by Stella Hart
“Yup.”
My face brightened again. “Wait, no! I just remembered. Last time I was there, Samara and I packed everything up and took it into the basement. It’s all down there, including the photos. So as long as we can manage to get into the house in the dark, it’ll be fine. No one will see us using lights in the basement.”
“True.” Alex glanced at his watch. “We’ll keep doing this for now, and we’ll head out to Fox Chapel at about eleven.”
“I have a good feeling about this,” I said excitedly. “I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but I really think it could work.”
Alex smiled faintly. “Good.”
“I can’t wait to get rid of every last one of them,” I said, my heart pumping faster at the thought of the Circle dying in agony.
“Patience, my little angel of death. We haven’t even found the place yet.”
“I know. But you were right earlier. We will. And then we’ll make them suffer. They’ve had decades to run the show and fuck everyone over… but now it’s their time to go down. They’re already crumbling, anyway.” I was beyond fired up now, my cheeks flushing and my pulse racing.
Alex frowned. “What do you mean, they’re crumbling?”
“I mean you’ve killed a lot of them already, and they’re losing power as a result. A lot of it. I don’t think they’re anywhere near as strong and influential as they were ten or twenty years ago.”
“Perhaps.”
I leaned closer. “Seriously, Alex. They’re nervous. I could tell from what Dwyer said. They don’t have anyone on the inside in the police anymore. He told me you killed the last of them years ago. And now he’s gone too, so they don’t have an FBI connection either.”
“Hm. Didn’t know that I got every cop involved. That’s good, though.”
“Yes. They won’t win.”
Alex chuckled. “I like this new attitude of yours.”
I smiled. “Me too.” For the first time in weeks, I felt real hope.
We spent the rest of the day searching fruitlessly on Google Earth. When it hit eleven, we put dark jackets and scarves on and headed out into the snowy outdoors.
We drove to Fox Chapel in silence, our jaws set with determination. When we arrived in the area, we parked about a mile from my parents’ old place and hiked in through the nature reserve that the property backed onto. It was freezing out here, but I was warm from the rush of adrenaline pumping around my body.
“We’re almost there,” I whispered. In the distance, through the trees, I could see glimpses of my old backyard and garden, lit with moonlight.
When we arrived at the tree line, Alex put his hand on my shoulder. “You stay here. I’m going to check out the place first; make sure no one’s here.”
I waited with apprehension as he stepped into the backyard and quietly crept toward the dark house. My heart had never beaten so fast, my breaths had never come so quick. And yet, time had never seemed to move slower. My stomach was a mess of twisting, tightening coils, and the hairs on my neck stood on end, telling me I should stay away from this place.
What if someone was in the house, waiting for us? What if Alex got ambushed? What if he didn’t come back?
But, as always, he did come back for me. I breathed out all my fear and inhaled sweet relief.
“It’s clear,” he said, taking my hand. “But we should stay as quiet as possible anyway.”
“Yes.”
We crept inside in the darkness. The back door must’ve already been unlocked, because Alex hadn’t needed to break anything when he checked it out a few minutes ago. That sent a chill through me—was it still unlocked from when I was last here, just before Alex took me, or had someone else managed to get the keys to keep an eye on things in case I tried to return?
I pushed the thought from my mind. I had to stop worrying about everything. The less stress I felt, the more likely my memories were to stop manifesting as nerve pain and start returning instead.
Taking a deep breath, I led Alex down into the basement on my tiptoes. Then I reached into my pocket and grabbed a small flashlight he’d given me earlier.
“Over here,” I whispered, heading toward a big stack of boxes.
Alex unstacked them all, and we slowly and methodically went through everything they contained. Old photo albums, documents, newspaper clippings my parents had kept for whatever reason… everything.
My hope diminished with each photo that failed to offer up any answers. There were plenty of them, but none were taken in front of anyone else’s house but our own, save for a few taken in France when my parents rented a chateau there for a few weeks during the summer. I was just a baby at the time.
“I was wrong,” I mumbled, throwing another album aside. “There’s nothing.”
I felt dumb for being so ambitious about this plan. Earlier, I’d been so certain that I’d find something in this house, but now I realized I’d just been deluding myself with false hope. If it was that good of an idea, I probably would’ve thought of it long before now.
“Don’t give up yet,” Alex said kindly, handing me another album. “You know I believe in you. Anything here could trigger a memory.”
I dejectedly leafed through the album. This one contained various family photos, and a few taken at a birthday party Mom threw for me when I was five. I barely remembered the event at all, but now that I was viewing the photos, I remembered the big pink-frosted cake she baked for me. I also remembered how she’d invited all our neighbors and their kids as well as my friends from kindergarten.
I looked at one of the photos of her watching me blow out the candles on the cake, and a sharp twinge of sadness pinched at my insides. My poor mom. Her life had been steeped in disaster and heartbreak from the day she married my father, not knowing what kind of monster he was until it was far too late.
Without him, she would’ve been happy. She would’ve never started drinking. She’d still be alive today.
But I might not be.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and put the photo down. I picked up another one which showed some of our neighbors at the party, stuffing cake into their mouths and posing for the camera.
A light bulb seemed to switch on in my head.
“Alex,” I said.
He looked up. “Hm?”
“Last time I was here, one of our neighbors came over to tell me that he had some old photos of my parents at parties. Maybe he has some pictures that would help us.”
“Where exactly does he live? We’d have to sneak over and break in. Can’t be seen.”
“Yes, I know. He has a lot of houses, but he’s usually here, right up the road at—”
I paused midsentence. Things in my mind were suddenly whirling, my thoughts rearranging themselves and falling into place with solid clicks.
“Celeste?” Two concerned lines appeared between Alex’s brows.
“Oh my god,” I whispered. “Bill.”
“What?”
“His name is Bill Francis,” I said, my heart racing a mile a minute. “I just realized… I think he could be William.”
“Circle William?” Alex said, eyes widening.
“Yes.” I could’ve kicked myself for not making this connection earlier. “He was really good friends with my father, and after he died, he was always checking up on us, coming round to help with the garden and stuff like that. I thought he had a crush on my mother, and that’s why he wanted to keep an eye on us and make sure we were okay. I always wondered why she never liked him back, because he was so nice. But maybe she knew what he really was. Maybe she knew he was just watching us.”
“Hm. Bill is a nickname for William. We didn’t think that was actually his real name when we got it, but hell, we don’t know for sure. It could be.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded emphatically. “And his dog… he has a golden Labrador named Luna. When I started to remember the mansion ballroom the other night, I remembered there was a little golden Labrador puppy everyone
called Lulu. Some of the kids were playing with her. And when Bill was here a few months ago, he said she’s around sixteen now. That lines up with the timing. I was in that ballroom about fifteen or sixteen years ago. Luna would’ve been a puppy.”
Alex rubbed his jaw. “Shit. So you really think it could be him?”
“I think so. He’s super wealthy. He owns a lot of different houses, and he’s definitely rich enough for one of those houses to be a mansion on an estate. Rich enough to pay people to work there as guards and drivers, too. Enough to keep their mouths shut.” My upper lip curled with disgust.
“But you don’t remember seeing him at the mansion?”
I shook my head. “No. But I barely remember any of the faces there. And if he’s one of the head guys, he might’ve been too busy to come and talk to me on the nights I was there with my father. Or maybe he did, and I just don’t remember.”
I racked my brains, but I came up empty. All I remembered of Bill was that he kept a close eye on me and my mother over the years after my father’s death.
Alex pulled out his phone. “Like I was saying earlier, it’s much easier to look at property records with exact names. What was the last name again? Francis?”
I nodded and waited with bated breath as he typed several things on his phone, frowning with concentration.
“Shit. It only gives addresses, no photos.”
“Google the addresses,” I said hurriedly. “Usually if you do that, it shows you what the place looks like.”
“Fuck.” He slapped his hand against his forehead. “I don’t know why I didn’t already think of that, considering my whole ‘street view’ idea earlier.” He typed something in, then showed me his phone. “Look familiar?”
There was a photo on the screen of a large red brick Queen Anne-style mansion with ivy creeping up the facade. I shook my head. “I’ve never seen that.”
He nodded and typed something else before dismissing it after a cursory glance. “Not this. White Colonial, and it’s too small,” he muttered.
He showed me his screen again a moment later. “What about this?”
It was an enormous three story Georgian mansion made with pale red brick.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose, a fast prickle. A sense of déjà vu zinged straight through me, and a flash of stop-sign red burst across my mind. The photo wasn’t particular clear, but the effect it had on me was, crashing through me like cymbals smashing together.
I kept staring at the photo, my mouth open. Colors and images and voices were whirling in the front of my mind, twisting and twirling together until they coalesced into one stark memory.
I remembered standing outside this mansion now, looking up at it and marveling as my father smoked a cigar beside me. I knew he was well off, given his job, but we were nowhere near this level of rich. This place seemed like a palace to my young mind.
At the time, I felt like Cinderella after she was invited to the ball. Just a little girl, and all of a sudden I was allowed to attend a grown-up party in a lavish palace. I was so lucky. Anything could happen inside; all sorts of astonishing things, beyond my wildest dreams.
As it turned out, astonishing things did happen within those red brick walls, only they were beyond my wildest nightmares.
“Alex,” I finally whispered. “This is it….”
10
Celeste
Raising a pair of binoculars Alex bought for me last week, I scanned the horizon and then lowered them to the Circle mansion grounds in the distance.
I was tucked in a little nook Alex had helped me fashion on a long-dead fallen tree covered by thick bushes speckled with snowflakes. My ass fit perfectly on a chunky branch that stuck through the bushes from the log, and if I tucked my legs up, I vanished right back into the leaves.
I was dressed in dark stretch jeans, a thick olive green jacket with a hood, matching beanie, and a scarf loosely wrapped around the bottom of my face. Alex said that was what usually gave people away when they were trying to hide—the flash of skin from not covering their faces up, which immediately drew the eye. But like this, I was essentially invisible, even if someone came all the way out here to the back fence.
From my spot, I had a clear view of the back of the mansion, provided I used the binoculars which allowed me to see things clearly from half a mile away. I was behind the back fence of the property—electric, of course—well away from the house and its snowy surrounds, but the land sloped downward from here quite a bit. Not at a drastic angle, just a little drop, but it was enough for me to be able to sit here in my nook with a perfect view of the grounds and house so I could spy like a secret agent.
That was how I kept myself calm during our daily stakeout sessions. I pretended it was just an exciting adventure; all part of an over-the-top thriller movie I was starring in. No real consequences.
But then I’d notice someone arrive at the mansion, and the excitement would vanish. Even though I couldn’t see the front of the house from here, I could see the driveway in the distance and therefore any cars meandering down it, bringing in various guys for a few hours at a time. When that happened, I’d go hurtling right back to reality, heart thudding painfully, and that painful prickle of nerve pain would return to my shoulders and spine.
This was no fictional thriller movie. This was real.
Kids and teens were being abused in that house right now, right as I sat here all warm and safe and cozy. The unfairness and cruelty of it made me feel nauseated. Adults were being abused, too, seeing as the ex-sex slaves were forced to work as maids once they were ‘too old’.
I wanted to run down there with guns blazing, literally, so Alex and I could get rid of all the guards along with whichever Circle members were visiting at the time. But I knew we couldn’t. Aside from the risk, we needed to wait until every single member and guard was present at the mansion.
If we killed just a few of them now, the rest would get spooked and never come back here. They’d blow this place up and find a new den of iniquity, and we’d be back at square one, trying to hunt them down with nothing to go on.
And so, as much as it pained me, we had to wait until the time was right.
I lowered the binoculars and made a note about the morning guard shift changing time on the little pad I kept with me in my bushy alcove. A chill wind was blowing through the area now. I shivered and pulled my hood farther over my head. Even though we were approaching the end of November and almost everything was swathed in snow, it had actually been pretty warm earlier. The sun had been out, glinting on the featureless carpet of white, and I’d been pretty damn cozy and comfy in my little nook.
Now I just wanted to go home and have a hot shower. Not that I could go home—Alex and I were still staying in a series of crappy cash motels, hiding out from the real world.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up a second later. Behind me, on the nature reserve that the property backed onto, someone was approaching. I knew because I’d put several sticks all around the area behind me so that I’d hear the crunching of footfall nearby.
Alex had given me a gun to use for protection when he was off surveilling other areas. That should make me feel safer, but the thought of anyone finding me out here still filled me with dread. There would be questions, a lot of them, and I wasn’t prepared to answer them right now.
“Celeste? You okay?”
I poked my head out to see Alex standing in front of the dense thicket behind me. I breathed a deep sigh of relief. “God, you almost gave me a heart attack,” I said. “I thought we were staying out here longer, so I figured you were just some random hiker or something. I was trying to think of a way to explain exactly why I’m hiding in a bush with all this spy gear.” I flashed him a rueful grin.
He extended a hand to help me out the back of my nook, then kissed me on the forehead. His lips were warm and tender. “Sorry, beautiful. Didn’t mean to scare you. But it’s getting colder, and I think we have everything we can get an
yway. Figured we’d head back into the city and start picking up the rest of what we need.”
“Have you taken down the cameras?”
He nodded. “Got them all. Don’t worry, no one spotted me.”
We’d been staking the place out for a week now. As well as doing our own spying and note-taking from our hiding spots in the distance, Alex had set up small, high-res cameras around the perimeter that could zoom in and record all activity at the mansion. Obviously it only showed us what went on outside, just like our binoculars, but it allowed us to discover important details that we wouldn’t otherwise know.
For example, the footage from four days ago showed us how heavily the place was rigged with alarms. A bird had accidentally flown into an upper story window at dawn, and an alarm was immediately triggered, sending guards into a panic as they frantically assessed the situation. The bird was okay, just dazed (it flew off a few minutes later), but we figured from that footage that every single window had some sort of sensor on them. If anything touched them, it would trigger the alarm and therefore the guards. We probably wouldn’t have known that without the cameras.
“Are you ready to go?” Alex asked, brushing some snowy leaves off the left shoulder of my jacket. “Or did you want to stay and watch for longer?”
I shook my head. “No, I think you’re right. We’ve got things sorted. As much as we can, anyway.”
In our stakeout period, we’d amassed a lot of information on the mansion and its expansive surrounds. The old-fashioned red-brick building was probably around fifty thousand square feet, and the property looked to be about a hundred acres.
Beyond the electric fence surrounding the perimeter, it was bounded by thick forest from a nature reserve, affording the place a lot of privacy. There were also large clumps of trees throughout the land itself. They could come in handy as hiding places when we eventually sneaked in.
On the front side of the land, there was a long driveway lined with forest-green arborvitae. The driveway widened near the mansion, circling around the large fountain, and there was a place for parking just beyond that to the right of the house, with enough space to fit at least fifty cars.
