Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake #4)(36)

“The good thing is that since we’re going to be looking for Olly, we get to sweep that compound of theirs pretty thoroughly. That should set them on their heels a bit.” Prester looks grim. He knows better than me how dangerous this could be. “You need to be real careful, Gwen. I don’t like this. None of it.”

I don’t either. I take my family home, to a house I’m no longer sure is really safe. It’s a very short night. I try to talk to Lanny, but she seems too exhausted and distraught, and I feel like a bad mom for keeping her awake. There’ll be time.

I don’t sleep at all.





11

GWEN

Our escape is the case of Remy Landry.

We leave Stillhouse Lake in the morning, all of us, and head for Louisiana. It’s a good eleven-hour drive heading south by southwest. We take the SUV, which at least allows us to ride in relative comfort, and I admit I feel a sense of existential relief putting our home in the rearview right now. Too much trouble.

Leaving it behind feels like freedom, even though I know that’s a temporary relief; regardless of what happens while we travel, we’ll come back to the Belldenes, who must be mad as a nest of poked hornets by now that my daughter is the main witness against one of their own. They wanted us gone, and I’m willing to make them happy on that front. But I’m not going to ask my child to lie for them.

The chill of the morning morphs into rain before we hit Mississippi, but the temperature rises along with it. Sam drives, and I sleep as much as I can before I call ahead to Remy’s father. No answer, I get voice mail. I explain to him that I will be coming into town and would like a meeting to talk about his son. I leave my phone number and the address of the place we’ll be staying, since I booked ahead.

We’re all tired and cranky by the time we arrive.

Remy’s hometown isn’t anything much—a wide spot in the road, basically, with a few thousand residents, the usual Dairy Queen and Sonic and truck stops. A few Cajun restaurants, all brightly lit with neon signs.

We slide into the motel pretty close to 10:00 p.m., and I have a flashback of all the cheap wayside inns I’ve stayed at these past few years, as the kids and I fled from one compromised home to another. I stayed at even more with Sam as we went on the hunt for Melvin. It’s strange how simultaneously depressed and nostalgic I feel about motels in general.

I deliberately chose something nicer this trip. Clean, well lit, relatively modern if not fancy. J. B. probably would have paid for something really upscale, but I’m more comfortable here, and it’s the best place that’s close-ish to the Landry family home. I haven’t gotten a call back yet, but I’m hoping Joe Landry will reach out in the morning. If not, I’m prepared to doorstep him. For tonight, we pile into our rooms—one for me and Sam, one for Lanny and Connor, though Lanny’s already making mutinous noises about wanting her own room and why does she have to share a bathroom anyway. But they’re okay. She’s relieved, I think, to be away from Stillhouse Lake right now. So is Connor.

Sam and I settle in, but I find I’m restless in the heavy humidity. I can’t get comfortable. I give up and coax a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the room—the results are surprisingly good—and open up my laptop to check messages.

There are quite a few, which is odd. I’ve put in certain keyword filters, so anything that contains rape or fuck or kill goes into a folder called RADIOACTIVE unless it’s from someone I already know. But these have bypassed that filter setup. They’re all from anonymous accounts, most just strings of numbers.

The message contents are nothing but pictures.

It takes a lot to shock me these days, to be honest. I’ve seen gruesome crime scenes, in real life and in vividly colored high-resolution photographs. I’ve seen mutilations and violations and so much more; a lot of it has been forced on me through accounts just like these, designed to horrify and incite terror.

But these are still disturbing. One’s a crime scene photo—God knows from where—in saturated color so the blood is a distinctively bright hue. A woman lies on the ground. She’s got no face, just a ragged mashed hole where it ought to be. One eye lies on the ground next to her. It’s a cloudy brown.

The caption on the picture says Soon, bitch.

I brace myself for the next message. And the next. And the next. It’s all bad, but some stand out. One’s a direct death threat against Sam. I put that one aside. I linger, horrified, over threats to both my children. There have always been assholes who fixate on me. But threatening to rape and murder my children just to make me feel the pain is beyond monstrous. They don’t care about Lanny and Connor; to these sick bastards my kids are just flesh dolls they can rip apart for effect. It makes me rage inside, and shake with fear, which is what they want. I know that and still can’t help it.

I tell myself this is normal, that panic comes in waves and it’ll subside again soon . . . but even if it does, this avenue of attack never closes. There’s always someone new stumbling upon a message board, a thread, a call for action. They feel powerless. It makes them happy to lash out.

The internet enables and organizes hate very effectively; it lets people believe they’re righteous warriors for justice when in reality they’re just clicking keys. All the emotional hit of adrenaline, none of the risk. Most of them will never do anything else; one shot, and they’re gone.