The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  But you must have read it in my face. You were always good at that, tuning in, reading expressions. You always seemed to know what I was thinking.

  “You don’t remember, do you? You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

  Again, I just opted for silence.

  You leaned in close. When you spoke, your voice was just a whisper.

  “What’s wrong with you, Hank?”

  And I told you. I’d never told anyone, not even my parents. Only my psychiatrist at the time was beginning to suspect. I was taking medication back then, Ativan for anxiety, Zoloft for depression. I had determined that it was high emotion, anger, stress that caused me to switch over. Like that night; it was the call from Detective Harper that had unstitched me.

  “You need help, Hank,” you said. “Serious help.”

  This annoyed me; I thought you’d have more sympathy.

  “Is that your boyfriend out there?” I nodded to the window.

  You nodded. “Yes.”

  “Does he know about us?”

  You took a sip of your coffee. “He does, yes. I told him—everything. I don’t know if he’ll forgive me.”

  “He’s here, isn’t he?” I didn’t like the sharp edge to my tone. You backed away from me, actually shifted your chair. It’s healthy, you know. The healthy person protects herself from dangerous men.

  “We’re friends before anything else. He cares about me.”

  “We’re friends, too. Aren’t we?”

  “We were, Hank,” you said sadly. I saw you almost reach for my hand, then hold back. How I ached to touch you. “We were best friends. But a horrible thing happened to us, and I’m afraid that’s one of the many things Kreskey has taken from us.”

  He was practically roaring inside. I focused on my breathing, took a sip of my chamomile tea. I try to avoid caffeine or any kind of stimulant. It’s all downers for me.

  I took the crystal heart from my pocket and put it on the table between us. It glittered and shone in the light, just like it had in the store when I first bought it. I remembered thinking, this is it. I’ll give this to her. And she’ll know how much I love her.

  “Do you remember this?”

  “Hank.”

  “I gave it to you for your tenth birthday.”

  You picked it up and looked at it, held it up to the light so that it cast flecks of bloodred on the white tablecloth. Then you put it back on the surface.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Not for me.”

  You wiped at your eyes, your lashes glistening with tears.

  “Have you thought about just trying to move forward? I know. I know, Hank. I didn’t experience the horror that you did. But when you try to stop looking back, to build a solid bridge of love, accomplishments, form new, happier memories, I believe it’s possible to live a life, a good one. Even after extreme trauma.”

  Unless it damages your brain. Which I honestly believe is what happened to me. Not just trauma but head injury, as well. (Did you know, Lara, that there’s a strong link between traumatic brain injury and psychosis? You can read my article about it in the New England Journal of Medicine.) Of course, they won’t know that for sure until after I’m dead. Then they can dissect my brain and see what’s really wrong with it.

  “He’s out,” I said.

  You looked at me and shook your head, stayed silent. But I saw it on your face, the fear, the anger. You had told me all about the letters Kreskey sent you, the ones your family received from Kreskey’s fan club. You had confided in our close moments how you felt like Kreskey still had a part of you—in his dreams, in his mind. Later, I’d discover the pictures he drew of you on that website that sold the effects of murders on the dark web. I knew how much pain you were still in. How you hated him.

  “I can’t live with that,” I said. “That he’s out. Walking around free. Can you?”

  I thought you’d get up and leave. Instead you took a sip of your coffee, seemed to settle. Your eyes stayed on that crystal heart.

  “What are you going to do, Hank?” you asked.

  I told you that, too. You didn’t leave, did you? You stayed and listened.

  You always want to paint yourself as the healthy one, the innocent who has managed to move on in spite of the awful things that have happened. I am the broken one. The one who cracked under the weight of it and couldn’t put myself back together.

  But there’s another side of you, too, Lara. And I’m the only one who knows it.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Hands shaking, breath shallow—she was practically vibrating. Sitting in Greta’s drive, she dialed Mitzi, who answered on the first ring.

  “Hi, there,” she said, voice low. “Lily’s napping, and we’ve had a lovely time.”

  Rain drew a breath, released it. The sound of Mitzi’s voice somehow managed to both energize and calm; a mother’s voice. Someone who knew the world, understood its steep hills and treacherous valleys, who knew the way. She’d missed that most of all, just the sound of her mother on the phone.

  “That’s—wonderful.” She meant it. It was wonderful to be able to count on someone. “Thank you.”

  She almost mentioned that she’d watched them on the camera, then realized she’d never actually told Mitzi about it. Was that a violation of her rights, of the unspoken trust between them? Wasn’t there something just south of creepy about it? They’d have to discuss it when she got home.

  “I’ll just be another hour or so,” said Rain. “Is that all right?”

  “That’s totally fine.” Not a note of impatience or judgment. “You take your time.”

  Ending the call, she clicked back to the camera. Mitzi sat at the kitchen table with an open book and her own thermos of tea. Lily, on the monitor app, napped peacefully.

  She clicked off and picked up the photos Greta had let her keep. Two people there that night, masked, a man and a woman. The back of her throat was so dry it ached. She saw Greta standing in the window, watching. Rain lifted her hand in a wave and drove away.

  Yes, just like Greta said, the earth would cover it all. It would take back the land and integrate every dark thing that ever happened there.

  Why couldn’t she let that just happen?

  “You owe me this much, Lara,” Hank said.

  The café was dim and mostly empty on that Wednesday afternoon. Outside it was winter gray, the air heavy with cold, threatening snow. Greg lingered on the street: she watched him pretend to read the paper, glancing up at the café window every few minutes, then down at his watch.

  He had been angry with her—that look on his face, so hurt and disappointed. She’d lied to him, cheated on him. But he wasn’t about to let her confront Hank alone.

  I’ll just be outside, in case you need me. That was the moment when she realized what kind of man he was. How deep, how faithful and good. And she was grateful for his friendship even if she’d fried everything else they might have been.

  “I don’t owe you anything,” she told Hank.

  She took cash from her wallet, put it on the table, was about to rise. The heart rested between them, glinting like an accusation. All the ways she’d failed him, let him down, didn’t love him the way he loved her.

  “He’s going to kill someone else,” he said, voice almost a snarl. “You know that.”

  She almost said, There’s nothing I can do about that. But that wasn’t quite true, was it? She sank back down.

  “Another Lara, another Hank,” he said. “Another Tess.”

  She felt the drop of dread in her belly. “He’s being supervised,” she said. She’d had a call from Detective Harper, also from her father. They’d promised her that she was safe.

  We’re on him, Harper had promised. We won’t let him out of our sight.

  “Not well enough,” said Hank
grimly.

  “How would you know that?”

  He looked down at his hands. She knew them to be calloused and rough, but tender on her body. There was something deeply wrong with the man in front of her; why was she so drawn to him?

  “I’ve been watching him,” he said. “At night. After classes I head back out there.”

  “Who does?” she asked. “You or the—other side of you.”

  “He does,” he said, shaking his head. “I do. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  You’re batshit crazy, she thought. That’s how you explain it.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked. It was more of a rhetorical question. But he had an answer.

  “I want you to lure him into the house,” he said. “That’s it.”

  It took her a beat to realize that he meant it, that he actually wanted her to be bait for Kreskey.

  “That’s it?” she said, leaning close to him. She accidentally knocked his empty cup and it clanged against the saucer. He righted it calmly. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  The girl sitting in the corner on her laptop with her earbuds in glanced over at them.

  Hank leaned back, locked her in the intensity of his stare. Something about his gaze, about the way he looked at her. He knew her. He knew her in a way that no one else had and no one ever would. He saw right inside to her shadow self. She couldn’t keep his gaze. Thought about getting up and running out but she didn’t. She stayed.

  “You said yourself that you feel like part of you is trapped inside him—in his dreams, in his mind. That it haunts you.”

  The words stung because, outside a shrink’s office, she had only ever admitted this to him, the sick fear that settled in her middle when she imagined Kreskey thinking about her. She regretted opening herself up to this version of Hank Reams who she’d mistakenly believed was still the boy she used to know. The words jammed up in her throat. She didn’t trust herself to speak without yelling, so she sat there quaking.

  “Have you seen these?”

  He turned around the tablet he had with him. Drawings—rudimentary, thick lines. Horrible images of a girl being strangled, or in a garden, or screaming in terror, or caring for a little boy. It was unmistakably Rain—she recognized the line of her own mouth, the arch of her brows, her wide blue eyes.

  “These were confiscated from his belongings,” he said. “Harper sent them to me.”

  Her stomach twisted, the espresso turning acidic.

  “We won’t be free until he’s dead.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said, pushing the tablet back at him. She didn’t have to look at that. What good was it? You couldn’t control what other people thought, or dreamed, or fantasized about. “We’re free right now. We’re as free as we allow ourselves to be.”

  “Are we?” he asked, grabbing her hand. She didn’t yank it away. “Are we really?”

  Now she came to a stop in front of the Kreskey place. She’d brought her real camera this time, a Canon Rebel EOS, and quickly set up the tripod. The ground smelled wet, the air cold. The sun was white and dipping lower, the light punching the brown leaves silver. It was beautiful here, peaceful, if not for the house that radiated a kind of menace. Once it was gone, trees would grow, animals would come to burrow, and birds to nest. The crow. The finch. The owl. The nightjar. And everything that happened here would fade away.

  The thought of Lily sleeping in her crib lowered Rain’s heart rate. Since Lily had been born, her only clear moments of focus had been when the child was tucked safely asleep in her crib. Down the hall was best. But, as she finished setting the camera, she figured she could work with this situation some of the time—as long as someone like Mitzi was on the case. Experienced, qualified, in control—all qualities Rain herself felt she lacked as a new mother. Was anyone “qualified” to be a parent? Were they all just muddling through?

  The ground was soft, and it took Rain a moment to steady the tripod. The low, sad whistle of the chickadee carried on the breeze; a squirrel rustled through the ground cover, then scampered up a tree. In the distance, the intermittent whisper of a passing car.

  She snapped a few pictures of the ramshackle structure, then set the timer and stepped in front of the lens herself. She snapped off a few more shots. Then she took the camera and hung it around her neck, headed toward the house.

  She stepped up onto the rickety porch, and barely avoided a ragged gaping hole in the wood, where it looked as if someone had stepped through. Click, click, click—the tilting railing, the abandoned rockers, the cracked pot that hadn’t held a plant in decades.

  Stepping carefully, she pushed the front door and it swung open with a nearly comical haunted house squeal.

  The smell hit her first—mold and rot, garbage, something else so foul that Rain covered her mouth and nose. She thought of the things that Hank had told her about the hallway, about Wolf, about how he’d headed out the door, free, but then turned around for Tess. She could almost hear him, see him in the dim.

  A scant light came from the windows caked with grime. She felt her way with her free hand and found herself at the bottom of the staircase. Her heart was thudding in that unpleasant way—fear, anxiety, the knowledge that she was acting like an idiot. She reached for the recorder, hit the record button. At least when they found her body they’d know that she’d come here, to the place where her friend was murdered, of her own accord—for “work.”

  She steeled herself against the smell and started to talk.

  “I’m in the Kreskey house. It has been abandoned for many years and looks it. It’s a shack—overrun with garbage, graffiti, the detritus of years. Hank Reams could have saved himself that day. He was hurt, yes. Had suffered. But the worst of what would happen to him lay ahead. He stood at the doorway, having killed the dog, Kreskey nowhere in sight. Instead of running, he went back inside to find our friend Tess.”

  She took a step, testing the stair with part of her weight. It groaned but held.

  “He climbed these stairs. How brave he must have been to do that. He was a small boy—thin, so young.”

  She, too, started to climb, distantly aware of how stupid this was, how she shouldn’t be here alone—again.

  “Meanwhile, I had been rescued and was in the hospital, trying to stitch together the broken pieces of my memory. What had happened? Who had been in the woods that day? Where had he gone? From the timeline we established later, I must have remembered about the same time as Hank was standing in the doorway, making the decision to go back inside.”

  Another step up, the wood groaning.

  “I have so much shame still for not being stronger that day. My rational mind understands the concept of shock, that I was a child, that I was badly injured and of no good to anyone. But the part of me that always wanted to be a hero, that wishes desperately that things were different—that doesn’t go away.”

  She reached the top landing, flipped on her iPhone light.

  Rain didn’t believe in ghosts. She wasn’t afraid of hauntings and ghouls. She was a reporter in search of the layers of a story.

  Her phone pinged:

  Holy shit. Are you at the Kreskey house???

  Greg tracking her on Find My Friends. She’d turned it back on after their last argument, at his request. She’d meant to disable it again. Shit.

  Just getting a few pictures. Heading home soon.

  Rain, WTF?? Get out of there right now.

  Yes. Leaving now.

  She switched off Find My Friends, and flipped on the Do Not Disturb. (Only Mitzi’s number allowed.)

  A low groaning—beneath her, in front of her. She couldn’t be sure.

  Then a rustling movement.

  Her throat closed up, heart lurching.

  She should leave. Right now. That was obvious.

  It was the last room at the
end of the hall, that’s what Hank had told her. The door had been ajar, like it was right now. No light at all. Her smartphone light fell on scattered cans and bottles, a broken crate. Some magazines soaked through and covered with mold. She could hear her own breath, ragged, afraid.

  Why didn’t she leave? Why didn’t she turn around? She couldn’t; she just kept moving toward the door as if it was her that day, coming back to save her friend. Wasn’t that part of it, too? She wished she’d been here that day, to help them, to save them. It was an irrational idea, a childish one. But it lived in her. She put her hand on the knob and pushed inside.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “I did some digging.”

  It’s Andrea Barnes, the child advocate I called about Angel’s claims. I remember what her voice sounded like when we first met. It was light and flirty, always just about to dissolve into laughter. In contrast, it is now clipped and professional.

  “There have been two other allegations of abuse against Tom and Wendy Walters, the couple who fostered Angel for six months late last year. A girl claimed that Tom Walters sexually assaulted her back in 2012. Then in 2014, a boy said that Wendy Walters slapped him hard enough to leave a bruise.”

  “And—”

  “Both claims were investigated and dismissed,” she says. “As you know, there is a high incidence of false reporting against foster parents.”

  “Which doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of abuse.” Three allegations against the Walters in this case, including Angel’s. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, I have found.

  “That’s true,” Andrea concedes. “It can be hard to prove. Meanwhile, during Angel’s stay with this family, there was no one else placed there. Angel claimed that there was a boy who was kept in a cellar, or some kind of bunker on the property?”