by Tessa Wegert
Already there are lookie-loos. Cars crawl past the displays, tiny faces mashed against windows and mittened hands patting excitedly against the glass. After lingering on the street for a moment, the camera swings around to face the sidewalk. What I see then is Crissy, walking toward Felicia’s house with her boys in tow. The boys wearing excited smiles, the light already dancing in their eyes. They run ahead. When they get to their grandmother’s neatly shoveled driveway, they stop.
She appears at her front door. Felicia’s wearing pink, and a shawl with tassels. With one hand on her heart, she waves.
After a long moment, Crissy waves back.
“It’s a start,” says Suze. “I know they’ve got a lot of history to work through, but I’m always telling Crissy how special Erynn’s relationship with Cheryl is. Maybe her boys can have that, too, someday.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “Maybe they can.”
As we say good-bye, I see Tim’s car pulling into the lot. He gets out and flips up his windshield wipers. There’s snow in the forecast again. That could work in our favor. Trey’s parents have agreed to let us interview their son once he’s recovered, and while we’re running blind until then, fresh snow can leave tracks. Expose activity where there should be none.
I touch the barrels of the two travel mugs on my desk. Still hot. The coffee inside is good, an Italian blend I brewed at home, and in a minute, I’ll hand one to Tim.
Regardless of the clues, there’s really only one reason I found Trey: Bram let me. For the second time, my cousin allowed one of his victims to live, but he’s still at large, possibly close. Tim and I have a lot to talk about.
The phone on my desk rings. “State police,” I say. “BCI Senior Investigator Merchant.”
“Hi, Shay.”
A shiver darts down my back. “Bram.”
“I guess you think you won.”
My gaze flicks to the window. Tim stands on the path to the door, head down. He stopped out front to check an incoming text.
I say, “I don’t want to play anymore.”
That amuses him. When he speaks again, Blake Bram sounds pleased. “See, that’s the problem. If you’d just kept playing back when we were kids, I wouldn’t have needed to raise the stakes.”
“What the hell do you want?” Try as I might, I can’t keep the frustration and fury out of my voice. This game is nothing like the others.
“I guess I should thank you,” he says, low and slow. “You found him.”
Him. He’s not talking about Trey now, but Robbie. I tunnel into every cranny of my mind, trying to parse his words. “You didn’t know what happened to Brett?”
“I suspected.”
And he needed me to complete the puzzle. “Why now?” I say, just like Tim did. It’s illogical. Why let his father’s remains rot out there all this time?
“He left me,” Bram says simply. “He deserved what he got.”
Brett did leave his family, but he also tried to make things right. Does Bram want me to appreciate how bad he had it? Use his childhood as an excuse for the destruction he’s reaping now? Was he unable to show forgiveness even at twelve years old? All at once, I think I understand. He wants me to see what he’s capable of, the brutal punishments he’s willing to hand out. He was callous and delusional even then.
“You have to stop this. This is between us. No one else.”
“Look in your purse,” he says.
I turn to stone. My purse is on the floor under my desk. I pick it up. Spread it open.
Cards. A whole deck of them sit inside. How? My purse has been by my feet for the last hour. Before that it was in my motel room, with me. I pull out a card at random. On the back, a black and white image of Eel Bay. I grab another. This one shows the Lost Channel.
The card I found in my gym bag belongs in this pack. Heart Island and Boldt Castle on the front, the Three of Hearts on the back.
Three hearts. Becca. Lanie. Jess. Three women gone, three hearts taken, and now here sits the rest of the deck. Bram isn’t done, not even close.
“What—”
I stop. The line’s gone dead. As I drag my gaze away from my purse, Tim opens the door.
“Morning,” he says. “I just got the strangest text.”
Acknowledgments
It was a joy working on this book with the amazing team at Berkley. Thank you especially to the brilliant Miranda Hill for committing to this story so completely and knowing exactly how to make it better, and to Brittanie Black, Elisha Katz, Erin Fitzsimmons, and Beth Partin for helping to polish and promote the Shana Merchant series. I’m deeply indebted to my eagle-eyed early readers Leila Wegert, Carol Repsher, Michelle Sowden, and Dorinda Bonanno, and always grateful to Jefferson County Sheriff Colleen O’Neill for answering my questions about the New York State Police and BCI investigators. To Bonnie and James Gombos, thanks for sharing your karate expertise. For your encouragement, savvy, and support, thank you Hank Phillippi Ryan and Wendy Walker; and for your generosity, thanks to the 2020 Debuts community of authors, Suzy Leopold, Barrett Bookstore, Finley’s Fiction, the Darien Library, and Crime by the Book. As always, thank you to agent extraordinaire Marlene Stringer for continuing to champion my work after all these years. To Grant and my family, I’d be lost without you. Thanks for everything.
Author photo by Hildi Todrin, Crane Song Photography
Tessa Wegert is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Huffington Post, Adweek, and The Economist. She grew up in Quebec near the border of Vermont and now lives with her husband and children in a hundred-year-old house in coastal Connecticut. Tessa writes mysteries set in upstate New York while studying martial arts and dance, and is the author of the Shana Merchant series, beginning with Death in the Family.
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