From the angle of the camera, it was impossible to tell which direction they had turned as the van left the parking lot, and no amount of coaxing could jog the cashier’s memory.
Sophie had spent the next forty-five minutes canvassing the area, checking motel parking lots, restaurants, and drive-thrus, her strategy ultimately disintegrating into blind Hail Mary turns down empty side streets.
She’d finally pulled back into the gas station and parked in the spot where she now sat, staring up at the ceiling of her car as if someone had scrawled the answers there.
Sophie shut her eyes.
The rain had tapered off into drizzle again, padding softly against the windshield.
Her phone rang beside her in her passenger seat.
She grabbed it.
Not Grant.
Officer Silver.
She answered, “Hey, Bobby.”
“I’m just leaving the brownstone in Queen Anne.”
“And?”
“Nobody home.”
Sophie’s heart lurched.
“You’re sure?”
“Empty as the warm, comfy spot beside my wife where I was soundly sleeping thirty minutes ago.”
“Did you go inside?”
“No. Just banged on the front door and then peered through the windows. Lights are on downstairs but it’s a ghost town.”
Sophie exhaled.
“Thanks, Bobby. I owe you big time for tonight. Apologize to Lynette for me.”
For a long beat, all she could hear was the acceleration of Bobby’s engine bleeding through the speaker.
She said, “You there, Bobby?”
“You know I got your back, right?”
“I know that.”
“There anything you want to tell me?”
She could feel the corners of her mouth beginning to quiver, her eyes blurring with tears. In this moment, there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to tell everything.
“Sophie?”
She squeezed the phone.
Steadied her voice as best she could.
“Everything’s fine. Go home, Bobby.”
The frequency of passing cars was increasing—early commuters heading toward the interstate to beat the rush into Seattle.
It felt like years since she’d seen her last clear day, one of those rare cloudless beauties when every horizon looms with mountains and the Puget sparkles and Rainier threatens to the south like the badass stratovolcano that it is.
What had she really seen, really experienced in Paige’s brownstone?
Grant had told her some whacked-out things. He’d certainly acted crazy.
But ...
What had she actually experienced that verified a goddamn thing?
A bad dream and a power surge.
That was it.
Hadn’t seen any creepy twin girls who wanted to play forever.
No one crawling across the ceiling.
There had been the phone video from Paige’s room, but it was just that. A video.
So let’s talk about what you did see. Something you could actually write down in a report that wouldn’t get you laughed at and fired ...
—Her partner had lied to her repeatedly about his whereabouts and absence.
—When she finally found him, Grant had overpowered her, taken her gun, cuffed her to a banister.
—She’d been held against her will in what was for all intents and purposes a modern-day bordello.
—A good man had died violently more than thirty hours ago in a bathroom upstairs, and her partner, as of yet, had failed to report his death, even to his wife.
—And when the shit really hit the fan with Art and their father at the asylum, brother and sister had vanished.
Yes, things had felt off inside the house, but now, with a little distance and perspective, the cold, dispassionate facts were rising out of the mire. And when it came time to sort things out—the actions of Paige’s clients, of Paige and Grant themselves, the death of Don—it was only those facts that would matter.
You covered for them, Sophie.
Lied for them.
And maybe she would’ve continued to. Maybe she would’ve extended her partner’s credit just a little longer, given him a chance to sort things out ... but for Don.
Don overshadowed all.
Because when you stripped everything away, the simple fact of the matter was that a good man was dead. And his memory, his wife, deserved an accounting.
She scrolled through contacts.
Sorry, Grant.
Pressed dial.
It only rang once, and the voice of the woman who answered sounded a far cry from the person Sophie knew.
All she said was, “Hello?” but it carried the ragged weariness of a soul in torment.
“Rachel?”
“Yes?”
“This is Sophie Benington.”
“Are you calling about Don?”
Sophie could feel the tears coming, the emotion dislodging in the center of her chest like a giant piece of ice calving off from her berg of grief.
“I’m afraid I am.”
Chapter 41
Dawn.
They were in the clouds, moving along wet pavement, the fir trees rushing past.
Occasionally, he glimpsed a mountain—dark, wet rock, swaths of snow across the higher terrain.
There was no more rain, only mist, but it was thick enough at this elevation to keep the windshield wipers in perpetual motion.
Grant swallowed.
His ears popped.
The engine groaned, the CR-V struggling up the steepest pitch of road so far, the double yellow winding endlessly ahead of them.
His right hand was inside the blanket, as it had been for the last hour, a tiny, warm appendage gripping his pinkie finger. He stared out the window. Saw everything and nothing. A kind of dual consciousness.
All up the mountainsides, the clouds were catching in the branches of the dark, epic trees. Their sharp, clean scent so strong he could smell them through the glass.
Paige watched him in the rearview mirror. He could feel her stare. The intensity of it.
He said, “We’re almost there.”
She said, “I know.”
# # #
They turned off of Highway 2.
A gravel road shot ahead through the forest, badly overgrown, but still navigable.
Just ahead, recent tire marks made paths through the undergrowth that peaked up through the loose rock.
They rolled slowly between giant hemlocks, the CR-V tilting and swaying across the uneven ground.
Grant could feel the blanket growing hotter, the shuddering intensifying, its grip around his finger tightening.
It was a minute past six a.m.
In the narrow corridor below the trees, Paige had punched on the high beams.
After a quarter of a mile, they broke out of the forest.
He had come here once since that last family vacation when it had been the four of them. Several years ago, a case had taken him out to Nason Creek, and he’d stopped by the old homestead; driven in as far as the clearing, but he’d never shut the car off, never even gotten out. Just sat in his Crown Vic for five minutes, hands clenched around the steering wheel, knuckles blanching, as if he could steel himself against the storm he’d been fighting all of his life.
So much pain caught. So much joy missed.
And there was no better embodiment than this decrepit place.
The cabin stood in the middle of a small clearing that had become considerably less clear in the years since his last visit.
It was a log-frame house, single story, with a steeply-sloping roof of rusted tin.
The front porch was covered, and even though the light was bad, Grant could make out Vincent, Talbert, and Grazer sitting in the rocking chairs.
Paige pulled into the grass beside the black van and cut the engine.