He made to scramble to his feet, but again, his movements hitched in sudden pause. His lips parted in a quiet intake of air as a new photo winked up at him from among the pile he’d studied so closely. In it, Jeffrey Halcomb stood in the front yard with Congressman Snow’s house to his back. One arm was looped around a brunette’s shoulders, her long hair hanging around her face like silken drapes. His other arm was around Audra. Lucas narrowed his eyes and plucked the photo off the floor, bringing it in closer to his face to study the dark-haired woman. At first it had looked like Georgia, but something about her face was wrong.
That was when he saw it, that large ornate cross given to Lucas at the prison. The cross he’d shoved into one of his desk drawers, too frustrated with a lack of answers to keep it in sight. The artifact was half-hidden behind the lapel of the woman’s shirt. Lucas brought the photo in even closer, squinting at the decoration that looked hand-painted and too big to wear.
He flipped the photo over.
Eloise, Jeff, and Jeanie.
His entire body went numb.
Lucas dropped the photo as quickly as he’d have dropped a lit match lapping at his fingers. It landed faceup. Jeff’s grin was now wider than before, beaming in malicious triumph. Echo smiled out at him, the cross around her neck winking in the sun. But he hardly noticed the change in Echo and Jeff, his eyes currently fixed on Audra’s face, her stick-straight hair now a halo of loose blond curls, her plain-Jane looks replaced by his daughter’s face. His girl. His Virginia.
“Oh my God . . .” The words came in a gasping rush.
He forced himself to his feet, pushed across the room, and without allowing himself the time to hesitate, pulled open the door.
In the living room, Audra Snow’s things were gone. So was the dark figure that had stood in the corner. But Lucas knew Jeffrey Halcomb was still there.
After all, Jeff had come home.
50
Monday, October 11, 1982
Five Months, Three Days Before the Sacrament
THERE ARE FEW times in life when a person genuinely doesn’t know how they arrived at their destination, when the journey has become so snared and twisted with lies that an individual can’t tell left from right. Audra had thought about leaving, had seriously considered grabbing Shadow, getting in her car, and driving to the hospital, where she’d tell them everything. The family. The pregnancy. The way she’d been made to slit Claire’s throat, only to leave Claire and her dead husband behind in their picturesque beach home. But they were watching her. Her screams at the scene of the crime had awakened their sleeping suspicion.
She was no longer Avis. Now she was nothing more than a threat.
Kenzie kept a constant vigil when it came to the news, watching for any information about Richard and Claire Stephenson’s murders. Pier Pointe police were stumped. The locals were in an uproar. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in their town. Audra hoped her father would catch wind of the crime and drive down, or at least call. But of course he didn’t. And so she remained trapped within her own home.
She had cried for the enemy, for people who had threatened her life and the freedom of her most cherished comrades. She was too weak to receive the blissful euphoria that Deacon had described eight months earlier. She understood now that to achieve that bliss, she had to lose herself. To gain that happiness, she had to give herself to Jeff beyond any sort of trust she knew.
They called it faith, but they really meant surrender.
But she couldn’t surrender, not with a baby on the way. She couldn’t shake what she’d seen, what she’d done. Claire Stephenson’s screams continued to reverberate within her skull. The way the blood spurted from Richard’s throat played itself over and over again inside her head. Even if Audra somehow made it to the police, her confession would implicate her in a double homicide. If she got to the hospital, they’d pull her records, see the suicide attempts. The mania. The endless list of medications. The fact that she was living in Pier Pointe despite her primary-care physician’s suggestion to stay close to family. Stay in Seattle, he had said. I know you and your folks have differences, but in case of an emergency . . . in case you need them on short notice. Family is always good to have.
Family.
Yes, family was always good.
Except it was pointless to think about escape. Her car was gone. She didn’t know what they had done with it. Maybe it was parked down the road, just out of view. Or it could have been all the way at Maggie’s house—Maggie, no longer her friend. Now Maggie was nothing more than another one of her captors. They could think that Audra had betrayed them with her sympathy for Claire and Richard, but it was they who had betrayed her. Maggie was supposed to be her best friend. Audra had trusted Deacon to protect her, had believed that Jeffrey would love her. But now, rather than peace and laughter and unconditional love, there was a sentry watching her every move. Whoever Jeff assigned to the job was told to act like nothing was wrong, like they were only there to help. They wanted to make sure the shock of what had happened at the beach house hadn’t hurt the baby.
But Audra knew better.
They were waiting for her to run.
Or to hang herself from the shower rod.
Or to leap from the window to the stone-dappled flower bed below.
If they cared about the baby, they would have let her go see a doctor to make sure everything was on track. They would have allowed her to take the prenatal vitamins she knew she needed, ones that—when she had brought it to Jeffrey’s attention—he had said were poison, manufactured by the enemy. His child would not be made impure by those toxins. He would not allow his baby to be infected by “the man” even before it left its mother’s womb.
Even if Audra did somehow make it to the hospital, Jeff would claim her. He would lie. He’d tell the nurses that she was unstable, that she’d stopped taking her medication because she was pregnant, terrified of birth defects. And now she was going out of her ever-loving mind. She was a loose cannon. A crazy person. If he could only take her home and get some food in her, she could sleep off the temporary hysteria. It would be fine. This sort of thing had happened before.
And the nurses would believe him. Charmed by his beautiful smile and his chocolate-brown eyes, they’d swoon as he batted his eyelashes.
My God, isn’t he gorgeous?
Isn’t she lucky?
What a beautiful baby that’s going to be.
Shame that she’s such a crackpot.
Yeah, a shame that she’s so crazy.
If I had a chance with a hunk like him, I’d do just about anything.
Anything at all.
And they would have. Just like Audra.
51
VIVI JUMPED WHEN a door slammed down the hall, her fingers drifting off the coin she was using as a makeshift Ouija board planchette. Her dad had asked for both her and Echo to keep their doors open and the upstairs lights on—and while Echo had snuck into Vivi’s room for a few minutes to get the scoop on what had happened with the house, she quickly retired to the guest bedroom, giving Vivi the solitude to do what needed to be done. Vivi knew the Maxima had never been taken. It was as though the world had suffered a computer glitch. The car had gone momentarily invisible. She’d seen The Matrix and read enough books on the paranormal to know that some people believed ghosts were exactly that: a hiccup in the system. Which meant there had to be a system. Perhaps that was the problem with this house—maybe it was sitting in some dead zone. But instead of a cell phone signal, all the regular energy that made reality what it was had gotten scrambled up somehow.