by Jen Blood
“You heard her,” I said. “It won’t take long. Anyway, you can go back to the motel if you want—we’ll just meet up in the morning.”
He looked like he was seriously considering it until Diggs gave him the eye. “Come on, Jacky Boy. They must cover this at Quantico.”
“Almost none of what I learned at Quantico seems to apply when Erin’s in the picture,” he said. He seemed a little depressed by that fact.
We decided to take Juarez’s rental, since there was more room for the five of us—Jack and Rosie in the front so she could navigate, much to Rosie’s chagrin, and Diggs, Einstein, and me in the back. Einstein required a window seat, which meant Diggs and I were forced to vie for space beside him.
“You take up a lot more room than someone your size technically should,” Diggs complained after I’d elbowed him in the side for the third time since we’d set out.
“I could go up front and let Rosie sit with you,” I whispered. “I’m sure she’d be more than happy to cuddle up back here.”
He stopped complaining after that.
What started as a lark got progressively more serious the farther we got from town, passing trailers and abandoned houses and an old, ruined mill along the way. Rosie gave us a surprisingly in-depth history of the town, but I was barely listening—too busy trying to imagine my father as a kid in this desolate little backwoods world. When I was growing up on Payson Isle, he never talked about his past. I could remember him reading to me, teaching me, praying with me (a lot)… But somehow in all that, the subject of his childhood never really came up. If it had been as bleak as I was starting to suspect, I could understand why he hadn’t been eager to amble down memory lane with me.
About twenty minutes after we’d piled into the car back at the VFW, Rosie directed Juarez down a dirt drive almost completely obscured by overgrown brush.
Not far in, our headlights hit on a sprawling colonial with the windows broken out and the front portico caving in. The shutters were half off and a picket fence around the perimeter had been torn to shreds by weather and unruly teens.
Einstein and I were the first ones out after Juarez stopped the car. “It doesn’t look so bad,” I said, studying the place with a critical eye.
A car door shut behind me, then another. “Says the woman who spent a solid week wandering the paths of Payson Isle alone,” Diggs said.
“If I didn’t see any goblins there…” I began.
“Maybe you just weren’t paying attention,” Juarez said. He shined his flashlight across the property, landing the beam on a No Trespassing sign riddled with bullet holes. “You know, legally that sign is all that’s needed to make going in there a prosecutable offense.”
“Pfft,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“Pfft?” Juarez asked. “What does that even mean?”
“Get used to it,” Diggs said. “That’s Solomon’s number one comeback when she knows you’re right but she’s gonna do it anyway.”
“Shouldn’t we at least wait until daylight for this?” Juarez pressed.
“Our plane leaves for Quebec at dawn—we won’t have time before we go. I just want to check it out. It’ll be fine.”
“Where have I heard those words before?” Diggs said.
“I’m with you,” Rosie said. She abandoned Diggs and took my arm. “You boys can hang out back here like a couple of little girls, but we’re going in. Right?”
I wasn’t used to having an ally in my madness, but I wasn’t about to question it. Still arm in arm, Rosie and I waded through thigh-high grass with a bravado borne of too much alcohol and not a lot of common sense. We were halfway there before I heard Diggs and Juarez start out behind us.
The front door of casa Lincoln was falling off its hinges—admittedly a little more so after I was done trying to pry it open, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that a wrecking ball would be a kindness there.
It had been a gorgeous house once upon a time, opening into a grand hall with high ceilings, a butterfly staircase, and a chandelier that I suspected would have fetched a pretty penny if it didn’t appear that hooligans had spent the past thirty years swinging from it.
The entire house had been graffiti’d within an inch of its life, and the floors were littered with old beer cans and cigarette butts. Whatever ghosts may have been in residence, they apparently weren’t enough to dissuade the locals looking for a den of iniquity in their own backyard. Juarez hung back with Einstein, while Diggs, Rosie, and I forged ahead to the second floor. Our flashlight beams bounced in tandem through each of the rooms, over broken glass and spent condoms and the occasional stray pair of underpants.
“Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?” Diggs asked when we’d hit nearly every room on the second floor, and I still hadn’t ventured farther than the threshold in a single one.
I didn’t have a clue what I was looking for. It wasn’t like I was expecting Erin Lincoln and my grandmother to spontaneously appear before us. I was just looking for a connection, I think… To feel as though, somehow, I belonged to this place. Or my father had, anyway.
“I don’t know,” I admitted to Diggs. “I just want to look around a little.”
Downstairs, I heard something skitter across the floorboards. Einstein whined, but he made no move to leave us. We walked down another short corridor tagged with clever slogans from the locals, none of them all terribly original. They kept up like that all the way to the end of the hall, with one notable exception: The last door on the left was closed. There were no beer bottles or cigarette butts in front of it. No sign that someone had used the door for target practice; no food or condom wrappers. The only graffiti was three words written across the center in large letters:
Here be dragons.
I looked over my shoulder at Rosie. Her bravado was wearing thin.
“Nobody goes in there,” she said. “Jamais. That’s the rule… Do whatever you like to the rest of the place. Just don’t touch that room.”
I don’t really believe in portents from beyond the grave or ghosts or ghouls, and the only creatures of the night I’m especially fond of can be found on primetime. But for the first nine years of my life, I was raised by a man who believed in all of them—his conviction in the afterlife and the spirits who roamed the shadow world was nothing short of fanatical. Regardless of how pragmatic Kat may have raised me to be after the fact, it was hard to simply dismiss those early years when Dad was running from every bump in the night.
Rosie took a few steps back to join Juarez and Einstein. Diggs, the perennial skeptic, took his rightful place by my side.
“There’s no such thing as spooks, kids,” he said calmly. He pushed at the door, but it didn’t budge. He tried pulling; still nothing.
“Is it locked?” I asked.
“Must be,” he said. “I don’t think it’s moving.”
I shouldered him aside to give it a go myself. I’d barely touched the knob before it opened.
“Very funny,” I said.
He frowned. I can usually tell when he’s kidding, but when my flashlight beam caught him this time there was no telltale spark to his baby blues.
“I must have loosened it for you,” he said.
That ghostly chill I’d been feeling ever since I’d started chasing the Gendreau/Lincoln story took up permanent residence at the base of my spine and the back of my neck as the old door creaked open. I shined the flashlight across the walls and the floorboards. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was untouched: no graffiti, no bottles, no condoms. There was no furniture. The only things that remained in the room were an old rocking horse and a baby doll that would have given me the willies on my best day.
“This must have been her room, don’t you think?” I asked. I didn’t go in.
Diggs passed the threshold and shined his flashlight along the walls, treading carefully to avoid rotted floorboards. He stopped at the other side of the room and focused his light on a section of the wall where the wain
scoting had broken away.
“Come take a look,” he said to me.
I crept across the floor, just waiting for the ground to fall away beneath my feet. When I reached Diggs, I crouched beside him. My flashlight beam joined his. There on the wall, hidden behind the wainscoting, the letter J had been carved into the wood. Beneath it, smaller but no less distinct, was the letter E. Jeff and Erin. Under the initials, someone had carved an arrow pointing all the way down to the floor.
I tried to imagine the two of them—these siblings Sarah Saucier said were too close, one light and one dark—making their mark on this home they barely knew, then covering it back up so only they would know their secret.
I knelt in the filth and checked out the floorboards directly below the arrow. What I suspected had once been the best hardwood flooring money could buy was now so rotted that it took no time at all to find the board Jeff and Erin had been pointing to. Einstein came over and tried to help, but he just ended up giving himself a sneezing fit by snuffling too much dust. He was relegated to the sidelines with Juarez and Rosie; Diggs took his place. He knelt beside me while Juarez manned the flashlight. Darkness shrouded the scene. We worked on the loose board for less than a minute before we were able to pry it up with Diggs’ utility knife.
Juarez shined his light inside the compartment we’d found in the floor. There, hidden beneath more dust and dirt, was a filthy old t-shirt. I took it out gingerly, disappointed until I felt the weight of something wrapped inside.
I peeled the shirt away. Inside was an old diary, worn and faded. The inscription on the inside cover was written in a child’s sloping handwriting:
The Journal of Erin Rae Lincoln
PRIVATE!!!
◊◊◊◊◊
We dropped Rosie at her grandmother’s place—a double-wide trailer on a dead end street not far from the VFW—and then waited until the light came on inside before we pulled away. By the time Juarez and I got back to the motel after getting rid of Rosie and dropping Diggs at his Jeep, it was almost one a.m. Juarez had been quiet all night—or at least since my little rebellion back at the bar. He and I walked Einstein together, on the same abandoned stretch of Route 1 I’d nearly been run down on twenty-four hours before. We were almost back at the motel before I finally broke the silence.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Maybe I should be asking you that,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”
That it had. “I feel like we’re getting closer, though,” I said. “The thing with Will Rainier is big; you might not see that yet, but you will. The fact that those three names—Jeff Lincoln, Will Rainier, Hank Gendreau—keep coming up can’t be a coincidence.”
“Will and Hank’s names only come up in connection with Erin Lincoln and Ashley Gendreau,” he pointed out. “There’s nothing to indicate they had any involvement with any of the victims found in Canada.”
“You’ve looked into it?”
He stopped walking and turned to face me, an amused glint in his eye. “I get the feeling you must not think I’m very good at this job.”
“That’s not true. I think you’re probably very good at your job. But things get missed… I just want to make sure that doesn’t happen with my father. I mean, look at Hank Gendreau.”
“There’s every indication that Hank Gendreau did, in fact, murder his daughter. So far I haven’t seen a thing in the file to convince me otherwise.”
“Have you talked to him? If you do, you might change your mind.”
He shook his head. Einstein sighed beside me, no doubt wondering when—if ever—we were going to bed. I reached down and scratched behind his ears while I waited for Juarez’s response. His amusement had given way to annoyance, or at least a hybrid of the two.
“You really are just…”
I quirked an eyebrow and waited for him to continue. “Just…?” I finally prompted.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled my jacket up around me more tightly and straightened my collar. His hands were warm. He ran his knuckles lightly against my neck and up along my jawline.
“Impossible,” he said softly.
He leaned down. I met him halfway, one hand resting on his chest. A full beat, maybe more, passed before he finally made his move. Once he did, I remembered why kissing Juarez was a memorable experience. There was no epic longing with him, no torturous denial… There was just Juarez, solid and strong and more present than anyone I had ever met before. His tongue pressed past my lips and his fingers twisted in my hair as the kiss deepened. By the time we parted, my head was a little light and my nethers a little moist and, if asked, I would have been hard pressed to remember my own name, let alone the names of all the ghosts I was chasing.
It was the first time I’d kissed him since our farewell in Littlehope in the spring—regardless of what Diggs may have thought happened while we were all in Washington. I made a promise to myself not to let another three months pass before we did it again.
A few years ago, making out with a man like Juarez under a full moon in the middle of nowhere would have led one place and one place only. But I was older now. Wiser. And there was that little matter of Erin Lincoln’s journal, burning a hole in the writing bag slung over my shoulder. Juarez walked Einstein and me to my room. I turned at the door.
“We really do have an early morning tomorrow,” I said regretfully.
“We do,” he agreed. He made no move to leave, though.
“So, we should probably just… You know. Raincheck.”
He nodded again. And stayed planted firmly behind me.
I leaned up and gave him another long, lingering kiss. “So… Goodnight.” I turned to unlock the door. And still, Juarez remained where he was. I turned to look at him one more time. “What are you doing?”
He looked at me like I was hopeless. Or daft. “My job,” he said. “Someone broke into your room last night, leaving evidence that you’re being stalked and that they have intimate knowledge of Erin Lincoln’s murder—and quite possibly the deaths of at least half a dozen other girls. I can’t just leave you on the doorstep when there’s the possibility someone could be waiting inside to butcher you. That kind of thing tends to make a man look bad.”
Right. That.
What followed was Juarez’s impressive impersonation of every cop from every primetime police saga I’d ever seen, as he drew his gun (!) and checked every square inch of the motel room, from the bathroom to the closets, behind the drapes and under the bed. When he was satisfied that no one was lurking in the shadows, he kissed me again and then advised me to lock the door behind him when he left. Which I did.
Diggs had returned to his own room now that Juarez was in town, which meant I had the place to myself. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, changed into my pajamas, and then curled up in bed. Einstein waited for my perfunctory invitation before he hopped up and lay down, stretched out with his head on the pillow beside me. I pulled Erin Lincoln’s ancient journal from my writing bag, dusted it off, and began with the first entry.
Christmas 1969
J. got this book for me—he says I need to write things down now, so when I’m famous people will be able to look back and see what I used to be like. He’s so weird sometimes. Anyway… It was Christmas today. Daddy barely spoke, and we just sat around looking at the spot where Mama would have been, but won’t ever be again. I asked J. if he believes she’s in heaven looking down on us, and he said that was stupid.
“Dead is dead.” That’s what he told me.
It made me cry later, but I didn’t let him see—it would just make him feel bad, and if Daddy saw me crying because of something he said, it would be all over but the shouting.
I remember when we were little, how much we used to love Christmas back in Lynn. Mama made everything magic. I tried to do the same thing this year without her—decorating the house, making Christmas dinner, everything you’re supposed to do to make it perfect. It didn’t matter, though.
Fr
om now on, I think Christmas will be the saddest day of the year in this house.
Chapter Eleven
The next morning, my alarm went off at five a.m. I stumbled into the shower and managed to get myself dressed and walk the dog without ever actually opening my eyes, and then at five-thirty on the dot, Juarez was at my door with coffee and that just-pressed grin he wore so well.
“You ready?”
I nodded, but still had no words—they don’t usually come until at least eight a.m.
The next stop was Rosie’s, to drop off Einstein. It was barely six o’clock, but she looked fresh as a daisy when she answered the front door of her grandma’s double wide. Oh, to be nineteen again.
Stein greeted her like an old friend, dropping into a play bow before he tried to take off for a sprint around the yard. I convinced him that as long as he was still on leash—and it was still seven a.m.—there would be no sprinting. Then, once I’d gotten him settled down, I gave Rosie his bag. At the doggy daycares Einstein frequented in Portland and Boston, this is standard procedure. Rosie just stared at it.
“What is this?”
“It’s his stuff,” I explained. “His treats, and his food. And his toys. He also has allergy meds, in case he starts scratching. And sometimes he gets a little lame in his hind leg, so just watch out for that when he’s playing. If it gets very bad, I’ve got a recipe and the ingredients for a poultice.”
She and Juarez were both looking at me like a crazy person. Clearly, they had no concept of the bond between a childless woman and her dog. Rosie at least had the decency to humor me, though. She took the bag and slung it over her shoulder, then took Einstein’s leash from me.
“He’ll be fine. We’ll just hang out, maybe go for a swim.”
“I’ll be back by tonight,” I assured her.
“Take your time,” she said. “If you’re not back by the time it’s my shift at the bar, I’ll bring him with me. C’est bien. You’ll have Diggs with you when you come back though, oui?”