The house was a near ruin, of course, but dark-hearted hikers regularly posted pictures of it online, pictures in which they posed with serious expressions next to crumbling walls pockmarked with satanic graffiti. The owners of the neighboring pig farm bought the land after the investigation was concluded, and while they claimed publicly they were repulsed by all the attention, the rumor was they’d give you a guided hike to the place for a small, under-the-table donation. Her father had told her years before the only reason they hadn’t shot the Savage Woods films there was because the new owners had demanded an exorbitant fee, a fact he’d relayed with a shake of the head, as if they were just bad businesspeople and not greedy profiteers.
It wasn’t quite the stuff of horror movies. It was the stuff of people who, for whatever reason, thought it would be cool to live in one.
The temptation to visit the place, if only to demystify it in her mind, plagued her for most of the drive to Asheville. But she knew she wasn’t up to such a visit alone. She never would be. Still, the urge was strong as thirst on a hot day.
She remembers how hard she gripped the steering wheel for that last leg of the journey. How she forced herself to stare at the winding highway ahead. How she kept the windows rolled down just a little so the wind could make a sound like a flag flapping on the prow of a speeding ship. A sound that drove out her thoughts.
Lilah Turlington’s favorite flower had been the calla lily. Charlotte had no trouble finding some as soon as she got to Asheville.
When she finally reached the grave site, Lilah’s story weighed more heavily on her than the others. Maybe because before her murder, Lilah Turlington, born Lisa Hilliard, had accomplished what she, Trina Pierce, now Charlotte Rowe, was just setting out to do. She had escaped her past, made a new life for herself.
The black sheep of her wealthy family, she’d changed her name after graduating from Bowdoin and moving to Asheville, probably so her new crystal-selling, Reiki-massage-practicing hippie friends wouldn’t know she was descended from a family that built and managed some of the largest oil and natural gas pipelines in North and Central America. While they weren’t married, she and Eddie were raising Lilah’s son together; he was only two years old when they left him with friends before going camping and met the Bannings on the Appalachian Trail.
If Lilah knew the identity of her son’s birth father, she never let anyone know. After her disappearance was reported, her older brother, who at that time was poised to become chief executive officer of the evil empire Lilah had fled, took custody of her son and whisked him out of the country. Either to Canada or Mexico, no one in the press was ever sure. Morton-Hilliard Corp. had projects in both countries, and a press office capable of managing far more complex scandals than a missing hippy-dippy backpacker who might have abandoned her son.
Charlotte had always envied Lilah’s little boy. Envied what she saw as his fairy-tale ending: the wealthy family whisking him off to a foreign country, protecting him from the dark repercussions of the tragedy that had befallen his mother. So different from what her father had done for her.
But it wasn’t until that sunny afternoon, sitting on a stone bench beneath the branches of an oak tree in an Asheville cemetery, that she’d realized it was Lilah Turlington who’d given her the idea to remake herself. That by turning toward her heart and away from her family’s money all those years ago, Lilah had planted a seed of hope in the mind of Trina Pierce, and the bloom was Charlotte Rowe.
Maybe this is why she’s never kept a journal. By the time she felt comfortable enough to begin, there was too much damn material to know where to start.
Now it comes to her all at once.
The sight of the pen in her frozen hand, which she’s been staring at now for who knows how long, confirms it. But she hasn’t wedged herself into this corner of Marty’s trailer to write her memoirs, only to find her voice. She’s got no plan for whatever ends up on these pages.
This is for her and only her—something between a letter and a prayer.
So she can’t begin with Lilah, or that cemetery in Asheville. She has to begin with the precise moment her nightmare began.
They didn’t plan to kill my mother, she writes. She wasn’t like the others, the ones they stalked and captured.
By the time the sun starts to outline the bottom of the window shade next to her, she’s still writing.
30
“Who’s bored?” Mona Sanchez shouts from her office.
Luke looks up from his desk. Peter Henricks, the only other deputy at the station, is tentatively raising the hand he’s not using to refill his coffee mug.
Judy Lyle, who’s both reception and dispatch, swivels in her desk chair and glares at Mona’s open office door as if a polka band just started up a set inside; it’s an expression that doesn’t quite match the Pepto-pink sweater she’s tied around her neck and draped over her back like a cape. Like many of Altamira’s senior residents, Judy’s a woman of stark contrasts, the kind who reads syrupy-sweet romance novels before bed but curses like a drunk sailor the minute someone cuts her off in traffic. Luke’s a fan.
As for Peter, his best quality, as far as Luke’s concerned, is how quickly he volunteers for crappy assignments, and Luke’s pretty sure that’s exactly what this random question of Mona’s is shaping up to be. One seriously crappy assignment.
Reach for the stars, Henricks. Come on. I’m rooting for ya!
It’s not like Luke’s silence is a lie. Boredom isn’t quite the word he’d use to describe his current mood, or any of the moods he’s suffered since he stormed out on Charley two days before. Defeat. Despair. Angst. Those are more appropriate. That said, the only real excitement in his life since then has been talking Stanley Morrison’s wife out of running over his skis with her truck because she caught him texting an old girlfriend. So if they’re being entirely truthful, maybe he should raise his hand, too.
But what does he know about things like honesty and truthfulness? He’s just an asshole who can’t make friends. According, at least, to a woman he was trying to keep from getting killed by a madman.
When nobody answers out loud, Mona appears in the doorway to her office. “Seriously, who wants to venture a guess as to why a pharmaceutical company’s buying the old resort?”
“What?” Luke shoots to his feet, all eyes on him suddenly.
Well, that was smooth, hotshot.
“You have strong feelings about this, I take it?” Mona asks.
“Which one?”
“There’s only one resort anywhere near here, and it’s not finished.”
“Which drug company?”
“Graydon. Ever heard of ’em?”
Don’t answer, and don’t mess yourself.
“That’s crazy,” he says. “I mean, why would a drug company want the resort?”
“I believe I just asked that question.”
“It’s still nuts.”
“And you’re jumping in your pants about this why? Did you have an offer in on the place?”
“How’d you find out about this?”
“Mayor’s office called. Says they’re working up a press release. Graydon’s paid off all of Silver Shore’s debt. They’re gonna partner with them on the whole deal, it looks like. They’re even going to retain the same lobbying firm that was trying to get the state to widen 293.”
“Well, that’s gonna suck.” Judy Lyle swivels back to her desk. “How many trees are gonna have to die for that?”
“Says the woman with a job and health insurance,” Peter Henricks grumbles.
“So I take it nobody’s got an answer,” Mona says. “Just a bunch of feelings, it sounds like.”
“I can try to find one for you if you like.”
The words are out of his mouth before he can think twice. It’s a strange offer, and Mona’s stare makes that clear.
“An answer, I mean,” Luke adds.
“I take it Stanley Morrison isn’t filing assault charges?”
> “On behalf of his water skis? Give me a break.”
“Well, I gave you a job actually, so I figure we’re square in that department.”
“Sorry. That was out of line.”
He better cool it if this is going to work.
What he wants is an excuse to get out of the station.
What he wants is an excuse to talk to Charley again, and this is most certainly it.
Of course, he could always just apologize. Which he knows he’ll end up doing if he goes and talks to her. But he’d like to arrive with his hat on, and then remove it at the moment of his choosing. What’s the matter with feeling useful while you’re being forced to eat crow?
“You’re just going to talk to people around town?” Mona asks.
“Well, they’re not buying it sight unseen, so they must have been poking around before now. I’ll find out if anyone strange has been around recently.”
“Stranger than you, you mean?” Judy asks.
He gives her a frosty look, which she returns with a coy smile.
“Maybe I’ll check in with some of the folks who, uh, we thought might be paying visits to the old place. See if they’ve seen any other activity.”
“The social justice looters, you mean? You think they’d tell you if they had?”
“I think I can get you a pretty clear picture of what’s been going on out there.”
“All right. Just go. I can tell you’re antsy. When you’re done, finish up with some patrols; then radio in.”
He grabs his hat and windbreaker off his desk.
A thought strikes him at the door and he spins.
“Mona!”
“Sheriff,” she says quietly when she reappears at her office door.
“Sorry. Sheriff. What are they gonna do with it?”
“Apparently Graydon’s getting in to the leisure business. The company’s got a venture capital arm that stashes their money in different places. But this is the first time they’ve done anything with a hotel. So the plan’s the same as it ever was. Turn it into a resort. If it’s real, it could be great for the town. So find out if it is.”
He nods. As he turns to go, he hears Judy say, “Maybe they’ll leave an antidepressant on everybody’s pillow at turndown.”
Marty’s truck isn’t parked in front of his trailer, but he recognizes the guy sitting on Marty’s steps as one of the crew he threatened to run a few days before. With the surliness of a teenager whose parents have taken his smartphone away, the guy tells him Marty’s shuttling back and forth between job sites. When Luke asks him about Charley, he goes quiet.
How much does the guy know, Luke wonders, besides the fact that Marty ordered him to watch over his home for the day?
As worry knits his expression, the guy stares past Luke, and that says his worry’s got nothing to do with Luke and everything to do with the subject of the question.
“She went off on her own, didn’t she? And Marty told you not to let her.”
“Something like that,” the guy grumbles. “She went up to the lake. Said she’d only be gone for a half hour.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“What’s she driving?”
“My Camaro.”
Lake Patrick is a quarter of the size of Nacimiento to the south, and it’s hardly a tourist destination even on the weekends, so he’s not surprised to see the guy’s battered white Camaro is the only car in the parking lot next to the boat launch on a Monday. And he’s not surprised to see Charley walking the narrow crescent of gravelly beach, which, like the lake itself, seems to appear out of nowhere amid the tinder-dry golden hills.
At the sound of his cruiser, she looks up, drops the stick she’s holding in her hand.
Only now does he realize how little real shelter his last-minute mission gives him. When their eyes meet, all the anger and embarrassment of their fight comes rushing back. She looks better, more well rested. But it also looks like her new store of energy has allowed her to retreat deeper inside herself after applying a thicker skin.
“Hey,” he says.
The same thing he said to her when he almost touched her in a sudden, unplanned way.
It wasn’t intentional, but she blinks and looks to the sand. Is she trying to avoid that little memory, too?
All things considered, hey is a pretty hard word to avoid, and if they actually end up speaking to each other again, maybe they’ll have to agree to just let that little moment between them go.
Or maybe he’s reading too much into this, into her. Maybe that little moment meant far more to him than it did to her.
“So I have some news,” he says.
“I’m listening.”
“It’s not Bailey. I haven’t heard anything from him yet.”
“OK.”
“It’s Graydon. They’re buying the resort.”
She’s so startled she seems to forget the tension between them.
“For what?” she asks.
He repeats what Mona told him moments before, putting special emphasis on the detail about the mayor’s office, because that makes the whole thing seem more real.
She doesn’t say anything for a while. Just stares out at the placid black water reflecting the few strands of cloud overhead. She’s pondering this news in some faraway place in her head, but she hasn’t asked him to leave, so maybe she’ll invite him to join her there in another second or two.
“Thanks,” she finally says, then turns her back to him and picks up her stick again.
“Thanks?”
“Yes. Thank you for bringing me this information. It’s very helpful. I will be resuming my treatment now.” She drags the stick through the gravel and sand at her feet.
“Oh, don’t be a . . .”
“A what? A woman who can remember two days ago?”
“Did it ever occur to you I might be afraid of you getting hurt?” he asks.
“Did it occur to you before you said all those shitty things to me?” she asks.
There’s some method to whatever she’s doing with the stick in the sand.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“None of your business. You’re out, remember?”
“Look, we were both a little out of line that night.”
“Oh, is that what you’ve decided, Dad?”
“Oh my God. I went to San Francisco State, for Christ’s sake. It’s not exactly a bastion of the patriarchy, all right? Can you stop talking to me like this?”
She turns, and for a second, he’s afraid she might throw the stick at him. “You called me Burning Girl, asshole, after a whole day of trying to prove you weren’t the guy you were in high school.”
“You know, maybe, just maybe, you could stop bringing up the way I was in high school every time I do something you don’t like.”
“Act different and I will.”
“All I did was say things you didn’t want to hear.”
“No, you had a meltdown. You had a meltdown because for three hours I was stronger than you were.”
“Stronger than I was? You were stronger than a speeding truck! Give me a break. So I freaked out. What do you expect me to do? Ask you to rob a bunch of banks with your bare hands?”
“I gave you a break, and you were a dick.”
“Well, that’s not when I had a meltdown, by the way.”
“So we agree it was a meltdown and not you being the voice of mansplainy reason?”
“Call it whatever you want. The point is, I didn’t freak out when I saw what the drug can do. I freaked out when you said you were going after a serial killer. Because I don’t want you to get hurt. And I don’t want you to get hurt because I . . .”
Shut up, fool.
At least it’s not Reggie’s voice this time. It’s his own.
His throat’s closed up, and his chest’s suddenly made of metal. And even though he knows on a conscious level that his arms and legs are still attached to his body, it does
n’t really feel that way. Charley’s just staring at him, her expression unreadable. It seems a little tense, a little wary, and a little skeptical, all at once. As if she knows what he was about to say and doesn’t believe it. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to.
“I just . . .”
“You just what?” she asks.
“I liked helping,” he finally says. “I want to help. And I fucked up. And I’m sorry.”
Before she can respond, there’s a buzzing sound from her pocket. She pulls out a cheap-looking cell phone. “Prepaid. Marty bought it for me.” She reads the text message, drops the stick, and walks past him.
“Where are you going?”
“Package just showed up at Marty’s house. No return address. Strange delivery guy. Marty’s on his way there.”
He’s tempted to follow her, but he’s distracted by something else.
Now that she’s moved out of his way, he can see a pattern to the marks she was making in the sand. They’re words.
He walks closer, positions his back to the lake so he can read them clearly.
PLANNING. PLEASE BE PATIENT.
She’s right next to him suddenly. When her hand comes to rest on his shoulder, he jumps, but she’s too busy pointing up at the sun with her other arm to notice.
“Look,” she says. “Blink a few times and let your eyes adjust and you’ll see them.” He follows her instructions. “They’re tiny, so if they line up with the sun, the brightness hides them. But they follow me everywhere I go.”
If they’re drones, they’re the smallest drones Luke’s ever seen. And they’re moving together in a strange, swarmlike pattern. Almost like they’re feeding off each other. Or positioning themselves in relation to each other. They’re small enough and high enough that if he’d noticed them on his own, he would have dismissed them as specks on the surface of his eyes. Or maybe a cloud of gnats.
“Hell,” he whispers.
So the message in the sand is for them.
“Makes you wonder if all the crazy people in the world are really crazy, doesn’t it?” she asks. She lowers her arm and her eyes, squinting and blinking the glare away. “Sure you still want to help?”
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