Now
AT THREE IN the morning, Beth awoke inside the hospital waiting room, alone and covered with a white blanket.
She checked her phone, folded the blanket, and placed it on the seat beside her.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” said Natalie’s voice at the entrance to the waiting room. She looked exhausted. Natalie nodded toward the blanket. “Mayor Truffant’s idea.”
“When did he leave?”
“Thirty minutes ago.” Natalie yawned. “I could sleep for days. Grover’s out of surgery. Serious but stable. Lost a shit ton of blood. Had a line out the back door to donate, though.”
“But they think he’ll make it?”
“Too early to tell, but it’s Grover. I like his odds just out of stubbornness.”
“And Doc?”
“Little deeper down the hole.” Natalie yawned again. “Unresponsive.”
“You heading home?”
“For a couple of hours. You?”
“I guess I should. Although I’ve got Simple Simon locked up.”
“He do it?”
“Something tells me no.”
“Never known Simon to hurt a fly.”
“I agree,” Beth said, remembering though how aggressively Simon had forced Lump’s face into the cell bars. “But at this point it’d be a mistake to let him go.”
Natalie nodded toward the seat. “Take the blanket. We’ve got plenty.”
Beth touched it. “Already losing its warmth.”
“Leave the blanket then.” Natalie forced a smile. “Careful out there, Beth.”
“You too.”
Beth read Natalie’s eyes before she disappeared into the hallway: Fearless doesn’t mean indestructible. Beth felt far from indestructible as she drove the three miles home, windows open to the cool night air to keep her awake. The tunnel itself was not visible from the town’s historic district, but from that direction a brief flash illuminated the sky. It had been in her peripheral, but she assumed it was lightning, or maybe what Grover called heat lightning. She watched for another strike as she drove. None came, but seconds later, as she pulled into her driveway, she heard a rumble of distant thunder, giving credence to the flash she’d seen. She didn’t think a storm had been forecast, but also knew how common pop-ups were in the area, and rarely lasted long.
She entered her house quietly, hoping not to wake Jax and Brody. With work pressing from every direction, she wasn’t in the right mind frame to deal with either of them. She locked the front door behind her and headed directly for her office in the basement. Jax called it her Murder Pit. That had sparked an argument between them last week, as she’d fallen asleep down there twice; but the truth—and it hurt—was that he wasn’t wrong, which was why she’d reacted so defensively and felt a pang of guilt now as she turned on the lights and surveyed the four walls of her basement office. Years of work that, if viewed without context, might have tagged her as mad. Obsessed, even. But as essential to her now as breathing, as one day she would gather it all into a book.
Her theory of cluster violence.
Her mother’s abrupt death at the hands of a drunk driver had taught her anger at an early age, the true meaning of revenge, and how best to seek it. Although Doc Bigsby would say the minute she was born, she was the most intensely focused individual he’d ever encountered. He said it in jest, but not really. It had been Grover who’d helped her channel it. Not only channel it to something positive and goal-oriented like upholding the law and hunting down anyone who broke it, but to focus on Harrod’s Reach and its history of what she would come to call “cluster violence,” and eventually examples of the same type of contagious violent behaviors across the country. And, in recent years, across the globe.
It had started one Sunday after mass, while she was eating dinner with Grover and his wife, Patrice, and had brought up something she’d been researching for a freshman high school paper, about what many in Harrod’s Reach had referred to as the tunnel’s Golden Periods. Except, she told them in between bites of cheeseburger, what had happened during those Golden Periods was anything but golden. Because interesting and fascinating shouldn’t equate to golden.
High activity, she’d told them, seemed more appropriate.
Grover had said she might be onto something, as he’d thought the same for years, as Detective James Harrington had before him. It was the townsfolk who’d called the more violent times golden. Grover had always gone more along the lines of when it rains it pours, so that had been the first thing Beth had ever written on what would become her project—when it rains it pours—and the first phrase she’d pinned to her basement wall after she and Jax bought the house in the weeks before their wedding. The first picture she’d tacked to the basement wall had been that of her mother, as a constant reminder of what she looked like and that bad shit happened to good people.
As a teen, she’d begun to dig into Harrod’s Reach’s past, and in particular, the history of the tunnel, going back to when it was founded by Colonel Harrod Guthrie in the winter of 1865. It didn’t take long to notice the correlation between the years and decades the town referred to as Golden—or as she wrote, High Activity—and the higher rates of Harrod’s Reach crime. And that wasn’t limited to injuries and murders inside the tunnel, what many had for decades assumed was a serial killer fond of lopping off limbs. In the case of Happy Jack Kingston in the seventies, they found his body from the waist up but not his lower half.
After the mysterious “maimings,” the most common term Beth found in the old newspapers to describe the attacks inside the tunnel, continued for longer than any normal human could live, whispers began to emerge that it wasn’t a serial killer at all, or else the torch had been seamlessly passed to a copycat. Or—as even more began to believe in the past fifty years—that something supernatural existed inside that tunnel.
The tunnel had claimed, by Beth’s latest tally, including the two mutilated bodies found last week, fifty-three deaths, with thirty-three from the 1923 train derailment. There were fifteen serious injuries (fourteen resulting in prosthetic arms, legs, or hands, and for Sully Dupree, a coma) and two strange disappearances (Connie Brine in 1865 and Bret Jones nearly a century later). Of those with serious injuries, not one, according to the newspapers Beth had scoured, could remember what had happened to them inside the tunnel, although a few claimed to see a flash of light, then blacked out. What Beth had found most fascinating, as she’d told Grover when she was seventeen, was that the periods surrounding those deaths and injuries inside the tunnel all coincided with a heightened number of crimes in town.
Murders. Rapes. Muggings. Robberies. Shootings. Domestic violence. The macabre.
Harrod’s Reach saw upticks in all those during the so-called Golden Periods, periods of time that lasted, in some cases, as little as a few months (the disappearance of Connie Brine in 1865) to several years, and in the 1960s, a full decade, culminating with the disappearance of Bret Jones in the fall of 1968.
Not only a noticeable uptick in crimes, Beth had told Grover, showing examples from a meticulously researched paper she’d written, but a big uptick in strange behavior from the citizens of Harrod’s Reach. It was bizarre enough behavior, Beth had pointed out, citing examples, to warrant visits from priests at the time, or ministers or psychiatrists and counselors. On several occasions a minister, Reverend Coleman Sharp (1980s) and two priests, Father John (1930s) and Father Tom (1960–70s), were convinced those people had been possessed by some kind of devil. Exorcisms were considered a total of seven different occasions but never sanctioned by the Church.
Beth felt a surge of adrenaline at being down here, and she couldn’t wait to show Gideon. Not for praise or approval but because he’d helped her with quite a bit of the research early on, as teens, much done inside the Smite House, with Archie’s help whenever they needed it.
She warmed day-old coffee in a microwave and sipped it as she surveyed the walls, covered with photos and newspaper articles and files and printouts on murders committed all over the country. A few more recent portions of the wall were devoted to murders worldwide, most recently a three-month cluster in Oslo, Norway. One of her five online forum friends, this one from New York—what Jax referred to playfully as her fellow online freaks—had brought that cluster to her attention two weeks ago. Before the current chaos in Harrod’s Reach, Beth had planned to research whether Oslo had any abandoned train tunnels, coal tunnels, or cave systems near where the violence was occurring. The tunnel here had been the source for that inspiration, and she had over thirty matches on her walls to give credence to it.
A week ago, she shared her findings with Doc Bigsby, who not only stared wide-eyed and speechless at her years of work but said that he had some things at home he needed to show her. She hadn’t gotten the chance to see what he was talking about, and perhaps now never would, but the way he’d said needed and not just wanted spoke volumes. It was clear they’d been on the same page. She’d been leery of showing anyone other than Grover and Jax before she was done with her book, but when the northern tunnel wall fell so suddenly, it had prompted her to confide in Doc.
But it was all hard evidence, as she’d tried to explain to Jax—whose only theory of the Harrod’s Reach tunnel was that it was fucked up and haunted—that their tunnel wasn’t the only one in the world with a history. Several jumped out at her as examples, among them the creek tunnels of Ocean Shore Railroad in California. The Buck Mountain Coal Co. Tunnel in Rockport, Pennsylvania. The vast cave systems in Crooked Tree, Kentucky. Grimms Bridge Tunnel in Ohio. Coal & Iron Tunnel #2 in Glady, West Virginia. The Florence & Cripple Creek Railroad in Colorado.
In a sense, with her fellow online freaks—her wide-reaching “team” this last year—her system of logging crime wasn’t far from what the FBI had been doing for decades at Quantico, tracking and profiling and analyzing crime for patterns. Her system might be simple, but it had produced results.
And she trusted them.
No one more than a young woman around her age named Brianna Bookman, who was not only willing to help her at every turn—although they’d never met in person and had only had a few Zoom calls online—but was working on her own system of tracking criminals, mostly violent, all spawning from the decades of violent clusters inside her own small town of Crooked Tree.
Beth knew what time it was in Crooked Tree, but decided to reach out regardless. She fired off a short email about the Charleston Strangler (Horseshoe Rapist) and explained, in strict confidence, how they’d found the body here in Harrod’s Reach. She at least had a connection to go on and planned on emailing the detective in Charleston next, but what she needed from Brianna was any information—what they called hits—on anything resembling how the second unknown body, the one holding his own head, had been found.
Five minutes later she found an email address for Detective Phipps, the detective mentioned in the Charleston article about the most recent Horseshoe Rapist victim, Maddy Boyle, and sent a quick message about maybe having something here that resembled what was going on there. While she waited for responses from both, she warmed a second cup of coffee to help keep herself awake. By the time she took her first sip, her laptop chimed with an incoming email. It was the detective in Charleston, asking if she had a couple of minutes to talk. Evidently, he slept little as well.
Detective Phipps called thirty seconds later. He was professional and to the point, and by the tired tone of his voice, at his wits’ end on any viable leads. “When was the body found?” he asked.
“Three days ago.” She then explained in detail—as she’d written in the email—exactly how the female victim was found. “You there?” she asked after he’d gone silent.
“Yeah,” he said, sounding like he was writing something.
“Does it sound similar?”
“Not just similar, Sheriff, but … exactly.”
She’d written Sheriff instead of Deputy Sheriff in her email. Grover would have approved of her fudging the truth to get a needed seat at any table. “How long since the last victim in Charleston?”
“Over a month,” he said. “With no leads.”
“Plenty of time to travel across the country.”
“Plenty of time to travel the world, Sheriff, but it doesn’t mean he did,” he said, adding. “Of course, it doesn’t mean he didn’t. We’d feared he’d gone underground here after nearly being exposed by his last victim.”
“Which was …”
“Madeline Boyle,” he said. “She was in a coma after the attack but made a recovery the doctors here are calling miraculous. She was my last good lead.”
“Was?”
“Skipped town a few days ago.”
“Where?”
“Didn’t say, but she did give me a fairly solid description of the attacker.”
“Can you share it?”
He did, and Beth, as she wrote it all down, realized no one she’d seen in Harrod’s Reach of late, even the workers she’d seen at the Beehive, matched that description. Unless … no … Jesus, other than, perhaps, Simon Bowles? If anyone resembled that description—the size, the beard, the hair—it was Simon. But she couldn’t believe it. And neither could Grover, so although they’d questioned Simon after he’d found the bodies in the woods, they’d never truly considered him a suspect. What suspect would take the time to draw those bodies?
She was hesitant to tell Detective Phipps about the second body, but felt he deserved the full truth about the crime scene. He went silent again, then said, “Well, that is weird, Sheriff, but … you said they were holding hands? The corpses?”
“Yes.”
“That’s where these cases would definitely begin to differ.” For whatever reason this was the first time his southern low-country accent had struck her in the few minutes they’d been on the phone. Was it so far-fetched to think a killer like that could uproot so completely? And once someone uprooted, what did the distance even matter? It was his turn to ask, “You still there?”
“Yeah, just thinking …”
“This is good, Sheriff. I’m gonna take a hard look, believe me, but with how swamped I am with another case, this one was placed on our back burner days ago. But please be in touch if something pops, and we’ll hope to Christ it isn’t another body.”
“I’ll keep you posted on my end,” Beth said.
“I’ll do the same. Stay safe. Sounds like some … weird times out your way.”
Beth said “Will do,” thanked him, and ended the call. She checked her email but saw no response yet from Brianna in Crooked Tree. Her coffee had gone cold while she’d been on the phone. It was five in the morning. The catnap she’d stolen in the hospital waiting room would not sustain her through another day like today, and now that she’d taken a moment to let some things settle into her mind, she realized how exhausted she was. A couple hours of sleep was necessary. She turned off the lights to her Murder Pit and headed upstairs to the main level of their ranch house. When she opened the door to Brody’s room and saw his toddler bed empty, she remembered Jax had taken him back to his room.
Not their room, because they’d never had one together.
She passed the room she typically slept in—whenever she didn’t fall asleep downstairs—and tiptoed into Jax’s room further down the hall. She found Jax snoring on one side with Brody’s tiny body asleep in the middle. She eyeballed enough room for herself on the other side of Brody and kicked off her shoes to lie there. She watched Brody lovingly as his closed eyelids moved in cadence to whatever circadian rhythms his mind had set. Was he dreaming? Tiny pushes of air escaped his little nose and open mouth. His chest rose and fell. The fingers on his left hand twitched. In fear of waking him up, she didn’t ruffle his hair or kiss his forehead like she so badly wanted to.
She looked past him and found Jax’s eyes open, watching her.
He grinned, mouthed the words, “You okay?”
She nodded.
“Good night then.”
“Good night,” she whispered, watching Jax’s eyes close, and then looked out the window at the night.
Hoped she’d hear from Brianna by morning.
Noticed that it had never rained. Realized that that flash she’d seen earlier from the direction of the tunnel had indeed been an isolated event. The thunder sound, a one-off.
And that that might not bode well come morning.