’t they be noticed?

And as Eddie had said, if a man is hunting, why wouldn’t he bring a knife or a gun? He’d strangled them or bludgeoned them with rocks. Max Shandler had supposedly used the knife he kept in his car in case of an accident. I was no cop, but that sounded impulsive to me. Like Max—if it had been Max—had seen Rhonda Jean hitching, and had suddenly decided she was going to die.

And then each victim had been left, forgotten. Like Eddie said, the death was the point.

I looked at Rose. She was pretending to read her magazine, like she didn’t care about this conversation. “I heard a rumor,” I said. “I heard that the Coldlake Falls PD know exactly who the killer is, but they’ve covered it up all these years. Did Robbie ever say anything about that?”

Rose snapped the magazine shut. “Beatrice Snell,” she said, angrily. “And her crazy sister.”

That surprised me. “Um, maybe.”

“I worked with her at the grocery store.” Rose sniffed. “It’s hard to shut that girl up and get a word in edgewise. UFOs, Roswell, the CIA giving people drugs—I never got a minute’s peace. Beatrice is morbid, but Gracie is the really crazy one. I’m not surprised they got their hands on you somehow. They’re going to get in real trouble one of these days, talking like they do.”

“Who does Gracie think the killer is? She had a theory she wasn’t telling us.”

“Probably because she doesn’t trust you enough, and she knows she’ll get in trouble if she repeats it too often. She thinks the killer is Detective Quentin.”

My jaw dropped open. “Holy shit.”

Rose looked like she smelled something bad. “I don’t like swearing. I had to remind Robbie all the time. I don’t care what you say outside my house, but leave your swears at the front door, under the mat.”

“It fits,” I said, ignoring her lecture. “He might be old enough. He’s in good shape. No one would suspect him.” Gracie, in her way, was kind of a genius. “It would explain why the murders haven’t been solved. It would also explain why he showed up at the hospital so fast at three o’clock in the morning, already dressed.”

“Wasn’t Beam there, too?” Rose asked.

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t in the mood for holes in the theory. “So the police have covered up the fact that one of their own is a killer. Maybe they needed someone to blame this time, so they framed Max Shandler. They could have put Rhonda Jean’s backpack in his truck, planted the knife they say they found.”

“Quentin isn’t a murderer,” Rose said. “Robbie was Coldlake PD. He would never have taken part in a cover-up like that—never. He would have died first.”

The bedroom door opened and Eddie came out, dressed in jeans and a tee. “Mrs. Jones,” he said, greeting Rose. Rose pressed her lips together and nodded at my husband without speaking. Eddie ducked his gaze away, embarrassed, and opened the fridge. Honestly.

“Mrs. Jones, would you like us to make dinner?” Eddie asked, still staring into the fridge. “I see hot dogs in here. I could barbecue them.”

“That grill out back hasn’t been used since Robbie died,” Rose said. “Two years.”

“Then I’ll clean it up and get it going for you.”

An hour later, we were finishing our meal and stacking the dishes. I was rinsing plates in the sink when I felt the light touch of a hand on my shoulder. “What is it?” I asked Eddie, not lifting my head.

“What is what?” Eddie asked. He was standing at the kitchen table five feet away, crumpling the used napkins.

My hands went still. I stood there, wondering what had just happened. Wondering who had touched me. Wondering why.

Eddie frowned at me. “April? Are you okay?”

Why?

My hands dropped to the counter. My stomach twisted. Cold sweat started on my back, but it wasn’t the same cold I’d felt on Atticus Line, the icy breath in the hot, sweltering air. This was a different cold, the cold of pure dread. The cold of fear blooming inside me.

Something bad is about to happen.

Was it a thought, or a voice?

“April?” Eddie said again.

Something bad is about to happen.I opened my mouth to say it aloud, to warn Eddie or Rose, or maybe to warn myself. I had the urge to turn and run out the back door of Rose’s house, to make for the trees and keep running as fast as I could until I was so deep in the darkness that no one would see me. But I gripped the counter and stayed still.

There was a knock on the front door.

“I’ll get it,” Rose grumbled, crossing the room.

I looked at Eddie, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was throwing out the napkins, then turning toward the door.

Rose opened the front door, and her tone was disdainful. “Oh. It’s you.”

“Good evening, Rose,” Detective Quentin said. “Can we come in?”