Earl stood there for a minute, breathing the thick air and feeling foolish.Then he went back inside and shut the door.
He huffed a plume of condensation and went back into the hut.Kids.It had to be.
Devilry, his dear departed mother would’ve called it.Idle youth looking for idle entertainment, and what better target than the old fool minding the waters?In his day, children were seen and not heard.Respected their elders, they did.None of these shenanigans.Running wild and wreaking havoc like packs of dogs.
Or had they?Now that he really thought about it, the memories were hazy.He could’ve sworn he’d been a hellion himself once upon a time.Could almost hear the echo of raucous laughter and feel the phantom thrill of mischief brewing.But the harder he tried to grasp the images, the quicker they slipped through his fingers.
Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing.That was the other possibility.The doctor had mentioned auditory things.Earl had dismissed that too, because Earl dismissed everything the doctor said on principle
Early onset.Progressive deterioration.Inevitable decline.
He lowered himself into his chair and his knees made a sound like someone stepping on a bag of chips.He reached for his coffee, remembered he’d already finished it, then reached for it again thirty seconds later because the information hadn’t stuck.
The third knock made him flinch.
This time he was sure.Three bangs on the door.
Earl strained his ears to ensure it wasn’t his imagination, or that there wasn’t an injured pigeon flapping around under the table.
No.No pigeons, no vermin.Just him and someone on the other side of the wood.
Earl stumbled towards the door again, clasped his hand around the knob and, with what little strength he had left, yanked.
And there, filling the doorway, was a figure clad in black.Earl couldn’t make out the face because the afternoon sun was behind the visitor and it turned them into a silhouette; a black shape cut out of the bright sky like something removed from a photograph.
Fear seized him and his instincts screamed to run, move, or perhaps grab a weapon from the shelf and fight.
But Earl’s body wouldn’t move.His feet stayed where they were.The gap between what his instincts told him and what his muscles did had been widening for months, and now, when it mattered, the gap was too wide to cross.
‘Who...‘ Earl licked suddenly dry lips and forced the words past the lump in his throat.‘Who are you?What do you want?’
The figure stepped forward.Earl stepped back.His heel caught on the leg of the chair and he went down hard.His knees hit the floor with a sound that would have made him cry out if the wind hadn’t already left his lungs.
But it all seemed to be happening to someone else; a stranger wearing his skin.The door was still open and the bayou was right there, thirty feet away, the same water that had been telling him its secrets for twenty years, and it said nothing now.
Distantly, as if from the end of a long tunnel, he heard a voice.
‘Earl Parsons, I’ve come to save you.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ella was outside the precinct with her back against the wall.She’d come out for air ten minutes ago and hadn’t gone back in because going back in meant sitting down at that desk and staring at the same information that hadn’t told her anything useful the last four times she’d stared at it.
Three victims.Three figurines.One chain she could follow and one she couldn’t.
She went through it again, because going through it again was all she had.
Amber Holloway.Ceramic snowman on her necklace.That one made sense, because it came from Rose Michaels’ music box, the one Jared Novak had given her, the one she’d donated after the custody battle blew her life apart.Ripley had called fourteen donation centres.None of them kept item-level records.The music box had disappeared into the secondhand economy and hadn’t come back out again.
Rose Michaels.Wooden ballet dancer glued to her palm.That one made sense too, once Ella had found the Colisée Theatre and its logo.Someone had carved a replica of it.That someone had put it in a dead woman’s hand to point at Eddie Foxall.
Eddie Foxall.Wooden man holding an oversized key, standing on a flat base with a thin blue line painted along one edge.Hand-carved, hand-painted, and made with the same skill as a ballet dancer.
And that was where the chain snapped, because Ella had spent hours looking for what the figurine pointed to and come up with nothing.She’d searched online in case it also resembled something local and didn’t.The character was so nondescript it could refer to anyone.The key in the character’s hand looked mechanical, like it opened an industrial storage container, but Ella didn’t know if that was just the limitations of the sculpture coming into play.The brief dash of blue paint on the base might mean water, but might meant nothing when someone’s life was at the other end of it.
Darryl Croon was a dead end.His clock cards put him on site both nights.Whatever else he was and he was plenty – he wasn’t their killer.
So Ella was left with a wooden figure she couldn’t decode, a fourth target she couldn’t identify, and no suspect.
