Wolfhunter River (Stillhouse Lake #3)(40)

“Work together.”

That pleases neither of them on the outside, and both of them on the inside. Lanny rolls her eyes. Connor sighs.

I know they’ll seize the chance to do something useful for me.

Sam comes out of the office, gets back in the SUV, and moves it into place in the parking lot. The headlights shine directly on two doors: numbers five and six.

“Okay,” Sam says, and holds out a key to Lanny. Wolfhunter hasn’t progressed to modern electronic key cards; it’s an elongated plastic tab with the room number on it. “Lanny is the keeper of the key. Lose it, you both chip in for the fine. Got it?”

“We won’t lose it,” Connor says. “Why does she get the key?”

“I’m older,” she says, and takes it. “We’re in six. So you’re—”

“We’ll be in five,” he says. “Breakfast at eight a.m., okay?”

“Do we have to hunt for it out in the woods?” Lanny sighs. “Bring home a squirrel or something?”

“There’s a McDonald’s half a mile down. But if you want squirrel bacon . . .”

“Ew. No. Gross, Sam.”

We make sure the kids are stowed away, and locked in, before we take the room next door. It does have a connecting door, and I make sure it works before I can relax. At least there’s no arguing from the other side.

“Two beds,” he says. “Romance isn’t dead.” There’s nothing familiar about the room, and yet it reminds me strongly of one we shared many months back, after Melvin’s escape from prison, before things ended in the green hell of a tumbledown mansion. This one is clean, neat, utterly plain. I put my duffel bag down with my purse. Sam has tossed his bag on one of the beds, and is unzipping it to get out his toiletry kit.

I sit in the single, stiff armchair crowded in the corner next to the air conditioner. It’s just blowing out barely cool air. “Do you want me to ask?” I keep the question calm, and soft. “I won’t if you don’t.”

He freezes, and is suddenly intent on the kit he’s holding. “About what?”

“Jesus, Sam, really?” I keep my voice low. My kids are right next door, and I definitely do not want them to hear any of this. “You know exactly what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he says. It sounds grim.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I want you to ask. But I don’t.”

I stand up, take the leather bag from his hands, and put it on the bed. Then I put my hands on his cheeks. The stubble’s sharp against my palms. No space between us. “What did he write in her journal?” I swore I’d never want to know anything else about Melvin Royal, especially when he was dead and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, but Sam needs to get this out like an infection from a wound. I’ve got the name of the person who might have sent it, and we’ll put a stop to any more of Melvin’s posthumous torture.

He pulls me into an embrace, as if he wants to keep me sheltered from what he’s about to say. “He gave me the whole story,” he says. “How he abducted her. How she fought back. How he—how long she—”

My mouth goes dry, because it’s as if Melvin knows, even dead, what will hurt us most. What destroys us. “Stop,” I tell him, and turn my head so that my lips are resting on the soft skin just beneath his ear. “Sam, this is what he wanted. Did I tell you that one of the detectives who interrogated him committed suicide six months later? That’s how toxic Melvin was, like breathing nerve gas. You can’t let him inside, Sam, you can’t. Everything he wrote down could have been just his sick, lurid fantasy. We can’t know. We shouldn’t know. And I wish to God you hadn’t read it.”

I feel the breath he takes in. It’s like a hand grasping for a life preserver. “I had to,” he says. “Everything he said feels true, Gwen. If she went through that level of pain . . . I don’t know what to do about it. He’s dead. I don’t have anywhere to put this . . . sickness.”

I’d wept through the medical examiner’s testimony of each of Melvin’s victims at my own trial. I’d forced myself to listen, to know what they’d suffered at the hands of a man who sat at my kitchen table and slept in my bed and was the father of my beloved children. I’d forced myself to endure it the way their families must have. I already know what happened to Callie, and it had been bad enough then as a clinical report; I’ve never heard it in Melvin’s own emotionally predatory words. He’d revel in the details. In every word choice.

“Put it on me,” I tell Sam. “Tell me.”

We sit side by side in the blank, empty motel room, and he tries. Outside, the sky is dark over the trees, the stars blaze, and I stare at that view with tears welling up and dropping cold down my cheeks. It’s awful, listening to the quiet rage of what Sam is feeling and what Melvin did. I wish it was beyond my comprehension, but it’s so familiar. I can picture every step of it, every cut and scream and horrific detail. After he’s done talking, he’s short of breath and shaking. I wish we had drinks. I feel filthy and heavy and unspeakably sad now, but I know it was important for him to share it, and not to hold it by himself.

Despite our best intentions, Melvin is still reaching out from the grave to hurt us. And I don’t know when that will stop. That’s probably his plan, to make us dance to his tune for as long as he can. Maybe the man in Richmond is the end of it.