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CHAPTER 26
FLORA
WALT DAVIES IS JACOB’S FATHER. My mind feels shattered by the information. And yet it makes perfect sense. The way the two men move, how they carry themselves. Their shared paranoia but also their natural technical aptitude. Walt has built an entire state-of-the-art microgreens operation in an abandoned barn, while Jacob spent years custom fitting houses and long-haul rigs to hide kidnapped girls.
They are both clever; they are both crazy.
I’m aware of Keith watching me, waiting for my next move, while across the barn Walt continues to fuss over a tray of tiny sprouts. Is he afraid of me, of what I’ll do next?
Is he telling the truth when he says that he tried to come back for me? That he believed what his son was doing was wrong and he wanted to rescue me?
This is a man who says the trees scream and the woods are alive with ghosts.
Then again, maybe they are.
I know what must happen next. The whole reason we came to Georgia. Because the only way forward is back. My only end, where it all started eight years before.
“Do you know where he held me?” I ask Walt.
He nods, still stroking pea shoots.
“Was it on this property?”
“Nah. I didn’t know he was even in the area. Till one night, at Stickneys Pub, he found me.”
“I want to go there,” I say.
He knows I don’t mean the tavern. “You won’t like it,” he says softly.
“Take me anyway.”
—
WE DON’T CLIMB INTO WALT’S truck. As Keith and I had theorized yesterday, the preferred mode of travel for the locals was the ATV trails. Walt has his four-wheeler, and we fetch our own to follow him, the subterfuge of having run out of gas no longer being necessary.
Keith doesn’t say anything as we approach our ride, still tucked in the bushes. Right before he pulls on his helmet, I stop him with a hand on his shoulder. I lean forward. This time, I find his lips all by myself. We kiss long and slow. Gentle.
It reminds me of the woods of Maine. Of being a girl again, with the sun on my cheeks and a winding deer path unspooling before me. It is promise and hope and a whisper of a future I once thought impossible.
When I finally pull back, his hand is covering my own.
“We’ll do this together,” he says, and I know exactly what he means.
Keith drives us onto Walt’s property. Most likely I should call D.D. and tell her what we have discovered and where we are going. But I feel fragile, the moment too dreamlike to survive being put into words.
I’m not alone. I have Keith. And besides, whatever we learn about Walt, about Jacob, it may still not hold any relevance for the taskforce. Maybe it’s simply another chapter in my story, which is for me to hear first.
Walt has his shotgun. It’s strapped onto the back of his ATV. It doesn’t strike me as ominous anymore. Simply a tool a paranoid microgreens grower never leaves home without.
Walt unchains the main gate, opens it long enough for us to pull out on the dirt road. He locks up behind, then mounts his four-wheeler and roars around us to take the lead. We follow him for several miles, having to weave our way around deep ruts. Then a smaller trail appears on the right, heading farther into the woods. Walt guns it and Keith does the same.
Up we climb. I think we must be somewhere in the vicinity of the two grave sites, but having cut through Walt’s property, I feel disoriented. I can’t be sure.
The wooded trail suddenly spits us out onto a newer dirt road. I recognize the pattern from the map we’d studied yesterday—the whole ATV trail system acts as a series of shortcuts, slicing straight lines through the mountains to connect road here to road there—hence the locals’ preference for moving around.
Then, in front of us: a hulking, misshapen form just now appearing in a clearing ahead.
The cabin that broke me.
