“I want you to lure him into the house,” he said. “That’s it.”
It took her a beat to realize that he meant it, that he actually wanted her to be bait for Kreskey.
“That’s it?” she said, leaning close to him. She accidentally knocked his empty cup and it clanged against the saucer. He righted it calmly. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
The girl sitting in the corner on her laptop with her earbuds in glanced over at them.
Hank leaned back, locked her in the intensity of his stare. Something about his gaze, about the way he looked at her. He knew her. He knew her in a way that no one else had and no one ever would. He saw right inside to her shadow self. She couldn’t keep his gaze. Thought about getting up and running out but she didn’t. She stayed.
“You said yourself that you feel like part of you is trapped inside him—in his dreams, in his mind. That it haunts you.”
The words stung because, outside a shrink’s office, she had only ever admitted this to him, the sick fear that settled in her middle when she imagined Kreskey thinking about her. She regretted opening herself up to this version of Hank Reams who she’d mistakenly believed was still the boy she used to know. The words jammed up in her throat. She didn’t trust herself to speak without yelling, so she sat there quaking.
“Have you seen these?”
He turned around the tablet he had with him. Drawings—rudimentary, thick lines. Horrible images of a girl being strangled, or in a garden, or screaming in terror, or caring for a little boy. It was unmistakably Rain—she recognized the line of her own mouth, the arch of her brows, her wide blue eyes.
“These were confiscated from his belongings,” he said. “Harper sent them to me.”
Her stomach twisted, the espresso turning acidic.
“We won’t be free until he’s dead.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, pushing the tablet back at him. She didn’t have to look at that. What good was it? You couldn’t control what other people thought, or dreamed, or fantasized about. “We’re free right now. We’re as free as we allow ourselves to be.”
“Are we?” he asked, grabbing her hand. She didn’t yank it away. “Are we really?”
Now she came to a stop in front of the Kreskey place. She’d brought her real camera this time, a Canon Rebel EOS, and quickly set up the tripod. The ground smelled wet, the air cold. The sun was white and dipping lower, the light punching the brown leaves silver. It was beautiful here, peaceful, if not for the house that radiated a kind of menace. Once it was gone, trees would grow, animals would come to burrow, and birds to nest. The crow. The finch. The owl. The nightjar. And everything that happened here would fade away.
The thought of Lily sleeping in her crib lowered Rain’s heart rate. Since Lily had been born, her only clear moments of focus had been when the child was tucked safely asleep in her crib. Down the hall was best. But, as she finished setting the camera, she figured she could work with this situation some of the time—as long as someone like Mitzi was on the case. Experienced, qualified, in control—all qualities Rain herself felt she lacked as a new mother. Was anyone “qualified” to be a parent? Were they all just muddling through?
The ground was soft, and it took Rain a moment to steady the tripod. The low, sad whistle of the chickadee carried on the breeze; a squirrel rustled through the ground cover, then scampered up a tree. In the distance, the intermittent whisper of a passing car.
She snapped a few pictures of the ramshackle structure, then set the timer and stepped in front of the lens herself. She snapped off a few more shots. Then she took the camera and hung it around her neck, headed toward the house.
She stepped up onto the rickety porch, and barely avoided a ragged gaping hole in the wood, where it looked as if someone had stepped through. Click, click, click—the tilting railing, the abandoned rockers, the cracked pot that hadn’t held a plant in decades.
Stepping carefully, she pushed the front door and it swung open with a nearly comical haunted house squeal.
The smell hit her first—mold and rot, garbage, something else so foul that Rain covered her mouth and nose. She thought of the things that Hank had told her about the hallway, about Wolf,