The short drive home is exquisitely dark. Even the stars are shut in for the night, abiding by the City’s curfew not to be out past nightfall. Rowan screws a knuckle into her right eye. The wind on the walk back to her vehicle wicked all the moisture out of them. Now, they feel raw and pinpricked with thousands of perforations that sing when the cold air touches them.
She rationalizes that as the reason she isn’t crying right now. Not that she is dead inside and has no emotions to pour out. She’s a rag that has been wrung and hung out to dry. If only a gust of wind would carry her off, and place her on a whitecap so she could sink to the bottom of the lake and shut out all this noise. Drowning seems like a dream.
Would she find Chloe down there, she wonders. She imagines her daughter as a skeleton, scraps of her red lace dress clinging to her bones, bleached white and nibbled on by perch and smallmouth bass. Or would she be pristinely preserved, with her artificially black hair tugging languidly at her scalp like frayed pieces of rope, her porcelain skin drinking in the moonlight that permeates the crystal-clear depths? She has read articles of corpses being found intact decades after their demise, the bottom of lakes creating a type of cold chamber. Lake Tahoe in California, for instance, has a reputation as an underwater graveyard of Chinese railroad workers and Mob victims. At depths of six-hundred-plus feet, the lake maintains a temperature in the neighborhood of thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, which prevents gasses that lead to decomp from being released into the bodies, thus freezing them in the moment of their death. Fascinating.
She cannot bring herself to imagine Chloe’s expression. Who would be reflected in the blacks of her eyes? Would it be Deschane, twirling the ends of a chain or a rope? Her mind careens to the crime scenes of Madison and Sari, and the marks on their necks. Kole had suspected ligature marks, but Rowan had been quick to dismiss that as the cause of the abrasions. Why? Had her misstep misled them down a circular path with a rising body count?
And what of the sisal fibers on Sari’s body? They could very well have been from a rope, though the lab will not have the results for weeks. Rowan doesn’t have weeks. She is at the end of her own rope now.
Or would the reflection be of Libby? The scorned, seemingly nonthreatening social pariah, whose hobby involves taking animals apart?
Rowan allows a rare moment of feeling sorry for herself, and thinks back to when today took a wrong turn. She’d been at Beck’s, peeling back the layers of Deschane’s allegations—Ms. Kazmaryck ordering him to off the neighbor’s dog, Mr. Cutler asking him to trap a fox, and Mr. Taylor requesting a pair of glass eagle eyes—when Axel walked in and assumed the unthinkable. Even now, her blood boils over his reaction. She would never cheat, especially with a mountain man like Dale Deschane.
She called Axel a total of nine times since he stormed out of Beck’s, and sent him a text. I’m sorry.
She really is, though. For everything.
For not telling him about her taxidermist lead. For meeting another man at a bar. For never allowing herself to be fully present in their marriage—their life—because of the life she ran from.
She is sorry for being so goddamn emotionally distant. Sorry for being so Rowan.
She loves Axel to death; however, the simple fact that Axel’s mind went there is enough to make her hate him. And yet, hasn’t she stewed in the same unsavory thoughts, that he is more than work partners with Riley? It’s more than that, though. She hates him for what he is not willing to admit—that their daughter is innocent and probably dead.
Chloe is not a murderer because she was murdered herself. What will it take for him to open his eyes and fucking see that? And when he does, will he come home? Or will they be trapped in this never-ending cold war, him always bracing for the impact of her I told you so.
And then as it always does, the inevitable realization sinks in. This is all her own doing. Chloe is gone because of something Rowan did eighteen years ago.
An eye for an eye.
Her hand shakes as she reaches for the glove compartment. Fumbling blindly, her fingers find purchase on the laminated cigarette carton she returned there after her near-death carbon monoxide experience in the garage the other day. The lone cigarette rolls out and slides between her index and middle finger, begging for a final hurrah. Smoke it and you have to leave. That was the promise she made to herself all those years ago.
She drives as autonomously as though she’s in the car wash, being pulled on a track. Muscle memory compels her to turn the steering wheel right and enter Belgrave Circle. Her house is the third on the left. She pulls into the driveway and hits the brakes.
Someone is sitting on her porch.
Dark hair. Red lace dress. White streamers drape from her arms and encircle her legs.
Chloe!
The tears she thought she’d run out of pour forth with a vengeance. She throws the shifter into park and, still gripping the cigarette box and leaving her keys in the ignition, Rowan catapults out of the driver’s seat and sprints across the front lawn.
“Chloe!” Her voice tears from her throat. The frigid air sears her lungs and she pushes herself harder, faster toward her daughter, her sweet girl who has finally returned h—
What is she holding?
Raked across a piece of white tagboard in black Sharpie are three words: Mummy, I’m Home!
Pure, unadulterated horror spikes Rowan’s blood, freezes her in her tracks just three feet away from the abomination on her porch steps. It’s a dummy, a white pumpkin with a black wig. The body is stuffed with straw and shoved into a red lace dress. Dozens of feet of toilet paper mummify the thing. The face on the gourd is demonic, taunting. Rowan screams and drives the heel of her boot into it.
The pumpkin tumbles down the porch steps and rolls onto the grass. Its dead eyes stare at her. Rowan goes after it. She stomps it again and again until the thing is a mangled mess and orange guts splatter the shrubs, the solar walkway lights, and everything within a ten-foot radius. Breathless, she falls to her knees and hears the obnoxious cackle of kids laughing, then the tap-tap-tapping of their footsteps as they take off running down the street.
She hopes they trip in a ditch.
Time passes. She can’t say how many minutes transpire between her crumpling to the concrete and crawling to the front door, but when she is back in her house, Fry scampers across the hardwood floors to greet her.
She would be alone if not for him. Completely and utterly alone.
Choking back a sob, Rowan scoops him up and heads up the stairs. She doesn’t go to her bedroom, though. Instead, she turns right, down the dark, narrow hall where Chloe’s school pictures watch her from the wall. She closes her hand over the doorknob and turns.
Blue moonlight filters in through the window and bathes the room in a ghastly glow. Chloe’s room is just as she left it, how she fixed it up after the police tore it apart. The bed is made with Chloe’s old bunny, Bubby, slouched against the pillows. Franklin the ghost’s shadow twirls in front of a black-and-white Winona Ryder poster. Trinkets collect dust on the dresser. Shirts and dresses hang limp in the closet, like skins shed by something other than a girl.
She sits on the edge of the bed. It creaks beneath her weight. Tears stream down her face and melt into the fibers of the comforter. She cries hard, sobbing until she is a dry, hollow vessel. And when she finally looks up, she discovers a book knocked askew on the shelf.
Rowan reaches for it. It’s thin. She turns it over and foil lettering catches the light. Monroe Academy. It’s a yearbook.
She frowns. Has she ever paged through this? Probably not, she thinks as she recalls her own high school yearbooks with the flirty messages and phone numbers from upperclassmen. She would have been mortified if her mother read them. But Chloe is not here anymore.
Rowan flips to Chloe’s sophomore class. Just to see her daughter once more, as she was before this depraved city swallowed her up and refused to spit her out. And she pauses. Because there on the first page, in the second row, is a photo that’s scribbled out.
Rowan’s gaze slides to the roster on the right. Madison Caldwell.
Her heart crawls into her throat. She swallows to tamp it down, but as she turns the page, her eyes frantically moving down the list for Sari Simons, she stops on a blacked-out square in the L’s. Rowan gasps as she reads the corresponding name: Libby Lucas.
Two rows beneath Libby is a scribbled-out Sari Simons.
“No.” The word is a breath, whispered from damned lips.
There, in the last tile of Monroe Academy’s sophomore class, is her daughter’s smiling face.