The Storm King(72)

Seeing the casket, Nate’s thoughts flew to Grams. She was going to die, he realized. They would put what was left of her in a box just like this one. If not today then tomorrow or next week or next year. One by one the universe would pick them all off. Because the one certainty in life is that no one survives it.

While he contemplated the casket, Nate became aware of eyes searing into the side of his head. A trio of mismatched teenagers stared at him from across the aisle. There was a short chubby kid, a wan towheaded boy, and a pierced goth girl. A punch line waiting to happen.

They stared at Nate with their greasy faces. He recognized the way their eyes burned with the unalloyed revulsion of children. One glance and he knew them just as they knew him.

“That’s them.” Nate nudged Tom. “The vandals.” If the vandals’ mayhem had been somehow triggered by the discovery of Lucy’s remains, then it made sense that they’d be at her funeral.

“Evidence?”

“Look at them.”

“Profiling.”

Nate glared at the pew of teenagers. These were the children who’d landed Grams at the threshold of death.

He stared back at them, his gaze scorching and venom pouring from the points of his smile. He bore down on each of them until they looked away. It didn’t take long.



“If it’s them, they might know what happened to Maura Jeffers last night. Pete Corso, too. They’re all in the same crew.” No matter Tom’s awful morning, he was still a police officer in a town where a child was dead and another was missing. Nate thought he could use this as a lever to reveal answers to the questions that mattered to him.

“Maura was the girl who washed up on the shore,” Nate added, when Tom didn’t respond. “And Pete’s the boy who’s missing.”

“Yeah, I know who they are, Nate.”

“So do something, Deputy.”

Tom took out his phone and pretended to check his messages while he took photos of the teenagers.

The girl wore a large flower in her hair, incongruous with her vampire styling. A dahlia, either orange or red—it was hard to tell in the candlelight. Both boys had similar blooms slipped through the buttonholes of their shirts.

“What’s with the flowers?”

“Lucy had flowers in her hair the last time anyone saw her.”

“They were white. Calla lilies.”

“The stories the kids tell make it a dahlia. They leave them at the barricade now,” Tom said.

“What?”

“The way we used to leave glow sticks. Now they leave flowers, too.”

Nate loathed the idea that she’d become one of their stories.

“She hated dahlias.” This wasn’t true, but he said it anyway.

The power outage had turned the church’s organ into so many inert pipes, so the cantor struck up a hymn a capella. The congregation rose.

The family began their procession. With linked arms, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett led the way.

Nate had last seen Mr. Bennett in court, during his criminal trial. He’d seemed tall and powerful back then. Now he was shrunken and gray and overweight. A man with too-long hair, wearing a too-tight suit jacket. He gave no outward sign of being a destroyer of worlds.



The years had left their marks on Mrs. Bennett as well. Nate remembered her being as slim as a dancer, but she’d become stout. Her once fiery hair was mostly extinguished by strands of white.

Though it was impossible to imagine them any older than they’d been, Nate’s own parents would be about the same age as the Bennetts. He wondered if his mom would have let herself go gray or if his father might have developed a prosperous paunch. Nate didn’t have to wonder what his little brother would look like. He caught a glimpse of Gabe every time he saw his own reflection.

Nate savored the pain that came with working at these scabs, but he wasn’t able to indulge them for long.

The girl captured his attention as soon as he got a good look at her. When she’d poured him a pint at the Union yesterday, she told him her name was TJ. Tara Jane Bennett. Lucy’s younger sister. The last time Nate saw her she’d just finished kindergarten. Back then, she’d had the same auburn hair as Lucy. With that hair, Nate might have recognized her, but she’d dyed it black. Now that he understood who she was, looking at her was like seeing Lucy through a tinted window into an alternate dimension.

Compared to forgiving Mr. Bennett for killing her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, it would have been a small thing for Grams to offer a job to Tara. Why no one had thought to tell Nate that the girl worked there was a separate question. Another secret to add to the tally.

Tara’s brother, James, walked next to her. He still carried his mother’s coloring; the light from the scattered candles flared across his hair. The twins had been five when Lucy disappeared, which put them at around nineteen now. James was by far the tallest of the quartet making their way down the aisle. In the flickering light, his face was all planes and shadows.

As James passed, he turned to the trio of mismatched teens. The young man exchanged a nod with them, and things began to make sense.



James’s older sister’s body discovered. Knowledge of her friends and enemies, one of whom was probably her murderer. Violence, destruction, rage. This was a ballad of revenge—a tune Nate knew by heart.