Her Final Words

by Brianna Labuskes

  “The basic details,” Zoey chimed in.

  “Look, I’ve been tracking the deaths for years,” Peggy said. “That’s what I was saying. I’m not a social worker for them—they’re outside my county. But I’m part of the team that’s going after those dang shield laws. And so . . .”

  “You know who’s died when other people don’t,” Lucy finished. And, Christ, wasn’t that lucky? Lucy cut her eyes to Zoey. Not just lucky. She owed Zoey a beer after this was all over.

  “Right, I know everyone who’s died,” Peggy repeated. “Plenty of kids have died. Plenty of babies, a few teenagers, too. A couple of adults, and some older folks. But Alessandra Shaw? Here’s the thing. Technically, she didn’t die.”

  “She went missing,” Lucy murmured, knowing this was important but not quite sure why yet. Because looking at the picture of the pretty, bright-eyed girl staring up at her, she was as sure as she could be without a medical examiner that Alessandra Shaw was the body that had been found in the riverbank this afternoon.

  “If she’d died of natural causes, why not just bury her in that cemetery of theirs?” Peggy asked, though it was hypothetical.

  Clean kills. The verse cut into flesh. Lucy wondered if they’d find markings on the other bodies. The wounds would be gone, but if the cut was deep enough, its traces would be left on the bone.

  Alessandra Shaw. Molly Thomas.

  And then the world tilted just right, her memories aligning. There was smooth wood beneath her fingers. Initials carved into a post.

  Molly sat there at the post, touching those letters enough that the oils from her hands turned roughness into an almost-glossy finish.

  AS. Alessandra Shaw.

  “You said ‘them.’” It was the one thing Lucy could hold on to. The rest of her thoughts slipped through her grasp, gauzy and teasing and so, so important.

  Peggy once again reached down, rifling through her files. She pulled two out, handed one over. It was of a young girl, Chloe Sanger. She seemed to be about the general age and build of the second body in the woods.

  Again there was a date of disappearance at the top, rather than a time of death. “Missing, right? Not dead.”

  Peggy made a low humming sound in agreement. “That one was hushed up pretty well. I’m not actually sure how long she was gone before Hicks even got wind of it.”

  Lucy eyed the third file. Did it fit the stats of the third body they’d found in the woods?

  A part of her continued to wonder if Peggy was the brand of serial killer who liked in on the investigations, the kind who liked to play with the very cops who were on the hunt. The files could easily be her souvenirs, her interest real, but for reasons different from the one she was giving.

  Lucy took the third file anyway.

  The details didn’t line up with the third victim from the woods.

  Lucy thought back to all that earth, shrouded so carefully by the trees; she thought back to the certainty that there were probably more bodies beneath their feet.

  “Gabriel Turner,” Peggy said, when Lucy remained quiet. Lucy couldn’t decide if she hoped he would be found next or hoped he wouldn’t. Missing meant he might still be alive, but missing also meant there wasn’t closure.

  “He was Church?” Lucy asked, though the answer seemed obvious.

  Peggy just nodded, a jerk of her chin. “He’s one of the first ones I noticed. Maybe ten years ago. Back then, it was harder to keep track of which ones had died and which ones had gone missing.”

  “Josiah made that better?” Lucy asked.

  Peggy tried to hide her flinch at the name, but Lucy saw it. “I suppose he has.”

  “Not a fan of the pastor?”

  “On the contrary,” Peggy drawled, a slight hint of a smile at her lips. “We’re good friends despite our disagreements.”

  Zoey nodded in her peripheral as if to confirm what Peggy was saying. But why the reaction then?

  “Has he ever talked about any of these missing children?” Lucy asked.

  “Some,” Peggy said, her voice almost considering. “He’s even been known to dedicate a sermon to one or two of them. But for some there are other explanations.”

  “Like Alessandra and Molly. They ran away,” Lucy said.

  “He treats those like—” Peggy paused, her hand stilling on the dog’s head. “The unfortunate reality of living in a world full of temptation.”

  “You haven’t raised your suspicions with him then?” Lucy pressed. How could the pastor not know that children were disappearing under his watch? If a social worker who didn’t even live in the community had gathered this much information, if the sheriff was always sniffing around, the pastor had to be aware of what people thought.

  Peggy bit her lip and then sighed. “You have to understand. Josiah is used to playing defense all the time. He doesn’t . . . It doesn’t even sink in that these are real people sometimes. He’s just trying to keep the Church alive.”

  Right. But how far would he go to do that?

  As if reading the question on her face, Peggy’s expression went tight. “There’s more.”

  Three more files were pushed into Lucy’s hands in the next second, and she paged through them. This was almost more helpful than any list the coroner could have come up with. Those children were the ones who’d been accounted for, after all.

  “They say ‘missing,’” Lucy murmured. It was important, that word. That one word. Missing. She looked up. “Not ‘dead.’”

  Peggy was watching her, stroking the terrier’s little head. Waiting.

  “Not ‘dead,’” Lucy repeated, something clicking into place. “Because you know everyone who has officially died.”

  “Ah,” Peggy smiled, a small twisted thing. “I think you may finally be getting somewhere.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  SHERIFF WYATT HICKS

  Three days earlier

  People thought Wyatt Hicks would buy land out by the mountains. They looked at him, saw something in him, and thought, That one doesn’t want civilization.

  People were wrong.

  Growing up, he’d had enough isolation to last him a lifetime. His mother’s favorite go-to punishment had been locking them in that dreaded crawl space in the attic. She’d sat outside and recited Bible verses, sang hymns, chanted psalms. He hated to admit it, even now, but the times that had been best were when Rachel or Cora were being punished as well. At least then he’d had a sweaty palm to grasp in the unending dark.

  He wondered about Molly Thomas. Wondered if the dark had consumed her, wondered if the ground had swallowed her instead.

  But despite the fact that he’d been all too familiar with isolation, it had been what he’d known. It hadn’t felt safe, not ever that. Just familiar. So Hicks had thought he was supposed to buy land by the mountains. He’d lived in that one-room cabin for two months and had counted each hour and each second that he stared at the wooden walls, a gnawing ache feasting on the fragile places inside him. It reminded him of the crawl space, the one their mother had locked them in whenever they’d been bad.

  The girls, they’d had it worse than him. Not that any of them ever talked about it. In their particular community that kind of treatment was expected, was normal. People would probably even say he had gotten off light, considering.

  It was never named for what it actually was.

  But in the darkness, that cabin had carried the terror of being trapped in the crawl space that as a boy he’d thought was a coffin. His fingers had itched constantly with the need to caress the beads of the rosary, which had been the one thing that had kept him tethered to reality when locked away for days on end.

  At two months and one day of living out in the mountains, he’d packed his belongings—the three plaid shirts, the jeans, the two pairs of boots, the three boxes of books—into the back of his pickup and found the first house in town that was for sale.

  It was a quirky old Victorian, dropped in the middle of ranchers and gener
ic Americana and nothing like the house people thought Hicks should live in.

  He loved it.

  Now, he sat on the back porch with a bottle of beer in one hand, as he rocked in a chair he’d built himself. Being out beneath the open sky kept the gnawing ache at bay.

  It had been a long day—they’d been searching for Noah Dawson for hours—and Hicks was just contemplating a second beer when he heard the rustle. Clothes, man-made fabric. So not an animal. Idly he shifted so that his gun was in easy reach, but he wasn’t worried.

  Hicks relaxed completely when the figure moved close enough to the house for the pale kitchen light from the window to catch her skin. Lily white.

  “Hey, Short-Stack,” Hicks called out, though he made sure to keep his voice pitched low. The wind told secrets, carried them through neighbors’ open windows. He didn’t want to cause trouble for Eliza.

  “Hicks.” She came up the stairs, her arms wrapped around her narrow frame, her chin down close to her chest. She was trying to hug the shadows. Something was wrong.

  “What’s up?”

  She looked up, met his eyes. Hers were just deep pools of darkness, and for a shameful moment he thought about the demons he’d been taught about as a child. Then the moonlight shifted, and she was once again Eliza.

  “I need a favor,” she whispered.

  He almost said, Anything, because he would do anything for this kid. Cora’s kid. But he knew better than to make that kind of promise. “Okay. What is it?”

  Eliza licked her lips, her gaze slipping to the side, and Hicks was glad he hadn’t agreed easily. “You can’t ask me that. I just need a favor, and you can’t ask me why.”

  The words were rushed, falling between them, the tint of mania in them underlying the request for complete trust. “Short-Stack . . . ,” he started, stopped. What was there to say? His mind snagged on Noah Dawson. But she couldn’t know . . .

  “I’m not in trouble,” Eliza said, and everything about her swayed into pure teenage annoyance. He blinked, and she was back to the haunted girl she’d been seconds earlier. “I just need your truck. Until tomorrow afternoon. Maybe tomorrow night.”

  “Josiah would give you keys to one of his.” Hicks knew she’d used it before to drive up to that clinic she visited sometimes.

  “I didn’t ask to use Josiah’s truck, did I?” Eliza snapped, unlike anything he’d ever heard from her in the past. She wasn’t bratty. Quiet. Too smart for her own good, maybe. Not this, though.

  “Try again,” he said evenly, but his mind was spinning out into every worst-case scenario, despite the fact that he thought they’d already gone through that a couple of months ago.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Eliza backpedaled immediately. Maybe the tears were real, maybe it was an act. Hicks didn’t care. If she was this desperate, he couldn’t refuse.

  He stood up without saying anything, stepped inside, and grabbed the set of keys off the ring he kept nailed up by the door. When he got back outside, he tossed them to her.

  “Take it.”

  She stared at them, her hair sliding forward to curtain her face, hiding her expression. But when she looked up, it was pure relief, pure gratitude that was written there. “Thank you.”

  “Hey,” Hicks said, already regretting whatever this was. “If you’re in trouble . . .”

  “It’s not that,” Eliza said, more gently this time, shaking her head. “Don’t. Don’t worry about me, okay?”

  “Like telling me not to breathe, Short-Stack,” he said, leaning back against the house so as not to rush forward and hold her close, protecting her from the Big Bad in the world if only for a few heartbeats. Like he had when she’d been a baby.

  Her smile was a ghost of her normal grin, and it fell quickly from her lips. She nodded, once, and then turned, only to stop with her foot on the stairs. “Uncle Hicks.”

  When she didn’t continue, he prompted, “Yeah?”

  Eliza’s chin touched her shoulder, so that he could see the sharp line of her profile in the starlight. “I’m sorry.”

  By the time Hicks found the composure to try to respond, she was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  LUCY THORNE

  Saturday, 9:40 p.m.

  “Is there a chance we just came from a serial killer’s lair?” Lucy asked Zoey, a bit punchy from the potent combination of high emotions and a long day.

  Zoey glanced at Lucy from the driver’s seat of her monster SUV and laughed like she was supposed to. “Peggy? Nah.”

  Lucy tapped the files Peggy had let her take. Handing them over would have been a rather large sign that these weren’t her souvenirs except for the fact that it was easy to have copies stashed elsewhere. “She cares a lot about the Church. Too much.”

  There were grudges, and then there was this.

  Obsessions get people killed.

  At least from what Lucy could tell, Peggy’s commitment seemed to veer more toward that extreme than the helpful Good Samaritan. And when people were operating in the extremes, their behavior could easily slide into dangerous territory.

  “That’s what it’s like here,” Zoey said, her voice light still. Clearly not buying the Peggy-as-a-serial-killer theory. “Even the ones who say they hate it can’t escape talking about it all the time.”

  Lucy shifted enough to rest her temple against the headrest so she could watch Zoey’s profile. The road they were on was winding, isolated, and there were few cars to cast any light on Zoey’s expression.

  “Why’d you come here? To Knox Hollow,” Lucy asked, curious for the first time. There were too many other questions to focus on to worry about Deputy Zoey Grant. But her mind needed a rest, and they had forty more minutes of a dark drive ahead of them.

  “Not exactly an obvious destination, huh?” Zoey threw back without missing a beat.

  Lucy just waited, used to this tactic that the Knox Hollow sheriff’s team seemed to deploy as their first line of defense.

  After a few beats of uncomfortable silence, Zoey finally broke. “Honestly?”

  Lucy smiled a little because usually when people said that, they were about to be anything but. What had been mild curiosity before sharpened, sliced through some of the tired fog she’d let slip in. “Hmm?”

  “It was the farthest bus ticket I could afford,” Zoey said. “All the way up from New Mexico.”

  There was an echo of Lucy’s conversation with Hicks in there. “You were running from something?”

  “Not really.” Zoey’s voice had gone wistful. “Running from nothing, is more like it. I came from a big family. Wasn’t the baby, wasn’t the oldest. Wasn’t the one they were proud of. That pretty much just left . . .”

  “A night bus to Idaho?”

  Zoey pointed at her, cheeky grin firmly back in place. “Exactly.”

  It was a nice, pat story. It might even be true. Or at least some of it. But it felt rehearsed and easy in a way that spilling actual secrets shouldn’t. “And Hicks hired you straight out?”

  The amusement that had sparked in the air around her extinguished at the mention of Hicks’s name. “Yeah, he took a chance on me.”

  And yet Zoey had been so quick to turn on him. “How well do you know him?”

  “Hicks?” Zoey clarified as if she needed to. A tactic to buy time? “Not well. We see each other at the bar sometimes, grab beers.”

  “You think he had something to do with Noah’s murder, though?” Lucy asked, losing any attempts at subtlety. Zoey had all but said it in the office anyway.

  “Just—” Zoey stopped, cleared her throat. Didn’t continue.

  “Or Molly’s disappearance?”

  Zoey didn’t answer at first, her eyes locked on the stretch of road illuminated by her high beams. “I can’t make it fit.”

  “Hicks’s involvement?”

  “Right. Molly, she . . .” Zoey paused, but this time kept going. “Molly thought it had something to do with him.”

  “But you can’
t make it fit.”

  Zoey threw her a look, the wryness back. “I’m a shit cop, remember?”

  “You’ve never suspected anything from him, though?” Lucy clarified. “Until Molly Thomas mentioned his name.”

  When Zoey didn’t answer, Lucy straightened. “Did you?”

  “I hate this,” Zoey muttered, just loud enough to be heard. “Okay, look. I don’t think this means anything. It doesn’t. But . . .”

  The exhausted fog had been completely eaten away. Lucy was watching every twitch of Zoey’s hands, each swallow and eye flicker. “But?”

  “After Molly contacted me, for the hell of it I kept a closer eye on Hicks’s activity log for the next few weeks.”

  The time period Molly Thomas would have gone missing, the time period when Noah Dawson was killed. “And?”

  Zoey huffed out a breath. “This doesn’t mean anything.”

  “All right,” Lucy agreed easily.

  After only one more slight hesitation, Zoey dropped the hammer. “He went out to see Darcy Dawson. Only a few days before Noah Dawson was taken.”

  “What?” Lucy asked, but it was barely out before she was reaching for the door handle as they took an unexpected hairpin turn too wide. A horn blared from the other lane, and Lucy’s vision whited out for a terrifying three seconds. Then there was darkness once more.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Zoey said, though she didn’t seem shaken. Driving backcountry roads could give you nerves of steel. So could planning and then implementing a distraction. Lucy shook off the suspicion.

  “He told you that? Hicks?” Lucy asked, not ashamed of the slight waver that adrenaline had pumped into the question. “That he visited Darcy.”

  “No.” Zoey shook her head. “But the code he used for the log was a check-in. We do those a lot out here.”

  Lucy absently leaned forward to test the resistance of the seat belt. “Interesting that neither mentioned it.”

  Interesting that Zoey had.

  Zoey hummed a little in agreement but didn’t say anything further. As they finished up the drive to Knox Hollow, Lucy was left wondering if Hicks had taught Zoey the swerve move or if she’d picked it up from him.