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Even though I have search engine alerts set with her name and details, and scour databases every couple of months searching for a death certificate for any Jane Does that fit her description, it’s only a matter of time before her body is found and identified.
So I suppose I’m really here visiting her, as I choose to believe that in some way, she left a part of herself here with her brother. That this is her place of rest, too.
I’m still unsure if I was meant to find and help Devyn, or if she was meant to help me see that this world is not black and white. To live in the gray is to experience life as it was meant. Passionately, fearlessly. Even recklessly. And there can be peace, a form of escape for the things we cannot control, for the sorrow that will otherwise destroy us.
I hope she found hers in the end.
Inhaling a deep breath, I place the pink gladioli beneath the symbol. “I hope I’ll see you again,” I say to the open air, even though I have difficulty believing in such a possibility.
As I turn and start toward the other side of the ravine, I think back to my first memory of following Emmons into the marsh, seeing the eyes woven to the trees, and his visceral anger. It was fear I sensed in him, but its source wasn’t what I initially presumed.
Emmons was fearful over what Devyn had done, drawing attention to them by going rogue with her own rituals. His fear drove him to extreme measures in the days that followed.
In psychology, we’re taught that fear is the weakest emotion, that its purpose is to be transmuted into its opposite, positive emotion which encourages the healing process. While I do agree, I also believe fear is the most powerful motivator on a destructive path.
It aims to overpower, manipulate, and destroy.
It’s how we deal with our fear that determines what our outcome will be.
Uncovering these fears in suspects has become the basis for my profiling technique, and it’s helped me close six cold cases.
Kallum and I departed the current case to make this trip, and already the pull to return to the scene is compelling me back there. Just last week, the case escalated and was upgraded to serial killer status, the media giving the unknown subject a moniker: The Acolyte.
The suspect suffers from erotomania, and has an especially brutal kill method.
In order to connect with this offender, I’ll have to immerse myself in their delusion. Which I admit, does induce a deep level of fear. Once the door has been opened, there’s no sealing it off. Entering into another person’s world of obsession is dangerous.
But Kallum is always there to catch me if I fall too far.
As I trek back toward the path of boulders, I stumble over a loose rock. “Shit.”
I look down and catch sight of something buried beneath a patch of thickly grouped bloodroot. My heart vaults as I shove my tote bag to my backside and hunch down, clearing aside the white lobed flowers to reveal what’s hidden beneath.
At first, I think I’ve finally discovered what happened to my Hollow’s Row notebook. While working the ravine one day, I set my journal down and forgot it there after Emmons took a fall. I returned later to look, and even asked the other members of the task force if it was recovered.
It never turned up.
But as I lift the notebook out of the flowers, adrenaline speeds my pulse. After two years, the condition should be worn and damaged from the elements—yet it looks like it was placed here just recently.
I glance around the ravine as a murder of crows takes flight above the ridge. The flapping beat of their wings holds me captive in a crushing vise of apprehension until I force myself to look down at what lie on the rocky earth beneath.
My fingers caress the soft beige yarn. Then, with a tremor gripping my hands, I hold up the small quilt, my eyes tracking the intricate stitchwork of the baby blanket.
A hot ache forms in my throat as I instinctively touch my belly.
Logically, I know it’s not possible. Devyn isn’t alive, she can’t be, and yet I’m holding a blanket knit with her signature pattern.
A mix of uncertainty and comfort envelops me as I touch the delicate stitches, my thoughts trying to decipher the meaning.
Regardless that my doctor assured me it was possible after my operation, I haven’t been able to conceive. Some days it’s an afterthought that doesn’t impact my life. Other days, it’s like suffering that painful loss all over again.
My fingers splay over my belly as I blink away the moisture. Then I push the blanket onto my lap and part the notebook open. I flip through the pages, a sense of nostalgia overcoming me as I scan my research notes.
There are no additions, nothing has been altered—then I pause at a highlighted section of text.
…in darkness, she found it filled with light. It was joined with it, since it had become divine according to her, and it lives in her. It also brought them out from darkness into light, from grief to joy, from sickness to health, from death to life.
A tear slips free, and I swipe at my cheek, the ache burning in the center of my chest.
