Lucy bit back an inappropriate “I’m sorry,” not quite sure why the apology was her first thought. It couldn’t have been easy growing up with someone who was as stunning as that, though, when Rachel was thick bones and dishwater-ashy hair. There was no bitterness in the twist of Rachel’s lips, just a sadness that matched the softness in her eyes.
“Please sit, Agent Thorne,” Rachel directed Lucy as Josiah angled his body close to his wife, his arm behind her back, the two of them presenting a united front. “We are well aware why you’re here. We want to help in any way possible.”
Lucy wouldn’t say that went as far as surprising her, but it was notable. The fact that they hadn’t lawyered up, hadn’t rushed to circle the wagons the second they’d found out about Eliza being held in FBI custody spoke of an emotional detachment Lucy wouldn’t have expected from a couple who’d raised the girl for more than ten years.
“Can you tell me a little bit about Eliza’s behavior over the past month or so? Did you notice anything different?”
“No,” Rachel said, shaking her head as if confused but adamant. “She was moody sometimes, sure. But there’s nothing unusual about that.”
“Moody in what way?” Lashing out was quite different from retreating into silence.
Rachel chewed on her bottom lip, glancing at Josiah as if for confirmation. “Sulky.”
“And she was homeschooled?” Lucy asked.
“Like a lot of the teens in our community, she took online classes.” Josiah’s voice deepened, defensiveness layered beneath the otherwise calm tone. “She was far ahead of where she would have been in a public school.”
“Of course,” Lucy murmured consolingly. “And your sons are no longer living here, correct? So it was just her in the house?”
“Yeah, our boys are grown.” Josiah turned to look at the pictures on the wall behind him. “Beau is the oldest, then Mark and Aaron are the twins.”
“They’re older than Eliza?”
“By about ten years. Cora was much younger than me,” Rachel said. They worked in tandem, these two, so that it was almost like having a conversation with one person. There was no talking over each other, no contradictions. Either they’d rehearsed this or that united front ran deep, borne from decades of a solid marriage.
“Are your sons still around? Does Eliza see them?” There hadn’t been much about the boys in the file. Names, ages. Everything so dry and clinical. That’s not where motives were found. They were found in the words that would never be put on the page, the resentments, the secrets, the betrayals.
“Aaron and his wife bought the property next to ours, but they’ve left on a cattle-buying trip for the next two weeks,” Rachel said. “Mark lives in town and Beau is overseas. Army.”
The son leaving town wasn’t necessarily suspicious, but Lucy made a note to have the details checked out.
Josiah shifted. “I wouldn’t say they’re particularly close with Eliza. She’s so much younger. She was just a kid when they were teenagers.”
“Didn’t want anything to do with a little girl at that age, you understand,” Rachel added.
Perhaps a dead end then.
“Does Eliza have any close friends?” Lucy asked, thinking of the girl who’d run away. Molly.
“There are a handful of kids her age in the Church,” Josiah said, his attention on Lucy, but his fingertips were dug in deep on Rachel’s upper arm. “We can get you a list of them. But no one . . . no one really close.”
Rachel nodded along with her husband, already reaching for the notepad on the side table.
Lucy tamped down the frustration. Despite knowing it had been too optimistic, she had been hoping there would be an obvious trail to follow to a potential accomplice. The fact that Rachel and Josiah couldn’t name one didn’t mean the person didn’t exist. They could be protecting someone, as well. Or they could just be too oblivious to realize they were ignorant of the day-to-day life of their ward.
So Lucy kept pushing. “Out of that group, she doesn’t have someone whom she spends most of her time with?”
“Eliza keeps to herself, Agent Thorne,” Rachel said, looking up from the short list on her lap. “We liked to encourage her to go to the social gatherings—Bible studies and such. To spend time with people her age. But mostly . . .”
“Mostly, she hid away in her room,” Josiah finished for Rachel. “We keep an open-door policy in this house, but her bedroom is toward the back, so it’s not always the easiest to monitor.”
Which brought Lucy back to the awkwardness at the coroner’s. The missing two days in the timeline. “Do you know her whereabouts between Monday afternoon and Wednesday night?”
Josiah and Rachel shared a look.
“Apparently, we did not know her whereabouts as well as we thought we did,” Rachel said, regret and guilt evident in the strain in her clasped hands. “But she had told us she wasn’t feeling well. She . . .”
“Stayed home,” Josiah jumped in. “From the search for Noah. She didn’t join the search.”
Lucy wouldn’t have been surprised if Eliza had gone looking for Noah—killers often joined in the efforts to find their victims, usually under the guise of being earnest volunteers. But something untwisted in Lucy’s gut at the information that Eliza hadn’t. There was something uniquely terrible about the practice that left Lucy emotionally hungover.
“You didn’t suspect anything was off with her then?”
“It was . . .” Rachel paused, glanced at Josiah, and then squared her shoulders. “She said it was her time of the month. I didn’t push.”
Lucy almost had to give Eliza props. That had been a smart tactic—few people would ask follow-ups to that excuse.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Rachel tapped a finger against her knee as if she were counting days. “I suppose Wednesday afternoon. I had come back from the Dawsons’ place around two. She had . . . She had been coming out of the shed, actually.”
“Even though she’d said she hadn’t been feeling well?”
“She had chores and such,” Rachel murmured, but her eyes had gone a little distant, staring beyond Lucy.
“Do you keep anything in there?”
Josiah coughed and Lucy cut her eyes to him. “Pastor Cook?”
“No, no.” His denial rasped against his freshly irritated throat, his eyes watering just a touch. “Sorry. Just the usual. Shovels, gear to fix the fence. Things like that.”
Something to check out when she was done inside. “You have a shed . . . as well as a barn, yes?”
“Correct.”
“And anywhere else she could have hidden something?”
“We have an underground shelter, as well,” Rachel said. “As most people do.”
So many nooks and crannies. Had Eliza brought Noah back to the ranch to kill him? She hadn’t kept him alive for long after taking him, not if the coroner’s TOD was accurate. But there would have been ample places to hide the body if she had planned on moving it at a more opportune time than in the middle of the evening.
The thought brought her back to the logistical nightmare of getting Noah into the woods. “Do you have any spare cars that Eliza had access to?”
Josiah shook his head. “We only have the two. And we’d taken them both over to the Dawsons’ place both Tuesday and Wednesday.”
That didn’t rule out the possibility that she’d had a car to use. But that meant that if she did, at least one other person had seen her during those two days.
The accomplice? Maybe.
“Can I take a look at her room?”
They caught each other’s eyes once more, but they must have known she could get a warrant without even breaking a sweat. If they really were sticking with their show of cooperation, it would be easier for them to control the experience.
“Of course,” Rachel said as the two of them stood in unison.
The hallway back toward Eliza’s room was dark and narrow, and Lucy understo
od what they’d meant when they’d said she’d hid herself away. It would be easy to do. “Did you ever suspect that she was sneaking out?”
Rachel didn’t stop walking. “We’d poke our heads in for one reason or another a few times a night. There’s always an excuse to pop in on her.”
Which was a nonanswer cloaked like a real one. A teenage girl could get up to a lot in the time between check-ins.
Lucy glanced back toward Josiah. “Noah Dawson, he was a member of your . . . congregation?”
The concern he’d been wearing on his face since she’d arrived didn’t waver, but it wasn’t as if he wouldn’t have been braced for the question from the minute he’d heard Eliza had confessed. “Yes.”
“Did they cross paths at all?”
“His father, Liam, helps out around the farm,” Josiah said as they came to a stop in the mudroom just outside Eliza’s bedroom. Lucy eyed the back door, thought about how secluded this part of the house was. There was no doubt in her mind that Eliza had been able to leave as she’d pleased. “Other than that, no, of course not. She’s seventeen, he’s middle-school age. There would be no reason for them to interact.”
Yet here they were, with Eliza being held for his murder. The wide-eyed denial could get these two only so far before it became disingenuous.
“But your Church is rather small, wouldn’t you say?”
Josiah shifted, and when he spoke, it was hesitant. “Yes, I suppose.”
“Would it be safe to assume then that they knew each other somewhat?”
At that Josiah’s posture relaxed, and Lucy wondered what path of questioning he’d been braced for her to take. “Of course, of course. But they didn’t seek each other out, is what I mean.”
“Would Noah have felt comfortable going off with Eliza? Alone, that is.”
Rachel stepped closer to Josiah, laying her hand against his shoulder blade. “If you’re asking if Eliza would have had to use force to lure him away, the answer is no. He trusted her, like he trusted all of the members of the Church.”
Lucy studied the shadows that clung to their features, hiding their expressions. “Do you have any idea why she would have wanted to attack him?”
A small but audible inhale met the blunt question, but Lucy couldn’t tell which one of them it had come from. After a beat of silence, it was Josiah who spoke.
“I have spent every waking hour of the past few days wondering that very thing, Agent Thorne,” he said, slow and solemn. A preacher’s voice. “But who are we to question God’s plan?”
The platitude sparked something in her blood—anger, hot and quick like a flame. It extinguished before it could build into anything potent, though. She wasn’t here to change minds. She turned away from both of them, anyway, in case any residual disgust lingered on her face.
Rachel stepped up beside her and gestured toward the doorway. “We haven’t touched anything.”
Light poured into the room from a window against the back wall. It offered up a view of sprawling land meeting an endless bluebird sky, the thunderstorm long passed. In the distance Lucy could make out the tangled metal wires that signaled the edge of the property. “Is that your son’s land over there?”
The question was careless, more just trying to get a sense of her surroundings than anything else. She hadn’t expected it to throw them.
But it did.
Turning, Lucy caught the tail end of an exchanged glance, Josiah’s face having lost some of its ruddiness.
“No, Aaron is on the other side,” Josiah finally said.
Okay. “And who is on this side?”
“That’s Frank’s place,” Rachel answered. “He and his family moved here from Oregon a handful of years ago.”
“Four years,” Josiah supplied, seemingly helpful. But Lucy was starting to get a hang of their rhythms. She doubted that nugget of information would actually be relevant.
“Frank,” Lucy repeated, more to herself than anything, the name catching against something in her memory as she shifted to take in Eliza’s room. The quilt on the bed offered the only burst of color in otherwise bare and drab surroundings. Lucy hadn’t exactly expected heartthrobs taped to the wall, but she hadn’t expected this nothingness, either. A desk stood in the corner, its top free of clutter; a single standing lamp cast a weak glow onto the beige carpet; plain clothes hung in a neat row in the open closet.
This wasn’t a teenager’s room. “You haven’t touched anything?”
“No,” Rachel said from right behind her, closer than she had been before. “Eliza is very tidy.”
Lucy circled the room, peeked in drawers to find carefully organized pens and unused paper. No doodles, no locked journal. Not even a picture of the mother.
Lucy’s eyes touched each corner, each possible hiding space that turned into nothing, each shadow cast by bland inanimate objects.
Where do you hide your secrets, Eliza?
Because if Lucy knew nothing else, she knew this girl had plenty of them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ELIZA COOK
Three weeks earlier
The church’s playground was empty or almost so. A lone boy sat on one of the swings, his fingers curled loosely around the chains, his head drooped, his body sagging beneath some unseen weight.
It was too early for most of the congregation, mass still more than an hour away, the tranquility of the morning unbroken, dawn a golden-tinged memory but not so far off as to call it day yet.
Eliza caught herself midstep, her arms loaded with the quilt that Rachel had wanted her to take out to the truck. A deep melancholy saturated the very air around the boy so that Eliza thought she might be able to draw in the dust it left behind. She dropped the blanket off and then detoured to the swings.
Noah Dawson’s ratty blue sneakers dragged through the wood chips at his feet, creating and then erasing a pattern over and over again in the few minutes it took her to cross to the swing set.
Instead of saying anything, Eliza sat next to him, her palms finding the cool metal chains of her own swing, holding on tight. She rocked her body once, then again, to get it into motion.
The freedom—the kind that came with the pump of legs, the smooth arc as the body fought gravity and inevitably lost only to surge up to the sky once more, trying again, always trying again—was addicting. It popped in the bloodstream like Fourth of July fireworks, tasted like cold popsicles on hot summer days, delighted like fireflies and birthday cake and everything good in the world.
The wind whipped at her cheeks and she was all of five years old, grinning too hard, the cold morning air harsh against her exposed teeth.
“Come on,” she cried out to Noah, who was watching her, big eyes and a shy smile that tucked itself into the corners of his mouth so as not to be obvious. “Come. On.”
He didn’t say anything as she swung by him, just shuffled his feet against the wood chips some more.
Her legs kicked out, harder, harder, harder, as her body bent back farther, farther, farther. “I’m going to go over the bar.”
“You’re not,” Noah yelled back, laughing as he finally pushed off the ground, trying to match her rhythm. “You can’t.”
“I’m gonna do it,” she hollered to the sky more than to him, wild and carefree—or was it careless? Did it matter? In that heartbeat, she knew nothing of the bounds of reality, knew only that she could at any minute cut herself free of the chains that kept her tethered to the earth.
Noah whooped beside her, little-boy joy uncontained, matching her irreverence laugh for laugh.
A door slammed, a car backfired, and reality returned. The service would be starting soon. Uncle Josiah would want to know where she was. Her chains would never be so easy to cut.
Eliza let her feet hang so that they brushed the ground with each pass. The light dimmed in Noah’s face as he followed her example.
When they both finally slowed to a stop, she didn’t bother looking at him, just twisted herself so that the
chains wove together above her head. “What’s up, buttercup?”
It was what Hicks asked her sometimes, and it always made her feel better for a stupid reason she couldn’t name. Maybe it was the silly rhyme, or the nickname. Maybe it was that someone cared enough to ask at all.
Eliza kept twisting her chains as Noah stared hard at his shoes some more. That was okay. It was okay if he didn’t want to talk; he should know that, too.
The metal squeaked an angry protest as she turned and turned and turned, and she kept going until the rubber of the seat squeezed at her hips so hard she wondered if there would be bruises. Then she let go.
The world blurred into silky color and muted sound as she spun. Her blood, her stomach, her brain went along for the ride, protesting as they did. She laughed again at the rush, and realized it was the most she’d done so in months. Years, maybe.
Finally, everything righted itself and then settled and she was once again just sitting on a swing, gravity still intact, the trees and houses where they should be and standing still.
Eliza smiled at Noah, but she recognized a brick wall when she saw one. She was just about to stand, to leave him to his sulk, when he started to speak. It was just a squeak at first, not even words, but enough to get her attention. She stayed where she was.
“Do you . . .” Noah tried again. “Do you remember the other day how you said . . .”
It took her a second, and then she remembered. At the grocery store. When she’d been helping his mom. Poor Mrs. Dawson had looked about two seconds from fainting straight to the floor. Molly had to . . .
No. Eliza didn’t want to think about Molly. Not right now.
“I remember.”
“You said . . . You said if I needed your help, I could ask.” Noah scuffed his foot against the ground once more and then turned to look at her. When he did, he seemed old, so much older than he should. “I think I need it now.”
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