Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(16)

He’s lying on his bed, headphones on and music audible from where I stand, but the percussive bang of the door against the wall brings him bolt upright, clawing the headphones off. He yells when he sees the gun, and I instantly lower it, but not before I see blind terror in his eyes.

It’s gone in a second, replaced by boiling fury. “Jesus, Mom! What the hell?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. My pulse is hammering perversely much faster now, responding to the adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream by the shock. My hands are shaking. I put the weapon down carefully on his dresser, ejection port up, barrel pointed away from both of us. Range rules. “Honey, I’m sorry. I thought—” I don’t want to say it out loud. I manage to drag in a trembling breath and sink down to a crouch, hands pressed to my forehead. “Oh God. You just forgot to turn it on when we left.”

I hear the music shut off in midscream, the headphones clatter to the floor. The bed creaks as Connor sits on the edge of it, looking at me. I risk a glance at him, finally. My eyes feel red and hot, though I’m not crying. I haven’t in a long time.

“The alarm? I forgot to turn it on?” He sighs and bends forward, as if he has a sore stomach. “Mom. You’ve got to stop going off the rails; you’re going to kill one of us, you know that? We’re out here in the middle of nowhere—nobody else even locks their doors!”

I don’t answer. He’s right, of course. I have overreacted, and not for the first time. I have pointed a loaded gun at my child. His anger is understandable, and so is his defensiveness.

But he hasn’t seen the pictures I get when I go through the Sicko Patrol postings.

It’s a hobby of a particular subset of online stalkers. Some of them are very good at Photoshop. They take gruesome crime scene photos and graft our faces onto victims. They alter images on child pornography so I see my daughter and son brutalized in unimaginable ways.

The one that haunts me, and I know will always haunt me, is the image of a young boy Connor’s age mutilated and left lying in a tangle of blood-soaked sheets in his own bed. That one popped up recently with a caption: God’s justice for murderers.

It’s right that Connor’s angry at me. It’s fine that he feels unfairly blamed and hemmed in by stupid, unnecessary, paranoid rules. I can’t help that. I must defend him from very real monsters.

But I can’t explain that to him. I don’t want to have to show him that world, the reality that runs like a black river underneath this one. I want him to stay in the world where a boy can collect comics and put fantasy posters on his walls and dress up like a zombie for Halloween.

I say nothing. I stand up, when my legs are capable, and pick up the gun. I walk out and shut the door quietly behind me.

Through it, my son yells, “Wait until I tell Social Services!” I think he’s joking. I hope.

I walk to the gun safe, put the Sig back in, and lock it away before I call my daughter and tell her to come home. I reset the alarm as I do. Habit.

I’ve just finished the call when I pick up the mail and carry it to the kitchen. I badly need water; my mouth has a dry, metallic taste like old blood. As I’m drinking, I sort through the circulars, charity pleas, local business mailings. I pause on something that doesn’t belong: a manila envelope with my name and address printed on the outside and a postmark from Willow Creek, Oregon. That’s my last remailing service. So whatever’s inside has followed a long, broken trail to reach me.

I don’t touch it. I open a drawer and take out a pair of blue nitrile gloves. I slip them on before I carefully, neatly slit open the top of the envelope and pull out the other one, business-size, that sits within it.

I recognize the return address in a flash and drop that envelope unopened to the counter. It isn’t a conscious decision, no more than if I’d realized I was holding a live cockroach.

The letter is from El Dorado, the prison where Mel is held waiting for his execution day. It’s been a long wait, and the lawyers tell me it’ll be at least ten years before his appeals are exhausted. And Kansas hasn’t carried out an execution for more than twenty years. So who knows when his sentence will finally be imposed. Until it is, he sits and thinks. He thinks a lot about me.

And he writes letters. There’s a pattern to them that I’ve figured out, and that is why I don’t immediately touch this one.

I stare at the envelope for a long time, and it catches me by surprise when I hear the front door open and the alarm starts beeping. Lanny’s fast fingers cancel and reset.

I don’t move from where I am, as if the envelope might attack if I don’t stare it down.

Lanny puts the keys in the potted plant and walks past me to open the fridge and pull out a bottled water, which she cracks and gulps thirstily before saying, “So, let me guess. Brain-dead Connor forgot to turn on the alarm. Again. Did you shoot him?”

I don’t answer. I don’t move. From the corner of my eye, I’m aware she’s staring at me, and that her body language shifts as she realizes what’s going on.

Before I can guess what she’s planning, my daughter grabs the envelope off the counter.

“No!” I turn on her, but it’s too late; she’s already sliding a black-painted fingernail under the flap and ripping it open, revealing pale paper inside. I reach out to snatch it away. She steps back, agile and angry.