He had been anxious to tell Allie the truth—that he was her father—a few weeks after she had moved into the house, but his mother didn’t think it was time yet. The woman was fiercely protective of him and, in her eyes, his safety came first.
The two didn’t know what Allie knew about him and the murders he had committed with her mother . . . or how much the unstable Dariah had told the kids as they were growing up.
And if Allie didn’t fully trust him and Bitty—if she wasn’t truly loyal to them—there was a good chance she would tell others. So their plan was to not only help her but to also win her trust and loyalty before revealing to her that she wasn’t truly an orphan. That they were her family and would be there for her, unconditionally. Always.
The only problem . . . they’d run out of time.
He heard a scraping sound coming from the house.
His hands trembling, he lit another cigarette, then lumbered to the house and opened the back door. Piglet bounded out and yipped at his feet. He watched the small dog as she ran around, sniffing the tree, the leaves, the chair . . . then finally found a place to squat.
There was no way he could have harmed the animal, knowing how Allie felt about her. Instead, he’d only caught her that night and clamped her mouth shut. And since then he had taken good care of her. Several times he had considered returning the dog, but he liked having a little piece of his daughter around.
His cotton shirt was stuck to his flesh, fused to the oozing wounds on both his stomach and back. He pulled at his shirttail and winced. Hope’s face flashed through his mind. If the circumstances were different, he’d be furious that she got away. She, like so many others, had let him down. But he was too weak for fury. His brain too numb.
Staring at the tree again, he realized he was looking forward to what he was about to do. Maybe it’s why he had become so sloppy, murdering so close to home. Maybe he was exhausted and just needed it all to end.
He wanted to call his mother to tell her he was relieved that his struggle was over, but his cell phone had fallen from his pocket at Hope’s house, and he didn’t have a landline. He also wanted to tell her good-bye and that he loved her, although he wasn’t sure it was true. It was a question that had gone unanswered all of his life. He knew he needed her, so if needing her was the same as loving her, he did love her. But if needing was the same as love, he loved the hunt much, much more . . . than both her and Allie combined.
He removed his eyeglasses and set them on a pile of crisp leaves. Then he pushed his shoes off and placed them neatly beside the glasses.
Lethargic from the blood loss, he tried to climb the tree. After three attempts, he finally made it up to the branch. As the rain began to fall, he reached out for the rope. Woozy, he snatched it and yanked a couple of times to make sure it was sturdy enough to support his weight. Then he waited several seconds . . . for what, he wasn’t certain . . . before he slipped his head into it.
His ears pricked as he heard cars approach in the distance. Only an occasional car passed on the sleepy rural road his rental house was on, so he knew who was coming . . . and that they were coming to get him.
His time had finally come.
He looked down to find the pup staring up at him, whining, her head cocked. The sky opened up and rain began falling in sheets. Shivering against the chill, he forced all the air from his lungs and stepped forward into thin air.
As he swayed gently next to the big oak, he was vaguely aware of the dog’s mournful howls and the two sheriff’s deputies, weapons drawn, running in the rain toward him.
EPILOGUE
Six Months Later . . .
BITTY SITUATED THE last box in the back of the Tahoe. It had taken six months to tie up loose ends with the law, get the adoption finalized, and place the house on the market—and now she couldn’t leave town quickly enough.
She needed to be somewhere else to function again.
She had to switch some major gears. After all, everything she’d done for the last few decades was to preserve her son’s life. Everything she’d do going forward was to guarantee the girl a new one.
Louis’s face flashed in her mind and her knees buckled. She leaned against the Tahoe’s frame for support. Since his death, his image muscled its way into her mind several times a day.
The nights were the worst.
In her mind, she lifted a big red “Stop” sign.
STOP!
She raised it higher. STOP! STOP! STOP!
Louis’s image melted away. A short reprieve from her pain until the next time.
He’d come back.
He always did.
She had a girl to finish raising. One who had come so incredibly far, but needed much more guidance to truly save. If it was the last thing Bitty did, she was determined to do right by the girl. After all, if she did right by Allie, she’d be doing something for Louis. Something he hadn’t been able to do for himself.
Thankfully, the law hadn’t pieced together her real relationship with Louis—or else she wouldn’t have been able to leave town so soon, if at all. The new identities they’d assumed years earlier had again worked in her favor. As far as the law was concerned, all Louis was to her was an employee and a friend.
Bitty still hadn’t found the right time to tell Allie the truth: that Louis had been much more than simply Allie’s tutor. He’d been her father, and the real reason behind their move to Grand Trespass.
She feared that revealing the truth would cause the fragile girl, who’d admitted that she sometimes saw a monster when she looked into the mirror, to backslide. Plus, Allie was already afraid of losing her mental faculties—so there hadn’t been a good time to explain that she had not only one, but two mentally ill parents.
Even worse, two who had literally been monsters.
She needed security, safety, love, and comfort. Not more fear and uncertainty.
When Allie confessed that she was hearing—and maybe even seeing—things, it made Bitty’s heart ache. She had begun experiencing the same type of things when she, herself, was just a little older than Allie: hearing voices, seeing things others couldn’t see. It started when Louis was around two years old.
She was often unable to figure out what was supernatural and what was just a product of an ill mind, but she had learned how to push through it in order to continue caring for her little boy. She learned to be concerned when she absolutely had to be. And to leave well enough alone when she didn’t.
After all, only a fine thread separated the spirit world and the physical world, and very few really knew for sure what was real or imagined anyway.
The extent to which Allie’s mental faculties would disintegrate, if they even did, would be discovered in due time. But, for now, Bitty’s job was to protect her.
She doubted she would ever tell Allie the truth.
After all, what would there be to gain?
Allie had experienced far more terror than most, but odds were, with a lot of love, nurturing, and good, clean living, she would be able to manage. Sadly, these things hadn’t worked in the long term for Louis, but Louis had been a special case. One of the tragic few who, with treatment, still couldn’t function like the rest. One who had a special appetite for violence.
One who she had just recently begun to fear was capable of killing his own daughter. Until their move to Louisiana, she never would’ve believed that was possible.
Joe Hicks had successfully completed Bitty’s wellness program, and before returning to California he’d given Bitty a lead on a rental house in East Texas, where she and Allie could start all over until they sold the house in Grand Trespass and found something that better suited them.
They were headed for East Texas this morning. Would there be danger ahead? Or peace? Bitty’s gut wasn’t telling her anything either way. For once, it appeared she would have to wait to find out like everyone else.
The old woman slid into the driver’s side and watched as Allie’s gray eyes moved over the h
ouse. Then Allie got into the car and shut the door. Bitty wondered what she was thinking.
“You okay?” Bitty asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Good. Ready to start our new adventure?”
Allie fixed her with one of her spellbinding smiles. Smiling freely was something she had only just started doing. “I think I was born ready.”
Bitty turned the ignition and threw the Tahoe into reverse. Once they were out of the driveway, she paused in front of the house to look at it one last time because she knew she wouldn’t return.
“Mommy?”
Her breath hitched. Did Allie just call me “Mommy”? That’s . . . odd.
Bitty’s eyes flicked to the girl, only to see her staring at the road ahead. “Did you just say something?”
Allie turned to her. “Huh?”
“Didn’t you just say something?”
“Uh, no.”
“Oh.”
Bitty glanced at the road ahead of them and nearly screamed. A five-year-old Louis was standing in the middle of it, watching the SUV.
Her heart froze.
Gathering a deep breath, she eased the vehicle forward. Louis’s specter, seeing that she was approaching, stepped to the side of the road and turned to face them.
When the car was directly alongside him, he locked eyes with her. Behind his small eyeglasses, the old woman could see that the skin beneath his big, blue eyes was wet. He was crying.
“Mommy,” he mouthed. “Mommy, hold me.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She wanted badly to stop the car, jump out, and take him in her arms. But she couldn’t. It was either keep reliving the past or help the girl secure a future. And she had already decided which it would be.
“Miss Bitty, are you okay?” Allie asked beside her.
Her eyes snapped forward and she jammed her foot against the accelerator, jolting the car forward. Peering into her rearview mirror, she saw Louis standing in the middle of the street again.
Facing them.
Wondering why she was leaving him.
“Miss Bitty, you okay?” Allie asked again.
Bitty cleared the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Remember when I told you I see things?”
“Yes. Why? Do you see something now?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“It’s not a what. It’s a who. And . . . it’s painful. Very painful.”
“Who is it?”
“I’ll tell you one day,” she sniffed. “Just not today.”
She felt Allie’s hand on her arm. The girl was trying to comfort her.
“Okay,” Allie said. “But . . . but are you sure you’re okay?”
Bitty didn’t want to upset the girl so she mustered up a smile. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
But she wasn’t.
And she doubted she would ever be again.
As they merged onto I-20, Allie tried to shake the foreboding feeling in her stomach and concentrate on all the good things that were happening.
As excited as she was to be leaving Grand Trespass, she was even more excited that the adoption had gone through. Miss Bitty was now officially her mother—the only real mother she’d ever had.
She no longer had to deal with visits from her nosy caseworker or Agent Jones’s needling, repetitive questions. She was going to have a fresh start in East Texas, in a town where no one knew her. She’d be able to distance herself from her mother, and hopefully even stop hearing the woman’s unbidden voice—if that’s what the voice in her ear even was. Miss Bitty had called it post-traumatic stress disorder, but Allie was still uncertain.
Miss Bitty also explained why Allie saw herself in the mirror differently than how others actually saw her. She suffered from body dysmorphic disorder, a condition resulting from her mother’s claims that she was ugly, the other unkind ways in which she’d been treated, and some of the bad things she had personally done. But Miss Bitty had given Allie some strategies to help deal with the disorder.
Strategies that were helping . . . even if only a little.
Allie still didn’t understand what had happened at the pay phone that night, but she knew that Miss Bitty’s story was a lie. And she couldn’t begin to wrap her head around the fact that Louis was the one who had killed Hannah.
Louis.
The first person who had made her feel smart.
The one who helped teach her to look at herself in a different, more positive way. The man who she once actually wished had been her father. She still couldn’t believe he’d had it in him to kill people. But Allie knew better than anyone that people hid important, and sometimes scary, things about themselves.
No one knew anyone very well.
People only saw what others allowed them to see.
She knew that Miss Bitty was having a difficult time getting over what had happened to Louis and that it might be the reason behind why she was still acting odd. It made sense since Miss Bitty and Louis had been very close, but still, Allie was sure there was more to what had happened than what she had been told.
Miss Bitty was a complicated puzzle. One Allie could probably spend a lifetime trying to assemble. For now, she’d work on reassembling herself. She’d let the woman tell her the truth when she was ready.
Earlier that morning Allie had visited her childhood house one last time. It was now little more than a charred foundation. Weeks after Louis’s suicide, the house had been torched by locals who believed it harbored evil. And the truth was, it probably did. Too much had happened in the house for it to remain standing.
As Allie stood that morning at the end of the dirt driveway gazing at the remains of the house, she swore she heard someone laughing from the pond in the distance. Thinking about it now sent a shiver up her spine, and it made her even more grateful for having the opportunity to leave Grand Trespass.
What was really awesome was that the town they were moving to was less than two hours from where Johnny lived, and he’d promised to come and visit once they were settled in. She couldn’t wait until he saw the changes in her. Surely he wouldn’t be embarrassed to introduce her to his family now. Her heart swelled as she thought of being in Johnny’s arms again, especially now that she deserved him.
Yeah, maybe she still looked a little strange when she looked in the mirror, but her image of herself was getting better and she was obsessing about it a little less. She also dressed with class now and was a hell of a lot more sure of herself. She was pretty sure Johnny would approve.
Piglet whined from her crate in the backseat. The pup had wandered home the morning after Louis killed himself. Allie had no idea where the dog had been during the weeks she was missing, but it was obvious someone had cared for her. Aside from being muddy, she looked just like she had before she vanished.
Allie glanced at the old woman and noticed that she was white-knuckling the steering wheel—and the tears were still flowing.
Her stomach twisting, Allie looked ahead at the open road again and tried to stay calm.
Life was going to be awesome in Texas.
She was going to have a clean slate.
I told you not to trust her. She’s seeing things, the voice whispered in her ear. She’s sick . . . just like the rest of us.
“Shut. Up,” Allie mumbled under her breath, trying desperately to keep it together.
Things are going to be fine, she told herself.
Life is going to change in Texas.
And it was true. Life was going to change . . . in ways she could never have imagined.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank everyone who helped make this book possible: Rhea Harris-Junge, Detective Brad Strawn, Adam Nicolai, Brian Jaynes, Mark Klein, Reida O’Brien, Patricia Bains-Jordan, Travis White, Roger Canaff, and Margy Jaynes.
Finally, an enormous thank you to the many readers of Never Smile at Strangers who, after reading it, reached out to me with such kind words. It gave me the encourageme
nt to write this novel and the one that will follow.
I appreciate every single one of you more than I can possibly express.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since graduating from Old Dominion University with a BS in health sciences and a minor in management, Jennifer Jaynes has made her living as a content manager, webmaster, news publisher, editor, and copywriter.
Her first novel, Never Smile at Strangers, quickly found an audience and, in 2014, became a USA Today best seller.
When she’s not spending time with her twin sons or writing, she loves reading, cooking, studying nutrition, doing CrossFit, and playing poker.
She currently lives in the Dallas area with her husband and twin sons.
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