Page 118 of Bad Intentions

Finally, we are leaving the past in the past.

Centuries ago, they started a rule of burying bodies six feet underground. For disease-control. To deter robbers. To prevent farmers from plowing into the bodies as well as animals digging for them.

The secrets like ours? Well, those have sharp edges, like broken glass, and sharp teeth that bite. Those sorts of secrets have to be buried seven feet deep. And all that goes with them has to burn. The fire is cleansing but also annihilating. Some things can’t leave a trace.

I nod toward Donna’s cardigan. “Go on now,” I encourage her.

She digs in her pocket, holds its contents in her hand for a moment, nodding to herself, and throws it into the fire. It’s a letter. The letter I got from him weeks ago. The letter I forwarded to Donna before I called her for the first time in decades, to remind her that what evil isn’t killed, comes back twofold.

I watch the paper catch on fire, the lines still visible but burning quickly.

Missed me?

I came back for what’s mine.

She’s a pretty girl, just like her dad she’s about to meet.

Derek.

The letter sparked Donna’s outrageous act of vengeance when, one rainy night, two weeks ago, she started her car and tracked Derek to Fair Road.

“When we get old, they tell us to slow down,” she said later, when she told me what she’d done that night. “What they don’t understand is that in order to get things sorted, sometimes you have to gun the engine.”

EPILOGUE

CONNOR

I guide the motorboat to the middle of the Susquehanna River, miles away from Burnville, and dump the gun. It’s unlicensed. No record. In this part of the river, it will be carried much farther, eventually buried in the riverbed. It got the job done.

For weeks, I’ve been staying at a rental cabin not far away from Burnville. I like these parts, the nature, clean air. Today was the funeral for the man who was my father. I couldn’t show up. Nor did I care. I sent flowers.

Most say, a father is a father, no matter the circumstances. That’s not how you look at it when your father is suspected of being involved in your mother’s drowning. At least, that’s my grandfather’s theory. He raised me. He used to be a sheriff. He hated my father’s guts.

I didn’t know much about my father until I was in my twenties, when I graduated from Harvard and moved to Silicon Valley. IT is helpful, including in tracking people.

“You’ve done well, I see,” said the man sitting across from me in a coffee shop one day. A full head of dark hair, despite him being in his forties. A charming smile. The sort of confidence that can be admirable if you don’t know his criminal record, domestic disputes, stalking, fraud, and credit card debt. As well as all the women he would tell me about in the next months of our occasional meetings.

James Derek Sickler. Intelligent but no steady job. Charming but no family. Amiable, until he learned about my successful start-up, and then all he could talk about was my money.

I wasn’t interested in him but more in the women he’d been with. Months before that, I’d done a DNA test. My information wasn’t shared, but the national database came up with a close match—a half sister, Rika Oren, the daughter of Victoria Oren, née Snickett.

I asked James Sickler about her. He shrugged with an arrogant smile. “Maybe?”

Suddenly, the one he was interested in was Josie Boots, the internet sensation involved in an online scandal.

You see, my father had a thing for pretty women and money.

“I’m going to Burnville, Pennsylvania, to meet her,” he said one day. He was on a mission to be part of someone’s success.

He borrowed money from me to travel to Burnville. I followed him. After all, I wanted to see for myself what my half-siblings were like.

In Burnville, he disappeared. I spent the first few days getting to know people. I met Rika at the bar she worked at. Smart, levelheaded, confident. Criminal record—that must be our father’s genes.

I saw Josie Boots several times. Quiet, kind, talented—I watched the online videos of her singing and playing guitar.

When the news broke about the kidnapped woman and my father’s picture was all over the media, I knew something was off. James Derek Sickler was many things—a Tinder swindler, a freeloader, and a scammer—but a kidnapper wasn’t one of them.

One person made me suspicious, Mallory Blain. So I followed her, stalked her, broke into her farmhouse when she wasn’t there—I guess I am my father’s son after all. She wasn’t a victim, that was clear. And she had something to do with my father’s disappearance. The tracking device on her car told me she had a lot going on. Including transporting a body in her car and putting it in Josie’s.