She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,249

of the two men in the control room shortly after.

Fogel regretted calling in the feds. They hauled off nearly three tractor trailers filled with documentation, audio/visual evidence, and equipment, enough to build a thousand cases against the people in charge. Although those tractor trailers left Charter property for the Philly field office, they never arrived. When Fogel tried to obtain information on the case, she discovered there was no case. When she took it upon herself to visit the Charter building again, less than one week later, she found it completely deserted, scrubbed, and staged. Signage had been replaced with Marshal Field and Grain. The few scraps of paper littering the now bloodless hallways bore the same name. The entire complex looked like a farming supply company that had gone out of business several years earlier, a building yet to be repurposed.

If I hadn’t given her all the documentation my father stole from Charter, there might not have been any remaining proof of what they did. Once Stack recuperated, the two of them worked to piece together a complete narrative, and by the time they finished, they knew all about the shot, the adults who received it, the children they had, and how Charter either exploited or killed all those involved.

Fogel took down the Wall of Weird shortly after that. Publicly, she ceased all efforts to follow up on those cases, and the information was quickly forgotten as her coworkers attempted to keep up with their ever-expanding workload. When August 8 rolled around the following year, only a handful asked about it. By the following year, no one brought it up.

She never told me where she hid all the data. She only said it was someplace safe. Someplace she could get to it, if the need ever arose.

“He’s getting so big!” Fogel beamed, watching Dalton.

“Yeah, they do that,” I said. “How have you been?”

“Good.” She reached into her pocket and took out her badge. “I made lieutenant.”

“Congratulations. I’m happy for you.” The words didn’t come out with the cheer I had intended. I tried to make up for it with a wider smile. I probably just looked like a complete goof.

There was a silver flask in her hand. She caught me staring at it.

Fogel’s face flushed. “It’s whiskey. I pour it on his grave. A little old school, I know, but he was old school back when old schools had dirt floors.” She hesitated for a second, then held it out to me. “Want a taste?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t touched the stuff in twelve years.”

This seemed to surprise her. “Really? That’s fantastic. Good for you.”

Fogel stuffed the flask into her pocket and nodded her head back toward the main entrance. “I need to get going. It was nice seeing you again. We should try to get together at some point. Maybe grab dinner or something.”

“I’d like that.” We never would, though. I knew that.

I watched her walk away, disappear over the hill. Then I turned to Dalton. “Let’s go, buddy.”

He skipped one final rock, then took my hand.

We made our way up the hill at the back of the cemetery, past the mausoleums. When the bench came into view, my eyes fell on a little girl sitting there with long chestnut hair and the most beautiful dark eyes, a book in her lap. When she saw me, her eyes lit up. “Daddy!”

She jumped up and ran to me, wrapping both arms around my legs.

From the opposite side of the bench, her mother looked up at me, too.

She smiled.

Somehow, Stella became more beautiful with each passing day, and my heart never tired of quivering at the sight of her.

She too was reading a book. She turned it over and showed me the cover. “This is utterly fantastic!”

The title was Glimmer in the Devil’s Eye. The author was Darby Brotherton.

Darby never learned to speak, but she found her voice. At twenty years old, this was her second bestseller. Cammie had called us last week to tell us the news.

Stella walked over, her white sundress fluttering in the late summer breeze. The weather today couldn’t be more perfect.

She ruffled Dalton’s hair and kissed me, her lips electric against mine. “Did you boys have fun?”

“It was nice to see everyone. You?”

She knelt and stroked our daughter’s cheek. “Clara here read Charlotte’s Web for the umpteenth time, then set about to find a word in every spider web in those mausoleums over there.”

I smiled down at Clara. “And what did you find?”

“Pittsburgh spiders