“Be faithful to death, and I will give you the crown of life.”
—The Book of Revelation, 2:10
24
JEANIE REFUSED TO come down for dinner. She was still angry about the house, and Lucas had turned around and made it worse during Echo’s visit by pushing her out of the way. I’m really good at this single-parent stuff. He did the only thing he could think of—ordered pizza and left it on the kitchen island for his kid. Like a runaway with a single sandwich, hunger would wear her down. When it did, he didn’t want her to have to scavenge for a meal. Certainly, she wouldn’t ask him to get something to eat with her, not in her state of animosity.
He spent the rest of the day in his study. His newfound information on January Moore enlivened his hope that maybe, possibly, there was still some life in this project. Perhaps, if he waited it out the way Echo had suggested, more hope would come.
By the time something jarred Lucas from the glow of his computer screen, it was well after dark. It hadn’t been a sound—more of a feeling that he should have heard something. Then the moment was lost, but the cool shiver of air held enough whisper to draw his attention away from his work. This time, however, he wouldn’t get out of his seat. Not until he had lined up at least a thousand words, one after the other—even if it was just transcribing his and Maury’s call to the best of his recollection. At least, that’s what he had promised himself.
That was before his gaze paused on the pictures pushpinned to the corkboard.
Lucas leaned forward, pressing his chest against his desk to get a better look.
Chloe Sears’s photograph hung upside down.
Chloe wasn’t an overly attractive girl. In every picture he’d ever seen of her, she looked dead-eyed, stoned. Her mouth was perpetually open, if only a little bit. Her wide, flat nose gave her face a strange, cubist look; a personified Picasso, where no facial feature was in the right spot.
Within the past few days, he had stared at that corkboard for hours. He’d paced back and forth in front of it, chewed away half his fingernails while inspecting computer printouts and news articles. Chloe had been right side up. Of that he was sure.
He broke his promise, got out of his seat, and stepped across the study to the board. Had Jeanie not closed herself up in her room all night, she could have been the culprit.
Lucas furrowed his eyebrows and pinned Chloe right side up.
Chloe had been twenty-three years old the day she died. Her parents had described her as “fiercely independent” in a blip of an article appearing in The Denver Post after police identified her as one of Halcomb’s devout. To them, she hadn’t seemed like the type of girl susceptible to the charms of a weird guy traipsing up and down the Pacific coast. She had vanished from her Denver-based home in early 1979, but because she had just turned eighteen, the police refused to take the disappearance seriously. That, and the Sears’s track record of domestic disputes didn’t bode well for finding the missing girl. Chloe’s brother, Chris, had a habit of threatening his parents. Chloe’s mother was a drinker, and her father had a chronic case of apathy. After police discovered Chloe to be one of the nine dead in Pier Pointe, her younger sister, Callie, revealed that her deceased sibling had had a mean streak. Chloe had attempted to talk her little sister into joining Halcomb’s group in early 1982, only a few months before they set up camp in the forests of Northern California.
Lucas had attempted to reach the Sears, but Chloe’s mother had succumbed to her alcoholism and died in 1995 of sclerosis of the liver. Chris Sears was in jail on multiple charges of rape and burglary. He wasn’t interested in talking to anyone about his sibling unless there was money involved; and Lucas didn’t have any to spare. He couldn’t find Callie anywhere. And while Chloe’s father still lived in the same house, when Lucas reached out to him, the cranky octogenarian called him “a gossip-mongering piece of shit” before damning him back to the worthless column or newspaper or wherever it was he had come from.
Every one of Halcomb’s kids had a similar story to Chloe’s—and every lead Lucas had followed resulted in his getting shut down. Halcomb’s Faithful came from broken homes, were looking for a place to belong, and Jeff had a knack for making the unwanted feel special. He was an expert at saying the right thing at the right time. Charming and conniving, he stated the obvious in ways that made him look wise. Runaways were a disenchanted youth. Unappreciated victims of parents that not only misunderstood their children but also didn’t seem to care. Those parents knew that was the message Halcomb had been passing on to their children—kids that had taken their own lives for reasons no one understood. That kind of loss came with a lot of guilt, and guilt made people defensive. Nobody wanted to talk because everyone felt as though they were at fault . . . and perhaps in a way they were.
He peered at Chloe’s photograph for a moment more, still perplexed by its hanging upside down. Maybe he was just losing it. He didn’t remember doing so, but he very well may have removed that photo while doing his research.
Lucas ducked out of his study and glanced up the stairs. Jeanie’s door was still shut. He frowned and crossed the living room to the kitchen, his stomach rumbling at the thought of a few slices of cold pizza. But he stopped just before climbing the brick steps that would take him into the kitchen. There, hanging on the wall, was a framed family photograph, taken when Lucas and Caroline still lived in the big colonial in Port Washington. It remained Lucas’s favorite family photo, taken when Jeanie was two or three years old. The three of them sat on the brown front lawn, crispy autumn leaves surrounding them in shades of red and gold. Caroline’s dream home was behind them, out of focus but still dominating the background. He’d hung it to remind himself of what was important, to keep his motivations in check. Except that, now, he gave the picture a perplexed look. He would have passed it by without a second glance had the fucking thing not been hanging upside down. Just like Chloe.
“What the hell?” He shot another look up at the second floor. Jeanie was screwing with him. She had to be. There was no other explanation. Except that he was almost positive Jeanie hadn’t gone into his study. The nagging voice at the back of his mind refused to go away.
That photo of Chloe hadn’t been upside down, Lou. You know it hadn’t been. You’re just afraid of what it might mean.
INVESTIGATIVE INTERVIEW OF CALLIE SEARS, EXCERPT
March 24, 1983
Investigative Officer: Russell Cole, badge number 381, Pier Pointe, Washington, PD
Russell Cole: Did Chloe tell you she was leaving before her disappearance?
Callie Sears: She hinted at it for a long time, but she didn’t come out and say “Hey, I’m leaving tomorrow” or anything.
RC: How did she hint at it?
CS: She hated our parents. I mean, me and Chris, we have major issues with them, too, but Chloe really hated them. One time, when we were younger, she told me that she tried to poison our dad.
RC: How old were you when she told you this?
CS: I don’t know, maybe eight?
RC: That would have made Chloe eleven, correct?
CS: Yeah, but when she told me, she said that it had been a few years in the past, so maybe she was around my age when she actually tried to do it.
RC: Did she tell you how she tried to poison your father?
CS: Sure, with rat poison. She said she sprinkled it into his food.
RC: And your father ingested this food?