by Ania Ahlborn
Except three bags of groceries for ten people wasn’t much, and Maggie didn’t have a dog, which got Shadow nothing but scraps. When Avis muttered something to that effect in the car on the return trip, Gypsy stated that they’d simply “have to get more.”
“Get more,” Avis said. “We can’t get more, not without Maggie noticing . . .”
Gypsy and Jeffrey looked at each other but didn’t speak, allowing Avis to stew in her own wariness. Getting more would mean going to different houses—something they were used to doing. But the proposition turned Avis’s stomach inside out. It was one thing to break into the house of a friend who, with a bit of pleading, would come to understand their predicament. It was altogether another to steal from total strangers. That was a whole new level of theft.
Avis’s heart just about leaped out of her chest when she saw Maggie’s Volvo come up the road bright and early the next morning. She watched her from the girls’ bedroom window while chewing a fingernail, sure that Maggie was about to storm inside and demand to know who raided her pantry. I know it was you, Avis. Or Audra. Or whoever you are now . . .
As a kid, someone had broken into Audra’s family home and stolen a bunch of stuff—their TV, the good silver, her mother’s jewelry. They tore the house apart looking for valuables while Audra and her parents were out to dinner, celebrating one of her father’s many political victories. She still remembered the sickening feeling of violation when they came home that night. Things flung everywhere. The TV stand upended in the living room. Couches moved. Lamps pushed off tables and glasses shattered on the kitchen floor. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t taken anything that belonged to her. She’d been ten at the time, and the childish appearance of her room must have turned the trespassers off. All that mattered was that someone had come into her family home without being invited. That in itself was enough to make her skin crawl, and Maggie had just as much reason to rage as anyone. Avis had violated her trust. Maggie would more than likely never forgive her.
But as Avis waited for Maggie to fly up the stairs and shove her against the bedroom wall, quiet laughter sounded from the ground floor instead. Avis could hear Maggie speaking to members of the group in low tones, as if not wanting Avis to hear. Maggie pulled away from the house a few moments later without ever seeking Avis out.
Eventually, Avis went downstairs, and that’s when she discovered the reason for Maggie’s visit. There, on the kitchen table, was bag upon bag of food. There was even a giant bag of Alpo dog food propped up against the wall, unopened, fresh from the store. Maggie had noticed the robbery, but instead of fury, she had shown mercy. For a brief moment, Avis loved her more intensely than she’d loved anyone in her entire life. She wanted to run through the woods that separated their homes, throw her arms around Maggie’s neck, and kiss her into oblivion.
But that notion was a fleeting spark. It gave way to something ugly, something akin to hate. Because Avis’s twisted, noble act of offering Maggie up as a sacrificial lamb had been outdone. In one graceful swoop, Maggie had transformed herself from victim to savior, and suddenly, Avis’s risk felt little more than childish. Maggie had stolen the attention, like always. Mother fucking Teresa, quietly living out her life in the Washington woods.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, Clover gave Avis a knowing smile, as if sensing her humiliation. “Well, that was pointless,” she said, lifting a mug of coffee to her lips. “I guess you’ll just have to prove yourself some other way.”
38
* * *
VEE AND ECHO walked along the coast, Echo’s long skirt flapping in the breeze like a patchwork flag. Vee kept her hands shoved deep in the front pockets of her jeans. She wasn’t one to open up, let alone to be friendly with strangers. She’d always been aloof, forcing her mother to give family friends apologetic smiles. She’s shy. Vee had heard that excuse a hundred thousand times—so much that, for a while, she adopted her mom’s cover story as a personality trait. But the truth of it was that Vee wasn’t shy as much as she was an introvert. She wasn’t fond of too much conversation, never did like being part of a big group, had always preferred silence to talk.
But Vee’s desperation to slough off at least a little of her growing loneliness was too strong to fight. She needed to subdue the pain of her father’s betrayal, her mother’s dishonesty. There was something about the way Echo had smiled at her, about how this strange woman had so easily confessed her own father’s negligence. Somehow, that admission assured her that she and Echo were alike. The ease of her movements whispered we’re the same. The way she walked beside Vee in comfortable silence urged her, take my hand. Something about the way she carried herself promised Vee that Echo understood her pain, the sad and lonely feelings of being brushed aside.
Eventually, Echo spoke, her words cutting through the salty breeze and the rolling in of the tide. “Has he told you about the house?”
Vee peered down at the sandy tips of her sneakers as they walked. Her dad had waved her off when Echo had first come to visit, as if afraid that Echo would say something he didn’t want Vee to hear—secrets about the house that Vee had already discovered but her father couldn’t come to terms with. “You know about that?” she asked, looking up from her feet to the woman beside her.
Echo gave her a sage nod. “Yes, I do. And I’d garner a guess that you know more about it than your dad does.”
Vee shrugged at that. She was sure her father had a bunch of newspaper articles that didn’t appear anywhere online. He had spent a lot of time at the library before they left New York. Yes, she knew a lot, but would be hard-pressed to say she knew more.
“You’ve seen them, haven’t you?” Echo asked, her question freezing Vee in her tracks. Echo paused her steps as well, turning to look back at the girl who was now standing statuesque upon the beach, and smiled. “Ah.” She nodded again. “Yeah, I had a feeling.”
“Y-you did?” Vee blinked at the strange woman before her. She didn’t want to come straight out and ask if Echo meant what Vee thought she meant. Maybe she was mistaken. Perhaps the moment she dropped the word ghost into the conversation, Echo would burst into a fit of laughter and ask her what in God’s name she was talking about. But Echo kept her gaze steady on Vee and nodded again.
“I knew you were the one from the first moment I saw you, Vivi.”
Vivi. That was new. She kind of liked it.
“The one?” Vee shook her head, not understanding what that meant. The one for what?
“You’re just like them, you know. Lost, wanting more than what you have, deserving of more than what you’re being given. Kids like you—that’s who Jeffrey loved the most. That’s why they turned to him, Vivi. He knew what they needed, and Jeff gave them everything he promised.”
Vee swallowed against the lump that had risen in her throat. Her thoughts drifted to the empty cardboard box shoved into the corner of her closet, the printed-out pictures she’d tacked to the wall behind it for no reason other than being compelled to do so by some ineffable force. That same force was what had kept Jeffrey Halcomb’s photo glowing bright on her laptop screen for the past day and a half. She had saved more than a dozen photographs of him onto her computer. When she considered closing them to shut down her system, she hesitated, backed down, as though closing them would somehow make the man who wasn’t present disappear. She’d spent hours staring into his eyes, wondering what he had been like, not once thinking about Tim or her friends or the old life she’d left behind. She wondered if, perhaps, those people had killed themselves not because Jeffrey Halcomb had been some terrible oppressor but because he had been wonderful enough to die for.
Echo placed a hand on Vee’s shoulder. “You’ll get to meet him soon,” she said. “He’s looking forward to it, Vivi. But you have to keep that a secret . . . you understand? Even after you meet him, whatever you do, don’t tell your father. Do you know why?”
Yeah, becau
se he’d think Vee was crazy. Because the moment she told him she was seeing Jeffrey Halcomb, the house would be history. He’d move them out within hours. Then it would be endless therapy sessions to get her head examined. Her father would do whatever it took to convince her it was all in her head. No, it never happened. You just imagined it, Jeanie. You fell down the rabbit hole, did too much research, read too many articles, got all mixed up.
Jeanie. That name hardly felt like hers anymore. Virginia, even less so. Maybe, as a fresh start, Vivi was the girl she needed to become.
“Yes, I understand,” Vee said.
“Can you tell me why?” Echo asked, and while Vee didn’t know exactly what it was Echo wanted her to say, she murmured the first thing that came to mind.
“Because he’ll ruin everything.”
That’s all he ever did. Both her dad and her mom. They messed everything up and didn’t even care. But Vivi didn’t have parents. She could forget them, forget the past and the pain.
“Do you think I should try to help them?” she asked, her gaze flitting to Echo’s face. “The people in the house, I mean. Is that what they want, for me to help?”
Echo smiled, as though having expected that very question. “Oh, honey, don’t worry. You will help them,” she said. “That’s what being the one is all about. Look.” Drawing something out of her cross-body bag, Echo held a small photograph out for Vee to see. It was a picture of Jeff Halcomb—young and handsome. His smile was nothing short of dazzling in the light that dappled down onto his shoulders from between branches overhead. “Turn it over,” Echo told her. Vee did so, blinking at the handwritten note scrawled onto the back.
Dearest Vivi,
See you soon.
—J.
Vee’s eye went wide. “Is this . . . ?” She paused, flipping the photograph over again in her hand. “But how?”
Echo exhaled a quiet laugh and placed a hand against Vee’s back. “Magic,” she said. “And he’s waiting to show you his best trick, Vivi. Any time now. It’ll be soon.”
39
* * *
LUCAS SLID MARK’S Honda into park and leaned back in the driver’s seat of the car, his eyes fixed on Audra Snow’s old house. His mind reeled around the new information Marty had offered about Halcomb’s time in prison—the dead inmate, the guard who had killed his wife instead of taking her to a luau. Two hours of uninterrupted thinking had him feeling as though he’d dodged a bullet. Halcomb had spared him of something the moment he denied Lucas his interview.
Thank God, he thought. Because who knows what would have happened?
He didn’t like to think of himself as impressionable, but the proof was looming directly ahead of him. Halcomb had talked Lucas into moving. He had convinced a hardened criminal to commit suicide. He had, potentially, persuaded a prison guard to kill himself and his wife. What influence could he hold over those who willingly followed him? What about the people who sent him letters, the ones who loomed in the trees just beyond the orchard?
I don’t want to find out.
And then there was the cross. He’d shoved it into his desk drawer days before. Then, it seemed to have had no purpose, and the things Echo had brought over had wiped Halcomb’s parting gift almost entirely from his mind. But now, after what Marty had said about the weapon Schwartz had used to kill himself, Lucas couldn’t shake the dread. All logic assured him that it wasn’t the same cross Schwartz had used—surely, the police had taken that one into evidence. And yet, the mere idea of it sitting in his desk drawer gave him the creeps. Because what if? Maybe he wants me to stab myself to death just like Schwartz. Fat fucking chance, he thought, shoved the car door open, and moved toward the front of the house. You may have convinced me to move into this house of horrors, but suicide isn’t in the cards for me, Jeff.
When he stepped inside, Jeanie and Echo were sitting on the living room floor. The coffee table was between them, a game of Scrabble in full swing.
Jeanie was just about beaming, but the moment she laid eyes on him, her mood shifted to something darker. He watched as his kid shot a look at Echo, as if questioning whether she should greet him at all.
“Hey,” he said, raising an eyebrow at the pair. “Uh, everything okay here?”
“We’re just playing Scrabble,” Echo announced. “Vivi is beating me by seventy-three points. If we could just forget this whole game happened, that would be great.”
Jeanie said nothing.
His kid flashed Echo a smile as she slid around a few wooden tiles, but her grin did little to diminish the weird feeling clambering up Lucas’s throat. Vivi? Echo’s new nickname for his daughter made him feel queasy and violated, as though someone had come into his home and stolen something invaluable out from under his nose.
Echo was looking a little too comfortable lounging on the floor the way she was. And Jeanie—a girl who avoided strangers—appeared more laid-back around her new friend than she did around her own dad.
Something twisted deep inside his guts.
“Can’t play,” was the only thing Lucas could manage, his mouth gone dry, full of cotton. “Jeanie . . . you should wrap up. I still want to drive up to Seattle today.”
The drive would get them out of the house and away from Pier Pointe for long enough to let him get his head straight. The news about the inmate, the guard, and now Jeanie’s weird silence, the strange stolen glances between her and Echo . . . it was all too much.
He turned away from them and stepped into his study. Closing the door behind him, he caught his breath, sure he was on the verge of vomiting his lunch down the front of his jeans.
After a few seconds of standing there with his eyes shut tight, a gentle knock sounded on the door. Echo peeked her head inside and gave him an apologetic sort of smile. It was almost as if she knew what was bothering him without an explanation.
“Okay, I’m off,” she told him. “Have a good trip into the city.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he said.
Echo turned to go, then paused. “If you need me to watch her again, I’d be more than happy to do it. Don’t hesitate to ask.” She gave him a conciliatory shrug, then stepped away from the door.
Lucas didn’t move from where he stood. He considered running out and apologizing. He was acting crazy, his jealousy bubbling up green and ugly from the pit of his guts. He couldn’t afford not to be Echo’s friendly neighbor, couldn’t risk her taking her stuff back. He needed those photos to fix his life.
It was only then that he realized what that sick feeling truly was. He was being held hostage. And while it would have been easy to tell Echo to never set foot near his rental house again, Echo wasn’t his captor. He was a prisoner to his own insatiable need, his own obsession. Because falling prey to desperation was easy when you had nothing left to lose.
That’s what had bothered him most about seeing Jeanie sitting there with Echo that way. It made him feel as though he’d screwed up one too many times. She’d finally given up on him. And if that was true, Lucas Graham was done. Nothing was all that he had left.
40
* * *
Monday, April 19, 1982
Ten Months, Twenty-Three Days Before the Sacrament
THE GROUP HAD taken to making biweekly drives into Pier Pointe, breaking into houses. Avis didn’t dare mention how uncomfortable the trips made her. She went along every time.
They now had more food than they knew what to do with. Cardboard boxes lined the wall of the kitchen, giving the place the look of an in-process move. When Avis offhandedly mentioned that they could take a break from their little trips, that they had enough food to feed ten people and a dog for at least a month, Jeff pulled her into the sunshine-yellow downstairs half bath and murmured scoldings into her ear.
“You’re not here to give advice,” he said, his fingers tight against her arm. “You’re here to participate.” Sh
e winced against his grip but kept herself from trying to wriggle away. “And if you don’t want to take part, then why are we here, Avis? Why are we here?” When she didn’t answer, he tightened his grip. “Why are we here?” he demanded.
“Because I want to participate!” She blurted it out, twisting away from him. “I’m sorry.” Her voice drew out into a whisper. “I want to participate.”
Avis had thought being part of things would be limited to walking along the beach, sitting around a bonfire, growing vegetables in the backyard. Now participation had escalated from a “Kumbaya” circle to breaking and entering. And it was becoming very clear that it wasn’t about the food. It was about the thrill.
Standing in the kitchen over a colander of freshly harvested rhubarb, Avis eavesdropped as Noah and Kenzie sat around the kitchen table. They laughed as they discussed plans to rearrange furniture in each house they hit.
“Everything is inside out,” Kenzie explained. “A couch against a right wall instead of a left. A TV on the opposite side of a room. Pictures reversed and backward. We gotta find a name for it.”
“A name . . .” Noah leaned back in his seat, gazed up at the ceiling, then snapped his fingers a moment later. “One-two switcheroo.”
“Switcheroo!” Kenzie howled with laughter.
When they told Jeffrey about their plan, he muttered something about how they were both idiots. They were going to get them all caught. But he failed to demand they not do it. Avis guessed it wouldn’t be long before they figured out how to glue furniture to ceilings and stick light fixtures to the floors.
But the switcheroos were the least of her worries. It seemed that the family had officially gained another member. Maggie was visiting almost every day now with Eloise in tow. “My mom is just . . .” Maggie shook her head, aggravated, when Avis had asked about Eloise’s standard babysitter. “She’s gone crazy, I think. I don’t want my kid around that.” And while Avis wouldn’t have minded had the group treated Maggie the way they had behaved toward the former Audra Snow in the beginning, Maggie certainly didn’t suffer the same level of rejection. She had nothing to prove.
