“This means no cutting, either, kid,” he said sternly.
She hadn’t. Since that day, she hadn’t. And it was because of Sam. She wished now that she could hug him, but the gesture would make them both uncomfortable.
“Cross wants us to find him,” she finally said, blinking back to their current case. She knew why the past kept sliding into her consciousness, nudging at the edges of her awareness, but that didn’t mean she had to give in to it whenever it pressed for her attention.
“He wants me to be smart enough to catch him,” she mused. “But I’m not.”
That shook Sam out of the depths he had sunk into, as she knew it would. “That’s bullshit, kid. You figured this out.”
“Only took me three dead girls.” When in doubt, fall back to self-deprecation and dark sarcasm. It was her MO.
“You know what’s nuts?” Sam asked, turning back to the lake. “We know who he is. We. Know. Who. He. Is.”
She didn’t need further clarification to follow his thoughts. “How many other agents can say the same? How many others would we judge for their absolute failure at catching someone where they knew so much about the perp?”
“I would maybe put it differently . . .”
“Of course you would, babe. You’ve got a heart of gold,” she said with affection. Between the two of them, Sam was the good person. The white hat with a kind, forgiving soul, who got cranky only sometimes and mostly with her.
Sam nudged her. “Not quite a heart of gold, but . . . doesn’t change the fact. With everything we know about him, we should have been able to catch him. We have his victimology, we know his weakness. Jeez, now we even know where he is holding the girls, if we look hard enough. And still he’s always one step ahead.”
“We suck.” Clarke sighed.
Sam barked out a harsh laugh. “God, we really do.”
They grinned at each other with a shared humor they wouldn’t be able to explain to someone who hadn’t lived through this with them.
“It’s different this time. Everything’s different,” she said, with enough optimism to startle him. She shrugged, happy to ride out the rush from the breakthrough she’d just had with the clues. “Can’t you feel it?”
“I don’t know what I feel anymore when it comes to Simon,” Sam said, defeated once more.
They’d both given up so much because of Cross. Relationships that could have actually meant something, nights of dreamless sleep, a life without an endless parade of bodies. God, Sam was so pure these days he didn’t even drink more than a glass of Chardonnay at Christmas parties. She wondered where the pain and frustration seeped out. Or if it didn’t. If it just lurked in his veins like a just barely toxic venom that was slowly poisoning him.
Back when they first started working together, she’d been able to get under his skin like no one else. He’d slash at her, and she’d swing back, and while they might have emerged from the tussles a little worse for wear, it let them both deal with some issues neither wanted to admit to having.
Now, he wouldn’t even do that. He knew her too well. He knew that coming from him, even a small nick to her carefully built-up self-worth and confidence would leave her destroyed like it never would have earlier. He was her best friend, her father, her confidant and shoulder to cry on.
So he held back; he held in. And he suffered in silence. Or she assumed he did. And she hated herself more for it. Not enough to change, though.
“Well, I feel it,” she said, pretending she was strong enough for the both of them when he so desperately needed it. Something in the air shifted and turned cool against her neck. A cloud partially covered the moon, and shadows tangoed along the banks of the lake. If she were the type to get jumpy, she’d be ready to hop out of her skin at the briefest noise.
But the demons of the dark had nothing on Simon Cross. She should know; she’d faced them both down.
Only one continued to defeat her.
She turned from both the thought and the endless black depths of the lake. She didn’t need the metaphor at the moment.
Sam followed her back, watching her as she collected her work. They started up to the little rental.
“So, you haven’t addressed the most obvious question there, kid.” Sam broke the silence as they slipped inside. “What are the clues telling us this time?”
“I was hoping you didn’t notice,” she said, grabbing the salmon-colored file with the name ANNA MEYERS printed on it in thick black letters. “Because I have no idea.”
“Ha.” Sam dropped onto the cushion of the couch next to her. He snatched the folder out of her hand.
“Have at it,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I haven’t been able to make any progress. He seems to have deviated from his number-based approach on this one. I’ve started by making a list of every single thing in each of the pictures, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
“Do me a favor?” Sam’s eyes were already devouring the first clue while he handed her the second. “Put a pot of coffee on. Doesn’t look like either of us is getting any sleep tonight.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ADELAIDE
April 2002
Adelaide kept the box hidden in the shadows of the far corner of her small closet. She dropped to her knees to retrieve it, knocking out of the way fallen shirts and shoes that had lost their mates.
It was heavy and dragged against the carpet as she pulled it out to rest in front of her. She pried the lid open, and it caught for a moment, before lifting it free of the edges.
The latest photo was still on her pillow where she’d found it. Adelaide walked over and reached out trembling fingers to touch its white edges. The Polaroid looked like it was out of another decade, all faded black at the corners.
She held it up to her desk light. An enormous sycamore tree stood tall in the center, its thick knobby trunk the focus of the picture, its branches reaching up toward an eggshell-blue spring sky. Its leaves were fresh and lush and wild, and she could almost feel their silkiness underneath her thumb.
But what made her pulse stutter was the young girl. She had her white-stocking-clad legs tossed through a dusty tire swing, her feet kicked up to the sky. Her head was tipped back, and red curls hovered just above the ground. Joy lit her face and stretched her mouth, and Adelaide thought the tire was the only thing tethering her to the earth.
The girl was even slightly blurred, out of focus, as if she were just an idea instead of a real person.
Adelaide turned the Polaroid over with shaking hands.
You would love it here. Soon. Simon
She didn’t know what “soon” meant. A day? A month? It seemed like she’d been waiting forever. Years. Four years.
She hadn’t seen him in four years. Since she was twelve.
But he wrote constantly.
I miss you. I’ll come back for you. Do you miss me?
Endless variations of the same idea.
Long ago, they’d made up a code name for him so that the Crosses wouldn’t get suspicious by her influx of mail once he’d left. They pretended he was a pen pal from Indiana. Part of a school project that had lasted long beyond the scope of the assignment.
But sometimes she’d come home and there would be something in her room. Or in another private place. She would know, then, that he had been there. In her space. Every once in a while she thought she could still smell the musk and herbs of male cologne in the air.
He was close tonight. Was he even now watching her silhouette against the wispy white curtains? She felt his eyes on her sometimes. When she was walking home from school. When she was at the mall with her girlfriends. When she’d gone on that one date that ended so disastrously she’d wanted to bury herself in a hole in the ground for the month following it. But he never showed himself.
She shivered.
Then she dropped down next to the box once more, the more recent Polaroid still clutched in her hand.
He’d written her so many letters, hun
dreds. She knew if he found out she hadn’t kept them all he would be livid. But she couldn’t have. There was no practical way to hide that amount of paper. She’d kept all the pictures, though. Stacked and rubber-banded together in different piles. They were chronological, starting with the first one. A close-up, smiling picture that was just his eyes, his nose, and his top lip stretched wide in a grin.
So you don’t miss me too much, pet.
He’d left it on her pillow the morning he’d left. She’d clutched it to her chest and cried for hours. Mrs. Cross had pulled Adelaide’s head onto her lap and cooed to her. Mr. Cross had brought her brownies. They’d both reasoned and cajoled and explained. But she’d been inconsolable.
She hadn’t talked to them for three days.
She plucked a different pile from the box. The top picture was of a bloodred cherry pie with a single slice missing. The lattice was a pleasant baked brown, and the cherries were plump and spilling out where the pastry had been sliced. She knew what the back of it said, by heart.
Me without you. Simon
She slipped the tree Polaroid in at the bottom of the pile, snapped the rubber band around the glossy stack, and then placed it back in the box. She shut the lid and pushed it back into the far corner of her closet.
She had to keep them. Even as they whispered to her in the darkness and sent shivers up her spine. She could almost hear them at night when the rest of the house was quiet. The worst ones were of the girls. They talked to her. They cried out sometimes in little girl voices. And she’d curl under the thick homemade quilt and stare, with eyes wide open, at the closed closet door.
She had to keep them, she knew, even though she did not want to. Someone might need them as evidence one day.
The girl on the tire swing stayed with her. As Adelaide brushed her teeth, washed her face, slid beneath the quilt made from her old T-shirts, the girl stayed with her.
She dreamed of her. The red hair. The smile. The girl was running through fields of sunflowers, her fingers tracing the upturned face of each one, neither flower nor girl constrained to the reality of the evil that lurked so nearby.
It was a happy place.
The gentle pings of fingernails against glass pulled her from the meadow with the girl.
She sat up, disoriented and still caught in the delicate space between dreams and consciousness. It took a minute for the shadow on the other side of her window to form into the shape of a boy.
The air stilled, and the electricity in it had the hair at the nape of her neck standing on end.
Simon.
Joy warred with fear warred with nostalgia warred with horror. And underneath it all—pulsing and unwanted and confusing—was something that still felt like love.
She clambered off the bed, rushing to push against the stubborn, distorted wood of the white-painted window frame. His smile was a breath away from her lips when she finally got it open.
“Adelaide,” he whispered, and it was hot against her cheek even as the cool spring night wrapped around her.
“Simon,” she said just as quietly. “What are you doing here?”
The happiness fell from his face, just a bit. “Not really the warm welcome I was hoping for.”
She just stared. What was she supposed to say?
He shook his head. “Come here.” He wrapped long fingers around her wrist and tugged. She let the force of it pull her out onto the little roof. The tiles cut into the soft flesh of her calves, and she drew her legs to her chest to escape the biting pain. Resting her cheek on her knees, she watched him. He was vibrating, and she could swear there were little flares of energy in the spaces where his body blended into the night.
“Adelaide,” he said again, “I came back for you.”
Who asked you to?
She bit her lip so the question didn’t tumble into the space between them.
“Where have you been?” she said instead.
“I know you might be mad at me for leaving you. But you got my letters, right? I told you I’d come back for you. To save you from them,” he said, his voice breathless. The tone wasn’t that of the confident boy who sent her letters and notes and told her she was his. There was something different about it, something that terrified her.
The night was cold, but the weather had nothing to do with why she couldn’t stop shivering. She took a deep breath and lay back against the uneven slabs of the roof.
“Hey, Simon,” she said and she wondered if the universe had swallowed the words, because she almost couldn’t hear them. He stretched his body out next to hers and nudged her shoulder, so she thought he did hear her at least. “Why do you watch the stars come out?”
Maybe he didn’t anymore. Maybe he’d stopped looking up to the night sky. Maybe she didn’t even know why she’d asked that. But he tensed beside her, and she thought maybe the question was still relevant.
His chest rose and fell, enough times that she lost hope that he would answer. But then there was a quiet intake of air, the kind that came the moment before someone revealed a little secret part of themselves. “My mother told me it was all the people we loved coming out to check in on us every day.”
She turned her head to look at him. He was still lying.
“I don’t believe you.”
There was a flash of something—anger? amusement?—when he met her eyes. But then it was gone, and he grinned, stark-white teeth bared against the dark night.
“They’re like you,” he said.
“The stars?”
“Yeah,” he said, watching them once more. His hand rose to trace patterns in the air. “They’re a puzzle, aren’t they?”
“I’m a puzzle?” She didn’t understand. But this time it actually felt like the truth.
“Everyone’s so easy to figure out,” he said. “People are so boring, aren’t they? The reasons they cry. The reasons they yell. The reasons they hurt. They’re all so fragile and boring. The stars aren’t so easy to figure out.”
He shifted so he was lying on his side, reaching to press his thumb against her cheekbone. “You’re not easy to figure out.”
She flinched away from the touch, shaking uncontrollably now. A mask slipped over his features. “Come with me, Adelaide. We can leave this place. We can be together. You and me. Like how it’s supposed to be.”
If she squinted, just a little bit, she could almost imagine this was everything she’d ever dreamed about when she was younger. She and Simon running off into the sunset, leaving behind the people who never quite loved them like parents should. They’d start a new life, go places that had always seemed unreachable, be people they’d never believed they could be. There was a part of her that ached for that future. That wanted to be able to sink into the comfort of his arms, to let him make her laugh like he always could, to challenge her, to spar, to chat, to love.
But she wasn’t squinting. Her eyes were wide open.
“Did you hurt those girls, Simon? The ones in the photos?”
In a quick move, he rolled on top of her, holding most of the weight on his forearms as a leg slotted in between hers. “Why would you think that, Adelaide? Is that what you think of me?” His voice was soft, like a caress. But there was something underneath it that made her wish she’d kept her window locked.
“I can’t go with you, Simon,” she said, wiping her palms on the soft cotton of her shorts to get rid of the slickness that had suddenly coated them in a thin film.
He almost looked regretful as he pushed back onto his knees to free his arms. She didn’t feel any less claustrophobic. “Oh, pet. It’s funny that you think you have a choice in the matter.”
It took her a second too long to process the words. His forearm was already pressed against her windpipe, both silencing the scream that had risen to the back of her throat and cutting off her air.
This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening.
She slapped at him, her fingernails digging into skin where she could find it. Her hips
bucked up, trying to dislodge him. But he simply batted away her hands and settled his weight more firmly onto her. “This could have been so much easier if you had just trusted me, Adelaide,” he said, his voice composed. It terrified her.
But everything had started going black at the edges of her vision. She clawed at his arm, but the pressure didn’t relent. There was no glorious air to save her, just dry-heaving lungs and a fuzziness that popped like bubbles in her brain.
“We’re going to have so much fun together.” The words came from far away, just an echo in a dark tunnel. She lifted her eyes from his face and found the fairy lights in the black sky above her. The stars blinked at her, becoming soft and golden. They were the last thing she saw before she gave in to the darkness.
Adelaide awoke with a gasp as everything slammed back into her. It was as if she were still desperately seeking air, even though Simon must have let up right after she’d passed out.
“Welcome back, Adelaide,” he said. She searched for him in the shadows cast by the dull bedside lamp, but all she could make out were shifting limbs and a flash of pale skin before he moved farther away from the mattress where she was curled. There was a spring poking into her rib, and the bed was hard and flat. They were no longer at the Crosses’ house.
“Where are we?” Her voice was raspy and broken. She touched her finger to her throat where there must have already been a bruise blooming. At least she wasn’t bound. She sat up, looking around. The room was small and messy. Clothes were piled on every available surface, and a staleness hung in the air as if food had been left beneath one of the heaps.
Her eyes flew back to Simon when he stepped into the light. The hollows beneath his cheekbones and the deep pockets of his eyes were thrown into dark contrast where the glow touched his face.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess.” There was disgust on his face as he waved a careless hand. “Matthew’s a slob.”
The name rattled against the back of her skull, a memory that wouldn’t quite form. But she silenced it, her survival instincts screaming at her to pay attention to the man in front of her instead.
It Ends With Her Page 14
