“He’ll be back when he needs to be,” Kitty says. “Aiden knows these woods as well as you or I.”
Deirdre frowns. “Aye, and I know him. He’ll be putting off coming home, dreading the rain keeping him indoors. He’ll drag up at the last possible minute, soaked to the bone and tempting pneumonia.”
Kitty shrugs. “At least you’ve gotten a head start on being mad about it.”
Her sister glares at her. Kitty smiles sweetly. Deirdre snaps the last of the beans with more force than necessary and stands, brushing off her apron. She’s a tall woman, where Kitty is short and plump. Deirdre is all angles and corners, age having carved away any softness she’d once had. She leans down to pick up the bowl.
“Try to finish those apples sometime before the resurrection, will you,” she says as she walks past Kitty toward the door.
“Quit fussing,” Kitty says. “If Jesus comes back by suppertime, he’ll have a nice apple pie waiting. With not quite enough cinnamon.”
“Well, I hope he has enough sense to come in out of the rain, or we’ll be nursing two men with pneumonia.” Deirdre slams the door behind her. Her footsteps echo across the worn floorboards as she heads to the kitchen.
“You can’t catch pneumonia from getting wet, Dee!” Kitty calls. “Doctors discovered these crazy things called viruses, and they don’t travel by rain.”
Kitty smiles when the window between the kitchen and the porch closes with a bang. She turns back to the apple in her hand, but movement catches her eye, and she lifts her gaze to follow it.
They’ve been there a while now, the figures playing hide-and-seek along the path that leads to the big house. They laugh with an abandon that only comes with youth, and the sound brings Kitty’s heart a rare kind of joy.
Deirdre didn’t see them, of course. She never does, and Kitty’s learned not to ask. She doesn’t like to upset her sister.
It’s a shame, though. Such wild, lovely children.
She watches them until worry begins to nibble at the edges of her enjoyment like a hungry mouse. They have no idea how beautiful they are. An overwhelming need to protect them comes over her. To warn them.
From what, she doesn’t know.
The smallest one spies her, then stops to wave.
Kitty raises her hand to wave back, but they’ve gone.
She drags in a sharp breath and glances down at her other hand. A line of red, the exact shade as the glossy apple, wells up across her palm where the blade of the knife has sliced her.
Cursing her carelessness, she squeezes her hand tightly into a fist and rises to get a bandage before Deirdre notices.
Her sister worries too much.
6
TESSA
Tessa can’t catch her breath. She’s left with nothing but her own tangled emotions, and there’s little peace to be had, alone with her churning thoughts.
It’s a familiar feeling, the sensation of breaking apart in slow motion. It scares her, knowing where it can lead if she can’t get a handle on herself.
She’s got her feet firmly on the road to a setback.
Setback. Her therapist’s term for it. Privately, Tessa thinks the phrase sucks. It’s nothing so benign. It’s a descent. A descent into a dark, lonely place. A place she’s terrified of being trapped again.
Because this time, she won’t be alone. The image of Valerie Winters will be there to keep her company.
Her intercom buzzes for the fourth time in the last half hour. The first three were reporters. This one, thank goodness, isn’t.
“Tess? Tessa, it’s me. Can you buzz me in?”
The voice is distant, mechanical, but there’s no doubt who it is. She’s been expecting him.
She told him not to come, but she didn’t mean it. She wouldn’t have called if she hadn’t wanted, needed, him to come.
She presses a button to open the door downstairs.
When the knock on the door comes, Tessa hesitates. This is the reason she called. A friend. Support. A lifeline.
“Let me in, Tessa,” says the voice on the other side of the door. “I know you’re there.”
She sighs. She’s not fooling anyone. Not even herself.
When she opens the door to her apartment, Ben Russell peers at her, concern etched on every line of his face. “You look like shit,” he says after a moment.
“Good to see you too.” She leaves him standing in the hallway and walks back toward the kitchen. She needs to walk away. If she stares at him too long, she’ll lose her composure. “I guess you’ve seen the news?”
“Yeah.” He drops an overnight bag inside her door, then closes it behind him. “The police haven’t found her, then?”
“No.” Tessa pulls open the door of the fridge and grabs two beers. “I don’t think so. I tried to call the Bonham Police Department, but . . .”
“Persona non grata?” Ben guesses, correctly.
She hadn’t even made it past the receptionist, whose manner had turned distinctly cold after Tessa had given her name. The chilly reception wasn’t a surprise. After fourteen months of exhaustive research and interviews, she produced a series that laid bare every mistake and abuse of authority she could dig up in the Bonham Police Department’s handling of the Gwen Morley murder case, and there was no shortage of material to find.
The results were devastating to the small, tight-knit community located just south of Albany. After the documentary was released, there was an outcry for justice from the rest of the country, but in Bonham, many, if not most, of the residents stood firm in their belief that Oliver Barlow was a rapist and a murderer.
Tessa devoted an entire episode to describing what seemed, to an outsider at least, like an inordinate amount of prejudice against the Barlow family that ran like a river through the little town.
“No one is going to let me anywhere near that investigation,” she says. “Not that I blame them. I just . . . I don’t know. I feel like I should be doing something.”
Ben follows her into the kitchen and takes a seat on a barstool. Tessa distractedly notes how kind the years have been to him, and the unfairness of that. By rights, he should have a middle-age paunch and at least a little sagging around the jowls, but no. His strawberry blonde hair, just this side of ginger, is as thick as it ever was, and if there are a few grays lurking in there, they’re well camouflaged. Ben moves with the lithe grace of a man comfortable in his skin.
“Have you eaten?” she asks. “I can find something to throw together if you’re hungry.” She avoids his eyes and clasps her hands together to hide their tremor.
“No, I’m fine.”
Tessa crosses to the pantry anyway and rummages through the shelves. “I don’t have anything but stale crackers anyway. I’ll order something.”
She gasps when she turns to find he’s moved from his seat. He’s standing directly behind her.
“Forget food, Tessa,” he says. “I’m not here for you to feed me.”
Her eyes are level with the buttons on his shirt, and she slowly raises them. When they meet his, she freezes.
“I came to make sure you’re okay.” One hand comes up and gently brushes a strand of hair behind her ear.
The worry in his eyes undoes her. Each of the defense mechanisms she uses to hold herself together begins to snap, one by one, and before she’s aware it’s going to happen, tears fill her eyes.