“That I do.” When I was a kid, the names on the lips of those gossipmongers often belonged to members of my own family. Bones. I took another sip of wine. Truth be told, I was indebted to this news, which would be a welcome distraction tonight. My encounter with Tim and my psych exam still loomed in my mind. If I could push them aside, I might even manage a few solid hours of sleep.
“Before I go,” my mother said, “I’ve been meaning to ask. How are things going with your therapist?”
* * *
* * *
McIntyre came home just before midnight, not long after I finished the dishes, took Whiskey out to pee, and put myself to bed. When I heard her bolt the door and shuffle off to her room, I pretended to be asleep. There was a disturbance in my bowels that had nothing to do with my pathetic supper or too much red wine, and I wanted to be alone with it. Figure out what it meant.
I used to sleep like a worn-out toddler, sprawled on my stomach and dead to the world. Lately, especially since ditching the pills Carson had prescribed to “nudge me into dreamland,” I spend most nights like this one: coffin-stiff and staring at the ceiling. When Mac closed the door to her bedroom, my eyes snapped back open, and I watched the firelight turn specks of dust into spiders and sheetrock seams into canyons. Its trickery was a good metaphor for how I’d felt earlier when I told Mom the same thing I told Sam. I’m good as new. I’ll be reinstated soon.
The claim wasn’t entirely false. Aside from that unnerving moment with my sensei, I felt markedly better. I’d assured Sam the flashbacks I experienced on Tern Island had disappeared once I got back to the mainland, and they had. I’d left the panic attacks behind, too. I still had visions of Bram, but they felt more like grit the wind blew in my eye than a murderous fiend breathing down my neck. Again and again I forced myself into the open, unprotected, and found I could handle it. Take that, Carson Gates.
And yet, I knew I couldn’t completely abolish my PTSD without facing the man who caused it. Gil Gasko, my counselor, said I had to accept the fact that my abductor was still free and learn not to live in fear. Fat chance. Blake Bram was the reason I’d been so detached during my game of Bullshit with Mac, my karate class with Sam, and everything in between. Bram had held me captive in a basement in New York’s East Village for eight days before shooting the cop who’d stumbled onto his chamber of horrors and seized his chance to escape. He may have left me behind, but he didn’t let me go.
For months I’d turned this puzzle over in my head, trying to decode Bram’s purpose. His three other victims were killed quickly, within days of their abduction, while he chose to keep me alive. He let me walk free—me, a police officer trained in suspect identification. A threat.
I’d gone back to Swanton again and again hoping to spot him. He was too clever to be flushed out so easily, but my instincts told me Bram was watching. I had no idea when he’d turn up again, or where, or what he’d look like when he did, but I had every intention of putting this fugitive behind bars. I’d find a way to lock him up. My need to contain him was innate. Sure, we shared the same hometown, but there was a deeper connection, one nobody was aware of but us.
And that’s what scared me most of all.
FOUR
I wasn’t ready to face them, not yet. There was a part of me that still hoped I’d find Jasper alive and break some local records for the fastest solve in history, so I skirted the living room and went straight for the basement, the door to which I found in the kitchen.
Picture a cellar from a horror film, dusty and dank with crumbling stone walls and a criminal air. Old pipes clang and a strange odor hangs heavy, nauseating in its rottenness, meat-sweet. That’s how I imagined the basement in the house on Tern Island. In truth it was pretty ordinary, but walking down those stairs gave me a head rush akin to eating too little and standing too quick. It took me hundreds of miles from the island, to a place I never wanted to be again.
I wasted no time getting out of there to do a cursory search of the grounds outside, rain be damned. There was no way I could cover the whole island on my own, but I poked through leaf piles and peered over steep cliffs with gusto. If there were indeed caves chiseled into the rock, they didn’t reveal themselves to me. Back inside I checked the sunroom, library, and Norton’s room. It was the sole bedroom on the main floor, accessible through a butler’s pantry. Predictably, it lacked the old-world glamour of the rest of the house. A single bed, a small chest of drawers, and a nightstand constituted Philip Norton’s belongings. There was a framed photo beside his bed that showed him as a much younger man, with a full head of red hair and his arm around a boy about ten years old. I picked up the frame and scrutinized the kid’s face. The boy might have been Jasper, but I couldn’t be sure.
Only the room where Tim had situated the Sinclairs and their guests remained. I stepped through the doorway and finally got my first look at our witnesses.
They made me think of Bram. Presented with the family and their pristine house at the summit of Tern Island, he would have seen perfection. To Bram, perfection was synonymous with danger. In the context of a murder case it alarmed me, too. Nothing about this place was flawed, and that uncanny fact had preoccupied me throughout my search. Every room I’d entered was magazine-ready, and the living room was no different. On the mantel sat a mindfully arranged autumn vignette of hefty pewter candlesticks, gourds, and pheasant feathers. Fresh-cut mums burst from vases on mirrored tabletops. Heavy valances in neutral tones were shaped like the bustle of a nineteenth-century skirt. Classy. That’s how I’d describe the place. And the family fit right in.
Like Camilla’s, their clothes were casual but perfectly tailored—dress shirts overlaid with cashmere sweaters, pants with centerline creases sharp as the blade of a knife. A woman with short dark hair and fat diamond earrings reclined artfully on a settee as if gracing the cover of Vanity Fair. A handsome man with coffee-colored skin leaned against the window beyond which trees strained against the storm. It was open a crack to let in a wet breeze, and sheer curtain panels billowed around him like smoke. The youngest of them all, a teenage girl with rosebud lips and shiny chestnut hair, looked like she could have been a celebrity’s little sister about to make it big herself. An equally striking man who was surely her father sat by her side. Against the high-polish backdrop of the house’s antique furniture and the fire that crackled happily in the hearth they were exclusivity personified. There was one exception, one person who didn’t belong in this picture of privilege and wealth, and I’d have bet anything her name was Abella Beaudry.
Abella’s eyes were ringed in red. Here was the source of the sobs I’d heard earlier. The woman looked dazed, as if she’d taken—or was given—something for the shock. Out of everyone, she alone wasn’t dressed. Her hair was a mess, her pink pajamas wrinkled. Even from across the room I could see the fabric on her hip was stained with blood. Jasper’s girlfriend had our missing man’s DNA all over her, and she hadn’t done a thing about it.