Sam kisses my temple, and I blindly turn toward him until our lips meet. I don’t like thinking about my earlier life. Melvin’s whisper is always there, far too close. The kiss turns deeper, sweeter, and I focus on it to try to push away the memories.
Until he breaks it with a regretful sigh and leans his forehead against mine. “I need sleep,” he tells me. “Sorry. Early lesson in a few hours.”
“I know,” I say. He’s working currently as a flight instructor, teaching private clients on small aircraft, but he’s also taking classes of his own and getting recertified on commercial jets. Busy man, but he’s here, against all the odds. And I’m no longer afraid to say that I love him.
Like everyone in our house, the two of us are damaged. He’s the brother of a serial killer’s victim. I was a serial killer’s wife. Our traumas hit head-on the day a drunk driver crashed into the house I shared with Melvin Royal, and that accident uncovered not just Sam’s sister’s body but a path of horror that stretched out for years.
That crash made wreckage of both our lives, but in very different ways.
We’ve come to terms with the legacy of Melvin Royal from both sides, and built a relationship over that dark, angry scar. It still bleeds, sometimes. And it always, always aches.
“Go back to sleep,” I tell him, and kiss him again. It’s regretful, but sweetened with the promise of a future. He hugs me and slips back to bed.
I’m too restless to try to rest, tempting as it is; I’d only toss and turn and disturb him. I head quietly back to our office. Benefit of a new house: more room. Sam’s got his desk, I have mine, and as I shut the door and turn on the lights, it’s another déjà vu moment: my battered old desk, my old filing cabinets, a clean and different room wrapped around them.
I’ve mounted pictures on the walls. Some are of places, some are of people. My kids and Sam, surely. My very select group of friends in happy times when Sam and I barbecued a couple of years back. All normal, at first glance.
Second glance, every picture means more. The east wall is my favorite. That beautiful, striking piece of art is the handiwork of a terrified young woman named Arden Miller we came across while hunting my ex. She’s now safe and living under a new identity; I check on her from time to time as her artist’s star rises. Like Sam, she came out of a dark place and is finding her light.
Next to that picture is a photo of two young women dressed in casual shorts and T-shirts with their arms around each other—normal as can be. When I first saw them, they’d been captives in a locked basement in Wolfhunter, broken and terrified—a mystery I never should have taken on, but that had launched me into the idea of finding missing people as a private investigator. The two women sent me that snapshot, no note, no location, but it reminds me that they’ve found their own safety now.
I keep only pictures of successes on this wall. Good memories. Even Vee has a place there on the end, arm around my daughter while they both flip off the camera. Vee is a success too. She survived Wolfhunter.
Not everyone did. The west wall, the one I keep in shadow, has other photos. That view of Stillhouse Lake reminds me that people died there as part of my ex-husband’s plot. The apparently peaceful photo of a cemetery is really a photo of Melvin Royal’s cheap, anonymously numbered tombstone in the far distance; it reminds me he’s dead and gone. I need to remember my failures as much as my successes; they teach me to think harder about the risks I’m taking. Because not all those risks are mine.
I know it’s wrong to keep score but it’s the only way I can make sense of things these days.
Out of habit, the first thing I do at my desk is check on my ever-present internet trolls. I have a list, and I run the searches to see what they’re posting. Lately things have died down a little—other outrages for them to scream about, other people for them to torment, guilty or not. But as the ex-wife of serial killer Melvin Royal, I will never be off that list of easy targets to hit, and sure enough, I see one of my most persistent trolls is back agitating for a reinvestigation of my “involvement” in Melvin’s crimes.
Being married to a serial killer is, in a lot of people’s eyes, proof enough that there must be something very wrong with me. But this guy isn’t about justice. He just likes hurting people . . . but at a distance, from safely behind his computer. Nothing new here.
I check work emails. I have a few boring background checks to do, but that can wait until later. The investigative company I work for—mostly remotely—does a fair amount of standard corporate busywork, vetting potential executives for high-profile positions. It’s still surprising to me how many of those turn out bad in the end. It’s almost like rising to the highest levels of power comes with a side order of sociopathy—who could have seen that coming? And if they have enough money and power, they rarely have to face any meaningful retribution for the lives they’ve ruined.
I’m not neutral on the subject.
When my phone buzzes ten minutes later, it sends my pulse racing so fast I feel it in my temples. Immediate panic reaction, just like waking up from the dream earlier. I immediately think of the people I love, and who could be calling at this hour . . . and why.
Caller ID shows it’s my best friend from Stillhouse Lake, Kezia Claremont. She’s a police detective, one of just two that the tiny town of Norton employs. “Kez?” I blurt out the second I have the phone to my ear. “What’s wrong? Is it your dad?”
“Nothing like that,” she says. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”
I swallow the panic and manage a hollow laugh. “Not remotely. I’ve been up the better part of an hour already. Bad dreams and a kid who doesn’t believe in curfew.”
“I had a feeling you’d be awake,” she says. There’s no humor in her voice; I don’t think I’ve heard her this grim in quite a while. “I caught a case. Now I’m out here in the middle of goddamn nowhere in the dark and it’s just . . . it’s bad.”
Kez has rarely shown me soft spots or vulnerabilities. It worries me to hear a tremble in her voice.
“What’s going on?” I lean my elbows on the desk, lean into the conversation. I hear her take in a deep breath on the other end.
“First glance, it seemed nothing much. Accident, most likely. But not anymore.” She doesn’t want to tell me. I feel that tug on the hair at the back of my neck again, and a cold chill comes with it.
“Prester isn’t there?” Detective Prester is her partner, a good man, steady, with the eternal eyes of a cop who’s seen it all. Twenty-five years her senior at least.
“No,” she says. “I’m trying to let him rest; the old man hasn’t been looking too well lately. It’s just me and a coroner out here. And a pretty useless sheriff’s deputy.”
“You need some company?”
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t ask,” I tell her. “But I’m on the way.”
2
GWEN
Eerie. It’s the first word that comes to me as I top the rise on the no-name back road and see mist coming off the pond, curling and twisting like a living thing. The whole scene is painted in the red-and-blue light bars of the vehicles assembled: a county sheriff’s cruiser, Kezia’s unmarked car, and a coroner’s van that looks as if it might date back to the 1970s, at least. I roll to a stop behind Kezia’s car. This place is narrow, a barely passable road into the dark, and it occurs to me that the more cars are here, the harder it will be for any of us to get out. But the important thing right now is the haunted quality in Kez’s voice. She called. I had to come. She’s shown up for me, more than once, when I needed help. Especially when my kids were in real danger. Kez’s quiet support means the world to me, and if I can repay that, even in a small way . . . I will.