Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake)

by Rachel Caine

  I listen to their exchange, not because I want to but because I have no other choice. I’m scrabbling with my fingertips against the pipe. It’s smooth. No rough surfaces. The floor is too. I can’t find anything, anything to work with.

  Jonathan presses another button, then swivels his chair to face me. He leans forward and studies me like I’m a damn museum exhibit. No feeling at all. “Does the gag bother you?”

  I nod. He scoots the chair over and undoes it, and I grab in a deep, whooping breath of relief. Then another one. Then I say, “You need to let us go. Right now.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says. “You’re safe here.”

  I don’t feel safe. I feel handcuffed to a damn pipe. “I’m pregnant.”

  He freezes for a second. Processing the information. Then he says, “Then I’m sorry for the way I treated you. And the car crash. But you’ll be okay. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

  “Then you can let me go. Right now.”

  He smiles, but there’s nothing behind it. It’s just muscles moving. An imitation of feeling. “I’d like to,” he says. “But I respect you more than that, Kezia Claremont. You could have let this go, and you didn’t. You wanted justice for those girls. I did too.”

  “We’re nothing alike,” I say, and I mean it down to my last drop of blood. “You let Prester die.”

  “Not me,” he says. “Sheryl. She could have called an ambulance. Maybe saved him. But she didn’t.”

  I feel a real surge of bitter, electric rage. “You’re not just some god hovering overhead. You were there, or you were close. You could have stopped her. You could have saved him. And you didn’t.”

  He tilts his head, and it looks like a praying mantis taking in its prey. “You should understand what I’m doing.”

  On-screen, Gwen’s outline is moving. I note that in my peripheral vision, but I don’t focus on it. I want him to focus on me right now. If he’s telling me the truth, if he doesn’t intend me any harm . . . keeping him fixed on me will let Gwen move more freely.

  “Your sister died,” I say. “I know that. You tried to save her.” He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t blink. “You never found the man who did that. I understand how that can make somebody—”

  “Crazy?” he says. Too calmly.

  “Desperate,” I say. Behind my back, I’m sliding my fingers up and down the pipe, trying to find anything to work with. I could have dealt with the zip ties, I’ve had training on precisely how to break them, but now I have the handcuffs to contend with. And I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. “Desperate to get justice.”

  “You think you understand me,” he says. “But you don’t. You really don’t.” He pauses for a second, and slowly blinks. “Sam did. A little. He was one of the only people who ever came close to the truth.”

  What truth? I don’t know what he’s saying. I can’t work it out. And then it doesn’t matter, because something’s happening on the screens.

  “If you make another sound,” he says, “I’ll kill your baby.” It’s such a calm, quiet threat. I feel it shudder through me, and it leaves behind a horrible conviction that he means it.

  Jonathan turns away from me. I hear a slight metallic jingle, and when I look down, I see he’s got a small metal carabiner clipped to the belt loop on his blue jeans.

  Keys. That’s a ring of keys, and even from here I can see a handcuff key on it.

  Get him over here, I think.

  But not yet. He’s completely absorbed in what’s happening on the screen . . . and as I focus on it, too, I feel the same magnetic force draw me in.

  Oh God, Gwen. Oh my God.

  We should never have come here.

  25

  GWEN

  There are more rooms, he said. I think about the implications of that as I walk through the processing room. There are other exits from this room, seven of them. I ignore the big doors he dragged me through before; those lead to the warehouse, to the trap where I last saw Kez.

  I have blood on my hands. On my clothes. And I am not really rational.

  It feels oddly fine.

  “Which door?” I ask Jonathan. I know he can hear me. He’s played this game before, with many people. How many, I can’t really know.

  “You choose.”

  I do. I pick one at random, and I move past the silent, stinking fish conveyors. This door is smaller. It leads to a hallway running right and left. More choices. I go right. “You going to give me any clues?” I ask Jonathan. “It’s not much of a game if I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You know,” he says. “You’ll know when you get there.”

  I’m not surprised to find that lights are working now. He’s kept the power on, of course he has. He controls the building, probably from whatever room he’s hiding in.

  We’re playing hide-and-seek.

  “Would you rather be rich or poor?” he asks.

  “Neither,” I tell him. “Just not afraid.”

  “That’s not how it works. There are only two choices.”

  “That’s why the game is wrong,” I tell him. “Because humans aren’t binary creatures. We’re confusing. We’re flawed. We’re—”

  I stop talking because there are three doors in the hallway, all on my left. The doors are shut. All have glass windows, but when I stand in the middle, I realize all the blinds are closed. No way to tell what’s inside.

  “Three doors,” he says. “Three choices. Two are empty.”

  “What’s in the third one?”

  “A tiger who hasn’t eaten for months.”

  I know this one. It’s a logic puzzle. A tiger who hasn’t eaten in months is dead. It doesn’t matter which door I open.

  So I do it methodically.

  The first door is an office with an empty desk, two filing cabinets, and a vacant office chair. It’s eerily tidy, like it’s waiting for a new employee to arrive.

  The second door is the same.

  The third door holds the monster, but as he promised in the riddle, the monster isn’t a problem anymore. I stare at the old, desiccated corpse. I can’t tell race, sex, anything; it’s just old skin, hair, and the outlines of bones now. The place reeks. The carpet’s absorbed decomposition like a bloated sponge. It isn’t immediately obvious how this person died—no severing of arms and legs, like Sheryl suffered. The corpse is handcuffed to a thick U-bolt driven into the floor.

  I don’t speak. I just step back and shut the door. Jonathan’s disembodied voice says, “Do you want to know?”

  “Just tell me where you are. Let’s get it over with.”

  “That man abducted young women, some of them barely into their teens. He raped and killed them and made harassing phone calls to their loved ones,” Jonathan says. “I gave him a choice of dying of starvation or gnawing off his hand like an animal in a trap. He chose to starve.”

  I lift my head and see the small, beady eye of a camera tucked in the corner of the hall. “I don’t care about your justifications.”

  “These people weren’t unknown,” he says. “If the police had worked harder, they could have put the pieces together. They could have stopped him. But they didn’t. He did have a judge and a jury once. They arrested him for an attempted abduction. The case was dismissed.”

  “You’re not omniscient. You can be wrong.”

  “I let them tell me who they are. What they’ve done. What they’re capable of doing next.” He sounds calm, of course. Certain. “What you’ve done tells me who you are, Gina. If you want to find me, go to your left now.”

  “Are you going to keep telling me your stories? Because I’d rather just die.”

  “Go to your left.”

  I take the other end of the hall. More offices. More blank, blinded windows. Three of them.

  “Did you ever find him?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “The man who killed your sister.”

  There’s a very long pause. I wish I could see him, the way he c
an see me. I wish I could understand him better, because then I’d know how to stop him.

  “Three doors,” he says. “Pick one. I’ll give you a clue. I’m in one of them.”

  I feel my stance shift, getting ready for battle. A fierce, cold wind blows through me. He’ll be armed, I think. I still have the ankle gun, and I bend down and get it. There’s one bullet, and I need to make it fucking count.

  I start at the far left. It’s empty.

  So is the middle one.

  I kick the last door open, smashing glass, blinds flailing wildly at the air, and leap forward in a flat-footed hop while the glass is still falling like sharp ice from the frame. My aim is steady.

  I fire at his face. Right in his forehead.

  He doesn’t blink. Glass cracks. He picks up a mug and drinks from it, and I realize through a sick, bewildered sense of disorientation that I’ve just shot a huge, flat television screen. It’s still working, despite the bullet that I’ve put through it. Jonathan sips again, staring at me with cool, empty eyes. “I didn’t lie,” he says. “I’m right here. It’s the only place you’ll find me in the building, Gina. There are twenty-one more rooms I’ve used. You can look in all of them. As you do, I’ll tell you why. And you’ll agree with me. They all deserved it. Every one of them.”

  I scream at the monitor. I can’t help it; I feel a savage upwelling of rage, so deep that it tears something inside me. I can’t put words on it. I can’t reach him. I can’t stop him.

  He’s a ghost. And this is just his graveyard.

  That’s when I hear Kez’s voice. Not here, with me. From the screen. “Gwen, get out, he’s fucking crazy, he took me to the—”

  Jonathan’s head swivels to his left, and then the picture and sound both die before she can finish that sentence.

  He’s got Kez.

  I don’t go to the other rooms. I don’t want to see more of Jonathan’s brand of justice. I’m barely holding on to myself as it is.

  I need to get to Kez.

  And this needs to end.

  I shove myself under the still-stuck loading dock door and run across the broken, pitted parking lot. The Honda is still on the other side of the fence, and I wriggle under the chain link, earning bloody scratches on my face I barely feel. I pop the trunk and grab another gun—one of Kezia’s, a Smith & Wesson semiauto, loaded and ready—and I see another knife at the bottom of the pile. I take it, and an extra clip, and I slam the trunk.

  There are only two choices: his family home, or the lighthouse. I choose the house because it’s closer.

  The place must have been beautiful once. Now it’s warped, weathered, half-burned, and left to ruin. The front door gapes open on a blackened, charred entryway. I step inside and go down the hallway that leads left to the part that hasn’t been destroyed.

  It’s what I suppose in the 1970s would have been called a sunken living room; there’s a step down, then another, then an octagonal carpeted pit in the middle. Matted shag, filthy and rotten. Animals have nested here. When I look up, I see jagged holes in the roof where rain has poured down.

  Apart from that, it’s still intact. Books rotting on warped shelves. A silver artificial Christmas tree leans in the corner, loaded with dirty, still-vivid ornaments. Presents scattered like stones, all still wrapped but misshapen from water and time.

  The octagonal pit in the middle of the room is full of sludge. Pillows float on top, bleached pale like dead fish.

  I move past it, past the dull, dirty white piano in the corner. Something rustles in the strings, and I flinch, but whatever it is, it stays hidden.

  The next room is a kitchen. It’s weirdly neat, like the cannery: counters clean and empty, floor shining. Off-green appliances have been polished. I open the refrigerator, afraid that I’ll find another body, and gag at the stench of rotten food. I will my heartbeat to slow down, my ears to stop the incessant ringing that hasn’t faded yet from that stunning sonic assault at the cannery. I can hear. Just not as clearly as I should.

  At least my pulse obeys, coming down to a slightly less painful pace.

  The kitchen is wrong, but it isn’t dangerous. I move on.

  The hall is filthy, streaked with mold. Drywall bulges and leaks. There are still framed photos on the wall, but rot has obscured what used to be a loving family, cute children. This house, I think, is a map of Jonathan’s destroyed brain. Pieces partly there. Pieces rotting. Some weirdly perfect.

  His room is destroyed. Not by the elements, though the window’s broken out and the carpet has wrinkled and molded. This seems . . . deliberate. Someone’s taken what looks like an ax to the furniture, left it in silently screaming pieces. Books ripped apart. Bedsheets and clothing shredded.

  He hates himself. Or someone else hates him this much. I could weep for the boy he used to be, the one who lost his little sister, but the monster that he is now has to be treated differently.

  You held a mother who killed her children, I tell myself. But it’s different. Somehow . . . somehow, it’s different. I can’t define why; unlike Jonathan, I don’t really want to understand.

  I just want it to stop.

  The next room is his sister’s, and it’s heartbreakingly perfect, a shrine, clean and neat and waiting for a dead child to walk in the door, sleep in the frilly pink bed, wear the neat white nightgown that’s laid out on the covers. I look at the boy band posters on the wall, at the stuffed animals, the games. My heart aches for her, not just because she’ll never see this but because so much harm has been done in her name.

  He isn’t here. Kez isn’t here. I check every place she could be kept, but there’s no trace of her, or Jonathan.

  That just leaves the lighthouse.

  I go.

  26

  SAM

  Gwen’s right about the lack of real, solid evidence, but I try anyway; I call the TBI and get the investigator Javier saw at the hospital, Heidt. I lay it all out for him. I tell him that the man he’s looking for is in Salah Point, North Carolina. That he’s a serial killer, a predator who took Sheryl Lansdowne and now has Gwen and Kezia too. I make it as urgent as I can, and . . . he says he’ll look into it.

  He thinks I’m bullshitting him. And I am, but only a little. The facts are there. He’s just not looking. Or, at least, not moving fast enough if he is.

  I call my friend at the FBI, but I’m told he’s on a case and unavailable. Can’t be reached. I leave him a long message, and then I ask to talk to someone else.

  I know what I have to do. Exactly what I have to do. And there will be consequences.

  So I tell them that there’s a terrorist cell in Salah Point, that I have personal knowledge of a plot involving multiple individuals, and the threat is imminent. I know the language to use; military training embeds that deep. And the agent I’m talking to pays attention. Close attention. I give him Tyler Pharos’s description, tell him the alias of Leonard Bay. I link Tyler to all kinds of things, including the abduction of Sheryl Lansdowne and the disappearance of my wife and Kezia Claremont. I throw everything that might stick at the wall, true or not. I know I’ll be in the shit for it. I don’t care. By the end of it, I’m practically begging them to get there, just get there.

  I have no idea if it will work.

  I call the North Carolina state police and try the same thing. I can tell they write me down as a crank. There’s going to be no help coming from that direction. The FBI, maybe. But they’ll call North Carolina, and North Carolina will take their sweet time checking anything out. I’m just some nut from out of state.

  The only thing that holds me back from just going is the knowledge that I need to stay here for the kids. That Gwen trusted me with that, and I have to treat that as what it is: a sacred responsibility. A level of letting go that I never imagined she could manage.

  I have to be worthy of that trust, even if it hurts. Even if it’s agony sitting here and waiting.

  I’ve told the kids everything. Vee’s here, too, huddled on the couch
with Lanny and Connor. Nobody’s saying much. Every once in a while, Vee tries to lighten the mood, but none of us are having it. Javier’s stormed out; I’m sure he’s going to be burning rubber to North Carolina, and I don’t try to stop him. He won’t get there in time, but at least he’ll get there to pick up the pieces. Man, that hurts.

  I wait with the kids, and it’s sheer torture.

  It’s two long, tense hours later when my cell phone rings. “Mr. Cade? I’d like you to go to your computer, please. I need you to be a witness.”

  I feel like I recognize the voice, but at the same time I don’t. Something’s familiar and different at the same time. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Jonathan Bruce Watson,” he says. “Go to your computer. Do it now. I sent you a link. Please click it.”

  I go to the office, and as I come around my desk, I see that my laptop’s awake, and there’s a text message alert. I click it, and the link appears.

  “Don’t do it,” Connor says. He’s come out of nowhere, and he looks angry. Anxious. Afraid. “Dad, don’t.”

  The voice on the phone says, “You know who I am, Sam. You know you need to click that link.”

  It hits, then. The voice. Tyler. MalusNavis. The puppet master. He sounds different, though. Maybe this is the real voice at last.

  “Where’s Gwen?” I ask him. “I know you’re behind all this, Tyler.”

  “You can see her if you click the link,” he says. “We’re going to play a game. It’s called Would You Rather. Do you know it?”

  “I’m not playing.” I cover the speaker on the phone and whisper to Connor, “Go. Now. Get Lanny. Go.”

  He doesn’t want to, but he obeys. I’m alone with the voice on the phone, the link steady and waiting on the laptop screen.

  “You don’t have to play,” Tyler agrees. “That’s a choice. Everybody makes choices.”

  “So tell me what happens if I don’t click the link. I can’t play if I don’t understand the stakes.”

  “If you don’t, Gwen won’t come home alive to her children.”