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Bree could still be alive?
“What about Damon?” I asked.
“Just awaiting the DNA, which should be in this morning, but if Mulch used one surrogate, I figure we’ll find that John Doe is not your son.”
I felt dizzy. “I need to sit down.”
She grabbed me by the arm and led me up the stairs to the coffee shop, and we went in again, both of us dripping. Aaliyah got me to a chair and I sat down hard.
For two and a half days I’d endured the hell of their deaths. And now the woman in the foundation was definitely not Bree, which meant the body in my backyard probably wasn’t Damon’s. Though it was clearly possible that Mulch still planned to kill them, par
t of me wanted to erupt with joy.
Instead, I laughed caustically, said, “First the doctored photographs, and now this? Killing my family again and again? Mulch is trying to drive me insane, isn’t he?”
“He’s tormenting you,” Aaliyah said, sitting beside me.
“Don’t you let him, whoever he is,” said the coffee-shop owner, setting two steaming mugs in front of us. “Don’t let him do it to you. You just gotta be strong and stay true to yourself.”
I looked at him appraisingly, said, “You’ve got experience with someone trying to drive you crazy?”
“I do,” he said. “My ex-wife tried.
She’s still trying.” Something about the way he said it made me laugh, and the agony of the past few days lifted and was replaced by hope. They were alive! God had not abandoned me.
It was unspeakable that Mulch had killed and butchered two innocent people to make me suffer, but I was overwhelmed with gratitude that my family was alive. They were not safe, but they could all still be saved. Humbled, I put my face in my hands, shook with happiness, and thanked my Savior from the bottom of my soul.
Then I looked at Aaliyah through teary eyes and said, “You can’t know how low I was when you told me.”
“I could see it,” she said, choking up and patting me on the thigh.
I cleared my throat and said, “Tell me about Harrow. And what happened to you?” I added, noticing some abrasions on her face.
“Harrow is dead,” Aaliyah said, getting back to business. “We think Mulch killed him after the murders and burned his place down. I got my face scratched up there during the investigation; it’s a long story. What about you? Where have you been?”
“Tracking Mulch,” I said. “Also a long story.”
“The headmaster said something about a woman taking Damon,” she said. “And that there was possibly a picture of her here?”
“It got erased,” Brower said sadly, back behind the counter again.
The door to the coffee shop opened with a tinkle of a bell and then shut.
“The FBI computer lab might be able to pull the erased image off the hard drive,” Aaliyah said. “It could take days, but it might be worth a try.”
Days? I thought. Did they have—
“Excuse me?” a boy said. “Are you Damon’s father?”
I looked over to see a string bean of a kid with wet red hair and bad acne, wearing a Kraft School hoodie, gray sweatpants, and flip-flops despite the weather.
“Yes?” I said.
“I’m Roger Wood, a friend of Damon’s,” he said awkwardly. “I was just having breakfast with Tommy Grant and Porter Tate, and they said I should come find you.”
“Okay …” I said as the coffee-shop door opened and several more customers came in out of the rain.
“They said you’d want to see this,” the boy said.
