Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake Book 2) Page 2

  And Sam? Sam is the brother of one of my ex-husband’s victims. Melvin’s last victim. I can still see that poor young woman’s body strung up by a wire noose. Tortured and murdered for pure, sadistic pleasure.

  We’re complicated. When I first met Sam, I’d believed he was a friendly stranger, no connection to my old life. Finding out that he had deliberately tracked me, stalked me, in hopes of finding evidence I’d been complicit in my husband’s crimes . . . that had nearly broken everything.

  He knows now that I’m not guilty, and never was, but there are still deep cracks between us, and I don’t know how to fill them, or if I should. Sam likes me. I like Sam. In another life, without the rancid shadow of Melvin Royal between us, I think we could have been happy together.

  For now, my vision is limited to surviving and ensuring the survival of my children. Sam is a means to an end.

  Which, thankfully, he completely understands. I’m sure he sees me exactly the same way.

  “What’s up?” he asks me, and I dig the phone out, pull up the text, and pass it over. “Shit. But Graham’s dead, right?” I hear the same free-fall disorientation in his voice, but he recovers faster. “They’re sending someone else?”

  “Maybe more than one,” I tell him. “Prester says Absalom might be some kind of hacker collective. Who knows how many people they have in their network? We need to be even more careful now. I’m dumping this phone and buying a new one. We use cash, we stay off cameras as much as we can.”

  “Gwen, I can’t keep doing this. Hiding isn’t—”

  “We’re not hiding,” I tell him. “We’re hunting.”

  He straightens and turns to face me. Sam’s not a big man, nor overly tall; he’s got a lithe strength, and I know he can handle himself in a fight. Most of all—and this is everything to me now—I know that I can trust him. He isn’t Melvin’s creature, and he never will be. I can’t say that of many people anymore.

  “Finally,” he says. “So, the kids?”

  “I’ll call Javier. He offered to take them before, and we can trust him.”

  Sam’s already nodding. “It’s a risk leaving them behind,” he says, “but not as much as trying to protect them while we’re going after Melvin. Sounds right.” He pauses. “Are you sure about this?” He asks it almost gently. “We could leave it to the cops. The FBI. We probably should.”

  “They don’t know Melvin. And they don’t understand Absalom. If it’s a collective, they could hide Melvin indefinitely while they track us down for him. We can’t afford to wait it out, Sam. Hiding doesn’t work.” I take in a sharp breath of the cold air and let it out as a warmed stream of fog. “Besides. I want him. Don’t you?”

  “You know I do.” He looks me over impersonally. Assessing a fellow soldier. “You’re sure you don’t need more rest?”

  I laugh a little bitterly. “I’ll rest when I’m dead. If we want to get to Melvin before the cops do, we’re going to have to be tougher than him, and faster, and better. And we’re going to need help. Information. You said before you had a friend who might be able to assist?”

  He nods. There’s a hard set to his jaw and a glitter in his eyes. Sam’s not usually easy to read, but in this moment I see all his rage and heartbreak. Melvin is free out there, free to stalk and kill more women like Sam’s sister. Melvin will kill again. If I know anything about my ex-husband, I know he will want to go out in a blaze of selfish, murderous, Grand Guignol fury.

  The FBI is after him. The police of every state adjoining Kansas are as well. But it’s unlikely that they’ll turn him up quickly in the Midwest, because the first thing Melvin has done, I am certain, is to make his way southeast, toward us.

  Absalom tracked us this far, and that means that Melvin won’t be across the country, or across a distant border to a nonextradition country. He might not be here yet, but he’s coming for us. I can smell it in the wind.

  “We’ll go at seven in the morning,” I tell him. “I want the kids to rest a little more. All right?” I look at my phone. “I’ll call Kezia and Javier to set everything up.”

  In a quick move, Sam takes my phone and slips it into his pocket. “If Absalom has this number, you can’t use it to set up the kids’ shelter,” he says, and I immediately feel stupid I didn’t think of it. I must be more exhausted than I think. “I’ll wipe calls and contacts and leave it for someone else to steal. Better it stays on and leads Absalom on a false trail for a while.” He nods across the street, at a lit-up convenience store. “I’ll go get one new phone tonight. We use it to call Javier and dump it immediately. We don’t buy any more phones close to this location; that’s the first place Absalom will search for purchases.”

  He’s right on every point. I need to think like a hunter now, but I can’t forget that I’m also prey. Melvin made me vulnerable before by luring me, manipulating me, to end up where he wanted me to be. Now we need to do the same to him.

  For years, I clung to a terrible fiction of a marriage—a life in which Melvin Royal controlled every aspect of my reality, and I failed to realize or fear it. Gina Royal, the old me, the vulnerable me . . . she and the kids were Melvin’s camouflage for his secret, terrible life. On my side of the wall, I had only known that it all seemed so normal. But it never was, and now that I’ve left Gina Royal behind, I clearly see that.

  I’m not Gina anymore. Gina was tentative and worried and weak. Gina would be afraid that Melvin would come hunting for her.

  Gwen Proctor is ready for him.

  I know in my heart that it all comes down to us. Mr. and Mrs. Royal. In the end, it always has.

  2

  LANNY

  My little brother, Connor, is too quiet. He’s barely said a word all day, and he keeps his head down. He’s gone behind those walls he builds up, and I want to kick them all down and drag him out and get him to scream, hit the wall, do something.

  But I can’t even exchange two words with him without Mom’s radar picking up trouble . . . at least, not until after the door closes behind her, and she’s outside on the motel balcony. I know my mother. Mostly I love her. But sometimes she doesn’t help. She doesn’t know how to let her shields down anymore.

  Connor’s awake. He’s good at pretending to be asleep, but I know his tells; for two years when Mom was away—in jail and at trial, accused of being my dad’s accomplice—we’d shared a room because Grandma didn’t have much space, even though I was ten and he was seven and we were too old to be sharing a room. We’d had to be each other’s allies, watch each other’s backs. I’d gotten used to knowing when he was really out, and when he was just pretending. He never did cry much, not as much as I did. These days, he doesn’t cry at all.

  I wish he would.

  “Hey,” I say. I make it quiet, but not too quiet. “I know you’re faking it, loser.” He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move. His breathing continues smooth and even. “Yo, Squirtle. Don’t play.”

  Connor finally sighs. “What?” He sounds totally awake. He doesn’t even sound annoyed. “Go back to sleep. You’re grumpy when you don’t get your not-beauty rest.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Hey, you wanted to talk. Not my fault you don’t like what I say.” He sounds normal.

  He’s not normal.

  I flop back on the bed. The bed smells like the dollar store, like old sweat and nasty feet. This whole room smells like the dollar store. I hate it. I want to go home . . . and home is the house Mom and Connor and I worked to make so nice. The one with my own bedroom, and a wall I painted with purple stenciled flowers. The one with Connor’s bugout zombie defense room.

  Our house sits right on Stillhouse Lake, and it represents something I thought we’d never have again: security. My memories after the day we had to leave our first home—the one in Wichita—were a blur of plain rooms and gray cities, for years. We never stayed anywhere long enough to feel like we were home.

  Stillhouse Lake was different. It felt permanent, like life was really starting again for all of us. I had friends. Good friends.

  I had Dahlia Brown, who started out being the kind of girl I hated and ended up being my best friend in the world. It hurt to leave her back there, like some discarded, broken toy. She didn’t deserve that. I don’t deserve it, either. I had a sort-of boyfriend, but it’s a little bit of a shock to realize I don’t really miss him at all. I haven’t thought about him.

  Only Dahlia.

  We’d left our house just as it was, and I wonder if it’s been completely trashed by now. Probably. News of just who we are, who our dad is, had broken in the middle of all the craziness with Officer Graham, and I remember what happened to our old places when people found out. Spray paint on the walls. Dead animals on the doorstep. Broken windows and vandalized cars.

  People can be really shitty.

  I can’t help but imagine what our house by Stillhouse Lake might look like now, if people took out their anger on it instead of us. It makes my chest get tight and my stomach boil. I roll over on my side and angrily punch the cheap pillow into better shape. “Who do you think that text was from?”

  “Dad,” he says. I don’t miss the slight inflection, the tiny hitch, but I don’t know what it means. Anger? Fear? Longing? Probably all those things. I know something my mom probably doesn’t: that Connor doesn’t really, really get why Dad is a monster. I mean, he does, but he was seven when our lives spun out; he remembers a father who was sometimes awesome to him, and he misses that. I was older. And I’m a girl. I see things differently. “Guess now she’s going to go after him.” Now I hear a different intonation. One that I recognize.

  So I dig. “Makes you mad, doesn’t it?”

  “Like it doesn’t you? She’s going to dump us like strays,” he says. This time, the cold, flat to
ne isn’t subtle at all. “Probably with Grandma.”

  “You like staying with Grandma,” I say. I’m trying to be upbeat about it. “She makes us cookies and those popcorn balls you like. It’s not exactly torture.” I’m horrified the second the word drops off my lips, but it’s too late. I’m angry with myself, a searing red flash that sizzles in my nerves like they’ve turned into firecracker fuses. In the next second I’m back in a cabin high up in the hills, being dragged down into a basement. Locked in a tiny little cell not much bigger than a coffin, along with my brother.

  I know my mom wonders what happened to us in that basement. Connor and I haven’t talked about it, and I don’t know when, or if, we will. She’ll try to make us, sooner or later.

  I just want to be able to close my eyes and not see that winch and the wire noose that dangled from it, and those knives and hammers and saws glinting on the pegboard mounted on the walls. That room outside the cell looked just like my dad’s garage workshop—the pictures I’ve seen of it, anyway. I know what happened there. I know what could have happened to us, in Lancel Graham’s replica dungeon.

  Most of all, I wish I could forget the stupid rug. Somehow, Graham found an exact replica of my dad’s rug. Well, it was really my rug, because it was one of my first memories: a soft spiral-braided rug in pastel greens and blues. I loved that rug. I would lie facedown on it and scoot around on the floor, and Mom and Dad would laugh, and Mom would pick me up and slide the rug back in place by the door, and it was love, that stupid rug.

  One day when I was about five, the rug disappeared from the spot in the hall, and Dad put a new one there. It was fine, I guess. It had a nonskid back, so nobody would go sliding around on it. He told us he’d thrown the other one away.

  But on the day that our lives ended, the day Dad became a monster, that rug, my rug, was on the garage floor, right under the winch and the noose and the swinging body of a dead woman. He’d taken a piece of my life and made it part of something awful.

  Seeing one just like it in Lancel Graham’s horror basement broke something in me. When I close my eyes at night, that’s what I see. My rug, made into a nightmare.

  I wonder what Connor sees. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t sleep. When you sleep, you give up the choice to control memory.

  Connor hasn’t responded to my torture gaffe, so I stumble on. “You seriously want to go with Mom if she’s hunting Dad?”

  “She acts like we can’t take care of ourselves,” he says. “We can.”

  I agree that I can, but I’m also old enough to face the ugly truth about our dad and what he can do. I don’t want to have to fight him. The whole idea hurts, and it terrifies me. But I also don’t want to be left on my own with Connor, responsible for keeping both of us safe. I almost want Grandma, even if her cookies are kind of terrible and her popcorn balls too sticky. Even if she treats us like we’re toddlers.

  I shift the blame. “Mom’s never going to let us fight him. You know that.”

  “So off to Grandma’s house we go. Like Dad can’t guess that.”

  I shrug, but in the dark I know he can’t see me. “Grandma’s moved and changed her name, too. It’ll be just for a while, anyway. Like a vacation.”

  It’s eerie how Connor doesn’t move, doesn’t shift. I never hear so much as a rustle of those stiff motel sheets from him. Just a voice in the dark. “Yeah,” he says. “Like a vacation. And what if Mom never comes back for us? What if he comes back for us? Do you think about that?”

  I open my mouth to confidently tell him that’s never going to happen, but I can’t. I can’t get it out of my mouth, because I’m old enough to know that Mom isn’t immortal, or all-powerful, and that good doesn’t always win. And I know—Connor knows—that our dad is incredibly dangerous.

  So I finally say, “If he does find us, we get away from him. Or we stop him, any way we can.”

  “Promise?” His voice suddenly sounds his age. Only eleven. Too young to deal with this. I forget how young he is, sometimes. I’m nearly fifteen. It’s a big gap, and we’ve always babied my little brother.

  “Yeah, doofus, I promise. We’re going to be okay.”

  He lets out a long, slow breath that’s almost a sigh. “All right,” he says. “You and me, then. Together.”

  “Always,” I tell him.

  He doesn’t say anything else. I can hear Mom talking in a low voice to someone outside; I think it’s Sam Cade. I listen to the soft blur of their voices, and after a while I hear that Connor’s breathing has deepened and slowed, and I think he’s finally, really asleep.

  That means I can sleep, too.

  Mom surprises us at oh-my-God in the morning with doughnuts and cartons of milk; she and Sam are already up and dressed, and they have coffee. I ask for some. I get shut down. Connor doesn’t bother. He drinks his milk and mine, when I pass it to him while Mom isn’t looking.

  She surprises us when she tells us she’s not sending us off to Grandma, all the way up the coast. Instead, she’s sending us back to Norton. Not home, but close. And I can’t help but feel a little relieved, and at the same time a little anxious, too. Being almost home seems dangerous in a whole lot of ways . . . not so much because Dad would find us, but because I immediately realize it means I can’t really go home, to our old house. To my room. Being so close and not home? That’s kind of worse. Worse still: Dahlia. I can’t talk to her. Can’t text her. Can’t even let her know I’m there. That’s the definition of suck.

  But I don’t tell Mom that.

  Connor perks up a little when he realizes that instead of weeks with Grandma, he gets to hang out with Javier Esparza, who is a quietly awesome badass. His presence always feels strong and reassuring, and I don’t doubt he can defend us. Connor needs a guy to bond with. He and Sam Cade got close, but I know Sam’s got his own battles. He’s going with my mom, no question about that.

  So we’ll be staying at Mr. Esparza’s cabin, which he sometimes shares with Norton police officer Kezia Claremont. Also a quiet badass. They’re totally sleeping together, which I guess we’re not supposed to know. I approve of Kezia, though. It also means we have twice the firepower protecting us. I know Mom’s doing it for that reason, but I’m still glad, for Connor’s sake. I hope having Mr. Esparza around might break him out of his rigid silence.

  Packing isn’t much of a problem. We’ve been running for so long, Connor and I are both pros at throwing our stuff in bags and being ready to go in moments. Actually, Connor doesn’t even have to do that. He packed early, while I was still asleep. We keep score on things like that, and he silently points to his bag to let me know he wins. Again. He’s got his nose in a book already, which is his way of blocking out any attempts to converse. Plus, he loves books.

  I wish we had that in common. I make the promise to myself, again, to borrow some from him.

  We’re in the car and navigating traffic on a foggy highway half an hour from the moment Mom sets the doughnuts down.

  I doze, mostly, with my headphones blocking out the nonconversation. Mom and Sam are being very quiet. Connor’s turning pages. I amuse myself by making a new playlist: SONGS TO KICK ASS AND TAKE NAMES. It’s a boring drive, and the pounding rhythm of the music makes me want to go for a run. Maybe Mr. Esparza will let me do that when we get to his cabin, though I kind of doubt it; we’re under house arrest, again, hiding from all the boogeymen in the shadows—not just of the real world of Dad and his friends, but all the amped-up Internet trolls. One pic, and somebody will paste me all over Reddit and 4chan again, and things will get very, very bad, very fast.

  So probably no run.

  We drive for a couple of hours, then stop at a big-box store, where Sam buys four new disposable phones; I’m temporarily thrilled to discover he had to buy real smartphones, even though they’re still kind of clunky. No flip phones available. These are plain black, nothing special. We unshell them in the car and trade numbers. We’re all used to this by now. Mom liked to buy me and Connor different colors of phones, just so we wouldn’t get them mixed up, but Sam didn’t think of that; all four phones are the same. Mom confiscates mine and Connor’s and does her Mom thing, which locks off all the Internet functions before she gives them back and disables as much as she can. Normal course of business. She’s never wanted us to see the flood of ugliness out there about Dad, and about us.