“Jeremy’s dead. She killed him. She brought me his eyes.”
Leo was quiet for a long time. Then he drained his glass in one swallow and set it on the sofa. “Just the eyes?” he asked.
“Jesus Christ,” said Archie. “He’s still alive.”
C H A P T E R 61
Susan’s mother was teaching a yoga class at the Arlington Club, and Susan was trying to figure out how to get Project Runway to stream on her laptop, when she looked up to see Archie Sheridan standing at the front door. She was wearing black sweatpants and a threadbare U of O T-shirt that she slept in, and Uggs. It was not the outfit she imagined wearing when she pictured Archie Sheridan showing up at her front door at night.
She closed her laptop and padded to the door.
Her bandage was off, but the two puncture wounds on her face had bruised and swollen, and a black eye was coming in. As she opened the door, she caught sight of her reflection in the glass and winced.
The porch light was on, and gnats batted against the fixture. August was the only month of the year in Portland that Susan felt comfortable outside at night without a jacket.
“What’s going on?” Susan asked. She’d been burning incense. Patchouli. And a cloud of it drifted out around her on the porch. She hoped Archie wouldn’t notice it.
“I need the phone,” Archie said.
She knew which phone he meant. But she was surprised by his confidence in the fact that she had it, that it wasn’t still sitting in her glove box unnoticed.
The only way he’d know that she’d found it was if he knew that she’d used it to try to contact Gretchen. And the only way he’d know she’d tried to contact Gretchen was if he’d been in touch with Gretchen since.
“Sure,” she said.
She left him on the porch, went into the dining room, retrieved the red purse she’d hung on the back of a chair, and returned to the front door. Then she dug out the phone and held it out to him.
He took it, and for a moment their fingers touched. Archie scrolled through the messages. He blinked in disbelief. “You texted her?” he said.
Susan shrugged and looked away. “You were in trouble.” She tried to make up for it. “I plugged it in,” she said. “I have the same charger.”
Archie finished going through the messages. “There’s nothing here,” he said. He dialed a number and walked away a few steps on the porch, the phone to his ear. Then his shoulders fell and he turned back around to face her. “The number she was calling from is disconnected. There’s no way to find her.”
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Archie steadied himself on the doorjamb. “Gretchen has Jeremy.”
Susan had seen his injuries—he had to be in pain. He was probably delirious. “Do you want to come in and sit down?” Susan asked.
“No time,” Archie said, shaking his head. “Gretchen didn’t kill Isabel Reynolds,” he added. “Jeremy did.”
Susan’s hand rose reflexively to her cheek. She flashed on
Isabel—tortured for two days before she died. It couldn’t be true. What kind of thirteen-year-old kid was capable of that?
“How do you know?” she asked.
Archie pressed his forehead against the doorjamb. “She’s going to kill him, if he’s not dead already,” he said. He lifted his head and banged it against the wood. “He played me. He told me that he remembered everything, that Gretchen killed Isabel in the woods. But Isabel was gagged. Wherever Jeremy took her, it wasn’t the woods.” He knocked his forehead against the wood again, as if trying to jog a thought loose. “If they were in the woods, he wouldn’t have had to gag her. But he would have had to take her somewhere private, somewhere he could hide the car. Somewhere people might hear if she wasn’t gagged.”
And suddenly Susan knew.
“Derek said that house on Fargo’s been empty for fifteen years,” she said. “The Rose Garden.PittockMansion. The old produce warehouse. They were all Beauty Killer crime scenes.”
Archie lifted his head off the doorjamb and looked at her.
Susan continued. “There’s a foundation for a garage. Maybe twelve years ago the garage was still there.”
“He parked the car in the old garage and tortured his sister to death over two days,” Archie said slowly. “Three-nine-seven.” He closed his eyes. “March 1997. He practically spelled it out for us.”
“You think Gretchen is there, right now?” Susan asked. “With Jeremy?” She waved a hand. “So call the SWAT team. Call everyone. Drop a bomb on the whole fucking block.”
Archie just looked at her.
“Oh, God,” she said. “You’re going by yourself, aren’t you?”
He turned and started down the steps, one hand held to his side, one hand on the railing.