Her Final Words

by Brianna Labuskes

But where Darcy had tolerated Lucy’s questions, Hicks’s presence seemed to push her over some edge. Darcy lifted a shaking finger, pointing it at Hicks, damning him with just that small gesture. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Wyatt Hicks. Cora would be.”

  Cora. Eliza’s mother. Here she was once again. Gone but clearly not forgotten.

  Lucy’s eyes swung to Hicks’s face, but he remained as blank as ever.

  “Ma’am,” Lucy interjected before this devolved further. “Please. We’re just trying to find out what happened to your son. We’re just trying to get answers. Don’t you want answers?”

  Darcy stared at her, dark, red-rimmed eyes reflecting nothing but disgust. “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.”

  “I don’t . . .” Lucy trailed off, wrong-footed and clumsy, her pent-up anger bending and twisting into confusion. Hicks remained silent behind her.

  “It means, get the hell off my property and don’t make me ask twice,” Darcy said, then shut the door in their faces.

  Lucy stared at it, her eyes unfocused on a knot in the wood, a blemish, a dark spot that curled out into the smooth finish of the rest of it.

  “Do you know what that was?” she asked when she finally turned, tracking over the land as she did, looking for fresh dirt that she knew she wouldn’t find. Noah could be anywhere by now.

  “It means”—Hicks paused, cleared his throat, continued—“it means that whoever killed Noah will have to face God. The person’s punishment on earth doesn’t matter.”

  The helplessness crept in, a dark, insidious smoke that rolled up from the ground where Noah now rested, that slid up along her hips, twined around her arms, then down into her throat, into her lungs, until she couldn’t breathe with it. There was something utterly alluring about surrendering to the feeling—a euphoria she knew awaited if she just accepted her own lack of control. For the first time in a long time, she understood. Understood the bliss that lay in the idea of a higher power.

  Then she thought about the bruises, the ones that were never explained. Thought about the cuts from the verse that might have told them about a killer’s hesitations or guilt. Thought about the little clues that had been devoured by the earth along with Noah’s body.

  “Yeah, well. When you don’t believe in the afterlife, the promise of someone burning in hell falls a little flat.”

  Hicks held up his hands. “Preaching to the choir.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SHERIFF WYATT HICKS

  Two weeks earlier

  “You’ve been looking at the file a lot,” Zoey commented from where she lurked over Hicks’s shoulder.

  Hicks didn’t elbow her out of his space like he wanted to, but he shifted far enough back from his computer that she got the memo. She circled his desk, taking the seat across from him and propping her boots up next to his keyboard. “Who is she?”

  Alessandra Shaw.

  The girl had been on his mind since Peggy had dropped her name like it was nothing back in the cemetery. Before that even—when he’d gone to question Josiah about Molly, the memory of Alessandra had been there, too, between them so that she might as well have been standing on the porch.

  Resting his interlocked fingers on his chest, he watched Zoey from his leaned-back position, trying to decide how much to tell her.

  Keeping secrets came as naturally as breathing to him. He hardly even thought about it anymore; it was instinct to hoard, to protect, to hide. But there was something about Zoey he trusted. Her undemanding loyalty, the way she let him know she was on his side without forcing answers on the tough questions—that was part of it. But not all.

  Zoey had been in Knox Hollow for only six months, and by all accounts he shouldn’t be telling her anything, let alone any of what he suspected was happening to these girls. These kids.

  She’d come to him from a small county sheriff’s office about thirty miles north of Missoula, where she said she’d gotten tired of drunk college dudes wandering off into the wilderness. Hicks had warned her there wasn’t much more action around Knox Hollow, but she’d just shrugged.

  The only other applicant for the job had been Jackson’s buddy Rory Klempt, who’d shot his own big toe off last Thanksgiving after too many beers. So Zoey it was.

  Despite the fact that she hadn’t had much competition for the role, Zoey hadn’t slacked a day she’d been there. Hicks wasn’t one to delegate, not in Knox Hollow where the balance between the Church and law enforcement was so delicate, but Zoey had slid in like she was made for the place. Over the past months Hicks had found himself leaning on her in ways he hadn’t with his previous deputy, who had held the position for twenty-two years.

  His eyes slid back to the picture of Alessandra on the screen. This was different, though. This wasn’t busting up a fight over at the bar or settling a standoff over a land dispute.

  This was personal.

  “Another runaway from about a year ago,” he finally said, clearing his throat as her brows lifted. “Friends with Eliza.” They climbed further. “And Molly Thomas.”

  Zoey whistled low. “What are you thinking?”

  Hicks rubbed his nose. “Not thinking anything.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Zoey said, something like fond exasperation sliding into her voice. She waited a beat, then rapped her knuckles on the desk as if to get his attention despite already having it. “Come on. Spill.”

  “I’m out of the business of throwing around accusations.”

  Smugness sat in the corners of her upturned lips. She’d known him long enough by this point to get what he was talking about. “I knew it. You think something’s going on with the Church.”

  “Haven’t you heard, I always think there’s something going on with the Church.”

  “Right,” she drew out. “You’re crazy like that.”

  They shared a look.

  “Come on, I’m not the DA,” Zoey said, waving her hand in a lay it on me kind of way. “You think it’s Josiah?”

  “I don’t even know what ‘it’ is.” Hicks knew she’d see through that and call him on it.

  She did. “Teenage girls going missing. Two of them now.”

  At least two, he wanted to say. He didn’t. He was scared to, if he were honest. Scared that someone else would look at the facts and come up with the answer he didn’t want to believe. “Could be Molly saw how well it worked for her friend. Copycat runaways.”

  Dropping her feet to the floor, Zoey then leaned forward, arms on her thighs. “It’s the pastor, huh?”

  Maybe. But there was more to this. More he wouldn’t even tell Zoey, that he couldn’t tell anyone. He knew he had a reputation for picking on the Church, for seeing evil in the most innocuous wrong step any of them made. Perhaps he was the boy who cried wolf; perhaps he really had lost all objectivity just like everyone said. This time, though . . . This time felt different. Yes, it was the missing girls, but that was only one part of it. The whole community seemed tense, unraveling at the seams. These days more and more of them were wearing that look he recognized from the mirror in the days right before he’d left the Church.

  He picked the words carefully, knew they’d sound guarded, but that couldn’t be helped. Zoey was already watching him too closely anyway, eyes bright and intense beneath the fluorescent lights.

  “You ever met Darcy Dawson?” He tracked the surprise that slipped across her face before she hid it carefully. He spared a second to wonder at the reaction. At the speed with which it had been controlled. Then he wondered if all this was making him paranoid.

  “Just know her by sight,” Zoey said. He could practically see the cogs turning slowly. “You think . . . ?”

  “No.” The denial lingered in his mouth as he held on to it, let it draw out so that Zoey would see how fragile it was. He wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. He had pieces of a puzzle, but just the blue ones for the sky. Wh
ere those fit in with the rest of the picture, he didn’t know. He was scared to know, really.

  “Say it again and maybe I’ll believe you,” Zoey poked at him. She was good at that. Poking at him. She reminded him of Cora in that way.

  “You ever hunt?”

  “Here or there,” Zoey demurred like she always did when he dug for anything personal.

  “I like to keep my eye on the folks in the Church, you know,” Hicks said, without making a big deal of how she liked to dodge straightforward questions. She wouldn’t be the only person in Knox Hollow running from a past she didn’t want to talk about.

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed.” It was dry.

  Hicks relented, sharing her smirk before sobering once more. “Darcy, she’s got that look.”

  “The ‘Bambi’ look?”

  “That’s the one,” Hicks said, touching his nose and then pointing at her. It wasn’t just Darcy Dawson who wore it. But she’d been one of the first he’d noticed had turned skittish, fragile almost.

  Zoey sat back, finally. And it was only when she relaxed that he realized how alert she’d been. “The husband?”

  Liam Dawson. Maybe. He had a temper and thick fists to boot. But that didn’t feel quite right.

  “Saw her the other day down at Ford’s.” The diner served as a popular meeting place in town for those not old enough for the bar or those too “Church” for it. “She saw Josiah having lunch there. She all but dropped to the pavement to avoid him.”

  “Hmmm.” Zoey’s eyes tracked to the back of his computer. There was no way she could see Alessandra’s file, but she knew it was still up. “So we’re back to it being the pastor. And the missing girls, for that matter.”

  Hicks refrained from touching his nose once more. A point to Zoey’s cleverness. She’d always been able to wade through his thought process and emerge with the right answer. It wasn’t Darcy herself that he was worried about. More that she was the visible crack in a community that seemed on the brink of shattering.

  Because of Josiah? Maybe. But really because of the missing children. Hicks couldn’t help but think about Rosie, and the fact that Darcy had already buried one kid.

  “We’re back to ‘it’ not being an actual thing,” Hicks said instead of any of that, dragging his hands over his face, exhausted to the core.

  Josiah was . . . frustrating. Stubborn as anyone Hicks had ever met, and he had to look in the mirror every day, so that was saying something. But Josiah genuinely thought of himself as a leader of his flock. He pushed back on the more radical of the elders, and preached sermons about taking care of the elderly, the vulnerable, the poor and downtrodden. The outcasts. He lived those truths as well. Hicks had seen it countless times over the past few decades.

  But . . .

  When you love something that much, it makes you forget.

  Forget what?

  What it means to be good.

  Zoey was watching him, trying not to seem like she was.

  He couldn’t believe she would answer, but he tried anyway. “Have you ever cared about anything enough that you just threw everything else out the window? Your beliefs, your ethics. Everything?”

  The room went still as if holding its breath. Then Zoey smiled. The sad kind that twisted Hicks’s gut into knots, made him wish he’d never asked.

  “Just once.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  LUCY THORNE

  Saturday, 9:45 a.m.

  Whatever Lucy had been expecting when she pictured Deputy Sheriff Zoey Grant, it was not the beauty pageant blonde in front of her in Hicks’s office.

  As much as Lucy had tried to school her expression away from surprise while they were introduced, Zoey must have seen the flare of it or at least the aftermath.

  “Yeah, I get that a lot,” Zoey said, a stilted smile doing a deliberately poor job at hiding irritation.

  “Sorry,” Lucy said sincerely, owning up to it with the hope that the sincerity would tell Zoey something about her.

  Zoey shrugged it off, smiling and friendly, and sank into one of the chairs across from Hicks. Lucy took the second one.

  “You’re looking grim, boss.” Zoey’s narrowed eyes were locked on Hicks.

  He scrubbed a hand over his face, then sat back in his chair, body language relaxed, shoulders loose, hands gently clasped. But even after knowing him for only a day, Lucy could see the effort that lay beneath it all.

  This obvious stress wasn’t about Noah’s missing body. Lucy had already seen him react to that news, and that controlled anger hadn’t looked like this.

  No. Whatever the emotion he was working so hard to conceal, it had to do with something else. And if Lucy had to guess, she’d say Hicks was worried about questioning Zoey about Molly Thomas.

  Did he know something that made him nervous? Or was he just bracing for a worst-case scenario?

  “Noah’s body disappeared from the coroner’s overnight,” Hicks said, breaking the news to Zoey, who whistled low, her eyes ping-ponging between them.

  “Jackson?” Just the name, the way Zoey said it, spoke multitudes. They hadn’t trusted the coroner before, these two, and Lucy wondered about that. Hicks had said Zoey didn’t like the shield laws, but he’d made it seem like she was on the outskirts, an onlooker who disapproved but didn’t get down and dirty in the fight.

  “He says he wasn’t involved, but to be honest I wouldn’t put it past him to have left the door unlocked,” Hicks said, and that got Lucy’s attention. She’d been thinking it, but neither of them had said it out loud yet.

  “We could get him for that,” she said. “If he actually left it open.”

  Hicks raised his brows at her. “Yeah, and who’s going to prove it to a judge? You?”

  The victory snatched away as soon as it had appeared on the horizon. Lucy took a shot in the dark. “I don’t suppose the building has security cameras.”

  It was Zoey who laughed this time. “Honey, Jackson has to buy his own latex gloves the budget is so tight.”

  Pettiness pouted and kicked and threw a general tantrum, but Lucy attempted to adopt a what’s done is done mentality. There weren’t resources—or time, either—to waste on this particular rabbit hole. That was if Vaughn, pissed about a missing body, didn’t yank her right away today instead of waiting until Monday. And she hadn’t exactly amassed enough evidence that something beyond Eliza’s confession was going on here. She couldn’t use that to convince Vaughn if the woman was truly fed up.

  The details they had from Jackson’s preliminary report on the body would most likely be sufficient in any case being compiled against Eliza. When the tox report came back, they’d be able to tell if Noah had been drugged, too. Lucy was still having a hard time imagining what had happened that night, what had been the sequence of events. Usually she could map it out, sketchy though it might be. In this case, she didn’t even know where to start. But none of that really mattered. The facts of the case supported the killer’s confession, and that would be enough for most people.

  Zoey was back to looking between them, her mouth mostly hidden behind her coffee cup. “So what’s next?”

  In the awkward silence that followed, Hicks watched Zoey, his eyebrows drawn tight, his lips slightly parted as if he were trying to say something and trying not to say something at the same time.

  “Do you remember Molly Thomas?” he finally asked.

  Zoey tugged at her pursed lips, considering. “The runaway? From a few weeks ago?”

  Hicks may have been braced for a reaction, but Zoey didn’t give him one. She hadn’t balked, hadn’t gone defensive in any way. Her hands remained loose around her mug, her face open and expressive, her legs splayed to take up most of the chair. She hadn’t closed off, hadn’t retreated. Maybe she was good, but there was no way she could have been prepared for that question out of nowhere.

  It was Hicks who had been worried about it, not Zoey.

  Had Hicks thought she would flinch? Had he thought she wouldn�
�t? Which was worse?

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Zoey looked a little confused, a little intrigued. Nothing else. If she really didn’t remember the girl, did that mean Molly hadn’t used the deputy’s phone number that she’d written so carefully in her journal?

  Or was Zoey lying?

  “That’s all I’ve got.” Zoey shrugged, still casual. “I know you were—” Zoey stopped. Looked at Lucy, blinked. Seemed to realize she was about to share thoughts that might have been better to have been filtered.

  “Go ahead,” Hicks said, leaning back in his chair. He didn’t seem concerned by whatever Zoey had cut herself off from saying.

  “Um. You were pretty displeased,” Zoey finally said, careful now. Speaking too freely was like missing a step, Lucy knew. There was that jolt and then the recovery. You were always more deliberate when you started down the stairs again.

  Lucy looked to Hicks then. “Why?”

  “She was Church.” The information wasn’t new, but the way Hicks said it made it seem like he thought it was. “I always get a little more suspicious when one of their kids disappears.”

  “Why do you want to know about Molly Thomas?” Zoey spoke before Lucy could comment further on that. Deliberate. Zoey was sharp.

  “We checked out her bedroom today.”

  “Okay.” Zoey’s body language still hadn’t closed off.

  “We’re looking into her connection to Eliza Cook.”

  And there. There was the reaction Hicks might have been braced for. It was subtle, a practiced thing, perhaps. But since Lucy had been watching closely for it, she could see the strain of the delicate muscles near the corners of Zoey’s eyes. She was trying to school her expression. She was good at it.

  Hicks picked up the conversational ball when Lucy just continued to study Zoey’s face, searching for clues about what the woman was hiding.

  “For some reason Molly had your name and phone number as the last entry in her diary,” Hicks said.

  Zoey’s eyebrows inched up, her mouth parting slightly. Surprise, seemingly genuine at that. There was movement in her face again now that the mention of Eliza was behind them.