by Rachel Caine
“Vee,” she says. “Vera Crockett. Momma said you help people. And your number was in her phone.”
The accent is familiar, and so is the last name. Marlene Crockett was the woman who called me after the Howie Hamlin disaster. Who clearly had something on her mind, but couldn’t bring herself to say what it was. Who’d wanted me to pick up and drive to a nowhere town to discuss it in person.
I’m instantly on guard. Using a kid, that’s low. I have to resist an urge to hang up. “Put your mother on the phone, please.”
“I can’t,” Vee says. She sounds strangely flat. “She’s dead.”
“Excuse me?” I’m turning to look at Sam, instinctively, lips parting. I shake my head to tell him I don’t know what’s going on, but the tone of my voice has alerted him to something odd. “When? What happened?”
“You should come,” Vee says. “They’re goin’ to get me soon too. She’s dead on the floor, and they’ll come for me next.”
“Vera? Vee? Are you saying that your mother is on the floor right now?”
“Yes.”
I feel the world shrink around me, reality condensing into the voice on the phone. “Okay, I need you to call 911, Vee.”
“If I do that, they’ll kill me.” She sounds calm, but terrifyingly disconnected. I don’t know what I’m dealing with here. “Shoot me down like a dog right here.”
I gesture to Sam, cover the mouthpiece, and say, “Get on the phone with Kezia. Tell her to get the Wolfhunter police over to Marlene Crockett’s house. I don’t know what’s going on, but the daughter says her mother’s dead.”
He doesn’t hesitate or ask questions; he grabs his phone and walks off to the corner to make the call.
“Vee,” I say. “Your mother. Can you tell if she’s breathing?”
“She’s dead.” No affect in her voice. None at all. Shock? Something else? I don’t know.
“Can you check for a pulse for me?”
“She’s dead.” For the first time, I hear emotion. It’s exasperation, and it jolts me. “She’s on the floor, and—”
I hear Vee Crockett hesitate. Go silent.
When she speaks again, she’s whispering. “They’re comin’ back.”
“Vee? Vee!”
She’s put down her phone, or dropped it. I hear something like footsteps, or banging, and then an ear-shattering bang that makes me flinch and stare at the mouthpiece, as if expecting something to come out of it other than sound.
I conquer that impulse in another second and put it back to my ear. “Vee? Vera! Talk to me! What’s happening?”
Sam’s still on the phone, watching me. I raise a hand helplessly. Vee Crockett isn’t talking. But I can hear something. Movement? Distant shouting? Something like that.
And then, suddenly, her flat, calm voice is back. “That sent him runnin’.”
“Vera, what just happened?”
“I fired the shotgun,” she says. “Right through the door. Guess that one’s headin’ right for the hills.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Vee . . .” I don’t know what else to do but keep her talking. “Vee, your mom said that she was worried about something. Was it about you?”
“No,” she said. “My momma’s never worried about me. Well, if she did, she sure gave up a while ago. Can’t really blame her.”
None of this makes sense. I don’t know how to read this young woman. “Vee, how old are you?”
“Fifteen,” she says. That hurts. I close my eyes briefly.
“I have a daughter your age,” I tell her. “I know I’d do anything for her. I’m sure your mother felt that way too.” I swallow hard. I need to keep her talking. God, she’s just a baby. “Tell me about your mom, Vee. What happened the last time you talked with her?”
“I don’t remember,” Vee says. “Doesn’t matter now. She’s dead. She’s dead, and I . . .”
She doesn’t finish the sentence, but I feel a sick, crawling sensation. Was the end of that sentence: and I killed her? Marlene had been so vague about what was happening. She’d mentioned nothing specific, but maybe she’d been loath to admit she was scared of her own daughter. That would be an awful thing to face.
I hear something in the distance. Sirens.
“Vee? Are you still holding the shotgun?” I ask her.
“Yes.”
“I need you to do something for me,” I say. I keep my voice calm, assertive, and caring as I can manage. Sam hangs up his call and comes to stand across from me, drinking in my expression, my body language. There’s nothing he can do, though. This is all on me. “I want you to put the shotgun on the floor. Do it now, please.”
I hear movement. Rustling. A heavy thunk. “All right,” Vee says, “I did that. But they’re gonna shoot me anyway. They’ve been itchin’ for an excuse.”
“They won’t,” I say. “Now I want you to open your front door, hold up both hands real high, and stand there on your porch. You have a porch, don’t you?” Most people do, in the rural south.
“Yes’m,” she says. “But if I go out there, they’re gonna shoot me dead.”
“I promise you they won’t if you raise your hands high.”
“If I do, I can’t hear you on the phone,” she says. Perfectly reasonably, yet still with that odd, flat lack of emotion.
“Can you put me on speakerphone?”
“Oh. Sure.” She does, I hear the change in environment, the way the world opens up into an indistinct fog around her. “Okay. I’m goin’ to the front door.” Shockingly, she giggles. “Man alive, I punched a hole clean through that thing! I can see all the way through.”
I’m sick, thinking that there might also be a dead person on the porch on the other side of the door, but I don’t say that. I just say, “Okay, please open the front door, slowly, and raise both your hands. Are you doing that, Vee?”
I hear the creak of hinges. Vee’s voice comes more distant now. “Yes’m.”
“Step out slowly, and keep your hands up.”
This is the moment. I hear the sirens outside wailing to a stop. I hear car doors opening. I can close my eyes and imagine it in a spinning 360 degrees: Vee, on the porch. The hole blasted in the door behind her. Someone wounded on the ground, maybe, or even dead. Two—no, three now—police cars, which must be the full complement of Wolfhunter police, gathered around the place. Officers with guns drawn, nervous and ready to fire.
“Drop it!” one of them yells, and I realize he’s mistaken the phone she’s holding above her head for a weapon.
“Drop the phone, Vee,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says, calm as a winter lake.
I hear the phone fall.
An impact.
Then three beeps, and the call goes dead.
There’s not a lot of discussion about what to do next. I try calling the number back. It just rings and goes to an automated robotic greeting. I can picture the phone hitting the porch and shattering . . . and even if it didn’t, it’ll be in an evidence bag shortly, and no one will answer. Either Vee Crockett has been shot, or she’s in handcuffs right now.
Fifteen years old.
I’m shoving a couple of changes of clothes into a duffel bag as I talk to Sam. “I have to go,” I tell him. “Her mother called me for help. And now I’m in this as a witness whether I go or not. Vee called me before the police came; they’ll need my statement on the record. I don’t want them coming here and making a scene for Miranda’s film crew to record.”
I see Sam flinch at that. Or maybe just at the mention of Miranda. “You don’t know that will happen.”
“I do,” I tell him. “These documentary people are circling like vultures. And they will seize on this if the police roll up to our door. Better if I handle it away from home.”
I want to talk to him about Melvin’s note in his sister’s journal, about the awful shock of that and the emotional wreckage of last night, but I know that this has to take priority.
> He shuts the bedroom door behind him. “Gwen. Stop.”
I pause, at least. I look up at him, restlessly folding and refolding a shirt.
“You’re a target,” he says. He walks to me. “You can’t put yourself in the middle of something when you’ve got no idea what’s going on up there.”
“I can’t leave a fifteen-year-old girl out there by herself either. She called me,” I tell him. “Her mother’s dead. If it was Lanny—”
“But she isn’t Lanny, she isn’t,” he says. He puts his hands on my shoulders, and I ache to be pulled into an embrace, but he doesn’t do it. He holds me there, at arm’s length. “You can’t take on trouble in a strange town. You don’t know the players, or the people. And you’ve got no stake in this thing.”
“But I do.” I meet his gaze, and he blinks first. “Sam, I know you’re just looking out for me. I know the risks. I know. I’m not that much safer staying here. Leaving and avoiding the cameras . . .” I have a second of bone-deep panic, of losing my breath. I’m back in Louisiana, in a room with a camera and blood and a dead woman and my brutal ex. I’m on the Howie Hamlin stage, trapped in a nightmare.
If I face another video camera right now, I’ll lose it completely.
“Goddammit,” he says, but he’s not angry. Just resigned. He leans his head against mine, foreheads gently touching. Then lips, in a sweet, quiet kiss, as if I hadn’t shattered him just last night. “Okay. But you’re not going alone.”
“But the kids—”
“The kids go too,” he says. “We all have to go, or you don’t.”
What he’s not saying is, We go as a family, but I feel that. I need that. I kiss him again, more fiercely, and feel his hands drift up to cup my face. He brushes hair back from my forehead and looks at me like I’m something he’s trying to memorize.
Then he steps back. “I’ll tell the kids to get packed.”
The kiss still lingers on my lips, makes me tremble inside, and I want . . . more. It scares me. I never expected to find this, not here, not with him, but Sam Cade is never what I expect, moment to moment. I want to heal the gulf between us. I need to.
I have the oddest feeling, though. I feel like he’s relieved.
Like he wants to escape Stillhouse Lake right now as much as I do.
“But where are we going?” Connor asks as I watch him stuff way too many books in his bag. “Someplace cool?”
“Probably not, kiddo,” I tell him. “A place called Wolfhunter.”
He pauses. I can tell he’s never heard of it. “It sounds cool.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been there. But it’s at the edge of the Daniel Boone.” The Daniel Boone National Forest is a huge swath of dark forest, and just saying it sets a mood. Connor’s eyes widen. We’ve been there, of course; it was one of the first things I did with the kids when we moved here.
“Are we camping?” he asks.
“I sure hope not. There ought to be a motel we can stay at. I’m hoping it’s just for a day or two.”
He hesitates, then packs another book. I have to hide a smile. He’s as bad about that as I am about self-defense equipment. The collapsible baton in the bottom of my bag weighs at least as much as three of his paperbacks, and it’s far from the only thing I have in there.
“Why are we going?” he asks.
“You remember the lady who called me the other day for help?” He nods. “Her daughter’s in trouble.”
“How old is she?”
“Lanny’s age.”
“Oh. I thought maybe it was the other girl.”
“What other girl?” I ask.
“The one from the TV show.” He picks up his phone, and calls something up. He hands it to me. On the screen is a picture of a beautiful little African American girl of maybe six or seven, smiling for the camera and bursting with charm. “Remember? Her parents were on there. She was kidnapped from her school. They were in the waiting room with us.”
I remembered now: the traumatized couple in Howie’s greenroom. I’d barely registered them at the time, so intent on fleeing that I didn’t care about anyone else’s reasons for being there. I’d just wanted out. “Oh.” I sit down on the edge of Connor’s bed. “How long has she been gone?”
“Almost a week now,” he says. “She’s probably not coming back, right?”
I don’t want him to know these things. Not at his age. But statistically speaking, he’s on point; most young children who are abducted don’t survive more than a few hours. “Didn’t I hear there was some kind of ransom demand, though?” The details are filtering back to me. Abducted from her school in a slick, organized effort. Not an impulsive, need-driven act, but a planned and orchestrated one. That doesn’t mean the girl is alive. But it indicates she has a better-than-average chance to survive.
Connor’s eager to catch me up. He’s clearly been following the case. “The discussion boards say that the dad paid the ransom, but nobody knows for sure,” he says. “So maybe there was a secret payment to get her back.”
“Back up, Connor: Discussion boards?”
Some of the brightness fades out of him. “Sorry. But I don’t go to the ones that talk about my father. I promise.”
“Don’t go to any of them,” I tell him. “And you know you can’t believe what you read on Reddit,” I say. “Stay off the boards, okay?”
“I don’t post, I only read.”
“Don’t make me put them on the block list, Connor.”
He gives me a frown. “I’m not some little kid. But you never want me to know anything.”
I don’t. Earnestly. Not about child abductions, and certainly not about the depths of horror that human beings have in them. Not about his dad, though I know he already knows much more than I think. “I want you to know things. I also want to be sure you’re ready for it,” I say, and mean it. “I don’t want you to get a warped view of the world either.” Not like mine. “People are good most of the time. Bad some of the time. Rely on the internet for how you look at the world, though, and you’ll see the worst side of people represented far too much.”
“That’s not true, Mom,” he says. “People put together big movements on the internet. They help each other. Strangers help strangers. It isn’t all bad.”
He’s right, of course. My son’s more well balanced than I am. “Okay. But I mean it. Do not fall for things that feel right, and sound wrong. Understand?”
“Like the lies my father was telling me,” he says. “Yes. I know.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I tell him, and he looks down at the book he’s turning over in his hands. “He shouldn’t have done that to you.”
He shrugs, a loose circle of his shoulders. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t as bad as what he would have done to you, probably.”
I blink. I see a cold black camera lens, focusing on me. My throat tightens up, and I know I’m going to have to deal with this trauma sooner rather than later, and in a more constructive manner than pushing it away. But right now there’s a girl in Wolfhunter who’s all alone. A dead woman who asked me for help.
“I’m sorry about the little one,” I say. “I wish I could help her too. But first we’re going to see what we can do for this girl, okay?”
He nods, and adds more books to his already overstuffed bag. Connor builds his walls out of stories. As far as coping goes, he could do a whole lot worse. I have.
I check on Lanny. She’s already packed, in one backpack. Less than what I’m taking. She’s pacing in the living room, arms folded, and when I say her name, she jumps and turns with a smile that I know isn’t real. “Hey! Don’t sneak up on me like that.” She seems genuinely distressed.
“Are you okay?” I ask her. That sets her back a step, and I see her put up her sarcasm shields to full strength.
“Oh, sure. I’m super okay with a sudden trip to nowhere, to do nothing, when I was going to see Dahlia tomorrow! You know how much I wanted to do that, right?”
I’d never leave her o
n her own, but I do briefly consider leaving her in the care of Dahlia Brown’s mom, Mandy . . . except that if Lanny and Dahlia are having trouble, putting the two of them in the same house for a day or two might shatter that relationship for good. I don’t want to be responsible for that. So I say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“Such bullshit.”
“Lanny.”
“Yeah, okay, fine. Let’s go already!” My daughter is nerves and edges, and I wonder why. I want to ask, but I know her. This isn’t the time. She doesn’t want confidences. She wants to be on the move. I leave her pacing, gather Sam and Connor, and head back for the living room and front door.
We all stop when the doorbell rings. Sam’s closest to the monitor; he steps back to look at the camera feed. “It’s Kezia,” he says, and I open the door.
Kez looks tired. She nods to me, and I step back to let her in. She embraces Lanny, bumps fists with Connor, and the kids are genuinely glad to see her. I’m not sure I am. I close and lock the door and cast a glance at Sam.
“Yeah, so, I thought I’d better come by,” she says. “Y’all are going out there?”
It’s not a huge deductive leap. The four of us carry bags.
“We are,” I say. I’m half expecting her to object, but she looks relieved.
“Good, because my little chat with Wolfhunter PD didn’t go so well. Good ol’ boys seem to have declared this case open and shut, but they want you to get up there to give them a statement, not just about what happened tonight but why you were in touch with the dead woman in the first place.” She wants to ask, but she also knows better. Kezia understands the kind of people who call me for help, and what their situations usually are: dire. She wouldn’t want to discuss it in front of the kids. “Call me when you get there,” she says instead. “Not sure I trust these . . . officers.” If we were alone, she’d call them a whole lot worse. “Seems like there’s only a couple of lawyers anywhere near Wolfhunter, so I texted you numbers for them. If you don’t want to memorize them, put them on your arms in permanent marker.”
It’s a precaution taken by activists at marches. I start wondering exactly how bad a vibe she got from the Wolfhunter cops, and what the hell I’m risking dragging my kids into. I look at Sam, and I see the same reservations, but he’s not going to let me go alone, and I’m not leaving them here to fend off this video hit squad that Miranda Tidewell has sent to destroy what’s left of my reputation. Whatever comes in Wolfhunter, we’ll handle it the way we’ve done everything: together.