Hide (Detective Harriet Foster #1)(18)

There it stood. The two-level, white-shingled nightmare with attached garage and asphalt driveway. The American flag flying from a pole on the front porch was new. Tom Morgan hadn’t been the patriotic type as far as Bodie could recall. In fact, Bodie couldn’t remember that he’d been at all fervent about anything, except his compulsion to kill young women with red hair and blue eyes. That was Tom’s sin, but it was his and Am’s blood curse. Their father was a killer. Their basement was his killing field, and they’d known it since the age of twelve, when they’d found the basement door unpadlocked and wandered downstairs to find what remained of someone’s daughter. Bodie had wet himself. Amelia had been brave, stoic. Neither of them had opened their mouths about what they’d seen, not to the police or a school counselor, not to a priest or a neighbor. Tom Morgan’s infection of evil had become their shame, their secret, their family legacy.

Thank God he was dead, Bodie thought. He had to be. Bodie hadn’t heard a single thing from him in almost fifteen years, and he fantasized about a painful death, a true reckoning. The man had deserved no less. One thing was certain: if Tom Morgan were still alive, still here, Bodie wouldn’t be. He couldn’t imagine coming anywhere near this place if Tom Morgan still walked the earth. Even now, though, as he neared the house—as his reluctant feet slapped against the concrete sidewalk, as he stirred up fallen leaves in his path, his eyes boring into the shingles—he had the very eerie sense that his father’s eyes were tracking him.

Staring up at the second-floor windows, one looking out from his old bedroom and the other from Amelia’s, he was back there again, in the basement, staring into the stillest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen. This was where it all started, or was it more accurate to say ended? This was where he could have become something different and had that chance stolen from him. This was where he’d been changed.

“Help you?”

He reeled to find a man standing at the garage in a flannel jacket and skull cap. He was holding an old rake. Bodie had been so haunted by the house, so drawn in, that he hadn’t noticed that the garage door was up or that there were garbage bags of raked-up leaves sitting on the driveway. The man looked to be in his midfifties. This was his house now, obviously. For a moment, Bodie stared at him. Did the man have any idea what he’d inherited? Bodie doubted it.

He smiled. It was the smile he’d seen his father give a million times—warm, friendly, fake, well-practiced. “Sorry,” Bodie said. “I used to live here as a kid. I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d come take a look.”

“A walk down memory lane, that it?” The man tossed down the rake and leaned down for a plastic garbage bag. “When’s the last time you saw it?”

Bodie scanned the house’s exterior again. “Almost fifteen years.” He pointed at the upstairs window on the left. “That was my room. That old hickory tree still in the back?”

“It’s partly to blame for me being out here. I hit the back this morning. Perks of home ownership, right?”

Bodie chuckled. “Right. How long you been here?”

“Me and the family moved in about ten years ago. It’s a great neighborhood. Not so busy. The neighbors keep to themselves.” He gave Bodie a playful wink. “And the school’s just up the way, but you’d know all that.”

He knew about the quiet neighbors. “I went to that school,” Bodie said.

“What’s your name?” the man asked.

“Dan. Dan Flynn.” The lie rolled off his tongue easily, but he doubted the man would check the house’s provenance to see if any Flynns showed up in the search.

“Frank Gibson.” Gibson gave him a good long look. Bodie was clean shaven, neat, nicely dressed. He didn’t look like a thief or a criminal. He looked normal, like someone the man would know and have a beer with. Safe. “You want to take a quick look inside? For old times’ sake?”

The thought alone made Bodie tense. Though the smile hid most of his unease, inside his head a Klaxon sounded. Seeing the house again was one thing, but he absolutely couldn’t step inside. “No. Thanks,” he said. “I remember it. Besides, what’s that they say? You can’t go home again?”

Bodie noted that there were flouncy yellow curtains hanging in his old room instead of the blue ones with stripes that he remembered having. He’d stood in that room on his last day, waiting for Tom Morgan to start the car. All Bodie had wanted to do was go. He and Am had lived with their basement discovery six years by that point without either of them talking about it. He couldn’t fathom now how they’d accomplished such a thing, how they’d managed to appear normal, act normal, say nothing, and continue to live in the same house with a murderer. The world beyond his room had felt like a giant trap. What if he slipped up? What if he told? Worse yet, what would he become if he didn’t?

That last day here, Tom Morgan stared at him with his warm brown eyes, not the cold ones Bodie had seen when Tom had discovered them in his private place, the ones that held not an ounce of humanity, the ones he feared at night. He’d wondered often which eyes his father’s victims saw when they realized they were going to die. Were they still alive when he disemboweled them or cut their hands from their wrists or their feet from their ankles? Some monsters didn’t look like monsters. No one would ever imagine the personable CPA who helped with homework and took his daughter to ballet class on Saturday mornings held such darkness, such a twisted soul.