“Yes, sweetheart?”
“I’m thirsty.”
“Get yourself a glass of water then, like a big girl.” When her daughter was gone, she said, “But there’s another problem with your story.”
“What?”
Monica paused. “In movies, on TV, people tell reporters that things are off the record. Is that a real thing?”
“It’s real. It means I can’t print anything you say, or attribute it to you.”
“But you could take what I say and keep, like, investigating. If you find some other source to confirm what I say, you could write it up.”
Laura shrugged. “I suppose. But if you talk to me, it could mean finding out what happened to Patty. Isn’t that worth the risk?”
“You might find nothing, and the Finch name could still get dragged through the mud.” She paused. “It’s not a nice story.”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. But there’s another little girl out there, very afraid, and so is her mother.”
Monica tapped her fingers against the side of her leg, unsure. But she finally nodded. “They didn’t just leave. They ran,” she said. “They ran away from my Uncle John. I know that much because everyone knew it. Aunt Mildred shouted that part from the rooftops, told everyone she could in the week before she disappeared.”
“What did she tell them?”
Monica grimaced. “That my Uncle John beat her. She went on and on about it, with very specific details. Things he did with a baseball bat, with a fireplace poker.”
“I thought you were just a little girl.”
“Oh, I was. But her stories were graphic enough to stick with people, and this is a small town. It came up more than once when I was growing up. Funny thing is, everyone had their own version of what Uncle John did to her. I used to think that was just because of time and retelling, like the telephone game.”
“But not anymore?”
Monica shook her head. “Now I think she was lying.”
Laura said nothing, just waited for her to collect her thoughts.
“I remember my cousin at least,” Monica said. “I lived in town with my mom and dad, and Aunt Mildred and Uncle John lived out here with my grandparents. Memories when you’re that young are few and far between, you know?”
Laura nodded.
“But I have this one vivid image. There’s a barn behind the house here, and it used to be stocked with hay in the fall. Patty and I would climb into the loft and jump down, again and again. It would kick up loads of dust, and the bits would float in the sunbeams coming in between the slats. Funny how you remember little details like that.”
Laura said nothing.
“And that’s all I really remember. I was very young.”
“That’s the whole story?”
She shook her head. “No, I said that’s all I remember. The rest of it is secondhand. Promise me again you won’t print this anywhere. Promise me you’ll just use it to look for them.”
“I promise,” Laura said, and meant it.
Monica studied her for a second, then nodded. She muttered under her breath, “If my mom was alive, she’d smack me for even thinking about talking to you.”
“It’s bad,” Laura said.
She nodded. “I never knew my father, so my mom and I were always close, but especially so toward the end. I had Francine, then got divorced and moved out here to be with her. So she helped me raise Francine from a baby, you understand? Got to see her grow up. Around when she started walking and talking is when it happened. I found her in her room one afternoon and she was just sobbing. The kind of sobs that run through your body like a shiver and make it so you can’t breathe. I never saw her like that before. I ran to her, held her, and in the course of that afternoon she pretty much told me everything.”
Laura tried to keep calm. She wanted to grab this woman and shake her, shake the truth right out of her, but it had to come in its own good time.
“It started with my grandfather, I guess,” she said, and stopped for a long beat. “He molested her.”
“Your mother.”
Monica nodded. “And my aunt, both starting when they were young. Very young. That’s what set it off. Seeing Francine in this house was like looking back in time, and the past was a very painful thing for my mother. She never got over it. All you need to see is a sixty-year-old woman crying like a baby to understand that. But my aunt…” she said.
“Your aunt.”
“My aunt was broken by it. She never recovered. My grandfather died when they were in their teens and Aunt Mildred wouldn’t believe it. They showed her the body, and she called it ‘one of his tricks.’ No one could convince her he wasn’t out there, just hiding somewhere. Waiting to grab her.”
“That must have been crippling,” Laura said.
“More than crippling. It made her insane. Her father was an evil man, but she didn’t put that label on him alone. It was his very nature that made him into what he was.” Her gaze was unfocused, a faraway look in her eyes as she replayed her mother’s story. “It was like some kind of twisted syllogism,” she said. “My grandfather was a monster, and he was a man, therefore all men are monsters.”
“And your Uncle John made her more sure of that.”
Monica shook her head. “It got worse and worse as she got older, but even as a young woman all those seeds had been planted. So when it came time to find a husband, she found just about the gentlest, most nonthreatening man in the world. My Uncle John stood about five foot six and had a stutter. He was a pushover. Hell, he was afraid of her.”
“So all that talk about him beating her—”
“Was a lie,” Monica finished. “He never laid a hand on her. Quite the opposite. He used to show up to church with a black eye. People used to make fun of him for it.”
Laura didn’t laugh.
“And when she cried abuse, and left, people didn’t take it too seriously. She was crazy.” Monica took a breath. “It just so happened they never came back.”
“That’s terrible, Monica.”
“Let me finish. Then you’ll see Patty can’t be the girl you’re looking for.”
“Isn’t it possible they ended up in Hillsborough, and that Patty became one of Hobbes’s victims?”
“I bet you’re a good reporter,” she said.
“Well, thanks.”
“I bet you did a records search for Patty Finch.”
Laura nodded.
“And what did you find?”
She spread her hands. “Nothing in North Carolina other than a school registration. I couldn’t find any paperwork in Virginia. Not even a birth certificate.”
“From what I know, a serial killer has a very specific type of victim, is that right?”
Laura frowned.
“And for Hobbes, it was girls. He liked little girls, right?”
Laura tried to cut in. “I don’t—”
“And my aunt, she hated men.”
“I don’t understand,” Laura said.
“She hated men. Which is why she refused to even acknowledge she had a son. Aunt Mildred had to have a daughter. It was the only acceptable outcome.”
Laura stared at her.
Monica paused a beat, waiting for her to say something, then filled the silence. “There is no birth certificate for a girl named Patty Finch because she doesn’t exist.”
“Excuse me?” Laura managed.
“Aunt Mildred’s child, my cousin—his name was Patrick.”
CHAPTER
34
ALONE IN THE car, she caught her breath. There was finally time to think.
Patrick Finch.
The name rolled around inside her head like a tire bouncing down a steep and endless hill. It blared in her ears like overwhelming static, glowed in neon etched on the inside of her skull.
Patrick Finch.
A boy living as a girl. She tried to imagine that. Before puberty it was perfectly possible for a child of one gender to pa
ss as the other. Hell, the girls were even a little bigger around twelve or thirteen. Patrick Finch had only been ten when he disappeared. At that age, so many gender cues hinged on social convention. With long hair and a dress, who would know the difference?
And on top of that, Patrick Finch had apparently been living as Patty for most of his life. She had no trouble believing he would be convincing in the role. After all, he had probably believed it himself. His own mother had conceived the ruse. Who would tell him different?
Monica was so certain that there had been a mistake, that Hobbes would never have been interested in a little boy. Laura refused to speak the terrible thought: if Patrick had fooled everyone into thinking he was a girl, wouldn’t he have fooled Hobbes too?
She pictured that day at the racetrack in 1988. Hobbes lures what he thinks is a ten-year-old girl into his car. He takes her wherever he took the others, begins to do what he would do to them. This time is different though. He quickly discovers that this long-haired, dress-wearing creature is male.
And then?
Laura shivered. That was the limit of her imagination. She didn’t know what he would do. The surprise must have been almost as great for Hobbes as for Patrick. Would he kill the boy and dispose of the body? Keep him alive?
Nothing good, that was for sure.
Two or three of the different thoughts bouncing around in her head locked together like magnets. A person seemed to have a vendetta against Eugene Hobbes, a man who killed young girls. Until now she had only guesses about the man in black’s identity. A father, an uncle, a brother. Someone seeking revenge. The stumbling block had always been this killer’s pathology. A simple vendetta didn’t explain the murder of Olive Hanson. Who would hate Hobbes but also emulate him? No one fit the bill.
Until now. Now she had the perfect candidate.
What if Hobbes hadn’t killed that little boy?
What if Patrick Finch was still alive?
* * *
It was almost five by the time she made it back to Hillsborough. The sun would be down in less than half an hour, and the house was creeping into shadow. She parked the Dart and unlocked the front door.
“That you?”
Her mother’s voice sounded shriller than usual, but it still came from the living room.
She poked her head in. “Yes, it’s me.”
Diane Chambers did her best to turn in her recliner. “People been knocking all day looking for you. Where you been, girl?”
“Out. Who’s been knocking?”
Her mother snorted. “Nobody for me. Some deputy came by.”
Laura paused. “What did they want?”
“I don’t appreciate being your errand boy, just waiting around the house to sign for your packages. He brought a box.”
“Where is it?”
“You could have at least given me a little warning so I could put my face on. He was a nice-looking young man, and you—”
She grabbed her mother by the arm and squeezed. “Where is it?”
“Laura! No need to—”
She squeezed harder.
Something changed in her mother’s eyes. The narrow slits of irritation went wide. Her lip started to tremble. When she spoke, her usual rasp had a quaver.
“Laura, you’re hurting me.”
She kept squeezing.
“It’s in the back room somewhere,” her mother said. “He put it back there for me.”
Laura found the box and popped off the top. Plastic bags stuffed it. She pulled the first one out, stared, and almost dropped it. It was the shirt she’d been wearing in the mountains the day Frank was killed. Tiny holes salted the chest and left shoulder, peppered with wooden splinters in the aftermath of the shotgun blast. Dirty brown molasses stained the fabric.
Blood.
Her blood or Frank’s, she didn’t know. Probably it was both. Underneath the shirt, individually bagged, were her pants and underwear and socks. She didn’t know why they hadn’t burned it all when they were through. At the bottom she found two more items.
Her hiking boots were a little mud-caked but looked otherwise in good condition. She pulled them out. The box was almost empty now. She reached in, felt around, came out with her father’s Browning.
It was in a plastic bag with a little tag tied around the trigger guard. She got it unwrapped and tore off the string. Worked the action. The metal didn’t slide smooth, but it was nothing a little oil wouldn’t fix. She lay it on the ink blotter of her father’s desk, sat in his old chair, and pulled open the bottom drawer. Behind old magazines and faded receipts, she touched rags and a bottle of gun oil. The Browning came apart just as she remembered, and it only took a few minutes to lubricate the moving parts and slide them back together again. She ejected the box magazine, and from a pocket of her own bag she recovered the last four rounds from the box in the basement. One by one she slid them home, then put the Browning in the back of the drawer and shoved it closed.
“Who else knocked?” she asked her mother.
“Some little shit playing ding-dong ditch, most likely.”
“How do you know it was for me?”
Her mother started to laugh, but it turned into a chest-wracking cough. It took her a second to catch her breath. “Of course it was for you. More people trying to get under your skin.”
“So nobody was at the door.”
“Not that I could see, but they were all around the house. Rapping on the doors, scratching at the windows. Never said a word.”
Goosebumps raised a pattern on her arm. “When was this?”
“Hell,” her mother rasped, “I heard it out back just before you pulled up.”
Laura kicked off her flats and pulled on the hiking boots, then stuck her hands through the arms of her sheepskin coat.
“You going out?”
“Probably just some asshole, Ma,” she said. “Maybe I can catch him.” When her mother turned back to the television, she opened the desk drawer and slipped the Browning into her coat pocket. Out on the front porch she looked down the center of the driveway but couldn’t see anything. She made her way off the side of the porch and around the back of the house, careful at the corners, studying her surroundings.
The western horizon bled a dwindling orange, and to the east the sky was shrouded by a wall of dark cloud, the harbinger of a winter storm. Wind licked beneath the eaves and the old farmhouse hummed. The rear wall of the house was featureless, so she kept her back to it and directed her attention outward, waiting for something to move. There was nothing to see but the small stand of river birch, devoid of life, and the tree line at the back of the field almost a mile distant.
A sound came from behind her. At first she thought it was the fluttering of birds’ wings, but no birds flew this time of the evening, and no birds roosted at the Chambers farmhouse. She turned and saw it.
A picture.
A small metal stake pinned it to the wooden siding, and it trembled in the wind.
Laura took her finger off the butt of the gun and let herself take a breath before ripping it from its pin. The thin paper fluttered in her hand, and her own bloody image flickered into sight and then disappeared, over and over, as though part of a demonic flipbook. It was the same picture that had been mailed to her, cut from the exact same edition of the News & Observer. She turned the picture over, and her hand went to her mouth.
Thick black lines blotted out the newsprint on the back, filling up the paper. It was the same neat block lettering from the package sent to the Gazette:
DEAR LAURA, I’M SO HAPPY WE GET THE CHANCE TO TALK AGAIN, EVEN LIKE THIS. DURING OUR LAST CONVERSATION YOU ASKED ME IF WE COULD MEET AND I TOLD YOU THE TIME WASN’T RIGHT. I HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU: THE TIME IS NOW. HAVE YOU LOOKED UP AT THE SKY? THE FULL MOON IS RISING, FAT AND RED, A BLOOD MOON. THIS NIGHT IS HOLY. THIS IS THE NIGHT FOR SACRED TRANSFORMATIONS. FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO TERESA. FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS OR SAMANTHA DIES. IF YOU LIE TO ME I’LL KNO
W. I’M WATCHING YOU.
Laura could feel the drone of her heartbeat on her temples and in the ends of her hair as they stood up. She flipped the picture over onto its front, then over again to read the message again.
Instructions. There were no instructions. She had to call Fuller, or Tim. He’d made direct contact again, and this time the proof was in her hand. She fumbled for her phone, pulled it out of her pocket—
—and it vibrated in her hand. The text icon popped up on the screen next to an unfamiliar number. She touched it.
I’M WATCHING YOU, LAURA. I’M WATCHING YOU RIGHT NOW.
Her knees felt like they might go out from under her. She scanned the horizon, couldn’t see anything in the gathering dark. The phone buzzed again.
HOLD THE PHONE UP ABOVE YOUR HEAD.
She didn’t move. Could he really see her? The sun had set; the far end of the field was very far away. But high-powered binoculars existed. Telescopes too. Night vision was a thing, she reminded herself. And how else would he have known the exact moment to text her? She felt the phone pulse in her hand.
I’M WAITING.
She extended her arm as high above her head as she could, and looked up at it.
GOOD. THERE IS A ROCK TEN YARDS NORTH. PLACE PHONE IN POCKET. HOLD BOTH HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD. WALK TO THE ROCK AND PICK IT UP.
Her first instinct was to run around the corner, into the house. In a matter of seconds a heavy wooden door could be between her and whatever lay hidden in the dark. She tried to turn, but couldn’t move. Her legs had turned to stone. All she could picture was a scared little girl already missing an ear if not her soul.
She pushed the phone into her pocket, raised her arms above her head like a robber coming out of a bank, and walked north. The walking bought her time to think. She didn’t fully understand his interest in her, but the logic of this small portion of his plan was becoming clear. These movements were designed to prevent her from sending a distress message of any kind. With her hands above her head and the phone in her pocket, he would know if she used it. And then Samantha Powell’s blood would be on her hands too.
If she called, the girl would die. And if she didn’t call, well, she had a feeling Laura Chambers would just disappear. It was a lose-lose situation, and when it came to a decision, he was counting on her compassion. He was counting on her compliance.
Last Girl Gone Page 27