by Lisa Regan
“Rory,” Josie said.
His head snapped up, and Josie saw the white forelock. A perfectly white lock of hair in the center of his forehead. Striking, she thought. Lorelei had probably loved it. Josie took a step toward him, keeping her movements small. He watched her warily but made no move to get away. She stopped about five feet away from him, staying in place, letting them both catch their breath.
“Rory,” she said again, “my name is Detective Josie Quinn. I’m here to help you, I—”
Again, she heard the telltale sound of a branch snapping and her words stopped in her throat. This sounded like a bigger branch. Closer. She took a quick look around but saw nothing. Her gaze went back to Rory. He stood up straight, moving a step away from the tree, to his full height, which was easily a foot taller than Josie. The fine hairs on the back of Josie’s neck stood up. She had the sense of someone or something watching them. Closing in on them. Rory’s eyes were brown, the same as Lorelei’s. Buckley was right. Aside from the white forelock, he was the spitting image of his mother.
Slowly, his index finger lifted and pressed against his lips.
Hush.
Josie felt a thin ribbon of fear wrap itself around her spine. Footfalls, soft and careful, came from behind her. She whipped around and they stopped. No one was there. When she looked back toward the oak tree, Rory was gone.
“Pax?” Josie called. “Rory?”
Reflexively, her hand went to her holster, but it was empty. Patting her back jeans pocket, she felt the reassuring square of her phone. Except she might not get service out here. She’d have to go back to Lorelei’s house if she hoped to get any bars. But perhaps Pax didn’t know that. She slid the phone out of her pocket and held it in the air. “I’m calling my team,” she yelled. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. It’s best if you come out now and talk with me before they get here. We can work this out, you and me.”
A gunshot shattered the air. Bark from the oak tree Rory had just been leaning against exploded. Josie dropped down to a crouch and started running. No conscious thought drove her body forward, only a primal instinct to get away from the direction of the gunshot. She ran until her lungs burned, her knees ached, and her ankle throbbed mercilessly. When she could barely catch her breath, she stopped, folding herself down beneath a tree trunk that had fallen over a small gully. She tried to listen for footsteps over the sound of her own breathing. She took out her phone and checked for service. One bar.
She didn’t want to make a phone call. Not if Paxton or Rory were still out there—one of them armed. Instead, she sent a text to the team. She watched the little circle next to the text spin as her phone tried to send the message. Seconds later, a red exclamation point appeared beside her message. Failed.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Two more attempts to send the message failed. Josie staggered to her feet. She couldn’t stay out here forever. Her phone wouldn’t send or receive data at the moment, but her GPS still worked. She pulled up the app and studied it, trying to orient herself. Once she had a pretty good idea of where Lorelei’s house was, she began walking in that direction, trying to stay quiet and alert for any noises around her.
She had almost reached the clearing she believed to be Lorelei’s house when she saw a flash of red ahead of her. She raced ahead, weaving among the trees until she saw a figure walking ahead of her in a red shirt and jeans. His head hung low. Paxton Bryan. He had changed clothes since she last saw him. Josie snuck up on him, drawing parallel to him. His hands were empty. He didn’t seem to notice her presence at all, unless he was just pretending. Josie fell back and shifted directly behind him. She waited until there was a small clearing ahead and then tackled him to the ground.
He went down hard, crying out. Josie straddled him and twisted his arms behind his back. “Stop!” he cried. “Stop!”
“Where’s the gun, Pax?” she demanded.
He twisted his neck, trying to look at her. “What gun? I don’t have a gun.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I don’t have a gun.”
“You shot at me.”
“No, no, I swear. I didn’t. It wasn’t me. Please, let me up.”
“Were you following me?”
“What? No.” His voice was pleading.
“Then what were you doing out in the woods, Pax?”
“I was—I was—I can’t tell, okay?”
“I know about Rory,” Josie said. “You can stop lying.”
He said nothing.
“Were you looking for him?”
Again, no response.
Josie sighed. “I’m going to let go of you now. Do you promise not to hurt me?”
“I wouldn’t hurt you. I promise you. I wasn’t doing anything.”
Josie stood. She took a few steps back and watched as he got to his knees and then his feet. He brushed dirt and leaves and pine needles from his pants and shirt. Josie was startled to see tears glistening in his eyes. She watched his Adam’s apple bob a few times as he swallowed, pacing in a tight circle, until he calmed down.
“Pax,” she said. “What are you doing out here? Where’s your dad?”
He kept pacing, eyes down. “He’s back at the market. It was busy so I snuck out.”
“You went to Lorelei’s house,” Josie said. “I saw your bike there. Were you looking for Rory?”
He nodded.
“What were you going to do when you found him?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just needed to talk to him.”
“You knew about him, but your dad didn’t.”
He stopped pacing and met her eyes. “Yeah.”
“How is that possible?” Josie asked. She wondered how she hadn’t known he was there when she visited.
“Rory spends most of his time in the greenhouse. That’s his thing. He kind of lives out there. He doesn’t like being around the girls, so he just stays out there. I mean, sometimes Miss Lorelei makes him come inside but mostly, that’s where he stays. He grows a lot of stuff out there, does experiments. He’s really good at it. You should have seen the peppers he grew last summer. They were huge!”
Before he could get off on a tangent, Josie said, “He was in the greenhouse when your dad came looking for you?”
“Yeah. He knew that Lorelei didn’t like people to meet him, so he stayed out there. He’s got anger issues. Did you know about that?”
“Yes,” Josie said.
“He’s my friend. I know that he can’t control it when the creature comes.”
“The creature?” Josie said.
“That’s the name we made up for his rage—the creature—because it’s, like, not him, you know? It’s something inside him that he can’t get a hold on. He doesn’t want to say terrible things. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone but sometimes, it’s like there’s this thing inside him that overtakes him.”
He must have seen her brow furrow because he said, “I don’t mean in a split personality way, if that’s what you’re thinking right now. Rory doesn’t have that. It was just this thing we did to make it easier for us to talk about the feelings he gets. Miss Lorelei taught us. He’s got the creature and I’ve got the palterer.”
“The what?”
He gave a small smile. “The palterer. It’s a great word, right? I read it in this super-old book I got from the library. It’s considered archaic now.”
“What does it mean?”
“A palterer is someone who talks or acts insincerely.”
“A liar.”
His smile widened. “Right.”
“Who is your palterer?” Josie asked. “Are we talking about a person?”
“No,” Pax said. “You know how I said Rory gets this rage inside him that he can’t control and he doesn’t want? I get this, like, thing inside me that’s always giving me trouble. Always telling me crazy things that don’t make any sense, but they scare me even though I know they’re wrong, so I have to do what the thing—the palter
er—says. Miss Lorelei made us name them so we would understand that they were not the entirety of our identities. Like, that’s not who we are. Rory isn’t just his rage, and I’m not just the palterer. These things are apart from us. Rory even drew his.”
Josie thought of the disturbing drawing in the barren bedroom at Lorelei’s house.
“Yeah, I think I saw that,” she said. “The palterer told you to make sure the boxes on the loading dock this morning were exactly one finger’s width apart, didn’t he?” she asked. “Or something bad would happen.”
His eyes widened. “How did you know?”
Ignoring his question, she said, “But the palterer isn’t an actual voice or identity or person, is it?”
He shook his head.
“You have OCD.”
His entire face changed. He took two steps toward her, his arms opening, as if he were going to embrace her. Instead, he placed them on her shoulders. Josie held still, divining no threat from the boy. “That’s what Miss Lorelei said!” he told her.
If Pax was not a threat to her, maybe he was telling the truth about not having a gun and not having shot at her.
“Emily has OCD as well,” Josie said.
He dropped his hands and stepped back, his look of relief tempered with something else. Something dark and uncertain.
If Pax wasn’t the one who had shot at her, then who?
“Pax,” Josie said. “Remember when you told me that even your father lied?”
His head bobbed in acknowledgment. Even as she watched him and worked out the scenario in her mind, her ears were tuned to the forest around them, listening for even the slightest noise. A soft footfall. The snap of a branch. An exhale.
“Emily is your sister, isn’t she?” Josie asked. “That’s what he’s lying about. He did have a relationship with Lorelei, and Emily was the result of it. That’s why you kept going there to see her.”
His face went ashen. “You can’t tell,” he whispered.
Josie thought she heard something swish through the brush to their right. She surged forward and grabbed Pax’s upper arm, pulling him along. “Come on, we have to get out of here.”
Twenty-Two
Josie found her pistol inside Lorelei’s house, put the toothbrushes in a paper bag she found in the kitchen, threw Pax’s bike into the back of her vehicle, and drove directly toward the stationhouse. It could take hours for the K-9 unit to arrive. They served the entire county and were often out on other calls when Denton PD asked for assistance. Josie would instruct one of her team members to search the house for some personal item belonging to Rory. Right now, she just wanted to get away from the house. In the passenger’s seat, Pax was silent. As they passed the produce market, he looked at it. Josie glanced over as well, noting that one of the vans was missing. Was Reed out looking for him?
As if reading her mind, Pax said, “My dad’s gonna be really mad.”
Josie said, “Pax, does your dad hit you?”
“Only a couple of times,” he said, his eyes still glued to the outside as the market faded into the distance.
“You know you’re eighteen now,” Josie said. “You don’t have to stay with him.”
“Where else would I go? I didn’t even finish high school. This problem I have, it can make things really difficult for me. Miss Lorelei was helping me, and for the first time since my mom died, I started to feel normal. But then my dad found out she was ‘messing around in my head.’ That’s what he calls it. He said I couldn’t see her—or Emily—again.”
Josie glanced over at him to see him shrug his left shoulder twice.
“Do you feel nervous?” she asked him.
“Anxious,” he said.
Josie said, “I can talk to your dad for you, if you want, when we’re done at the station.”
His shoulder shrugged again, but he said nothing.
“Pax, can I ask you a couple of questions that are important to our investigation?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Do you know what your blood type is?”
“No,” he said. “I have no idea.”
“How about your shoe size?”
“Well, yeah, I wear a size ten, just like my dad.”
Josie felt a small jolt but then reminded herself that it could mean nothing. Lots of men wore size ten shoes. Noah wore a size ten. “Do you know Rory’s shoe size?”
“No. We’re friends, but I don’t know that kind of stuff about him.”
“Fair enough,” said Josie.
Ahead, Denton’s quaint, historic Main Street came into view. Josie saw Komorrah’s Koffee on their right, and had a terrible craving for coffee. It would have to wait. She pulled into the municipal parking lot behind the station and parked. “Pax, how do you know about Emily? That your dad is her dad, too.”
He looked at his lap. “I see things. I hear things. I’m not an idiot. I know he thinks I am. Always telling people I’m ‘not right in the head.’” He lowered his voice in a comical impression of Reed that Josie also found sad. Then he continued, “Yeah, I didn’t finish school, but I go to the library all the time. I read a lot. Miss Lorelei said I was brilliant.”
“She was right,” Josie told him. “I mean, come on, ‘palterer’ is a great word!”
He laughed. Josie noticed his shoulder-shrugging had gone away for the moment. She wanted him relaxed, especially now that she was going to ask him to come into the police station and make an official statement about all the things he’d told her.
He said, “I saw him and Miss Lorelei back in the office once, at the market. It was right after my mom died. They were having sex. They did it a few times at the market after that, and then it just stopped.”
“Did he go visit her?” Josie asked.
“No. I don’t think it ever went anywhere. I don’t think it was more than those few times. She kept coming to the market for food, but she avoided him and he avoided her. Then, as the months went on, her stomach got bigger and bigger. It was pretty obvious what was going on. The other thing about my dad? He thinks I don’t understand anything so he has conversations with people while I’m around and thinks I don’t get what’s happening.”
“He confronted her about the pregnancy,” Josie supplied.
“Yeah. She said the baby was his—that she hadn’t been with anyone else. I’m not sure he believed her—or maybe he just didn’t want to—but then he got mad at her. He said she should have ‘gotten rid of it.’ She asked him how he could say that about his own baby. Then he said—”
Paxton broke off. His shoulder jerked up and down again. Josie reached over and touched it lightly, glad that he didn’t flinch. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat again. Then he said, in a croak, “He said, ‘I already got one broken kid, why would I want another?’”
“Oh, Pax,” Josie said. “I’m so sorry.”
He waved a hand in the air, as if to dismiss her words. Josie kept her hand lightly on his shoulder, feeling it twitch under her palm. “You know you’re not broken, right?”
He nodded, not convincingly. “Miss Lorelei took an interest in me after that. Every time she came in, she’d talk to me. When I got older and got my bike, I’d ride over to see her, and I’d visit with Emily. Hold her and stuff. Play with her. Then I got old enough to work at the market, and it wasn’t easy to get away anymore. You have to understand though, I don’t have anyone in my life but my dad. My dad’s sister, my aunt, she wanted to see me all the time after my mom passed, but he won’t let her visit. She lives far away in Georgia. I wish she was closer. I’d try to see her, too. She always treated me well.”
“I’m sorry to hear you haven’t been able to see her,” Josie said. “Pax, is it possible that your dad was… seeing Lorelei for many years before Emily was born? Is it possible that Rory and Holly were also his children?”
“I don’t think so. He was married to my mom.”
While Josie knew that to be true, she also knew it didn’t mean a damn thing. As Pa
x had told her himself, if there’s one thing that all adults do, it’s lie.
Twenty-Three
Josie sat in her chair, her left foot bare and resting on top of her desk. Beside it, Noah perched, holding an ice pack over her ankle and intermittently shaking his head. Josie had an urge to stand up and smooth the worry lines from his forehead. Mettner had taken Pax down to their conference room to try to get a full statement from him about the Mitchell family and his father’s relationship to them. Gretchen had gone back to Lorelei’s with several patrol units. Sheriff’s deputy Sandoval and her K-9 companion, Rini, were going to meet them there so that they could try to find Rory before nightfall. Amber had gone to Komorrah’s for coffee.
Noah said, “I should have gone with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Josie said. “I went there looking for a personal item. I didn’t expect to get my ass kicked by a fifteen-year-old boy, chase him through the woods and get shot at.”
“It just seems to me that if anyone should expect something like that to happen, it should be you.”
Josie tried to slap him from her seat, but he laughed and moved out of reach.
“By the way,” he told her. “Hummel got Buckley’s prints from your business card. They’re not in AFIS and they don’t match any of the unidentified prints in Lorelei’s house.”
“But Buckley said he was there,” Josie said.
“He said he hadn’t been there in years. Hummel says it’s entirely possible for none of his prints to remain if he hadn’t been there in years. He also lifted Pax’s prints from a water bottle he threw away at the produce market. He went there right after you texted him this morning. As expected, Pax’s prints match up to one of the unidentified sets of prints in the house.”
“Which means we’re down to two sets of unidentified prints in the house,” Josie said. “One of those has to be Rory’s, which leaves who?”
