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Layla hasn’t been answering my calls all day, and now this.
Fuck! Something’s not right.
Driving as fast as I can on the freeway, I pray I’m not too late.
Coming to Somerset is a risky move. It can ruin everything I’ve built since I left that life behind.
Left behind everything that happened. Tried to bury the monster I found deep inside me. Hoping and praying that if I could get out, they died in the fire.
But now, I’m going to a town where I should be dead.
I haven’t been there in seventeen years. Not since I was a teen. Not since that fateful night.
The night I died, yet I didn’t. The night where I came out of a fire a new man.
All I wanted was to survive, to start over. I wanted to leave that fucked-up life behind and move away from all the damage found in that hellhole of a town. I also wanted to disappear from Cynthia. She didn’t need to see me, and I sure as hell didn’t want to see her again.
Before I head into town, I make one stop at a cottage on the far outskirts.
I haven’t been to Jim’s cottage in years.
Not since I came that night. I ran a mile to get here. Blood on my hands.
I had to do it.
To save her, I had to kill him. There was no other choice.
After . . . Afterward, I went to find Jim.
Jim was the only man I could trust in my life. Local firefighter who fostered me for two weeks when my brother was sent away to the hospital. Mother had disappeared. She had left us all alone. Or so I thought at the time.
I was young, so very fucking young, and I had no idea where she went, just that my older brother was gone, too. Jim took me in until Stone could come back.
The door looks exactly the same as it had all those years ago. I can still see my bloody handprint that had stained the wood. Staring at the door, I notice it’s open. Slightly ajar.
Shit.
I push it open, transported in my mind to that night. The night I told him what I did. The night he came up with a plan.
A plan we would both have to live with.
A fire.
I told Jim what I found at the cabin. My father’s old cabin by the lake near our house. The only thing our father left us after he was sent to jail for killing the man he caught in bed with our mother.
After he went to prison, my mother boarded up the cabin.
The last good memories I had of the place were when I was a small boy. No point of going back since my mom became a drunk and stopped bringing us to the lake.
It wasn’t until that night that I returned and found him.
After I killed him, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. He was dead on the cabin floor.
I ran all the way here and woke Jim. He came to the cottage with me and saw what I had done. I made a call and followed the instructions he gave me to the letter.
Where to start the fire. How to accelerate it. Then I left.
Jim took care of everything. He was the firefighter who was called to the scene first.
He was the one who planted the burned bones. The one who made sure the report was filed. I don’t know how he did it all.
I was able to walk away, and he was able to help me start a new life. Now, here I am, seventeen years later, and the past has finally come back to haunt me.
I move through the house, and my footsteps halt.
There is Jim. Lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood.
I start to run to him, but the blood is everywhere. If I get too close, I’ll leave evidence that I was here, so I step back from Jim’s mangled body and look around the room.
That’s when I see it on the wall. Written in blood. A postcard addressed to me.
North.
Beneath my name is the symbol he always used to mark his victims.
The Compass Killer is back.
My brother is alive.
Fuck.
I need to stop him. I am the only one who can make all this madness stop once and for all. I thought I did what was necessary years ago, but he’s been lurking in the shadows this entire time.
I pull down the postcard taped to the wall and see that it’s an image of Cape May. He’s been following me.
There, written on the image are three words:
She will die.
Flipping it over, I see more written on the back. A clue . . .
You’ll find her where it all began.
I have to return home.
46
Layla
I come to again, my head shaking away the confusion of what must have happened.
