Artemis appears skeptical of that. And rightly so: There is no email, and if Nico dies, everything will likely remain hidden forever.
“I can take you there right now, but you have to promise.”
“Scout’s honor,” Artemis says, dryly.
With that, he gestures to the door, and the twins march Nico and Jenna out of the house.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
JENNA
Nico leads the way through the back alley, around the park, and down a dirt path to a meadow behind a dilapidated house.
Artemis stops, stares at the house where the man they all called Ned Flanders lived, the man who recognized Arty’s brilliance and mentored him. The closest thing Arty had to a father figure, and ultimately a relationship that fostered the technology that supported the then newly emerging social-media sites, technology that made Artemis a rich man by his mid-twenties.
The pixels are now coming together for Jenna. Ben Wood was being blackmailed and it prompted him to revisit the events of that night, and he uncovered something none of them had known at the time: Ned Flanders’s real name was Park Jones. He was a child molester who’d befriended a boy who had easy access to young girls. She thinks of Ben’s handwritten note at the library: BROOD-ROBOT
LLC-FAGIN JONES. Ben loved to read; he’d referenced Boo Radley. And Fagin is an infamous character from a Dickens novel—a despicable man who used children to commit his crimes. Flanders used Artemis to lure girls.
And Artemis must’ve agreed, since he needed Park Jones. So Marta, Annie, the others … it’s so awful, Jenna can’t finish the thought.
But the theory is confirmed when she sees the holes dotting the knoll. The final resting place of the missing girls, no doubt. Arty created a shell company to buy the property to ensure no one ever discovered the bodies, the crimes he had been party to. But when Nico blackmailed him with photos of Mr. Brood’s bones, Arty needed to remove all the remains on the property and destroy all possible evidence linking him to the murders.
Something she can only describe as blind rage is consuming Jenna now.
Nico leads the group not to one of the holes, but instead, to a mound of freshly tilled soil. The spot from all those years ago …
Nico looks down at the dirt. “Here,” he says.
“Here?” Artemis lets out a wooden laugh. “You dug up Mr. Brood, and what?—then brought him back to the original gravesite and reburied him?”
One of the twins walks to a shed near the house and returns with a shovel. She jabs it into the dirt so it stands upright. The other twin removes Nico’s zip ties.
Artemis gestures to the shovel. “Get to it, then.”
The other twin still has the tube weapon pressed against Jenna’s spine. She watches, shaking her
head, knowing that Nico is not only retrieving the bones Artemis is after but also digging his own grave.
The woman whispers in Jenna’s ear, “I’m going to enjoy burying you alive.”
Jenna feels a rivulet of sweat drip down her side. Her mind is racing, teasing out how she can attack without that bolt driving through her vertebrae, without Nico being torn to shreds by the other hit woman’s gun.
Artemis looks out at the other holes. A field of weeds now pockmarked by tilled soil, bordered on one side by Flanders’s ramshackle house through the brush, bleak woodland on the other side.
“You should’ve filled in those holes,” he says to the hit woman with Jenna.
“We kinda got tied up with the judge and didn’t think returning was a good idea,” she says like a snarky teenager. “Don’t worry, no one will ever find what was left of the others.”
“Still,” Artemis says, but drops it.
Nico continues to dig as Jenna plays out different scenarios. She could lunge forward, charge at Arty, and the twin with the gun might not shoot for fear of catching him in the cross fire. No, she thinks these chicks wouldn’t care if they did. Frankly, she wonders if Arty is going to make it out alive.
Alternatively, she could do a backward head-butt, crush the other hit woman’s nose, and dart away. But the woman would likely instinctively set off the weapon, which would send Jenna to the ground with a severed spinal cord. And that would surely result in her being buried alive, as promised.
If she can catch Nico’s glance, he could swing the shovel, hit the one sister, and Jenna could get away, race into the woods, be done with the lot of them. But again, the weapon digging into her back presents an inescapable peril.
Then, she spies something that may give her a way out: a man with scraggly hair hiding behind one of the trees.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
DONNIE
The air is ripped from Donnie’s lungs when he sees them. The two identical women. He now understands how Ben was killed while Donnie was attacked on the ship: It wasn’t the same killer.
There are two of them. And they’re marching Jenna and Nico out of Savior House and down the street. He sees Arty as well, but no Derek Brood.
It was reckless to come back. But he couldn’t let Jenna, or even Nico, walk into a trap with Arty, the person who betrayed them all. And though his heart feels like it will explode out of his chest, his mind filled with doubts that he can save them, he owes it to Benny to try.
He follows in the shadows as they go to a house he remembers from when they were kids, their neighbor’s place. What was it that they called the owner? Some character from The Simpsons? His house bordered the woods and had an expansive meadow in the back that led into the bramble where their beloved tree fort hung in the canopy.
Donnie follows at a safe distance as the group moves to the back of the house. When he catches up, he takes in a breath but just as quickly loses it when he sees the holes in the field. He’d glimpsed the hidden graveyard in Benny’s video, but it’s even more chilling live.
Who killed them? Mr. Brood? Donnie now doubts that. It was a fiction created by Artemis to make them think Brood was selling the girls to a mysterious woman for sex slavery or whatever. But they’d been only two blocks away the whole time, buried less than six feet under. Was Artemis the killer? It didn’t make sense. He’d never shown interest in girls, in anyone sexually, for that matter. It was one of the reasons they called him The Robot. So, who?
Right now, it doesn’t matter. He has the gun from the Boo Radley hole. Ben led him there. And now he’s going to stop the people who killed his best friend.
He ducks low in the shadows. He sees Jenna. Her eyes are darting around. He can almost see the calculations going on in her head, figuring out how she’ll break free.
He can’t let the others spot him. But if he can show himself just enough to catch her eye …
He sees Artemis directing Nico, who’s pulling a duffel bag out of a freshly dug hole.
Donnie stares at Jenna and she locks eyes with him.
All attention is on the duffel as Artemis unzips the top and peers inside.
This is their chance.
Jenna nods at Donnie, who fires the gun in the air and charges the knoll.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
JENNA
The gunshot echoes in the night. The next seconds are a whirlwind.
Jenna simultaneously arches her back and thrusts her head into a reverse head-butt. Her skull connects hard and she hears the crunch of cartilage at the same time as the deadly whoosh of the cattle gun. The steel rod connects with her back, but she’s managed to put enough distance from the device that it sends a shock wave of pain through her without piercing flesh or bone.