by RJ Scott
I was scared in my own damn town, and after a moment’s hesitation, I sat down on the log with my back to the tree and with the best field of vision.
Harry sat next to me. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“You’re still grounded.”
“For how long?”
“Until you’re twenty-three at least.”
This was a standing joke but familiar. My temper, my fear, the desire to shake some sense into Harry, had eased a little. Now all I felt was love, and the worry had become a need to hug him forever. I put my arm around his shoulders and held him close as we watched the fast-flowing river at the center of the lake. Some parts of the river had snaked out and begun to fill the hollows, and all too soon, the huge open space would be full, and any remaining secrets out there would be buried. I didn’t think anyone would be able to look at Iron Lake the same way again, or come to think of it, the town either.
“Seriously, Harry, there’s stuff you don’t know, but there are missing kids, boys, and I’m scared, okay?”
“I’m sorry. I promise to stay away.”
We sat there for a while until all the thoughts in my head coalesced into one sentence that was blurted out before I could even think of what I was saying. “I’m thinking of selling the hotel.” How had my brain told me that this was what we needed to confront when I should be furious with Harry?
He wasn’t fazed at all. “Okay, but we’re staying in Lancaster Falls, right?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yeah, with Marco and being at the school and stuff.”
I loved that word stuff. He used it to indicate anything from homework to what he’d had to eat at Calabresi’s.
“I was looking at the house on the corner of Lincoln and Grant.”
“The blue one with the yard?”
I knew where this was going. “Yeah, that one.”
“Can we get a puppy?” He side-eyed me, and I could see the moment he thought that maybe now wasn’t the right time to ask for a puppy, given he was grounded for the next ten years.
“When you’re done being grounded.”
He muttered something under his breath, but he knew, and I knew that when we moved, we’d be getting a puppy.
Wouldn’t it be cool if it became a place that Lucas could visit and stay. It was a two-bedroom place, but it had a large open kitchen and a den, as well as a plot of grass and flower beds.
“It’s a secret right now,” I stated firmly. “Don’t even tell Marco, okay?”
“He’ll be so excited we’re getting a dog.”
I snorted a laugh. My kid was a master negotiator, and then we headed back up to the hotel as it started to rain, only to find Grandma Garton and Doc waiting outside, sheltering under the porch.
“What do they want?” Harry faux-whispered as much as he could over the heavy rain.
Probably to shout at Harry, and I wasn’t having it. He was my son, and I would deal with things in my own way. “Mrs. Garton, Doc.”
The two of them exchanged glances. “Jacob has suggested I apologize about the fact that I thought Harry was in danger and that you let him out.” It took me a while to recall that Doc’s real name was Jacob. I’d never thought of him as anything else but Doc. Grandma Garton was stiff, and I sensed that she didn’t really mean any of her apology. Not only that, but she’d added the proviso. Harry moved to stand behind me. After all, he’d been on the wrong end of Grandma Garton’s sharp tongue on several occasions.
“Come now,” Doc murmured. “Harry seems very scared, and I think we should address the elephant in the room in a patient way. Why don’t we get out of the rain to do this?” Doc suggested smoothly and stepped past me to the hotel door, trying the locked handle. Wishing I had the courage to say no, I unlocked the door, let us all in, then locked it again. I hoped to hell a mass of FBI agents was all here working, but it was quiet, so I was faced with the Garton offensive on my own.
“Start again, Barbara,” Doc suggested.
“I was talking to Jacob and he made me see that I overstepped myself, and scared you that Harry was lost. If I insinuated in any way you weren’t a good dad, then… you see, Jacob’s opinion means so much to me.” She sent him a fond glance, and I could have laughed at the way Doc flushed if this wasn’t so serious.
“I’ll get tea,” Doc said, embarrassed, and vanished into the kitchen, and I wished I’d been the first to think of that one to escape. We took seats in the front room, a small area with sofas.
She cleared her voice. “I’m glad you found young Harry,” she said and gave a smile that I thought was aiming for welcome and instead was pained. “How are you doing, Harry?” she asked.
“I’m fine, ma’am.”
“Such a polite boy, and, Harry, I really do owe your dad an apology.”
“There’s no need,” I began, but she shook her head.
“I implied that Harry was lacking something and that you weren’t fit to—”
“There’s no need to rehash it,” I interrupted, and thank god Doc was back with four mugs of tea and cookies he’d found in the cupboard.
“This storm,” he murmured and glanced from Grandma Garton to me and back. “Everything okay?” He didn’t wait for an answer, sitting on the nearest sofa. “So, Harry, your dad mentioned you love art? I recall your mom being excellent at life drawing.”
I didn’t have a choice but be hospitable, but I at least managed to exchange subtle eye rolls with Harry before we all sat down to drink the tea. I had two of the cookies, and last night began to catch up with me. I hadn’t gotten much sleep, and with Harry next to me, warm, snuggled up next to my arm, I felt an overwhelming sense of peace, as if everything in my world was right. I yawned behind my hand, feeling lethargic, listening to Doc explaining, again, how the water levels climbed when they blocked the river to form the dam.
“I remember it to this day. It was fascinating,” he finished his story, but next to me, Harry was quiet when normally he loved old stories of the town. Doc sat back in the chair, placing his mug on the small table, and he took off his glasses and smiled at me. “How are you feeling, Josh?”
“Tired,” I said. “Late night.” I yawned again, and I felt like I was dreaming right now, everything hazy, and the mug in my hand was so heavy.
“You should give me the keys now.”
“The keys?”
“You should be proud of your son,” Doc murmured. “It’s been a long time since Casey, but he started up again, so I need to fix things.”
“What’re’ya…” Was I slurring my speech?
“Don’t worry. It’s up to me to look after young Harry. No one is left to hurt him now, and I need to see this done. He’s one of the last one Stokes touched. You see that, right?”
“Doc—”
I blinked to keep my eyes open, tried to stand, to move at all, glancing over at Grandma Garton, who was bent over her mug sleeping. I watched Doc stand swiftly, not the slow old man I’d grown used to, and then he gripped my hair and tilted my head back, forcing open my mouth and tipping the remainder of the tea down my throat. I gasped and tried to struggle, but my limbs were like jelly. Harry was gone from my side, walking down the corridor to the back door with Doc, docile as a puppy but swerving a little. He wasn’t arguing at being led out, just doing what he was told.
Doc came back and frowned at me. “I think probably you should come too, in case… hmmmm, I wasn’t expecting this. I don’t want to kill you, but after today… they’ll know, and I need to get to Lewis, the Janitors son, and fix him as well.” He hummed to himself. “I can’t let you walk around telling everyone.”
“Where’s Harry—”
“Come now, Josh,” Doc singsonged. “The car is there, and you know you want to be with Harry.”
My world shifted, I looked into his eyes, and I wanted to get to my son. “I want to get Harry,” I murmured.
“Off we go.” I walked with Doc as if it was perfectly okay to leave. Harry was on the back
seat of the Honda, lolled to one side, his eyes closed, and I wasn’t even scared for him. He looked so sweet when he was asleep, and sleep wasn’t hurting him. Doc smiled and encouraged me into the passenger seat, and I just knew that was what I had to do.
Get away. Get out of the fucking car. Get Harry out.
Doc headed back into the hotel, and in my mind, I was reaching for the horn, letting people know what was happening, but the rain was so heavy I was wet through just going from hotel door to car. And my arms wouldn’t move. They wouldn’t see me, but I tried to reach the horn. I tried so hard with a strength I’d never used before. My eyes wouldn’t stay open, and when Doc slipped into the driver’s seat, he patted my knee, leaving a scarlet handprint.
“Everything is okay now,” he said.
And I swore before I closed my eyes for good, he was smiling at me.
Twenty-Three
Lucas
What I really wanted to do was go back to the hotel, back to bed, snuggle into Josh’s arms, and go back to sleep.
“Say again?” I prompted for the third time as one of the team working the grids on the mountain was making his report.
With exaggerated patience, Officer Lopez began from the beginning. “We started our grid search from the intersection of Kappa four and Lima three and—”
“No, skip to the end bit.”
She blinked at me in that way a cat does before it pounces with its claws outstretched. “It’s the area across the top of the Gray land, and we think we may have found an ingress from the road. It’s ancient, probably hundreds of years old, but there’s evidence that it was cleared…”
“Maybe a few years ago judging from the branches cut away,” Avery interjected. “Then again recently, although you would have to look hard to see.”
“And this is where you located these items.”
There. That was what I was stuck on. A camo jacket that stank, with the contents of the pockets removed, solid-as-a-rock dog treats, bullets. Everything had been carefully removed and placed on the table in the center of the PD, along with the rifle.
I snapped out of my fugue. Was finding these objects somehow the answer to every question when it was nothing more than a wet-through jacket and an old rifle? “Show me the location grid on the map,” Sawyer instructed, and Agent Lopez pointed out the grid marking.
“That’s close to the old Dwyer cabin, the one that was converted and that Chris stayed in,” Sawyer commented, and I thought that was the second time he’d said that.
“We entered the cabin with a key, and it’s undisturbed, no sign of recent use. Then we combed every inch of that area.”
“A fingertip search?”
“Much of the area is inaccessible. We used a drone for some of it, but if we couldn’t get in there, then I doubt anyone—”
“We need to get up there. I want the entire team based in the single area.” I pulled the other map over, the one from fifty years ago. It showed the cabin that Sawyer had mentioned, and much lower down the mountain where we’d found Adam Gray’s body, and there in the middle was the place that Adam had been building for his wife. That was the entire area that needed covering by us now.
“What’s left of this place that burned down?” Avery asked.
“Nature has reclaimed it,” Sawyer said.
“You can tell there was a building there,” Agent Lopez pointed out.
“Yeah, there’s part of a stone chimney left,” Logan added. “You can see that from the aerial drone shots if you look closely, but it’s a crumbled pile of stones. There’s no structure remaining.”
Something was poking at my thoughts, some memory of a fact I knew, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“The cabin, Sandoval said he burned it down to hide the fact that he’d killed Lily Dwyer and her son, back in…”
“1972,” Sawyer offered helpfully.
“But there’s something.” I pulled over the folder with the information from my face-off with Sandoval, and it hit me front and center. “The cellar. He said she fell into a hole that was the cellar dug for the cabin, right into the hillside, and he shoved the son in as well. Did anyone check below the cabin? Does any of what was the cellar feed into the cave system?”
There was a buzz of chatter, and I could see agents and cops alike staring at each other, searching for one person to say they’d had that covered. But why would they have? I shuffled through drone footage, and Logan helped me, passing the photos to Sawyer, who put them together like a jigsaw, and the picture it made was impressive with very few gaps.
Agent Lopez traced a finger from the old Dwyer place, down the old path they’d found, which crossed close to the old broken chimney, and continued sideways to the sinkholes.
“There might be something there, something safe that no one knew about and was used to kill the women? We haven’t found a kill zone, working on the assumption they were killed in random places, but what if…” I peered at the photos, checking for signs of disturbance. “We need to get the drone back up, get it closer… what are these?” I picked up the magnifying glass and stared down at a small patch of land about six feet from the chimney.
“Three chimney stones,” Sawyer murmured and didn’t seem to think there was anything weird about it, but either they’d fallen in a random fashion but had been left in perfect alignment, or they’d been placed there. Stones to mark the death of Lily and her child? But that would be two, and this was three. Maybe it was a religious thing, the three, the Holy Ghost, and all that.
“We need to get a team up there. I’ll go.”
“Count me in,” Logan and Drew said at the same time.
“Me too,” Sawyer murmured.
The rain was so heavy on the windows that they rattled, and I grimaced. Sawyer was pulling on a rain jacket, but my FBI-issue coat was back at the hotel, so I headed to the door.
“Agent Lopez, I want eyes on those stones and a perimeter. My team leaves in two.” The others nodded, began to shrug on rain jackets, and I left and sprinted to the hotel. It wasn’t just the coat I needed. It was to tell Josh I’d be late, which seemed to be a thing now, and not only that I’d left this morning without a kiss, and something told me I’d need that fortifying action before heading to find fuck knew what. I unlocked the door, then slammed the door behind me, shaking off the rain and heading to the stairs.
“Josh! You here?”
Nothing. The hotel was silent, and I was pissed that I wasn’t getting that kiss I needed. Then a scent hit me, and my heart stopped as I lurched to the source in the small sitting room behind reception. No. Not Josh and Harry.
And that was when I saw her. The old lady they called Grandma Garton, sitting on the sofa, her head tilted back at an angle, and the blood.
Someone had slit her throat so deep I could see—
Fuck.
“JOSH!”
A quick search, a frantic, desperate hunt, but there was no sign of Josh or Harry, and they could’ve been anywhere, over at Calabresi’s. They didn’t have to be here, dead.
I yanked at the hotel door and came face-to-face with Nicky Farmer under a giant pink umbrella. “Well, hello, Agent, you’re just the person I wanted to speak to.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have the time to—”
“Saw Doc driving out of town up the mountain road, Harry sleeping in the back of the car, and Josh slumped in the passenger seat. Is everything okay here?” She peered past me.
“Doc.”
“Yes.”
I pulled the hotel door closed behind me and locked it.
“Go home, Nicky. Stay the fuck inside.”
I didn’t wait for an answer, sprinted back to the PD, making the most dramatic entrance of my life, hitting the door open so hard I slammed into the wall.
“It’s Doc. He killed Barbara Garton. He’s taken Josh and Harry!” Every eye turned to me, people who’d been sitting standing up and tensing in readiness.
“I want a BOLO on Jacob Milden, aka, Doc.
He’s taken Harry Baker, thirteen, dark hair, dark eyes. And Josh. Fuck, we all know Josh. Potential drugging of both. Trace Doc’s car, track his movements. I want eyes on the mountain, on and around the remains of that chimney. No one spooks him. There is a child involved. Put out an Amber Alert. I want people at the hotel, dealing with potential murder and abduction. Call the coroner. I want everyone out looking for Josh and Harry.” No one was moving, immobilized by information overload. “Do it!” I shouted, and everyone scattered in different directions, and thank god Avery took charge of the teams because I was numb with fear. Josh. Harry.
“We’re sure it was Doc? Where do we go? What do we look for?” Logan snapped the questions so fast I held out a hand. I had to be calm and focused.
“Nicky saw him on the mountain road.”
Sawyer and Drew exchanged pointed glances. “We’re heading that way then, following your hunch, get to the cabin that was destroyed by fire. We’re getting Josh and Harry back.”
Sawyer stopped by Avery, “we need someone looking in on Lewis Jackman, Derwent Street, Harry told us … I don’t have time to explain, but I have this gut—”
“I’m on it.”
Within seconds, we were in Sawyer’s SUV, going out of town, a convoy behind us.
“Lewis Jackman?”
“Harry said Lewis was crying, it was what led us to the mayor, I don’t know why I think he’s in danger, but…” He didn’t finish, we never questioned him, and then there was absolute silence in the car.
Twenty-Four
Josh
I felt like I was falling, tumbling and hitting steps, face down in dirt.
Blackness.
Something hit me, a slap to my face, then cold water, and I sputtered as I regained consciousness. I attempted to move, but I was tied down with rope, anchored to something metallic in the wall of a dark and damp place with water running through cracks.
“Welcome to my quiet place,” Doc said and smiled again. He epitomized a kindly grandfather, but there was nothing kindly about him taking me and Harry. He tutted. “I really didn’t want you here, and now I don’t know what to do. It’s a somewhat odd feeling.”