by Ragan, T. R.
She held her breath as she reached the landing. After taking two steps to the right, she turned back the other way when she heard a voice coming from the room to the left.
“Leave her alone. She’s done nothing to you.”
She recognized Palmer’s voice. He was here.
The moment she stepped into the room the stench hit her in waves: urine, feces, the smell of rotten eggs.
Palmer was on the floor, his back against the wall, blood pooling around him. In the center of the room was a young girl chained to a bed. Riley Addison. One arm hung over the side of the mattress, dragged down by the weight of the metal cuff and chain. Her finger twitched.
She was alive!
Melony Pershing stood at the girl’s side and raised her arm high, a sharp blade glinting in a ray of sunlight coming through the window.
There was no time to think.
“Aim and shoot,” Aria had said. “Aim and shoot.”
Arms straight, gun gripped tight, instead of pressing the trigger, she said, “Put the knife down.”
Melony whipped around, a look of surprise on her face when she saw Sawyer standing there with a gun aimed at her chest.
“You just couldn’t leave it alone,” Melony said through gritted teeth.
Sawyer held her ground. “Put the knife down. It’s over. The police know everything. They’re on their way.” She hoped the woman fell for her bluff because she didn’t want to shoot.
“The police know everything?” Melony Pershing laughed. “So dramatic.”
“Your real name is Deena Thatcher, and you moved to Sacramento after your husband got a restraining order to keep you from harming your daughter, Molly. It’s over.”
Her face twisted. “I never hurt Molly. I loved Molly. She loved me too, but that man put thoughts in her head, told her falsehoods. You’ve never been a mother. You wouldn’t know what it feels like to have a child taken from you.”
“Put the knife down.”
“I did nothing wrong.”
“You killed Cora O’Neal,” Sawyer said.
“That was an accident.”
Sawyer hadn’t known for certain if Melony had taken Cora until now. “You’ll be spending the rest of your days behind bars.”
“Are you going to read me my Miranda rights?”
Sawyer glanced at Palmer. His face held a lingering grimace, but he was holding on.
“You can’t help him. And you can’t help Molly either. Just like you couldn’t help Rebecca. It must be tough living with yourself, knowing your very best friend spent her last days trapped in the crawl space beneath your feet as you plodded around on top of her, coming and going as you pleased.”
Aim and shoot.
“Put the knife down,” Sawyer said. “I’m not going to ask again.”
The woman’s marble-size bloodshot eyes, just as Paige Owens had described, were wide open and unblinking. The tip of her tongue poked out between thin grayish lips.
Was she sticking her tongue out at her like a five-year-old?
Melony waggled her tongue at Sawyer and then released a bark of laughter right before she rushed toward Sawyer with the sharp blade held straight out.
Melony had been trying to distract her, and it had worked. Sawyer fumbled with the gun slightly before finding her footing and pressing the trigger. A shot rang out just as the woman slammed into her, taking them both to the floor.
Sawyer’s head hit the ground. A jolt of pain tore through her. The woman’s deadweight was heavy on top of her. Panicked, Sawyer kicked and pushed her way out from under Melony Pershing, then jumped to her feet. Her breathing was ragged as she steadied the gun and aimed it at the woman.
Lying facedown, Melony Pershing wasn’t moving.
Sawyer ran her free hand over her stomach and side, surprised she hadn’t been struck with the blade. The knife had skittered across the floor. She picked it up, then returned to the woman and used the tip of her shoe to nudge Melony Pershing’s body.
Still no movement, but that didn’t stop Sawyer from wanting to put a bullet through her head just to be sure. Kneeling down, she checked the woman’s pulse. There was none. She took in a breath as she moved to the girl’s side, watched her chest rise and fall, then set both weapons on the end of the bed and used her phone to call 9-1-1.
She made her way to Palmer and put a hand to his neck to feel for a pulse. He stirred, opened his eyes, and winced when he tried to move. “The girl needs help,” he said.
The girl was alive. Her first priority was to stop Palmer from bleeding out. She ripped off the button-down shirt she wore over a white tank top and used it to make a tourniquet around his waist. She placed his good hand on the cloth and told him to keep pressure on it. The deepest wound appeared to be on his arm. She had on a sports bra so she stripped off the tank top next and wrapped it around the wound on his arm. It was the best she could do for now other than pray the medics hurried.
“I’m good,” he said. “Help the girl.”
The girl’s face was pale, and her head had fallen to one side, making Sawyer wonder if she’d imagined the slight movement she’d seen moments ago.
They had come too far. She couldn’t die.
Again, Sawyer felt for a pulse, then sucked in a breath as she tried not to lose it. Riley and Palmer were both alive. And they both needed medical assistance immediately.
She was examining the metal cuff, trying to figure out how to remove it, when the girl’s eyes parted halfway. “Mom?”
Sawyer’s heart twisted. “No. My name is Sawyer Brooks. You don’t know me, Riley, but I’ve been looking for you since the day you went missing.”
The chains rattled as the girl reached for Sawyer. She leaned low and took the girl in her arms and held her close, didn’t want to let her go. She had done it. She’d found Riley. In her mind’s eye she saw Rebecca smiling at her. Sawyer pulled away so that she could look at Riley. “I need you to stay strong until I get you out of here, okay?”
“I’m not dreaming?” Riley asked.
“No,” Sawyer said, trying to keep it together as tears rolled down her cheeks. “You’re not dreaming.” Exhaustion and all the emotions she’d felt when she’d thought Ella had been abducted still flowed through her bloodstream. “You’re going to be okay. The ambulance is on its way, but I need to get these chains off you.”
Riley let her head fall back onto the pillows. Her arms dropped to her sides. “The key is around Bubbles’s neck.”
The girl’s voice was groggy. Clearly she’d been drugged, but who the hell was Bubbles?
It could be only one person.
Sawyer didn’t want to go anywhere near Melony Pershing, but she didn’t have a choice. She walked that way, knelt down beside the woman, her hands trembling as she reached around the woman’s neck and undid the chain. Back on her feet, she walked to the bed.
Riley winced when Sawyer fiddled with the locks. Her wrists and ankles were red and raw. Her clothes and the bed were soiled. The stench made it difficult to breathe, and yet the girl hadn’t broken down and cried. She was tough.
Once the chains were off, Riley told her she had a broken leg, then asked in a shaky voice if Sawyer could help her change her clothes. She didn’t like the scratchy, ugly dress and the shiny shoes.
Sawyer tried not to cause the girl any more pain as she removed the shoes, then walked to the dresser across the room. In the top drawer were syringes and pills, a sling, and a Polaroid picture of Riley, her head strapped to the headboard and a gruesome smile on her face that had been drawn with a red marker. A thing of nightmares.
She shut the drawer, opened another, and found an oversize T-shirt. “Is this good?”
Riley nodded, her eyes watering.
It was such a simple thing—a big tee—but Sawyer could see that for Riley it was more about taking off the outfit that Melony Pershing had dressed her in than it was about being dirty and soiled.
Sawyer helped her change. Her body and soul had b
een bruised and beaten. It was clear Riley struggled not to cry out in pain.
“Will you take me out of here?”
Sawyer looked at Palmer. He nodded and said, “Get her out of here.”
Sirens sounded in the distance as Sawyer scooped the girl into her arms, surprised how light she was.
“She was going to kill me,” Riley said as they walked past Melony Pershing’s body. “That man saved me.”
“He’s a good guy,” Sawyer said.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?”
Sawyer wasn’t so sure, but she smiled and said, “I think he will be. He’s tough like you.” The sirens grew louder. Thank God. Please hurry.
Riley frowned. “Bubbles was going to drug me and then drown me in the bathtub.”
“She told you that?”
Riley nodded. “She killed other girls. Lots of them. There are pictures of them in the closet.”
Chills swept over Sawyer as she thought of Aria’s poster board with all those young faces. “She’ll never hurt anyone else.”
“Bubbles killed her daughter, Molly, when she was a baby. She told me it was an accident.”
“She lied.”
Riley’s eyes grew round. “Are you sure?”
“I am. Molly is alive and well and living with her father,” Sawyer said as she carried Riley out of the stench-filled room and down the stairs. The front door was open, the sun shining bright as she stepped outside.
A string of police cruisers with lights flashing and two ambulances pulled up in front of the house, one after another.
Three uniformed officers and an emergency technician rushed past them and disappeared inside the house.
Perez climbed out of an unmarked car and looked at Sawyer.
“She’s going to be okay,” Sawyer told him.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The gleam in his eye said it all. He was glad she’d followed her instincts. Apologies might come later, but she wouldn’t hold her breath, and she didn’t care about any of that.
“Palmer is upstairs,” Sawyer said. “He’s hurt bad. He needs help. And you might want to look in the bedroom closet.”
Perez tipped his head and continued on toward the house.
The doors at the back of the ambulance were open and Sawyer walked that way. “Don’t leave me,” Riley said when a paramedic approached.
“I won’t. I promise.” Sawyer explained to the paramedic that Riley had a broken leg and that she was going to ride in the back of the ambulance with her to the hospital.
“What about you?” he asked, taking note of the blood smeared across Sawyer’s arms and chest. “Are you hurt?”
“No. I’m fine. Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Three Days Later
Sawyer stepped out of the hospital elevator and then got out of everyone else’s way. Her phone was vibrating. She set the vase filled with flowers on the floor and picked up the call.
“Is this Sawyer Brooks?”
She could see the door to Palmer’s hospital room from where she stood. “Yes, this is Sawyer.”
“This is Mark Brennan. I just wanted—” His voice wobbled, emotion getting the best of him.
He’d been released the same day Riley had been found. She’d seen it all on the news. She said nothing as she waited for him to pull himself together.
“I needed to call you,” he said, “and tell you thank you. I owe you my life.”
She scoffed at that. “You don’t owe me anything. I was just doing my job.” It sounded cliché, but it was the truth.
There was another pause before he said, “If you ever need anything, anything at all, I’m your guy.”
“Thank you for calling,” she said. “Take care.”
“You too.”
Sawyer put her phone away, picked up the flowers, and made her way to Palmer’s room.
“You look like hell,” Palmer said when Sawyer walked into his hospital room with a vase full of flowers she’d bought at the farmers’ market downtown.
“Ditto,” she told him, glad to see him awake. For days now, she’d been in and out of his room. He’d been stabbed once in the back, once in his right side, and had taken a muscle-severing jab to his left arm. Bubbles had missed his artery. Not only was he alive, doctors were optimistic about a full recovery.
He used his good hand to gesture weakly toward his mouth. “Can a guy get a drink around here?”
She filled his pink plastic cup on the tray with water. “Here you go. Small sips.”
He gulped it down.
She put the cup back on the tray and said, “You’re lucky to be alive.”
He grunted. “That woman scared the shit out of me.”
Sawyer moved a chair close to the bed. She gave him a good long look, happy to see him awake and talking. She was going to say something, but the words got stuck in her throat, and she simply let her forehead fall to the side of his mattress. Palmer was her mentor, her friend, one of the few people who believed in her ability as an investigative journalist.
After a few seconds, she felt his hand on the top of her head, petting her as if she were a small child or a beloved dog. She sat up, grabbed a tissue from the table, and blew her nose. “I’m sorry. I’m just glad you’re okay. When I brought the file to you, it never dawned on me that you might get hurt.”
“I’m okay, Sawyer. And even if I wasn’t, it’s not your fault. You’re the hero in all of this.”
She said nothing.
“What? You don’t like being a hero?”
She shrugged. “If doing the right thing makes me a hero, then sure, whatever.”
“Well, I don’t like it either.” He coughed. “But all the nurses around here keep making a big deal over what happened, heralding me as a saint this morning when I woke up for the first time since being carried out of that house on a stretcher.”
He coughed, took a sip of water after she refilled his cup and handed it to him. “It was all you,” he went on. “Perez took you down a notch when you went to see him. I tried to do the same. But you wouldn’t quit,” he said. “It was your dogged determination that saved the little girl.”
More coughing. More water. He lifted a brow. “How’s the kid doing? Do you know?”
“Riley was dehydrated when they brought her in. Her leg is broken in two places, but she never cried out in pain, even when I picked her up and carried her out of that house of horrors.” Sawyer shook her head in awe. “She’ll be going back home today to be with her family.” She smiled, but Palmer wasn’t buying it.
“What is it?” Palmer asked.
Sawyer scoffed. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Tell me,” he said, his voice groggy from the drugs. “Get it out.”
She anchored her hair behind her ear. “It’s nothing and everything all at the same time. Riley Addison has been traumatized, and she’ll never be able to forget it. All of the horrors have been imprinted in Riley’s mind, and for the rest of her life, even with therapy, she’ll remember every detail of her time spent with that woman.”
“So saving Riley wasn’t enough? You have to carry her pain too?”
She met Palmer’s gaze. “Did you ever consider becoming a therapist instead of a journalist?”
“Not until this very moment.”
She smiled then and changed the subject. “Detective Perez called me an hour ago. His team has found two bodies buried in Melony Pershing’s backyard. They’re still digging, but they also found Polaroid pictures of every girl on my list.”
Palmer groaned, the color draining from his face as he clutched his middle.
“I’ll get the nurse,” she said.
He waved her off, but she could tell he was hurting. “First thing tomorrow morning,” he said, his voice strained, “I want you to get hopping on the Black Wigs story.”
“I thought I was supposed to take a couple of weeks off.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass.”
/> “Are you sure about the Black Wigs story? I had gotten the feeling you didn’t like the angle I was taking—”
“I changed my mind.” He sipped his water. “If the Black Wigs are going after specific men for a reason, I want to know why. The public will be interested too. I’m not saying it’s right to take the law into their own hands, but I think it’s important to know all the details.”
“I’ll get right on it,” she said with a smile.
His brow furrowed. “First get that nurse for me, will you?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Sawyer tossed and turned for most of the night. A thumping noise sounded, then the creak of a door. When she opened her eyes, she saw Melony Pershing standing over her, a bullet hole in her chest, her hands tucked behind her back. Her hair was back to its natural gray, and she was wearing the red cardigan with the ladybugs, most of the insects hanging on by a thread.
“I found Rebecca,” the woman told her. “Your friend looked thin as a rail, ghastly. She kept banging on the floorboards and wouldn’t stop asking for you. I told her you were never coming.” Melony drew out a hand hidden behind her back and held it high in the air, where Sawyer could see the ax in her grasp, ready to strike. A freaky, wide grin had been drawn on her face with a red marker.
Sawyer bolted upward as she let out an ear-piercing scream.
Breathless, Sawyer sat still.
Nobody was there. Just a nightmare.
But the banging coming from the other room was real, and it grew louder. She heard the doorknob rattle. Someone was trying to get in.
She jumped off the bed, her heart racing as she rushed to the kitchen and grabbed the first metal object she felt inside one of the drawers.
A shadowy silhouette stood outside her door. She should have kept Aria’s gun.
“It’s Derek. Are you in there?”
Derek? She opened the door, the weapon still in her hand, her body trembling.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She jumped into his arms, almost knocking him over, the object she was holding clunking him in the back. For a long moment they simply held one another. Finally he stepped away, took the meat tenderizer from her hand, and brought it to the kitchen.