Molly’s fingers traced the carved initials at the bottom of the post, the gashes almost smoothed over by the way she always worried at the marks, petting and stroking them for comfort. A reminder that some terrifying things were worth it. “Saw Hicks at the rodeo.”
Silence greeted the confession. Eliza was like that sometimes, drifting off, untethered to their conversation. Molly couldn’t see her, but she knew Eliza’s pupils would be dilated, her eyes unfocused, her skin maybe even cold to the touch.
“Was th-th-th . . .” Molly grunted in frustration, swallowed hard. “Was wondering if we tell him, maybe?”
Eliza’s shoulder nudged hers, probably because Molly’s stutter had made an appearance. It was a tell between them. When she was with Eliza, it showed up with frequency only if Molly was actually distressed. And tonight she was distressed.
Molly had tried being brave, so brave, just like Eliza always was. But sometimes she worried; sometimes she stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep because fear had turned her breathing so shallow it was loud in the quiet house. Surely someone would hear the wheezing, the slight whine of protest as oxygen tried to force its way into her lungs. Surely they’d hear the screaming in Molly’s head, the panicked wails of a girl in too deep. Far too deep.
Eliza never seemed to worry like that. Even though she had more reason to.
Molly traced over the initials again. And then again and again.
“Sorry,” Eliza finally said, the apology catching against the wind before wrapping around Molly, and once again Eliza was a girl and not a ghost. “I got lost.”
“It’s okay.” Molly laid her head back against the fence post and breathed in the night—the smoky campfire in the distance, the rich earth devouring dying leaves, the sugar-sweet perfume Eliza sometimes wore. “You can be lost with me.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Eliza said, an affectionate smile evident in the curve of her words.
“Doesn’t have to.” And Molly meant it. Sometimes Eliza scared her when she’d get that far-off look, or that stubborn set to her mouth where she couldn’t be convinced about anything, but she was still Molly’s favorite person in the world. The panic that had been threatening to devour Molly dissolved just at that reminder.
Eliza had a plan, and Molly would stick to it. She would.
The silence that unspooled between them was a different kind then, velvety and present and warm despite the chill slithering ever closer, frost trailing behind it. She’d miss these in-between days of crisp air and pleasantly pink cheeks, but fall was certainly nipping at summer’s heels.
“Molly,” Eliza finally said, warning in her tone. Molly’s fingernails all but dug into the wood of the post, right by those initials. “You know why you can’t tell anyone, right? We talked about this.”
They had. Time and again, as they pored over old articles of vicious crimes they’d found on the ancient computers in the back corner of the library.
Molly nodded but didn’t say anything, tasting copper from where her teeth bit into the inside of her cheek.
Eliza being Eliza grabbed Molly’s hand, squeezed it too hard. “I couldn’t live with myself if you . . .”
Got hurt. This conversation was familiar enough that Eliza didn’t need to finish the thought. Like Alessandra Shaw. Like Kate Martinez. Like . . .
But who’s going to protect you? Molly always wanted to ask.
She never did.
CHAPTER SIX
LUCY THORNE
Friday 10:45 a.m.
The walk back to the cars was as quiet as the one into the belly of the forest.
It was still on the earlier side—Lucy had woken up at 4:00 a.m. to make the five-hour drive from Seattle to Idaho—and the sky had lightened by the time they cleared the tree line.
While they’d been protected by the forest, the deluge had eased, but the wind howled in the rain’s wake. She and Hicks shouldered their way toward their cars, bodies bent forward, hands on their hats. They got to his white pickup first.
“The coroner?” Lucy prompted, needing to look over the body now that she’d seen where he’d been left. Now that she realized how much care Eliza had taken with Noah despite dumping him in the middle of the woods.
“Yeah. Follow me into town,” he directed and then wasted no time climbing inside the safe warmth of the cab.
Lucy ran the last few feet to her battered sedan.
The body drop where Noah had been found was about a fifteen-minute drive outside Knox Hollow, a straight shot on Highway 41. Both the town and the hiking area were remote, isolated, and Lucy passed only two other cars on the way to the coroner’s.
Every dull, stripped-down thing about the squat building that the sheriff parked in front of screamed government-owned property. Even if she hadn’t known what it was, she could have easily guessed it was the coroner’s.
Hicks held the door of the building open for her as she dashed from her car, the drizzle back but not quite in full force. The cowboy hat finally came off, revealing a surprising sandy mop that softened Hicks’s angular features into something almost boyish. After yanking off her baseball cap, Lucy ran a hand over her own frizzy ponytail, knowing any attempt to tame her hair into respectability was futile.
Hicks gestured toward the long hallway, and once again she was left staring at his back, and then the muddy footprints he left on the clean white linoleum.
They passed a few open office doors, but there wasn’t anyone else inside.
“Lots of budget cuts,” Hicks said quietly, as if he could hear the question she hadn’t voiced. It spooked her a little. “Just the coroner and one assistant these days. They’ll probably sell the building off eventually.”
The coroner, it turned out, was a young man named Jackson. It was unclear if that was his first or last name—“Just call me Jackson”—and it didn’t seem necessary to clarify. He was short, only an inch or so above her own vertically challenged five feet two, with the broad shoulders of a linebacker. His bright red hair came with the stereotypical pale skin and freckles of the Irish, and his smile was big and easy. Welcoming.
They shrugged into smocks and then pulled on gloves before Jackson held out a tub of menthol. Lucy dabbed the gel beneath her nostrils, the burn of it surging into her nasal cavities, obliterating her receptors.
The familiar coroner’s trick was to protect from the stench of death, the rotting flesh, the sour blood, any festering wounds turned black at ripped edges. Sometimes Lucy thought she could still smell the maggots writhing inside the bodies, anyway. But she knew that was impossible.
Jackson just smiled at her as she breathed in, holding on to the mint, letting it wipe the memory of anything else away.
“Over here,” he prompted, before crossing the lab to the cold chambers that lined one of the walls. He pulled out a slab that was about waist height.
This part never got any easier. It was even worse when it was a kid.
Noah Dawson was on the smaller side, but he looked like all little boys seemed to look. His brown hair was floppy, baby fat still rounding out his cheeks, and his arms were a little too long for the rest of a body clearly on the cusp of a growth spurt.
“Do you have a time of death?” Lucy asked, her voice gentling with the instinctive reverence that came in the presence of destroyed innocence.