Headlights(55)

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I do. And when you find her—if you do—just … Seriously. I’m telling you.” Her eyes fill with tears, but she keeps them on me. “Don’t fucking let go.”



* * *



I drive Daphne back to her car at the museum, and I get out and hug her goodnight. She lets me. I tell her she can give my jacket back another time. One more flimsy excuse to see each other, for me to try to make it all right. Make any of it right.

She steps back, puts her hands in the pockets, and pulls something out. “Do you need this?” she asks.

I look up. And I freeze.

Daphne is holding a six of spades playing card with a drawing of a fox on it.

A playing card that no one knows I took. From the wall Tillman and CSI photographed in Hannah Lawrence’s cabin. Photos which would be in Hannah’s file.

“Right,” I say. “Yeah, thanks.” I’m not breathing. Adrenaline rushing through me. It’s not a huge deal. It shouldn’t be. Right? I don’t know. Tampering with a crime scene. Theft? More, probably.

Daphne watches me a very long moment and holds the card out. After another, I take it.

“It’s good to see you, Daniel,” she says, studying me like I’m one of her insects or cadavers. Like she’s seeing so much more than I want her to.

Maybe too much has happened and we’ll never get it back—this, us—maybe life just takes so much from a person sometimes, there’s hardly any person left at all. Or maybe she knows me too well and can see all the ways I’m slipping.

I wait until she drives off, standing in the dark of the museum parking lot, the playing card in my hand for all the world to see. My fingers sliding over the silky edges of it.

The air feels different. Everything a little tighter.

Somewhere close by, coyotes yip and cackle. It sounds like it comes from everywhere at once, echoing, crackling. Static and pressure and cold. And I don’t know how I know it, I can’t explain, but I feel a shift in the air, a tension between atoms.

A rumble of something in the near distance, closing in.

Heading straight toward me.





17



I get in the car just as we receive an email with the security footage we requested from Rock Creek subdivision security. The video shows Everett Brown walking exactly where he said he was on Sagebrush. Walking, looking into people’s yards. He’s standing very near the spot where the little girl’s chalk drawing was.

WW.

Witchwalker.

And then there’s a 1.2-second glitch. Everett Brown is gone in the next frame.

I pull up the CCTV footage from six years ago. Fourteen-year-old Claire Wright at the gas station. There, and then gone. One second exactly on hers.

I watch them ten times, twenty, in the museum parking lot. I listen back to Tillman’s interview with Everett, to my own. I drive, and I listen. I don’t even know where I’m driving. My headlights cut through this town that makes me insane, that— I have such a Bad Feeling.

I don’t know where the thought comes from.

Another email ping. Tillman’s uploaded his interview with Mona Brown to the file. I listen to it as I drive through the night. Tillman’s right. I do think she’s gonna leave Everett, and that she’s been logging in as him in the chat rooms. And the way she talks about Wizdumteller … it is reverent. Obsessive even.

“Who is Wizdumteller?” Tillman asks. “Do you know?”

“No,” she says.

Tillman moves on to the next question, either doesn’t clock the lie that I just did, or is working toward finding it from another angle.

He doesn’t though. The whole interview, and he doesn’t ask her again about Wizdumteller.

I think she knows. I feel it.

The only other strange thing in the interview is a moment that shouldn’t be strange at all. But it just … that prickling, the itch at the back of my skull. I start the recording over. At the very beginning of it, Tillman says, “That’s a nice vase. I like the clouds on it.”

“Thank you,” Mona replies. “My father gave it to me.”

“Where does he live?” Tillman asks.

“Out in Yam—” She clears her throat. “Yuma,” she says.

And something about it. The way she says father. The way she just … I don’t know. I don’t know why it bothers me. But it does. Just a little stress on the word.

I run it back, listen to it again.

A third time. My father—

The radio flips on by itself, playing music over Tillman’s and Mona’s voices. I turn the radio off.

It turns back on again. Static, the air distorting a little.

Pressure in my ears.

I flip it off, try to listen to the interview, to see if there’s— A song. Now playing in the car. One I know. I hit the radio button again, try to turn the interview volume up. The music only gets louder, unbearably.

Blaze Foley’s “If I Could Only Fly.” But discordant. Almost like … there’s a pulse underneath. A deep, wet heartbeat.

Blaze Foley. Rose, on the river. Her hand holding mine.

I flip the switch again, but nothing. The stupid radio keeps— “This is what life is supposed to be,” she says. “Happy. Beautiful. I love you, my—”