Darling - K. Ancrum Page 0,66

to lure her out of her family home. She had watched a thirty-six-year-old man threaten a child.

She had let down her defenses around him because other kids weren’t inherently scary most of the time. Peter must have been using that to his advantage. She remembered with violent clarity the moment they met. When Peter was facing the window in her bedroom, silhouetted by a streetlamp, and she thought for exactly one second that he was a man. But when he turned his face to her, she corrected herself. She looked at his small, cute face and bright wide eyes and thought, This is a kid like me, this is a boy in my house, this is a boy who might need help. This is a boy.

Wendy remembered the hot press of his body as he’d climbed down the side of her house and how she’d liked it, and she felt like clawing her own skin off to get rid of the memory of the feeling. Things he had said ran through her mind at rapid speed. This is Bella’s dance, the ‘Never Bird.’ She’s been doing it at this place for fifteen years, I’ve heard … You want to look like you’re fifty in your thirties, keep smoking like this … I’ve had this jacket for a very long time … Fyodor calling him a man, Ominotago calling him a man. Everyone calling him a man but her.

Wendy thought about her mom.

Her mom, clenching the bar tightly on the train, describing this man–describing Peter—in fits and starts, haunted by a ghost that turned out to still be alive. Moving away to escape the memory, waiting until she felt safe, then inadvertently placing her family back into the path of the same predator that had haunted her nights. Her mom. Who would have to learn that Wendy had spent a night the same way she had, with the same predator, when she came to pick Wendy up from the police station.

The necklace Peter made her hours ago suddenly scraped against her skin like rope. Wendy pulled it off and threw it hard across the room.

Detective Hook watched the acorn and string bounce off the concrete wall and land on the floor, and wisely chose to say nothing. He waited patiently until Wendy was able to pull herself together and sit up again. Then he got up and poured Wendy a glass of water from the water cooler and placed it in front of her, along with a box of tissues. Wendy pushed the tissues away but grabbed the water, gulping it down gratefully.

“Who else knows?” Wendy choked out. “Do the others—”

“They know. They learned about a month ago. Genevieve punched me in the face when I told her, so you’re handling this better than she did.”

“Genevieve?” Wendy asked numbly.

Detective Hook rolled his eyes. “She likes to be called Tinkerbelle, I think.”

Wendy could unpack that later. “They let me be close to him when … they let him touch me … they let…”

Detective Hook thumbed through Peter’s folder and took out a few more pictures, but this time he held them in a stack instead of handing them over. “They know, but it’s not their fault that you didn’t know. They’re all contractually restricted from sharing that information with anyone outside of people working on the case. Also, they spent the majority of their time with him not knowing, either, much longer than you. Peter is very charismatic and convincing; it’s not hard for him to trick a group of teenagers. But the thing is that it only works if they’re teenagers. He can’t trick people who are much older than you are right now. Whether it’s because we’re old enough to recognize another adult when we see one, or because the things that make him charismatic stop working after a while, we don’t know. But we know that he knows it, too, and that he doesn’t allow this situation to happen if he can manage it by keeping the age of people around him low enough for it to keep working. How long have you been with the others? It couldn’t have been long … a week, maybe?”

“Seven hours,” Wendy said, her chest as hollow as a gourd.

Detective Hook grimaced apologetically. “Peter works predictably. He makes friends with vulnerable children, figures out what they need most in the world, and then gives it to them. Food, a home, a brother, a father, a friend. He sticks by them for a couple