She began to pace in her bedroom. One stupid mistake in the middle of the night. Just one. She’d been half asleep. She hadn’t been thinking clearly. And of course, she was going to pay for that stupid mistake. Of course.
Technically, she guessed it was three stupid mistakes.
Mistake number one: Forgetting to put in a new birth control ring.
Mistake number two: Forgetting to buy condoms at the grocery store.
Mistake number three: Unprotected sex with Hawk in the middle of the night when she was barely awake and still traumatized from being knocked out and put in a well.
She took out a ring and started to open the package.
But no.
She should probably not put that in now. Not if the damage was done.
She threw herself face down on her bed and pounded her fists into the mattress for several moments.
Then she got up, smoothed over the covers, and stalked out of her house. She sent Reilly a text saying that she wasn’t going to make it in to work this afternoon after all. Then she got in her car and started it up. She pulled out on the road and headed for the interstate.
She drove.
She took one highway to another, ended up going south on I-95 for a long time. The traffic was bad and she was in a snarl of slow moving cars, all the lanes creeping along.
By the time she got to her destination, it was late.
She considered that the guy might not even be there. She didn’t know if he’d moved or if he had a class or if there was some other reason why he might not be in his apartment. And it would just figure that after she’d been in a car for almost four hours, that he wouldn’t be there, and she would have wasted a trip.
But part of her almost hoped he wouldn’t answer the door. She needed to know, but she didn’t want to know.
She wanted to hide from this, the way she’d hidden from it already, even though she knew, she’d always known. In some ways, she’d been certain, deep down, certain since that night when she’d found Vada Walker’s body.
She knocked at the door of Spencer Collins’s apartment.
She waited.
Nothing.
She drew in a shaky breath, hoping for relief, but instead feeling a rising panic that threatened to strangle her. She needed him to be home. She needed to know. She wasn’t certain after all. She only had suspicions.
She knocked again.
Immediately, the door opened.
Spencer Collins looked her over. “Oh, whoa,” he said. “You’re back.”
“Hi,” she said.
“Look, if you’ve been getting more calls—”
“I haven’t,” she said. Now, she was wondering why she hadn’t simply called Spencer Collins instead of driving down here. She could have texted him a photo. She didn’t need to be here in person. Maybe the long drive had been a delay tactic. Maybe—but he was looking expectantly at her. “That’s not why I’m here. Well, it has something to do with why I’m here.”
“You going to accuse me of murder again, because I thought you caught the guy.”
She took out her phone. “I, um, I want to show you a picture.”
“Okay,” he said.
She had to hunt the picture down. She scrolled and clicked. “Um, when I was here before, you told us that there was a guy with you, someone who told you things about the Fellowship and the Crimson Ram. You said that he got you drunk and you didn’t remember making the calls.”
“Yeah,” said Spencer.
“Was it this guy?”
Spencer looked. “No, not that guy. He’s the one you arrested for the murders. Major Hill. I saw his picture on the TV. I know who he is. If it had been him, that would have been so freaky—”
“This guy?” She showed him another picture.
“That’s David Song. You think I wouldn’t recognize David Song?”
“Well, he’d be older now,” she said. “And maybe he wouldn’t have a beard. Maybe he’d…” She scrutinized the picture herself, wondering what David Song would look like older and without a beard.
“No, he wasn’t old. I mean, he wasn’t young or anything either. He was older, but not old, you know?”
She didn’t. Not exactly. She showed him another picture. “What about this guy?”
Spencer swallowed. “Yeah. That’s him.”
Wren grimaced. Her voice squeaked a little. “You sure?”
“Positive,” said Spencer. “That was him.”
Wren put the phone in her pocket. “Thanks.” She turned to go.
“Wait,” called Spencer after her. “Who is that guy? Why did he come to me? What’s this about?”
Wren kept walking.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Reilly pulled on his jacket. He was standing at the door of Janessa’s place, getting ready to leave. It was around 10:00 that night.
She was taking off her jacket. “He go to sleep okay?”
“Yeah, went great,” said Reilly. “We had a lot of fun.”
“Thanks for doing this, Caius,” she said. “When my sitter backed out at the last minute, I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Like I said, happy to do it,” said Reilly. “I didn’t have anything going on, and I’m always up for seeing the little guy.” He had to admit that now that the first rush of joy over connection with Timmy had waned, what he felt now primarily was guilt. All along, his little boy had been in there, reachable, and he hadn’t tried to reach him.
How many years had he missed due to his ignorance and idiocy? How much further along could Timmy be? He worried too that they’d missed the prime years for Timmy’s language acquisition. He was too old now, his brain didn’t have the same elasticity as a two-year-old.
Of course, it may not have made much difference. Maybe Timmy wouldn’t have been ready as a toddler. But they didn’t know. They couldn’t know. And they couldn’t go back.
Anyway, any time he could spend with his son now, he wanted it. Not only because he loved his kid, but because he had so much to try to make up for. So, when Janessa had called last minute and asked if he wanted to come over to feed Timmy dinner and put him to bed, he’d jumped on it right away.
“I know you are,” said Janessa. “And I’m glad.”
“Me too,” he said.
There was an awkward moment, and then he headed for the door. “Well, give me a call if you need me to do it again.”
“Okay, I’ll do that.”
He opened the door, and then he paused and turned back to her. “Hey, Jannie?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s the next step?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I read that book, and I get how kids are supposed to start breaking down the gestalts, how if he gets to the next stage, he’ll start mixing up the quotes from Thomas, putting them together with other quotes. But what I don’t get from the book is how to get him there.”
“Yeah,” said Janessa, making a face. “That part isn’t very clear to me either.”
He shut the door. “The first part has seemed so easy, and he’s a different kid already. It’s like, he didn’t realize anyone cared about anything he said and now that he knows, he’s communicating so much more. Or maybe he was communicating all along, and we just didn’t understand. So, just for that, I think the book is brilliant. But it’s not much of a step-by-step thing.”
“I think it’s more descriptive,” she said. “I think the kid has to sort of naturally acquire the language. That’s why it’s called obtaining language naturally.”
“Yeah, but if he could have naturally obtained language, he already would have,” said Reilly. “Should we model it for him? Should we break up gestalts ourselves?”
Janessa spread her hands. “I have been.”
“Oh, good, because I did too,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s just going to make him copy what we’re saying as new gestalts, though? I mean, is that bad?”
“I don’t know.” She shrug
ged. “I guess we just wait. And talk to him as much as we can and engage with him. I think the more he realizes that language is a way to engage with other people, the more he’ll be motivated to use it with us. I mean, I hope so.”
“I hope so, too.”
“When you think about what language is, it kind of has to come from Timmy. Anything else would only be him saying things he’d memorized, which is what he’s good at. He needs space and freedom to form words on his own, and we have to be there to foster his growth, not force it.”
“I’m not trying to force anything.”
“I know. I don’t have the answers either,” she said.
“I guess… it’s easy to want it all, you know?” he said. “I had just gotten to this place where I had mostly accepted Timmy for what he was, and it wasn’t much. And then I realized that I was selling him short. So, now, I’m getting more than I’d thought I could have, but… how much can we hope for?”
“We hope for the moon, Caius,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And when it hurts too much to hope, we take a break for a little bit until we have it in us to hope again.”
* * *
Reilly was scribbling his signature on one of a stack of documents in the prison where Vivian Delacroix was being kept.
It wasn’t too far away from Cardinal Falls. They’d had about a forty minute drive, during which Wren had kept starting to say something and then stopping, telling him it was nothing. It was driving him crazy. He wished she’d just spit it out. But he figured she was nervous about seeing her mother, so he was giving her a pass.
He flipped the page to the next one, scanned to the bottom and signed again. Paperwork.
“Initial here,” said the guard who was working there. She pointed at a spot on the piece of paper.
Reilly initialed. He flipped the page. He signed the bottom. That was the last page. He looked at the guard. “Good?”
The guard took the documents and flipped through them. “Good.” She set the papers aside. “You need to leave all your weapons behind here.”
Reilly took his gun out, unloaded it, and handed it over.
The guard looked at Wren, who was chewing on her bottom lip.
“She doesn’t have anything,” said Reilly.
“Okay,” said the guard. “Well, it’s through there.” She pointed to a thick, metal door.
Reilly headed over.
Wren hesitated and then joined him.
The guard buzzed them through the door.
They went through and emerged in a small room where another guard was sitting. He waved them through, and then they had to wait to be buzzed through another set of doors.
“Down the hall, second door on the right,” the guard called after them.
They proceeded down a narrow hall with no windows, the light overhead bright and fluorescent.
Reilly opened the second door and they entered a small room with a table in the center. No one was in there. There were two chairs on the side next to the door, and one chair on the other side. There was a bolt on the table to attach chains to.
Reilly shut the door and pulled out one of the chairs. It screeched against the floor. He sat down and scooted it noisily in.
Wren stayed standing, chewing on her lip.
He looked up at her. “You all right?”
“I went to see Spencer Collins yesterday.”
“Who?”
“You remember,” she said. “When I was still at the FBI Academy, I got phone calls from a guy claiming to be David Song?”
“Oh, right,” said Reilly. “That guy in Richmond? Why’d you go to see him?”
“Well, we never… he said that there was another man who came and who got him drunk and that while he was drunk, the calls were made from his phone. We speculated that maybe the man who made them was the killer. That maybe it was connected to me somehow. The killer wanted me back in Cardinal Falls. And then we caught Major, and he supposedly had a thing for me, and that was why the girls were the age that I was when I was an initiate.”
“Yeah, I remember this,” said Reilly.
“But we never went and asked him if it was Major who came to see him.”
“No,” said Reilly. “We didn’t. I guess it didn’t seem important. We didn’t need that information in order to prove that it was Major. But I can see why it might put your mind at ease to go there. So, did you to talk to Spencer?”
“I did. I showed him Major’s picture.”
“And?”
“And he said it wasn’t him,” said Wren.
“Huh,” said Reilly. “Well—”
“It was Hawk,” said Wren.
He turned to her sharply, his mind reeling.
But then the door opened and two guards brought Vivian Delacroix into the room.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wren’s heart stopped at the sight of her. She hadn’t seen her mother in fifteen years, and then, only at the sentencing, from across the room. Her father Hayes had tried to encourage her to go over to see Vivian, to say goodbye, but Wren didn’t want to. She remembered that Vivian hadn’t even looked at her during the sentencing anyway. Vivian had been too interested in looking at the cameras.
Vivian looked older. Her hair was streaked with gray, and her face was weathered. But her face was familiar, and Wren knew her. Seeing her, it made her chest tight.
She sat down in one of the chairs as the guards hooked Vivian’s cuffed hands to the hook in the table, her cuffed ankles to the floor.
All the while, Vivian looked straight at her. Her eyes were shining.
Wren wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. She was fixed by the gaze, and everything else in the room seemed to fall away. She only realized that the guards had left the room when she heard the door close. The sound of its clicking shut made her jump.
“Wren,” said Vivian. “Wren, my little girl. You’re so grown up.”
Wren licked her lips.
“When I heard you were coming to see me, I couldn’t believe it,” said Vivian. Tears were starting to spill out of her eyes. “After all this time. I had given up hope of ever getting to see you again. Thank you for coming.”
Wren looked down at the table. Her voice was dull and flat. “You said you have information for us. Start talking.”
“This must be Detective Renley?” said Vivian.
“Reilly,” said Reilly in a low voice.
“I never thought you’d work with law enforcement, Wren, sweetie.” Vivian laughed a little. “If I’d been there while you were growing up—”
“Well, you weren’t,” said Wren. “And let’s not do this, okay? You don’t need to pretend with me. I know you.”
“What are you talking about?” Vivian’s voice was gentle, melodious. It was the voice Wren had always imagined to hear from a mother after a scraped knee or a broken heart. It was funny that Vivian was so good at faking that voice. “I’m not pretending, sweetie. I missed you so much. You are the most important person in the world to me—”
“You had my father killed,” said Wren. “Why’d you do that before I ever got the chance to meet him?”
“Hayes? Hayes is dead?”
“You know that Hayes isn’t my father,” said Wren. “Adrian Campbell is. Was. But then you sent people out to kill him—”
“Listen, baby girl, I don’t even know where to start, but the things they say about me, they aren’t true. Wren, sweetie, you were there. You know that I never told anyone to kill anyone.”
Wren sat back in her chair and gaped at Vivian. “Seriously? You’re going to deny everything?” Then she laughed a dry laugh. “Oh, of course, you never really did admit it. But what’s the point now, Vivian? Your appeals, they’ve all been shot down. Why lie?”
“I’m not lying.” Vivian’s voice broke. “I said things, and my words got twisted, and then—”
“We’re not here for this either,” said Wren, nostrils flaring. She stood up fro
m the table. “Do you have information for us or not?”
“Maybe I just wanted to see you. Maybe I knew that there was no other way to get you to see me. Maybe—”
“So, you lied. Well, big surprise.” Wren was sarcastic.
“I didn’t lie,” said her mother. “I think you arrested the wrong man for the murders of those little girls. Major Hill would never have it in him to do that.”
“Right, so who did?” said Wren.
“Hawk Marner, of course,” said Vivian, the corners of her lips turning up slightly, as if saying this out loud satisfied her.
Wren’s jaw twitched.
Reilly cleared his throat. “Why would you accuse Mr. Marner, Ms. Delacroix?”
“Just… call it intuition,” said Vivian, turning to Reilly. “Hawk’s mother abandoned him. I practically raised him.”
Wren snorted.
“Mother’s intuition,” said Vivian in a silken voice, ignoring Wren.
Wren got up from the table. “We’re done here.”
“Oh, wait, please don’t go, Wren.” Vivian reached out a shackled hand toward her daughter.
“Wren,” said Reilly. “Let’s find out what she knows.”
“You heard her,” said Wren. “Intuition. She’s got nothing. And anyway, I don’t need to hear this. I already knew this. Before we came in here, I told you—”
“Just wait,” said Reilly.
“Wren,” said Vivian. “Don’t leave. You have the wrong idea about me. I could never have orchestrated all this death and pain. I don’t know why you would think that about me, when all I ever showed you was unconditional love. Honestly, I miss you so much. If you would consider just visiting me once in a while, so that I can see you—”
“Stop,” said Wren.
“I think about you all the time,” whispered Vivian.
It was quiet in the room.
“You were always so close to Hawk,” said Vivian. “You never saw him clearly.”
“Stop,” Wren said again.
“You don’t see me clearly either,” said Vivian.
Wren shot across the room to the door. She yanked it open.
“Hey,” said Reilly. “Wait.”
Wren didn’t.
* * *
Wren Delacroix Series Box Set Page 46