Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(86)

“You wanted to find Sam Cade, right?” Graham says. “I gave him a ride into the back country, up the hill from my house. Rough out there, though. He was joining up with a party that was going to work their way up. Might not be easy to catch up to him now; you sure you want to do that?”

I don’t have anywhere else to go, and I certainly can’t go back to that house, disfigured, broken, empty of those I love. I’m not dressed for the outdoors, especially not with the rain and cold, but I’m not going home. I think about calling Sam, but if he’s out on the search, he might not hear his phone in this mess.

My backpack vibrates against my foot, and for a second I can’t think why, until I remember I put the phone in there for protection against the rain. I lean forward and slip it out. The number’s blocked, but I can’t take the chance, so I answer. It’s another troll. This one’s masturbating while he tells me he’s going to tear my skin off. I hang up on him. As I do, I see that I have two texts. Both from blocked numbers.

“Anything useful?” Graham asks me.

“No. That was a pervert getting off on tormenting me,” I tell him. “That’s what it’s like, being the ex-wife of Melvin Royal. I’m not a person. I’m just a target.”

“Rough,” he says. “I’ve got to admit, you’ve got a lot of guts, the way you kept your family together and tried to move on. Couldn’t have been easy.”

“No,” I tell him. My family isn’t together. The ache of that hurts so badly it’s hard to take the next breath against it. “Not easy.”

“I’m a little surprised Prester let you keep that phone,” Graham says. “Usually they want to keep it, monitor the calls at the station. Must have some kind of trace on it, I suppose.”

“He said they cloned it. Maybe they can catch the assholes calling me.”

While I’m saying that, I check the first text. It’s from Absalom, because it has his peculiar little symbol at the end of it. It says U have a cop living close. I checked. Good resource.

That is a shock. Absalom’s standard advice is never trust a badge.

I delete it. I was hoping desperately he had good intel on my kids, but instead, it’s nothing I don’t already know. It feels like he’s checking out of our problems.

“This weather’s too hard to be out there tonight,” Graham tells me. “I’m going to turn around and go back to my house. You can stay on the couch tonight, join the search at first light. How’s that?”

“No, I need—I need to be looking, if the search party’s still out there. I’ll manage.”

Graham eyes me with a trace of a frown. “Not wearing that you won’t. Those boots are all right, but you’ll get hypothermic up there in an hour with what you have on, wet as it is. There’s a coat behind your seat. You can wear that.”

I put the phone down. I feel behind me on the floorboards and come across the silky fabric of a down jacket, one with a fur-edged hood. I pull it toward me, and as I do, the back of my hand skims over something smeared on the leather surface of the seat behind me—low, near the bottom. It feels tacky and slightly damp. I pull the coat free and dump it in my lap, and as I do, I see that my knuckles are smudged with what looks like grease. I reach for a tissue from the holder that sits in between us and wipe it off, and as I do, I think, This doesn’t feel like grease.

As my hand comes closer, I catch a dark copper scent that is utterly unmistakable. That smear on the back of my hand is not grease at all.

We’re out of Norton now, and Graham has his foot firmly on the gas, speeding faster than we should on these wet roads. The incline up to Stillhouse Lake is just a black screen with the lights firing raindrops and a gray, indistinct wash of road.

There is blood on the back of my hand.

The realization wipes me clear inside, light and clear and empty, and I think for a second or two that I might pass out from the enormity of it. Lancel Graham has blood in his SUV. And everything, everything, begins to make sense. I don’t dare let that show.

I finish wiping my hand and ball up the tissue and stick it in my jeans pocket as I say, “You sure Kyle won’t mind my taking this for a while?” It probably is his son’s jacket. It has that peculiar adolescent boy smell. “I think he spilled something back there, by the way.”

“Yeah, meant to clean that up; we hit a deer and I loaded the carcass. Dumped it off at my house on the way to the station. Sorry,” Graham says. “Listen, Kyle won’t care about the coat. Keep it as long as you need it. He’s got plenty.”

He has such a nice voice. Layered, nuanced, friendly. He’s got a ready explanation for the blood, but I don’t feel anything either way now. I’m numb inside. I’m not really here anymore. I’m just a mind, putting together puzzle pieces, all the emotion blocked the way a blood vessel will clamp down to slow the blood loss. That’s shock, I realize. I’m in shock. Fine. I can use it.

I remember him visiting the house, what seems an age ago, to return my son’s phone . . . or a phone that looked just like it. Another burner could have been programmed with everything my son’s phone contained—easy enough, since all he had in it were phone numbers and texts. It could have been cloned, just as Prester had demonstrated. The history copied over. Even the number replicated.