Headlights(43)

Rose and me on a rock, in a river. Someone singing Blaze Foley.

If I could only fly.

The thing releases me. I drop forward to my hands, forehead to the grass. I wheeze in a breath. That image. The same place. Same memory—not memory—that hit me in the office. When were Rose and I ever at a river?

When I’ve recovered enough to sit up, the shadow is gone. The lights are turned off in Jack and Emily’s house. I know I’m crazy, that this isn’t real. Grief does this, PTS does, rips the air from your lungs, makes you think you’ve—but … Still, just …

Just in case, I say, out loud and into the night.

“Not them.”

The words barely rasp out after what it just did to my throat. This is what happens, when they start to come for me. Or when the grief does. Or PTS. Or I don’t know, but— “Not this family,” I say. “You stay the fuck away from them.”

I shake my head to clear the half-memory—not memory—of my birth mom, get myself in the car.

I pull away from the Murphys’ house, the streetlights flickering, one by one, as I pass.





11



I hired a cleaning service for Whileago Manor. When I get back now, it’s less dusty, and the smell is gone. In some ways it’s worse, cleaner like this. Looks more the way it did when my parents were here. But dark, empty.

As if to contradict me, footsteps pound upstairs. A door slams in the basement. The lights of the entry and living room glow at my approach. The power’s still off. I go to the wall switch to double-check. I walk to the living room and sit by the hearth, start piling on the logs.

A glass bottle smashes to the floor of the bar. A shadow moves along the wall.

“Jesus. I am not doing this,” I say. “We’re not fucking doing this.”

Stillness, silence. Save for the crackle of the fire, the pop of it catching.

My heart going wild like always. Kid in the motel, kid with the murdered mom, kid in the haunted house, kid at war. Therapist once showed me a report on what constant fight-or-flight can do to a body, over time. No matter which way I play it, I’m fucked. Heart attack’s comin’, any day now, and that’s gonna be that. You can only push it so far for so long.

I go to the bar and pour myself a whiskey, knock it back. Ignore the mess on the floor.

“You’re not real, and you’re not fucking helpful, and I swear to god, if you—”

The lights flash brighter, then stop glowing. Dim down to darkness. I take another drink.

“Thank you,” I say.

Back by the fireplace, I spread out the files again, on the coffee table and floor, walk in and around them, the fire glowing at my back.

I pull the fox drawing from my pocket, Hannah’s card. Set it down with all the photographs and reports, everything compiled on this case over the past six years. All these names, faces and stories and relations and connections or lack of connections. Twenty-three now with the three recent murders—Kimberly Chen, Ross Thompson, Pete Noland, Ramona Lopez, Everett Brown, Tony Howell, and Hannah Lawrence. Seven new names here.

So why can I only think of Hannah?

I open my laptop, close my eyes against the black, then search for her again. I use a hotspot for service from my phone, remotely log in to my work desktop, and read over Frazier and Garcia’s memo. They got her safely back to the cabin, noted how she was able to hike even injured, that they found her camera and asked if they could develop the film. She’d been protective of it, had insisted she get it back after they got it developed, said she wanted to see the photo she’d taken of the fox.

Hannah Lawrence. Her name, even. Like a part of me knew she would always be involved in this, like I’ve somehow heard it before.

Have I?

I search through the files, try and find any way she could have been even tangentially associated with anyone else here. Any way I could have ever come across her.

One thing about PTS is that sometimes there are gaps. These memories of Rose surfacing now could be that. You get blank spaces in your life, periods of time your brain shuts you out from, and sometimes it’ll spit them back at you out of nowhere. Could I have met Hannah before and just not remember? Is that why seeing her makes me feel …

I touch the edges of the sketch. Drop it and run my hands over my head.

My heart, that lightheaded nausea.

The murder that ended the hiatus—Kimberly Chen as the “Drifter”—was November 2. The second—Pete Noland and Ramona Lopez—November 10. The third—with Everett Brown, Tony Howell, and Hannah Lawrence—was November 16, three days before I arrived here. Eight days between the first two, six between the second and the third. And November 16 was the six-year anniversary of the very first murder, of Claire Wright. Could it be Oliver Wright acting in revenge?

I check the clock on the computer. It’s the 21st now, two days since I was at the motel.

That third murder in the motel the only one seemingly targeting me specifically, on the anniversary of Claire Wright’s death, the beginning of all of this. Is it possible there won’t be any more? That whoever’s doing this just wanted me to have to go back there? There’s nothing worse for me. If it’s about torture, that was it. What else could they do? They’ve already made me go back to the worst moment of my life.

Could Wright have found out about my past?