Blum.
“For shit. But I tinker with it here and there. Get some stuff on sometimes. Mostly sports.” He grinned. “If the news comes on, I just turn off the sound. Too damn depressing.”
Pine took a moment to look around the room. It was hard for her to imagine ever living here. This seemed like foreign soil to her.
“Where did you and your sister sleep?” asked Blum.
Pine pointed to the stairs. “Up there.”
Tanner drew back and let her lead the way up the scarred, uncarpeted plywood stairs.
Now, with every step, Pine was drawing closer to that horrible night in 1989. The landing outside the bedroom door found her mind and soul, if not her body, returning to that time in her life. She stared at the closed door for a moment as though it might plausibly be a portal to another universe that would answer all her questions.
Nothing like setting the bar too low.
Tanner said, “You can go on in, ma’am. Ain’t nothing in there now. I sleep on the bean bag chair downstairs. Don’t have no bed.”
Pine gripped the doorknob like it was the only thing tethering her to the earth, turned it, and pushed the door open. When she stepped through, in her mind’s eye, the room and she had been fully transported back to the late eighties, to the absolute worst moment of her life.
She saw the bed, the nightstand, the cheap light fixture, the chest of drawers on top of which she and Mercy had kept their dolls. And the square of carpet with the My Little Pony graphic on it. The tiny closet where their few clothes hung. The blue ball that Pine loved to kick and throw, and the little ballerina dress that Mercy, the dancer and more girly of the two, loved. She would wear the garment until it grew so dirty the white had turned brown, forcing her mother to whisk it away in the middle of the night and wash it in the sink, for they had no other means to launder their clothes.
And finally, the one window in the room. Through which Tor, or someone like him, had climbed and clamped gloved hands over the mouths of the little girls. Then had come the nursery rhyme, the thumping of their foreheads. The selection of Mercy to take, the fist smashing into Pine’s head, fracturing her skull and leaving her for dead. Her mother tottering in the next morning, nursing a hangover from the comingling of pot and beer. Only to discover one daughter gone and the other near death.
The ambulance ride to the hospital, the anxious faces hovering above her, the stark white ceiling of the ambulance—perhaps an early glimpse of Heaven—the gurney sprint through the hospital. The pinch of a needle, the unconsciousness of anesthesia, the subsequent cut into and repair of her skull, though she was clearly not aware of that, followed by the long, frightening recovery. Frightening because she really had no understanding of what had happened to her.
Then back home, to find Mercy still gone, her parents inconsolable. Unable to talk about their other daughter, unable to let Pine out of their sight, yet reluctant to hold her, or to talk to her about any of it. The thickness of guilt lay heavy over them all, crushing out what little family nucleus was left to them.
“Agent Pine?”
Pine came out of these thoughts like she remembered waking up from her surgery. Instantly alert and curious but still befuddled somehow, as though she had risen too quickly from deep water and there was something potentially deadly floating inside her.
Blum was looking worriedly at her. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. “Just remembering some things.”
“Anything helpful?”
Pine crossed the floor, opened the window, and looked down.
“A ladder. The man had to use a ladder to get up here.”
“Did they find one?” Tanner asked curiously.
“No. At least not that I know of. I was only six. The police didn’t really talk to me. Not after they learned I couldn’t really help them.”
“Were there ever any suspects?” asked Blum.
“My father was the first suspect, perhaps the only one.”
Blum and Tanner exchanged a quick glance.
“You think he did that to his own kids?” asked Tanner, clearly not believing this.
“No. It wasn’t my father. I would have recognized him. And why come in through the window? And they were drinking and smoking pot that night. He couldn’t have made it up the stairs, much less climbed a ladder. And I saw the man come through the