The Dead and the Dark(77)

Logan blinked out the front windshield. The road was narrower than the highway she remembered. The trees closed in like a tunnel, headlights cutting through the filmy dark. She’d driven into the city with Brandon once and it hadn’t looked like this. “Sure, I guess. How long was I out?”

“Only about fifteen minutes. Are you feeling okay?”

“Uh, yeah. I’m fine,” she lied. She wasn’t okay, but she hadn’t been in a long time. “Did you arrest the guys who did it?”

Paris gave her a thin-lipped smile through the rearview mirror. “John’s at home. He’ll be getting a talk when I get back.”

Logan swallowed. “Like, a parent talk or a police talk?”

“You’re funny,” Paris said.

Logan was no expert on the law, but she was fairly certain she’d just been the victim of a verifiable crime. The kind that people went to prison for on TV. Instead of arresting everyone involved, Paris had just sent them all home. All but her. Paris hadn’t called an ambulance. She shrank into the back seat and clutched the seatbelt.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened,” Paris said. “From the beginning.”

“Okay.” Logan cleared her throat. “Me and Ashley were at the lake, just talking. Then John and Paul showed up and—”

Paris shook his head. “Before that. John says he saw you two at the graveyard. What were you doing there?”

Logan narrowed her eyes.

“There were shovels against the fence. I found one of the graves partially dug up. Did you two find anything?”

Logan peered into the front seat. Paris’s knuckles were a sickly yellow with bruising, and red welts like claw marks tracked all the way up his forearm. On his ring finger, a puckered indent was purple where a wedding ring should have been. He kept his eyes trained forward on the road, but his stare was miles long. She shook off the swelling sense of dread that curdled in her chest and focused on breathing. “We weren’t at the graveyard.”

“Huh.” Paris turned the cruiser along the curve of the road. It skidded off of pavement and onto gravel. “Do you know what prompted the attack?”

“No.”

“You have no idea?”

Logan cleared her throat. “I was at the Chokecherry earlier today and John threatened me…”

“Gotcha.”

Logan swallowed again. Between the scratches on Paris’s arms, there were red half-moons like fingernail indents. His thousand-mile stare was fixed on her now, and she understood. The truth was a slow thing, but the fog was burning away second by second. Logan met Paris’s eyes and there was nothing there. He smiled, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing.

She’d seen a face like that before in her dreams. She’d seen it behind Brandon’s spectacles, piercing and cold and empty. She could taste her heartbeat.

“You’re sure this is the way to the hospital?” Logan asked. “It seems pretty dark for the highway.”

“Yep. Almost there.”

This was not the way to the hospital. Logan had driven on this road before. She’d seen these trees at night. She’d seen the black hills across the lake, the blips of campfire, the scratches of road on the distant shore. This was the way around the lake.

Paris was taking her to the cabin.

It was him.

He was the killer.

Paris leaned back in his seat. “You’ve been through a lot since you got to Snakebite. Can’t be easy coming here, where things are so different from the big city. We’ve got good hearts, but we keep things traditional. Maybe that’s a bad thing—I don’t know—but it must be hard on you.”

Logan could only stare at his hands. They looked strong enough to choke the life out of her like they’d done to all the others. Maybe that was why he was taking her to the cabin: to kill her. She kept her arms at her sides to hide her shaking. She was going to throw up.

“You probably think I’m backward, or that I hate gays. I’m not like that, Logan. I never had a problem with your dads. It hurt me to see all that hate just as much as it hurt them. Alejo and me were always good friends, and I never had a problem with Brandon. The two of them always kept to themselves. To see people accusing them of crimes we both know they didn’t commit … it’s a shame. I really wanted to keep your family out of this.” Paris sighed. “But I think you’ve figured out by now that the three of you are always gonna be connected to all this.”

“What do you mean?” Logan asked, voice shaking.

Paris arched a brow. “You still cold? You’re shaking.”

“A little.”

Paris reached into his passenger seat and handed her a towel. Logan wrung out her hair and covered her face with the towel. She counted her breaths to keep from panicking. There had to be a way out of this car, off of this road, back to safety. She patted her back pocket for her phone, but it was gone.

Paris gave a low hmm and looked at her in the rearview mirror. Suddenly, his expression changed and he shook his head. “Looking for your phone? I’ve got it up here.”

“Can I have it back?”

“No, I don’t think so.” He let out a disappointed sigh. “Wouldn’t matter much. There’s no service out here.”

Logan blinked. Her heart climbed up her throat. Somewhere, miles away, she hoped Ashley was looking for her. She hoped someone was looking for her. There had to be a way to tell them where she was. Who she was with. What he’d done.