Wolfhunter River (Stillhouse Lake #3)(87)

“Stay here,” I order, and I’m directing it at everyone, but no one listens to me. As I run for the door, I look back. Sam’s coming. And worse, so is my daughter. I slow as I come up the front steps. Vee tried to kill the last person who surprised her. I gesture for the other two to stay back, and I enforce it with a scorching look.

Sam grabs Lanny and pulls her to a halt. I proceed carefully. Slowly.

The house is worse than I’d imagined. A leaning, neglected thing, with a half-rotten porch with no railing. The front door creaks as I ease it back. The stench of old blood hits me, and I try not to gag. “Vee?” I say. “Vee, are you here? It’s Gwen.”

I look back at Sam, who’s still holding Lanny back. I point to the car. To Connor, who’s hesitating next to it. I mouth Look after them. Sam nods and goes back. No hesitation. I send him a silent thanks for not second-guessing me, and I realize that he rarely does. That’s a gift he’s been quietly giving me this whole time, and I never saw it.

I step inside. The place is dim, rank with the smell of death, and yet oddly neat. Marlene tried, I think; the carpet is worn but clean. Pictures of Vera as a little girl hang on the wall, along with a set of plaster praying hands and a simple cross.

Vera is sitting in an old rocking chair, hunched over, motionless. She’s still wearing the jail jumpsuit we saw her in before. Her hair hangs lank over her face. As my eyes adjust, I see she’s got something in her hands.

A knife.

That’s when Lanny slams breathlessly through the front door. “I’m not waiting in the car!”

Oh God. I step between the threat and Lanny. “Vee. Please put the knife down.”

I hear Lanny slide to a stop. She realizes the situation, and at least she holds back from doing anything more impulsive.

“You can’t help,” Vee says. She sounds different. When she raises her head, she looks different. The frozen lake has thawed. She looks like a girl who’s finally starting to feel something, and it’s hellish. “They killed my momma. And they’re going to kill me too. I’d already be dead except you tried to help me, and I’m sorry, I heard them talkin’, and they say you’re next. I’m sorry.” She’s crying. There are tears running down her cheeks. She’s shivering. I want to wrap her in a blanket, but I can’t; I can’t even comfort her as long as she’s holding that knife. “I was just so scared.”

“This isn’t your fault,” I tell her. “Come with us. We can help you.”

She shakes her head, and she puts the edge of that knife to her arm; it’s set to cut upward, tearing open the long artery. People bleed out quickly from that. I hear Lanny gasp. I see the skin indent from the pressure of the knife. There’s a tiny, tiny impulse that’s holding Vee back, and anything can tip things in the other direction. I don’t dare say anything.

My daughter does. “My dad was a murderer, did you know that? And they thought my mom helped him. They wanted to take her away from us forever. And”—Lanny gulps air—“I didn’t see any way out. I was twelve, and so many people hated us, Vee. So many. I just wanted . . .”

Vee hasn’t moved, but she’s listening. “Did you try?” she asks when Lanny pauses.

Please say no, I think. But my daughter says, “Yes. Once. When I was living with my grandma. I got scared after I took the pills. I threw them all up. She never knew.”

I never knew, either, and it shakes me to my core.

“You can change your mind,” Lanny says to the girl in the chair, the girl who is one-quarter of an inch away from death. “I did. You can be braver than this. You aren’t guilty. My mom wasn’t either. Look at her. She fights every day, and you can too. I believe in you, Vee.”

“Why?” Vee’s crying harder now, and it’s a quiet, wrenching wail. “Nobody else ever did.”

“Well, then, somebody should,” Lanny says. “Come on. Stay with us. Fight. Do that for your mom.”

Vee gasps. She drops the knife, and it bounces away. I quickly pick it up, and my daughter heads straight for the girl; she wraps Vee in a hug, and Vee shudders and relaxes into that embrace like it was all she ever wanted. Someone to believe, for just a moment, that she was worth saving.

“Come on,” I tell them quietly. “Vee, you’re coming with us. We’ll take you to Mr. Sparks.”

She nods listlessly. It’s like she’s back to a passive state again, but it’s not as eerie. More like relief.

We make it outside. I wipe the knife and toss it out into the weed-covered yard. Best not to have my fingerprints on anything here, or Vee’s either.

We switch around. Connor comes up front. Sam and Lanny bracket Vee in the back, in case she suddenly decides to bolt again. And I accelerate away from the house and round the next corner just as one of the Wolfhunter PD cruisers turns down the street. It doesn’t follow. It stops at the first house.

Grid search. It’s helpful right now.

Hector Sparks’s home office looks like a safe harbor. I pull up to the immaculately kept house and stop the engine. Then I turn to look at Vee Crockett. “Before we go in, I need you to tell me something, okay? What did your mother know? Because I think you do know, or you wouldn’t be so afraid they’d kill you.”

“If I say, they’ll kill all y’all,” she says. “You know that, right?”