Dan Padavona
Bury Her Bones
(Darkwater Cove Book 2)
CHAPTER ONE
Monsters are real. We see them on the evening news—murderers, rapists, child predators. Though we construct walls and moats around our families to keep them safe, the danger always finds a way past the barricades.
Darcy Gellar, former profiler with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, must keep her children safe, for the monsters are coming for them again. They’re here in Scarlet River, Georgia, and it’s only a matter of time before they rear their ugly faces.
It’s the fourth day of December. Darcy and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer, walk the aisles of a small southern-based grocery store with dirty, scuffed floors that haven’t seen a mop in days. With her long brunette hair pulled into a ponytail, Jennifer is the spitting image of Darcy as a teenager. Her daughter’s demeanor can shift from jovial to furious without warning, a growing issue as Jennifer closes in on her fifteenth birthday. Darcy can’t blame Jennifer. She’d uprooted her family for the second time in half a year, and her daughter had just made friends in their new village when the Full Moon Killer invaded their lives and forced them to flee.
Two weeks have passed since serial killer Richard Chaney abducted Jennifer in Genoa Cove, North Carolina, or Darkwater Cove as the locals refer to it because of the black shadowed waters below the cliffs. Two weeks since Darcy and her old FBI partner, Eric Hensel, shot and killed Chaney. Jennifer won’t talk about it, won’t even acknowledge the nightmare happened, but Darcy can see the fear in the slump of the girl’s shoulders, as though she cowers from a shadow coming up behind her. Her nails, usually garish and manicured, are gnawed to the quick, pink and angry. The teenager seems muted and suppressed as she reaches for organic oatmeal and places it in the cart.
A scrawny, thirty-something woman pushes a cart spilling over with processed food and snacks. The woman steals a glance at Darcy and Jennifer when they aren’t looking, but Darcy spies the woman from the corner of her eye and shifts a step closer to Jennifer. Darcy and her family are outsiders, strangers. This is cousin Laurie’s town. Darcy and her family should still be in Genoa Cove, cobbling together the pieces of their shattered autumn, but fate calls them to Scarlet River.
When Laurie told Darcy about the man stalking her, Darcy urged her cousin to go to the police. Then Laurie discovered the smiley face, the signature of the Full Moon Killer, painted in bleeding reds on the back of her house, just as Darcy and Amy Yang found on the backs of their houses before the Darkwater Cove murders tore apart the village. The nightmare had begun again.
Except Michael Rivers, the legendary murderer Darcy shot and captured three years ago, is in prison outside of Buffalo, New York, and couldn’t have painted the symbol on Laurie’s house. Just as Rivers paid Richard Chaney and Bronson Severson out of his unlimited funds to butcher Darcy and her family in North Carolina, he’s contracted another killer to terrorize Laurie. Rivers vowed to destroy Darcy and everyone close to her. He means to keep his promise.
Jennifer never hides her disdain for being in Georgia. As they wheel the shopping cart through the store, Jennifer keeps hissing at Darcy as though there’s a leak in the heating vents.
“You’ll have high blood pressure before you’re twenty,” Darcy says, grabbing a head of lettuce off the shelf.
“Whatever. Why did we come here? If Laurie is in trouble, she should call the police.”
“We’re family, and family supports each other. Besides, there are no police out here. Only the county sheriff, and he’s way up the road in a town called Millport.”
“Sounds more like a disgusting whole grain bread than a real town.”
Not that it matters if the authorities don’t take the danger seriously. Had the Genoa Cove PD reacted sooner, Amy Yang would still be alive, and Hunter and Jennifer wouldn’t have experienced a night of horror, courtesy of the Full Moon Killer’s henchmen. She pictures Amy’s body strewn on the shore of Darkwater Cove, her throat sliced open by the murderer’s knife and the smiley face branded on her neck.
When Darcy turns the cart down the beverages aisle, she catches a reflection in the glass. Painted ghost-like over the beer containers is a large, bearded man with his belly rolling out of his red flannel shirt and over his jeans. A fine line exists between paranoia and awareness of her surroundings, and Darcy has learned to detect people following her. Jennifer, unaware of the man, slides the glass door open. A cool breath of wintry air puffs out as Jennifer grabs a six pack of bottled soda. When she bends over and slides the soda into the bottom of the cart, the man leers at Jennifer from behind and makes a hungry sound in his throat.
“Let’s go,” Darcy says, wishing Agent Hensel and her son, Hunter, weren’t across town at the outdoor and camping store. She appreciates Hensel taking a week of annual leave from the FBI to watch her family’s back in Scarlet River but doesn’t understand why the FBI won’t send a team here.
“What’s the matter?” Jennifer asks as Darcy locks elbows with her daughter and nudges her forward.
Darcy wants to tell Jennifer not to turn around. It’s too late. A six pack of beer dangling from his hand, the man follows them around the corner into another aisle like a hungry dog trailing a cart of raw meat.
Jennifer spins around and picks up her pace, Darcy relieved her daughter doesn’t fire a scathing remark at the man. After they turn down the bread aisle, the man appears behind the display case of hamburger buns. Darcy snatches a loaf of oat bread off the shelf and tosses it into the cart. The wheels squeak and wobble as Darcy pushes faster.
The man materializes in the canned goods aisle while Darcy loads the cart with soups.
“Who’s the creep?” Jennifer asks a little too loudly.
Darcy cranes her head and searches for a store manager.
“Don’t look at him. He won’t hurt us inside the store. And keep your voice down.”
Darcy worries what will happen after they pay for their groceries and wheel the cart into the parking lot. Passing the customer service desk, she searches for a friendly face behind the counter and instead finds a sullen woman stacking returns in a disorganized pile.
Shooting a look over her shoulder, Darcy grabs her phone. When she finds Hensel’s number, the man blends into the crowd until it swallows him. The cashier, a boy with a pink and red landscape of acne across his forehead, rings them up and stuffs their food into brittle paper bags that will rip before Darcy gets them inside Laurie’s farmhouse. The boy’s face colors when he glances at Jennifer, and he avoids eye contact while he fumbles with the bags and wrestles them into the cart.
Outside, Darcy dodges a muscle car of teens speeding through the parking lot. The Prius blinks its lights when she presses the key fob. Unlocking the trunk, she helps Jennifer load the bags inside. But as Darcy rounds the car and opens her door, she sees the man staring at them through the windshield of a red SUV.
Before she slides inside, the man climbs out of the SUV. He’s walking toward the Prius, and there can be no mistake in his arrow-straight trajectory that he’s coming at Darcy. A young worker pushing a train of shopping carts blocks Darcy from fleeing. Jennifer, who spies the man in the mirror, swivels on the seat and urges her mother to get in the car.
To the man’s surprise, Darcy walks right at him. With a van between Darcy and the Prius, Jennifer can’t see what her mother intends. And Darcy wants it this way.