My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(99)

“Why?”

“Don’t I get a thank you?”

“Thank you,” she said, though uncertain of his intent.

He tossed them at her feet. When she didn’t move, he said, “Go ahead and put them on. You can’t leave dressed like that.”

“Are you letting me go?”

“I can’t keep you here anymore. Not with Calloway on my ass.”

She slid the frock he’d given her from her shoulders and stepped out of it, naked before him. He watched as she picked up her jeans and slid them on. They hung from her hips. “Guess I’ve lost some weight,” she said, her rib cage and collarbones prominent.

“You had a few to spare,” he said. “I like you skinny.”

She held up her arms. “My wrists,” she said.

He took the key from his pocket and unlocked the left manacle. She slid her arm through the sleeve of her Scully shirt and expected him to reattach the manacle. Instead, he unlocked her right wrist and let the manacles and chains fall at her feet. It was the first time in seven weeks that both her arms had been free. She slid the shirt on, snapping the buttons, fighting to remain calm.

“Where are we going to go?” she said. “We could go to California. It’s big. It would be impossible to find us.”

House walked to the shelving and shook her jade earrings and necklace from a can on the shelf. He picked up Tracy’s black Stetson, seemed to consider it a moment, and then put it back on the shelf. He handed her the jewelry. “You might as well put these back on too. No reason for me to keep them.”

She bit back tears. “You’re letting me go?”

“I knew it would always come to this.”

Tears flowed down her cheeks.

“Don’t start crying about it.”

But she couldn’t stop. She was going home. “When are we leaving?” she asked.

“Right now,” he said. “We can go now.”

“I won’t say anything,” she said. “I promise.”

“I know you won’t.” He nodded to the door. When she hesitated, he said, “Well, go ahead.”

It was all she could do to keep from running, anxious to get away, to breathe fresh air again, to see the sky, hear birds, and smell the scent of the evergreens. She took a tentative step toward the door, and looked back at him. His face was a blank mask.

Sarah took another step and thought of seeing Tracy again, and her mother and father, of waking up in her own bed, in her home. She’d tell herself that it had all been just a nightmare, a horrible nightmare. But she wouldn’t dwell on what Edmund House had done to her. She was going to get on with her life. She was going to go to school and graduate and then she’d come back to live again in Cedar Grove, just as she and Tracy had always planned. In her excitement, she did not hear him pick up the chain from the floor.

She’d reached the door when the chain wrapped tightly around her throat, strangling her. She tried to dig her fingers beneath the links, then tried to scratch his arms, but he yanked her backward with the chain, flinging her with such force he lifted her off her feet. The light through the door grew distant, as if she were falling down a darkened well. She reached for it, arms straining, and thought she saw Tracy just before the back of her head hit hard against the concrete wall.





[page]CHAPTER 64





I hated to kill her.” Edmund House had resumed his seat atop the generator box, forearms resting on his thighs as if he were tending to a campfire and telling a ghost story. “But I knew I wasn’t going to get an opportunity to get rid of her body like that again. And I wasn’t going back to prison.”

He sat up straighter. Anger crept into his voice. “I should have been in the clear. I’d planned it perfectly, bringing her here. But then Calloway made up all that bullshit evidence and got everyone on board—Finn, Vance Clark, your father. Even my uncle turned against me. So I decided, if I was going to hell for the rest of my life, I was taking Calloway with me, and I told him exactly what I’d done to her.”

House grinned. “One big problem. He wasn’t recording it. Man, I knew that would piss him off, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be used to hoist him by his own petard. How’s that for irony? When they closed the door to my cell at Walla Walla that first day, I thought that was where I’d spend the rest of my life.”

He paused, taking her in with his eyes in the way that made her sick. “And then you came to talk to me.” He started to laugh. “And the more we talked, the more I realized they’d never told you what they’d done. You told me about the jewelry, how you knew your sister hadn’t been wearing it that day, how she couldn’t wear it, but that no one would listen to you. I got to admit, you got my hopes up, but then I realized that, with her body at the bottom of a lake, I’d screwed myself. So I settled in to do my time. I guess fate took over.”

Tracy slid down the concrete wall, her legs suddenly weak. She knew who’d made the decision not to tell her. It was what DeAngelo Finn wouldn’t say, that day she had gone to visit him. It was what Roy Calloway had nearly said outside the veterinary clinic. It had been her father’s decision, and he’d made them swear to never tell her. Tracy was the one Finn was referring to, the one still left, the one her father had loved so very much.