Street house on the market the week before, and there was already an offer on it. Not that she was getting market value for the house—the gruesome things that had happened there made it a tough sell, though not tough enough for someone not to take advantage of a discounted house on Greenlake Park, it seemed. As soon as the sale went through, she planned on moving to Portland with Sam—a fresh scene for healing. She was barely talking to anyone in her family anymore. They’d made it abundantly clear that it was Manda and Winnie who’d driven Dakota to what he’d done. They didn’t dare blame Nigel; the dead couldn’t defend themselves.
As for Terry Russel, Winnie supposed she’d never know why Nigel had sent Terry Russel the information that brought her to the Crouches’ doorstep. How could he? Nigel had helped her that night, as she clung to him crying, her arms wrapped around his waist. He’d gone to the car and taken the baby’s body out, put it somewhere no one would ever find it. That’s what he promised her: No one will ever find him. I put him somewhere safe. He’d put her in the shower, scooping her bloody clothes from the bathroom floor as he went, and come back a few minutes later with a sleeping pill and glass of water. Winnie had let him dress her and put her to bed all in a semicatatonic state. How could he help her this way and then bring Terry to her doorstep? And how could he do it without implicating himself? Though what other possibility could there be? Abbot had said that the emails had come from the IP address in their own home.
The morning after the baby had died, she’d woken up and gone downstairs to find Nigel drinking coffee in the kitchen, freshly showered. When he looked up and their eyes met, she saw something different inside them, something...gone. She knew she had ruined their lives that day. Had it been enough for Nigel to finally snap and incriminate them both, after all these years?
She’d been so distraught at everything that had happened, she’d almost talked herself into confessing to the crime she’d committed fourteen years ago. In the end, she’d decided she couldn’t help that little boy anymore, but she could help her own son by being around. Let the dead deal with the dead, Winnie thought. And that’s the last she thought about it for a while.
EPILOGUE
They’d been living in the new house for a month before they smelled it. It was terrible, wet and rotting. When George caught onto it, he’d gone around the house, sniffing, crawling on his hands and knees in the kitchen at one point, sure he’d find a dead rat behind the fridge. But there wasn’t a dead rat, just the permeating smell of death.
“It’s an animal, it’s died in the house...oh my God, what if it had babies in the walls?”
His wife was always the negative Nelly, but George had heard weird noises at night, and at night was when the sneaky animals came out. She may not be wrong, he thought.
The smell was thicker on the main level; it was a sizable animal, he decided. He grabbed a handful of thick, industrial garbage bags from under the sink. He wished he had a mask to put over his mouth and nose—wherever that smell was coming from, it was only going to get worse as he got closer. There was a mask shortage, go figure, some virus people were shitting their pants about. George found a bandanna from his wife’s accessory drawer and wrapped it around his nose and mouth, and then he went downstairs to the foyer, wearing the gloves he used for yard work.
The entrance to the crawl space was in the front closet, the left one, if you were facing the front door. He’d had to pull the plans out to find the entrance to the thing, but he knew old houses like this one had them. He yanked open the closet door, eyeing the floor carefully. It was carpeted. New-looking, from what he could see. He might even have to pull the whole thing up. He dropped to his knees, looking for a seam, and found it: a trapdoor lay beneath a rectangle of carpet. George held his makeshift mask tighter across his face. Yep, that’s where it was coming from. The door was an original fucking piece of wood, if ever