by Jen Blood
“Rita?” I said. She stood in our path, immovable, her gaze still fixed on Ariel.
“Do you remember me?” she asked Ariel.
Ariel looked at her blankly, one arm around Jack’s neck. A shiver ran through me. Phantom growled, advancing another step.
“I don’t know you,” Ariel said. I could see her body shaking from where I stood, and knew shock had taken hold. I couldn’t imagine a way they could save that leg.
That was assuming we made it out of here, of course.
“Get out of the way, Rita,” Jack ground out, forehead furrowed as he glanced behind him. The walls were about to come down, and if we didn’t move soon we would be under them.
“Leave her alone,” I heard a voice behind Rita. Wendy—I’d almost forgotten her, she’d practically disappeared with everything else going on around us. “You heard her: she doesn’t know you. You had nothing to do with us.”
At the words, Rita snapped out of whatever spell she’d been under. She frowned. I got the sense the statement hurt her, but thankfully she didn’t waste time now processing her pain.
“Do you have Ariel?” Rita asked Jack.
He nodded. Ariel was small, but I guessed she still weighed a solid hundred pounds—not to mention the fifty-pound trap still attached to her leg. “If we get a move on, I do.”
Meanwhile, behind Ariel and Jack, Mary remained rooted where she was—pleading for me to help her.
I was committed to helping the living first, though.
Jack took a step forward, toward Rita and Wendy. Phantom was still advancing on the women. “We can talk about this when we get out of here.”
“I don’t think so,” Wendy said. It was only then that I noticed the look on Ariel’s face at the sound of her aunt’s voice. It was as though every horrifying memory she’d blocked over the past three days came flooding back at once. Terror shone in her eyes.
Rita turned, and I saw the glint of a knife in the darkness.
Everything happened in an instant after that. Wendy moved with impossible speed considering the woman I’d thought she was all this time, jabbing deep into Rita’s kidneys before she pushed past the agent and headed for Ariel.
“It was you,” I said to Wendy. Rita fell to her knees, her hand clasped to her side as blood flowed freely between her fingers. “You killed those women?”
“Whores,” Wendy said. The word came out in a hiss. “I killed the whores who tried to take my family from me. The ones who tempted Gordon—the ones who tempted Barrett. And when that scourge reached my own blood, there was nothing I could do.”
She looked at Ariel with pure, venomous rage. “Do you know what it would have done to your father if he knew what you were doing? After all he sacrificed—”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Ariel said. “I told you that. Barrett asked us to come over. Melanie thought we’d maybe get some dates out of it—good God, woman. You move us out to the middle of nowhere, and what do you think we’re going to do? But I sure as shit wasn’t a whore.”
Wendy all but roared with rage. She rushed the girl, her knife at the ready. I held the gun Jack had given me, but I had no idea where to aim it. Besides which, a single gunshot was all it would take for this entire tunnel to collapse around us. Wendy rushed on and Jack feinted right, Ariel still in his arms. Phantom dove into the space he’d left behind. I watched in horror as the now-bloody knife hit Phantom’s side with a wallop that took my breath away.
Time stopped for a millisecond. I waited for Phantom to fall, then breathed again when I realized it had been a bad strike—or a good one, in this case. Phantom twisted away at the last moment, struck by the flat of the blade, and the knife fell harmlessly to the ground.
Caught off balance, Wendy stumbled. I watched in horror as she tripped over another of the traps we’d passed—the one Phantom had nearly been caught in earlier. Behind us, the shadow grew, the screams behind it deafening as rocks fell and the tunnel began to cave in on itself.
“Go!” I shouted to Jack. He ran on ahead with Ariel. I grabbed Rita and draped her arm over my shoulder, with no idea how I would manage this with my knee in the state it was. Wendy lay with her leg in the trap, eyes wide with terror. The shadow closed in on her, wrapping itself around her as her screams melded with the others.
Rita and I both stood mute, staring, until a final massive tremor shook the world around us, and the tunnel caved in on Wendy. Mary Wieland flickered before my eyes, unimaginable pain on her face. And then, she vanished.
The screams, muffled now by tons of rock and dirt and debris, continued. The shadow grinned at me.
Rita, Phantom, and I ran before the earth could swallow us the way it had Wendy, Mary, and the other dead it clung to.
* * *
Epilogue
“SO YOU FINALLY MADE IT for the grand tour,” I said as Jack got off the boat and set foot cautiously on our island.
“I’ve got a lot more free time these days.”
Two weeks had passed since the events in Glastenbury. My knee was healing well, though it was still in a brace and required nightly icing and a steady regiment of ibuprofen to keep the swelling down. Phantom, never far from my side before, had become my shadow in the last couple of weeks. It turned out we were all a little more shaken than I’d expected after everything that had happened in the tunnels and dense forests of the Bennington Triangle.
I’d read brief accounts of the events in Vermont on the news, so I knew the highlights. Chief among them was the discovery after Wendy Redfield’s death of a secret chest of antique purity rings in the back of her closet, along with the cross earrings and the rope used to tie her victims.
“So there’s no doubt now that she was the one who killed all the victims—even the prostitutes around the country over a decade ago?” I asked.
“There’s always some doubt,” Jack said. “But you heard her, she confessed. And we’ve been talking to Dean… She did some traveling back in those days, and it looks like the timelines match up.”
“You wouldn’t think someone like that would be strong enough for a crime like this. At least, not alone. Capturing, tying, and torturing two women…”
“Two drugged women,” Jack reminded me. “And according to the little that Ariel remembers, Wendy had no problem managing her and Melanie.”
I frowned at mention of Ariel. “How’s she doing?”
“Better than can be expected considering everything she went through,” he said. “You heard they couldn’t save the leg?”
I nodded wordlessly, thinking of the young athlete who had dreamed of being a personal trainer.
“She’s handling it all right,” he continued. “She’s pretty tough. Very interested in what you’ve got going on around here, too.”
“I emailed her just after everything happened,” I said. “Maybe I’ll pay a visit with Phantom while she’s still in the hospital.”
Jack nodded his approval. It was a gorgeous fall day, bright sun reflected off the blue sea. The scent of pine and salt were in the air. I could think of little I wanted to talk about less than the depravity of Wendy Redfield, but I was happy to hear that Ariel would be all right.
“What about everyone else?” I asked. “With Angie Crenshaw’s death…”
Jack’s face darkened at the mention, and I realized I still didn’t know what had gone on between them. Clearly, though, it was something. “Claude’s up on charges, but my guess is he’ll be institutionalized—there’s no way he’s competent to stand trial. And Dean’s awaiting trial for the kidnapping, though there’s a chance he could get off since he wasn’t in his right mind, either.”
“Where does that leave Ariel?” I asked.
“With the State right now,” Jack said regretfully. “Once she gets out of the hospital… She doesn’t have any family left but Barrett and Gordon.”
“I don’t know that she’d be better off with either of them,” I said. “What about Gordon? He’s been cleared… I don’t suppos
e Rita’s interested in taking him back.”
“No, thank God,” Jack said. “I don’t know what Gordon will do. He talked about doing some consulting, maybe even getting a license as a PI. As long as he stays away from me, I don’t care what he does.”
I wondered about Rita and McDonough, though I didn’t ask the question aloud. Despite my initial dislike of McDonough, I thought the man might actually be good for her. Not that I was in any position to weigh in on anyone’s romantic decisions.
“I’m still not completely sure I understand Wendy’s motivation,” I said, after a few seconds’ thought. “I understand that she wasn’t a fan of ladies of the night, but everything she did was so…extreme.”
“She was trying to keep the family together, I think,” Jack said. “And with June and Katie, I think it was a combination: Punish them for the path they’d chosen, and then punish Gordon by setting him up when it was clear he was never coming back—especially after he came in with the Bureau and helped take their house away.”
“But why go this long without killing only to start up again in Glastenbury?” I asked. “She’d made it almost a decade.”
“That we know of,” Jack said. I looked at him, newly interested. “Dean’s wife died four years ago under mysterious circumstances. I think she felt like she was losing control again, with Barrett’s business dealings and his plans for Ariel and Melanie.” He paused. “You know she was actually poisoning Dean and Claude? Not enough to kill them, just enough to keep them sick. She tried to do the same with Barrett, but he went to the hospital and then moved out.”
I thought of everything Bear had told me about the black threads he’d seen spiraling in the air around Dean. Was that what he had seen? A physical manifestation of the poisoned thoughts swarming in his head?
“It makes sense, I guess,” I said. “If she wanted to keep everyone together and make others stay away, that’s one way to do it.”
I led Jack from the boat launch up the hill to the wildlife rehab center we’d just finished building. Phantom kept pace at my left side as usual, head up and ears pricked forward as though searching for some hidden danger I might miss.
“So, you want to see what you’ve been missing all this time?” I asked Jack.
He looked sheepish. “That’s why I’m here.” The way his eyes met mine made my cheeks burn and my heart beat just a little bit faster.
The rehab center itself isn’t really that heart stopping, however. It’s a six-room wooden cabin made of repurposed lumber, but it’s flooded with light and runs almost exclusively on wind power—courtesy of turbines installed by a local alternative energy company that gave them to us at cost.
Jack was suitably impressed, or at least he made a good show of acting like it.
“Sorry for the smell,” I said as we moved past the still-gleaming front room, where my vet—Therese—was bringing in a crate of orphaned red fox kits we’d rescued early that morning. “It’s clean, but there’s only so much you can do with twenty-five wild animals in a space like this.”
“Twenty-nine now,” Therese said, looking up briefly from her new charges. “But I take your point.”
“I’ve smelled worse,” Jack assured me as we moved on.
Phantom followed along beside me as I introduced Jack to the injured raptors, held in floor-to-ceiling cages in a room with the shades drawn. Three buzzards, a bald eagle, a great horned owl, two barn owls, and a peregrine falcon whose wing had nearly been sheared off in a head-on collision with an SUV.
“They’ll stay here or go to another facility, where they can help with education—if they take to that, of course. Some birds don’t. In that case, they’ll have an easy early retirement in the sanctuary out here.”
“So, a happy ending for all,” he said.
“Not always,” I said. “Far from it… But enough to make this worth it.”
We moved outside to one of the larger enclosures, where a motley assortment of injured and orphaned fawns grazed in the sunshine.
“See those two over there?” I said, nodding toward two dappled, leggy fawns standing together at the fence. “Phantom found them just before we left for Glastenbury.”
Jack grinned. “I remember. They both pulled through?”
“They did. They’re getting big now—we’ll release them in a sanctuary up north in another couple of weeks. We want them to be settled before the first snow flies.”
Bear was at the other side of the enclosure, Ren and Casper beside him. His arm was still in a sling, and he hadn’t quite gotten his color back, but he was making progress. That progress was definitely aided by Ren’s presence—since everything that had happened in Glastenbury, the two were even tighter than they’d been before. I sensed a shift in the relationship, but of course Bear wasn’t about to confide in his mom about such things.
I waved across the enclosure. Both Bear and Ren waved back, but neither made any move to join us. Ah, teenagers.
I gave Jack a tour of the rest of the island, and then he shadowed me for much of the day while I did the things I usually do: trained dogs, fielded calls, fed buzzards and bears and honeybees, and a dozen other things that keep me busy from dusk till dawn. All the while, I kept thinking about the one piece I’d told no one about Glastenbury: the image of Mary Wieland, the screams I had heard underground… The shadow that seemed to feed on them all. Had they actually been real? Or had it been a manifestation of my own exhaustion, fear, and pain?
Finally, as we were heading back to the boat, I spoke up.
“You know, I went back to Glastenbury a couple of days after we found Ariel,” I said.
Jack looked surprised. It was evening by now, the sky a rich caramel, the sun just going down on the horizon. “I didn’t realize,” he said. “Did you find anything?”
“No. The tunnel’s completely caved in.” I’d seen no sign of Mary that day, but I had heard cries that seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth. It felt like an indictment, proof that I had helped to save the living, but I had failed the dead. I wanted to ask Bear about it—to at least learn from him what he experienced when he saw these things. How did he know they were real, and not just a figment of his own imagination?
“Did you ever find out anything about the remains we found there?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “There are some urban legends about a mad trapper who used to live out there in the 1930s. It could have been him, if he actually existed. Whoever killed the victims we found in that tunnel is long dead now, though. He can’t hurt anyone else.”
Dead, yes, but I wasn’t so sure about the other.
The boat was idling at the dock, Monty waiting patiently at the helm. Jack looked awkward for a moment. I reached down and patted Phantom’s head, feeling just a little bit vindictive. I waited Jack out, letting him squirm.
“I wasn’t sure whether you’re still shorthanded out here,” he finally said.
“We are,” I said. “We’ll manage.” I wasn’t sure how, of course, but we always did. Jack shifted. At this point, I knew I was being cruel—he’d already told me he was officially done with the FBI, and had no intention of ever returning. I remained mute. I’d asked him once—this time, he would have to make the first move.
“Right,” he said. “I’m sure. But, if you wanted another hand…” He cleared his throat. “I mean, I’m out of work right now.”
I looked at him, trying to hide my smile. “Yeah, you’ve mentioned that.”
His eyes narrowed, a grin playing at his lips now. “Wow—never let it be said that Jamie Flint doesn’t have a mean streak. What I’m trying to ask, in as clumsy a way as possible, is… Does the offer still stand for a job?”
“It’s not all crime solving, you know,” I said. “We spend a lot of time just rescuing ducklings and building latrines.”
“I think I can handle that,” he said. His voice was quiet, his eyes intent on mine.
I studied him for a long moment, as the sun went down behind him. Wav
es lapped at the boat as two bald eagles circled overhead. I smiled, finally, without reserve.
“Yeah,” I said. “I expect you can.”
Looking for more from Jen Blood?
Turn the page to read an excerpt from ALL THE BLUE-EYED ANGELS,
book one of the bestselling Erin Solomon Mysteries.
All the Blue-Eyed Angels Free Sample
Turn the page for a free sample of All the Blue-Eyed Angels, the first novel in the bestselling, now-complete Erin Solomon Pentalogy. There, you’ll get more background on Special Agent Jack Juarez and K-9 search and rescue handler Jamie Flint, who makes her first appearance in the series in book two, Sins of the Father.
Jonestown. The Solar Temple. Heaven’s Gate. In the summer of 1990, the Payson Church of Tomorrow joins the ranks of those infamous cult suicides when thirty-four members burn to death on a small island off the coast of Maine. At ten years old, Payson member Erin Solomon watches helplessly as the church and its congregation are reduced to ash and embers.
More than twenty years later, Erin is an accomplished investigative journalist when she receives word that she has inherited Payson Isle... and all its ghosts. She returns to Maine to learn the truth behind the tragedy that has haunted her since childhood, aided by the rakish mentor who’s stood by her side since she was a teenager, her trusty mutt Einstein, and a mysterious stranger with his own dark past.
Soon, Erin is enmeshed in a decades-old conspiracy rooted in lust, delusion, and betrayal, as she fights to unearth the secrets of the Payson Church of Tomorrow—secrets someone will kill to keep buried.
* * *
Prologue
AUGUST 22, 1990
On my tenth birthday, I am baptized by fire.
I race through a forest of smoke, ignoring the sting of blackberry brambles and pine branches on sensitive cheeks and bare arms. Up ahead, I catch a glimpse of my father’s shirt, drenched and muddy, as he races through the woods. I follow blindly, too terrified to scream, too panicked to stop.