Shhh.
She replayed the way that figure had lifted his finger to his lips.
Don’t say a word. Don’t tell him anything.
With her back against the door, she took deep, steadying breaths. Maybe she’d just imagined it. Sure, yeah. She’d spent all night looking at those stupid pictures, reading articles about how they had all died, how Jeffrey Halcomb had convinced them to take their lives. I just imagined it, she told herself despite knowing it was impossible. Because how could she imagine so much so frequently? I just imagined it! She yelled the conviction inside her head, trying to convince herself, but it was no use. Believing that it was all in her head was just as crazy as believing she was seeing ghosts.
“Just . . . just give me a sign,” she whispered. “Just tell me you won’t hurt me and I won’t say anything.” She’d read about people being attacked by spirits. She knew all about demonic possession, about losing yourself to a world most refused to believe in. She had fantasized about knowing what was on the other side a countless number of times, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid.
But if they promised her . . . if they swore she was safe . . .
Vee swallowed against the lump that had built up in her throat as her gaze shifted toward her bed. There, on the floor beside her mattress, her laptop glowed. The image of Jeffrey Halcomb smiled up at her. And as if by magic, the panic that had been clawing at her insides began to subside.
It was his eyes. They promised to dissolve Vee’s fears. All that anxiety about her parents, about fitting in, about what was lurking in the dark . . . he’d make it go away, if only she believed.
If only she believed in herself.
If only she believed in him.
22
MORNING. LUCAS DROPPED a cardboard box onto his desk chair. For such a small container, the thing weighed a ton, packed full of papers and manila envelopes and computer printouts of articles he’d found online or in the library.
Despite the media circus that surrounded the eighties Halcomb impasse, the information that was readily available was a lot like listening to the same song on a loop. Raised by a pair of fanatical Protestants back in Veldt, Kansas, Jeff Halcomb had been seen as a prophet. When he got too bold and started messing with the young minds in town, he got the boot, courtesy of his own father. That’s when Jeff started collecting his own congregation up and down the Pacific coast. But when it came to his true motivation, nobody knew. Lucas had read the few crappy, dated biographies that existed on Jeff more than a handful of times, but they only raised more questions. The reason as to why Jeffrey Halcomb killed Audra Snow while his hard-earned adherents lay dying around him remained little more than a question mark.
Speculation had shifted from the why of the crime to that of Halcomb’s silence through the years. Some thought his refusal to speak was a simple case of him not having a compelling enough answer to such a loaded question. People expected the explanation to be mind-bending, infused with satanic worship, weird rituals, and terrifying beliefs. Except that, perhaps, Jeffrey Halcomb had been a lunatic who ended up killing those who had come to trust him most. No spooky motivation. No nightmare reasoning. Just mental illness. Maybe that was why Halcomb had never said a word about what had happened that March afternoon. It wasn’t exciting enough, and Halcomb’s narcissism wouldn’t allow for dissolving the mystery that surrounded him with an answer that didn’t live up to the hype.
Others thought that Halcomb’s silence was because of exactly that: the devil worship, the strange rituals. Halcomb refused to talk because his inspiration was somehow sacred. If he dared to speak of the event, he would give away a secret that demanded being upheld.
A lot of Lucas’s accumulated research material claimed that Halcomb’s Faithful were his only true followers. Other articles insisted no, that couldn’t possibly be the case, but it wasn’t an angle readers wanted to entertain. Back in 1983, the majority of folks cared for nothing more than to know that the crazy ones had killed themselves off and their insane leader was behind bars.
But a handful of Halcomb’s estranged believers slowly bubbled to the surface after everything had died down . . . willing to come forward after they were sure they wouldn’t be implicated in any of Halcomb’s crimes.
January Moore had been close with the deceased Georgia “Gypsy” Jansen and Chloe “Clover” Sears, and she was still out there somewhere. From hours of tracking her down on the web, Lucas had narrowed his search to either Tacoma, Washington, or Salem, Oregon. Last he could find, January was the co-owner of a novelty boutique specializing in handmade soaps and candles.
Then there was Sandra “Sandy” Gleason, whom Jeff called Sunrise. She had been as young as Shelly “Sunnie” Riordan—only fifteen—when she met Halcomb for the first time. In the only interview she ever gave, Sandy confessed that Jeff had tried to impregnate her on multiple occasions. When Sandy came to realize that Halcomb was courting her for a baby and not her charming personality, she made a break for it. She hadn’t been followed because Halcomb had since deemed her a waste of time. Lucas narrowed Sandy’s location down to somewhere in Vallejo, California, but she proved to be even more elusive than January Moore.
Back in New York, he had tried to reach out to the citizens of Veldt, Kansas, but none of them wanted to talk. Even Mira Ellison, who’d given a vivid account of what Jeffrey Halcomb had been like while still living in their hometown, refused an interview. Lucas had managed to get her on the phone, only to have the woman insist he never call her again. I don’t know any Halcomb, she’d said, then immediately hung up.
He couldn’t find anything on the Gate of Heaven, not a number or a location in Veldt. The only speck he managed to glean off his endless Google searches was that Veldt had suffered a bad fire in the spring of 1984. There was no tracking down Pastor Gregory Halcomb or his glossolalia-gifted wife, Helen. It was as though the Halcomb clan and the church they founded had simply vanished . . . and, for whatever reason, the folks of Veldt seemed too terrified to speak about where their church and its parishioners had gone.
Lucas tried to reach Trevor Donovan and Susanna Clausen-King, two other characters who had breezed in and out of Jeff Halcomb’s life after his exile from Kansas. He had circled their names in red marker on a long list of potential interviewees, but all searches resulted in dead ends. Janessa Morgan—Laura Morgan’s mother—had been an option, until her name ended up as a hit on an obituary site. Washington State congressman Terrance Snow and his wife, Susana Clairmont Snow, would have been an ideal source, but the couple had passed away in a fatal US 101 crash in 1986, just north of Olympia’s Schneider Creek.
When it came to the ghosts of Halcomb’s past, January Moore and Sandra Gleason were Lucas’s only leads.
And then there was the neon-blue sticky note he’d slapped onto his legal pad full of unanswered questions. The names “JOSH MORALES” and “EPERSON” were scribbled across it with the number for Lambert Correctional printed below. Josh—despite being a little starstruck—had made a good point: Lucas had written a book about the Black Dahlia, and he hadn’t had a killer or witnesses to interview then. A book was a book. If he had been able to pull it off a few years ago, he had a decent chance of a repeat performance.
But that was all over now. He could have worked around Halcomb, but Jeanie was altogether a different matter. She’d found him out. He couldn’t, with any semblance of a clear conscience, stay in that house any longer, even if it meant breaking his end of Halcomb’s already defunct deal.