Erin Solomon Mysteries, Books 1 - 5

by Jen Blood

Juarez didn’t blink. “Watch me.” He straightened and retrieved his cell phone. He was just walking toward the door when Hank stopped him.

  “Wait!”

  Juarez turned calmly. The man looked terrified. His eyes shone with tears Juarez was certain would fall before he was through.

  “What happened that weekend?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Hank repeated. “I didn’t do any of it.”

  Juarez sat down at the table again. He leaned back, calmer now. “So who did?”

  Hank hesitated. All Juarez had to do was look toward the door this time before the man folded. “It was Will,” he said brokenly. “It was this stupid thing we did—I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill any of them. Will did Erin, but it was all Jeff’s idea. That was where it all started. Jeff Lincoln started everything.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I woke in the cave an indeterminate amount of time later to pain—the kind that digs in deep and holds on so tight it feels like your whole body’s being rung out. I reached for my phone and turned it on long enough to get my bearings. Light filtered in through an entrance above us that I hadn’t noticed before, so at least I could see something of what was going on around me. According to the iPhone gods, it was ten o’clock in the morning. Diggs was sitting on the ground with his back against the cave wall, his eyes closed. It was warmer than it had been, but it was still damp and dark and dank. Still a cave, in other words.

  “You okay?” Diggs asked.

  Our fight came back immediately: everything he’d said. Everything I’d said. All I’d done to get us here.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m good. Why don’t you get some sleep? I’m up.”

  “You haven’t been out that long. I can stay up a little longer.”

  “I’m all right. I won’t be able to get back to sleep anyway. You go ahead.”

  He came over and waited while I extricated myself from the sleeping bag. I put too much pressure on my broken wrist and had to stop for a second, waiting it out while the world dipped and spun. I felt Diggs’ hand at the small of my back.

  “Sol?”

  I got up. Backed away a little. “I’m fine—I just need to be a little more careful. What about you?”

  “I’m good. Or as good as can be expected given the circumstances.”

  I gave a stilted laugh that sounded even more stilted in our subterranean prison. When I stopped, the whole world went silent. Diggs stood a foot away from me, but it was like the Berlin Wall had been resurrected between us.

  “Well… I’ll just go over there,” I said. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Sure thing.”

  I walked past him, thinking of his words this morning: You don’t think.

  And look where it had gotten us.

  I sat down on the cool ground, trying not to see any of the unknown creepy crawlies I was bound to find if I looked too hard. Diggs cleared his throat.

  “Hey, Sol?”

  I looked up. “Yeah?”

  There was a long pause. I saw him shake his head. “Nothing, forget it. Just wake me if you get tired.”

  “I will.”

  I sat there in the semi-darkness and watched him toss and turn until eventually his breathing evened out.

  While Diggs slept the sleep of the damned, I dug out Erin Lincoln’s journal and sat in the miniscule shaft of light funneling in from outside. I opened to the entry I’d left off at, and retreated to the past.

  January 20, 1970

  Me and Bonnie and Sarah had a sleepover last night at Sarah’s house. I didn’t want to go—I don’t like to leave J. and Daddy alone together after last time, but J. said he’d spend the night at Hank’s. Sarah’s mother (Maman) had so much food I thought I’d split, and then Luke came in and drew a picture of me while we were sitting there. He says I’m an angel. I told him angels can’t spit halfway across the room or land a free throw better than any boy in town.

  Hank and J. and Creepy Will tried to sneak in the window but Sarah screamed and got her Maman. She came running in and told the boys to get the HELL out of there or they’d be sorry. Then she made Luke go to bed, too.

  Bonnie says she can see the future, because her mémère could. She’s an Indian, and a witch. She says she can see everything that ever happened when me and J. were in Lynn. She says Daddy is a bad man.

  I told J. what she said, but he said not to get too worried. He says you don’t have to be a fortune teller to know Daddy’s no good.

  February 3, 1970

  I haven’t written in a while because J. got sick again. I’ve been taking care of him. He’s been coughing and had a fever and he’s got the same white patches all up and down his throat as he did last time. I finally convinced him to go to the doctor on his own, because Daddy won’t ever take him. All I’d need to do is sneeze and Daddy would move heaven and earth to get me to the finest doctor in New England. J. could be dying and Daddy would just let him go, same as he did with Mama.

  He has strep throat, and the doctor said maybe he should get his tonsils removed since this is the third time this year.

  If he’d stop kissing so many gross townie girls, I bet he wouldn’t get it at all.

  Most of the entries continued along those lines, giving me some insight into my father’s life as a child, but providing very few clues as to what had happened to him and his sister that fateful weekend in September of 1970. Until I found this entry, that is:

  May 19, 1970

  Jeff’s mad at me because I won’t call him J. anymore. I never would have started in the first place if I’d known what it was all about. Sarah told me. We were at her house while her Maman was cooking, and Bonnie and Luke and Sarah took me out to the back of their property—way out in the woods. I told them I didn’t like it out there, and Bonnie says it’s because the woods there are filled with ghosts.

  Sarah told me that her great great grandpa (or something) was buried there. She said he’d been très mauvais (very bad), and he killed a girl our age. His name was Jason Saucier, and him and these two other boys had a club where they had S_ _ with every girl they could, and whoever did it the most got a hundred dollars.

  Then she told me Jeff has the same kind of club.

  She said he did it to her, and he and Hank and Creepy Will were all in the club. That’s why Jeff wants to be called J. now—because of Jason Saucier. I called Sarah a damn liar, and I ran all the way home, even though I was supposed to spend the night. Not that it matters. Nobody knows if I’m here or gone, anyway.

  I told Jeff what I found out—what Sarah told me. I wanted him to tell me she was lying, that he’d never do that stuff, but he didn’t say anything like that. Instead, he said why pretend he’s something he’s not? It’s better to just be honest. And besides, everybody’s gonna think he’s bad anyway because of Daddy. ‘The sins of the father,’ he said to me. He said he’s been paying for what Daddy did his whole life, and now he might as well have some fun with it.

  He said he never hurts those girls, but Luke said Sarah cried after.

  I told him if that happened to me, I would cry.

  He said nothing like that will ever happen to me, because he’ll keep me safe. No matter what, he said he’ll keep me safe. I told him to go to hell. How many of those girls have brothers who promised them the very same thing?

  That’s why I told him I won’t call him J. anymore. I don’t care if I never lay eyes on him again.

  I closed the journal and set it down. There it was, in black and white: the key to this whole thing, I was sure. If he hadn’t killed Erin—and I was still ninety-nine percent sure that was the case—then it had to have been Will or Hank. And all of it was tied to this sadistic fucking sex club my father had started as a teenager. I thought of the way Will had looked at me at the bar the other night, and what he’d said: Had a little rite of passage that Saturday night. Come to think of it, she looked a little like you. Had Erin Lincoln been his ‘rite of passage’?

  If Hank was in jail
, then Will Rainier seemed like the most obvious lunatic out there stalking Diggs and me now.

  Except…

  I thought of the hooded man from Payson Isle—the one Kat and Diggs both kept telling me to forget. The deaths on Payson Isle and the murders of all these girls over the years couldn’t be coincidence; I already knew he had something to do with my father’s past. Was this it? Diggs had dismissed the idea that the hooded man was trying to frame my father as absurd from the start, but I wasn’t so sure about that. What if that man, that mysterious specter who’d been haunting my dreams since I was a kid, was actually the one who had been kidnapping and killing teenage girls for the past forty years? If my father had known about it, that would be motive enough for the hooded man to burn down the Payson Church in a bid to maintain my father’s silence, wouldn’t it?

  But how did my father’s fingerprints end up at the crime scenes of so many of those murders over the years?

  I lay my head back against the cool, damp cave wall and closed my eyes. On Payson Isle, my dad used to tuck me in every night. Some of my earliest memories were of being curled up in his arms while he read to me; walking along wooded paths, my hand in his; him singing silly nonsense songs when I was hurt or sad. I’d never felt so safe, so protected, as I had in those early years with him watching over me.

  Whether he had committed the murders or not almost didn’t matter; he’d done enough without that. He’d been the one to get his sister killed. The revelations last spring had been hard enough, learning that my father had sent me away when I was nine years old, relegating me to the mainland and a mother who’d never wanted me in the first place. I’d been able to rationalize that, convinced he’d done it for my own good. This, though… He really had been a monster. Hell, maybe he was a monster still.

  Diggs stirred on the other side of the cave, mumbling something in his sleep. I thought of what he’d said to me: You don’t think… It’s like you don’t care.

  He was right. I didn’t think. I didn’t care. For most of my life, I’d been chasing a ghost—a man who didn’t even exist. A fictional character my father played for the first nine years of my life, but in his off hours who the hell knew what he was doing. Who he really was. Had whatever he’d done as a kid paved the way for what came after? The fire on Payson Isle; the cloaked man who chased me in my dreams; the deaths out on the island last spring. My mother’s attack. What if he really was at the root of all of it?

  I was pulled from my thoughts when Diggs sat bolt upright in the sleeping bag. “Sol?” he called, looking around. In the dim light of the cave, I could just make out the look on his face. Sheer terror, his eyes wide.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  Relief washed over his face. He ran a hand through what was rapidly becoming a rat’s nest of greasy curls.

  I went to him, but I couldn’t figure out how to bridge the gap between standing there and actually being there—especially not after everything that had happened. So I just stood there.

  “I’m right here,” I said again. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was just… I was in the woods. I couldn’t find you.”

  “Oh.” I started to tell him it was all right, it had just been a dream, but then I realized that the reality was probably worse than any dream his subconscious could come up with. At least if it was a nightmare, he could wake up. “Well, I’m here.”

  “Right,” Diggs said. He still looked a little bleary. “I see that.”

  He sat and I stood, that chasm still between us.

  “You could go back to sleep,” I finally said. “You weren’t out that long.”

  “I’m set,” he said. “We should probably get a move on, anyway.”

  He started to get up with some difficulty. I resisted the urge to offer any help, knowing he wanted nothing to do with me, and instead shoved my good hand in my pocket while the other just hung there, useless. When he was up, he started to go for his pack at the same time I went to roll the sleeping bag back up, thus managing to block his progress completely. We did an awkward little dance to try and get out of each other’s way.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay. I’ll go this way.”

  We ducked around each other and worked in silence. I’d just packed the sleeping bag and Erin Lincoln’s journal when he returned to my side. He put half a Power Bar in my hand without a word.

  “I’m all right. You eat it,” I said.

  “I’ve got my half. If we’re both getting out of this, we need to keep up our strength.” No arguments, in other words.

  I ate it without further comment, though I will say now that surviving exclusively on Power Bars and warm water isn’t something I would recommend. My stomach was grinding, and there were other issues I’d eventually have to address. I was just hoping we’d be able to leave the confines of the cave before I did.

  It wasn’t quite noon; we’d been out here more than twelve hours. Juarez had to be looking for us by now. At least I hoped he was. Even if he’d decided I wasn’t worth the effort after this latest stunt, I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t just let Diggs die.

  I finished my half of the Power Bar and put the wrapper in my bag. Diggs handed me some more warm water to wash it down. I reached for it, but somehow in the process ended up knocking it over rather than grabbing hold of it. Before I could fumble the damn thing upright again, half the contents had spilled.

  “Shit! I’m sorry.” I put the cap back on the half-empty bottle and patted ineptly at the wet cave floor.

  “Relax—It’s okay,” he said.

  “No, it’s not.”

  He actually laughed, pulling me up before I went completely apoplectic. “I’m thinking a little water won’t do this place a lot of harm.”

  “But I shouldn’t be wasting our supplies,” I insisted. “Like I haven’t caused enough problems, now I’m just dumping your water out willy nilly.”

  “We’re fifty yards from a fast-flowing river, Solomon. I’ve got plenty more iodine tabs; we’re not gonna die of thirst out here. I can think of about a dozen other ways we might die, but we’ll be well hydrated when we go.”

  I didn’t crack a smile. “It was still stupid, though. I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing,” he said. A trace of irritation crept back into his voice. “I don’t want to spend the last days of my life listening to you say you’re sorry.”

  That was all it took to push me over the edge. I looked him in the eye. A tear or two escaped and spilled down my cheeks. I could barely breathe. “But I am sorry,” I managed in a choked whisper. Another tear fell.

  Diggs brushed it away with his thumb. “I know you are,” he said. He pulled me into his arms.

  “It’s all right if you want to go,” I said. I pulled back so I could look at him, trying to get hold of myself again. Unsuccessfully, I might add. “I wouldn’t blame you if you just took off—honestly. You really should save yourself. I could even create a diversion and you could run. I’d understand.”

  His mouth twitched, a hint of amusement touching his eyes. Which was annoying, considering the fact that I was completely serious. “What kind of diversion did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I thought about a fire, but then I’d end up burning down the whole friggin’ forest. Like my karma isn’t bad enough with a sociopathic father intent on deflowering tweens in the backwoods of Maine, then I’d be responsible for the fiery deaths of millions of woodland creatures.”

  “It could take a while to hit nirvana with that kind of cred,” Diggs agreed.

  He was kidding, but I chose to ignore that. “He doesn’t want you,” I said. “He’s only after me. I could distract him. You could run.”

  “Run where, exactly?”

  “I don’t know—go find help. I could keep him busy.”

  “Yeah, I imagine rape and torture would probably keep his attention diverted,” he said, his eyes suddenly hard again. “Jesus, Solomon.
I’m not leaving you. It’s not going to happen, so just forget it. If you die out here, I’m dying with you.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I know I don’t have to,” he interrupted. “I didn’t have to come with you in the first place; I didn’t have to leave the safety of my desk in Littlehope. I didn’t have to agree to that bogus interview you concocted when you were fifteen just so I’d let you come hang out at the Trib. But I did, and as far as I can tell I’m gonna keep agreeing to shit I probably shouldn’t where you’re concerned.” He studied me intently. “And you’ll keep doing the same for me. Because that’s what we do.”

  I lay my head against his chest. He stroked my hair while I listened to his heartbeat. “So, if you’re not leaving me here to die, do you have another plan?” I murmured into his chest. “Because I’m thinking we’re gonna need one.”

  I felt his lips brush the top of my head. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  Diggs wanted us to leave the safety of the caves and head for a fire tower about twenty miles northeast of us. I wanted to stick to the caves, with the assumption that if we continued within the network of tunnels, eventually we would find some adventure-seeking spelunkers who could help us get to safety.

  “He won’t let us get that far,” Diggs said. His tone changed when he said it, took on an edge we’d managed to avoid for the past hour. The words made something sink like a stone in my gut.

  “What do you mean, ‘let us’?”

  “I mean ‘let us,’” he said. “He’s holding all the cards here. I think he knows every move we’re gonna make before we make it. He might even know where we are right now.”

  “And he’s just out there…what? Following us? Watching us right now?”

  “Possibly. Yeah.”

  The thought chilled me to the bone: the idea that he—whoever he was—was just waiting, biding his time until he decided it was time to make the sky fall. And once he did, there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.

  “How do we level the playing field?” I asked. “He knows these woods; we don’t. He has weapons; we don’t. He has access to food and water and shelter, presumably.”