“You would never understand,” Rachel finally said, her voice cold, disdainful. The gun clattered to the floor, and Lucy advanced, still cautious in case Rachel had any other weapons. “Our mission is bigger than one sick child. I did what I had to do. I always do what needs to be done, do what others are too weak to stomach.”
“Yeah, not interested in your manifesto on why you like killing kids,” Lucy muttered.
Hicks was alert behind her, the air charged with his nerves. But he didn’t say anything, didn’t try to take over, just edged with the same precision as Lucy toward Darcy, controlling the chaos, eliminating the threat.
Rachel meanwhile was spouting some sort of propaganda, some sort of plea, some sort of righteous prayer, some sort of something that Lucy didn’t give a shit about. Rachel was a serial killer, just like any other. Just because her justification looked a little different from the norm didn’t make it worth listening to.
Instead Lucy was busy watching Rachel’s hands, making sure she didn’t reach for any other weapons, watching her eyes dart around the kitchen to look for a possible escape route, watching each twitch and breath, trying to anticipate the next move of a cornered animal.
It was because Lucy was so focused on Rachel, confident that Hicks was on Darcy, that she didn’t notice Molly was no longer on the floor until the girl was standing just behind Lucy’s shoulder.
There was a breath, just a breath, between the soft snick of the gun being cocked and the resulting crack as the trigger was pulled.
Everything froze, hung suspended for an infinity of seconds, and then, all at once, sped up again as the bullet slammed into Rachel’s chest.
Midthought. Midsentence. Her hands grappled at the edge of the wound, at the tender flesh shredded beneath metal. When she looked up, her eyes were wide and uncomprehending.
Lucy’s fingers trembling around her own gun even though she knew she hadn’t been the one to fire. They met each other’s eyes, Rachel’s dimming as her mouth worked, no sound coming out of it.
Then the light blinked out behind her expression, and her body crumpled.
There was no need to feel for a pulse—from just a glance it was easy to see that the damage to her chest, her heart, and probably her lungs had been severe.
Swinging around, Lucy found Molly standing now, Darcy’s fallen gun clutched in a loose grip by her side. Her eyes were hard as she met Lucy’s.
And Lucy thought about where the girl must have been for the last three weeks to look that hollow. Thought about the fact that Lucy hadn’t been sure they would ever find her body. Thought about the blood that was clearly her own and slick on her hands.
“You can call it self-defense,” Molly finally said. And though her voice cracked, it was anything but weak.
Lucy caught her, just before she hit the floor, an unconscious weight that took them both down.
When Lucy met Hicks’s eyes, he stared back, mouth in a grim line. Then he nodded once, a decision made that couldn’t be unmade. That only the people in the room would know the truth about.
Self-defense. That’s what it had been.
CHAPTER SIXTY
SHERIFF WYATT HICKS
Now
The path was familiar to Hicks now. He’d walked it too many times in the past few days not to know it. The way it curved and snaked through his beloved woods that were newly tainted with the stench of death.
The way his life was.
Josiah and Rachel both dead. Eliza . . .
And now this.
He’d thought he’d be numb to anything at this point. Walking in on that scene in Darcy’s kitchen had hit like a punch. It had been only a few days earlier when he and Rachel had created their makeshift bonfire for the evidence they’d never wanted to see the light of day. It had been only a few days since he’d met her gaze over the flickering flames and felt home again. The same way he’d always felt as a kid when he’d reached out in the dark and gripped her palm.
For the briefest moment in time, he’d thought that maybe they weren’t strangers or adversaries who just wanted to make each other bleed.
And then Eliza had confessed and everything had splintered again. Rachel had shut down, built walls, met his searching gaze with blank eyes.
He hadn’t asked Eliza why she’d texted Rachel that night instead of him. But a part of him suspected she had wanted Rachel to be scared of what Eliza knew.
Hicks wasn’t numb, though. He felt it all, a pulsing wound that hurt so much he thought surely it must be real. He’d woken up in the middle of the night, his fingers grappling at his chest, the exact spot the bullet had entered Rachel, positive that he was dying. He’d stood in the shower for an hour that morning, the water masking the tears on his cheeks. He’d stared at the one picture he kept of his family, gently touching each of them. Cora as a kid, Rachel as a teenager. His mother.
He’d taken out his lighter and watched the glossy corners curl into ash. The flame had burned the tips of his fingers.
It would get better, he knew. There was still a purpose for him—but maybe it wasn’t in Knox Hollow anymore. Finally, finally, he might be able to walk away.
There was just one thing left to do.
He found Zoey where he’d been expecting—sitting on the ground next to the rock where Noah’s body had been left.
Hicks stopped, eyes tracing over the curve of her spine, the way her hands dug into the earth by her sides.
When Molly and Darcy had given their statements to him about the events in the kitchen before Hicks and Lucy had arrived, neither had given much weight to Rachel’s denial of killing Noah, seeming to write it off as an unimportant lie.
But Hicks hadn’t been able to dismiss it. Not after reading Kate Martinez’s file.
Now finding Zoey here, it seemed all but confirmed. He just need to know . . . “Why?”
Zoey didn’t startle, simply shifted so that he could see her profile. The midday light slid into her honey-laced curls. If evil had a face, he would never had said this was it.
“Have you ever cared about something?” Zoey asked, quiet and deep. “So much you throw everything else out? Your morals, your ethics?”
It was nearly word-for-word what he’d asked her before. He called up her answer.
Just once. “Who?”
Her smile when it came was soft, sad. “Her name was Kate.”
Hicks inhaled sharply, surprised though he probably shouldn’t have been. And crushingly disappointed that his suspicions were in the process of being confirmed. It was irrational, really, to feel upset about any deception from Zoey when he should still be reeling from everything that had been uncovered about his sister. But there had been a small part of him that had been hoping he’d been right to trust Zoey.
“Kate Martinez,” Hicks said, and it wasn’t a question. Here was the piece they’d all been missing. It was when he’d read Kate’s file again for the first time since Zoey had come to Knox Hollow that the suspicion had buried roots in his skin. He hadn’t made the connection when he’d hired her that she came from Missoula, Montana, the same place Kate Martinez’s body was found. But after Lucy had gone digging for the file, it put the coincidence into context. “Tell me.”
“We were young, in love, and stupid with it,” Zoey said without hesitation. Like she was desperate to talk about it. “Her family moved around a lot but always came back to our town.”
“In Montana.”
“Yeah,” Zoey said softly. “One time when Kate came back . . . she was scared. But she wouldn’t tell me why.” Zoey broke off, shook her head. “Then she died.”
“She saw something?” Hicks paused. “Rachel?”
That finally got Zoey to look up. “You knew.”
Her voice had gone sharp, accusation and—somewhat inexplicably—betrayal in her eyes.
“No,” Hicks said, the denial weighted with absolute certainty. He hadn’t. Not until he’d seen the verse. That’s when he’d started to suspect it wasn’t Josi
ah. “Romans 3:23. It was my mother’s favorite verse. She would lock us in the attic crawl space and sit outside the door, repeating it over and over again. For hours. For days.”
“Pardon me for saying so, but I don’t give a shit how Rachel became a monster,” Zoey spit out.
And that was fine. It wasn’t an excuse anyway. He’d had the same life as Rachel, been shaped by the same abuse. If Hicks wanted to waste any time psychoanalyzing his sister, he’d say that where he’d rebelled, she’d given in. The Church was a cult in everything but name. It had its own moral structure, and those in the community who succumbed to the gaslighting, the brainwashing, the lifestyle had learned to convince themselves it was the right one.
Protect the Church from any threat. He was sure Rachel had seen it as her duty. Doing the dirty work no one else wanted to think about.
Some would say it was the Church’s fault, rather than Rachel’s. That she was as much a victim as the bodies in the ground, that she was shaped and molded and twisted into the monster that she’d become, rather than being born to it.
In truth, that was all simply justification for a mind that had bent toward evil long ago. Rachel wanted to kill, and so she’d found a reason to. It was as simple as that. It was never about religion or God or a way of life even. The fanaticism of their particular Church had let her thrive, had let her live in a reality where her itch was justified. But the monster beneath? That was all Rachel.
“What happened?” Hicks asked. Because something must have turned south in Zoey’s plan for Noah Dawson to have ended up out here.
“It took me a while to figure it out,” Zoey said, her eyes back on the river. “I had never wanted to be a cop, you know. I’m shit at it anyway.”
He wanted to protest, but he kept quiet.
“But I wanted . . . I needed to see the file,” Zoey continued. “So I did. I got hired by the sheriff’s department in the county next to the one we grew up in. I knew a town name. Knox Hollow. That’s it. That’s what I had to go on for years. Years.”
She paused, her throat working as she swallowed. “I never knew what she saw. Didn’t know who even to suspect. But I started keeping tabs on the town here. The cult.”
Zoey spit the last word.
“Watched people disappear. Watched you.” Zoey cut her eyes up to Hicks. “Watched you fail to stop whoever it was.”
It was a punch in the gut. One he deserved. After Alessandra Shaw “ran off,” he’d known, he’d known something was wrong, yet he hadn’t been able to figure it out fast enough.
He hadn’t been close with Rachel since before Cora’s death, and even before that he’d always felt like the odd one out. After Cora had died, he and Rachel had interacted when they’d had to, but those times were few and far between. His attention had always been on Josiah.
Looking back, Hicks couldn’t say she’d exhibited serial killer tendencies—there had been no fire starting, no torture of small animals. But when the cow needed slaughtering, and their mother insisted on one of the children doing it, Rachel had stepped up. At the time, Hicks would have said it was to protect Cora and him from getting blood on their hands. Now it made him wonder what else he’d missed.
“Then this deputy position opened up, and it felt . . .” Zoey rolled her shoulders. “Like the universe was telling me something. I didn’t even have to try to pretend I was on loan from another sheriff’s department or anything like that. I just walked right in and applied.”
Hicks had checked her story of course, her references, but she hadn’t even had to hide that. There was nothing that actually tied her to Kate Martinez on paper. “Did you figure it out? Who it was?”
“No,” Zoey said. “But I knew Eliza was trying to. That girl . . .” She broke off, and this time her smile was almost real. “She’s smart. Tenacious.”
“A pain in the ass,” Hicks muttered, and when their eyes met, it was like they were back in the office or at the bar grabbing drinks, that easy, shared humor familiar and painful all at once. He looked away.
“I figured it was Josiah or Rachel,” Zoey said, and her voice was quieter now, cowed a little from that moment. “But whoever it was knew it was getting too risky.”
How did Noah end up here, Zoey? “You had to make something happen.”
“Molly came to me,” Zoey went on without acknowledging that. “Again, a little gift from the universe. Even better was Darcy Dawson saw it happen. Molly talking to me.”
Darcy, who’d been looking fragile for the past few months.
“I knew Darcy was getting worried—even you knew it,” Zoey said, tipping her head in his direction. “Rumors all around town about her spacing out and losing time.”
Hicks thought about Noah’s bruises. Thought about the test results Eliza had shared with him after she’d visited that clinic up north. The ones that had been her own death sentence. “Noah had cancer, too. And Darcy had been putting the pieces together.”
Zoey nodded once and then reached over to where her bag was dropped carelessly a bit away from her. She pulled out a file and handed it over.
“Alessandra, Noah, Eliza.” She had said each of their names with a reverence that made him want to punch something. “All three of them, stage four cancer.”
That matched what Rachel had taunted before her death. He was dying.
“You think people didn’t realize when a kid got cancer like that they didn’t last long in the Church?” Zoey asked, a bitter edge to her voice. “Clusters like this happen, you know. I looked into it. There was an old battery plant out on the outskirts of town, out where most of the Church people live. It contaminated the groundwater.”
So many things clicking into place. “Anywhere else, that’d be a lawsuit.”
“Here you have a psycho serial killer taking care of the problem,” Zoey said.
Hicks closed the folder, tapping it against his thigh as he did. “Where did you get all this?”
Zoey huffed. “You know that stubborn niece of yours? Yeah, she was a planner, too. Texted me right after she texted you about your truck. She’d been keeping everything in a safety-deposit box for the right moment.”
Something heavy settled on his chest. Guilt, anger, grief. For the rest of his life he’d wonder why Eliza had thought she couldn’t just come to him.
“But why did you have to kill Noah?” Hicks finally asked the question.
Zoey flinched back, eyes wide as she studied his face. “Oh,” she breathed out, and it was almost lost to the babbling water. “You still don’t get it.”
He had no time for lies or games. “Get what?”
“I helped things along, maybe, didn’t stop anything when I probably could have stepped in,” Zoey said. “But I didn’t kill Noah, Hicks.”
No. Hicks stepped back, as if that would be enough to protect him from the truth.
But of course it didn’t, couldn’t. The blow when it struck nearly took him to his knees.
“Eliza did.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
ELIZA COOK
One week later
The hospital chapel lacked personality of any kind. There were religious symbols on the wall but none of the graphic depictions of suffering Eliza was used to, so it didn’t feel like home.
She sat in the back pew, the wood smooth against her legs where the gown parted. The gently swinging IV stand settled in beside her, the tube pumping something clear directly into her veins.
As Eliza gripped a perfectly new Bible in her lap, she thought about the woman who’d believed God to be dead, the one who had come to the church in Knox Hollow, had knelt before the altar, and then had shot herself.
God is dead. And yet . . . Were they all doomed to end up here? Kneeling at a loathed altar.
“Late night,” a voice said just over her right shoulder. Eliza didn’t need to turn. She recognized it even though they’d only ever had one conversation.
“Or early morning,” Eliza said nonsensically as Lucy Thorne sat beside
her, giving her enough space to breathe, not enough to run.
“All in how you look at things, I guess,” Lucy said, like they were just two strangers who’d met in passing.
Eliza inhaled, exhaled, lemon disinfectant coating her nose rather than the too-sweet incense of the one-room church back home. It was wrong. All wrong. “I’m sorry.”
Lucy looked over. Eliza knew she did, despite her own eyes staying locked to the gentle version of Christ nailed to the cross at the front of the room. “Want to explain it?”
Forgive me, for I have sinned. A confession, that’s what this was. Her last one. The one that would count.
“I told you. I killed Noah Dawson,” Eliza said, an echo of that first confession, which felt like a lifetime ago but was really only days. “And I thought . . . I thought you wouldn’t believe me.”
Lucy huffed out a breath. “You played me.”
“Maybe.” Eliza licked her lips, and then they both had to ignore the coughing jag, the one that came quickly and left slowly, the one that laid a heavy hand against Eliza’s spine until her forehead touched her bony knees. The one that stole air from her lungs with greedy, hungry fingers, hoarding the oxygen for itself.
When it was gone, Eliza’s lips were numb, her fingertips, too. She gripped the Bible harder and tried not to think what that meant. Hoped nurses wouldn’t come interrupt.
“Nothing would have happened if Alessandra hadn’t gotten sick,” Eliza finally said. If she had to start someplace, that’s where it should be.
“Alessandra Shaw,” Lucy said as if it needed clarification.
“It’s not actually strange, you know?” Eliza said. “When you grow up with those beliefs. Medicine is the devil, and kids die because they don’t believe in God enough, or someone who held them didn’t believe in God enough, or God was calling them home.”
Lucy didn’t say anything, didn’t try to argue. Eliza appreciated that.
“Some of the moms in our Church, they don’t even say they’re mothers,” Eliza continued. “They say they’re babysitting for God.”
At that Lucy shifted.
“It’s true,” Eliza rushed out. “I’ve heard them. But you don’t think it’s weird—I never did. But Allie was always questioning it. People thought it was me, but it wasn’t.”
Her Final Words Page 27
