“I still think about that, you know, those hours, that ticking clock. How could we have been faster? What difference would have been made in two hours, one?”
Rain felt the familiar rise of emotion; she bit it back.
Indeed, what difference would there have been if Rain had managed to run, to even answer the voices she heard calling for her? An hour earlier, according to Hank, and Tess would have survived. He would have escaped the worst of his ordeal.
But she was frozen, deep in shock, her voice encased in ice inside her chest. The Winter Girl.
“It was just luck that I found you, you were buried so deep in that tree. I saw this flash of something, the last light of the day came out from behind the clouds and there you were. Huddled. I won’t forget the way you looked.”
“The way I looked?”
“Your eyes,” he said. “I’ve seen that look on men after combat—men much bigger and stronger than you were. They’ve seen and experienced horrors that changed them. They check out, go blank. It’s almost like a brain reboot, you know? When they come back online, they’re someone else. I wanted to cry—I remember that. You were so young. That look didn’t have any place on you.”
“PTSD.”
He gave an assenting nod. “Yeah, that’s what they call it now. After Vietnam, they gave it a name, a list of symptoms, ways to treat. And that’s all good, a way for people to get help. But some of those guys, it was too much. Meds, therapy. But some things you can’t unsee. Some things just stay with you. You either live with it. Or it haunts you. Or you let it kill you.”
He leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight.
“It’s like you didn’t die there on the battlefield, but you did. You just didn’t know it.”
He went quiet; Rain and Gillian waited. Outside there was shouting. Kids she’d seen playing in the street. Laughter. Then, distantly, a siren. Her mind drifted briefly to Greg and Lily. What if there was an accident? A fire? Stop it, she told herself. Focus.
“It took us a couple more hours to coax you back, to find out what you’d seen, what you knew. Honestly? I wasn’t sure you’d come back. You were hurt—badly, drifting in and out of consciousness. You shook, like you were the worst kind of cold. I thought, she’ll never get over this.”
He looked at her, his gaze level, seeing.
“But look at you,” he said with a fatherly smile. “You’re all grown up. Family, good job. That’s the one good thing from all that. That he didn’t get all of you.”
“Because of you,” said Gillian. “You saved her, and Hank.”
“Like I say, it was luck,” he said. “The luck of the way light moved in just that moment. Mind if I ask, why now? Why do you want to go back?”
She opted for a bit of honesty. You couldn’t get people to open up to you if you weren’t open yourself. She’d give him as much as she could.
“The murders of Steve Markham, and also the Boston Boogeyman. They have me thinking about Kreskey. It’s brought me back to that time and place—a time and place I’ve buried deep. It has me asking questions about justice, and what makes men like Kreskey, and what unmakes them. And…”
She let the sentence trail off.
“No matter how many times we go back, we can’t change what happened,” he said. “Sucks, right?”
“I still have a lot of guilt about that day,” she said, though she hadn’t intended to. She felt Gillian’s eyes settle on her.
Harper regarded her, his eyes full of facets and layers. He knew things about her that no one else did, not even Gillian.
“There’s no shame in survival, Miss Winter. It’s what we’re all doing, every day. The brain—they didn’t get this for a long time—it does what it needs to do to keep the rest of you living. It’s not about will or bravery or any of that. You were a tiny slip of a kid. You hadn’t run, you’d be dead, too. Where’s the justice in that?”
The grandfather clock in his foyer chimed the hour.
“So, at a certain point,” she said, moving on, “I remembered where I’d seen Eugene Kreskey before, who he was. And then—”
He sat up from his reclined position. “As soon as you mentioned the garage, along with your description of him, we knew. Kreskey had been on