by Anne Frasier
David hadn’t believed Elise when she’d told him her body was probably worth a lot of money. But judging by the amount of traffic that obviously came through here, she had a large following. “We need to put a twenty-four-hour watch on this grave,” David said.
Had Elise known about the shrine? Had she ever come here out of curiosity? She was so secretive about that part of her life. Well, maybe not secretive, but it was painful for her to talk about. He knew that much.
His phone vibrated. He checked the screen. Bartholomew Gordon.
“I think I’ve identified the two other places,” Bartholomew said. “The church is located on St. Helena Island in South Carolina.”
St. Helena Island, where Elise’s father was rumored to have been buried. Given Tremain’s obsession, it made sense that it would be included in the visual history.
“And the other building . . .” the historian continued. “I had to get out a magnifying glass, but I’m eighty percent certain it’s the old Broder Plantation long before it went through a fire and restoration. Later it was bought by some hippie woman and she turned it into kind of a commune. It’s somewhere northwest of town, I believe. On the Ogeechee River.”
CHAPTER 44
We could go away together,” Tremain whispered, his body pressed against Elise’s back, his breath hot against her cheek.
Elise continuously drifted in and out of consciousness, welcoming the nothingness. But sometimes, like now, she’d wake up to find Tremain on top of her.
The only light in the cramped, windowless room came from the lantern on the floor, and the battery seemed to be fading. Or was that her vision? She didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t know how long she’d been there. It could have been hours or it could have been days. It almost seemed she’d always been in this room that smelled of mildew and sweat and old wood. This bed . . . no, not a bed, just a pallet or bed frame that bit into her skin. She was bound, facedown, her wrists and ankles tied. She’d lost feeling in her hands and feet.
Was she wearing clothes? She didn’t know—that’s how disconnected she was. Sometimes she thought she was naked, but other times she thought she might have felt the weight of fabric against her back and legs. A blanket?
She was shutting down. That much she knew. In the deep recesses of her mind she attributed the shutdown to shock, but did it matter where it came from?
Last time Tremain held her hostage she’d played the part of her own negotiator and had tried to reason with him. This time nothing he said or did touched her. Had she given up? Maybe. Or maybe her brain was simply misfiring and she was unable to form the complex thoughts needed to bargain with him. More likely.
But there was a price to pay for unconscious escape, because the shock of coming back around and finding herself in this space, with Tremain breathing in her ear . . . it was unbearable. His slobbering kisses against her neck, her mouth. She would turn away and gag, and he would punch her in the face.
He was all about torture and violation, but sometimes he lapsed into groveling regret after a brief glimpse of himself, maybe feeling sorry for what he’d done to her. He would rouse enough from the depths of his obsession-driven insanity to frighten himself, at least a little. Whenever that happened, his persona shifted, and he began talking about how they could be happy together.
Once a murderer committed to the kill, to the twisted rationality of what he was doing, he shouldn’t step back. He had to keep charging forward, without question, without self-examination.
Elise had seen murderers falter, seen murderers look at themselves and recoil. That was when they went full-blown crazy. Those were the people who took out random strangers, who went on shooting rampages, because the alternative, the thinking, the realization of what they’d done, was intolerable. They needed the noise and violence and shock and commitment to cover up the bad.
“Kill me.” Her words were spoken in a harsh rasp, with a voice she didn’t recognize.
What about Audrey? Yes, there was Audrey, but Elise was dying. This she knew. Of this she was certain. She could feel herself fading. And since she was going to die, she’d much rather it happen sooner than later. Yet Tremain seemed unwilling to let her go, unwilling to take that final step. Once she was dead and his obsession was gone, what would he have left?
She could feel the bullets lodged in her body, and she visualized hot metal embedded deep within raw flesh. When she moved, blood oozed from holes. She tried not to move.
“It’s this thing on your back. That’s what it is,” Tremain said.
He’d mentioned the body art before. She had a vague recollection of his trembling fingers as he traced the outline of the Black Tupelo design.
“It’s protecting you,” he said, and now the tremor was in his voice. The design scared him. “It’s keeping you from opening up to me.”
“It’s Strata Luna’s,” Elise said. “You know that, right?”
The Gullah woman’s name evoked fear in most men and women, and Elise wasn’t disappointed in Tremain’s reaction. He sucked in a breath, and muttered something about an evil priestess.
His fear inspired her, and she began to chant the words of a spell she’d learned years ago, a spell she no longer believed in. All of it was nonsense, just as David said, but if Tremain believed . . .
“Bones of anger, bones of dust,
Full of fury, revenge is just—”
“Don’t!” He clamped a hand over her face, stopping her words, pressing hard, his fingers biting into her cheeks, covering her nose and mouth. He didn’t let go, and she finally lost consciousness.
Minutes or hours or days later, a stabbing pain in her back brought her around. The pain began slowly, then increased until it swallowed her. She felt liquid warmth run down her hip and drip to the floor.
“I’m going to get rid of this damn thing,” Tremain said.
That’s when it dawned on her that he was removing the Black Tupelo design, cutting it from her body with a knife or scalpel. After creating a slit, he worked his finger beneath the skin. Then, with one terrific pull, he ripped the piece from her back.
She screamed. Even though she knew he liked the sound, she screamed.
Tremain dug his fingers into her hair and jerked her head up. “Look at this!” he shrieked. “Look!”
She opened her eyes. Through a red haze of pain, she saw Tremain’s hand in front of her face. Between his bloody fingers was the very thing meant to keep this from happening.
“It can’t protect you anymore,” he said, tossing the implant to the floor. “Nobody can protect you. Nobody is coming for you, because nobody knows you’re here. It’s just you. And me.”
He wasn’t satisfied with ripping it out. Or maybe he hadn’t gotten it all. Or maybe he just wanted to hear her scream once more. Whatever the reason, he began cutting her again. She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut. Then, mercifully, she blacked out.
CHAPTER 45
Night was the toughest, when nothing happened and most of the city was asleep, leaving David to obsess over the mistakes he’d made, his latest being the tattoo hunch that had proven to be a waste of valuable time and manpower, an area search and door-to-door canvass of St. Helena Island having turned up nothing.
There was no way David could go to bed, so he drove around for hours, as if he would somehow stumble upon a clue. Or better, stumble upon Elise, alive and well. He drove past her house; he drove past all of the locations Tremain’s victims had been found. He parked outside Tremain’s house, waiting and watching even though the place was already under surveillance. About 4:00 a.m., he drove to his apartment, fed Isobel, pet her, sweet-talked to her in a way that would have been embarrassing if anybody had caught him, slept on the couch for an hour, took a shower, and returned to headquarters to see if any tips had come in.
He was in the break room pouring a cup of coffee when Meg Co
ok stuck her head in the door. Over twenty-four hours had now passed since Elise had gone missing, and David was trying not to fixate on the twenty-four-hour thing.
“They found her car.” Meg rattled off the location, which was roughly ten miles from the plantation. “A photographer was out early this morning trying to get some sunrise pictures when he saw what looked like the top of a vehicle submerged in a marsh. A rescue diver reports that the vehicle is empty, and we’ve confirmed that the plates belong to Detective Sandburg. A wrecker is on the way there right now.” The rest of the pertinent information was spoken as she tried to keep up with David as he ran for the stairs.
David arrived on the scene just as Elise’s yellow Saab was being dragged from the marsh, brown water and mud gushing from every crevice. A couple of cop cars were on site, along with a wrecker and three civilian vehicles. No media coverage. He spotted a man in a mud-covered wetsuit, flashed his badge, and asked, “Any chance someone escaped from the car after it went in?”
The guy shook his head. “Pretty sure it was empty,” he said. “Windows were up and doors were closed.”
“Thanks.” David had to walk away, and when he pulled out his phone to call Meg Cook, he realized his hands were shaking. “Pull up Blaine Johnson’s statement,” David told her. “The kid who gave Tremain a ride.”
“Got it right here,” she said.
“I’m looking for time of day and direction he was traveling.”
“Time of day . . . Oh, that’s weird. I don’t see anything about it in his statement. And as far as direction . . . we don’t have that either.”
In a very distant part of his mind, David realized it was starting to rain. “Call him. Find out.”
Minutes later, she was back with the information.
All along they’d figured the teen had picked up Tremain before Elise was kidnapped. Instead, he’d picked him up after. And why would Tremain dispose of Elise’s car so quickly, then get a ride back to the plantation? Only one reason David could think of. He’d left Elise there. Maybe the tattoo hadn’t been a false lead after all.
“This is why small details matter,” he told Meg. “I don’t know who took Johnson’s statement, but he needs to be more thorough.” David also faulted himself. He’d missed it too, and there was zero margin for error right now.
Leaving the young officer with instructions that she call with anything that seemed relevant no matter how small, David drove the ten miles to the plantation through what had now become a torrential rain. At the plantation house, David dove from his car and ran for the cover of the porch. He broke the yellow seal left by the crime-scene team, ripped off boards, and went inside.
The pie was soggy, and fruit flies had gathered. The flowers were wilted from lack of water. How quickly things died.
With wet hands and rain dripping from his hair and coat, David pulled out his phone to call Meg. One bar, so he sent a text message telling her to get all she could on the plantation. History, but especially floor plans, if any existed. He hit “Send,” then continued through the house while deep thunder rattled windows.
The pool room looked the same as it had twenty-four hours earlier. Back through the living room, down the hall, to Elise’s bedroom. Undisturbed except the shell casings had been collected and there were signs the room had been dusted for prints.
And now he started to think that this was another dead end, another of his mistakes and misplaced hunches born out of desperation.
He moved through the building as silently as he could, his heart sinking a little more with each step, the conclusion to this drama already foretold. He imagined going to Strata Luna’s house, taking Audrey aside, telling her that her mother was dead, all the while unwilling to believe it himself.
Up the stairs to the second story, visually examining bedrooms that had been stripped of fabric and plaster. On the third floor, he took fresh note of the weird room that had obviously been occupied recently, but there was no sign of anybody today. He was trying to make sense of it when he thought he heard the faint sound of a car outside beneath the noise of the storm. He listened, the unmistakable slam of a car door serving as confirmation.
With gun drawn, David made his way downstairs, wincing with every creak. Once he’d traversed the hallway, he swung himself into the kitchen, gun arm extended and braced.
The door opened and a woman in a red raincoat and purple tights let out a shriek, dropped a paisley bag to the floor, and raised her hands high.
CHAPTER 46
David didn’t lower his weapon. “You’re Elise’s aunt, right?”
She nodded while continuing to look at him in horror.
“What did you have to do with her disappearance?”
“Why is everybody so eager to paint me black? To think so poorly of me?”
“For one thing, you committed a felony. I did some research,” he added, by way of explanation. “And then there’s this.” He held up the note she’d left for Elise. “You were running.”
“I’ll admit I was ready to leave the country, ready to start a new life as an expatriate, but then I saw the news about Elise.” She slowly lowered her hands, wiped at her wet face, and shook rain off her arms. “I don’t know if I can be of any help, but I had to come back.”
He tossed the paper aside. “Do you know Atticus Tremain?”
“I’d never heard of him until all this awful stuff started happening.”
“Tremain wasn’t always his name. He changed it. He used to be Joel Francis.”
She put a hand to her throat and her eyes got big. “Joel Francis?”
He lowered his gun. “Heard of him?”
She looked around the room, her gaze dropping to the table. “My poor pie,” she said forlornly, in an obvious attempt to derail the conversation.
“Did you know him?” David asked.
“There was a Joel Francis who used to come here years ago. Elise called him Joe, but his real name was Joel. You have to realize that a lot of people came and went back then. The plantation was always open, and I never turned anybody away.” She looked nervous and flustered and uncomfortable, and none of those reactions seemed to have anything to do with David and his gun.
He returned the weapon to his shoulder holster. “What are you not telling me?”
“If Tremain is who I think he is, then he stayed here one summer when Elise was visiting.”
Wow. David wasn’t expecting that.
“He seemed like a nice young man. He wrote these folksy songs, and we recorded some of them. He was going to shop them around, try to find a record label.”
“What about Elise? How does she fit into this?”
“Well . . .” With both palms flat on the table, Anastasia lowered herself into a chair. “The whole thing is kind of fuzzy. There was a party.” She jumped tracks, and her face lit up. “Wasn’t that a lovely party the other night?”
“Yeah, but let’s hear about the one that took place years ago.”
“I feel funny talking about this to a detective. I think maybe I should discuss it with a lawyer.”
“Let me point out that every second that passes brings Elise closer to death,” David said. “Holding back information right now could very well result in her funeral.” Brutal, but he didn’t have time to be nice.
Anastasia pressed her lips together and nodded. Then, like someone waiting in the wings preparing to go onstage, she lifted her chin and took a deep breath. “My parties were . . . well, not really for children. People ran around naked, and we smoked a lot of pot. Really good stuff that I suspect was laced with something, because wow. Anyway, I was really stoned that night. Normally I put Elise to bed before things got so wild, but I remember going for a swim in the river and getting out of the water to see Elise standing there. People were drunk and high and making out. I think I said something about Elise needing to go to bed. On
e of the regulars, a man named Scott, said he’d take her upstairs. He left with her, and Joel followed. I do remember that, and I thought it was strange. So I got dressed and I went after them, just to make sure Elise was okay. I thought I would tuck her in the way I usually did. But before I even stepped outside, I heard the sounds of fighting and broken glass . . . and then nothing.”
“Tremain.”
“This is where things get really fuzzy for me. I think I may have blocked it out. Maybe some kind of post-traumatic stress, but once I got upstairs, I remember seeing Joel—or Tremain, as you know him—standing over a body, and poor little Elise—” She let out a single long sob. “Oh, poor thing, poor thing. With her nightgown pulled up, and her panties ripped off.”
David reached blindly for the table and dropped into a chair.
“I think Joel, or rather Tremain, got there in time,” she rushed to add.
“Are you saying Tremain killed a rapist and pedophile?” David asked in disbelief.
She nodded. “Tremain was hardly more than a kid. I’m guessing maybe twenty, twenty-one. I never asked people their age. I didn’t want to know.” She picked up a petal that had fallen from the bouquet of flowers, and she began fiddling with it rather than looking at David. She swallowed, then continued: “I know it was wrong, but we hid the body. He was just a kid. I didn’t want him to go to prison. And I can tell you that the people around here were looking for a reason to shut me down. Just a month earlier we’d had an arson attempt. I couldn’t lose the plantation.”
David’s profiler mind kicked into full gear. That night the secret murder most likely triggered the killer instinct in Tremain. Hard to say what he would have become if it hadn’t happened. He still might have taken a dark path. Different circumstance, different trigger, and probably a different dark path, but a dark path all the same. This one led him directly to his obsession with Elise. He’d saved her. God, it all made bizarre sense now.
