Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(82)

It feels like half an hour before I can find words, but it can’t be more than a heartbeat, and then I scream, “Give me back my kids, you bastard!”

There’s silence on the other end of the phone. As if I’ve caught him out. As if I’m not following some kind of script. Then the synthesized voice says, any surprise stripped from the words by the algorithms that change it, “What the fuck?”

“Are they all right? If you’ve hurt my kids, you son of a bitch, I will find you, I will rip you apart—” I’m standing up now, leaning over the phone on stiffened arms, and my voice is sharp enough to cut, loud enough to shatter.

“I didn’t—uh—fuck. Shit.” The call disconnects with a crackle, and the calm musical beeps of the phone telling me it lost the signal. I sink down in the chair, grab the phone, and swipe to the caller ID. It was a blocked number, of course.

“He didn’t know,” I say. “He didn’t even know they were gone.” I should have seen this coming; my address was out in the open. Someone who got close to me leaked it, took pictures. Mel must have distributed my number, too. I can expect a torrent of calls like this: death threats, rape threats, threats to kill my children and pets, torch my house, torture my parents. I’ve been through it before. There isn’t much that shocks me anymore, in the Sicko Patrol world. I also know, as the police remind me every time I report it, that most of these sad, sick little men will never follow through on their vicious promises. Their enjoyment comes from psychological damage.

The troll didn’t hang up because he felt guilty for doing this to me. He was caught by surprise and was afraid of being swept up in a kidnapping investigation. The upside is, he won’t call back.

But there will be a thousand others in line behind him.

Kezia interrupts my thoughts by taking the phone out of my hand. She says, “I’ll answer for you until we decide how to handle this, okay?” And I nod, even if I know it’s a ploy to grab my phone as evidence. Sam averts his gaze as if he’s ashamed. I wonder if he left a few angry messages on my voice mail, back in the day. Sent me a few rage-filled e-mails from an anonymous account. He wouldn’t have done the truly sociopathic ones; his would have been stuffed with pain and real loss and justified anger.

I wish now that he’d put his name on them, that we’d been honest with each other, understood each other, seen each other from the beginning.

It doesn’t take long for the police to arrive. Things get busy. We’re ushered outside as the police thoroughly check the house and start the process of investigation. Prester arrives with another, younger detective—apart from him, they all seem too young to have any experience—and shakes his head when he sees me standing there with Kezia and Sam. The fact that Sam’s with us raises his eyebrows, and I see him recalculating things, revising all his earlier judgments and assumptions. I wonder if this puts me and Sam back in a box together as conspirators.

If it does, that would have an ugly ring of authenticity to it. We do have a past, even if I hadn’t known it. We do know each other. We do like each other now, on some level. It makes my head hurt, trying to think like Prester, but I have a notion that he’s already seeing us in a very different light.

“Tell me everything,” Prester says.

Once I start, I can’t stop.





12


I don’t want to leave the house, though I don’t want to be here, either . . . It no longer feels like our safe space, our haven. It feels spoiled, cracked open like that house back in Wichita to reveal something ugly at its center. Not Mel’s evil this time. The house is no longer a home because of the cold absence . . . the absence of the one thing that makes any kind of home for me.

I sit outside on the porch with Prester, who quizzes me and Sam in great detail, with Kezia nearby to add her confirmations as needed. I imagine the timeline he’s sketching out in his notebook. I wonder where the red star goes on it, the moment someone came into my home and ripped my heart out. He must also believe that I could have done it, but I no longer care about that. They have to be found.

I have to believe they’re okay—scared, but okay. That the blood is stage blood, or animal blood, put there to terrify me. That a ransom call will come. That anything, anything is true but what I instinctively, horribly believe.

I give Prester the cell phone numbers for my kids, and he gives them to Kezia; she comes back half an hour later to say, “The phones are off and not pinging on GPS.”

“No surprise,” he says. “Any TV-watching moron knows to ditch the damn phones these days.” He shakes his head a little and closes his notebook. “I’ve got every cop in the county out looking, Ms. Proctor, but meanwhile, I need you to tell me what happened this morning after Officer Claremont ate breakfast with you.”

“I already told you.”

“Tell me again.” His eyes are cool and remorseless, and I hate him with a clear, pointed fury in that moment, as if he’s the one holding my children, hiding them from me. “Because I need to understand exactly how this happened. After seeing the officer off, what did you do?”

“Locked the door. Reset alarms. Washed dishes. Got the call from Mel. Grabbed my shoulder holster, my gun from the safe, the box to put it in. My hoodie.”

“And did you knock on the kids’ doors? Tell them where you were going?”