In Strange Woods - Claire Cray Page 0,54

a resigned look on his face.

“Where did…” James trailed off as he walked quickly to the table, spinning the folder of trust documents toward him to read the note scrawled on the front in blue ballpoint ink:

2pm Bone Creek Bridge

Just us!

James picked up the folder, his pulse quickening with excitement.

“I just found it on the deck,” Hunter said. “Missed it earlier. Somebody left it last night, I guess.”

James ran his thumb over the end of the note on the folder, feeling the faint indentations of the letters. The idea that he had a twin had been following him like an apparition, stepping on his heels. Now it was finally materializing, and he felt high. “Bone Creek Bridge. Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah.” Hunter was looking at the note, too, but a frown was tugging at his handsome lips. “My dad dragged us out that way a few times when he was hunting. It’s way upriver. Northeastern edge of your woods, I guess.”

“Can you show me on the map?”

“Well, yeah, but…” Hunter sighed.

“What?”

“You’re gonna go out there by yourself? You think that’s a good idea?” Hunter glanced at his watch and looked dismayed. “I gotta get ready to go.”

James stood aside to let him pass and then took his seat, watching him go to the kitchen and pull a travel mug off the dish rack. “How could I not go?”

“Ain’t like it’s your only chance, for one thing.” Hunter poured coffee into the mug, still frowning. “You said Shelley knows him. So you have a way to reach him. You could set it up on your terms, someplace safer.”

“The cops are looking for him,” James said. “I don’t think a public place is an option. Anyway, if I don’t come back, you can tell the search party where to look.”

“Ha-ha,” Hunter said humorlessly.

“What’s he gonna do, kill me?”

“I dunno.” Hunter put the coffee pot back, his face growing more troubled by the second. After a long pause, he said, “Have you thought about…”

James raised his eyebrows, waiting patiently.

“‘Bout him being involved somehow?”

“In what?”

Hunter shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “Your family.”

James’s spirits dropped to the floor. He looked down at his coffee, biting his tongue. It was always a punch in the gut, remembering, and he felt a flash of anger at Hunter for bringing it up when his guard was down.

“It’s just…” Hunter was quieter, obviously registering James’s displeasure. “He’s been unaccounted for, since right about the time it happened. And unless I’m missing something, he’d have a motive, wouldn’t he?”

“What would that be?”

“Well, the inheritance, for one thing.”

“Oh, I see.” A burst of irrational anger scalded the inside of James’s chest. “You think Beau Woodstock went all the way to New York, murdered my family, left a spotless crime scene, came back here, and strolled back into the fucking woods, to…what? Grow some more pot, wait for me to maybe, possibly show up?”

“I dunno, James,” Hunter murmured, and it looked like something else was on his mind, something he didn’t want to say.

“What?” James asked, the edge in his voice growing sharper.

“He can pretend to be you,” Hunter said reluctantly. “He did it at the hotel, right?”

James was silent at first, until the implication sank in and stirred the morbid nerves in his brain. Then he imagined it all, unwillingly: Beau, the outlaw, the abandoned twin, the forgotten heir, appearing at the door of the townhouse. Pretending to be James, saying he’d lost his keys. His family letting him in. Complimenting his new tattoos. Settling in for the night.

Then the killing. The shock and horror of their final moments compounded by the belief that it was James who did it to them. James, embedding the fireplace poker in Robin’s skull. James, butchering Bryce in his bed. James, slitting Grace’s throat to the bone.

It was an idea so poisonous that he actually felt his body prickling with pain, like he’d been injected with acid.

“Wow,” he seethed, refusing to look up at Hunter while his eyes were stinging. “You should call up one of the podcasts. They’d love this theory. Better yet, call Isaac.”

“That—” Hunter cut himself off and said no more. Just let out a barely audible sigh.

James gritted his teeth and pressed a hand to his brow, slowly recognizing what he was doing. Instead of a panic attack, he was lashing out. Maybe it was the same thing. Either way, he was blaming Hunter for painful thoughts and dark imaginings