Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(88)

She remembers the drive now.

The mountains, low, rolling, and green, gentler and more inviting than the coastal peaks near Altamira. But within the seductive folds of their threadlike valleys, a place of nightmares had endured and thrived.

She knew the farm’s main house was still standing, but the root cellar, where the victims had been held captive and raped, had been dragged from its foundation by the FBI during their search for buried bodies.

The house was a near ruin, of course, but dark-hearted hikers regularly posted pictures of it online, pictures in which they posed with serious expressions next to crumbling walls pockmarked with satanic graffiti. The owners of the neighboring pig farm bought the land after the investigation was concluded, and while they claimed publicly they were repulsed by all the attention, the rumor was they’d give you a guided hike to the place for a small, under-the-table donation. Her father had told her years before the only reason they hadn’t shot the Savage Woods films there was because the new owners had demanded an exorbitant fee, a fact he’d relayed with a shake of the head, as if they were just bad businesspeople and not greedy profiteers.

It wasn’t quite the stuff of horror movies. It was the stuff of people who, for whatever reason, thought it would be cool to live in one.

The temptation to visit the place, if only to demystify it in her mind, plagued her for most of the drive to Asheville. But she knew she wasn’t up to such a visit alone. She never would be. Still, the urge was strong as thirst on a hot day.

She remembers how hard she gripped the steering wheel for that last leg of the journey. How she forced herself to stare at the winding highway ahead. How she kept the windows rolled down just a little so the wind could make a sound like a flag flapping on the prow of a speeding ship. A sound that drove out her thoughts.

Lilah Turlington’s favorite flower had been the calla lily. Charlotte had no trouble finding some as soon as she got to Asheville.

When she finally reached the grave site, Lilah’s story weighed more heavily on her than the others. Maybe because before her murder, Lilah Turlington, born Lisa Hilliard, had accomplished what she, Trina Pierce, now Charlotte Rowe, was just setting out to do. She had escaped her past, made a new life for herself.

The black sheep of her wealthy family, she’d changed her name after graduating from Bowdoin and moving to Asheville, probably so her new crystal-selling, Reiki-massage-practicing hippie friends wouldn’t know she was descended from a family that built and managed some of the largest oil and natural gas pipelines in North and Central America. While they weren’t married, she and Eddie were raising Lilah’s son together; he was only two years old when they left him with friends before going camping and met the Bannings on the Appalachian Trail.

If Lilah knew the identity of her son’s birth father, she never let anyone know. After her disappearance was reported, her older brother, who at that time was poised to become chief executive officer of the evil empire Lilah had fled, took custody of her son and whisked him out of the country. Either to Canada or Mexico, no one in the press was ever sure. Morton-Hilliard Corp. had projects in both countries, and a press office capable of managing far more complex scandals than a missing hippy-dippy backpacker who might have abandoned her son.

Charlotte had always envied Lilah’s little boy. Envied what she saw as his fairy-tale ending: the wealthy family whisking him off to a foreign country, protecting him from the dark repercussions of the tragedy that had befallen his mother. So different from what her father had done for her.

But it wasn’t until that sunny afternoon, sitting on a stone bench beneath the branches of an oak tree in an Asheville cemetery, that she’d realized it was Lilah Turlington who’d given her the idea to remake herself. That by turning toward her heart and away from her family’s money all those years ago, Lilah had planted a seed of hope in the mind of Trina Pierce, and the bloom was Charlotte Rowe.

Maybe this is why she’s never kept a journal. By the time she felt comfortable enough to begin, there was too much damn material to know where to start.

Now it comes to her all at once.

The sight of the pen in her frozen hand, which she’s been staring at now for who knows how long, confirms it. But she hasn’t wedged herself into this corner of Marty’s trailer to write her memoirs, only to find her voice. She’s got no plan for whatever ends up on these pages.

This is for her and only her—something between a letter and a prayer.

So she can’t begin with Lilah, or that cemetery in Asheville. She has to begin with the precise moment her nightmare began.

They didn’t plan to kill my mother, she writes. She wasn’t like the others, the ones they stalked and captured.

By the time the sun starts to outline the bottom of the window shade next to her, she’s still writing.





30

“Who’s bored?” Mona Sanchez shouts from her office.

Luke looks up from his desk. Peter Henricks, the only other deputy at the station, is tentatively raising the hand he’s not using to refill his coffee mug.

Judy Lyle, who’s both reception and dispatch, swivels in her desk chair and glares at Mona’s open office door as if a polka band just started up a set inside; it’s an expression that doesn’t quite match the Pepto-pink sweater she’s tied around her neck and draped over her back like a cape. Like many of Altamira’s senior residents, Judy’s a woman of stark contrasts, the kind who reads syrupy-sweet romance novels before bed but curses like a drunk sailor the minute someone cuts her off in traffic. Luke’s a fan.