Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake)(18)

But my kids are at an age where a little freedom can help them feel more confident in their own abilities. It’s part of growing up.

Much as I hate it.

We arrive in Knoxville. It’s an interesting place. The winters can get cold, but snow’s typically rare; ice is a much bigger problem. Today’s a sweetly sunny day with temperatures in the high sixties, and it gives the city a shine it doesn’t altogether deserve.

For an otherwise typical small southern city, it’s had a fair number of truly awful murderers. And as we drive through, I start identifying nondescript locations where bodies were found, crimes committed, murderers caught. It isn’t that I want to know these things. I just don’t really have much of a choice. After Melvin, after his abductions and murders of young women were carried out under the roof of the home we shared . . . I needed to understand why he was what he was. So I looked deep and long into a very dark abyss. I can’t say I’m any wiser for it, but I am far more . . . aware.

Knoxville—and Nashville even more—will always have a darkness under the shine, at least for me.

Thankfully, Navitat—which specializes in nature trails and zip line adventures—doesn’t have much in the way of horror stories, and it’s well managed and guarded. I give Lanny and Connor spending money and make them promise to not lose sight of each other, ever, and I quiz them on emergency procedures. They know the drill. Scream and run. Emergency calls on their cells. Attract attention and get help. Never let anyone get them off alone. I keep reinforcing it, even though I know kids will always find a reason and a way to break rules and take risks. If I can make them hesitate for a second, think just a little more, that’s all I can ask.

“Panic buttons?” I ask them. They both show me their key chains. The buttons activate an alert on my phone, plus an ear-piercing alarm that I hope to never have to hear again in person. “Okay. Be safe, be smart, be—”

“Careful, yeah, we know,” Connor says, and slides out of the SUV. He looks back inside. “Thanks, Mom.”

“I love you.”

He’s at that age where he just nods. Saying it back feels wrong. It doesn’t matter. I know he loves me too.

Lanny gives me a quick hug and is gone in seconds.

I idle at the curb until I see them pass through the security gate, and then I look up the address of Remy’s mother.

Fifteen minutes away.

I head that direction, and find myself sliding not into middle-class suburbs, but bustling streets crowded with apartments. I know Remy’s mother moved to Knoxville, but this isn’t a place a middle-aged woman fits in. Every person I see is well under thirty, most loaded down with backpacks and heading to or from the university.

It hits me then. She’s living in her son’s old apartment. He’s been gone for three years, and she’s paying the rent and . . . waiting. I take a breath. Think about what I’d do in the same situation after the police gave up and the case went cold. If Connor disappeared and I couldn’t find him, would I be able to give up a place he’d once called his home?

No. That would be like giving him up too.

The address takes me to a not-very-impressive apartment block that screams that it was built in the mid-1980s, but has at least been repaired and repainted on a regular basis. The unit number in my notes is 303.

I park and climb the stairs. Someone on the second-floor landing has a nice fern soaking up sun, and it gives me a welcome scent of damp earth to replace the faint odor of dust and age and wood rot.

I knock on the faded brown door with the tarnished number 303 on it.

“Who is it?” A shadow darkens the peephole.

“Gwen Proctor. I work for J. B. Hall; I believe she’s already been in contact with you to let you know I’m coming. I’m a private investigator,” I say. “I’d like to talk to you about your son, Remy.”

I don’t make it a question. I’m not a tentative person. And she responds, after a few seconds, by inching the door open. “Do you have ID?”

I silently produce my wallet and show her my private investigator license and photo ID. She opens the door fully and steps back, and I cross the threshold.

It’s like stepping into a tomb someone lives in. Everything looks right—the lamps are burning, the blinds are open. But this place has a young man’s style imprint everywhere, from the sports posters on the wall (soccer is a favorite) to a frayed plaid couch that most women would put right out on the curb. A gaming console near the big-screen television. Two controllers perfectly positioned on the coffee table, like monuments. There’s still a hoodie thrown over the back of a gaming chair, and a pair of tumbled sneakers nearby.

As if he were just here. Just stepped away, and this life here is like a game on pause.

The thing that’s out of place is the woman standing in front of me. She’s older than me by at least ten years, but looks older still; there’s an indefinable grayness about her, as if she’s the ghost that haunts this place, not her son. She’s wearing plain black pants, a soft pullover with the University of Tennessee seal on it. It fits a little snugly, and I wonder if it belongs—belonged—to Remy. The thought makes me feel both sad and a little wary.

“I’m Ruth,” she says, and holds out her hand to me. “Ruth Landry.” There’s a faintly Cajun spice to her words, but I don’t think she was born to it. Married into it, most likely. “Thank you for taking our case, Mrs. Proctor.”