What Have We Done (76)
When Nico doesn’t answer, Artemis turns to the twin.
Jenna closes her eyes.
“All right, stop!” Nico yells. “I’ll take you to the site. But you have to promise to let her go. This is on me. And, so we’re clear, I was never going to tell anyone.”
“How brave of you, Nico,” Artemis says. “It only took twenty-five years.”
Nico feels like the miserable person he is. “Promise me.”
Artemis smiles again, but Jenna looks disappointed, as if suddenly understanding there’s no promise Artemis will keep.
Artemis gestures at the other twin to help Nico to his feet. Without releasing the zip ties, she hoists him up.
“She comes too or I swear I won’t take you there,” Nico tells Artemis. “And if I don’t call someone by midnight, there’s an automatic email that will go out to the FBI that tells them everything.”
Artemis appears skeptical of that. And rightly so: There is no email, and if Nico dies, everything will likely remain hidden forever.
“I can take you there right now, but you have to promise.”
“Scout’s honor,” Artemis says, dryly.
With that, he gestures to the door, and the twins march Nico and Jenna out of the house.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
JENNA
Nico leads the way through the back alley, around the park, and down a dirt path to a meadow behind a dilapidated house.
Artemis stops, stares at the house where the man they all called Ned Flanders lived, the man who recognized Arty’s brilliance and mentored him. The closest thing Arty had to a father figure, and ultimately a relationship that fostered the technology that supported the then newly emerging social-media sites, technology that made Artemis a rich man by his mid-twenties.
The pixels are now coming together for Jenna. Ben Wood was being blackmailed and it prompted him to revisit the events of that night, and he uncovered something none of them had known at the time: Ned Flanders’s real name was Park Jones. He was a child molester who’d befriended a boy who had easy access to young girls. She thinks of Ben’s handwritten note at the library: BROOD-ROBOT
LLC-FAGIN JONES. Ben loved to read; he’d referenced Boo Radley. And Fagin is an infamous character from a Dickens novel—a despicable man who used children to commit his crimes. Flanders used Artemis to lure girls.
And Artemis must’ve agreed, since he needed Park Jones. So Marta, Annie, the others … it’s so awful, Jenna can’t finish the thought.
But the theory is confirmed when she sees the holes dotting the knoll. The final resting place of the missing girls, no doubt. Arty created a shell company to buy the property to ensure no one ever discovered the bodies, the crimes he had been party to. But when Nico blackmailed him with photos of Mr. Brood’s bones, Arty needed to remove all the remains on the property and destroy all possible evidence linking him to the murders.
Something she can only describe as blind rage is consuming Jenna now.
Nico leads the group not to one of the holes, but instead, to a mound of freshly tilled soil. The spot from all those years ago …
Nico looks down at the dirt. “Here,” he says.
“Here?” Artemis lets out a wooden laugh. “You dug up Mr. Brood, and what?—then brought him back to the original gravesite and reburied him?”
One of the twins walks to a shed near the house and returns with a shovel. She jabs it into the dirt so it stands upright. The other twin removes Nico’s zip ties.
Artemis gestures to the shovel. “Get to it, then.”
The other twin still has the tube weapon pressed against Jenna’s spine. She watches, shaking her
head, knowing that Nico is not only retrieving the bones Artemis is after but also digging his own grave.
The woman whispers in Jenna’s ear, “I’m going to enjoy burying you alive.”
Jenna feels a rivulet of sweat drip down her side. Her mind is racing, teasing out how she can attack without that bolt driving through her vertebrae, without Nico being torn to shreds by the other hit woman’s gun.
Artemis looks out at the other holes. A field of weeds now pockmarked by tilled soil, bordered on one side by Flanders’s ramshackle house through the brush, bleak woodland on the other side.
“You should’ve filled in those holes,” he says to the hit woman with Jenna.
“We kinda got tied up with the judge and didn’t think returning was a good idea,” she says like a snarky teenager. “Don’t worry, no one will ever find what was left of the others.”
“Still,” Artemis says, but drops it.
Nico continues to dig as Jenna plays out different scenarios. She could lunge forward, charge at Arty, and the twin with the gun might not shoot for fear of catching him in the cross fire. No, she thinks these chicks wouldn’t care if they did. Frankly, she wonders if Arty is going to make it out alive.
Alternatively, she could do a backward head-butt, crush the other hit woman’s nose, and dart away. But the woman would likely instinctively set off the weapon, which would send Jenna to the ground with a severed spinal cord. And that would surely result in her being buried alive, as promised.
If she can catch Nico’s glance, he could swing the shovel, hit the one sister, and Jenna could get away, race into the woods, be done with the lot of them. But again, the weapon digging into her back presents an inescapable peril.