The Red Hunter(59)

“She lived,” Claudia said. The words seemed to float from her lips.

“Are you alright, Mrs. Bishop?” asked Officer Williams. Her deep, black eyes were kind, concerned. Just the sight of her young, sweet face made Claudia want to weep. Again. Some more.

“I’m just—really shocked by this,” she said. She let herself sit on the top step. Raven came out to sit beside her. How much worse was this night going to get? Her life? How many shitty, wrongheaded decisions could one person make? It was one thing to be a flaky dreamer when you were young, with a million possibilities ahead. As a forty-year-old mother of a teenager, it was downright dangerous and sad.

“Seth Murphy knows all about the case if you’re interested,” said Officer Dilbert. “You’ll find him in town—or just Google him. He’s our local PI.”

“A private investigator,” she said.

“It was a long time ago, Mrs. Bishop,” said Officer Williams. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you?”

No, she didn’t believe in ghosts. The living did far more harm than the dead. After her rape, she’d found herself wondering if violence like that left its mark on you. If it opened a hole in your life where other dark things could crawl through. If after something like that you were a magnet for more ugliness. Her shrink had talked her out of that kind of thinking. And she believed, had to, that she created her life, wasn’t just a victim. But sometimes, just sometimes, when she was feeling very sorry for herself, she imagined that she’d stepped into quicksand fifteen years ago and all this time, she’d just been very slowly, a millimeter at a time, sinking beneath the surface.





twenty-one


I’ve had a family emergency. I can ask the night doorman to look in on the cats until I return. I understand if you need to replace me.

They’ll be okay. I’ll connect with Charlie. How long?

Not sure.

Keep me posted.


WHY DIDN’T I JUST QUIT? Maybe I would. I was surprised to find that I didn’t really want to. The truth was that I had grown to like Nate Shelby’s place, his energy, his cats. I actually wanted to go back there, sleep in his white bedroom, watch the cats. Maybe he’d fire me and make it easy.

“You need your own place,” said my father in the passenger seat of Paul’s Suburban. He had a single bullet hole wound in his forehead tonight. I had never seen him like that, but I knew from the files that I read that it was finally how he died. A bullet in the brain. I remembered the sound of it, the cracking report. It’s a distinctive sound. Once you’ve heard gunfire, you never mistake anything else for it.

“You have to move on and build a real life. You can’t keep on like this. You’re a ghost.”

“You should talk,” I said.

“Very funny.”

I took the key out of my pocket and looked at it.

“What’s this key for, Dad?”

But he was gone, and I was parked outside Seth Murphy’s office on Main Street. Seth was into his identity as PI, even had a door with an old-timey cloudy glass window. Seth Murphy Investigations. Background checks. Insurance claims. Missing persons and pets. I actually felt a little bad for Seth, as much as I could feel anything for anyone other than Paul. That night—I think it unstitched him a little bit. Even though he’d just grazed the edges of what happened, it got its hooks in.

He couldn’t get out of his house that night; his dad had stayed up later than usual. That’s why he was late meeting me. An hour late. He’d run the whole way, arrived breathless at the bridge only to find me gone. He could see footprints in the soft earth leading up the bridge, Catcher’s, too. He could tell by the pacing nature of our tracks that maybe we’d waited awhile. He figured that he’d just missed me. So he took off running after us through the woods.

What if he hadn’t been late? How long would I have stayed out there with him? Would I have been spared the things that happened to me? Would I have returned home to find my parents murdered, never understanding why? Or would my parents be alive? Probably not. They—those men—they were always going to kill everyone in that house. I wonder if they would have found what they were looking for if it weren’t for that siren? Maybe my dad did know. Maybe he finally would have relented and they would have gone. Maybemaybemaybewhatififonlyonandonandon, that terrible spaceless run-on into nothing and nowhere.

Seth followed me that night, saw Catcher lying lifeless on the ground. Saw the parked car, the fourth man inside, sitting still in the passenger seat. He watched as I was dragged out of the barn window and across the clearing, screaming, to the house. He said a kind of shock settled, a paralysis. Then he slipped back, backward into the darkness, turned, and with every ounce of strength and speed, he ran for help. It took him just under twelve minutes to reach the Jacob home, two minutes of frantic pounding and screaming to rouse them from sleep, two minutes to dial 911. It took the police six minutes to race to our house and arrive at the scene. Twenty-two minutes. Within that span of time, I was tortured, and both my parents were killed. Still, he probably saved my life.

Seth was kind of a nerd, which was why I had liked him. I was never into jocks or bad boys. He was sweet, smart, curious—a great lab partner. He had soft hands, a shy smile. I always thought he’d do something more with his life. Maybe he would have—if he hadn’t asked to meet me that night.