Wren Delacroix Series Box Set

by V. J. Chambers

  Reilly told her.

  “Oh, right,” said Kimora. “That was the day that he went out to Hagerstown to pick up some stuff that we needed from Ollie’s. They have a better selection and better prices than Wal-mart, so I send him there. But his truck broke down, and I ended up paying for him to stay at a hotel while he got it fixed, because I couldn’t get anyone to go out there and get him. I couldn’t go because of the kids, and everyone else was busy with tours and things. The tours have gotten so busy lately, what with Major getting arrested and stuff. I had to hire two new workers, even.”

  “Wow,” said Wren. “That’s good?”

  “Yeah, it’s amazing,” said Kimora. “Anyway, is that a help to you guys?”

  “Definitely,” said Wren.

  * * *

  “So, stuck in a hotel in Hagerstown that night,” said Wren.

  “It’s possible he left,” said Reilly. “He could have gotten an Uber or rented a car.”

  “An Uber from Hagerstown to Cardinal Falls? That sounds pricey.”

  “True,” said Reilly. “It’s not probable, maybe, but it’s possible.”

  “Look, we wanted him eliminated,” said Wren. “He’s eliminated. Good. Let’s move on.”

  “That’s really how you feel about this?”

  “It doesn’t matter how I feel,” said Wren. “The evidence points toward his not being involved. So, let’s put him on the back burner for now.”

  “All right,” said Reilly. “Except we’ve got no one on the front burner.”

  “I know,” said Wren. “We’ll figure it out, though. We will.”

  “You want to stop for coffee on the way back to headquarters?”

  She grinned at him. “You know me so well.”

  He chuckled. “Let’s get some caffeine.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  That afternoon, Reilly left work early so that he could get to Janessa’s house. Now that he and Timmy could have conversations, after a fashion, being around the little guy had taken on an excitement that he’d never quite known before. He was seized by the desire to get to know his little son, and he wanted to do it all the time.

  Janessa had been very understanding. When he’d asked to come by and take Timmy out for dinner, she had said it was fine.

  He hadn’t been expecting that response. Truthfully, she never wanted to give Reilly extra time with Timmy, not unless she wanted something, and Reilly felt strongly that it was more about punishing him for diving into his work and abandoning his family than it was about anything else. The thing was, maybe he deserved it, but Timmy didn’t.

  This time, though, Janessa had been very accommodating. Then they’d chatted on the phone about the book she’d given him, and she’d asked him whether she should talk to his speech therapist about it, and he’d said that of course she should.

  She was nervous. Didn’t want to appear as though she was telling the woman how to do her job. Reilly said he’d go with her, and they’d get the woman to see that this was the best form of therapy for Timmy. He was confident the speech therapist would find it as exciting as they had.

  He arrived at Janessa’s place, and—for the first time—he didn’t think of it as his old house. It was Janessa’s. He didn’t live here. He knocked on the door and no one answered.

  He waited.

  He knocked again.

  A call from within, far away. “Come in, Caius!”

  He tried the door. It opened. He stepped inside. Now inside the house, he could hear Timmy wailing in the background.

  Shit.

  He left the living room and went up the steps to the upper levels of the house. He stopped in the doorway to Timmy’s bedroom.

  “Thomas goes to Tidmouth Sheds!” Timmy was sobbing. “Percy goes to Tidmouth Sheds. Thomas is a really useful engine.” He was in the middle of the bedroom floor and he had taken off all his clothes except his underwear.

  Janessa was kneeling in front of him, holding out his shirt. “Come on, babykins, let’s put on your shirt. You want to go for pizza with Daddy, right?”

  “No!” said Timmy.

  “Hey,” said Reilly from the doorway.

  Janessa looked up at him. “Hey. I’m sorry.”

  “What?” he said. “It’s not your fault.” He knelt down next to her. “Hey, Timmy-Tim. It’s Daddy.”

  Timmy looked at him and sniffled. He started singing the Thomas theme song in a wavery voice.

  “Timmy,” said Reilly. “We’re going to go get pizza. That would be fun, right? You can bring your trains. We can play with trains at the pizza place.”

  “No,” said Timmy, breaking off the song.

  “Sure you do, babykins,” said Janessa. “You want to go with Daddy. You love pizza. You love your Daddy. You’ll have so much fun.”

  “Thomas, he’s the cheeky one,” sang Timmy. “James is vain, but lots of fun.”

  Janessa shut her eyes. “I think it’s my fault.”

  “Janessa, nobody’s blaming anyone,” said Reilly, who was coming to terms with the fact that he wasn’t going to take Timmy to get pizza.

  Janessa got up and went to the door.

  Reilly followed her.

  They stood in the hallway, outside Timmy’s room, and the little boy continued to sing to himself.

  “I didn’t prepare him enough,” she said. “I meant to. I really did. But my morning sickness has been getting worse, and then when I felt better, I wanted to play with him, and… the day just got away from me. I think I only told him about your coming once.”

  “Oh,” said Reilly. “You didn’t tell him what to expect.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t do it on purpose, Caius. I swear. I actually have plans. I was going to go out with Garth tonight. I want you to take him.” She rubbed her forehead.

  “Hey, I believe you,” said Reilly. “He’s doing the end of the Thomas episode. That’s the song. It’s at the end of every episode, and this is the end of his day. He’s trying to tell us that he doesn’t like the change in his routine. He wants to have the normal end of his day, not something new and different.”

  “Oh, I think you’re right.” They both turned and looked at Timmy and Reilly could feel that even though they were frustrated, they were excited as well, because Timmy was communicating, and it was huge.

  Reilly knew that if you wanted to change Timmy’s routine, you needed to telegraph it. You needed to tell him five or ten times that things would be different, go through every permutation of what was going to happen, and make sure he knew what to expect. Otherwise, he would throw a tantrum.

  In the past, he might have faulted Janessa for what she’d done. She knew as well as he did what was necessary to prep Timmy for a change in routine. But he didn’t fault her.

  “I don’t think he’s going to go with you,” said Janessa. “I can’t get him dressed.”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” said Reilly. “He’s too upset at this point.”

  “But I wanted—”

  “When were you supposed to meet Garth?”

  “Uh… in about twenty minutes.”

  “Well, how about you go and do that, and I stay here and give Timmy his typical dinner and a bath and put him to bed. I mean, he might still be annoyed with it being me and not you, but I do put him to bed when he stays with me, so it’ll be better than trying to get him in a car. And then, your night isn’t ruined.”

  “You would do that?” she said.

  “Hey, I just wanted to hang with him. I don’t care about pizza,” he said, grinning.

  She grinned back. “Thank you, Caius.”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  She looked at him for a minute, her brow furrowing.

  “What?”

  “It’s only… it’s so easy to talk to you lately. It makes me wonder…” She twisted her hands together. “If we would have got him diagnosed when he was younger, maybe we would have found this therapy earlier. Maybe if I hadn’t been so stubborn, we woul
d have had hope for Timmy, and then we wouldn’t have started hating each other.”

  “Hey, hey,” he said. “There’s no point in playing that game. I’m the one who destroyed everything anyway. I gave up. I ducked out. I disappeared in work, and I betrayed our vows. I exploded the marriage, not you.”

  She just gazed at him, surprise in her eyes, and he wondered if he’d ever taken responsibility out loud to her before. She’d certainly never said anything like what she’d said to him. “Cai… we can’t go back.”

  “No, we can’t,” he said.

  Her hand strayed to her belly, and she looked back at Timmy. “What you said before, about having another baby, a do-over—”

  “I was out of line.”

  “Maybe it was true. I didn’t have to put so much pressure on Timmy to be what I wanted him to be. I could let him be autistic if he was autistic. You know?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Jannie. You’re a great mom.”

  She smiled at him.

  Reilly inclined his head at Timmy. “I’ll deal with him. You go get ready to leave and then you can say goodbye to him.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks again.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  * * *

  “So, anyway,” Reilly was saying to Maliah from the doorway to her office, “then, I go and open the refrigerator, and I get out the milk and juice. And I hold them up, and I say what they are. And I say, ‘Which one?’” It was morning. Reilly had been by the coffee shop, but Angela had told him Wren had already been in to get his coffee, so he hadn’t purchased anything.

  “Okay,” said Maliah. “I thought you told me that you stopped asking him to choose between stuff because he just repeated the last one you said, no matter what.”

  “No, you’re right,” said Reilly. “I mean, as I was doing it, I was thinking he was probably going to get mad and knock the milk carton out of my hand and I’d be cleaning up a spill. Because that’s what he’d usually do. He’d say the last thing you said, and then you’d give him that, and it wouldn’t be what he wanted, and he’d throw a fit.”

  “But I guess that didn’t happen this time?”

  “No,” said Reilly. “No, he just looks at me, and I go, ‘Timmy wants to drink…’ And he says, ‘Juice.’” A huge grin burst across his face. “He seriously said it. And he pointed. Like, he knew what we were talking about. He was right with me. It was crazy.”

  Maliah grinned back. “That’s so cool, Cai. I’m so excited for you. You know, sometime, I have to meet Timmy.”

  “Yeah, you do,” said Reilly. “Uh, we should definitely—”

  Wren appeared in the doorway, holding out a coffee cup. “I thought I heard you.”

  “Oh, great,” said Reilly, taking the coffee away from her. “Thank you for this.”

  Wren gave Maliah a little wave. “Morning.”

  “Morning,” said Maliah.

  Reilly leaned over and kissed Maliah’s cheek. “Talk later, huh?”

  “Sure,” said Maliah, who beamed up at him as if the kiss had made her morning.

  Reilly smiled at her. Things were good for him. If this case they were working wasn’t so damned confusing, everything in his life would be pretty perfect. He ambled out of the office, sipping on his coffee. “Hey, Wren, I got something to talk to you about.”

  She fell into step with him. “Okay. What?”

  “Well, I got some communication from, uh, from Vivian Delacroix’s lawyer.”

  Wren stopped walking at the mention of her mother’s name.

  Reilly stopped too.

  “What’s she want?” said Wren. “Is she trying to negotiate something?”

  “She didn’t say that,” said Reilly. “The message I got was that she wanted to help. She thinks she has insight into our case.”

  “Which case? The copycat case? Does she even know about that?”

  Reilly spread his hands. “I don’t know. But I think we have to go and hear her out.”

  “Are you kidding me? That’s a terrible idea.” Wren started walking again.

  He went after her. “Maybe so, but if we don’t check into this, we could be missing out on important information.”

  “She’s lying. She doesn’t know anything.”

  “That could be true, but we can’t be sure. I know it would be tough for you to see her—”

  “I’m not going to see her,” said Wren. “Neither of us are. That’s a stupid, bullshit idea.” She turned her back on him. She walked stiffly down the hallway and into her office. Her door closed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Reilly gently rapped on the door of Wren’s office about ten minutes later. He had given her a little space to calm down, hoping she’d come out on her own, but she hadn’t.

  The door was yanked open and Wren stood there, her face twisted in fury. “When I was about six years old, I kept trying to climb up on the counter in our cabin, because it looked fun. I wanted to sit there and swing my legs over the side. And my mother told me to stop it. She said it wasn’t safe up there. I wouldn’t listen. The third time I climbed up there, she grabbed my hand and stuck it on the side of the toaster, which was right next to where I was sitting, and which had been recently used to make toast. It was hot. It wasn’t like, third-degree-burn hot, but it hurt, and I screamed, and she wouldn’t take my hand away, and she looked into my eyes and told me that it wasn’t safe, and that I needed to know what pain was to be frightened of it, and that pain was nature’s way of showing us our limitations, and that if I got badly hurt, people would think she was a bad mother.”

  Reilly licked his lips. “Listen, Wren—”

  “I didn’t get a blister or a bad burn from it. But it hurt, and it was red for days, and I cried and cried. When she was talking to me, when she had her face in mine, when she was explaining how my getting damaged would be a problem for her stupid reputation, I feel like that was when I really got to understand that woman. I don’t talk to her anymore.”

  Reilly hung his head.

  “She doesn’t know anything,” said Wren. “She wants something. She’s never done a thing to ‘help’ anyone in her life, not without strings, and she certainly isn’t going to help our case. She’s playing us.”

  “All right, okay,” said Reilly. “But we’ll know that going in, so whatever she tries to say, we’ll be on our guard, and if she doesn’t give us any information, we won’t play games with her. We’ll leave.”

  “I’m not going to see her.”

  He sighed. “Okay.” He nodded. “Okay.”

  “Good, let’s drop this.”

  “What if I went and talked to Vivian on my own?”

  “She would chew you up and spit you out,” said Wren.

  “Listen, I’m sorry that—”

  Wren slammed the door in his face.

  He sighed again.

  * * *

  Wren fought her way through the woods. These woods were owned by the Fellowship, and the last time she’d been out here, she’d been on her own, looking for Major, trying to save Hawk’s life.

  She had been frightened. She remembered that. She remembered the strange thoughts she’d had of the Crimson Ram. Those thoughts seemed to come back to her at the worst moments. When she’d had to leave the Academy, they had been triggered by the phone calls from David Song. Well, he hadn’t been David Song.

  Come to think of it, they’d never gotten to the bottom of those calls.

  They’d solved the case, but there were still threads hanging, threads that needed tying off.

  Like coming out into the woods here. Why hadn’t someone done this already? Wasn’t it the obvious thing to do? But she hadn’t even thought of it, and it made her wonder if she was really seeing all of this rationally.

  She had protested when Reilly had accused her of killing Oliver, because she knew she was innocent.

  Except now… the memory of the vivid visuals of the Crimson Ram, on a horse in a blackened forest, the stars raining do
wn… What had been done to her all those years ago? When she came back to this place, she had done it because she was drawn to the bodies of those dead girls. Something about the death called to some part of her, some awful, dark part.

  And she still remembered the way she’d felt after she’d shot Kyler Morris, the jolt of pure power that had lit her up.

  She knew what all this stuff added up to, and it added up to her not being able to trust herself.

  She looked along the path, and the thoughts formed unbidden in her brain. Have I come down this path again? Did I come down this path with a body on a litter, dragging it behind me?

  No, no, no.

  The logistics of it didn’t make any sense. She couldn’t have killed Oliver and then transported him all the way out here.

  He was walking next to me, responded her brain, and she flashed on an image of Oliver walking next to her through the forest.

  “Stop,” she said aloud. It didn’t mean anything. She’d told herself before that conjuring an image was nothing. Anyone would do it if it was described vividly enough. That wasn’t a memory, it was her goddamned imagination.

  But, whispered a scaly voice in her head, wouldn’t it have been easy enough to convince Oliver to come with you if you offered him help with his sister? Wouldn’t he have done anything for her? Hadn’t he already proved that?

  She was not going to think this. She tamped down her thoughts and she forced herself to make her mind blank. She wasn’t going to think about anything.

  She walked in silence, and there was nothing but the autumn leaves on the trees, occasionally falling to the ground here and there.

  Then, there it was. The path that Major had taken. She turned onto it, and immediately came to the clearing, where the stone circle was laid out. It had been covered in piles of bones before, but those had all been collected for evidence.

  She noticed that there was a new one here, a small pile of bones, like from a tiny animal—maybe a squirrel or a rat.

  Giving the stone circle a wide berth, she walked out to where they had found the girls’ clothes. It should be empty too, but it wasn’t. There were clothes there. Men’s clothes. Oliver’s clothes. Folded neat and pretty as you please.