Oliver turns and stares directly at the screen, his eyes boring into Tessa’s.
“To Chief Winters and the Bonham Police Department, I was a problem to deal with, so they dealt with me, even if they had to break a few laws to do it. They locked me up and patted each other’s backs. But they got caught. You’d think cops would make better criminals, wouldn’t you?”
Oliver chuckles, but there’s no humor in it, only a deep and seething anger Tessa’s never seen before.
“Then for a while, I was a story. An underdog to champion, to show off your virtue, and, most importantly, to sell, sell, sell. But hey, who am I to complain? The crooked cops got called out, and a judge let me out of jail. Everybody loves a happy ending, right? RIGHT?”
Tessa flinches when he yells the last word, his palpable rage a force that feels directed at her personally.
“But there’s one problem. Nobody cares what happens next. Nobody gives a damn when their favorite underdog is set free, but the world has closed up around the place that was meant for him. Nobody cares when there’s no life left for him to go back to.”
Tessa tastes the coppery tang of blood as she bites down on the inside of her cheek.
“Where are the reporters now, huh? The movie people? The lawyers working pro-fucking-bono to spit-shine their own reputation? They got theirs. They got their happy ending. And me? I’m supposed to be grateful for the scraps of a life and shut the hell up.
“But I’m not your pet. You wanted me to sit and shake and roll over like a good dog, but I won’t do it anymore.”
A slow grin spreads over Oliver’s face, and Tessa’s skin prickles.
“You took everything from me, Winters. Everything. Now it’s my turn.” He leans close to the camera, and his voice drops to a low, satisfied whisper. “Do you know where your daughter is, Winters? Pretty little Valerie? I know where she is.”
Tessa struggles to breathe.
“You won’t find her alive. But if you do what I say, exactly what I say, because make no mistake, I’m the one in charge now, I might tell you where to find her body.”
Oliver looks straight into the camera. Tessa doesn’t recognize the man staring back at her. She dives for the wastebasket beneath her desk, but even the sounds of retching can’t block out the final words of Oliver Barlow’s message.
“Then you can bury her like you buried me.”
4
Tessa, clammy and dazed, looks up and realizes nearly an hour has passed. Time she’s spent wide-eyed and sour-stomached. Her pajamas are soaked with sweat, and the hangover of earlier is a child’s tantrum compared to the boulders shifting and grinding between her temples.
Oliver poured a trail of gasoline and lit a match, and the world is burning in his wake. Tessa is burning with it. She scoured the news sites, searching for every detail. Each story is frustratingly the same.
The video was sent directly to the media, to multiple outlets, ensuring that even if some of the networks found the ethics to contact the police rather than broadcast it, at least one of them was bound to leak it. And they did.
The footage was sent from Valerie Winters’s phone, which was later found in her empty apartment along with clear signs of a struggle.
Chief Winters’s daughter is only twenty-five years old, a student studying to become a vet.
The photograph that runs in most of the stories, likely pulled from a social media account, shows a fresh-faced girl with a large smile. Her shoulder-length hair, cut into choppy waves, is the same deep brown shade as her eyes.
Valerie Winters was last seen leaving a friend’s party late the previous night.
Questions lash at Tessa. Her thoughts circle back to the call from Ollie she ignored the night before.
Did he reach out to Tessa as he was waiting outside the girl’s apartment? Or was he already inside? Did he kill Valerie, then, with blood on his hands, dial Tessa’s number? Would anything be different if she answered his call? If she answered any of the calls he made to her in the last few months?
She has no answers.
Facts are scarce, the investigation ongoing, and most articles resort to a rehash of old information. The Morley case is brought up again and again. Inevitably, someone suggests that, given the latest developments, it appears the state had the right man in prison for the murder of Gwen Morley all along. At least until a popular documentary convinced the public of his innocence, prompting a new investigation and the eventual release of a monster.
She slams her laptop closed.
This can’t be happening. But even as the words float across her mind, Tessa recognizes them for the denial they are. The low-level dread that normally sits warm and ready at the base of her stomach is awake now and roaring to be fed.
Oliver Barlow is a killer.
She staked so much on that statement being false. Her career, her reputation.
The life of a girl she never met.
Tessa reaches for the wastebasket again. The brass key her mother gave her swings forward on its chain, clinking against the trash can.
There’s nothing left in her stomach.
Oh God, what has she done?
5
KITTY
A world away, deep in the northern Pennsylvania forest, a small wooden chest lies in darkness, hidden beneath the floorboards of an ivy-covered cottage. It has brass fittings and a lock with no key.
Two old women sit in the early afternoon light on the front porch. Deirdre, the eldest, holds a pile of green beans on an apron across her lap. She snaps the ends off each before dropping it into a bowl by her side. She works slowly, her movements weighed down by age and the onset of arthritis she refuses to acknowledge.
The other, Kitty, is clearly younger, but not so much as one might think. Generous genetics and a sunnier disposition have left her skin less ravaged by time.
Kitty holds a bone-handled paring knife in one hand and an apple in the other, such a glossy red it borders on profane. Not a speck of yellow mars the relentless crimson.
With a practiced gesture, the younger old woman slices just below the skin and turns the fruit in a slow, smooth motion that peels away the red in a continuous ribbon, revealing the ripe flesh beneath.
“Do you have any regrets, Dee?”
She hadn’t realized the question was forming until it fluttered past her lips into the silence between them.
A slight break in the rhythm of the beans snapping is the only indication her sister hears the question.
“I regret I didn’t add cinnamon to the grocery order,” Deirdre eventually says. “The bit we have will have to do.” She eyes the number of apples Kitty has left to peel. Her own hands don’t stop their work. “I’d like to get that pie in the oven so it can cool before suppertime.”
Kitty makes no effort to increase her pace.
Deirdre squints into the distance where the trees stand between the two of them and the world outside.
It’s always been this way. Deirdre never looks back, even now, with far more of their lives behind them than in front.
“You’re an irritating woman,” Kitty says, common words with no heat behind them.
“Aye,” Deirdre replies, but her eyes are still trained on the woods, an extra furrow in her wrinkled brow. “Supposed to be a storm coming.”
Kitty follows her gaze, but there’s no sign of what, or who, her sister is hoping to see.