“Did she get loose?”
“She was in my cart, she couldn’t have gotten out without my noticing!”
“Someone took her,” I snarl, and adrenaline starts coursing through my veins. Suddenly, I feel like I can see more intensely, every sense heightened as I take off running through the busy parking lot.
“FLORA!” I bellow, my deep voice carrying through the whole parking lot.
“Flora!” I hear Blossom’s voice behind me. If only to help find her child, she can set aside her judgment and work with me. I would take that as a good sign, if I weren’t busy feeling just as much urgency to find Flora as she is. After all, she’s my daughter, too. And I’ll be damned if I let some stranger harm a hair on her precious little head.
I dart through cars, bursting out onto the next aisle and hearing the sounds of honking horns and screeching tires as customers scramble to avoid hitting me. One comes close, but I hop over the hood and keep going without missing a beat. I worry for a moment that Blossom is going to chase after me, but she smartly fans out and covers the ground closer to the store.
The two of us fill the parking lot with our shouts, and after a few moments, I catch sight of Sage staggering out of the store, looking wide-eyed and confused. Blossom starts shouting the situation to her while I dart off further across the lot, shouting my daughter’s name.
My daughter.
The idea of coming so close to reconnecting with Blossom and meeting Flora, my own flesh and blood, only to have her torn away from me...it fills me with a more pure and unrestrained fury than I’ve ever known in my life. What Blossom described sounds like a textbook kidnapping from public. A mother turns her head for half a second, and the child is gone. It’s a nightmare come to life.
And if there’s one thing I can say I’ve done with my life, it’s take a little more of that nightmare out of the world and sent it to hell where it belongs. I’m going to find whoever took our child and tear him limb from limb.
Searching car to car, I see nothing. Every second that goes by feels like another inch toward oblivion. I stop and reach down to my pant leg to take my knife out, holding it at the ready as I whip my head around for a sign of anything. I keep running toward the far end of the lot, where employees normally park, and I stop dead in my tracks.
Lying in one of the empty parking spots is the little white lilac I tucked into Flora’s hair at the cabin. I feel my fist tighten around the leather handle of the knife so tightly that my knuckles turn white, yet I feel like I’m seeing red.
She’s gone.
We are too late.
I hear running footsteps coming up next to me, and Blossom comes to a halt at my side. She gasps at the sight of the flower, a more terrible, heart-wrenching sound than I’ve heard in my life. My eyes scan the area around the parking spot, but I see nothing. No sign of anyone, much less Flora and a kidnapper. I feel my heart sinking, and for the first time in a long time, I feel powerless.
“Mommy!”
The word hits us both like a lightning bolt, and our heads snap to a tree on a median not far from where we’re standing. I stow my knife and race after the sound of Flora’s voice so fast that I don’t even realize my legs are moving.
I vault over a compact car and find Flora sitting on the curb of the parking lot, her knee scuffed and her eyes wide with fear and confusion.
“Baby!” Blossom cries, and she rushes past me to Flora, scooping her up in her arms and hugging her tight as tears flow from her eyes freely. I’ve never felt so relieved in my life, and I let a smile cross my face as I step forward and look into Flora’s frightened face.
“It’s okay, darling,” I say, “we’re here.”
As soon as I say that, Blossom turns Flora’s face from me, glaring at me with a face that tells me she hasn’t forgotten the fact that we’re not on good terms right now, but both of us know our relief over finding Flora overrides that for now.
“What happened to you, sweetie?” Blossom asks, holding Flora back enough to look her in the eyes. “Did someone hurt you?”
“A man was here,” she says. The kid is clearly still jarred by everything that happened, unable to process all of it, but she’s old enough to be very alert to her surroundings.
“A man! A man? Sweetie, what kind of man?” Blossom urges her in a trembling voice, more panicked by the second.
“He was big, and he picked me up,” she says.
“What did he do, honey? Did he hurt you?”
She shakes her head, but she seems put off enough that she is at least partially aware that this was not a good man.
“He took me outside here,” she says. “He clicked the car open with his key, but then he saw them and got scared.” She points past us to a police cruiser that is stopped outside the store, idling. The cops are probably here on routine shoplifting prevention duty. They must not have even seen us running.
“The police cars?” Blossom clarifies. Flora nods her head.
“The kidnapper must have seen the cops and gotten scared,” I say.
“He drop me, but I’m okay,” she says bravely, looking down to her scraped knee. Blossom seems to have only just noticed it, and she gasps, quickly sitting down on the sidewalk, reaching into her purse and taking out a wet wipe to start cleaning it.
“Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry,” she says, and I see her hand shaking as she tries to work. I calmly stoop down beside her and take the wipe from her. She looks up at me for a moment, hesitant, but I give her a nod and start cleaning up Flora’s scrape. The little girl winces when the wipe touches her scuffed-up knee, but to her credit, she holds it together without so much as a single tear. She’s one strong little lady.
“He’s long gone by now,” I say. “If he so much as suspects the cops saw him with Flora, he’ll have run so fast I’m surprised he doesn’t get busted with a speeding ticket.”
“He drove real fast,” Flora confirms.
“You’re safe now, sweetheart,” I say to Flora reassuringly, giving her a smile. “Now honey, I need you to listen closely, okay? That man was a bad man. Strangers who try to take you when your mommy isn’t looking are bad people.”
She nods slowly, her face clearly not entirely sure what to make of this new information, but she seems to accept it in stride.
“If that ever happens again, I want you to kick and scream as much as you can,” I say slowly, gesturing with my hands to drive the point home. “Scream that it’s not your mommy or your sister. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says, and Blossom sniffs as she nods in agreement.
“I love you so much, honey,” Blossom says, hugging Flora tight. The kid, blissfully ignorant to what almost happened today, simply hugs her back and giggles.
“I love you too, Mommy!”
Sage finds us, panting and out of breath, but she looks just as relieved as Blossom when she sees her niece.
“Oh thank fuck,” Sage gushes.
“What does that word mean?” Flora asks Blossom innocently as Sage winces.
“She said ‘duck’, honey,” Blossom says quickly, covering Flora’s ears while narrowing her eyes at Sage, but she smiles the next moment. “Let’s get back to the car. I’ll explain in there.”
We make our way back to Blossom’s car, and even I can feel how awkward and tense the walk is. Blossom doesn’t want to look back at me, but Sage keeps glancing between me and Blossom, knowing something’s up. I get the feeling she hasn’t told Sage what she has all but confirmed. I can’t help but feel relief, but that leaves unanswered questions between me and Blossom. When we reach the car, Sage helps Flora get into the carseat and climbs into the passenger’s side, closing the door while Blossom lingers by the closed driver’s side door.
She’s waiting for me to speak, or rather debating with herself whether she wants to wait. I make the decision for her.
“I was twenty-four,” I say calmly. She looks up at me with a searching gaze, and I meet it, not a scrap of dishonesty in my eyes. “Almost a fu
ll year after you got taken away, and just a few months of being on my own in a new town. I hadn’t gotten this job yet. I was working at a lumber camp for cash. It was the kind of place people went when they had to lay low.” I run my hand over my face and take a deep breath, putting a hand on the trunk. “That was where I killed first.”
“What happened?” she asks, her voice as defiant as it is curious.
“The foreman used to bring his son to work with him,” I say, remembering the boy’s face. “He couldn’t have been older than fourteen. Frail boy. Wasn’t suited to that kind of work. The foreman had problems at home with his wife. Everyone knew it, but nobody could talk back to him. The workers who took smoke breaks did it behind this old abandoned trailer at the camp. I headed back there to take a phone call one afternoon while I was cleaning up, and I caught them.”
Blossom’s gaze is fixed on me, deciding whether to believe what I’m saying. Given her career, I have no doubt she knows where I’m going with this.
“He was beating the boy with the flat of an old hand-saw. I don’t know what set him off. I think he made a bad cut earlier that morning. Or maybe the foreman was just having a rough day. The boy was biting down on a rag, just taking it, tears in his eyes. Getting hit all over his thighs and his stomach, places his mother wouldn’t see.”
I look over at Blossom without a shred of remorse in my eyes.
“We saw each other, but the foreman didn’t even say anything. He knew I wouldn’t talk. It would cost all of us our jobs. He just left with his boy.” I take my hands off the trunk and let them hang at my sides, taking a deep breath. “I waited until his wife finally kicked him out of the house, tracked down the bachelor’s motel where he was crashing, and caught him on his way to work one morning. That was before I started using the lilacs. The police haven’t even connected that one to my profile. I’ll be surprised if they even find what’s left of him.”
“Why are you telling me this, Hunter?” she asks, her voice so close to quivering with fear and yet so strong.
“Because I want you to know why I do what I do,” I say firmly, taking a few steps toward her. She doesn’t budge. “Because I want you to know I’m not some narcissist doing this to stroke my ego. I do it because people like my parents, like that foreman, like the man who tried to take Flora, they’re out there and getting away with evil every day. Someone needs to be the bad guy who can bite back.”
We stare into each other’s eyes, both of us equal parts defiant and resolute.
“And if there’s someone out there who wants to hurt Flora,” I say in a low, deadly tone, “I’m going to crush their skull with my bare hands...but we need to be on the same page. That, or you could call the police, and they’ll be all over my ass before I’m halfway back to the cabin.” I pause, looking into those beautiful, reflective eyes.
“So?” I ask. “What’ll it be?”
Blossom
Hunter’s story keeps pinging around in my brain, like a bunch of marbles rattling around a cardboard box. I can’t seem to wrap my head around what he confessed to me. What he revealed. The side of him he’s kept closed-off and private from the rest of the world. For a moment, I wonder if there’s anyone else out there who knows the truth. If there’s someone else he’s confided in. But I can’t imagine what type of person that would have to be. Hunter has always been fiercely independent and private. He wears a brave, nearly unreadable face, all the time. I know it’s by design. You don’t live through the kind of upbringing he had and escape totally unscatched and with your innocence intact. Hunter doesn’t trust anyone, and I’m sure that kind of long-term paranoia and frustration with the way our world fails to reward the good and punish the evil is what pushes him into this dark, shadowy corner. It is easy enough to follow the exact trajectory that led him to becoming the White Lilac killer. The path he walks is littered with reasons, big reasons, solid reasons, for taking up the mantle of a vigilante for justice.
But those are just reasons, right? Not excuses.
It’s a circular line of logic, I know, but I keep riding this infinite track back and forth between two ends of my reasoning. On the one hand, Hunter has straight-up admitted to me that he’s responsible for at least one death, if not countless others. He has a death toll, and it’s climbing ever higher. What’s more is that he seems to bear no remorse for his actions. Hunter is not ashamed to have played the roles of judge, jury, and executioner for a bunch of random strangers. That should frighten me. It does frighten me. Of course, it does. I would have to be totally insane to look at Hunter with that damn hunting knife in his hand and not feel a twinge of fear. It’s only natural. Humans may think they’re complex, but underneath all the trappings of society and decorum, aren’t we just frightened animals all desperately trying to stay alive and out of harm’s way? Especially me. Because it’s not just myself I have to worry about. There is a tiny, perfect, pure creature completely under my wing. Flora. I have to protect her from bad things, even if those bad things look so handsome and seem to care so much about her and me. That’s my role as her mother: to protect her.
But on the other hand, if there’s anyone in this world who is capable of protecting my little family, wouldn’t it be a man like Hunter? He’s agile and strong. He’s clever and cautious, and yet he’s reckless enough to throw himself in harm’s way if it means protecting the ones he loves most in the world. And I know he doesn’t have anyone else to love. No family. Probably no real friendships. I mean, I can’t imagine that life as a traveling hunting specialist-slash-serial killer is particularly conducive to creating long-lasting friendships. All the love he has in his heart is reserved for me, and now for my sister and daughter, too. I can still see so vividly in my mind’s eye the image of him doting on Flora, holding her, playing with her, making her laugh and smile so big. Hell, even Sage, who is notoriously stubborn and hard to crack, seemed to like him. He made her smile. He got her to talk a little bit. That has to mean something.
Don’t be so foolish, Blossom, I think to myself sharply. I have researched more than enough true crime content to know that serial killers are often very good at charming and disarming people. It’s why they’re so dangerous, so insidious. They know how to smile and look normal, even when they’re hiding a knife behind their back.
But I can’t deny that what happened with Flora at the supermarket has me pretty shaken up. I have had only a couple of moments during the past five years that were even remotely similar to the dire panic of a near-kidnapping.
One time, when Flora was just a little baby, maybe not even six months old, I was lying in bed listening to the baby monitor. I used to fall asleep that way every night, soothed to sleep by the soft, rhythmic sound of her snoring. And then suddenly, it was all too quiet. Silent, actually. Her breathing had stopped. I sat straight up in bed, petrified. I listened hard...and nothing. Terrified that my baby was in distress, I rushed into her nursery to see that she was sleeping soundly, her little chest rising and falling just as it should. As it turned out, the batteries in the monitor had simply run out, so the thing turned off. Another time, when she was just about to turn four, I momentarily lost track of her at a public park. I looked down for one second to send a text message to Sage, who was in a tizzy because she’d locked herself out of our apartment, and when I looked back up, Flora was nowhere in sight. I immediately freaked out and ran around screaming her name, no doubt traumatizing all the other kids and parents there that day. Finally, I found her sitting underneath a slide, just chilling out like nothing was wrong. Her explanation? It was hot out, and she wanted to go into the shade to cool down. I was so relieved to find her again, and even though she’d only been missing from my sight for less than a whole minute, it was enough to give me recurring nightmares for weeks afterward.
I glance up at the rearview mirror to see Flora’s eyelids drooping a little. She’s staring out the window, blinking slowly and yawning. I smile to myself, feeling my heart surge with affection for my little angel.
“Sleepy, baby?” I ask softly.
It seems to take a lot out of her to turn and look at me, yawning. She nods. “Tired, Mommy,” she says simply.
“It’s been a big day,” Sage agrees, stroking Flora’s pudgy cheek.
“You can close your eyes and take a little nap, if you want. We’ll probably be home by the time you wake back up,” I urge her in a gentle tone.
“Okay, Mommy.”
She shuts her eyes and leans her head against one side of the booster seat. Her pouty bottom lip pokes out as she almost immediately drifts off to sleep. Sage and I exchange looks of pure exhaustion. Even though she missed the bulk of our panic in the parking lot, I know this is wearing on her, too. It’s a lot of work, both physically and mentally, caring for a little one. Most of the time, I feel like Sage and I are a dream team. But sometimes...I just wish we had someone else around to help out.
Like Hunter?
I swallow hard, trying to shake away that thought. But the truth is, I don’t feel safe with him, and I don’t feel safe without him either. Still, when I notice he’s still trailing behind us on the highway, I do feel a little thrill of relief. I guess that’s my answer. For now, at least.
The rest of the three-hour drive goes smoothly. I stop once for gas, with Hunter doing the same, and thankfully Flora stays asleep the whole time, even when I have to start up the engine again. The poor little thing is totally worn out. I can’t blame her. She was nearly kidnapped today. That’s got to take a major toll on a tiny body. I find myself angrily wondering if she’ll have to get counseling for this. Such a frightening experience could have a serious negative impact on her developing psyche. The thought that some strange man would put his filthy hands on my daughter with no regard for her well-being makes me want to pull over, get out of the car, and just scream at the top of my lungs. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right that evil guys like that even get to exist and breathe the same air as sweet, innocent children like Flora.
Hunter’s Baby Page 11