“I had a feeling about you,” Loraine said. “As soon as I saw you last night on the porch. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it—still can’t, actually—but there was something there … something in the air with you. Like, well, to be honest, I had this odd sense that you were here to help.”
Lance jumped at this. “Help with what?”
Loraine, who’d seemed like maybe she was easing back into her normal self, floated in thoughtfulness for just a moment before her eyes snapped back to attention and her stare hardened. “You tell me, Lance. I’ll ask again: Why are you here?”
After some quick deliberation, Lance decided his best defense might be a strong offense. After all, he’d told Leah he was going to have to move fast, whatever he did. Now seemed like as good a time as any.
He sighed, as if now he was tired of the game. “Okay,” he started. “How about we trade?”
Loraine’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Trade what?”
“Answers,” Lance said. “I’ll tell you why I’m here, and you can tell me why you’re luring kids to your posh B&B and helping them kill themselves before you dump their bodies on the beach.” And then out of nowhere, anger flooded out of him. “How about you tell me exactly why you feel like you have the right to ruin the lives of five different families?”
He’d hissed these last words louder than he’d wanted. Diana was still upstairs asleep, and he didn’t want to get her involved in this. They might be fleeing from here in a matter of minutes anyway, depending on how Loraine Linklatter reacted, but for now, it was better if she stayed where she was. Oblivious and uninformed and not a liability.
Lance was ready. He gripped the coffee mug tightly in his hand, with the ridiculous notion he could beat the odds and use it as a weapon if need be. A projectile, a distraction, anything to keep him from taking a bullet. His body was wound tight, his muscles tense and ready to spring into action—either directly at Loraine, hoping to knock the gun from her hand as they collide, or retreat out the door behind him. Open spaces were always nice in a fight, Lance had found.
But instead of anger, instead of retaliation or any other intensely charged reaction, Lance was surprised to see Loraine Linklatter lower her weapon and meet his gaze with eyes that looked as though they finally understood.
“Are you a private investigator? Did one of the families hire you?”
Is she actually going to admit it? Just like that?
Lance shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m just a guy passing through.”
Now Loraine shook her head in response. “No,” she said. “You’re more than that.”
Lance nodded. “I am. But that’s all I’m telling you for now. Why are you killing kids? Why shouldn’t I call the police right now?”
And suddenly Loraine looked very, very tired. She sighed, heavily, and with it, Lance sensed some sort of relief, as though a great ruse had finally been revealed, and Loraine could stop playing the game. “You could,” she said. “Call the police, I mean. I am guilty, in a sense.”
“In a sense?”
“Yes,” Loraine said. “But not the way you think.”
Now it was Lance’s eyes that narrowed, skeptical. “Enlighten me, please.”
Loraine took a long time considering this. She sighed heavily again, and in the dim foyer lighting, Lance could see the glistening of tears welling up in her eyes. She forced them back and asked, “How did you know?”
The truth would only upset her more. Lance shrugged. “It’s just what I do.”
It was a bad answer that wasn’t really an answer at all, but Loraine accepted it. She nodded, then turned and started down the hallway. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll make some tea and I’ll tell you. After, you can decide what you want to do.”
Lance, who was fully aware that Loraine Linklatter still held a gun in her hand, a gun that she’d continued to point at him even after she’d learned he was not a burglar or other home invader of the traditional sense, knew his only option was to follow her.
He decided not to tell her he was more of a coffee guy.
26
Loraine Linklatter made herself some tea. Lance refilled his coffee mug with what was left in the French press and tried to wrap his head around the fact that the two of them were acting like they were an old couple getting ready to start a book club meeting, instead of one of them keeping a pistol within easy reach and the other trying to lay blame on them for causing five innocent people to lose their lives. It seemed incredibly civilized, entirely too implausible.
The last time Lance had faced down somebody he was accusing of murder, it had been in a dark basement, and a shotgun had been involved. The perpetrator had not taken the accusation well at all. Weapons had been fired that night, blood had been shed. Police had arrived. An ambulance and paramedics had been needed. Lance had escaped by a hair on his head.
So, being invited to share a warm beverage and discuss the way of things after calling somebody out on their crimes was something Lance found himself increasingly uneasy with.
Unless…
Unless I’m wrong about her, Lance thought.
Loraine slid into the breakfast nook and Lance stayed where he was, leaning against the counter, next to the fancy fridge.
“Would you like to sit?” Loraine asked.
“I’m good here, thanks,” Lance said. “No offense, but as a moving target, I’ll be a lot harder to hit if you decide our talking has gone … not the way you’d like it to.”
“I’m not going to shoot you, Lance. I’m not a…” A pause. “I won’t hurt you. Like I said, I’ll tell you what I know, and you can decide the rest.”
Lance said nothing, and he did not move. He sipped his coffee.
Loraine nodded, as if understanding completely. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really. About the gun. I just … I heard the door open, even though I knew I had locked it, so I just panicked a bit—habit of a woman living by herself, I guess—and then I saw somebody on the porch and, I guess, once I saw it was you, I just sort of … I just needed to know what was going on. I guess … I just knew it was all coming to an end.”
“What was coming to an end?” Lance moved down the counter, a bit closer to the breakfast nook. In the glow of the small light hanging above the table, Loraine Linklatter’s face looked calmer than Lance had ever seen it, even more so than when he’d watched her doing yoga. “I’m not sure if you’re doing it on purpose, but you’re being incredibly cryptic, if I might say so. And that’s coming from a guy who … well, let’s just say I know how to say as little as possible when need be.”
“Well, there you go. Something we have in common.” Loraine smiled at him, and Lance realized what she was doing.
“You’re stalling,” he said. “Why?” And he had a terrible thought that whatever Loraine Linklatter was involved in, maybe there was a connection to the house with the security cameras and the girls selling sodas. Maybe she’d recognized Diana and had played dumb, but then called somebody and asked them if they knew one of their girls was out shacking up with the new guy in town, off the clock. Maybe they were on the way right now, to pick up their product and take care of the loose end. Him. He could practically hear the engine of the black Excursion pulling up to the curb.
“Because,” Loraine said. “Because it’s hard.” And then the tears came. Loud and heavy and unabashed. “I just … I couldn’t take it anymore!” Loraine said in between gasps of air as she continued to sob. She’d gone from zero to sixty in two seconds, and Lance stood by, confused as ever as the second person in one night had broken down hysterically in front of him.
Loraine cried for what felt like forever, and Lance pulled a paper towel from the roll and handed it to her. He was getting good at that. She took it, thanking him, and slowly got herself under control again. When her breathing had returned to normal, she took a long sip of her tea, as if it were a swig of whisky to calm her nerves.
“I used to be a psychologist,” she said, wi
ping her mouth with the napkin. “Did you know that? No, of course you didn’t,” Loraine said, chuckling. “How could you?”
Lance said nothing.
“But, yes, I was. PhD from UNC, a couple of papers published. Decent career. Was even considering starting my own practice, but then we got pregnant and nothing seemed to matter but family. We moved here, we had Daisy, and everything was … perfect.” She closed her eyes, remembering, and she smiled. “It was perfect, Lance.”
She opened her eyes. Stared down into her tea. “But then Daisy got sick, and…”
Fresh tears trickled down her cheek.
“And then everything wasn’t perfect,” she said. She wiped at the tears with the back of her hand and looked at Lance. “It’s funny, you know? All my education, all my training, all my years of devoting my time to helping other people deal with their demons, the monkeys on their backs, the skeletons in their closets and every other metaphor you can throw around … and I didn’t know how to help myself.” She shook her head, slowly. “I couldn’t help myself, and I couldn’t save my little girl.”
Lance said nothing.
Loraine was quiet then, for a very long time. Lance set his coffee mug on the counter, put his hands in his pockets and waited. Finally, Loraine looked up at him. “You’re here to find out what happened to those kids, right?”
“I want to know who’s helping them,” Lance said. “And if you’re not that person, I think now is the time to let me know.”
Loraine shook her head. “Did you listen to what I just told you? I was a psychologist. My job was to help people, including those who dealt with depression and anxiety and, yes, entertained suicidal thoughts. And after … after Daisy, how could you think I would encourage somebody to end their life?”
Lance shrugged. “All I know is that they stayed here, under your roof, and then they died.”
“You still haven’t told me how you found that out,” Loraine said.
“You’re right,” Lance said. “I haven’t.”
“Somebody told you?”
“Yes?”
“Who?”
Lance said, “I can’t tell you. And you wouldn’t believe me if I did.”
Loraine shook her head. “Now who’s being cryptic?”
Lance said nothing. The air in the room seemed to shift, and with it came an almost imperceptible feeling of unease. It was so faint, even Lance had a hard time picking up its traces. But it was there. Something was stirring, but he wasn’t sure what.
Loraine let out a heavy sigh that sounded as though she were releasing a decade’s worth of frustration. Her head dropped, her chin almost touching her chest. She spoke, barely a whisper. “So tired of the lies,” she said. “So tired of lying to myself.”
“Ma’am?” Lance said, taking a small step closer.
Loraine raised her head, looked at him. She asked, “Do you have any idea, Lance, what it’s like to walk around in life carrying such an enormous, terrible secret that the entire world would look at you differently if they ever learned the truth?”
Lance answered honestly. “Yes, ma’am. I do, actually.”
Loraine acted as though she hadn’t even heard him. “A secret so disgusting, so vile and unthinkable that they’d hang you in the center of town if it were still acceptable? Even if they have no idea—no idea!—what it was like, how much we suffered, how hard we tried! Oh, they would say they’d never be able to do such a thing, I’m sure. They’d say all the right things and act like they all would have been stronger, but it’s bullshit. Bullshit. If they haven’t lived it, they’ll never know.”
The stirring in the air crept closer. Lance could feel it growing. He didn’t like it. He looked around the kitchen. Expecting what, he didn’t know. But he knew this feeling—if not the specifics, the underlying idea.
Something bad.
“Ma’am? I think maybe—”
“I bought the drugs from him,” Loraine said, cutting Lance off. “There, you wanted a name, here it is. Jerry. Jerry is the one selling the kids the drugs they’re using to kill themselves. He calls it the Emergency Exit package, the sick bastard.”
And then a fresh wave of tears was washing down her face and causing her breath to stutter and words to come out in garbled, rushed syllables. “I … it’s my fault. I had him … I had him start … making it. I was … his first … customer.”
And Lance’s heart dropped to his gut. More pieces fell into place.
Loraine didn’t even bother with wiping the tears or the snot from her face. She looked Lance fully in the eyes and spoke with an eerie coldness in between breaths. “There are security cameras in the bus station. I should have known that, but I wasn’t thinking. He said I’m on video, talking to him both times—once for the initial request, and again for the pickup. Stupid of me. So stupid. He knew, though. He knew exactly what he was doing. I found out later he never deals directly from the station. He always plans different places, different times. But he saw an opportunity in me. He used the footage to blackmail me. I never told him why I wanted what I did from him, but after what happened, the timing of it all—again, I should have been smarter about it, not that it would have changed anything in the long run—he put two and two together and figured out what I’d done. It’s the curse of the small town.” She shook her head and gave off a sad laugh. “God, I was so stupid in my grief. But, that’s how the Boundary House became the last place these kids would ever sleep before Jerry delivered his Emergency Exit and they’d walk off to the beach together. He needed a safe place to make his deal, and I needed my secret kept.”
Lance did not want to accept the truth he was hearing. The horror of it was…
“So,” Loraine said, “if you want the person who’s actually feeding the pills to them, your man is Jerry. He’s the janitor at the bus station, but that’s just a ruse to cover his real income.” Loraine shrugged with shoulders that had absolutely given up hope. “What better place, right?”
And Lance was transported back to the very first moment after his arrival in Sugar Beach. The janitor in the men’s room, staring at him and asking, “Are you here to die?”
It all made sense. Horrible, tragic sense. The man Lance had been trying to find from the moment he’d realized there was a problem in Sugar Beach was the very first person who’d spoken to him.
But right now, there was something else. Something that was making his stomach churn and his insides boil. There was only one thing Loraine Linklatter could have done that would have been so terrible, so universally condemned, that she would stand quietly by and allow a man to run a suicide factory out of her home.
“What did you do?” Lance said, his voice firm and deep. He needed to hear her say it. It was impossible to accept it based only on assumption.
She’d purchased the Emergency Exit from Jerry the janitor, and she was still alive. But there was somebody else in the Boundary House who wasn’t.
Loraine took a deep breath. Closed her eyes, squeezing out final tears. When she opened them, she said, “I killed my daughter. I couldn’t watch her suffer anymore, so I killed her.”
And before Lance could even fully process the words, the air came alive with a hum, there was a rush of pressure that Lance knew only he could feel, a buzzing like the sound of a thousand bees rushing past.
Evil.
And Lance saw what would happen a fraction of a second before it did. Not enough time for him to reach Loraine Linklatter before she picked up the pistol from the table and then put the barrel to her temple and pulled the trigger.
27
Loraine Linklatter’s body had slumped forward, bent in half at the waist, torso and head resting atop the table. Her neck was bent awkwardly. The tiny black hole where the bullet had entered looked innocent enough, could maybe even be mistaken for a mole at the right distance and in the right lighting. But there was nothing innocent about the blood and brain matter and bits of Loraine Linklatter’s skull that had exploded from the opposite
side of her head and splattered against the wall of the breakfast nook. Her eyes were half-open still, lifeless. But Lance thought he saw accusation there, boring into him. Look what you made me do, Lance.
He shook his head. No, he thought. You did this to yourself.
All of this—the gunshot, the expulsion of brain and blood and life, Lance’s passing moment of guilt—happened in the span of only three of four seconds. And after that, Lance’s survival instinct took over, his mind shifting into damage control mode.
The gun had fallen from Loraine Linklatter’s hand and scattered across the kitchen floor. Lance gave it only a cursory glance, not daring to touch it. He didn’t plan on being anywhere near this place when the police came, but when they did, the last thing he wanted was his fingerprints on a weapon.
And the police would come. Surely a neighbor had heard the gunshot. It had sounded like a cannon firing in the confines of the kitchen, and Lance’s ears were still ringing, like tiny sirens sounding off in his head as he tried to think.
Diana, he thought. We’ve got to get out of here.
He ran from the kitchen and down the hall, bounding up the stairs two at a time. He pushed against his bedroom door and flung it open, rocking it on its hinges, the door slamming against the wall hard enough that the doorknob punctured a hole in the drywall. Diana was sitting bolt upright in the bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, her eyes wide, like white saucers in the darkness. Lance flipped on the light switch and raised his hands.
“It’s just me,” he said. “We have to go. Like, right now. Get dressed.” He walked around the bed and grabbed his backpack, slinging the straps over his shoulders.
Diana nodded and leapt from the bed, no questions asked. Lance guessed that when you came from a country at war, you grew used to this sort of thing. He watched as she quickly dressed, again showing no signs of modesty as she stood half-naked, pulling on her sweatpants. Once she’d finished, pulling on her shoes, she began walking toward him and finally asked, “I heard gunshot?”
The Lance Brody Series: Books 3 and 4 Page 16
