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CHAPTER 34
Kara’s stomach was still queasy, her nerves tight as bowstrings as she and Tate walked through the gloomy house. It was cold inside, a rush of wind sweeping in from the open cabinet near the fireplace, the bin where, in the past, her father had stacked firewood, now empty, the latch obviously having worn through.
“Let’s get on with this, get it over with,” she said, and circumvented the living room to walk through the dining area. The room where the family had shared so many meals, the boys hitting and shoving and laughing, was now empty and dark.
Kara remembered her family gathered around the table, the tinkle of cutlery over the sound of holiday music, her father’s deep laughter and Mama smiling over a glass of champagne that glistened in the dimmed lights and candle glow. The smells of roasting turkey or ham, cinnamon and cocoa had been ever-present during the winter retreats to the mountains, until that night.
Tears burned the backs of her eyes as she gazed at the long table where once there had been platters of corn, green beans and potatoes and gravy and along with the turkey, roast beef, ham or venison, there had been baskets of bread and bowls of fruit and a sense of gaiety.
Now the table was warped and dusty, covered in carcasses of dead flies, bees, moths and whatever other insect had died here. Cobwebs dangled from the chandelier, and the built-in buffet, long stripped of Mama’s Christmas china and silverware, was dirty, the glass panes of the cupboards cracked, the backboards riddled with small, chewed holes, evidence of a squirrel’s or rat’s nest visible in one corner.
Kara’s skin crawled as she walked into the kitchen. It, too, had been stripped bare. No knives suspended from the magnetic strip over the eight-burner stove, no pots or pans visible behind cabinet doors that hung drunkenly from broken hinges, the checkerboard tile floor grimy and mottled. She walked into the adjoining hallway, around the back of the staircase to the entry hall and into her father’s den.
The room was empty, devoid of his massive desk, nothing to see. As she stepped through the French doors and was again in the foyer, she turned her eyes to the living room once more.
“I could hear music,” she said as the memories tumbled through her, memories that had been locked away for decades. “I, um, I went through the bedrooms. And Jonas’s was a mess. His room had some old hunting trophies in it, like a deer’s head and an eagle that had been mounted on the wall, but it . . . it had been decapitated and Jonas’s room itself looked as if a tornado had swept through it.”
“Or someone with a sword had done the damage? Someone out of his mind with rage?”
“Yes,” she said meekly, as if she were seven again. “Out of control and”—she licked her lips—“with a bloodlust.” In that moment she reverted to her younger self, a small girl padding barefoot along the runner feeling the sticky dampness along the railing. “I knew something was wrong, really wrong.”
She viewed the living room as it had been then. “I saw them,” she said, her voice a whisper. “The three boys. And . . . and all that blood.” Her voice cracked and outside the wind moaned. Overhead floorboards creaked, the sound of the old house settling, or protesting its intrusion.
“I thought they were all dead,” she said, “and then Jonas, like a man coming out of his grave, raised up on one elbow and croaked at me to get help. To run.” She was staring into the living room, seeing it as it had been with the fallen Christmas tree, the glowing embers in the fireplace, the broken mantel and all that blood. So much blood. “Run, he’d yelled,” she whispered, and spun toward the door. “And then there was this huge person in the doorway, like a monster, his face covered in a mask. I ran, oh, God, I ran through the living room and the kitchen and out the back door.” She took two steps to follow that path but felt a hand on the crook of her elbow and stopped, her hand on the door handle.
“You don’t have to go,” Tate said, and she snapped back, no longer a child, but a woman again, creeping around the old house where so many she loved had been butchered. She felt tears on her face and before she knew what was happening, Tate folded her into his arms. “Let’s stop this. Now. Bad idea.”
She melted into him, her whole body shuddering, her knees buckling, his strength keeping her on her feet. She teetered between wanting to go forward and to run away, to close the door behind her and never look back.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not, Wes. You know it and I know it. It will never be okay.Never.”
* * *
“Got him!” Johnson said as she strode into Thomas’s office. She spread a series of 8 × 10 photos on his desk. Different pictures of the crowd that had gathered around the hospital when Jonas had been a patient at Whimstick General.
“That was fast.”
“I had someone in the tech department help me with facial recognition, and we were able to match anyone close to the original investigation to people in the crowd at the hospital. It was pretty easy.” She was proud of herself. “Also, I grabbed a lot of shots off the Internet, under the Facebook fan page where a lot of Jonas’s followers, if you’d call them that, anyway, his fans posted selfies and pictures of the crowd that had gathered. That’s how I got so many different angles and perspectives. Take a look.”
Thomas leaned in closer as Johnson said, “The thing is this, quite a few of some of our nearest and dearest suspects were there.” She shifted the pictures on his desk. “Let’s start here with dear old ‘Auntie Fai.’” She pointed out Faiza Donner, who stood separately from Roger Sweeney, parted by a sea of people so that it appeared Faiza didn’t know Sweeney was there, and vice versa.
“Now, let’s move on. Take a look at this.”
In the picture he saw Brittlynn Atwater again, and he recognized Sheila Keegan holding a microphone near to Mia Long. “Right here.” Johnson touched another image, of the man in the baseball cap, standing beneath the tree and staring at the woman in the long coat who looked so much like Marlie Robinson. In this picture, from the opposite angle of the first, he stood still hanging back from the crowd, but now he stood in front of the tree, his face in clear view.
Walter Robinson.
Staring at the woman who was a dead ringer for his missing daughter.
And he didn’t look the least bit surprised.
“What the hell was he doing there?” Thomas said, the wheels spinning wildly in his mind. Walter Robinson? Joining the crowd rallying for Jonas McIntyre and staring at his daughter or a dead ringer for her?
“Check out his hat.”
She showed him an enlarged print of Walter’s face and cap. Not a baseball cap as he’d originally thought, but a cap emblazoned with the emblem for the United States Marines.
