The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

“Ah,” I say. “Interesting.”

  “You said he needs a driver, something deep inside that compels him to kill. If that’s true, then I think he was a victim of something awful. I think there’s more to it than just revenge, or even justice.”

  I watch her. There’s that flicker of wanting. Like me, like you, Rain. She’s trying to understand. I wonder again what’s driving her. I plan to find out.

  “What do you think he wants, Agent?”

  Something on her face changes with my tone. Maybe it came off as condescending—I’ve been accused of that before. I didn’t mean it that way. In fact, she’s a bit too close to the bone. She’s quiet for moment, then she starts gathering up her files, puts away her notebook. Her energy has shifted. It’s gone still and careful.

  “I think he’s trying to keep them from hurting anyone else.”

  She pins me with her gaze for a moment. Then continues to organize her materials.

  Now it’s my turn to go quiet. I see her gun in its holster under her blazer. It seems too big for her, out of place on her person.

  “How did you feel when Kreskey was killed, Doctor?” she asks when she’s finished packing her things.

  I hand her my file with my notes, theories, possible profiles. I lean back and sigh, meet her eyes.

  “I was in the middle of getting my doctorate when that happened. I understood a lot about the human mind, about the brutality of Kreskey’s life. I wouldn’t say that I’d forgiven him, exactly. But I knew he was a victim of terrible abuse.”

  “How did you feel?” she asks again. There’s an intensity to her stare.

  “Relieved, I suppose,” I say. “One less person in pain, one less person to create pain. Not everyone can be cured—some people suffer and make others suffer until the day they die.”

  “If you’d had the opportunity to kill him, would you?”

  I smile at this, as if she’s a child who knows very little and understands far less. What’s she playing at?

  “I tried,” I say. No point in hiding it; the account of my ordeal is out there for anyone with a computer. “I nearly succeeded. I wasn’t strong enough, though. I was just a kid.”

  “Someone finished the job,” she says.

  I don’t know what she’s getting at. I maintain the easy, disinterested posture I’ve been holding, leaned back, hands in pockets, comfortable slouch.

  “So he did,” I say, watching her. “But it didn’t change what happened, if that’s what you’re wondering. It didn’t undo the damage or erase the memories.”

  “You didn’t feel better.”

  “No,” I admit. “I didn’t.”

  She seems disappointed, slouches a little. I want to ask her: What happened to you? Tell me. What is hurting you? What are you trying to understand? But I don’t. And she tells me she’ll be in touch. There’s no warning, or indication that she suspects me in any way. But there’s something just off in our interaction, a strange new vibration. What did I say? What did she intuit from our conversation? What will be her next line of inquiry?

  When I close the door, Tess sits on the hearth.

  She’s a girl in pigtails again, with those ridiculous glasses and a mouth full of metal.

  “You should have told her that you felt worse afterward,” says Tess. “You should have told her—that’s when you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  She looks up and she’s as I last saw her. I turn away, heart thumping.

  “That he was never going to feel better.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The Kreskey house. It was still there. In Rain’s mind, it had been torn down. Or maybe it had burned, set on fire by vandals. What other fate could a place like that meet? No one would ever live there, surely. She expected an empty lot, or a burned-out shell. But from the road, she could just catch sight of it. It sat empty and sagging, the peaks of its roof jutting above the tree line. It was still there, intact.

  Rain sat in her car at the edge of the drive, wondering if she’d completely lost her mind. Coming here. Bringing the baby. She could envision the ashen look of worry and disapproval on her husband’s face, pretty much the look he’d given her last night when she told him that she couldn’t explain herself to him. He’d gone to bed angry, left this morning without saying goodbye. He didn’t even know that she’d taken Lily to Markham’s house, that she was about to enter into negotiations to go back to work. She was a bad person, a horrible wife. She might be a shitty mother, too. But she was a good journalist. That much, she knew.

  Rain cast a look at her sleeping baby, then took the digital recorder from her bag, hit Record and pulled up the drive. She was fine with the ambient noise of tires on the road, her own breath. There was a certain aesthetic to it; the realism of it appealed. If she was going to do this, she was going to get in deep, warts and all.

  “While I sat in the hollow of the old tree, bleeding, in shock, barely aware of myself, Eugene Kreskey brought my friends, then twelve-year-old Tess Barker and Hank Reams, back to the house he’d inherited from his parents,” she said.

  “It’s still here, sitting on an isolated property in this rural New York town. Within its walls, I’d learn at his trial, the young Eugene Kreskey suffered. As a child in this place, he was starved, beaten, locked in the basement for weeks at a time. There are no records that he was ever sent to school.”

  She brought the car to a stop, regarded the abandoned, dilapidated house.

  “Kreskey was twelve when a carbon monoxide leak killed his parents,” Rain said.

  “A hiker, on the trails behind this house, heard the sound of his screams and called the police. The year was 1990.

  “Locked in the basement, he’d been spared the fate of his parents. He was in the house with his dead parents for a week, before the hiker’s discovery. It was suspected but not proved that he was responsible for the accident—the furnace in the basement was cracked, might have been faulty.”

  She paused here, thinking, wondering what it was like to be Eugene Kreskey. A child, a victim of unspeakable abuse at the hands of his deranged parents. He was a baby once, just like Lily. She tried to imagine him, locked in a basement, starving, alone in the dark, his parents dead upstairs. She couldn’t get her head around it.

  “At the time of his first hospitalization, Tess, Hank and I were not quite toddlers,” she went on. “We each lived within five miles of this house. Kreskey was made a ward of the state, treated, and housed for the next ten years. He was released, deemed fit to hold a simple job and live alone, a year before the three of us encountered him in the woods just a mile from my house. He was twenty-two years old.”

  Rain brought the car to a stop and stared, took a few pictures with her phone.

  “Doesn’t it sometimes seem like places hold energy? This house—shingles falling, windows cracked, red siding peeled and puckered—looks as if it has never been a home. Only bad things can happen here.”

  She clicked off the recorder, glanced at Lily sleeping and rolled down the windows. She stepped out of the car, started recording again and walked toward the house, footfalls crunching and loud in the quiet.

  “Since Kreskey’s arrest, this house has sat empty. An examination of public real estate records reveal that after a decade of taxes in arears, the county seized the property. But the house stands, and the property has not been sold. Local kids, of course, say it’s haunted. That on full moon nights, you can see Tess running through the brush. Sometimes she’s just a floating light, they say. Sometimes you can hear screaming.”

  She moved closer, came to stop at the stoop and looked up at the front door, which stood ajar. There was a sign pasted there, stating that the property was owned by the county, had been condemned. Trespassers would be prosecuted.

  “Eugene Kreskey came for me that day,” she said.

  She paused a minute, surprised by a
sudden rush of emotion. Then went on, “He’d seen me a week earlier at the garage where he worked when my father brought his car in for service. He’d been educated by the state, learned a trade, was good with his hands. His ability to earn a living was part of the reason for his release. He’d never shown a tendency toward violence.”

  The woods around hummed with the sound of insects and bird chatter. The sun was high in the sky, the temperature had risen. Sweat beaded on her brow.

  “His boss was a distant cousin who wanted to give him a chance after all he’d been through—the abuse, the death of his parents, most of his life in a hospital. That’s why he was working at that particular garage.”

  She had her reporter voice on, something low and soothing that didn’t match her everyday voice. It let her keep a distance from what she was saying. She didn’t feel the quaking inside that she usually felt when she told this story. Which wasn’t often.

  “Kreskey had use of his cousin’s car. He spent the next week following me when he could. He told police that I looked like a nice girl, and he just wanted to talk to me. But it turned out, he said in the transcript of his police interview, that I was a little bitch with a smart mouth and it made him angry. That I fought. I hurt his dog. I ran. So he took the others—to punish me.”

  She imagined music here. Something slow and morose, with a light note that might communicate hope.

  “Ten years later, after Eugene Kreskey was released again from psychiatric care to a halfway facility nearby, someone killed him. Here in this house, where he assaulted Hank Reams, and killed our best friend, Tess Barker. He died the way he killed—a victim in terror and unspeakable pain.”

  She paused again, watching the grass blow and the trees bend in the wind, casting shadows on the house. She tamped down the rise of anger; it was an acidic pain lodged in her throat. All the ugly pieces fitting together.

  “Since then, two other men, both accused killers who many believed escaped justice, have been murdered in ways that mimic their alleged crimes.”

  Another pause, another breath.

  “Is there a connection? The FBI seems to think so. Is there a vigilante at work? I’m Rain Winter. And since in many ways this story begins with me, I intend to find out.”

  She clicked off the recorder. It was a decent start. She’d edit and rewrite, rerecord. But that was the lead. Her father was right; this was her story. The one maybe she’d been trying to tell with all the other stories she’d told. She felt something like relief, a thorn pulled from her paw.

  A movement in the brush caught her eye, and she felt her body freeze.

  She cast a quick glance back at the car, all the windows wide open, and she could just see the top of Lily’s head, her little toes. Feet still. They were the first thing to start moving when she woke up. When Rain turned back, there was an old woman standing among the grass. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and carried a walking stick, a pack on her back. Around her neck was a camera with a long lens.

  “Hello,” Rain called with a wave.

  The woman nodded, and then kept walking.

  “Excuse me,” Rain called.

  Rain followed, but the woman was surprisingly fleet-footed for someone so small and frail-looking. She was down by the creek by the time Rain moved into the trees, across it and gone by the time Rain reached the bank. The water babbled and sparkled.

  “Hello?”

  The woman was nowhere in sight. Something cold and fearful moved through her.

  “Hello?”

  Then a sound, shrill and terrified, shot through her like a rocket.

  A blood-curdling scream of pain, connecting with every single one of her nerve endings. Lily.

  Rain turned, the old woman forgotten, and ran with every ounce of strength and breath she had back toward the car.

  Every step was an eternity, every foot a mile stretching on and on. Rain crashed through the trees, a branch lashing at her face. She raced past the house, the car only seeming farther with every step. How had she come so far?

  “Lily,” she screamed pointlessly. “Lily!”

  When Rain finally reached the car, the baby was bright red and wailing.

  A black wasp, impossibly big and menacing, like something out of a comic book.

  It was still on the baby’s leg as Rain swung open the door, the site of its sting swelling, angry scarlet. Rain swatted it away with her bare hand and the thing fell dead to the ground. Lily’s wail was a siren.

  “You’re okay, baby. Mama’s here.”

  Rain’s whole body shook as she dug out the Neosporin and a bandage from the first aid kit in her diaper bag. At her touch, the baby’s wails amped to ear-shattering levels. Lily’s leg was too swollen; it wasn’t right. It seemed to balloon and grow redder before her eyes.

  Heart racing, breathless, the rest of it was a blur: the race to the emergency room with Lily screaming and screaming; her run inside; the baby being whisked away from her by a nurse as Rain followed, desperate, arms outstretched.

  “What happened?”

  “A wasp. She was stung.”

  “Allergic?”

  “I—don’t know. I’m not allergic. Her father’s not.”

  The nurse was quick and efficient, taking Lily, removing the stinger, applying a compress, all the while soothing with gentle touches, soft words; Lily’s crying quieted to whimpers, the redness and swelling going down quickly. As Lily calmed, Rain’s body was so weak with relief, she almost passed out.

  “There we go, little one,” said the nurse. “There we go.”

  She swabbed Lily’s leg with something, then held up the stinger for Rain to see.

  “That’s a nasty one,” said the nurse.

  Lily wailed, reaching for Rain. The nurse handed her back. Rain held her baby, rocking and rocking, as the nurse bandaged the site, handing Rain an ice pack that came from she didn’t even know where.

  “Oh, Lily, Mommy’s so sorry that happened. I’m so, so sorry.”

  More whimpers, Lily’s head nuzzling into Rain’s neck.

  “There you go, Mom,” said the sweet nurse. An older lady with kind eyes, she rubbed Rain’s shoulder and Rain, to her embarrassment, started to cry with relief.

  “Everything’s okay now, you two. Bad wasp.”

  Bad mom, thought Rain. The world’s worst mom.

  “I’ll give you two a minute,” she said. “Get the doctor in here to take a look.”

  She nodded gratefully, couldn’t get any words out.

  I left my baby in the car while I chased after some old woman in the woods, she wanted to say but didn’t. What was I chasing? What was so important?

  Sandy’s words rang back, hard and accusing. Because nothing else matters if you fail your child.

  “Oh, Lily,” she whispered. “Mommy’s so, so sorry.”

  “Make me understand this, Rain.”

  She hated that, again, her husband was forced to utter this sentence.

  Greg had built a fire, and it crackled, comforting and warm. Lily was sleeping, none the worse for wear from her ordeal. Rain was a bundle of nerves; head pounding, neck aching. Guilt sat heavy on her shoulders, her heart.

  An open bottle of wine sat on the coffee table between the facing couches. She was already on her second glass, but he hadn’t touched his. His face was tight with worry, some anger there, too. She didn’t blame him. She’d come clean about everything—her research, where she’d been with Lily, the offer from NNR. Not the crystal heart. No, not that.

  “Please,” he said when she stayed silent.

  She’d called him from the hospital, and he’d been there in under twenty minutes. She could have lied to him about what happened, said it happened in the park or while she was driving. But they didn’t do that. She didn’t lie to Greg—not since they’d been married. Sins of omission didn’t count, d
id they? The letters. The heart. He didn’t need to know about those things; that’s what she told herself. He’d only worry.

  Fidelity is more than what we say, it’s even more than what we do, her mother had written in one of her novels, The Widow, about a woman who’d lost her husband only to find that she never knew him at all. It’s who we are in our relationship, it’s about sharing the nether regions of our hearts.

  “I don’t have any excuses,” she said. “I went from Tess’s place to the old Kreskey house. I was just following the story. My story.”

  “Your story,” he repeated, a low note. “And in telling it—what?”

  “In telling it…I release it, finally,” she said. “I own it and control it.”

  Yes, that was it. That was the truth of it.

  “You know,” he said, shaking his head. He looked down into the glass as if he might see the future there. “I wish I believed that. I think in some way, you keep going back there because on some deep subconscious level you believe it should have been you that day. That Kreskey should have gotten you. That you should be dead, Tess alive, Reams unharmed.”

  “He came for me.”

  Greg dipped his head in his hand for a moment, then looked up at her.

  “You had a right to survive him, Rain,” he said softly. “You all did. But you got lucky. I’m sorry, but that’s not a reason to carry guilt for the rest of your life.”

  Wasn’t it, though? She drained her glass and poured herself some more. She was tipsy. It felt good, some of the day’s tension draining.

  “What would you tell Lily if she were sitting where you are now?” he went on. “Would you tell her to fight a monster or run for her life? Would you want our twelve-year-old daughter to take on Kreskey?”

  The thought made her sick. “Of course not.”

  “Then you can’t hold little Lara Winter responsible for what happened to them.”

  I’ve got the Winter girl! Detective Harper’s voice bouncing off the trees. She was still that girl inside, frozen, half-gone.

  “I have to do this,” she said. “Anyway, we could use the money.”