When You See Me (Detective D.D. Warren #11)(63)

“Take me anyway.”



* * *



—

WE DON’T CLIMB INTO WALT’S truck. As Keith and I had theorized yesterday, the preferred mode of travel for the locals was the ATV trails. Walt has his four-wheeler, and we fetch our own to follow him, the subterfuge of having run out of gas no longer being necessary.

Keith doesn’t say anything as we approach our ride, still tucked in the bushes. Right before he pulls on his helmet, I stop him with a hand on his shoulder. I lean forward. This time, I find his lips all by myself. We kiss long and slow. Gentle.

It reminds me of the woods of Maine. Of being a girl again, with the sun on my cheeks and a winding deer path unspooling before me. It is promise and hope and a whisper of a future I once thought impossible.

When I finally pull back, his hand is covering my own.

“We’ll do this together,” he says, and I know exactly what he means.

Keith drives us onto Walt’s property. Most likely I should call D.D. and tell her what we have discovered and where we are going. But I feel fragile, the moment too dreamlike to survive being put into words.

I’m not alone. I have Keith. And besides, whatever we learn about Walt, about Jacob, it may still not hold any relevance for the taskforce. Maybe it’s simply another chapter in my story, which is for me to hear first.

Walt has his shotgun. It’s strapped onto the back of his ATV. It doesn’t strike me as ominous anymore. Simply a tool a paranoid microgreens grower never leaves home without.

Walt unchains the main gate, opens it long enough for us to pull out on the dirt road. He locks up behind, then mounts his four-wheeler and roars around us to take the lead. We follow him for several miles, having to weave our way around deep ruts. Then a smaller trail appears on the right, heading farther into the woods. Walt guns it and Keith does the same.

Up we climb. I think we must be somewhere in the vicinity of the two grave sites, but having cut through Walt’s property, I feel disoriented. I can’t be sure.

The wooded trail suddenly spits us out onto a newer dirt road. I recognize the pattern from the map we’d studied yesterday—the whole ATV trail system acts as a series of shortcuts, slicing straight lines through the mountains to connect road here to road there—hence the locals’ preference for moving around.

Then, in front of us: a hulking, misshapen form just now appearing in a clearing ahead.

The cabin that broke me.

The cabin that made me.

I can’t help myself; I feel as if I’ve finally come home again.



* * *



—

“WHY DIDN’T JACOB HAVE YOUR last name?” I ask Walt as we climb off our four-wheelers.

We are parked on the edge of the woods. The dilapidated structure is several hundred yards ahead in a clearing. I already know Walt will recon the area before we advance. His paranoia, I can tell, is a lifestyle.

The old man shrugs. “He was called Davies when he was a kid. But his mom and I, we never married. Just two people who shacked up for a bit. I never thought to ask what might be on the birth certificate. Or maybe he changed it later. I didn’t ask.”

“How old was he when he and his mother split?” Keith asks, removing his helmet, shaking out his hair.

“Four or five. Little guy. Could shoot, though. I taught him that.”

“After they left, you never saw them again until . . . he came back?” I ask.

“Nope.”

“Never went looking?”

“Nope.”

“He just . . . showed up. What, forty years later?” I’m not sure I believe this.

Walt looks at me. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“How did you know he was really your son?” Keith asks.

“A man always knows his own blood.”

“He’s your son,” I state without hesitation. “Having seen you both.” Then, because Walt is now unhooking the shotgun from his ATV: “Do you know how he died?”

“FBI killed him. It was on the TV.”

“The FBI didn’t kill him.”

Walt stops. He studies me for a long while. “Did you love him?” he asks, which isn’t what I was expecting at all. “Seems to me, that’s what drives most women to kill.”

“I didn’t love him. I thought he was a monster. I thought he needed to be wiped off this earth. But toward the end . . . He might have loved me a little. If monsters are capable of such a thing.”

Keith blinks his eyes at this revelation.

“Monsters can love,” Walt declares. “But that don’t change what we are.”

Keith and I fall in step behind Jacob Ness’s gun-toting father, and follow him toward the cabin.



* * *



—

MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE MIXED. The structure isn’t a house as I’d always assumed, but more like a collapsing shack. There’s a tiny wooden porch with a sagging roof and rotted floorboards. The first step up isn’t even attached anymore, but lies a few feet away, nearly lost in the tall grass.

“Who owns this?” Keith asks, eyeing the building dubiously.

Walt shrugs.

“Jacob said he had to leave because the owner wanted it back,” I speak up.

“Nah. This place has been abandoned for decades. Mountains are dotted with shacks just like it. Old family homes, long since deserted. Custom is to let ’em be. Such things can come in handy for lost hikers, hunters, whatnot.”