When her bag was packed, she headed for the study, ignoring the framed photo still lying facedown on the desk as she punched in the safe code, waited for the light on the keypad to go green, then blindly raked the contents into her purse: insurance policies, investment records, passports, birth certificates, and the envelope containing Stephen’s emergency cash—in case of a zombie apocalypse, he had once joked. Leave it to Stephen to think he could buy his way out of the end of world.
She closed the safe and was preparing to leave when she looked down at her left hand, at the ring that symbolized her marriage—a colorless two-carat emerald cut. Nothing but the best for the wife of Stephen Ludlow. It slid easily from her finger; apparently she’d lost weight after a week of subsisting on tea and toast. Her hand felt strangely light, but there was no sense of guilt as she placed the ring on the desk. Stephen had walked away from their marriage some time ago. Now it was her turn.
She held her breath as she peered out the front windows. As far as she could tell, the coast was still clear, no news trucks parked outside the gate, no photographers crouching in the boxwoods. Breath held, she shouldered her bags, stepped out onto the porch, and made a break for the Rover sitting in the middle of the driveway.
Her heart hammered as she scrambled up behind the wheel, locked all four doors, and started the engine. The gates slid soundlessly as she pressed the remote, and then she was through them with nothing but empty road before her.
The exhilaration was almost heady, but unsettling too as the memory of another night—another hastily packed bag, another breathless getaway—came rushing at her. It was hard not to see the irony. At the age of sixteen, she had slipped out of a house in the middle of the night and run for all she was worth. Now, twenty years later, she was running again.
FOUR
Ravenel, South Carolina
January 8, 1994
Christy-Lynn hunches deeper into her jacket as she moves down the puddled sidewalk, kicking herself for not leaving her math and science books in her locker. It’s ridiculously cold, even for January, and an icy rain is falling. She keeps her head down, drawn in like a turtle’s beneath her oversize hood, limiting her field of vision to the three feet of pavement directly in front of her.
Her hands are numb with cold, clenched into fists and thrust deep in her pockets. Her apartment key is there. She turns it over in her fingers, already anticipating the cup of hot chocolate she’ll make when she reaches the apartment—if there’s any left. At this point, she’ll settle for tea. As long as it’s hot.
She quickens her pace when the sign for the Palm Manor Apartments comes into view, the painted letters flaking off into what might once have been a garden, but is now just a muddy puddle littered with candy wrappers and cigarette butts. Only a few more steps and she’ll be inside, warm and dry, with a mug of something hot to drink. And her copy of The Outsiders.
It was supposed to be homework for Mrs. Kendrick’s English class, but it didn’t feel like homework at all. How could reading be work when you got to meet people and go places you’d never be able to go in real life? She smiles as she thinks of Cherry and Ponyboy, the movie-star-handsome Sodapop. They have become her friends, outsiders like her, from the wrong side of town. Except they have one another, and she has no one, a freak loner from an entirely different world than kids who wore name-brand jeans and went home to real houses. It might be nice to belong to a gang—not the drug-selling, gun-toting kind of gang—just a few kids who wouldn’t tease her for wearing thrift store clothes and bringing her lunch in a brown paper bag.
She’s still weighing the pros and cons of gang membership when the rain-drenched quiet is broken by a sharp string of oaths. “Goddamn rain! Every goddamn time I gotta boot somebody out, it goddamn rains!”
Christy-Lynn jerks her head up, knocking the hood back from her face as she searches for the source of the swearing, then freezes when she spots a mound of clothing and furniture on the soaking wet steps outside their apartment. And then she’s running with the rain in her eyes and a knot in her stomach, running toward a man carrying the mismatched lamps her mother had brought home from Goodwill a few months back.
“What are you doing? That’s our stuff!”
“And that’s my apartment,” the man says, jerking a thumb at the open apartment door. He’s tall and beefy, wearing a soggy wife-beater and dirty gray overalls. “’Less you got six hundred dollars on you. But I’m guessin’ you don’t—any more than your mama did.”
“But you can’t! She isn’t even here!”
“I can,” he barks back. As if to make his point, he drops both lamps onto the soggy heap of household belongings. The larger of the two rolls off the pile and onto the pavement with a sickening pop as the bulb implodes. “Says so right in the lease your old lady signed when she moved in. Two months late, you’re out.”
A boy carrying an armload of towels and pillows appears in the doorway. He’s not much older than she is—fourteen or fifteen—a younger version of his father, with the same yellow hair, hard jaw, and cold eyes. He fires the pillows out onto the pile from where he stands, then aims a hard little smile at her. It isn’t the first time he’s helped his father evict someone.
Eviction.
The word fills her with shame. She knows things have been tight, that her mother’s been struggling to make ends meet, stretching the groceries with hot dogs and boxed mac and cheese, but she never realized it was this bad. No wonder she’s been picking up extra shifts at the Piggly Wiggly. And why she always looks so worn-out, like little by little she’s coming apart at the seams.
Christy-Lynn is still staring at the sopping heap of their belongings, her gaze locked on a fuzzy purple foot—the stuffed dinosaur her mother had given her for her sixth birthday—when something, a bit of sound or movement, suddenly catches her eye. Her stomach lurches as the curtains part in the window overhead and a pair of faces appear. And they aren’t the only ones watching. All around the complex, people are peering through windows or hovering in doorways, looking on as the scene plays out. Their watching makes it worse somehow.
She shoves down the urge to cry. What good will crying do? She needs to call her mother, to tell her what’s happening, only her boss doesn’t like her getting calls at work, and the last thing they need right now is for Charlene Parker to get fired. Besides, there’s no way to call. Even if the landlord were to let her back into the apartment—which she was willing to bet he wouldn’t—the phone had been shut off weeks ago.
The landlord’s son appears again, this time with an armload of pots and pans, including the cast-iron skillet her mother uses to make corn bread. He drops them onto the stoop with a clatter, then turns back to take a box his father is holding out. It looks like cleaning supplies from under the kitchen sink, window cleaner, cleanser, dish soap, a half-used roll of paper towels. She watches as the cardboard darkens in the rain, the roll of paper towels slowly wilting.
It’s the paper towels that finally push Christy-Lynn to the edge, the sight of them slumping in the sharp, icy rain is simply too much to bear. They don’t have much, a fact that’s hard to dispute when everything they own now sits in one ghastly pile on the stoop. Is it too much to ask that he spare their roll of paper towels? A wave of rage suddenly boils up in her, mingled with a throat full of tears she struggles to swallow. It isn’t the unfairness of it; if they’re really two months behind in their rent, he has the right to evict them. But did he really need to toss their stuff out into the rain while everyone watched?
The son reappears with a stack of plates and mugs. He sets them down on the sidewalk, then drops the dish towels he has wadded under his arm into a puddle. For a moment, she considers charging him, knocking him off his feet and pummeling him bloody, but he’s too big for that.
“Your father’s a bastard, you know that?” she chokes out instead, hating that she can’t keep the tears from bleeding into her words.
He stares at her a moment through the rain, his stra
w-colored hair plastered flat to his head, then shrugs. “If there’s stuff you want, you best get busy.” He bends down and reaches into the carton of cleaning supplies, coming up with a box of plastic trash bags. He tosses the box to her without aiming. “If this stuff ain’t off the sidewalk in the next hour, it’s going in the dumpster.”
Christy-Lynn watches mutely as the landlord’s son disappears back into the apartment. And then finally, because there’s nothing else to do, she stoops to pick up the box of trash bags, rips one from the roll, and begins stuffing handfuls of wet clothes into it.
FIVE
Sweetwater, Virginia
November 20, 2016
Wade Pierce stared at the blinking cursor with gritty eyes. It still wasn’t right. Three hours on one damn scene, and it still wasn’t right. Nor was bashing away at it for another three hours likely to fix the problem. It wasn’t the scene; it was him. He was edgy and unfocused, buzzy from way too much coffee. Frazzled, he shoved back from the table and padded to the fridge for a Mountain Dew, then opted for a bottle of water instead. The last thing he needed was more caffeine. He took a long pull as he opened the sliding glass doors and stepped out onto the deck.
The air was heavy and gray, thick with the scent of damp ground and distant wood smoke. It was a good smell, an earthy smell. No bus fumes or car exhaust. No reek of trash or piss-soaked alleys. He filled his lungs, scanning the rolling hills that rimmed the town of Sweetwater. The foliage that had set the hilltops ablaze in recent weeks was gone now, leaving behind a landscape that seemed to mirror his mood of late, chilly and barren, devoid of color. Maybe a city boy trying to live off the grid wasn’t such a good idea after all. Or maybe he was just sick of his own company.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time—getting away. Okay, running away if he was being truthful. To finally get back to doing something that fed his soul instead of just his bank account. Only it wasn’t working. He liked to pretend running off to the wilds to live like a hermit had been about getting in touch with his muse, but it hadn’t. At least not entirely.
He’d been hoping for peace, maybe some kind of closure after his abrupt and somewhat volatile departure from Week in Review. But coming to Sweetwater hadn’t brought him anything remotely close to peace. Instead, he spent the better part of each day questioning the wisdom of chasing a dream he should have buried twenty years ago.
A novelist. After all the lost years, all the sporadic fits and starts, he was back at it again. Which could only mean he needed his head examined. There were guys who were born with the Midas touch, the Stephen Ludlows of the world, karmic alchemists who despite breaking all the rules never failed to turn dross into gold, who with little or no effort enjoyed fame, fortune, and the adoration of millions. Not to mention getting the girl—the kind who stood by you no matter what. And then there were guys like him, who walked the straight line and kept their noses to the grindstone, but always seemed to end up at the back of the line.
Hell, maybe it was time to pack it in and go back to New York, reclaim his reputation as one of the city’s premier journalists. Except there really wasn’t much to go back to. He’d quit his job and lost his wife pretty much in one go. As for Ludlow, that was ancient history. Holding a grudge about something that happened twenty years ago had been a handy excuse, but it was time to own the choice he’d made all those years ago to walk away from his writing. And so he would stay in this place, where he’d spent every summer of his childhood fishing with his grandfather, and do what he’d come here to do. Win or lose, he would finish the book and take his shot.
Staring out over the lake now, he thought of his grandfather, of sticky afternoons spent on the water, waiting for something to bite. The old man was gone now, God rest his soul, and the cabin belonged to him, though it had been empty for more years than he cared to count. It had been strange at first, being back. He’d spent the first three months getting the place in shape, updating fixtures and appliances, bringing the plumbing and wiring up to code. It was comfortable now, in a barebones, back-to-the-land sort of way. Best of all, there was no television, no phone, and no Wi-Fi. Other than the cell phone he kept for emergencies or an occasional conversation with the mailman, he was blissfully cut off from the world. And that was exactly how he liked it. If there was a blizzard on the way, his phone would alert him, and if it was the end of the world, he’d just as soon not know.
The wind was picking up, swirling the dun-colored leaves at the corners of the deck into papery little tornadoes. To the west, the slow, brooding clouds that had lingered over the hills most of the day had darkened to an ominous shade of pewter. It would storm soon, and he was fine with that. He had nowhere to be and nothing to do, and he wrote better when it was raining.
He had just turned to head back inside when he heard his cell going off. It rang so rarely these days it took a moment to register what he was hearing. Stepping in off the deck, he grabbed the phone from the top of the fridge, expecting it to be Justin saying he was on his way with the cord of wood he had ordered last week.
“Wade! Buddy! How the hell are you?”
Okay, not Justin. Wade scrambled to connect the voice with a face, finally landing on Glen Hoyt, Week in Review’s top crime beat writer. They had teamed up on a few pieces—dirty politicians, contractors lining their pockets on the city’s dime. When it came to digging up dirt, Glen was everybody’s go-to guy. He had also tried to talk him out of leaving Review.
“Glen. What’s up?”
Glen barked out a laugh, and for a moment, Wade could see him leaning back in his chair, battered wingtips propped up on his desk. “Yeah, it’s me. Just calling to see if you’re ready to rejoin the rat race.”
“Let me guess, Killian put you up to calling.”
“No, but I’m sure our beloved editor in chief would kill to get his hooks back in you. Though after the way things went down, I’m guessing that’s not going to happen. You, uh . . . you gave it to him pretty straight.”
“Someone had to.”
“Maybe, but Jesus, man—calling the guy a blackhearted bastard in front of the whole newsroom? That’s a little over the top, don’t you think?”
“Truth in reporting.”
“More like burning your bridges.”
“You only need bridges if you’re planning to go back, and I’m not.”
“Okay, I get it. But you can’t blame me for trying. Place isn’t the same since you left. Killian’s gone through three guys trying to replace you. The last one was the worst yet. Bastard couldn’t lock down a story with both hands and a lug wrench.” A brief silence fell. Glen cleared his throat. “So . . . have you heard from Simone?”
Wade winced at the mention of his ex-wife’s name. He’d been preparing himself for the question, but it caught him off guard, like a punch you saw coming that still knocked the wind out of you. “Why would I hear from Simone?”
“I don’t know. Old times, I guess. She left right after you did.”
“No,” Wade said flatly. “I haven’t heard from her. We don’t have much to talk about anymore. The judge tied everything up nice and neat.”
“Damn. That sucks. I was hoping you guys would patch it up, though I heard a while back that she was seeing someone.”
The silence yawned as Glen’s words sank in. Seeing someone. Yes, of course she was. It wasn’t Simone’s MO to fly solo for very long. She needed a wingman, an alter ego to feed off, someone to fill in her blanks. He’d been that for a while.
“What Simone’s up to is none of my business, Glen.”
“Sure. Sure. I just thought you might, you know, be carrying a torch.”
“No. No torch.”
“Right. Good. Guy’s some hotshot with WKPR. Tall, dark, and hair sprayed. Does the evening news. I think they might be living together.”
Wade set down his bottled water and reached into the fridge for a beer. He twisted off the top, tossed it into the sink, and took a long pull. He wasn’t sure why the new
s stung. Simone had always wanted to make the switch from print to television. God knew she had the looks—not to mention the instincts necessary to claw her way up the food chain.
“You still there, man?”
Wade started. “What? Oh, yeah. Just, you know . . . busy.”
“Oh good. For a minute there, I thought I lost you. So what’s the deal with the book? I know you said you were finally going to finish it. How’s that going?”
“Good,” Wade replied, hating the lie. “Just polishing, you know.”
“Yeah, you were always a polisher. All the i’s dotted, all the t’s crossed. Every word chosen for maximum impact. Killian really screwed up when he let you get away.”
Wade checked his watch, suddenly eager to end the call. “Listen, I’m in a kind of time crunch here with the edits, but anytime you want to come down to the cabin to do a little fishing, you let me know.”
“Phone works both ways, man. I’m here if you need me. I mean it. Anything.”
Wade ended the call, drained what remained of his beer, then promptly reached for another, hoping to drown the memories of his time at Week in Review. Not that it was all bad. In fact, in the beginning it was pretty amazing. The pace had been grueling, but he’d relished the work. He had interviewed POWs and Holocaust survivors; the victims of rape, incest, racism, and mass shootings; the survivors of oil tanker explosions; and wives who lost firefighter husbands when the towers fell on 9/11. And somewhere in there he’d even managed to snag himself a Hearst Award.
But as time went by, the lines between news and sensationalism began to blur, and word came down from on high that human interest was dead. They wanted shock and fear, blood and gore, the gruesome tick-tock of human tragedy, because fear outsold hope and always would.
Things finally reached critical mass when Killian ordered him to interview a survivor from the Crystal Lake Middle School shooting; a twelve-year-old whose mother—a teacher’s aide—had been shot and killed while standing just three feet away. That’s where he had drawn the line and walked away, though not before letting Killian and an entire newsroom full of reporters know exactly what he thought.
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