Girl One(65)

“You’ve heard of the Homestead, sir?” I asked.

“Of course I have,” he said. “You think I’m out of touch just because I’m an old man, is that it?” He laughed, and a cautious warmth spread through me. Something about him reminded me of Dr. McCarter. He had that same good-natured self-assurance, like he could fix everything. “With Vera and Delilah living right here in town, we all tried to learn more about that place. Now what’s that you’ve got there, sweetheart?”

Isabelle let him take the dress from her. He shook it open, fabric hanging in the light of the TV screen. The bloodstain was unmistakable, blossoming dark against the soft, brittle white fabric. “Is this Vera’s dress?” he asked, his voice tightening. “Delilah’s? Good lord.”

“Like I said,” I went on, “we’re concerned that somebody who’s been chasing us found the Strouds and—and hurt them.”

“Can you give us a name? Anything?”

“No,” I said, hating how flimsy it sounded. “We don’t know exactly who’s after us.”

The men exchanged worried looks. “Can you give us a physical description?” Black Shoes pressed. “That’d be a big help.”

“He’s tall,” I said, hearing how inadequate this was. “He has brown hair, I think. He drives a maroon sedan.” And I hadn’t seen him in three days now. I was miles and miles away from the last place I’d spotted him. The stranger wavered, flickered like a phantom.

“People around here know their neighbors pretty well,” Black Shoes said. “We’re a close-knit place. Anybody from out of town would’ve stood out to us right away.”

“They sure would have,” Orange Shirt agreed. He was even younger than I’d first assumed, closer to my own age.

“When’s the last time anybody talked to the Strouds?” I asked. “Maybe that could help narrow it down.”

“That,” Black Shoes said, “is some smart thinking, young lady. We’ll have to get on that, ask around. Not sure it’ll do much good, though.”

“You said you were a close-knit town,” I said, biting down my frustration.

“Those two kept to themselves,” Black Shoes said. “It’s too bad. Maybe if they’d been friendlier, we would’ve noticed sooner. There’s a lesson there for you girls,” he said, like it’d just occurred to him. “You can’t help that you were grown in a test tube. But you can always try to be civil. You don’t have to be like Vera and Delilah.” He made eye contact with me now, steady. “You don’t have to hide away like witches in a storybook.”

Those trees, the word repeating and repeating, hewn again and again. Precise and urgent at once. A litany, an excuse, a justification. A curse and a prayer. W I T C H E S. The work of multiple people, I realized now. Dozens. There’d been too many words spread across the trees for all the writing to have come from one person. I should have recognized that the moment I saw those words ringing the clearing. It hadn’t been the work of just one man, arriving in the shelter of night. It had been a whole town.

And now Black Shoes had brought that word into the room, placed it between us like a dare.

He was watching me. It was a test. Would I swallow the word, pretend it was nothing? Would I smile and agree with him that we could be nicer, sure, of course, recognize the threat, let this go? Leave the Strouds’ fate unexamined, unmourned, and unavenged? If I said something—if I spoke up now—I wouldn’t be able to go back to my old life. I understood that, cleanly and clearly. Choosing between saying something now and letting it go would break my life in half. The freedom to leave and return to my old life, or violence.

I made my choice. “You killed them,” I said, not breaking our eye contact. “It wasn’t a stranger from out of town at all, was it? It was you.”

Saying the words aloud changed me. It reached down into me and altered the shape of who I was. The men were unsurprised; they’d understood the inevitable conclusion of this evening as soon as they had walked in. I’d been the only one in the dark, trying to play along with them.

Ignoring me, Black Shoes held out an arm to Isabelle. “You look uncomfortable over there, sweetheart. Why don’t you come closer?”

Isabelle gave me a searching look, like I was taking on the role of Patricia now, the person who could tell her what to do. But I was frozen. She moved closer, just an inch. Black Shoes shifted closer until he was next to her. His thigh nearly touched hers.

“Has it been you all along?” I asked tightly. “Have you been following us?”

“I haven’t been following anybody,” he said, a contemptuous laugh wrapped around the word. “All of us here in Kithira mind our own business. We never went looking for trouble.”

The dizziness began at the back of my skull, washing forward. Without even thinking about it, I leaned forward, stared directly into his eyes. Those small, dark pupils, little holes in the fabric of his being. I could slip a hook in there and just pull the truth out.

But the night at the motel, I’d been alone. It was a private, impulsive act, an opportunity seen and seized in the dark of night. Even the prison had offered a certain anonymity. Now I was surrounded. Two men in here, two with Tom. I wasn’t sure what the other men would do if they realized what I was, what I could do. And they were watching my every move.