by Jen Blood
It was two a.m. by the time we got back to the Durhams’ that night. Contrary to Sheriff Jennings’ threat, there was no sign that the cops had been there. According to Barnel’s prophecy, Armageddon should be in full swing by this time, but so far things looked pretty peaceful. The porch light was on, the rest of the house dark. Einstein and his pack of hounds greeted us with a few half-hearted woofs, but thankfully no lights came on inside. Diggs followed me into the house. It was quiet. Hard to believe upwards of thirty people had been crammed in the place just a few hours before for Wyatt’s wake.
I went upstairs to my attic hideaway with Einstein by my side, anxious for some space and a little time to think. Diggs retired to his room—I assumed for the night. When I got to my door, however, he was back. This time, he had his duffel bag with him.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to wake the boys up,” Diggs said. “And I need to talk to you.”
“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for the past twenty-four hours?”
He made a face at me and pushed the door open, nudging me inside. Once we were in, I sat on the end of the bed, on the alert once more. The room was small—barely big enough for the double bed and a bureau. Diggs paced the three feet or so of space half a dozen times before I snapped.
“Diggs, seriously? Spit it out, or get the hell out so we can both get some sleep.”
Abruptly, he set his bag on the bed, unzipped it, and pulled out a file. He tossed it on the bed beside me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“You don’t run,” he said shortly. I picked up the file, completely confused.
“What?”
“You don’t run. You never run. You fight. You get answers, or you die trying. You don’t just sit back and let some nameless monster take over your life.”
I opened the file. My hands were shaking. “What did you do?” I asked hoarsely. I already knew, though. I knew exactly what he’d done.
There in front of me, keen eyes staring up, was a sketch of the hooded man. The angel of death. My nightmare, come to life. And beneath it, in bold letters, was a name.
Chapter Nine - Diggs
The attic bedroom where Solomon was staying used to belong to Ashley, when we were still kids. I remembered sneaking in there one summer night when I was staying with Wyatt, sure she’d secretly been up waiting for me to come along. It hadn’t worked out that way, though: She’d screamed bloody murder, and Wyatt’s father sent me packing early that summer. It would have saved everyone a lot of heartache if I’d just seen the writing on the wall that night.
The room seemed smaller now. My heart was pounding and my palms were sweating, and the bedroom ceiling was so damn low I could barely stand up straight. My leg hurt like hell, as did my jaw. I had a headache, too, but none of that held a candle to the beating my ego had taken in the past twenty-four hours.
Solomon looked at the sketch I’d handed her, then back at me.
“What did you do, damn it?” she asked a second time.
I swallowed hard and wet my lips, nodding toward the file. “His name is Mitch Cameron. I had a friend of mine do a composite sketch based on my description, then I put his face through every database I could think of until something came back.”
She closed the file. When she looked at me, her eyes were burning. I’ve been on the receiving end of Solomon’s wrath more than once—the truth is, it’s kind of a turn on. But not this time. Anger is one thing, fear another entirely. And Solomon was positively terrified.
“Where the hell do you get the right?” she hissed at me. “I asked you—”
“No,” I said. My voice was raw. “You told me—late one night when you could barely breathe, a month after Cameron held the gun to my head, you called and told me not to look into it. You never asked. You never talked to me about any of this shit. And by then it was too late, anyway—I’d already started.”
She ran her hand through her hair, turning her back to me. “And now, he knows,” she whispered. She shook her head. “That’s why he’s here—he knows you’ve been looking.”
“I don’t think so. I covered my tracks,” I said. “The very model of the modern paranoiac. I swept for bugs, used burner phones, tapped only my most trusted sources. He’s here because we’re together, just like he said—that’s it. He would’ve just killed me otherwise. He’s just making sure we stay scared.”
She laughed. The sound was a hollow echo of the one I knew. “Well, mission accomplished. Goddammit, Diggs.” She wheeled on me. “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?”
“Because this isn’t you,” I said. “You can’t let this bastard break you like this. Your father’s out there. A killer is out there, and they’ve waged a friggin’ war. And you’re letting them get away with it.”
She looked me in the eye, her chin tipped up, her jaw hard. She pushed me lightly in the stomach, her anger mounting again. “You’re the one who begged me—the one who tried to drive us in the opposite direction of all the trouble back in Maine, all the while telling me it was all too dangerous. We sat in that cave and you ran me up one side and down the other for being so selfish. You said I needed to back off, and I did. So why now—”
“Because I won’t lose you over this,” I shouted. The words felt like they’d been wrenched from somewhere deep; somewhere I was powerless to cap. Solomon looked at me with those brilliant green eyes, and I could smell her shampoo and the cinnamon on her breath and the fear that rolled off her in waves. “If you don’t want me, that’s one thing,” I said. It was too late to go back now. “I’ll handle it. I’ll let it go. Wish you and Juarez the best. But I’m not saying goodbye with the lame friggin’ excuse that you’re being noble; that you have to walk away to save my life.”
“So this is your ego?” she asked, incredulous. “You’re gonna get us all killed because of your goddamn male pride? Juarez and I talked about this. He agrees—it’s time for me to let this go.”
“Juarez doesn’t remember the first thirteen years of his life. And he’s fine with it. I don’t care how much time you spend with the guy, kid, you’re never gonna be that zen.”
She pushed me again, harder this time. For the first time, fury outweighed the fear in her eyes. “Fuck you.”
“Nice comeback.”
“Juarez is a good guy,” she said. She advanced on me, pushing me toward the wall. “He’s nice, and he’s stable, and he’s not tortured by every freaking mistake he ever made. He—”
My blood was boiling, and I knew she was just getting warmed up. There were things I could say, arguments I could make, but words had never seemed so pointless before. And so I grabbed her—one hand at her side, the other at the back of her neck—and pulled her to me. My mouth crashed down on hers. She fought me for a second, no more, before she fisted her hands in the front of my shirt, her body moving against mine.
I pushed her back against the wall, my tongue pressing past her lips, and for three miraculous seconds, she gave as good as she got: her teeth nipping at my lower lip, her hips pressed to mine. And then, she came to herself. Her hands flattened on my chest and she pushed me away so hard I stumbled. Her eyes were wide. We stood there, silent, our breathing ragged, for another quarter of a second before her hand came up. I caught her just before her palm made contact with my cheek.
“No hitting,” I said. “It’s bad form.”
She lowered her hand. Pushed me one more time, hard, and grabbed her bag. “Drop it, Diggs,” she said again. “All of it. Get on with your life. But do it without me.”
She left.
◊◊◊◊◊
Solomon slept in the car that night. Because I was feeling spiteful, I let her—something Jack Juarez sure as hell never would have done. In the morning, I brought her a cup of coffee. It was cold outside, a dismal gray dawn just breaking on the horizon. Solomon was cocooned in her sleeping bag in the backseat with Einstein, wearing half her wardrobe and a purple ski cap. She hid her head whe
n I opened the driver’s side door and got in.
“Go away,” she said. Her voice had that whiskey rasp to it that I love about Solomon in the morning.
“Good news: we’ve kept the Four Horsemen at bay another day. And I brought you coffee.”
“I don’t care.” She burrowed more deeply into the sleeping bag. “I’m not speaking to you.”
“Because of Mitch Cameron, or because of the kiss? Or because you liked the kiss?”
She sat up. Einstein scrambled out of her arms. She opened the door and let him out, then closed it again and pulled the sleeping bag up around her. I looked at her in the rearview mirror, blinking in the harsh light of day.
“We’re not talking about the kiss, all right? The kiss didn’t happen. I’m with Juarez—you know that. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”
“Well, it’s hard to argue with that logic. Let’s just pretend it’s not there and maybe it’ll go away. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before.”
“You spent the first fifteen years we knew each other pretending it wasn’t there, you asshole,” she said, the fire back in her eyes. “You should be pretty good at it by now.”
Touché. “All right, fine. I didn’t kiss you last night. You didn’t kiss me back. What about Mitch Cameron? Are we pretending he doesn’t exist, either?”
She rubbed her forehead. I’d seen Solomon exhausted before, after days of not sleeping and emotional turmoil and serial killers…but I’d never seen her this bone weary before. “I don’t know. That was the plan.”
“Come on, Solomon. Were you really planning on going through life calling him ‘the hooded man’? ‘The guy in the cloak’? He has a name. A past.”
She took the coffee from me. “Let’s just drop it for right now, okay? Put a pin in it.” It was clear she’d spent the better part of the night coming up with that. “Can we focus on one mystery at a time? I’d still like to figure out what the hell happened to Wyatt—and what Jesup Barnel had to do with it. Or is that no longer a priority?”
“It is. But I’m not giving up on Cameron,” I said. “Whatever happens between you and me, someone still needs to bring him down.”
“Diggs.” I turned to face her. She studied me for a few seconds, the pain in her eyes palpable. Her voice quieted. “Do you know how much blood I’ve got on my hands? Matt Perkins; Joe and Rebecca Ashmont… Max Richards. Will Rainier. And I still don’t know how much the fire on Payson Isle had to do with my father... But clearly this guy—Cameron—wiping the Payson congregation out had something to do with my dad.”
“None of that’s because of you,” I said. “You didn’t pull the trigger, for Christ’s sake.”
“But if I’d gotten the cops involved sooner, or I hadn’t pushed so hard, or I’d warned someone…” she said. She shook her head stubbornly. “I’m not asking for absolution here. I’m telling you: I’m done. I won’t watch him kill you, knowing I could have done something. I won’t lose you.”
You already have was on the tip of my tongue, but I held back. Instead, I took a deep breath and nodded.
“All right. We put a pin in it—for now. And we move onto Wyatt, and Jesup Barnel.”
“Thank you.”
It wasn’t hard to make the transition from one case to the other: I’d been thinking about Wyatt and Barnel all night. When I wasn’t thinking about Solomon, of course.
“Do you think Barnel did it?” she asked me. “Do you think he’s the one who killed Wyatt?”
Before I could answer, Mae came flying out of the house with Rick on her heels. She headed for the car as soon as she realized I was inside, and I rolled down the window.
“Have you seen Danny?” she demanded.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Danny,” she repeated. “He didn’t come home last night.”
I got out of the car. Solomon followed suit. “He buried his father yesterday, Mae,” I said. “I’m sure he’s just taking a break. Trying to get some perspective.” Or, more likely, he was just too stoned to move.
Mae looked at Rick.
“That’s what I told her,” the kid said. He was the polar opposite of Danny: buttoned up and put together, his blond hair cut short, his smile straight and pearly white.
“You know how he gets,” Rick continued. “He said he didn’t wanna go back to school yet. Maybe he’s just takin’ the day.”
“He could be out with friends,” Solomon suggested. “Or a girl, maybe?”
“Sure,” Rick said easily. “Could be.” I noticed that he wasn’t looking at Mae, which told me he probably had a better idea than he was letting on as to where Danny had gone. I wasn’t ready to call in the National Guard, regardless. I’d been a teenage boy, after all—one not unlike Danny. A kid like that… Things get to be too much, sometimes you just need some space.
“What about George’s place?” I asked. “Have you dropped in there? It could be he’s just bonding with the old man.”
“George left town last night,” Mae said. “He went on up to the mountains. Said he just needed some time.”
“Now?” I said in surprise. “It seems like that could have waited a few days…”
“You know him,” she said. “He puts on a good show, but he’s takin’ this pretty hard. Just needs to get his feet back under him is all. Anyway, I dropped by his place this morning to feed the rabbits. Danny wasn’t there.” A tinge of hysteria crept into her voice.
“Rick, why don’t you go in and get yourself some breakfast?” I said. “Give your mom and me a chance to talk. Everything’ll be fine, though. Danny will show up in no time, and you’ll be laughing about this by supper. You’ll see.”
Rick looked at his mother. She nodded. He went inside wordlessly, leaving Solomon and me alone with Mae. Before I could reassure her, Mae looked at me with wide eyes, her hands clenched.
“There’s something else,” she said in a whisper. Mae’s usually the coolest person in the room. Today, she looked ready to climb out of her skin.
“What?” I asked.
She wet her lips, her eyes sliding from mine. “Buddy told me about Wyatt’s cross—what got done to him, how they turned it upside down and all. He said he saw it before, too, back when Marty Reynolds got killed in ’02. He said maybe that’s why they took Wyatt.” I wasn’t making the connection between this and Danny. Her tears overflowed, spilling down her cheeks. “Diggs, Danny’s got the mark.”
My stomach turned. “What are you talking about?”
“Reverend Barnel’s cross. Danny has it.”
Rage came before the fear—white hot and boiling over, catching me completely off guard. I fought to control it. Solomon touched my arm before I could speak. I held my tongue.
“When did he get it?” Solomon asked.
“Two summers ago,” Mae said. “He was acting up: partying, drinking.” She looked at me, eyes pleading. “I know what that night with Reverend Barnel was for you—Wyatt told me what the reverend did. How bad it got. It was different for Wy, though; it put him on the right path. Set him straight. We figured maybe it was just what Danny needed.”
I walked away, afraid I’d explode if I didn’t.
I thought of that night more than twenty-five years ago: The feel of leather straps cutting into my wrists and ankles, strapped in before a crowd that just sat there, watching me writhe. Strangers’ hands on me. Bright lights. Sweat dripping from Barnel’s face onto my naked chest. Repent, Daniel. Beg the Lord’s forgiveness for spilling your brother’s blood. Turn your back on the devil. It’s the only way to get back to the light.
Solomon pulled me back to the present, her hand once more on my arm. Mae was nowhere in sight.
“You’re freaking out,” she said. You can’t get anything past Solomon.
“You don’t think I have reason to?”
“Are you kidding? I think anyone who tries to straighten out their kid by sending him to a guy like Barnel is batshit crazy. Haven’t any of these p
eople heard of Outward Bound? Jesus. But the horse is kind of out of the gate now… It’s done. And maybe you’ve forgotten this, but someone was out taking potshots at the reverend last night.”
“Danny didn’t have anything to do with that,” I said.
She didn’t look convinced. “Why don’t we just focus on finding him first, then we can get the rest figured out.”
“I still say he’s probably just off somewhere, blowing off some steam.”
“Could be,” she agreed.
“But you don’t think so.”
She looked at me. “Do you? Really?”
I shook my head slowly. “I hope so. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”
Chapter Ten - Solomon
Since it was a school day, it was easier than it might have been otherwise to do a blanket survey of Danny’s friends to see if anyone knew where he could be. Mae went over to the school and met with a couple of teachers, who in turn spoke with the students. The last time anyone had seen Danny was at the local Dairy Queen the night before. No one had heard anything from him since then. Or, if they had, they weren’t volunteering that information.
The pall already over the Durham house was getting darker by the second; I wasn’t sure how much more Mae could take. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her—to all of them—if Danny met the same fate his father had.
At just past noon that day, Einstein and I went up to my room only to find Diggs sitting on the bed with the Justice Daily News and his laptop. My neck was stiff and my back ached and my ass hurt. Once you pass thirty, apparently sleeping in a car has the same effect on the body as being run over by one. Diggs eyeballed me as I sat down at the edge of the bed.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No, as a matter of fact. I think my spine’s dislocated, thanks to you.”
“I didn’t make you sleep in the car. You could’ve come in anytime.”