“This is all we took. Some bank statements. A few IOUs from a local feed store. An unpaid invoice for a tractor service, along with this.” Remy Jones, a middle-aged pot-bellied man held up a red notepad that had been curled and rolled with an elastic band and a pen jabbed in the pages. “We figured she killed him and then herself because they were up to their eyeballs in debt, and it was only a matter of time before they lost everything. She blamed him for their lack of fortune; couldn’t be bothered struggling anymore. Bang, bang.”
My eyes locked onto the notepad as he waved it around with his stupid conclusions. Mrs Mclary didn’t shoot her husband for something as useless as money. She shot him because she’d had enough of him raping girls. Maybe in her twisted mind, she thought he cheated on her, or perhaps, she’d finally woken up to how fucking horrible they were and what they were doing to kids.
Either way, she’d killed pure evil and then done the world a favour by eradicating herself, too.
I tried to look away from the notebook as the officer flicked through its pages with a scowl. “This thing makes no sense, though. It’s just a bunch of numbers with prices beside it. Four hundred here. Two hundred there. A thousand dollars a few times, but that’s rare.” He shrugged, tossing it back onto the counter with a slap. “Must be another IOU book, or maybe how much they paid for stock?”
No one seemed interested in answering him, but I couldn’t tear my gaze off that damn red notebook.
Something familiar…something tugging me to tumble backward through time.
Red.
Pages.
Pen.
The farmhouse fell away, replaced with an older version—a version where Marion Mclary still lived, and she sat rocking on her rocker by the grimy window, her spindly hand scribbling.
I’d been tasked at lugging in firewood. Load after load until my arms shook and my shoulders threatened to pop from their sockets.
She hadn’t cared.
On and on she rocked, writing in that little notebook before creaking her way toward the bookcase that lived in a shadowy part of the living room.
The past and present blended as I followed the tug of my feet, leading me toward the bookcase that still groaned under the weight of cookery books that were never used and auto mechanic magazines that were torn up as fire kindling.
“Ren?” Della asked softly, but I wasn’t really there with her.
I was in an in-between world. A place where I was neither thirty nor ten. I was plasma, merely a figment as I reached for the book where I’d seen Mrs Mclary stuff cash that afternoon before swatting me around the head for spying.
Pulling the Bible free, a few coins tinkled inside as I released Della’s hand and flopped open the Book of God. Inside, instead of silky pages of testament, someone had hacked away and created a box—a carved out section for secrets.
Martin Murray came up behind me, muttering something to his colleague as I gingerly reached in and held up a matching notebook to the red one he held, except this one was black, sinister, and dripping with filth.
Someone reached over and pinched it from my fingers, leaving me to stare at a few measly bucks and a chewed-on pencil in the Bible. Placing it back on the shelf, I shook my head clear from memories and re-settled into my current existence.
I expected the same hum of conversation from before. The same beat of footsteps as cops trawled the house. The same knowledge of safety that comes from hustle and bustle when you aren’t the main attraction.
Only, I kind of was.
Bob Colton scanned the notebook pages then gave me a strange, almost scared look. Snapping his fingers, he commanded, “The red notebook. Now.”
An officer scrambled into the kitchen, darting back with the matching notebook to the black one he held.
The moment Bob had it in his hands, he strode to the sideboard, shoved aside an old candelabra with decades’ worth of dripped wax, and spread out both booklets, his finger trailing one line of text before matching it with another.
“Oh, my God.” He flicked me another look. “Do you know what this is? How did you know where to look? You’ve been in this house five minutes and already found more than we did.”
Della gave me a worried glance, staying silent beside me.
This was the house she was born in, yet it was as foreign to her as it was familiar to me. I shook my head, swallowing a cough. “I saw her one day. Writing something. She stored cash in the Bible.”
“There are two hundred and seventeen names here.” Bob’s face turned to chalk.
“What do you mean?” Martin brushed up to him, skimming the same text.
I didn’t understand why both men suddenly looked at me as if I was some unknown specimen. Some sort of thing that shouldn’t be standing before them.
Martin swallowed hard, his face matching Bob’s in chalkiness. “You said there were ten or fifteen.”
“Ten or fifteen?” I questioned.
“Children. You said there were ten or fifteen children in captivity here.”
“Yes. At any one time. I have no idea how many came and went on top of that.”
“Holy fuck.” Bob Colton clamped a hand over his mouth and spun to look at his team. “Call for help. Cadaver dogs. Diggers. As many hands on deck as you can.”
Della asked nervously. “Wh-what’s going on?”
Martin’s grey eyes landed on hers, wide as full moons. “The two notebooks are a ledger.”
My heart sank to my toes. My lungs stabbed with pain. “She kept records?”
He nodded, beckoning me forward to glance at the two spread apart notebooks. “See? The red one has the line number and price. The black one holds the name.” His voice became unsteady with fury for all the children the Mclary’s had bought and hurt. “Number eight in the red notebook correlates to a girl in the black one called Isabelle May.” His uniform creaked as he murmured sickly, “They paid two hundred dollars for her.”
Della sucked in a gasp, her eyes dancing over text faster than I could, latching onto names, breathing them like a chant. “Duncan Scott, Ryan Jones, Jade Black, Monica Frost.” Her blue eyes glittered with malice for her mother and father as she snatched the notebooks and flicked the pages faster and faster, skimming and skimming until she finally froze, face tight, body stiff, hands shaking. “Ren Shaw.”
Icicles replaced my heart as my feet locked to the floor. “What?” My question was barely audible as Della read the number beside my name and tracked it to the number in the red notebook.
Tears spilled down her cheeks as the notebooks fell from her hands, and she threw herself into my arms. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars.”
And the farmhouse vanished.
And all that mattered was holding Della as we trembled together.
Because I finally had answers to whom I was.
I was Ren Shaw.
And my mother had sold me for a measly seven hundred and fifty dollars.
*
I suppose I had something to be thankful for.
For the past six hours, the Mclary farmhouse had become a hive of activity with cops buzzing and machinery humming and dogs sniffing.
I was no longer the suspect of a kidnapping investigation. I was the kid who should never have survived and, instead of side glances whenever I touched Della, I received thumbs-up for taking her away from this morgue.
Because it was a morgue.
In the past few hours, the cops who’d brought reinforcements from every county they could, who’d strung up police tape, and blocked off every way onto the property, had already found four tiny skeletons.
One beneath the veranda just tossed like one would a mouldy potato.
Three in the offal pit, boy bones with sheep bones and pig.
And one behind the house that had at least been partially buried with fingers sprouting through the grass like a new species of weed.
No one noticed us anymore.
No one commanded us to leave or get back.
We were invisible as I led Della out of the farmhouse and toward the fields I’d toiled in for two years.
Funny, how two years had felt like an eternity back then but were nothing in the scheme of a life. Odd, how two years had scared me so spectacularly, leaving gorge marks in my soul and unfilled holes in my psyche.