Page 70 of Death is Familiar

“Now, before you say anything else that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside, you should know I may have done more troublemaking than you realize.”

Jack failed to conceal his amusement. “Not that it should be shared outside this room, but your troublemaking, has been… entertaining.”

“Not all of it,” I sighed, steeling myself for the words that would come next. “I need to do something you’re not going to like. I need to go to Eureka, Kansas.”

The town where I grew up.

And I needed to go now, whether the agents liked it or not.

15

Eureka, Kansas was a small town known for its hand in the cattle trade, as well as its proximity to nothing and nowhere. It was also home to four tornados since the 1950s. A stat I knew because of my very rational fear of tornados. And we were living in Kansas.

Growing up, my parents owned a house a few minutes outside of town, where the property was surrounded by cattle farms. Lawrence and I would spend days stirring up trouble in the fields. Occasionally, after school, I’d bike to the convenience store, grab some ice cream and watch the world go by. A world that was brimming with hopes and dreams.

Like anything was possible.

How wrong I was.

Now, as I drove through town on my hard-won good graces of the FBI, I saw only the pain of my past.

How foolish I had been to think life was simple and full of hope. That good people got what they deserved, and the bad were always punished.

Over the last ten years, I found excuses to visit as little as possible. It was only when Lawrence pulled out the ‘brotherly obligation card’ that I allowed him to drag me back. And even then, I did it with ample eye-rolling.

Despite this, I didn’t think returning to Eureka would stir much of an emotional response. I was a grownup who had seen more than my fair share of misery and suffering. Surely, I should have outgrown the discomfort of my memories.

But it was hard to ignore the tightness in my chest, feeling and reliving each and every one of the ghosts of my past.

Okay, maybe I had been avoiding returning to Eureka, because, now, I could feel the painful memories etched into the pavement. The three boys I’d fallen for in my youth, and the tragedies that befell them. My stabbing. My parents getting sucked into that godforsaken cult. The foreclosure of the house. Lawrence and I having to fend for ourselves, with nothing saved up, all of it used for my surgeries post-stabbing.

White-knuckling the steering wheel, I swallowed the jagged little lump in my throat, and forced myself past all the places that made me want to forget. The sidewalk where I was stabbed. The family home, now derelict and abandoned. The nursing home⁠—

Damn, I really didn’t want to go in there. But it was a necessary discomfort if I wanted anything I said to be believable.

And that was hard. So much harder than I imagined.

Even though I spent the morning preparing myself for the rendezvous with Mads, eating enough candy to keep the local convenience store in business, being back in the town where I was raised took an emotional toll. Everything I did felt weighted. Everything took more effort.

Scoping out the location and all possible escape routes should have taken twenty-minutes, tops, but more than once I caught my thoughts drifting, so I’d started all over again. I had to re-do it three, four, times to make sure I got it right.

And I was running out of time.

Lawrence’s note had been very specific: FOUR TWO ONE / GRIFFIN HOME.

The first part was easy. Four hundred and twenty-one was the street number. It was the Griffin Home line that held meaning only for me.

As kids, while our parents did their grocery shopping, Lawrence and I would be given free rein to roam about town, so long as it was within a three-block radius of the grocery store. We’d be given five dollars, which was usually spent on treats that immediately gave us a sugar high. And more often than not, Lawrence and I would turn whatever it was we were doing into a competition. Racing was common.

Once Lawrence suggested that we race to the Greenwood Hotel—just about the only landmark within our grocery store radius—but with a mouthful of taffy I’d heard him say, “Griffin Home”. Lawrence being Lawrence, he thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, and ever since then we’d referred to the hotel as the Griffin Home.

Only the Griffin Home wasn’t located at a street address of four hundred and twenty-one. And the Griffin Home wasn’t a bank.

There were, however, five banks on the same road as the Griffin Home, but there was only one with an address which corresponded with the numbers from Lawrence’s letter.

It was there that I would meet Mads.

Well, technically, I told him to meet me in a parking lot a block away so he wouldn’t know our final destination before I took him there. The last thing I needed was for Mads to go to the bank without me.