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“So you think it’s someone out for what, decades-old retribution?” She asked.
“I wouldn’t say that. I think pain of that magnitude settles into us as the world turns. It becomes just another part of what and who we are and it’s accepted with a shrug and a blind eye. Nothing to be done because the damage has been achieved completely.”
Teddi cursed softly under her breath, the wind refusing to carry it away.
Vera didn’t know what to say. She couldn't walk away with the fresh dark truth of the land beneath her feet. There were no words to comfort the woman because she felt firsthand pain, shaped in twisted garish metal, grinding against her soul inside her. She knew that no one could provide comfort for what was stolen from her life, her job, her cousin, or her beliefs and there would be nothing she could say to this stranger either.
The woman stood with an aged groan. Her silver hair was a crown if she’d ever seen one. Evidence of survival, of women she didn’t know and never would, but respected in a way one fighter did to another. Mother after mother, sister after sister, grandmother after grandmother left standing in the dust and destruction others left in their wake. But standing, nonetheless.
“I will give you one piece of advice and then you both best be on your way.” She looked between them with a hardness they had come to see often in Sylen's residents. “The men in this town aren’t to be trifled with. No one in Sylen is.” Vera began to speak but the stranger shook her head. “Go home. Leave Sylen before you find something that finds you too.” With that, she walked slowly, a limp tilting her side to side, until she stepped inside her home and shut the door.
Teddi slumped against the square pillar at the edge of the porch. “Holy shit.” Vera echoed the sentiment.
A town built on violence. A land once planted with hope and faith in the future was ripped up by the hands of self-righteous anger. Sylen wasn’t just some backwoods town but an entire universe of twisted history all on its own. It was forged in solitude and that was the way they wanted to keep it. Their town. Their problems. No outsiders sticking their noses in their business.
But they fucked up. When they let Alex get hurt. When they left his young body cold and tortured in a forest so black it blotted out the sun. They fucked up putting him in the missing person’s database, raising the alarm that he was here because now she was in Sylen and she wasn’t going anywhere without an answer. She could knock on her door and ask what she meant about seeing things in the woods and Sylen and secrets, but she knew it was pointless. The fact that she opened up and told them her tale was more than anyone else had given them. It was insight straight into the rotted core of their community.
She understood now more than she ever had in all of her years of investigating, of hunting killers and dancing with criminals who thought death was a fun way to exert power and greed. If they were going to find answers in the godforsaken town, they were going to have to pry them from someone’s cold dead fingers.
Chapter 26
Vera
Teddi’s slow breathing was a steady rhythm in the dark motel room. The outline of her hip a soft s-curve beneath the blanket.
An erratic ticking sound came from the radiator as it tried to stop the cold from seeping in. It began to creep beneath her skin. With a frustrated sigh, she rolled to stare up at the ceiling. It was the only white wall in the room. If she squinted she thought she could make out the shape of a face in the texture, dimly lit by the sliver of light cutting the room in half.
Only in the dark could she let the thoughts she kept barricaded away seep through, bringing them out in the open where no one could witness them.
Sylen’s strange and violent history. Her terror of visiting Alex’s crime scene. Teddi’s admission.
Teddi’s admission left her feeling like she’d been T-boned going ninety.
In all the years she imagined having that conversation with her, she never fathomed the idea that Teddi did it because she knew exactly what Vera had been planning. She’d been head-over-heels and twenty-two. With the kindness of time, she could admit the foolish grandeur of her ideas.
She’d been prepared to leave school. Maybe take a year off and travel with Teddi. Make some of her dreams come true instead. Make new dreams together. She hadn’t cared at the time. Like a handkerchief caught in the wind, she was ready to fling herself into the unknown solely to be with her. Meeting in the summer was ideal. Classes for Vera were minimal while Teddi only worked nights and weekends at the bar. When summer rolled into the fall semester, they’d made it work. Fort Collins and Denver weren’t that far away. It wasn’t supposed to add up.
But it did. It did for Vera because every day they were apart she ached with a kind of longing she didn’t know she was capable. It made the space between her ribs pinch. Lead in her feet made each step heavier than the one before. She wanted Teddi back. Wanted to be next to her, to lie with her every night not just when time allowed. She’d begun looking into switching to online courses, lightening her coursework, and pushing back graduation. The fact that Teddi knew, or at least anticipated her willingness to make those changes was a shock. There’d been no discussion. Fear had held her back from taking that final step, from having that life-changing conversation.
Then Teddi pulled the plug and everything unraveled like a fallen spool of thread.
Vera rubbed her temples, begging for sleep to swallow her whole and free her from herself. A good memory was a terrible thing some days. It ensured she was never truly free. Not from people or the past and especially not herself. It was a haunting that no exorcism or religious fanatic could free her from.
There were too many ghosts and she was tired of carrying them around like chains. She failed Alex today in her fear of seeing his crime scene. What Sam said about there being a mark nearby meant visiting it was detrimental. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Thankfully Teddi seemed to understand as much and suggested heading back to the motel to get some much-needed rest after leaving Alice Grennan's abandoned home. Passing a skittering Al in the lot had barely registered on her radar.
There was the pull between needing to see where he’d been disposed and wanting to run away from what she’d left him to. Alex was just another mistake she’d come to find too late.
Teddi shifted in the bed making a rusted spring creak.
Vera stole another look at her in the low light. What was she going to do about Teddi? Her steadiness, her lack of judgement, her presence that never asked for anything but honesty. She laid herself bare and Vera still couldn’t figure out how to turn the pieces into something she could make sense of. Teddi knew her when she was still naive about the realities beyond her own experiences. They were together in their early twenties, both eager to get out into the world and grab everything by the horns.
Every moment between them had been steady. Steady and honest and hard. It had been hard to let Teddi in that first time. Never hard to love Teddi, never that. Teddi was easy to love. Vera accepted long ago that she was not. It made her want to scratch her skin and go on a run so hard she puked. The vulnerability didn't come easy, even when she was a child. It fit oddly in her chest, like something she never learned how to make room for. A flaw she was born with, she assumed. Letting Teddi in had been the hardest thing she’d done to that point.
She compared every woman to her. No one’s sense of humor could handle her dryness. No one knew how to sit in silence or let her be in control the way she needed to be. Teddi softened her edges without demanding it. The world was something to be enjoyed instead of solely navigated. They flowed together, not against one another. It was one of the many reasons they worked. Until they hadn’t.
Teddi would have known what to do in D.C. She would’ve handled it better, avoiding the fallout altogether because she would have made an entirely different decision when it all came down to that one split second. There wouldn’t be blood on Teddi’s hands and Vera was glad for it.
Sometimes she heard the gunshot like it was still in front of her and she tried not to flinch. Her ears would ring, her shoulders aching as she held the weight steady. And then the questions began. What if she’d walked away? What if she hadn't interfered? What if she’d let one more injustice slide like all the times before? What if she’d stayed inside the lines and trusted a broken system to fix it?
