by LENA DIAZ,
He frowned. “I thought the other shack, the one where Hargrove got the drop on us, was where you lived.”
She shook her head. “That must have been a front to fool everyone else. The mining company assigned those shacks and that’s the one they gave my . . . that’s the one they gave Hargrove. No one knew about us. He kept us here.”
He stilled. “What do you mean, here?”
She cupped his face in her hands. “No, no. I didn’t mean here, in this basement. Not always, anyway. We lived in the house most of the time. But sometimes . . .” She shivered again and stared at the blackness surrounding them.
“What exactly do you remember?”
The tears she’d been trying to hold back fell down her cheeks. Pain twisted her face. “Everything.”
He pulled her to him and cradled her against his chest. If Hargrove hadn’t already been killed, Matt would have followed the man to his last breath to make him pay for whatever horrors he’d put Tessa through.
Dull echoes pounded on the wooden floor above them. Someone was walking through the house.
Matt cursed. Hargrove Senior wasn’t the problem right now. Hargrove Junior was.
He pulled Tessa back into the darkness until he bumped up against a wall.
The yellow beam of a flashlight shined down through the darkness. Owen crouched over the opening above, searching until he saw them.
“Ah, there you are.” He snickered. “You might notice I tore down the ladder steps Pa used to have down there, sis. Remember all the fun times we used to have—you, me, and Mom—sitting in the dark, huddled together, waiting for Pa to come home?” His voice had turned hard and cold by the time he finished. “Of course you don’t. You don’t remember me at all, do you? You blocked me completely out of your mind. You and that bitch of a mother abandoned me.”
Tessa pushed against Matt, but he wouldn’t let her step any closer to the trapdoor.
Thankfully she didn’t fight him, because there was no way in hell he was letting her get any closer to that maniac.
“Owen,” Tessa called out, “I do remember you now. I remember it all. And I’m so sorry I left you. Please believe me. If I’d known I had a brother, I would have come back for you years ago. I’m so, so sorry.”
“I don’t believe you,” he snarled.
“It’s true. You have to understand.” She looked over her shoulder at Matt, then back at Owen. “The night before we left, Mama woke up and heard me crying. She . . . came into my room and Daddy was . . .”
The blood drained from Matt’s face. Had she remembered differently than what she’d told him before? Had her father . . . hurt her?
He clasped Tessa back against him, wrapping his arm around her, as if he could somehow protect her from her past.
She covered his arm with her own and squeezed his hand.
“Nothing happened.” She was facing Owen, but Matt knew she was talking to him, reassuring him.
He shuddered in relief.
“But only because Mom stopped him. You know what he was going to do, Owen. The same thing he did to Mom when she was a little girl, when he kidnapped her.”
“Shut up.”
“But Mom stopped him from hurting me,” she continued. “For the first time in our lives, she fought back against that monster. She fought for both of us, but he was too strong. She hit him over the head with a lamp. It cut him. He was bleeding. He would have killed her for that. She told me to run to the car while she got you. She ran down the hall toward your room while I—”
“Shut up. You’re lying. That’s not what happened.”
“It is what happened. I remember. And you were just a toddler. There’s no way you could remember—”
“Pa told me what happened later, when I was older. You both just left. She didn’t care about me. Neither of you did.”
“You’re wrong. I did love you. And she loved us both. She tried to get you, but he chased her. She couldn’t get you, and when she ran to the car he was right behind her. We barely made it. She tried to get you, but she couldn’t. She swore she would come back for you. She was crying the whole time we were driving away. She hated leaving you, but he’d only been dazed and he was too strong. He would have killed—”
“You’re lying! Stop it! Stop it!”
“No. You have to hear the truth. He had never let her drive a car. She didn’t know what she was doing. She could barely keep the car on the road. She didn’t even know which way to go. The whole time she was crying and saying your name. She hated leaving you. She was going to take me somewhere safe and get help to come back for you. But Daddy followed her. I didn’t know that back then, but I do now. He must have stolen one of the mining trucks. He had his rifle. He caught up to us.” She wiped at the tears flowing down her face. “She didn’t come back for you because she couldn’t. He killed her. He shot her and the car crashed, and I hit my head and that’s why I forgot you. Until now. I remember now.”
Matt wanted to shove Tessa behind him, but she resisted when he tried to move her. He couldn’t clearly see Owen because he was shining the light down at them. Any second now Matt expected a bullet to come slicing through the air.
“Tessa, for God’s sake, get behind me,” he whispered.
“No. I have to make him understand.”
She was far too close to this if she thought she could reason with him. Owen may have been innocent in the beginning, but his mind had been twisted by living with his father. There was no reaching him now. Tessa should have known that, but she wasn’t thinking clearly right now.
“Owen? Did you hear what I said? Mom and I didn’t abandon you, not on purpose. Please. Let Matt and me go. We can help you.”
The boards creaked.
“Owen?”
The flashlight switched off. A metallic squeak sounded above. The trapdoor slammed shut, plunging the basement into darkness. The unmistakable sound of a latch bolt sliding into place echoed in the room, followed by the sound of footsteps on the wooden floor as Owen left them locked in the dark hole.
Matt turned Tessa in his arms. He gently ran his good hand up her arm until he reached her face. He wiped the tears off her cheeks and kissed her before letting her go.
“I wish I could give you the time you need right now, and keep holding you,” he said. “But we have to get out of here before he comes back.”
He stepped forward, slowly, feeling for walls or furniture. Three more steps and he bumped against what felt like a desk.
The basement flooded with light.
He whirled around.
Tessa was standing on the opposite side of the room with her hand on a light switch.
She gave him a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Told you I remembered everything.” Her smile faded. “And now I remember why some of the names on those letters seemed so familiar, and where all the faces in my dreams came from.” She nodded her head, looking past him.
He turned around. Sure enough, he was standing in front of a desk. And on a corkboard hanging on the wall above the desk was a collection of laminated driver’s licenses, each one with a red plastic thumbtack impaling it to the board.
Each one showing a name that matched a name on one of the letters.
He counted the faces of the dead, one by one.
Tessa stepped to his side, quietly staring at the wall of horrors.
The sheer number of trophies on the wall had Matt feeling sick inside. He looked down at Tessa. Her face was pale, but she looked surprisingly composed.
“There are a lot more than twenty-three.” Her voice sounded desolate, lost.
“He showed you these, didn’t he? Your father. That’s why the names were so familiar.”
She nodded. “I didn’t understand back then. But I believe my mother did. Whenever my father locked us up down here, to make sure we didn’t run away when he had to go somewhere, my mother would tell me not to look at the faces. I think she wanted to protect me, in her own way, but I could tell those pictures scared her
. I think that’s why I looked at them even when I wasn’t supposed to. I wanted to understand what was so scary.”
Matt reached past her and opened one of the cabinets. A stack of blank paper sat neatly on one side, envelopes and stamps on the other. An old box of crayons sat on the shelf above, along with some children’s books. A fine layer of coal dust coated much of the cabinet.
“Looks like we found the paper he used for his letters,” he said.
He opened another cabinet.
Tessa gasped beside him.
Taped to the insides of the cabinet doors were newspaper articles from all over the South, detailing the horrific deaths or, in some cases, disappearances of many of the people represented by the driver’s licenses on the corkboard. In the middle of all the other stories was the colored photograph from USA Today, with the title, SIMON SAYS DIE SERIAL KILLER CASESOLVED. It was dated three years earlier, right before the first letter had arrived.
Tessa pulled the newspaper clipping down. “You were right. This is how he found me.”
“The photographer must have loved you,” Matt said “He put you smack dab in the middle and seemed to focus on you. I bet when your father saw all that red hair, your green eyes, and that your name was Tessa, he put everything together. It must have been quite a shock to find out you’d gone into law enforcement.”
Footsteps echoed across the wood floor above them. Not directly overhead, farther away, as if Owen was in another part of the house, pacing back and forth.
Matt ran to the far wall. “We’ve got to find a way out of here. Look for some kind of weapon while I look for a way out.”
Tessa began opening the other cabinets and drawers.
The walls were covered in old, rotten boards. The dampness of the basement had eaten away at them. Matt plucked one of them off the wall. Behind it was a solid wall of rock covered in dark dust. He ran his hand across the bumpy surface as understanding dawned on him. “This isn’t a basement. This is part of the mine.”
She turned. “Then there must be a tunnel entrance somewhere.”
He nodded. “Look for boards that don’t seem to belong, or are too perfect, straight like a door would be.”
She ran to the other side of the room. They both focused on the walls, lightly knocking on the boards, trying not to make noise that might draw Owen’s attention. They listened for hollow sounds that might indicate tunnels behind the walls.
Footsteps sounded again, back and forth overhead, back and forth.
What was he doing up there?
Matt cocked his head to listen.
“Matt.”
The urgent sound of her voice had him turning around. She pointed toward the corner. He strode to her side of the room, squeezing in between some boxes to stand beside her.
There, next to the wall on another bright red rug, lay Sheriff Latham. Or what was left of him. His corpse was charred and black. The fire hadn’t been hot enough to completely destroy his body, and the only way Matt knew it was Latham was because Owen or his father—perhaps as a crude joke—had used a thumbtack to secure the sheriff’s driver’s license to his forehead.
Tessa clasped her hand to her throat. “Why would Hargrove, or Owen, kill Latham?”
“My guess, Latham must have been following up on a lead and got too close. Maybe after seeing the profile and the flyer he figured he knew who the perp was. Instead of coming to us, he wanted to solve the case on his own. But Owen or his father got the drop on him.”
A loud thud sounded overhead. The footsteps started up again, followed by another sound.
“What is that?” Tessa asked. “It sounds like . . . splashing?”
The smell of gasoline and kerosene reached both of them at the same time.
Tessa’s eyes widened in horror. “He’s going to burn us alive.”
Chapter Seventeen
* * *
TESSA COUGHED AGAINST the strong fumes.
“Take off your shirt. Cover your mouth and nose,” Matt ordered.
Tessa ignored his command and ran to him.
“What are you doing?”
“Helping you.” She untied his shirt from his arm, noting with relief that the bleeding had mostly stopped. She unrolled and rerolled the shirt so the blood was on the inside instead of the outside, then tied it around Matt’s head so his mouth and nose were covered.
He nodded his thanks and ran to one of the walls, pounding on it again to search for hollow spots.
Tessa pulled her shirt off and covered her mouth and nose, tying the sleeves behind her head.
A loud whoosh sounded above. Fire flashed around the trapdoor, following where the accelerant had dripped down through the cracks, quickly engulfing the entire door. The little space began to heat up. Flames dripped down between the cracks in the floor as accelerant made its way between the boards.
One of the flaming drips landed on Tessa’s arm. She cried out and brushed her arm on her pants.
“You okay?” Matt yelled from across the room.
No. Her arm felt like it was on fire.
“Just hurry and find a way out of here!”
He turned around. “The rug. The rug under Latham is just like the one upstairs on top of the trapdoor.”
They both ran to the rug. Matt rolled Latham’s body in the carpet and pushed it to the side. Where the rug had been was another trapdoor.
“He’s playing a game with us,” Matt said. “He wanted us to discover this trapdoor. He wants us to go into the mine.”
Tessa coughed, her eyes watering from the fumes. “We don’t have a choice.”
“We need a weapon or a light, something to give us an advantage.”
“There’s nothing in the cabinets.”
Matt grabbed the carpet and unrolled it again.
“What are you doing?” Tessa coughed and wiped her eyes, which were tearing from the fumes.
“Seeing if Latham has anything in his pockets that might help us.”
A quick search of his pockets yielded only a handful of charred coins.
The trapdoor creaked above them, then fell to the ground, sending out a shower of flames and sparks.
Matt threw himself over Tessa. He arched his back, hissing between his teeth. He was burning. He jumped up and ran to the wall, scraping his back on it.
Tessa ran to him. “Let me see.”
“I’m fine. The fire’s out. Let’s get out of here while we still can.”
A small section of the floor above fell down on the other side of the room.
Tessa ducked, but no flaming pieces of wood shot at them this time.
Matt threw the bolt on the trapdoor and pulled the handle. He flung it back and it landed on the floor with a loud thud.
They both crouched down over the opening, but it was pitch-black. They couldn’t see inside to know what they were about to lower themselves into.
“Hang on.” Tessa grabbed the box of crayons from the desk and ran back to the trapdoor. She dropped them into the black hole. A moment later a loud thud sounded as the box hit the ground and spilled its contents.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I’m thinking maybe ten feet. I’ll go down first and catch you.”
He grasped the wood that framed the hole in the floor.
A loud creak and groan echoed through the room. They both looked up. The entire floor above them seemed to be moving.
“No time. Go, go, go.”
They both dropped into the hole below.
MATT LANDED HARD, again. The rocky ground jabbed him in the back, right where the burning wood had scorched his skin. He forced the pain from his mind and scrambled toward Tessa, who’d thankfully fallen onto a small mountain of papers and clothing.
He reached her as she struggled into a sitting position. Light flickered above from the open trapdoor, reminding him how urgent it was for them to get moving. He didn’t want either of them anywhere near that opening when the floor above caved in.
Tess
a yanked down the shirt that had been covering her mouth. She suddenly coughed and recoiled against Matt.
“What is it?” he demanded.
She swallowed hard. “I think I found Detective Stephens. Or what’s left of him.”
Matt leaned around her, his stomach tightening at the sight of Stephens’s decomposing body half-covered by the pile of papers and clothes.
“No way to know who died first, since Latham’s body was burned. I wonder if Hargrove killed Latham and Owen killed Stephens. Seems like if Hargrove had killed Stephens, he would have burned him too.”
Tessa pressed her hand to her throat. “Right now I really don’t care who killed whom. I just want out of here.”
Matt sniffed the air and tensed. “This entire pile is soaked in gasoline!”
He scooped her up and set her on her feet. They both swatted at the pieces of paper clinging to her, then linked their hands and took off in a dead run into the darkness beyond.
“Feel the wall on your side to guide us,” Matt shouted. “I’ll feel for obstacles in front of us.”
“Okay!”
They jogged through the blackness, following the curve of the wall, much like they’d done when in the other mine.
An enormous bang sounded behind them. A burst of heat and light reached out toward them but didn’t make it around the curve they’d reached.
They both stopped and gasped in deep breaths of air.
“The bastard’s plan didn’t work,” Matt said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” a voice sneered from the darkness.
A gun boomed in the tunnel. A searing, white-hot heat slammed into Matt’s shoulder. He fell to the ground.
Tessa screamed and crouched down beside him.
He shoved at her, blindly looking around but not seeing where Owen was. “Run,” he urged her. “Go on.”
“I’m not leaving you behind. Get up. Now.” She sounded like a drill sergeant and even slapped him on the butt to get him moving.
Matt would have laughed if he wasn’t so damned scared for her.
“‘Ring around the rosie . . .’” Owen’s voice carried through the darkness as he sang the same song Tessa’s mother had once sung.
