by Dale Mayer
Imagine his surprise when he’d seen Rowan at Theo and Sven’s house. The old man should have been taken out a long time ago. As the Supplier’s own energy reserves had been dropping with the constant need to mask his own energy, that Sven had been a simple easy answer. The Supplier had no idea Sven was so close to his father though, whether geographically or emotionally. The Supplier had hoped to have much longer before the body was found. Hearing footsteps, he’d been forced into the woods, only to see Phoenix there, waiting. They were surrounded by men soon enough, and the Supplier had lost his chance. But he’d heard enough to understand Haro was taking her somewhere interesting.
His plans had been quickly made, and the Supplier had paid the price.
Still, he’d taken out Theo and Haro. The need for vengeance inside him settled. He’d be good for a bit now.
Chapter 16
To consider that somebody from the cult was still alive and trying to stop her from putting that letter in the lava was enough to make her stomach revolt. She realized her thoughts must be evident on her face when Rowan hopped to his feet and leaned over. “Easy. Take it easy,” he said.
She gasped several times, to get enough air into her lungs. “Oh, my God,” she said on an exhale. “Just the thought of somebody still being alive …”
“And yet, you always knew it was a possibility?”
“Children, yes. But it never sunk in that children grow up into adults. Although I saw my bullet-ridden father’s body, that doesn’t mean he was dead. I just have an image of a man on his back with five holes, covered in blood. The cops told me that he was dead, but were they correct? He was very wily. If he’d wanted to escape, I’m pretty sure he could have made that happen.”
“I can contact the police in that area and see if we had a body and DNA tests of any kind or forensic material back then.”
“Maybe,” she said. Her fingers nervously pleated the sheet in front of her. “It does add a different element to my trip though.”
“Why did you come here? Specifically?”
“The paper itself came from here, although I only have his word on that,” Phoenix said. “It just seemed like everything was telling me that I needed to do this finally.” She didn’t know what else to add. It sounded lame to her too.
“We do try to keep the Burning Fires a secret,” he said. “Along with suicide season. It would not be to our benefit to have any of it brought out in the open. Somehow the tourists find out anyway.”
“Understood,” she said. “I can’t really explain how this came about from my perspective. All I can tell you is that, when the opportunity arose, I knew I had to come.”
“Anybody else know you came?”
“Not really,” she said. “I haven’t had many friends to tell. If somebody from the cult is still alive, the only reason for them to be here now is if they knew I would be here. If they wanted to stop me from doing this, that would mean they would have some way of knowing who I was, how I lived, what I was doing and what my plans were.”
“Do you have any close friends?”
“I have a few colleagues who are friends,” she said cautiously. “But nobody I’m close with.”
“Who did you tell about what you were doing here?”
“My foster parents,” she said. “But just in brief. I didn’t explain why. They don’t know anything about Iceland being my father’s hometown.”
Rowan’s body stiffened. “What?”
She looked up at him. “Yes, my father is from Iceland. I told you that.”
“Wow. You never mentioned that last part,” he said.
She watched as his hands fisted in front of her.
“I thought I did,” she said. “A lot of details I didn’t tell you. I’m not sure of my mother’s nationality, but I think she was American. My father is the one who told me about this fire. He’s the one who said the paper itself came from here, and the only way to destroy it was to return it.”
“Then I need to do some research into your father’s family,” Rowan said. “Because that is a different avenue of inquiry. What if he has family here?”
“I never considered that,” she said, frowning. “It never occurred to me that I had a family over here. He told me that he was an only child and that his parents were dead.”
“But that doesn’t mean somebody else hasn’t been following him, or you, all these years.”
“That’s a little disturbing,” she whispered.
“Any newspaper articles? Anything that would have put you back into the news?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I graduated and was hired by the same university I’d attended, but it’s not as if I’m married or I’m involved in any litigation. I mean, police files exist regarding the raid on the cult obviously, but it’s not something that’s been resurrected.”
“Has the case been closed?”
“As far as I know it has been,” she said as honestly as she could. “But I don’t know that they tell the whole story either. Do they ever?”
“For the moment,” he said, “I want you to not worry about any of it. I want you to lie here and focus on getting well.”
“As if. You just brought up a whole mess of other issues. That will stop me from sleeping, possibly for the rest of my life,” she said. “Somebody tried to kill me. How am I supposed to think it’s anybody other than a local?”
“It has nothing to do with being a local,” he said. “It could have been anybody. We had three busloads of people in town just on the day you arrived. Remember?”
“Well, maybe you should start by finding out who else missed their spot on the buses,” she said. “For all I know, the killer came with me. Did you check to see if anyone else missed the bus?”
“We checked the numbers yes. You were the only one that missed the next leg of the trip.”
“Doesn’t that figure. I’d only been planning this for a lifetime …”
“And maybe this is as far as you needed to come …” He spoke with a smile but his gaze was searching.
As soon as Rowan left, she lay back on her bed, wondering. She could remember the other cult kids, but she didn’t know for sure there weren’t more. She had younger siblings too. But she couldn’t remember the names of them all. She remembered those who were the worst. The more she thought of it, she realized no sons were in her family. They had all been daughters. Yet she had tidbits of memories regarding boys.
Had it been that her father could only create daughters? Or had something happened to the boys? She didn’t even want to contemplate that. Just as she thought she had no way to tell Rowan, he stepped back into the room and said, “I’ve arranged for the hotel to bring over your laptop, phone and personal belongings.”
She smiled up at him. “And I just thought of something else. I don’t know why I never thought of it before. But I think only girls were in my family.”
He looked down at her and frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I have vague memories of boys but not toward the end. I can’t be sure.”
“Are you saying other girls were the ones who were mean and tormented you during the night too?”
She nodded. “Don’t ever think we’re the fairer sex,” she said bluntly. “Everything I experienced proved to me that women were deadly vipers. But I don’t know what happened to the boys. Maybe there were no male children. I can’t remember.”
“Or your father did something to make sure they weren’t around. Maybe he could justify giving those children away or killing them,” Rowan said thoughtfully. “Obviously more questions need to be asked.” He walked to the door. “Okay, let me keep digging.” He stopped at the doorway and looked at her. “Once you get your personal belongings, you can contact me on your phone.”
“I thought I left my phone in either your car or Haro’s truck.”
“Let me check with the front desk,” he said and disappeared again.
She relaxed against the bed, her mind humming. She had heard n
othing but silence regarding the cult for all these years, literally nothing. The original investigating cops had checked in on her once or twice afterward, but, realizing she was doing okay, had gone their merry way, content with having given her a chance at a better life.
Whereas now somebody had shot her, and the geologist died. Was that a random shooting, or was she targeted? She had to think it was intentional, yet there was no reason for such a thing—except to stop her from tossing that letter into the lava.
And the only one who knew what they would do at the Burning Fires that night was his grandmother. And that was something else in and of itself.
When Rowan returned, he had her cell phone in his hand. “Your purse is at the front desk and locked away. We can bring it here if you want, but I figured your cell phone is what you needed.”
She reached out a hand and accepted her phone. “What about your grandmother?” she asked softly.
“What about her?” he asked as he walked back to the door.
“Would she have told anybody what we were doing?”
He stiffened and slowly turned to look at her.
“I’m not accusing her,” she said quickly. “But she is the only one who knew what I was doing.”
He stared over her head for a long moment, as if working out something. And then he smiled and said, “I guess I’ll go ask her then, won’t I?” And, with that, he disappeared.
*
Rowan headed back to his office to work through several different threads for this investigation. Because now it was another murder on his home turf, and what the hell was he supposed to do about the poor geologist? There wasn’t even a body, but he had seen it with his own eyes as the arm and head had disappeared into the lava. So basically he could confirm there was a deceased male. Thankfully he had several photos. As poor as they were, they were something. And he could call it what he wanted, but he didn’t know how to prove if it was murder, suicide or an accident.
Back in his office, he slammed the door hard behind him, just an outlet for his frustration and rage. Frustration that Haro had been killed. Rage that somebody had tried to shoot Phoenix. Angry that he wasn’t getting to the bottom of this nightmare. And none it answered Theo Hogarth’s death. Were they connected? The crime scenes were nothing alike, … yet the two men were neighbors.
He needed to talk to his grandmother. And he needed to get more history on Phoenix’s background. How many children were in that cult? Were they all deceased? Where were the males? Had there been any males? He knew some families could have ten or twelve females in a row, but eventually the odds went to having a male child.
He feared the cult didn’t keep good birth records. And, even if they did, surely Phoenix’s father had burned up any evidence before that fateful day when he was sure to die by police gunfire.
Rowan wrote furiously, dumping everything from his mind. The anger, the frustration, the pain at seeing Phoenix’s X-rays was something he had never even thought a child could survive. He hadn’t seen any of her scars firsthand, except for the one along her face. But, if her body was as bad as the doctor said, and they’d certainly seen a lot of her, it was amazing she was alive. And Rowan kept coming back to that. How was that possible? Was her psychological state something he could trust?
Or was this all a mask for some incredibly traumatized child on the inside? And that was just sick but maybe, in her case, understandable. Yet he couldn’t see anything evil in her energy. He picked up the phone and called his grandmother first. “Hi, Grandma. Did you tell anyone about our visit?”
“No,” she said, her voice low and dark. “I didn’t. Since you were here, I’ve locked myself in my apartment and haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Why?”
“Because something here is dangerous.”
“Did you think it would visit you?”
“It’s here, in town,” she said. “It might always have been. I don’t know. But what was locked is now open, and what was dead is now alive.” On that note, she hung up on him.
He swore and wrote down what she’d said and stared at the words. Maybe it was always here, and what was dead is now alive. He didn’t know where to go with that one either. He would have to stop by and talk to her. He knew of nobody else in town with the sight like she had, except himself, and, at that, he gave a short bark of laughter.
A knock came at his door. “I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Pelchi is here to see you,” Anna said from the other side of the door. She turned the knob and pushed it open and looked at him. “Not sure what’s going on here,” she said, “but he looks distraught.”
Irene’s husband. He had plenty to make him distraught. “Bring him in,” Rowan said. “To bring you up to speed, there was a shooting and also a death.” He filled her in, ending with, “And that’s on top of Hogarth’s father being murdered.”
She gasped. “Oh my. I didn’t know.”
“I know. We have a team out searching the woods right now, hoping to find some evidence. I haven’t heard from anybody. Outside of the fact that, so far, they haven’t found anything.”
“Let me go get Pelchi,” she said. A few moments later she showed him into Rowan’s office.
Rowan stood and shook the young man’s hand. He motioned at a chair. “I’m sorry for your losses, Pelchi. I know this is a very difficult time for you.”
“There’s something you need to know.”
Rowan watched him and waited.
“She killed him, you know?”
“She killed who?”
“Our son. Everybody said it was an accident, but it wasn’t. Everybody said it was stress from her birth, but I know the truth.” Pelchi took a deep breath and continued, “I came in one day, when she was screaming at the baby, beating on him. I tried to stop her, and she dropped him. With a whole lot more force than necessary.” His face was hard, and his voice was hoarse. “If I’d gotten in just a few minutes earlier, I might have stopped her. But she killed our son. She killed my son.”
Rowan sat down hard. “I did hear a suggestion during the investigation of why she committed suicide. Everybody said it was the loss of her son, but somebody suggested she might have been guilty of planning a murder-suicide.” He didn’t add in that the same rumor had said Pelchi himself might have been involved in that plan too.
Pelchi nodded. “She was very guilty,” he said. “I don’t think I could have lived with her any longer. We no longer shared a bed. I couldn’t even look at her without seeing my dead son, and the look on her face was revulsion.”
“Postpartum blues can act like that sometimes,” Rowan said. “I wouldn’t judge her too harshly, given that the baby was still so young, and she was too.”
“I keep telling myself that,” he said. “Honestly, I do. I tried not to judge her for it, but I keep seeing my son.”
“Understandable,” Rowan replied. “I’m sorry, and I’m sorry for your double loss. Because, without the one, it probably wouldn’t have led to the other one.”
Pelchi ran his arms up and down across his chest. “It’s just so hard. I don’t know who I should tell.”
“You’ve told me now,” Rowan said quietly. “Who do you feel you need to tell?”
Pelchi stared out the window, his bottom lip trembling, then it firmed up, and he said, “I don’t know. I know the news will devastate her parents. And her brother. And now that she’s gone, I guess the question really is, is it necessary to spoil their view of who she was?”
“I’m not sure either,” Rowan said. “I suggest what you should do is think about what you need to do to heal yourself, because that is what’s most important now.”
“We can’t help her anymore,” Pelchi said somberly. “Maybe we all failed her. She didn’t get any help after the birth, and maybe she needed that.”
Rowan nodded his head solemnly. “I do remember seeing her before she gave birth, and she looked absolutely delighted with the baby coming.”
“She
was,” Pelchi said. “That’s why I was so shocked when I saw the look on her face afterward. As if she was possessed.”
Rowan’s whole body became alert. “This look on her face. Did it still look like her features, or was it just dark and angry?”
“Dark, angry and twisted. I don’t know,” he said. “I was so worried about my poor son. I just shoved her away and brought him to the hospital, but it was already too late.”
“Right,” Rowan said. “I remember that. An accidental fall, wasn’t it?”
“That’s what they said,” Pelchi said. “I think they just covered it up too.”
“It’s possible,” Rowan declared, staring off in the distance. “And maybe it was just inconclusive.”
Pelchi got up slowly and said, “Let me think about what to tell her parents. It’s difficult.”
“If you need help dealing with this,” Rowan said, “please get it.”
Pelchi shoved his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and said, “I know it sounds terrible, but, now that she’s gone, in a way, I feel like I’m free.”
“I suppose in a way you are,” Rowan said. “Take careful steps now. You need time to come to terms with the changes in your life.”
He nodded. “It’s like she was a dark cloud over my life for these last four months. I haven’t slept. I’ve hardly even eaten. I mean, what do you do when everything you love suddenly takes a wrong turn?”
“I’m sorry,” Rowan said. “It is always hard to deal with one death, much less two. But, when it’s family and a child and brought on by somebody close to you, well …”
Pelchi nodded and walked to the door. He turned toward Rowan and said, “Thanks.”
Rowan stood, walked around the desk and escorted the young man back out to the waiting room. “You’re welcome, although I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I just want to make sure you heal from this.”
“I think I can now,” he said and gave a wan smile. “It helped to tell someone.” He walked out of the waiting room to the front doors.