our radar since his release. We all remembered him. Then it was five of us like bats out of hell, racing for that house. I remember feeling like it was a hundred miles away, that the car couldn’t go fast enough even pedal to the metal. The road just seemed to get longer, and longer.
“Then we got there. We knocked, identified ourselves, but then we just blazed in through that front door, breaking about a million rules. We didn’t care—we were just thinking about those two little kids.”
Rain sat breathless, listening.
“What a place, I swear you can still feel the energy there—all that pain and death. It’s like it radiates out of the ground.”
She was a pragmatist—didn’t believe in ghosts or hauntings. When people talked about energies, she kind of glazed over a little. But she knew what he meant; she’d felt it, too. The malevolence of that place; it was still on her skin.
When she looked back at Detective Harper, his eyes had filled.
“What he did to that girl. What he did to her. She wasn’t even a person to him. She was a doll. And Hank Reams. Man, just an hour sooner.”
Rain felt her eyes fill, too, with the rush of just wishing that one thing had been different that day.
That Tess’s mom hadn’t had to work.
That they’d listened to Rain’s mom about not crossing through the woods. That one of them had a phone. That Hank had run instead of trying to save them. She bowed her head into her hand, felt Gillian’s arm on her shoulders. Maybe this was a mistake. How could she tell this story well when it still hurt so much? When the memories still burned.
Gillian took over, asking questions about the arrest, the trial.
“So,” she asked finally. “What was Kreskey like?”
“He was a child, you know that,” Harper said. “Kreskey. I mean, he was a monster—huge.” He lifted his arms wide to signal Kreskey’s girth.
“He had the glazed stare of a sadist, a sickness deep, deep inside. But he could barely read or write, he had zero education before the age of twelve, not even a television in that house. He didn’t know who the president was. When he was left in the interrogation room, he asked for crayons and paper. Soft-spoken, shy, very polite—‘please’ and ‘thank you.’”
“Did you give it to him?” asked Gillian. “The paper and crayons.”
“We did,” said the detective. “We wondered, what would someone who just murdered a child and tortured two others, what in the goddamn world would someone like that draw with crayons?”
“What did he draw?” asked Rain, even though she already knew the answer.
He looked at Rain, lowered his eyes. “He drew pictures of Lara Winter. Over and over and over. Sweet pictures—playing with him, making cookies with him, walking through the woods.”
Rain had seen them, most of them. She’d asked Henry to show her after he told her about them; reluctantly he sent her instructions on how to access the dark web, find the images. Harper was right; they were the drawings of a toddler, two-dimensional, facile. He was a child, a deranged murderous child.
“It was—sad, I guess. Unsettling. Kreskey was a sick fuck—pardon my language. There was no helping that guy, his hardware was damaged—irreparably.”
“So, when he was murdered ten years later,” said Rain. “How did you feel?”
Harper shrugged, his features hardened a little. He cast Rain a look and she averted her eyes.
“I guess I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t some sense of relief,” he said after a moment in thought. “I fought against his release from the psychiatric prison, even into that controlled work release facility. That was a minimum-security situation. I think they figured that he was so docile, so heavily medicated, that he wasn’t much of a threat.”
“But you didn’t feel that way.”
“I thought it was only a matter of time before he hurt someone else. We were aware of him, let’s put it that way.”
“You had someone watching him.”
Harper looked uncomfortable. “Well, there wasn’t manpower for that. And even if there was, we wouldn’t have had the overtime hours in our budget. But some of us watched him in our spare time. We organized a group—it wasn’t enough. But it was something.”
She could feel Gillian seize on this.
“Wow,” said her friend. She was queen of the controlled gush—not over the top, sounding totally sincere. “That’s really amazing. That you all took time from your life to watch him, to protect your town.”