by Tessa Wegert
I only felt his eyes on me when I reached the parking lot. After finding the cat, we’d decided to go our separate ways: I would search the field, while Abe explored the woods. But he wasn’t doing that at all. I sensed his eyes mapping my movements as if through a rifle scope. I spun around, and my gaze raked the distant forest. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there.
“Family,” I said again, my voice crisp. “I wonder what it’s like to have one you really know. This whole thing has made me realize I don’t know the Skiltons at all—and that makes me wonder how well I know myself. All that stuff about nature versus nurture? You can’t tell me genes don’t play a big part in who we become. Are killers born, or are they made? It has to be both. That means it’s in your blood.”
“Where is he, Shana?”
“Who?”
“Abe.”
The question felt like a guillotine, the blade raised above my neck. “He ran away,” I said. “Right before our senior year.”
“Crissy said he was obsessed. That he didn’t want to leave Swanton because he couldn’t stand to be away from you.”
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t let him draw this conclusion. It was a burden too heavy for my family to bear. Felicia, Crissy, my mother, they didn’t have it in them to face a media circus. There would be questions: Did you suspect? See the signs? They’d have to acknowledge, as I had, that Abe was never right in the head. We’d have no choice but to admit to the world we turned our backs on him, and that whether we admitted it to ourselves or not, we’d sighed with relief when he was gone.
“I’ve been trying to understand,” Tim said. “Even before you saw the composite sketch, you were so sure Bram was behind Trey’s disappearance.”
“Because of the poster. He knew Brett’s face would get my attention.”
“That message on the back you said Bram wrote. It sounded like an inside joke. It made no sense to anyone but you.”
Across the field, at the entrance to the woods, an army of trees swayed in the winter wind. I hadn’t seen him muss it, but Tim’s hair stood on end. It was bushier than usual, and I realized he hadn’t cut it since before the Sinclair case. The last month had felt like one of the longest of my life.
As I looked at him, it occurred to me that maybe this was what I’d wanted—or needed—all along. Tim’s job was to flip through conversations and burrow into witness accounts. Did I really think I could keep him in the dark forever? Did I honestly believe he could talk to Bram’s sister and not arrive at this place? There was no hiding it now, not anymore. “His name is Abraham,” I said. “Abe, for short. Or, if you shorten it another way—”
“Bram.”
We were silent. I felt like I’d just exposed a close friend’s sordid secret, except the secret was my own. Tim hated silence, will say anything to fill the void. This time, he let it stretch on for miles.
“Who else knows? Your parents? Felicia?”
I shook my head. No one. Just me. Now us. “They can’t find out, Tim. They just can’t.”
His cheeks were a mottled blend of scarlet and white. I waited for him to admonish me all over again. This secret spoke to our lack of professional trust. All he’d asked was that I remain truthful.
“This is why you blamed yourself for your abduction,” he said, “and for letting him get away in New York.”
“It’s because of me that Bram killed those women. I’m the reason he took Trey. He wants to hurt me. I knew him better than anyone,” I said. “This side of him didn’t show itself right away or all the time, but it was there, and I think I . . . God . . . I think I encouraged it. We used to play detective, and he cooked up crimes for my benefit. They were terrible sometimes. Violent. I didn’t tell him to stop.”
“Do you think Bram’s the one who killed his father?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wants to show me just how evil he is. I mean, why is this happening now? Brett’s bones have been out there for decades.” I thought for a minute. “If Bram was the one who tipped off the police, he definitely knows something about Brett’s death. But maybe he doesn’t know everything. If that’s the case, he could be using Trey to force me into doing the legwork for him. He might see it as a form of torture, too, me having to come back here and relive our childhood, knowing what I know about him now.”
I touched my scar and watched Tim’s eyes go hard and shiny. After holding it all in for so long, my need to unload on him was akin to releasing scummy water from a reservoir. I felt empty, but cleaner.
“If Bram’s holding some kind of sick grudge against you for leaving him after he did this, this”—Tim motioned to my face—“that’s on him.”
“We were best friends,” I said. “I think he saw me as the only sure thing in his life. I should have helped him fight whatever demons were setting up camp inside his head. Instead, I abandoned him.” My breath hitched. Was that the kind of person I was? I thought of Suze and what she’d said about how I ended our friendship. Even Robbie knew it fell apart because I ditched her. But they didn’t know why.
It took me years to realize Abe was the reason I was always so hard on Suze. He put a bug in my ear about her early on. Suze is trouble. Stay away. I didn’t want to believe him, tuned out his warnings for as long as I could, but Abe was persuasive. Before I knew it I was noticing her faults, too, magnifying them in my mind until canceled plans became indefensible acts, and typical teenage bad behavior seemed deplorable. Abe didn’t want to share me, that was the crux of it, so he poisoned the well. He governed me in ways I was ashamed to admit then, and that disgust me now. By the time he ran away and I got an untainted look at the life I’d lived, I was too guilt-ridden over what I did to Suze to make amends.
“He’s why I became an investigator.” I laid my forehead against the window and savored the cold as it fanned out across my skin. “I guess that makes this whole situation pretty ironic. I did this to protect people who can’t—or won’t—protect themselves, and because of that, he’s out there hurting them.”
“What makes people kill?” Tim said.
I knew the famed Four Ls, had learned them long ago. “Lust. Love. Loathing. Loot.”
“No. I’m asking what makes a murderer. You said yourself it’s in the blood. Abe was fighting demons even as a kid. Think back. Did he have dark impulses? Lie easily? Did he have a hard time distinguishing between right and wrong?”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
“You’ve convinced yourself that shunning him was the act that flicked the switch and turned a child into a sociopath. But Shane, you’ve got to acknowledge the wiring was already in place. He’s a morally bankrupt criminal. Some people are just born that way.”
“I know,” I said thickly. “But, Tim, he’s my cousin.”
Tim leaned across the console toward me. His eyebrows were a straight line. “You’re not like him,” he said. “You never were. You didn’t make him do what he did. But we can make him stop.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was Tim’s idea to go to Police Chief Harmison. He thought we should fill in local investigators on what was happening in the Thousand Islands, and the connection between our two cases. He said we could do it without revealing Bram was my cousin. For now.
We planned to stop at my parents’ place only long enough to get some food in our stomachs, but when we got there Doug was at the kitchen table, flipping through a high school yearbook.
“There you are,” my brother said, pushing aside the empty plate at his elbow. “And look, you brought a friend.”
I made introductions, then turkey sandwiches on sourdough for Tim and me. The second my back was turned, Doug pressed the yearbook into Tim’s hands.
“Some light entertainment while you eat. You can see how much Shana’s improved,” Doug said.
With the coffee brewing, I crossed the tile floor to deliver a shuto strike to his ribs.
<
br /> “No fair, Chuck Norris. That shit hurts.”
At the table, Tim laughed.
“Ignore my brother. What year is this?” I reached for the book. The answer was embossed on its thick, forest-green cover: 2000. Doug and Crissy’s graduation year. I sat down and flipped to the individual photos of the grads. It was a miracle Crissy had managed to finish high school, but there she was in her cap and gown. I recognized several of their fellow grads as well, including Robbie. Blessed with those beautiful eyes, he’d been attractive when Crissy dated him, but in his senior year Robbie was scrawny. His awkward phase had started late. No wonder Crissy lost interest.
I should have stopped there, but I couldn’t help myself. I leafed through the pages until I found my eighth-grade class. In his photo, Abe was doing his best to de-emphasize the hack-job haircut and crooked teeth. He could almost pass for normal. Two years later, he’d leave me with a defect of my own.
Doug closed the book, nearly catching my fingers.
“We can’t pretend he never existed,” I said.
“Actually, we can. His disappearing act was the best thing that ever happened to our family. Abe’s dead to me,” Doug said, “and you of all people should feel the same way.”
I didn’t like the way the photo was affecting my brother. I said, “Don’t let him get to you.”
“Don’t let him get to me? He tried to kill you.”
I touched my cheek, the scar as much a part of me as the nose on my face. “That’s not what this was about.”
“Like hell. He split your face open with a rusty nail. That should never have happened.”
“I didn’t see it coming. I couldn’t have stopped him.”
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Doug said, “because Abe was supposed to be gone.”
When he was little, Doug developed a tell that allowed my parents to measure the potential force of his tantrums. There was a spot on the back of his neck that flushed when he started to freak out. Salmon-pink was manageable. Fruit punch meant trouble. I could see the spot now, at the base of his hairline. It was fire engine red.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said. “Doug?”
He’d reached the peak of his anger and was coming down the other side. My brother looked at me for a long time before he said, “With Brett. Abe was supposed to leave with Brett.”
“We know,” I said, glancing at Tim. “Crissy told us. Brett was going to take the kids with him to Philadelphia, only Felicia found out.”
“That didn’t matter. Brett never showed up at the meeting place. He intentionally left them behind.”
That’s what Crissy had said, too. Except . . . “How would you know that?”
“I was there.”
“Where, Doug? With Crissy? At the last place Brett was seen alive?” I stared him down, challenging him to come up with an excuse, any excuse, for such an egregious omission. Doug’s jaw shifted. What my brother was about to divulge, he’d kept hidden for more than half my life.
“Brett told me he was planning on leaving with the kids,” Doug said. “He needed help. I said I’d pick up Crissy and Abe and drive them out to where he was.”
“To the boat launch?” Tim said. “Crissy told us she walked it.”
“No. I drove her.”
Something wasn’t adding up. Doug knew things weren’t right at the Skiltons, but he’d never shown any interest in getting involved. “Since when was Brett in the habit of calling you for favors?”
“He wasn’t. I offered. You were too young,” Doug said. “You didn’t get it. Felicia was a disaster, Crissy was in a tailspin, and Abe . . .” He shook his head. “I didn’t like the way he was with you. I didn’t trust him, not ever.”
Doug and I didn’t get close until after Abe left town. I’d always assumed that up until my injury, I was alone in the knowledge that Abe was unstable. That wasn’t the case, though. Doug had seen it, too.
My head swam. I didn’t trust myself to formulate the questions that needed asking. I felt Tim’s eyes pass over me before settling on Doug.
“Start at the beginning,” Tim said. He took out his notebook, and the conversation shifted from a chat over lunch to a witness interview.
Doug took his time recounting what he knew. Well after midnight, when we’d long since gotten home from the movie, Doug went to Crissy’s house. He expected to find both cousins ready to go. Instead, he found only her.
Crissy was frantic. She didn’t want to leave without Abe. Doug suggested they drive to the refuge to discuss the situation with Brett. He took Crissy to the designated meeting spot at the fishing access on Hook Road.
“I figured Brett would go back to the house for Abe, or come up with some other idea,” Doug said. “But we couldn’t find him. His car was there—he’d parked it at the boat launch—but he wasn’t around. I thought maybe he’d gone to take a piss or something. So, we waited.”
“How long?”
“Half an hour, maybe? The more time that passed, the more worried I got, but I kept telling Crissy he had to come back for his car. All his stuff was in there, packed right up to the ceiling. At one point we even searched around the tree line. Meanwhile, Crissy was losing it, going through denial, anger, fear. She was convinced it had all gone to hell. She said she couldn’t go home, not now that the plan to desert Aunt Fee was out in the open. I tried to convince her to come back to our place, but she didn’t trust Mom not to side with Felicia. No matter what I said, I couldn’t get her to leave.”
“So what did you do?” Tim asked.
“I went to get Mom anyway.”
“You left her there?” I said. “Alone?”
“Yeah. And if you’re hoping to make me feel guilty about that, don’t bother. I’ve had nineteen years to stew in my regrets.”
Not knowing what else to do, Doug told Crissy he’d return to the house and try to sneak Abe out. By then, he said, maybe Brett would have returned.
“I got as far as the car dealership on the outskirts of town before I realized leaving her was a bad idea. She was hysterical by then—and I knew about her problem with drugs. She’d been using for a while,” Doug said, “smoking a bowl in the woods, busting out the hash pipe at parties. I did a little of that myself for a while, so we were together pretty often. She never resorted to harder drugs, not as far as I knew, but I was worried she might have some scary shit on her and that she’d do something stupid. I was probably only gone fifteen minutes. By the time I got back, she was gone.”
I blinked at him. “Gone.”
“Brett’s car was gone, too. I thought, okay, so Brett got back from wherever he was and they decided to leave without Abe. It’s not like the man could show his face in town again after what he tried to pull. Felicia could have him arrested. I didn’t like that they blew Abe off. Trust me,” he said through his teeth, “I was very unhappy about that. But what could I do?”
I found myself nodding. What could he do? Brett and Crissy were gone. Only somehow, Crissy came back.
“So Crissy was reported missing the next day,” Tim said. “Did you tell the police what you knew?”
“I figured Brett and Crissy were halfway to Philly by then. I had no reason to think otherwise, and I didn’t want to rat them out. It wasn’t until two days later, when Crissy was found, that I knew something went sideways.”
Doug had been looking at Tim, but when his eyes pinged to me, I saw they were veined in red. “When Crissy turned up and Brett didn’t, I had no idea what to think,” Doug said. “She wouldn’t tell me anything, not even when she tested positive for meth. My best guess was that she and Brett missed each other somehow, and she got desperate. Maybe she had the drugs on her. Took a hit and wandered off into the woods. Or maybe she met some tweaker on the road and didn’t want anyone to know. I played out every scenario I could think of, but the bottom line for me was s
he was okay. What good would it do to tell everyone I was out there with her? You’ve gotta understand, I was sixteen years old. I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing, but I knew it wouldn’t look good if I admitted to driving her out of town.”
“But didn’t you wonder what happened to Brett?” My voice sounded oddly high to my ears.
“His car was gone,” Doug said meekly. “I thought he went to Philadelphia. We all did.”
I’d never considered the possibility there might be a downside to Doug’s exceptional memory. He told the story like it was days rather than decades old, and that made it all the more unsettling. While I’d relied on him to sweep the cobwebs from my own mind, he’d been harboring this secret. It was like one of those gotcha moments from a detective drama—I wasn’t even at the quarry last night! Who said the body was found at the quarry? There was no connection between Doug and Brett’s murder until, suddenly, there was.
“Look,” Doug said now, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. You keep a secret long enough and you forget it’s there, you know?”
Again I nodded, but the truth was Doug never forgot anything.
It’s funny how the mind plays favorites, jettisoning some memories while spotlighting others. Right then, mine was on my talk with Russell Loming. How he’d told me he’d sold drugs to a boy at the drive-in, and that the boy had been around Crissy’s age. Doug had been at the drive-in that night. Doug and Crissy were born just a few months apart.
I stared at my brother. His brow was stitched, and he was looking down at the cover of the yearbook like he couldn’t understand how it got there. By the time Tim’s cell phone chimed, Doug’s face was buried in his hands.
“It’s a text from McIntyre,” Tim said as he studied the screen. “We have a sighting at the river.”
TWENTY-NINE