by Rachel Caine
I see the cabin only because of a glint of broken glass in the distance. It’s a sagging, half-destroyed thing, windows busted out and door gaping open. Nobody lives here. Nobody’s lived here for years. I slow down and look at it closely, because I am absolutely sure that if there’s ever been a place that was haunted, it’s this place. It has an awful feeling about it, a kind of terrible gravity. People died here. You can feel them screaming.
Come on, I tell myself. If there’s no phone in there, you can still go down-mountain. But you have to look.
I cross the weedy ground that used to be a yard. There’s a covered round spot that I suppose was once their well water, or maybe a septic system. Roses are growing wild around the side of the house in tangles of thorns the size of animal claws. Nothing blooming now.
The door’s open, and I step inside. My heart is hammering, and I’m sure there’s someone inside, waiting; I want to run so badly my legs shake with it. But I edge into the darkness, and I nearly do scream when I see the glint of what seems like eyes in the corner.
It’s not eyes. It’s a video camera. It’s new tech, nothing from the Betamax generation that this cabin hails from. There are lights, too, all hooked up to a small diesel generator. What the hell is this? The feeling of dread is so strong in here I can taste it, and everything, everything, is telling me to run, get out of here, and never come back.
I stop dead when I see the princess-pink canopy bed on the other side of the room. It’s new, or new-ish. Neatly made, with a pink ruffled bedspread and fluffy white pillows. It’s wrong, and sick, and incredibly creepy, and I don’t go any closer at all. Couldn’t if I tried. I back up toward the camera and the lights, and I find a closed laptop sitting on a warped apple crate. I open it, and it boots up without asking for a password. It has an Internet connection. It’s using a cell-signal USB.
I pull up the messaging program, and silently thank Mom for making me memorize phone numbers. I quickly type in Kezia’s, Javier’s, Connor’s, every number I can think of, and tell them to track the cell address on this connection. I can’t tell them where I am, but if the computer’s sending, this should work. IP addresses can be faked. Cell signals have to be routed through towers. Harder to fake.
I check the other programs and find FaceTime. I quickly boot it up and call Kezia’s number. She accepts in seconds, and her face resolves on the screen out of a blur of moving pixels. “Lanny? Jesus, where are you?”
All of a sudden, I’m in tears. Seeing her has made it all real, and I can’t hold it back anymore. I want someone to come get me. Now. I try to talk. I can’t, for a few seconds. When I finally manage to, I say, “I’m okay, but come get me! Please!”
“I will, I promise. Can you tell me where you are?”
“Up pretty high,” I tell her, swiping at the tears still streaming hot down my cheeks. My voice keeps breaking, and I can hear the terror in it. “I didn’t see the road. But this is some old cabin. I don’t know what it’s for, but . . .” I pick up the laptop and pan it around to show them the room, lights, camera, bed.
When I turn it to face me again, Kezia looks shaken. For just about the first time since I’ve known her, I see real fear on her face. She tries to speak and can’t. She swallows and tries again. “Okay. Okay, here’s what I need you to do. You keep this connection open. We’re going to trace this signal.”
“It’s a cell signal,” I tell her. “I think there’s only one road up. We’re somewhere west of Norton. The road kind of curves in a big S coming up.”
“Good,” she says, and she tries to smile. “That’s good. We’re going to find you. Is there any way you can lock the door of this place?”
I swallow hard. My nose is dripping, and I wipe at it with a corner of my shirt. My eyes are swollen, and they ache now. I just want to curl up in the corner, but I get up and take the laptop across with me to the door. “There’s no lock on it,” I tell her.
“Can you brace it with something?
I put the laptop down, and I look around. I try pulling the bed, but it’s big and heavy, and I can only move it a few inches. I come back and see that she’s talking to Detective Prester now. And someone else.
Connor.
My brother’s head is bandaged, and I can see some dried blood on his chin. But the first thing he asks when I come into view is “Lanny? Are you okay?”
“Yes.” I realize I’m whispering. “I’m okay. I just—” I swallow. “I’m afraid he’s coming back.” Something terrible occurs to me, and I stand up and look around. Really look. There aren’t any closets. No hidden places for my dad to be hiding in. “Did Dad tell you he’d meet you here?”
“No,” Connor says. He looks so miserable. “He was supposed to meet me at the house. I never meant this to happen, I swear, I just—” He starts to cry like his heart is breaking. “He said he loved me.”
I can’t imagine what that feels like, or how big it seems to him. I just want to wrap my arms around him and hug him until he stops feeling so bad. Until he’s my annoying little brother again.
He’s the one who’s been quietly, constantly suffering, and I didn’t even know about it.
Connor gulps and says, “Please come back. Please. You have to.”
He backs away from the camera. Kezia leans in, and I see her looking at him in concern for a second before she transfers attention back to me. “Honey, I need you to find yourself a place to hide. If you can’t find one in there, get out of that cabin. We’re triangulating the signal, and we’re sending police as fast as we can. I’m going to stay here and stay on the line with you. Take the laptop with you if you can and keep it on.”
I have to keep the lid open, and that’s awkward, but stepping out of the cabin feels like intense relief. It only lasts a few seconds, though, and then I start wondering where the van is. Is it coming back? I can’t see anything through the trees. I can’t hear anything.
What if he comes back on foot? I had to leave my club behind.
“There’s no place to hide,” I tell Kezia miserably. “It’s just the cabin and trees.” I pan the camera around.
“Stop,” Kezia says. “What’s that?”
I take a look at what I moved past. “I think maybe it’s a well? Do you want me to open it?”
“See if it’s some kind of basement,” she says. “But don’t go down there. Just look.”
I reach out and wrap my hand around the metal cover, then slide it back. I can’t see anything much. There’s a ladder on the side, rickety iron, but I can’t tell if there’s a room down there.
I turn up the brightness on the laptop as much as I can, minimize the Skype screen, and go to a white page. Then I angle the laptop awkward over the edge and shine the light down.
It’s not as deep as I thought. If it was once a well, it’s been filled in part of the way. About fifteen feet down, the ladder ends in a concrete floor.
There’s a white pile of sticks down there. Lots of sticks. I don’t know what it is until I see the pale curve of something that looks . . .
. . . like a skull.
I’m looking at bones.
I almost drop the laptop. I hear a high, thin hissing in my ears, and I stumble backward and sit down, fast. The laptop falls on the ground next to me, but the lid doesn’t close. Everything looks grainy and weird, and I feel like I’m floating.
I’m fainting, I think, and that’s so stupid. Why would I do that? My heart isn’t pounding, it’s almost fluttering, and I feel sick. Cold sweat has broken out on the back of my neck, on my face, my neck, under my breasts and arms. It smells rancid.
I don’t know what’s happening to me.
“Lanny!”
I blink. Kezia’s been calling my name for a long while now. I turn toward the laptop. I tilt it so the camera can see my face, and I bring up the Skype screen. Kezia’s practically filling the camera, she’s leaning so close.
“There are dead people,” I tell her. “In the well. They’re dead.”
; I see her swallow. I want to cry again, but everything feels wrong side out now. I don’t know if I have tears. I can’t feel anything but cold.
“Are you coming?” I ask her. “Please come. Please.”
“We are,” she promises. Kezia’s got tears for me. I can see them rolling down her cheeks. “You just breathe, sweetheart. We’ve—” She pauses to listen to something someone’s shouting in the background. Takes in a deep, unsteady breath. “Okay, we’ve got your signal triangulated. We’re coming, Lanny. We’re coming right now. I’m going to send Connor with Detective Prester, and I’m going to stay right here with you. Right here. I’m not going to leave you alone, okay?”
“I’m okay,” I say. It’s automatic. I’m not okay. I’m glad she didn’t shut down the call. I don’t know what I’d do if someone wasn’t looking at me. Scream, probably. Or just . . . vanish. This feels like a place where people just . . . disappear.
Kezia keeps telling me I’m safe, but I don’t feel safe at all.
I sit and stare at that open pit until I hear the sirens coming. All this time I thought I knew what evil was. Mom knew. I pretended. But now I know it’s that room in the cabin. That pile of bones. Evil’s a quiet place, and darkness.
Kezia says, “Can you see the police cars? They’re coming up that road. They’re coming now. Don’t worry about the man in the van. They got him down toward the main road. He’s in custody. He can’t hurt you.”
I nod. I look away from the pit. I look at her, and I say, “He was going to bring Connor here. Wasn’t he?”
She doesn’t answer.
I’m glad she doesn’t.
24
SAM
Mike Lustig and I sit in the coffee shop where I’d retrieved the tablet, and a few customers trickle in as the leaden sun rises. Some of the cloud cover begins to thin. Ice will melt off by noon, the news is promising, but commuting will still be a mess. Flights are starting in an hour out of the airport, which is now packed with stranded travelers.
Gwen is gone. There’s no tracking her now. We lost any chance at it the second that van went over the hill and disappeared into thin air. There’s nowhere for me to put my grief and fear and anger except to bottle it up inside. That pressure cooker will only hold for so long, but it has to hold for now.
We have to find a way to get to Melvin Royal that they can’t foresee.
Mike and I ignore the slow resumption of normal life and sit in the corner watching the video as we try to find something, anything, that we’ve missed. The tablet has a provision for two sets of earphones, and he has his own. When we get to the end of the video the first time, Mike nods and makes a circling motion with his hand. Play it again. I do, all the way through. We watch it over and over again, and I’ve lost count of the screams, the pleas, the questions and answers. I see nothing I didn’t see before.
And then I do.
It’s a flash of memory rather than what’s on the screen, sparked by the sight of a dirty eighteen-wheeler moving past the coffee-shop windows. And from that random glimpse, my viewpoint shifts, and I get it. I know why all this is happening. Why I’ve been feeling this shadow, this weight, almost from the beginning.
I wish I could feel relief. I don’t. I feel real horror twisting my guts into a knot. This can’t be happening. Can’t be right.
Mike sees it in me as I take my headphones off, and he pauses the video midscream. “What? What is it?”
“We got it wrong. No. No, I got it wrong from the start.” My voice sounds rough and distorted. It’s my fault. That fact yawns in front of me in a black, bottomless canyon of blame. “Christ, I did this, Mike. It’s—”
“Hey, man, focus. What did I miss?”
“You didn’t miss anything,” I say. “Come on. We’ve got to move, now.”
I’m already on my feet. He grabs the tablet and shoves the headphones in his pocket. “Where are we going?”
“The airport.”
“Airport? Tell me you’re not taking their bait and going to Kansas, man. You’re smarter than that . . .”
The walkway’s been coated with rock salt, and it crunches under my boots as we head for the Jeep. The air tastes heavy, sharp in my lungs with ice crystals, but the sun’s a thick, hazy glow behind the clouds. The front will burn off soon. I’m thinking about that because I’m trying to figure logistics. Logistics is better than the guilt, because if I fall into that chasm, I’m never climbing out of it alive.
“Let me ask you a question,” I tell him. “What was the name plastered on that eighteen-wheeler on the access road last night?”
Mike pauses to stare at me over the hood of the Jeep. “The hell are you talking about?”
“Last night we were following the white van. It was about a half a mile up when the pickup wrecked, remember? When we came over the hill, we saw a red sedan, another black Jeep going too fast, a police SUV with lights burning. And an eighteen-wheeler.”
He’s frowning now, and I can tell he thinks I’ve completely dropped my marbles. Maybe I have. Maybe coming at this crazy is the only way to understand it. “What about the eighteen-wheeler?”
“Rivard Luxe,” I tell him. “The truck on that road had Rivard Luxe written on the side of it. Mike, it’s big enough to fit a van inside.”
I see it when I blink: fancy gilded script on the dirty side of that eighteen-wheeler, as if it’s suspended on a jumbotron hanging right in front of me. The most vivid memory I’ve ever had. I noticed, but I didn’t pay attention. I was too focused on Gwen, on that van, to see what was right in front of me.
Mike still isn’t getting it. I open up the driver’s-side door and get in, and when he’s inside, too, he says, “Even if you’re right, what the hell does the truck have to do with the video we were just watching?”
“The first time we talked about the video, I asked if you knew the name Rivard,” I say. “And you told me that Ballantine Rivard is famous. From that moment on, we were making the wrong assumptions. We just did it again, while we were watching it.”
“Jesus.” Mike drags out the word, and it’s so reverent it’s almost a prayer. “That poor bastard PI wasn’t hired by Ballantine Rivard. He just said Rivard.”
“Exactly,” I say, firing up the Jeep. “He wasn’t hired by the old man at all. He was hired by Rivard’s son. The dead one.”
“And that’s not a coincidence,” Mike says. He gets it now. All the way. “Fuck.”
So now we know. The problem now is . . . what can we do about it?
There’s a reason I want Mike on my side. FBI agents carry weight.
Mike has a backroom conversation with an airline manager who magically produces two tickets for us, despite the backlog of travelers, and we’re rushed through security on the strength of his badge and into business-class seats to Atlanta on the first available flight.
I’m reminded of the plush seats on the Rivard Luxe plane we took to and from Wichita, and I feel angry and sick that I fell for it. I keep chewing on it. I can see it all now, every step. Ballantine Rivard has gone out of his way to mislead us, misdirect us, threaten Gwen, sow doubt and fear to split us up.
I’d lay heavy bets that Rivard’s son was never hounded to his death by Absalom. Not the way his father described to us, anyway.
“Rivard’s never going to talk to us,” Mike says. “I don’t have a hope in hell of getting a warrant based on a supposition and a wild-ass guess.”
“I know you don’t.” I sound bitter and angry, and I am, because I’ve been a damn fool. I’ve left the idea that Gwen’s guilty in the rearview. I don’t know why I ever fell for it in the first place, except that I was already conditioned to believe it. She’s only ever been straight with me. I’m the one who lied. I’m the one who came into her life intending to tear it apart.
And now I’ve done that, and I need to find her and help her put it back together. It’s the only way I can even start to make up for what I’ve just done to her.
“How do you feel about
helping me out without that badge?” I ask Mike, and he sighs.
“I’m not too likely to be carrying one, anyway, once this is all done; the Bureau doesn’t much like agents going rogue, and brother, I am as rogue right now as it gets. But I’ll stand with you.” He’s silent for a second, maybe just contemplating the breathtaking mistake we’ve both made to get us here, and then he asks, “You think Rivard’s behind his son’s death?”
“Has to be,” I say. “That tower is his fortress, and if I had to guess, the stores are nothing but an elaborate money-laundering operation. Absalom’s dark web is his real business, and he wasn’t about to let anybody kill his golden goose. If his son got too close, maybe grew a conscience, that explains his ‘suicide.’” I air-quote. I’m basing a lot on an eighteen-wheeler and a guess, but it all rings true. It all, finally, makes sense to me.
I knew something was off about that slick old man. I’d felt it from the beginning—the effortless way he’d conned us into the tower, then gotten us to do his bidding in Wichita. He wanted a plausible way for the second false video about Gwen to be discovered, and maybe Suffolk had been getting a little difficult. Two birds, one stone.
This goes deeper and darker than I ever imagined. Melvin Royal, vile as he is, is just another tool for Absalom—fulfilling his own sick fantasies, and there was Rivard, ready to pay him to do it. I feel dizzy and sick with the scope of it, and the cruelty.
“I don’t care what we have to do,” I tell Mike in a low, dead-quiet voice. “I want Rivard to tell us where Gwen is. Whatever it takes.”
“Whatever it takes,” Mike says. “But you need to gear down a little, son. Save that edge for when you need it.”
I sit in impatient, jittering silence as the plane is deiced, as we wait for our turn for a runway, and finally, we launch upward toward Atlanta.