by Mary Stone
Mr. and Mrs. Bleeker. Full-sized candy bars on Halloween.
Little Betsy Tanis’ house. She’d babysat there twice. Betsy bit her the second time, and she’d refused to go back, despite the lure of three dollars an hour.
She realized she was narrating her memories out loud to Noah when he chuckled. She decided to keep talking. She could share this with him. He’d proven himself to her over and over.
The car slowed, and then cruised to a stop.
She could smell the dead leaves she’d crunched through, huffing her way home from Sam’s house in the middle of the night. Feel the cold breeze against her face that carried the smell of woodsmoke from someone burning leaves earlier in the day.
The house sat big, dark, and silent. Sharply shadowed in the bright moonlight. The image in her mind was superimposed now over the run-down reality. Grass grew thick in patches in the yard, and a crooked “For Sale” sign sat drunkenly near the cracked sidewalk. The wood siding was a sickish faded green now. Her dad had painted it that summer, and it had looked crisp and grassy-colored, paired with immaculate white trim.
She’d stomped up the front walk, wrenching open the front door with its heavy brass knob. Her parents never locked up, especially when she was out for the night. It was a safe neighborhood.
She’d kicked off her Nikes in the hallway and made her way up the stairs in her stockinged feet. A smell had caught her attention. It was almost like hamburger. Coppery and heavy in the upstairs hallway, where the bedrooms were.
Her stomach lurched at the memory, and she took a steadying breath. It wasn’t real. It was a memory. The light, masculine smell of Noah’s aftershave grounded her as much as his silence did.
She’d walked past her parents’ door, slightly ajar. Her brother’s bedroom door was closed, and the faint, bluish glow from his SpongeBob nightlight showed under the door. She had her hand on her doorknob when something made her stop. A slight scrape.
She’d shivered, turning around.
The hallway was empty. Moonlight streamed through the window at the end. On the carpet in front of her parent’s door, she noticed clumps of mud. The carpet had been flattened in places, as if by heavy boots.
Which was strange. Mom never let anyone wear shoes in the house. She said the carpet would last longer that way.
She backtracked, slowly, looking down at the clumps of mud as if they’d speak up and tell her how they got there. In front of her parents’ door, a flash of movement beyond it caught her eye. She put her face up to the crack and didn’t understand what she was looking at for a moment.
Someone had written all over the walls. Crosses. Letters. Numbers. Big splatters that went almost all the way to the ceiling and ran down the light blue plaster walls in streams, only to trickle over the wide wainscoting and puddle on the wood floor.
From where she stood, she could see her dad’s hand, hanging over the side of the bed, like it usually did when he slept. As she watched, a drop of paint slid off the end of his index finger to land in a small pool at the side of the bed.
She drew in a breath to scream almost before the scene had fully registered in her brain. She pushed the door open wide and took three steps into the room, her sock-clad foot stepping in paint, still wet, making her slip a little.
She locked eyes with her mom. Mom’s were opened wide, as wide as it was possible for them to be open, and she had paint all over her face, even in her mouth. Behind her, Justin called her name. She spun around to tell him to stop, to go back to his room, but something slammed into her head.
There was an explosion of pain.
Starbursts of white lit behind her eyes, and she didn’t feel herself hit the floor.
Faintly, for the first time, before the white sharply faded to black, she heard a voice echo through her mind.
“Sorry, girlie. I don’t want you. Just him.”
Noah felt shaken to his core.
She’d walked him through it in third person. Calm and detached. Just like she’d been reading to him from a Stephen King book. He’d been quiet, understanding it was something she needed to relive. Something she hadn’t done yet.
He felt like he’d seen the horror of that night through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old child. Relived it right along with her. It was enough to ice his guts. Even her voice had sounded younger somehow. Like she was possessed by the soul of some other kid who had gone through that bloody experience.
Now, she looked as wrung out as a dishrag. Her shoulders were slumped with fatigue as she stared at the house she’d grown up in. But her eyes, when she turned to look at him, were sharp with discovery. Dark with pain, but energized somehow.
“He’d intended to take Justin. I never knew for sure. I’ve never remembered that before.”
“Are you finished here?” His voice sounded like he had something caught in his throat.
“Yeah.” She lay her head back against the seat and looked at the house again. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” he burst out angrily. “Son of a bitch, Winter. If I’d had any idea…”
She shook her head and gave him a small smile. “You couldn’t have had any idea. No one does. Honestly, though, it had to be done. Thanks for hearing it through.”
He shoved the car into drive and pulled away from the curb so quickly, the tires squeaked. “I need some fucking coffee.”
“That sounds good.”
How did she sound normal? How did she go through every day like a normal person? He was beginning to think he’d wrapped his head around her abilities. Those were just like weird personality quirks, and he liked quirky people.
But that…?
How could anyone go through something like that and hang on to their sanity afterward? It was devastating. Damaging. And that was just to hear it.
They drove in silence to the same hipstery coffee shop they’d stopped at before. The Mumford and Sons song playing, usually one that made him tap his fingers, grated on his ears. “A large coffee, double shot of espresso,” he told the girl behind the counter curtly.
The college-aged girl, huge holes gauged in her earlobes, her nose and lip pierced, blonde hair—judging by her almost invisible eyebrows—dyed a dark purple, raised an eyebrow and turned her back to get his coffee.
Winter stood beside him, silent as a wraith, studying the menu.
The barista slapped his to-go cup on the counter hard enough to slop coffee over the side. “And you?”
“Large mocha. Decaf, no whip, please.” Winter gave the girl an apologetic smile and nudged Noah hard in the ribs. “Ignore Oscar here.”
The girl sniffed and fired up the grinder with a loud roar.
Winter paid with the company card and left a generous tip.
They picked a couple of battered-looking armchairs by the front window, near a half-dead ivy plant.
“Stop looking at me like that.” Winter sipped her coffee, steam wreathing her face.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m going to crack and fall into a million pieces. I feel better. Really.”
“Maybe I’m the one that’s going to crack.”
“Trust me. It helped.”
He took a swallow of his coffee and relished the burn that scalded his throat. “I’m sorry,” he told her gruffly. “I didn’t get it before.”
“Don’t apologize.” Fire came into her eyes. “And definitely don’t start pitying me or treating me any differently just because you ‘get it’ now. That’s exactly what happened right after.”
“Tell me. I need to know it all.”
She sipped her mocha again and plucked a dead leaf off the ivy plant, setting it down carefully beside her cup on the table in front of them.
“I was in a coma. You knew that.”
He nodded.
“When I came out of it, it was scary. Everything was bright, too bright, and so loud. I had these headaches. And everything, every detail, just about jumped out and punched me in the face. I remember this one
nurse, I could tell what she’d had for lunch, right down to the Dijon mustard on her sandwich. It was awful.”
She pulled off another brittle brown leaf and twisted it between her finger and thumb for a moment. Then, she set it down next to the other one. Two dead leaves. He stared at them, unable to look at Winter for the moment.
“No one would tell me about my family. I’d missed their funeral. My grandparents came to the hospital as soon as I woke up…but for an hour or so, I had no idea what had happened. When they got there, they explained most everything. That was probably the hardest part.”
She plucked a third leaf. This one was still partly alive, the green and white pattern faded into crinkly brown edges. That leaf was dead. It just didn’t know it yet. It went in the line on the coffee table.
“My grandparents moved everything to Harrisonburg. We didn’t live in the same house. Instead, they rented one near the middle school. We couldn’t just pretend everything was different but normal. Kids at school looked at me weird. Started calling me Lizzie Borden, like the murders were my fault.”
Noah swore. Lord of the Flies, in real life. Adolescence was a cruel age to be an outsider.
“Ironically, I have Samantha and Tom to thank for getting me out of that situation,” Winter said with a half-smile. “Along with dealing with all the crap at school, I was struggling with the new things my brain could do. Like I told you before... Sam didn’t react like a BFF should. It got around school almost immediately, and the harassment got worse. Then, the media labeled the killer as The Preacher because of the crosses, so kids taunted me with things like Bibles. My grandparents finally pulled me out of school when an eighth grader knocked me into a wall hard enough to almost break my cheekbone. We moved out of Harrisonburg, to my grandparent’s house, and started over. Things got better.”
Noah glanced over at the barista. She was scowling into her phone, texting like there was no tomorrow. If Winter had a normal life, she might’ve still rebelled and remade herself like goth girl over there.
Instead, she had faced trauma that no child should ever have to endure, the abuse that followed, and came out ahead.
Noah felt like he’d been coldcocked. Looking at her across from him, face serene and composed, a strand of black hair fallen loose from her bun, tickling her collarbone, he realized he had a problem. Flirting was one thing. He bantered as easily as he breathed. But what he felt for Winter was something else altogether.
He could very easily find himself in deep—treacherously deep—waters.
17
David Benton’s address was listed in a posher part of town. He’d apparently done well for himself over the years, since Tom had grown up near Winter, in a smaller, middle-class area. A sprawling two-story with an attached four-car garage sat placidly behind a black iron fence that enclosed a perfectly manicured yard. A gardener puttered in the beds out front, clipping things back for the winter. The gate stood open, since Noah had called Benton Senior to let him know they were coming.
Winter thought she caught a glimpse of a figure standing in front of the bay window at the front of the house, but the curtain dropped back into place, and the outline disappeared. “So, how are we going to approach this?” she asked, breaking the silence that hung in the car.
She was glad to be getting back to the matter at hand. Noah had been staring at her oddly since she’d taken her trip down memory lane. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and it bothered her. She wanted to get back to their easier, friendly, working relationship.
“You want to take the lead?” he asked. “You know the guy, right?”
“Only in passing. I’m told he went to the funeral, but I don’t remember seeing him other than at school events and things like that. But yeah, I’ll take it.”
The sidewalk that led to the front door was made of weather-aged brick. Winter noticed that not even a spare blade of grass had been allowed to poke through between the bricks.
Their knock was answered by a housekeeper wearing a traditional black dress and white apron. It seemed pretentious, but the woman gave them a professional-looking, welcoming smile and opened the door wider.
“Come in. Mr. Benton is in the library. He’s expecting you.”
The foyer of the house was discreetly elaborate, with gray marble floors and skillfully painted landscapes framed in gilt on the walls. The housekeeper led them down a short hallway that opened into a high-ceilinged room.
David Benton stood up from where he’d been seated at a large mahogany desk, a brandy snifter in front of him, though it was barely after noon. He gave them a politician’s smile, wide and toothy. She wouldn’t have recognized him if they’d passed on the sidewalk. Instead of his son’s portly build, he was tall and lean. Black hair, faded to distinguished white at the temples, was brushed neatly back from his narrow face.
“Little Winter Black,” he said warmly, holding out a hand. His nails were groomed neatly, and an expensive watch gleamed at his wrist, beneath the sleeve of his white dress shirt. “It’s very nice to see you again. I always wondered what happened to you after you moved away. It seems that you’ve done well for yourself. The FBI, of all things.”
Winter forced herself to smile. “It’s nice to see you too.”
He gave an avuncular chuckle and turned to Noah. “And you must be Agent Dalton. We spoke on the phone. I must say I was surprised to get your phone call. How can I help you?”
“I’ll defer to my partner.” Noah’s smile was remote. “Special Agent Black is the case agent, and therefore my superior.”
Winter shot him an amused look. Humble Noah was a new persona for him.
“Certainly.” David Benton laughed again and addressed Winter instead. “Still seems like you’re playing pretend to me, like you used to when you were a kid, running around in my yard. But Agent Black, please have a seat. Maria, will you bring coffee for our guests?”
The maid, who had been standing quietly attentive at the door, murmured her agreement and hurried off, her low black heels tapping on the marble tile.
“I’m sure you’ve heard about the human remains that have been found just north of here, in Linville,” Winter began, pulling out her notebook and pen.
“Yes, of course. My son is an investigator on that case.”
Noah cleared his throat but didn’t say anything. She saw him lean back in his seat from the corner of her eye and cross his ankles.
“We’re hoping you can give us more information about the…um, religious group that operated near there, back in the eighties.”
David arched one smooth black brow. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much help with that.”
Maria came back with coffee, and set the tray with three cups, a pitcher of cream and sugar on his desk. “That’ll be all, Maria.” His tone was cutting, and she looked at him in surprise. “Please close the door behind you and make sure we’re not disturbed.” Another pointed look from David and she scurried out much faster than she’d entered.
“We’re told that you were a member of Wesley Archer’s group, the Disciples of the Moon.”
Small spots of color showed high on David’s cheekbones. Seemed he did share some tendencies with his son, namely, a short fuse.
“That’s ridiculous. Who told you that?” He was trying to stay cool, but Winter could see the skin around his white collar was darkening as well. “Was it that old newspaper writer? Wilkes?”
“Wilkins,” Noah put in.
“Whatever. He’s been around for years. Digging into government conspiracy theories and such. Writers have such wild imaginations. He had files on everything from aliens to chemtrails. If he said anything, he can’t be believed.”
Interesting. David Benton was the first person who had cast any doubt on Elbert as a reliable source of information.
“Actually,” Winter said, watching Benton closely. “Elbert Wilkins was murdered. His files were destroyed.” It was a stretch, since they hadn’t actually been destroyed, just rifled an
d possibly stolen.
A look of relief passed so quickly over Benton’s face that it would have been unnoticeable for someone not paying such close attention. The smooth, urbane mask dropped back into place, and David smiled sadly. “I’m very sorry to hear of his death. Maybe one of his government conspiracies finally got him in the end.”
“That seems a little insensitive,” Noah put in.
“It wasn’t Wilkins that told us.” Winter nudged Noah’s foot discreetly. Noah nudged back. “And there is no source,” Winter lied smoothly. “We discovered some old documents, and you were listed. You and your wife.”
David’s face paled. “That’s impossible.”
Her bluff had paid off.
Before she could push him further, there was a mechanical whirring sound outside of the closed double doors, and a rubbery squeak. David fumbled for his phone and stabbed at a button, his knuckles gripping the edge of the handset until they whitened.
“Daaard.” There was a thump, and the door rattled.
“Maria. I said we were not to be disturbed.” He was angry but also afraid. Blazingly so.
Before he could protest, Noah had jumped to his feet. “I’ve got it. No problem,” he offered cheerfully. He’d hardly opened the doors before an electric wheelchair buzzed into the room. Noah stepped back, barely saving his toes.
“Daard.” The word was accusing.
The man in the wheelchair had David’s dark hair and lean face. He was very thin, strapped into the chair so he didn’t topple out sideways, counterbalancing the odd curvature of his spine. He looked to be in his twenties, but his face was scruffy with a day’s worth of beard, threaded with silver strands. His eyes were wide and almost childlike in their silent accusation. His hands, where they curled over the arms of his chair, were misshapen, the knuckles knotted, tendons standing out thick. The green plaid shirt he wore with rumpled khakis was loose on his painfully thin frame.
David looked at the newcomer in silent horror, and Winter didn’t miss the calculating glance that he threw their way in the next moment.