by Jen Blood
“Of course. Wait—you didn’t know that?” Diggs shook his head silently. A storm settled in the girl’s eyes. She looked genuinely troubled. “Sorry. But…yeah.”
“What about the later months? After you guys stopped talking,” I said, to get us back on track. “Do you know if he was in touch with anyone else?”
She thought for a minute. “I saw him around Mike a few times—like, we’d meet at the church, and Mike would show up. Or I’d get there and they’d be hanging out. Your dad always got worked up then—I actually thought a couple times he was on something, the way he acted after Mike left.”
“Mike. Mike Reynolds, you mean?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Did Mike know what was going on between you and my father?” Diggs asked.
“He caught us doing it in your dad’s office once.” She made a face. “The dickhead tried to blackmail your dad into getting me to have sex with him to keep quiet, but the reverend just got pissed. He got Mike to back down. Not very many people got to see just how much power your dad had, you know? How much passion.”
“So you saw Mike and the reverend together,” I said, once again steering the conversation back on track. “Were they ever with anyone else?”
“A woman,” she said immediately. “A couple times when I wasn’t there, and I got pissed, because I thought maybe Mike brought her so they could do the deed—like all three of them or something. And it’s not like I would have said no if they just asked me—”
“Was that why she was there?” I interrupted, before we got into something I would never, ever unsee.
“Nope. At least, the reverend said it wasn’t—anyway, she was old. No way your dad would have gone for her.”
“How old?” Diggs asked. “Did you know her?”
“Never saw her before. And old, old. I don’t know—it’s hard to judge after a certain point. Like, at least forty.”
That made me feel great about my thirty-three years on the planet. Laurie looked at me like she knew exactly what I was thinking. “A lot older than you. Black hair. Really dark eyes. Maybe Spanish, I think.”
“Did he ever say her name?” I asked. “Or tell you what she was doing there?”
“Lilah,” Laurie said. I made an effort not to react to the name, thinking of the J. team leader Cameron had talked about: Lilah Waters. “I remember because of the whole Samson and Delilah story, you know? And I overheard them, the only other time I saw her here—talking about revolutions and the end of the world and all that shit. It didn’t make a lot of sense.”
“That’s all right,” Diggs said. “It might make more sense to us. Just tell us what you remember.”
“They mostly just talked about how godless Littlehope was. And how people needed to understand what was coming, you know? Your dad was really into the godless angle. I got the feeling Mike just wanted to blow some shit up. Talk about anger issues.”
“Was there anywhere in particular it seemed like they thought was more godless than others?” I asked. I’d been wondering what the reverend’s target would have been, if he’d lived. Or Mike’s, for that matter.
“Bennett’s,” she said immediately. “And the paper. He hated that paper—the Trib? He used to go on these crazy tirades.”
“Anywhere else?” I asked.
She thought for a minute. “That island over there—the Payson place where all those church people died. He hated that place, too. And McDonalds.”
“Wait—what did he say?” I said.
“It’s making the country fat.”
It took some effort not to strangle her. “No—not McDonalds. Payson Isle. What did he say about the island?”
“The usual: it was filled with evil, and if he could just wipe it off the map, he’d do it.”
“Do you think he’d ever actually do something like that?” I said.
She looked at Diggs knowingly. “Uh—yeah. Definitely. Like I said, he was a violent guy. I mean, I like that kind of thing, so it wasn’t a big deal. But yeah. Not too much would have surprised me where he was concerned.” Her gaze fell to my swollen lip, then back to Diggs. “Did you do that to her?” she asked.
“No,” he said tonelessly. “That was the reverend’s thing. It’s never been mine.”
She looked disappointed. “Yeah. I figured. Listen, hang on just a second, okay? I’ve got something I want to give you.”
She ran up the stairs. Diggs and I didn’t say anything while we listened to drawers open and close; a door slam. Then, she hurried back down a minute later. She held a white jewel box in her hand. She pushed it toward Diggs awkwardly, a little out of breath.
“This is yours. Your dad gave it to me, but…” she faded.
Diggs looked stunned. “He gave it to you?”
“What is it?” I asked.
“He asked you to marry him, then,” Diggs said.
She looked offended. “I told you: we had something, okay? But I felt bad when he gave that to me. He said he wanted to have a family again. Start over. And it’s not like I didn’t care about him, but no way do I want to get stuck in Littlehope, knocked up and married to some crazy old preacher. He wouldn’t take it back, though.”
I thought of the chaos in Diggs’ house—the graffiti on the walls, the Bible verse. All that damage. The reverend had done it all.
“Is that what you were looking for at your place?” I asked Diggs.
He stared at the box for a minute before he nodded. “Yeah. That’s it.” He shoved it into his pocket without looking at what was inside. “Thanks,” he said to Laurie. “I was looking for that, actually.”
“I figured. You’ll get more use out of it than me, anyway.”
The way she said it sent the faintest shiver of foreboding through me. I studied her. That manic light was still in her eyes, but there was a hollowness beneath it. I thought of what Bill had said back at Bennett’s—about something having been off about her for a long time. We didn’t have time to take on every horrible story in Littlehope right now, though, so I pushed the feeling aside.
“Just one more question, if you don’t mind,” I said. “This Lilah person. When was the last time you saw her?”
“Last night,” she said. If I’d been eating anything, I would have spit it clear across the room.
“What? Where?”
“Edie Woolwich’s place. My mom works there, volunteering with the crazies. Doing her civic duty, she says. I had the car, so I had to pick her up.”
“You’re saying this Lilah person is one of Edie’s residents?”
She laughed. “It would make sense, right? Considering what happened to Mike and the reverend? But no, I think she’s a friend of Edie’s. They were going out to dinner.”
Edie Woolwich was a little old lady who used to work for my mom at the medical clinic. Now, she ran a residential house for the mentally ill. I never had a grandmother, but if I could choose one out of any woman in the world, Edie would be in the top two—second only to Blanche Dubois on the Golden Girls. For very different reasons, obviously.
“You’re sure?” I said.
“Pretty sure, yeah,” she said with a shrug. She glanced at the clock. “Listen, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but my father will be home soon. If he finds you here, he’ll definitely lose his shit. He wasn’t crazy about everything that went down with the reverend.”
“Go figure,” I said.
Chapter Twenty
When Diggs and I left Laurie’s, the sun was gone, the sky a pure washed-out gray. A few flurries were already flying, though the storm wasn’t supposed to start in earnest until evening.
“So…the thing missing from your house was a ring.”
He didn’t look at me when he answered. “It belonged to my mother.”
“Ah.”
“I’m not even sure why she gave it to me. I mean, obviously she wasn’t my biggest fan. But it was the only thing she left me in her will—her wedding ring.”
; I had no clue how to respond to that. “Well… Three wives later, at least she knows you got some use out of it, right?” I winced as soon as the words were out, but Diggs didn’t look offended. He just shook his head at me.
“You’re such an idiot,” he said fondly. “That thing’s been traveling with me or locked up from the day I got it. There was only one person I could ever imagine giving it to—and I couldn’t figure out how the hell to make that happen.”
I blinked somewhat stupidly. “You’re not…”
“Proposing?” he supplied. He looked surprisingly calm. A little amused, even. “What would you say if I was?”
“You’ve been married before,” I pointed out.
“So have you.”
“All the more reason we shouldn’t be having this conversation.” I was dangerously close to hyperventilating. Diggs and I weren’t the kind of people who were supposed to get married. And if we were going to get married, I really didn’t want him to propose outside his dead father’s teenage lover’s house just before a blizzard on New Year’s Eve, when the evil organization infesting my brain could materialize at any moment and murder us both.
“So the answer would be no, then?” Diggs said. He was still the picture of calm.
I had to think before I answered. “No. I mean—I don’t think so. But it would definitely be, not right now. Why would you even want to marry me, anyway? I’m a mess. You know I’m a mess.”
He didn’t argue. We just stood there for another couple of seconds, not speaking. I shivered when a gust of icy wind blew through me.
“Come on,” he said, getting us moving. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I forgot how cold it gets here,” I said, since a subtle change of subject was in order.
“After all the months I had to listen to you bitch about the heat in Australia, you better not be complaining about the weather.”
“Not complaining. Just…noting.” I glanced sideways at him, switching topics again. “So, that was a pretty horrifying glimpse into your old man’s psyche. Are you ready to bleach your brain yet?”
“Pretty much. The good news? Apparently, he wasn’t my old man after all.”
“Maybe,” I corrected. “So far, we don’t have the most reliable witnesses backing up that story.” My attention was diverted by a car idling in a driveway two doors down from Laurie Smith’s place, in the opposite direction that we were headed. A navy-blue sedan, the engine running. I grabbed Diggs’ arm.
“What are the chances Jenny’s still looking for more J. operatives to murder?” I asked.
He followed my gaze, his jaw tense. “Better than average, I’d say.”
He turned around and started toward the car without waiting for me, his strides long and purposeful, his hand already going for his gun. The car pulled out about two seconds before he got there. The way he ran after it told me Jenny had definitely been behind the wheel. By the time he’d returned to me, I was calling Cameron. He answered immediately.
“What have you found out?”
“Just a second. First, have you heard from Jenny?”
“No. Why, have you seen her?”
“She’s apparently on the same trail we are, but she has that unfortunate habit of blowing people up first and asking questions later. And we’re really trying to avoid that.”
“Damn it,” he said. “Did you talk to her?”
“No, we just spotted her outside the house of one of the people we were interviewing.”
“You spotted her?” he asked.
“She was pretty obvious about it.”
“Then she wants you to know she’s there—she’s not that sloppy.”
“Are you still on the island? When are you getting over here?”
“Soon, I just want to do one more thing here. What did you do with the information you found last night?”
Diggs frowned at the expression on my face, which I was guessing wasn’t a good one. I’d had a huge inner debate that morning before I finally decided to keep Will Colby’s letters and photos close today.
“I have them,” I said.
“Damn it,” Cameron murmured under his breath. “You should have left everything with me. That means she’ll be after you to get to them.”
“That makes no sense,” I said, frustration mounting. “You said Payson Isle doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and the only reason Jenny was there was to come after me. What the hell does she want with any of the leftover shit from my childhood with the Payson Church?”
“Obviously, she thinks you have something that will help her get to J.—I have no idea why. Jenny’s logic usually eludes me. You’ll need to be careful, regardless. What else have you found out?”
“The biggest thing? Lilah’s apparently in town—she was seen at Edie Woolwich’s place last night. Do you know who that is?”
“I have no idea,” Cameron said briefly. “It doesn’t matter, though. If Lilah is in town, you need to leave. There’s no question that something’s about to happen.”
“We already talked about this,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere—”
“Listen to me—”
“No,” I said. “You listen to me. We’re not going, and there’s no time to keep having the same discussion. If Lilah was at Edie’s place, what does that mean? What’s our next step?
There was a long, seething silence on the other end of the line. Finally, Cameron spoke.
“Is it possible this Edie woman is another of J.’s operatives?” he asked. “That Lilah programmed her as the next alternate?”
“Edie Woolwich? Unless things have changed drastically since I was here a couple years ago, I seriously doubt it,” I said.
“Will you check? Carefully. I don’t expect that you’ll run into trouble there as long as you keep a low profile. Jenny will keep her distance, at the very least. And you won’t find Lilah there,” he said. “If she’s still in town at all, she knows something’s up. She’ll be staying under the radar. If you could just talk to this Edie woman, get a sense of her state of mind… If she is another alternate and we’re able to get a fix on her early, we may be able to stop this once and for all.”
“Let’s go hog wild and say your theory’s right,” I said, “and Edie Woolwich goes psycho killer on our asses? I mean, this is Diggs and me we’re talking about. We tend to bring that out in people.”
“Just tread carefully,” he said. “I need to go. Call me as soon as you learn anything else.”
He hung up on me.
“He wants us to talk to Edie?” Diggs asked.
“That’s what he said.” A red BMW convertible rolled toward Laurie’s house with an attractive man about Diggs’ age at the wheel. Laurie’s dad, presumably. I nodded toward the sidewalk, and we got moving.
“Call Jack. Let’s see what he says,” Diggs said.
“Do I mention Lilah? Because let’s not forget that she’s ostensibly the woman responsible for his wife’s death. It could get messy if he decides to come with us, and Lilah’s actually there.”
“You don’t think it’s going to get messy anyway?”
“Right.”
We kept walking while I dialed, headed in the direction of Edie’s rooming house. Jack took longer to answer the phone, and honestly wasn’t that much more pleasant to talk to than Cameron.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Any number of things,” I said. “The most pressing at the moment is that we think someone from J. was at Edie Woolwich’s place last night. Cameron wants Diggs and me to check it out.”
“Someone from J.,” he repeated. “Lilah?”
I thought of the look I’d seen in his eye that morning when we were talking about all this. Thought of what Diggs would do if someone did to me what J. did to his wife. The mental picture that came up wasn’t a good one.
“Erin,” he prompted.
“We think so,” I said. “Yes.”
“When was she seen last?” he asked.
<
br /> “Last night.”
“You’re headed there now?”
“Yeah, but we’re on foot.”
“I just need to tie a few things up here. I’ll meet you at Edie’s.”
And he hung up on me. I was sensing a trend.
“What did he say?” Diggs asked.
“Not goodbye. He’ll meet us at Edie’s.”
“Good. At least we’re not going in alone—that makes me feel a little better.”
Since I figured neither of us had it in us to go over any more of what we’d learned from Laurie, and I definitely wasn’t prepared to talk about that ring again, I settled for slipping my hand into Diggs’ so he at least knew I was in his corner. He squeezed my fingers. We picked up our pace. Whether Lilah was at Edie’s now or had simply been there recently, I really didn’t want Jack to get there first.
Edie’s place was close to the Littlehope wharf, which was conveniently located on the other side of town from Laurie’s house. Diggs and I walked the mile there in silence, both of us hunched against the wind and snow, which was coming down harder now. The roads were already covered with a light dusting, but it did nothing to slow the pickups that sped past.
When we reached the end of the lane leading to Edie’s, I searched the roads both ahead and behind. So far, we’d seen no sign of Jenny since we’d left Laurie’s.
The Littlehope Residential Home for the Mentally Ill was a rambling old Victorian situated on a hill at the end of Seaside Lane. It housed at least half a dozen people with afflictions ranging from borderline personality to schizophrenia to bipolar disorder, and any number of combinations thereof. As we walked up the hill to Edie’s place, I tried to ignore a mounting sense of dread.
A hinged wooden sign mounted on a post on the front lawn swung violently in the wind, the hinges creaking so loudly that I could hear them even after we were long past the thing. There was a wraparound deck at the front of the house, where a woman and two men were smoking. At a glance I could see that the woman was most likely not Lilah—Laurie had pegged her age as over forty, but had said she was dark-haired and Spanish. The woman on the deck had black hair tinged with silver, and looked closer to sixty. The thought that I was putting this much faith in Laurie’s vague description was not comforting.