Wolfhunter River (Stillhouse Lake #3)(27)

“Sam . . .” I don’t know whether to tell him I’m sorry or not. I don’t know if he’s sorry. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it’s something that will help him deal with old wounds. “Sam, maybe you should stop. We don’t know who sent this.”

He’s not listening to me. He’s reading, and he laughs a little. “God, she’s bad at this. She skips weeks at a time, then writes a long thing about her dinner. Two more weeks, and she talks about a job interview.” He turns more pages, reads, looks up at me. Tears in his eyes. “She writes about the first time we did the video call. I was such an idiot. I acted like it was no big deal, finding her. I should have—”

“Please don’t, Sam.”

“But it hurt her,” he says. He sits down in the nearest office chair: mine. “Jesus. I didn’t realize how much it hurt her to think I didn’t care. I made her cry, Gwen. Over nothing. Because I wanted to play it cool.”

I go to him. Put my hands on his shoulders. Kiss the top of his head. “But you both got past that. Didn’t you?” I feel awful inside, listening to this. He’s thinking at the moment only of his sister, and her life. I’m already thinking about her death, and how it happened in my house. How my husband was to blame. These two dead people are always between us.

He takes a deep breath and lets it out, then turns more pages. He reads in silence, and I stay with him, because I know this is something he doesn’t want to do alone. “Yeah,” he eventually says. “We got past it. We were friends.” He stops on a page. It’s written in a looping, feminine hand in purple ink. Bold, confident, happy writing. “Shit. This . . . this is the last time we talked. She was going to write me a letter. I never got one. Gwen . . . he took her away just four days after she wrote this.”

I have a premonition suddenly, and I want to grab the book out of his hands. I want to stop him here, in this place, sad as it is.

But I don’t, and he turns to the next page.

Same purple ink.

Very different handwriting.

Sam’s whole body jerks, a shock like someone has hooked him up to electrodes, and I recognize the writing in the same instant.

One second too late.

“It’s him,” he says. I know that. I’ve just understood what’s happening, whose writing this is. Sam’s voice is different now. Low. Harsh. Blank of emotion, but that’s coming—it’s coming in a horrible, violent wave next because I can already feel the shock running through him. And through myself. “Oh Jesus. He wrote this. In her diary.”

“Don’t,” I tell him, and I grab for the book like I should have before. He turns away, staring at the pages. “Sam! You can’t! He meant for you to do this!”

Melvin loved gaslighting. Loved games. I don’t know how he’s doing this, but I can guess: he had accomplices hold things for him, and gave them orders on which to mail out, to whom, and when.

That is what he was like; he’d have planned ways to hurt and control us even from his grave.

The only way to win this game is to walk away. But I know Sam can’t help himself. He needs this. He hasn’t been through this. He thinks he needs to know.

It’s self-inflicted torture.

“Go,” he tells me.

“No. I want to stay with you.”

“I know. But . . . I can’t do this with you here. Please. Go.”

“I’m asking you not to read it,” I tell him. “Sam . . . you’ll only let him hurt you. You understand that.”

“I know,” he says, and turns to look at me. I want to take this pain away from him. But I can’t. “Please go.”

So I do. I leave the office. I shut the door behind me. I leave him to suffer in the hell that Melvin has created in that journal, because I can’t follow.

But I am going to find the asshole who sent this to him. Richmond, Virginia, might seem like a big place to hide, but not when I’m done. I will find out who Melvin trusted to deliver his bitter gifts.

And I will stop it.

I put on a too-bright smile for Connor, and together we finish up the rice, dress the salad with the handmade sweet Asian vinaigrette, put plates on the table, get drinks. I pour wine for me and Sam, and Connor gets water, as he usually does. Lanny hasn’t come out of her room. I go and knock; she’s out in a few more minutes, and an almost perfect replica of her usual self.

Almost.

She picks water as her beverage, and as we sit down, she says, “Where’s Sam?”

“He’s coming,” I tell her. I hope that’s true. I dish out the rice and the thickly sauced chicken; it smells amazing, but I have no appetite. My stomach is in knots. I keep staring at the hallway as I fill up Sam’s plate. We wait for another minute or two. The kids are looking longingly at their food, fidgeting. “You guys go ahead. I’ll get him.”

They dig in before I’m up from the table. I walk down the hall to the closed office door.

I rest my fingers on the knob for a long few seconds before I turn it and look in.

Sam’s sitting with his back to me. The journal is lying on my desk, closed now. He says, in an unnaturally flat voice, “I’ll be there in a minute, Gwen.”

No point in asking if he’s okay. I just close the door and go back to the table, and when Connor asks me where Sam is, I smile a little and say he’s on a call. The kids talk about what they want to do this weekend. Connor’s up for another trip to the town library, which he loves; Lanny wants to see a movie, and there’s some kind of house party across the lake that they’re definitely not going to attend. I don’t want to scare them, to crush this fragile normality they’ve achieved. But I don’t know what else I can do if they’re to stay safe. It feels like we’re standing in a small, warm spotlight, but the darkness is closing in all around us to swallow us up.