I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t want to lie, but I also don’t want to tell her about Vee. I’m ashamed of myself, and I’m angry that Vee left me, and I have no idea where she’s gone. So after I fumble for a few seconds, I say, “I just—I wanted to go to the party, Mom. I knew you wouldn’t—”
My voice is quavering, voice unsteady, on the verge of tears. My tough-girl persona has melted away, and I feel like I’m a little kid again. I remember being twelve and showing off for Connor; I’d gotten Mom’s gun out of the lockbox and unloaded it and reloaded it, and the expression on her face when she found us was just like this. Angry, terrified, disappointed, so worried. It hurts. I just want to curl up in a ball and cry myself sick.
I’m the only real witness.
If the cops don’t get Bon and the guy with the mullet, I’m going to be in real trouble.
10
GWEN
It’s hard to even fathom the relief I’m feeling right now. Lanny’s cold and soaking wet and shivering, but she’s alive. Uninjured, but terrified. I need to get her home and into dry clothes, but the police officer who stopped Sam’s truck and has directed him to park over by the side is coming at us, with Sam and Connor close behind.
“I’m going to need y’all to wait for the detectives,” he tells us. “They’re on the way right now.”
Lanny says, “Is she okay? Candy, the girl up there?” She’s pale, shaking, but steady enough.
Up where? What girl? I wonder, but it’s not the time to ask. I turn to the paramedic and he says to my daughter, “We’re headed up there right now.” He directs the rest to me. “Lanny’s okay. Get her warmed up and let her rest. Her lungs are going to be sore and irritated for a while, so take her in to see her doctor; he may want to give her some treatments for that.” Then he and his partner are gone, carrying a lightweight stretcher and heading for the cliff the kids call Killing Rock.
I turn to Lanny and say, “Baby, what happened?”
She doesn’t want to tell me, and I don’t know if that’s shock or her physical misery or something else. I want to press, but Sam puts a hand on my shoulder and says, quietly, “Gwen. She’s okay. Take a breath.”
“I just wanted to go to the party,” she whispers. Her lips are getting a little color back, but she still looks half-drowned. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s dangerous for you to go out like this, you remember what happened with your dad—”
My son’s been silent until now, but he shoots me a look full of resentment and impatience. “Yes, Mom. We remember. She just wants to be normal. Do normal stuff.”
I stop myself from telling him that it’s never going to be normal, because I don’t want that to be true. We need to find normal. Work for normal. Now, more than ever, it hits me that we can’t stay here. Being a teen is hard in any circumstances. The level of difficulty my kids have to navigate now is crushing.
We can’t go on this way.
I just hold Lanny and rub her arms and try to warm her up. The area’s littered with discarded bottles; a huge bonfire is still raging on the shore. Abandoned camp chairs and discarded bottles are a testament to how many were here. There’s absolutely nobody in sight, and there’s an eerie silence to the whole thing.
I can see a light up on top of the cliff: the paramedics, working on the girl Lanny mentioned. They’re not up there long, and they come down carrying a still form on the stretcher. She’s still alive, but her pallor is awful. From the bandages, she’s got a serious head wound. Lanny found her up there, clearly. But then why was my daughter in the lake? I want to pepper her with questions, but before I can, the detectives pull up in their old black sedan. I see Detective Prester climb out first; then my friend Kezia Claremont exits from the passenger side. Prester looks like he doesn’t much relish a climb; he considers the cliff trail, then dispatches Kezia up and instead comes straight for us. As he approaches, his seamed old face blurs history with present; I remember him coming like this at me before, when a body was dragged out of Stillhouse Lake and I was a suspect in her death. I don’t want him interrogating my daughter the same way.
“Hey, Gwen. Sam.” Prester exchanges sober handshakes with the two of us, then looks at Lanny. He’s got the sort of face that can seem kind and supportive right up to the moment he slams the cell door on you. And I’m not reassured by his good manners. “Young lady, I’m going to need to talk to you. Gwen, you can come along.”
“Fine,” I say, as Lanny draws breath to tell me she can do it alone. I’m not about to let her get trapped. Not that I think she’s done anything wrong, but . . . still. “Maybe in your car?”
“Yeah, that works, I’ll get that heater going. Miss Atlanta, you get into the front seat with me. Gwen, mind sitting in the back?”
I don’t until the door shuts, and I remember that I probably can’t open it by myself. But I’m not the one in trouble here. My daughter looks tough, but I see the scared little girl inside, and it hurts.
Detective Prester takes out his phone and presses a recording app. “This is Detective Timothy Prester interviewing Atlanta Proctor. Lanny, state your address and birth date for the record, please.”
She does, stammering a little; I’m not sure whether that’s the chill she’s still feeling, or nerves. Prester gives her a warm, reassuring smile. It puts me on guard. “Right, the time right now is . . . two fifteen a.m. Okay, I promise we won’t be long, I know you’ve been through a lot tonight. You doing okay? You need anything?”
Lanny shakes her head, but she’s still shivering. Prester turns on the engine, and the heater starts blasting. “You just tell me the story the way it happened, Lanny. I’m listening.”
Lanny’s unusually reticent, but he coaxes it out of her, step by step. Sneaking out. Arriving at the party. Hanging out with a senior named Bon. Going up to the cliff to get away from the crowd. Finding the victim.
I know she’s telling the truth about the sequence of events. I also know she’s leaving things out. Prester will too.
She recounts the terrifying story of being confronted on the cliff, tells him about Bon Casey and a second man. And Prester just nods. He looks, if possible, even more grim. “From your description, sounds like it’s probably Olly Belldene,” he says. “Bon Casey does some grunt work for him, pushing pills and weed at parties. We’ll look into that.”
I know this isn’t good. We didn’t need another reason to be at war with the Belldenes, but here it is. My daughter’s the only witness to what seems to be a crime that Olly Belldene is involved in, and that makes me very, very worried.
Lanny must realize it too. Her shoulders are hunched, and though she’s stopped shivering, she seems drawn into a tight ball of nerves. Prester gives her a break and thanks her for her help. I let out a breath and realize that my whole body is aching. I’ve been trying so hard not to interfere.
Lanny reaches for the handle, and Prester says, “One last thing, Lanny. I’d like to get a DNA swab so we can eliminate you from the scene, okay?”
I want to object. I’m frozen with doubt, but Lanny just turns her head and opens her mouth as he takes a sealed swab from his jacket. Before I can tell her it’s a bad idea, it’s done; Prester’s as slick as a stage magician. And, truthfully, her DNA will probably be found on Candy, there’s no doubt about that; she must have touched her, checked her pulse at least. So maybe this is a good step, not the start of something worse. But I can think of a thousand ways this can go sideways.
Prester tells us we can go home after that. I’m exhausted but jittering with nerves, and I just want to get my kids home. But I linger just a moment to ask him a blunt question. “Are we safe here?”
He takes his time with the answer. “Ms. Proctor, I wish I could say you were. But you’ve got trouble with the Belldenes already, and now this? Might want to take your family on a vacation, if you know what I mean. If I need you back here, I can call.”
I heave a sigh. “Thanks, I will. Speaking of the Belldenes, though
. . . I got a visit from the top today. Jasper and Lilah Belldene. Lilah made me meatloaf.”
He stares at me. For the first time, I’ve surprised Detective Prester. “Did you eat it?”
“Nope. I was afraid it might have a nasty surprise inside.”
“Well, I doubt that; Lilah’s a damn good cook, and her meatloaf’s pretty near legendary around these parts. She wouldn’t want to cast a shadow on her reputation. What did they want?”
“They want us gone,” I tell him. “And that was before this happened. Can’t imagine this will make them like us any better.”
“The good thing is that since we’re going to be looking for Olly, we get to sweep that compound of theirs pretty thoroughly. That should set them on their heels a bit.” Prester looks grim. He knows better than me how dangerous this could be. “You need to be real careful, Gwen. I don’t like this. None of it.”
I don’t either. I take my family home, to a house I’m no longer sure is really safe. It’s a very short night. I try to talk to Lanny, but she seems too exhausted and distraught, and I feel like a bad mom for keeping her awake. There’ll be time.
I don’t sleep at all.
11
GWEN
Our escape is the case of Remy Landry.
We leave Stillhouse Lake in the morning, all of us, and head for Louisiana. It’s a good eleven-hour drive heading south by southwest. We take the SUV, which at least allows us to ride in relative comfort, and I admit I feel a sense of existential relief putting our home in the rearview right now. Too much trouble.
Leaving it behind feels like freedom, even though I know that’s a temporary relief; regardless of what happens while we travel, we’ll come back to the Belldenes, who must be mad as a nest of poked hornets by now that my daughter is the main witness against one of their own. They wanted us gone, and I’m willing to make them happy on that front. But I’m not going to ask my child to lie for them.
The chill of the morning morphs into rain before we hit Mississippi, but the temperature rises along with it. Sam drives, and I sleep as much as I can before I call ahead to Remy’s father. No answer, I get voice mail. I explain to him that I will be coming into town and would like a meeting to talk about his son. I leave my phone number and the address of the place we’ll be staying, since I booked ahead.
We’re all tired and cranky by the time we arrive.
Remy’s hometown isn’t anything much—a wide spot in the road, basically, with a few thousand residents, the usual Dairy Queen and Sonic and truck stops. A few Cajun restaurants, all brightly lit with neon signs.
We slide into the motel pretty close to 10:00 p.m., and I have a flashback of all the cheap wayside inns I’ve stayed at these past few years, as the kids and I fled from one compromised home to another. I stayed at even more with Sam as we went on the hunt for Melvin. It’s strange how simultaneously depressed and nostalgic I feel about motels in general.
I deliberately chose something nicer this trip. Clean, well lit, relatively modern if not fancy. J. B. probably would have paid for something really upscale, but I’m more comfortable here, and it’s the best place that’s close-ish to the Landry family home. I haven’t gotten a call back yet, but I’m hoping Joe Landry will reach out in the morning. If not, I’m prepared to doorstep him. For tonight, we pile into our rooms—one for me and Sam, one for Lanny and Connor, though Lanny’s already making mutinous noises about wanting her own room and why does she have to share a bathroom anyway. But they’re okay. She’s relieved, I think, to be away from Stillhouse Lake right now. So is Connor.
Sam and I settle in, but I find I’m restless in the heavy humidity. I can’t get comfortable. I give up and coax a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the room—the results are surprisingly good—and open up my laptop to check messages.
There are quite a few, which is odd. I’ve put in certain keyword filters, so anything that contains rape or fuck or kill goes into a folder called RADIOACTIVE unless it’s from someone I already know. But these have bypassed that filter setup. They’re all from anonymous accounts, most just strings of numbers.
The message contents are nothing but pictures.
It takes a lot to shock me these days, to be honest. I’ve seen gruesome crime scenes, in real life and in vividly colored high-resolution photographs. I’ve seen mutilations and violations and so much more; a lot of it has been forced on me through accounts just like these, designed to horrify and incite terror.
But these are still disturbing. One’s a crime scene photo—God knows from where—in saturated color so the blood is a distinctively bright hue. A woman lies on the ground. She’s got no face, just a ragged mashed hole where it ought to be. One eye lies on the ground next to her. It’s a cloudy brown.
The caption on the picture says Soon, bitch.
I brace myself for the next message. And the next. And the next. It’s all bad, but some stand out. One’s a direct death threat against Sam. I put that one aside. I linger, horrified, over threats to both my children. There have always been assholes who fixate on me. But threatening to rape and murder my children just to make me feel the pain is beyond monstrous. They don’t care about Lanny and Connor; to these sick bastards my kids are just flesh dolls they can rip apart for effect. It makes me rage inside, and shake with fear, which is what they want. I know that and still can’t help it.
I tell myself this is normal, that panic comes in waves and it’ll subside again soon . . . but even if it does, this avenue of attack never closes. There’s always someone new stumbling upon a message board, a thread, a call for action. They feel powerless. It makes them happy to lash out.
The internet enables and organizes hate very effectively; it lets people believe they’re righteous warriors for justice when in reality they’re just clicking keys. All the emotional hit of adrenaline, none of the risk. Most of them will never do anything else; one shot, and they’re gone.
But there’s always a possibility that one of these messages is from a stalker with time and inclination to travel. To shadow our family until an opportunity presents itself. And that terrifies me, because I know better than anyone that safety is an illusion.
I stop at the thirty-fourth message, because that one is a picture of the four of us together. Me, Sam, the kids. We’re in front of the cabin, talking as we carry in groceries. Lanny’s smiling. I’m wearing my favorite red sweater. There are targets on each of us.
This picture is recent, within the last month, because I just bought that damn sweater when the weather started to turn.
The caption feels like a knife at my back. You don’t get to be happy. How many times have I heard that? From the lips of victims’ families, former friends, perfect strangers.
Often enough that I have to work not to believe it.
I archive all the emails, complete with all the header information, onto a thumb drive, and then I dive into the radioactive folder for another unsettling swim in the sewer. It’s even worse, but at least most of it is just words, not pictures. I put those on a separate drive. Close to two hundred of those.
Sam’s hand falls on my shoulder, and I flinch. “You’re quiet,” he says.
“Yeah.” I shut the lid on the computer and turn with a smile. But my smile dies at the serious look on his face.
“I need to talk to you,” he says. “Got a minute?”
“Sure. Remy’s father hasn’t called back yet anyway.” I let a second go by before I ask the question I’m kind of dreading. “What is it?”
He sits on the edge of the bed across from me and rubs his hands together. That’s a tell of his; it means he’s feeling very uncomfortable, working himself up to something personal. “I’ve been contacted by the Lost Angels,” he says.
Contacted. Not targeted? I don’t answer, because I’m not sure what to say. He doesn’t, either, for a moment.
“They wanted me to know that they’re about to do a podcast. You know how popular those are right now.”
The
y are. Listeners in the millions. I even subscribe to some myself.
“About me?” I ask. He shakes his head. He’s looking down now. It alarms me more than the rest of it.
“Not directly,” he says. “It’s about me. They believe I had something to do with Miranda’s death.”
Miranda Tidewell and Sam had a . . . relationship. Not the traditional, sexual kind as far as I’m aware, though she was possessive of him; she and Sam shared a deep trauma. Miranda’s daughter had been murdered by my ex-husband. And so had Sam’s sister. She’d been the one to help him through that grief, not me. She’d been the one who’d channeled Sam’s grief into a pure, burning rage against Melvin, and against the woman she believed had enabled Melvin to commit his crimes.
Me.
Miranda had sharpened Sam and pointed him at me like a spear, and I thank God that he’d had enough of his soul left to recognize that he’d been used. And that I was innocent.
But Miranda hated me to her last breath, and she blamed Sam for turning on her and protecting me. I wasn’t there when she was killed, but Sam was. The official verdict was that he didn’t have a thing to do with it . . . but that wasn’t about to satisfy the conspiracy-hungry anger addicts on the Lost Angels website.
They’re coming for Sam. That horrifies me, because he thinks he’s ready for it. He’s seen what happened to me, to my kids . . . but observing isn’t the same as experiencing, and he’s about to get drowned in a storm of shit. Worse, a podcast like that could make him a pariah in his own right; it could ruin him professionally as well as personally. He wants to fly again, but the first thing potential employers do these days is conduct a Google search. Sam’s name is about to become notorious.
I reach out and take his hands, and he looks up and meets my gaze. He manages a quirk of a smile. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t see this one coming. I guess it’s nice they sent me a warning before they get the knives out.” I don’t think it is. I think they wanted him to start dreading it. It’s psychological torture, and the Lost Angels have a lot of experience in that. I don’t want to hate them; most of them are the family members of my ex-husband’s victims who are genuinely grief-stricken—and probably normally good—people. But on that message board, on that website, they unite in one dark purposes: to make me pay. And now Sam, because Sam left them to side with me.
Bitter Falls Page 11