by AJ Lange
Matt gripped the long curl tight, then shoved it into the front pocket of his shorts without responding. Drew jumped into the hole beside him and helped him lower Melanie’s body into the ground.
It took Matt another twenty minutes to cover her with dirt. Before he shoveled the first scoop, he peeled his grimy t-shirt over his head and used it to gently cover her face.
Micah snorted above him. “Real classy, Matt.”
The faded Led Zeppelin logo mocked Matt as he began to work. He didn’t care; he had no love for this girl, and would gladly accept the guilt of not noticing her, especially if Micah’s words were the truth. She had not deserved this and, inadvertently or not, Matt had played a role in her death. He did, however, love Gavin, with a violent surety that belied his age, and sending her to her final place of rest with a piece of something imbued with that love was the best that Matt could give her now.
His father let him ride in the front on the way home. He even went through a drive through at a McDonald’s and ordered Matt a cheeseburger meal, a sick testament to his newfound delight in his youngest son; he never allowed them to eat fast food.
Matt was not hungry, thought he may never truly be hungry again, but he ate every bite, too tired to withstand the anger his refusal would surely invoke. When he snuck out of his bedroom window hours later and shimmied down the lattice, his stomach was still unsettled.
He pushed Gavin’s window up and fell through the opening, into the strong arms waiting there, Gavin having jumped from his bed the moment he heard Matt outside.
“Matt, my God, where have you been?” Gavin tried to pry Matt’s arms from around his neck so he could see his face, but the other boy was shaking too violently. Gavin held him close, tucking his nose into Matt’s hair. “Matt?”
Matt held on, breathing Gavin’s scent, letting it envelop him in warm familiarity. When he finally relaxed his grip on Gavin’s neck and backed away, he had to rub the wetness from his cheeks.
Gavin frowned as he gingerly touched the cut on Matt’s lip. “Son of a bitch,” he swore. “I’ll—”
“No!” Matt cried harshly, his voice carrying across the room. He pressed his lips to Gavin’s fingertip. “Please,” he whispered, eyes pleading.
Gavin studied him for a long moment in the soft light of the moon. “Okay, Matt.”
He tucked Matt into bed, pulling him close and covering them both with the sheet. Matt’s body still trembled, but he eventually fell into a restless sleep. Gavin lay awake long into the night, troubled, his finger glancing over Matt’s swollen lip, lightly feathering across his tear-stained cheeks, wondering how many secrets it would take before Matt was broken for good.
Present
Gina was so cold she couldn’t feel her fingers or her toes. She was beginning to fear hypothermia because she was having a hard time staying awake.
She blinked, blinded by the sudden light when the rolling door of the hatch was thrown open.
“Well, hello, beautiful,” a silky voice murmured as the silhouetted figure climbed into the back.
Gina tried to focus on his features when he leaned over her, and failed, the sun’s afterimage too strong, her head fogged with cold and exhaustion. She protested weakly, her reaction time delayed as he tied a dark cloth around her head, closing off her vision.
“Let’s get you settled in, shall we?” He whispered against her ear and she shivered, this time from a stark fear rather than the cold.
She fell into him when he unstrapped her arms and legs and pulled her to her feet. Her legs were too weak to hold her and he chuckled darkly. “Looks like you’re going to need some TLC, Gina, my love.” He swung her into his arms and stepped carefully from the back of the truck, his jolting movements telling her the truck had a portable stairway. She must have blacked out then, because the next thing she was aware of was another bed beneath her head. She struggled and he held her firmly against the mattress.
“Who are you?” She moaned. “What do you want?”
“Easy, there, angel.” His fingers bit into her arms. “I don’t want to tie you down, but I will if I have to.”
“Let me go,” she whispered, hating the tears that burned behind the blindfold.
“All in good time, my dear, all in good time.”
He stood abruptly and she was free, although still disoriented. A loud clank followed by retreating footsteps let her know she was alone again and her hands shook when she fumbled to remove the cloth tied round her head.
She blinked several times, trying to adjust to the dim lighting. She sat up, looking frantically around, but she was alone in an empty cell, pale grey bars surrounding her. There was an adjacent cell, with two more across the narrow corridor that divided them. She shook her wrists, willing the feeling back into her fingers.
A fluorescent fixture overhead buzzed. It was the only sound.
The cell held a cot with a thin blanket and pillow, and there was a sink and toilet in the corner, much like she imagined a jail cell would contain. She stood and unsteadily made her way to the bars, pulling fruitlessly against the door. It remained locked tight. To the right of the cells was a concrete wall, to the left, the corridor disappeared up a dark stairway. Gina knew with a certainty she attributed to the latent sixth sense her grandmother had always warned her she would one day possess, it skips a generation, Gina, she was underground.
Matt leaned against the hood of the Jeep and watched Gavin pace while he talked to Dom on the phone. They were in the parking lot at Camp Chitaqua, and it looked as though the three of them were in this together now. Somehow, some way, after all of his watchfulness and years of denial and shielding and yes, fucking protecting the thing he held most dear, Matt had failed and Gavin was firmly entrenched in the cesspool that was Matt’s legacy.
“We’re on our way to the gravesite, Dom.” Gavin listened, frowning, but his voice was soothing when he spoke again. “Matt thinks the killer may have left something for him there, you’re going to have to trust us on this.”
Matt’s heart twisted at the ‘us’.
“I don’t give a fuck what you tell Burke. He wouldn’t get anyone out here until we’re long gone anyway.” Gavin stopped in front of Matt, green eyes unsteady, anger and fear and uncertainty belying his assured tone. “We’ll find her, Dom.”
He hung up, his arm falling limply to his side.
“We will, Gavin,” Matt said quietly.
“Yeah? Can you guarantee that?”
Matt didn’t answer and he stood, carefully avoiding him when he brushed beside him to go to the rental car. “We should hurry.”
He popped the trunk and retrieved the shovel he had stowed there, and a roll of garbage bags. He felt rather than saw Gavin wince.
“I’m not sure what we’ll find,” he apologized. Melanie Bodine had lain in the grave Matt had provided for her for almost twenty years; whatever else was there in the woods, Matt couldn’t change that fact. He pressed the trunk lid back in place with a click and turned to go.
Gavin stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“You could have told me. All of it, Matt.”
There was sorrow there, an unbearable sadness, and Matt wondered if Gavin, too, was steeling himself against the inevitable loss when this was over.
“No, Gav. I couldn’t. Not without risking your life, your family’s life.” He looked down at the hand still holding his arm, the veins on the back well known, the calloused fingertips well loved for the way they played across his features, dragging gooseflesh behind them. “I’m tired of apologizing,” he sighed.
“Then don’t,” Gavin urged, lifting the same hand to Matt’s chin, dragging his eyes back to Gavin’s face. “Help me find this bastard and bring Gina home safe.”
Matt nodded, once. He hoped to God it was that simple. He felt calm, shockingly so, and it disgusted him. But he also knew that for the better part of two decades, he had been chasing a dragon, and he finally had it by the tail.
It helped that G
avin believed him, unquestioningly.
They followed the trail into the woods, and Matt hesitated only once, just before he crossed the threshold and entered the hushed thicket of trees. He concentrated on location, the years playing havoc with his memories; they had entered the woods from the highway side of the forest the day they buried Melanie’s body.
“Is it Drew, then?” Gavin’s words were the first either had spoken since entering the forest.
Matt contemplated that; he had been running it over in his mind as well, from the moment he had found Leanne, had seen the letter’s postmark. He shook his head.
“It doesn’t feel like Drew, he was never cruel.”
“Everyone else is dead,” Gavin said flatly. He had never been fond of any of Matt’s family save Matt, with the exception of a single and horrifically devastating night with his sister Nikki. He watched Matt’s back, waiting for him to respond, knowing he was remembering that fateful night, bright orange flames lighting the sky over Matt’s childhood home.
Matt finally stopped, waiting for Gavin to come along side him. “I’ve always thought Micah got away,” he admitted softly. His eyes were hooded in the shade of a low-hanging branch.
Gavin whistled low. “That would be a pretty neat trick, Matt. I’m not sure even Micah could have pulled it off.”
Matt began to walk again, reaching down to clasp Gavin’s wrist, to keep him close. “He could have done it.”
They continued in silence for another half-mile. When Matt’s fingers brushed his, Gavin wanted nothing more than to grasp them, cling to him. He was torn between the frantic need to go to his partner, tear across the country until they found Gina, and the desire to soothe, to save, the man beside him. His best friend. The only person Gavin had ever loved. Gavin wondered how he would ever overcome the shame he felt, now that he knew Matt’s childhood—his entire life outside of the time he had spent with Gavin—had been literal torture.
That Gavin had been so close, and did nothing to prevent it.
It didn’t matter that they had been children; a part of Gavin had known. Gavin had covered for Matt sometimes when he asked him to, the days he would show up bleeding or cut or, God forbid, burned. Gavin might have even prayed on more than one occasion to finally be big enough, strong enough, to beat the hell out of Matt’s father and brothers.
Even Matt’s anguish over the death of Nikki, the only other Laurel that seemed outwardly untouched by the putrid stench of evil that surrounded that house, could not temper Gavin’s gladness that Isaiah and Micah had perished with her. Drew had been gone by then, a runaway at nineteen, never to be heard from again.
Drew.
Gavin still put his money on the middle brother as the most likely suspect, no matter what Matt thought. He was starting to understand that Matt was haunted by a mythical illusion of the eldest two Laurel brothers, brought about by a childhood that forced him to create artificial worlds as a safe haven, when the reality of his life became too harsh. When he couldn’t escape to Gavin.
But Gavin was a realist, and an investigator, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the perpetrator turned out to be the most obvious suspect. Even when they were smart enough to feign a slight of hand. He made a mental note to text Dom and have him dig into Drew’s disappearance, and find the report on the Laurel fire. Maybe there was something in it that definitively stated how many bodies were in the home; he had always assumed it was three. The fire had been the day Matt had left him for good, and at the time Gavin had been too heartbroken, too numbed by grief, to question the details.
He remembered something and reached for Matt’s hand, pulling him to a stop. “The letter,” he said. “The one in your jacket. I opened it.”
Matt bit his lip and his brow furrowed with concern. “What did it say?”
Gavin shook his head. “I don’t remember, something about the lamb straying and the wolf coming home.”
Matt blanched.
“What?” Gavin urged, taking a step closer. “What does it mean?”
“I’m the lamb,” Matt said, eyes hard and glittering. He turned and started walking again. “My father always called me the lamb.”
Gavin followed, lips pursed. “And the wolf?”
“Father,” Matt said curtly. They crested the top of a hill and he stopped, out of breath. “This is it.”
Gavin looked down into the small valley. The sun beamed through the trees, exactly as Matt had described it a few hours earlier, exactly the way it must have when they had interred Melanie Bodine’s remains. “Let’s get this over with.”
He squeezed Matt’s fingers in reassurance, then pulled the shovel from his hand.
“Gavin,” Matt protested, but Gavin stopped him with a hard look. He crowded against him, free hand pulling at Matt’s waist until their belts clinked together.
“Not a word,” Gavin spoke quietly against his temple. “They don’t get one more piece of you, Matt. Never again.” His lips grazed his cheek and he took a much needed step back, inhaling a shaky breath. “Tell me where she is.”
Matt’s mouth worked as he swallowed back the rush of emotion filling his throat. “I’ll go with you.” He held up a hand when Gavin’s lips parted to protest. “I love you.” Gavin’s mouth snapped shut and Matt smiled sadly. “I love you,” he said again. “And I’m humbled by what you’re offering. But we’ll do this together. I owe her that.”
Gavin pushed into Matt’s warmth and kissed him. His breath was a welcome heat on Matt’s mouth when they parted. “Then we’ll do it together.”
Matt nodded and led the way.
Chapter 11
Gavin had seen his share of bodies, in varying states of decay.
In his line of work, it was inevitable, and a time or two he had even known the victim. Today would be different, if they found her.
He had been haunted by Melanie Bodine’s face that summer, her shining curls and friendly smile plastered across the nightly news for weeks. It sickened him to know Matt had suffered the truth of her death alone, protected a gruesome secret, protected Gavin, and all he’d received in return was a best friend who had distanced himself.
At first Gavin had simply been wary, Antonia’s gentle caution heavy on his mind. In retrospect, Gavin knew had misread Matt’s subdued behavior, thinking his friend was sorry for the kiss they had shared in the cabin, that they had moved too fast. Unwilling to lose his best friend, unsure he could cope with a life where Matt wasn’t wholly in it, every day, Gavin had simply reverted to familiar behavior. It was never a conscious decision and it happened naturally, easily; they were simply best friends again.
Now that he knew the horrors of Matt’s home life, Gavin was devastated by the vanity and stupidity of his teenage self. Maybe if he had been more open and honest with him, Matt would have felt he had someone on his side, someone he could turn to. So many things might have been different.
Instead, Gavin had fucked Heather Morgan, a two-year mistake he would come to regret. Heather was the cheerleader to Gavin’s all-star athlete, and even as a teen he could admit he had enjoyed the notoriety that came with scoring on the hottest girl in school. Gavin still occasionally woke up in a cold sweat, dreaming about the afternoon she told him she thought she was pregnant. In an instant, Gavin’s future had flashed before his eyes. He could see himself clearly, changing oil and rotating tires down at the Jiffy Lube for the rest of his life, never having more than a third floor walkup. Never having the money to take a vacation, visit a beach or a national park.
Never having Matt.
It was an instant of clarity and truth for Gavin. The day, the hour, the minute he realized that he, Gavin DeLuca, loved Matthew Laurel. And had done so for so long, that his life would be dimmer, duller, unremarkable -- ordinary -- if he couldn’t spend it with Matt.
Dingy walkups and pitiful vacations seemed like grand adventures, if only he could change the person he shared them with.
People might say he was too young to know his mi
nd or heart, and Gavin would normally be inclined to agree. But he was right about this. A sick fear had gnawed at him for days while he wrestled with a worrisome thought: what if it had been Matt who had placed this new distance between them, and not Gavin’s idiocy or the thing with Heather.
Heather wasn’t pregnant. That welcome news barely registered in light of Gavin’s inner turmoil. He immediately (and rather callously, all things considered) broke up with her and couldn’t dredge up more than the thinnest veneer of guilt when he told her there was someone else and always had been. Always would be.
Gavin invited Matt to the lake on a Friday, not an unusual invitation; they often went on fishing trips on the weekends when the weather was warm. Usually they slept in Angelo’s old pop up tent, or sometimes in sleeping bags under the stars if it was clear. Sometimes they were forced to drive home early, skies dark with thunderclouds, harsh waves licking the shores.
Gavin had checked the weather report before they left; he didn’t mention the eighty percent chance of rain. He conveniently forgot the sleeping bags and the tent. He was jumpy and tense and more than once Matt poked fun at his absent-mindedness while they packed their food and fishing gear.
He tried desperately not to fidget when they were finally alone.
When the first raindrop fell, Matt had laughed, snatching up their meager belongings and racing with Gavin to the Jeep. The car had been a present for Gavin’s seventeenth birthday and it was his pride and joy. He had once teased Heather that they should christen the back seat, but Gavin had never planned to follow through. Not with her.
He and Matt watched the rain pelt the Jeep’s shiny hood from the front seat, drinking the beer they had snuck out of the mini-fridge in the DeLuca garage. Matt kept the cooler between his feet within easy reach. The radio was tuned to a local rock station and the car’s interior was warm, but not overly so; it was nice, companionable. Though they had remained largely inseparable, for as long as Gavin could remember, his relationship with Heather had admittedly added an uneasy tension over the past two years. The strain made Gavin twitchy now, and he worried he had fucked them up for good.
