I was right. He did take it.
I think of all the times now that Daniel has made me doubt myself, my sanity, if only for a moment. I’m going to New Orleans, don’t you remember? Second-guessing the things that I had seen; the things I knew in my heart to be true. He continues to stare into his palm until he finally exhales, pushing it back into his pocket. He walks toward the front door, and that’s when I notice a suitcase resting in the hallway, his laptop bag leaned gently against the wall. He picks them both up, turns around. Surveys the room one final time. Then he lifts his finger to the light switch, and like a pair of pursed lips channeling breath into a flame, everything goes black.
I place my phone in my cup holder, trying to decipher what I just watched. It isn’t much—but it’s something. Half an hour ago, Daniel was here. He isn’t too far ahead of me. I just need to figure out where he would go. The possibilities are endless, really. He could go anywhere. He has a suitcase. He could be driving across the country, prepared to hole up in a hotel room somewhere. Maybe even go south into Mexico—the border is less than ten hours away. He could be there by morning.
But then, I think of that necklace, his finger stroking the silver as it rests in his palm. I think of Riley, still missing. Her body not yet discovered. And I realize: He isn’t running, because he isn’t done yet. He still has work to do.
The coroner had determined that the victim’s bodies had been moved after death. That they had died somewhere else before being dropped back in the same place they had vanished. So, if that’s the case, where is Riley? Where could he possibly be keeping her? Where did he keep all of them?
And then it hits me. I know. Somehow, deep down, on a cellular level. I know.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I start my car, flip on my headlights, and drive. I try to distract myself by thinking of anything and anywhere other than where I’m about to be—but as the minutes tick by, I can feel my heartbeat accelerating. With every passing mile, it gets harder and harder to breath. Thirty minutes go by, then forty. I know I’m almost there. I glance at the clock in my car—it’s just before midnight—and when I peel my eyes from the dashboard and back to the road, that’s when I see it, approaching slowly in the distance. That old, familiar sign, rusted on the edges and dirty from years of mud and grime caking to the metal. I feel my palms go slick with sweat, the panic setting in as it inches closer and closer into view. A flickering light illuminating it with a sick glow.
WELCOME TO BREAUX BRIDGE:
CRAWFISH CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
I’m going home.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I turn on my blinker and take the next exit. Breaux Bridge. A place I haven’t seen since I left for college more than a decade ago; a place I never expected to see again.
I wind through town, through the rows of old brick buildings with moss-green awnings. In my mind, this place seems to be separated by a crisp, clean line: before and after. On one side of the line, the memories are bright, happy. A small-town childhood filled with gas station snow cones and consignment store Rollerblades; the bakery I used to duck inside every day at three p.m., picking up a complimentary slice of sourdough, still warm from the oven. Melted butter dripping down my chin as I walked home from school, jumping over the cracks on the sidewalk, picking a bouquet of flowering weeds that I would present to my mother in a cloudy juice glass.
On the other side, a bloated cloud hovers over everything.
I pass the empty fairgrounds where the festival takes place each year. I see the very spot where I stood with Lena, my forehead pressed against her warm stomach, the dampness of her sweat sticking to my skin. A metallic firefly glowing in my hands. I look across the field, at the spot where my father stood in the distance, staring at us. At her. I drive past my old school, past the dumpster where a senior boy had slammed my head against the metal, threatening to do to me what my father had done to his sister.
Daniel has been driving this same route for weeks, I realize, disappearing into the night before coming home again tired and sweaty and full of life. I approach my street and pull over onto the side of the road, just before my old driveway. I eye that long path I used to run down, kicking up dust before vanishing into the trees. Running up the porch steps, slamming into my father’s outstretched arms. It’s the perfect place to take a missing girl: an old abandoned house situated on ten acres of discarded land. A house that nobody visits, nobody touches. A house that’s considered haunted, the very place where Dick Davis buried his six victims before ducking into my bedroom and kissing me good night.
I think back to that conversation with Daniel, both of us stretched out across my living room couch. The conversation when I had told him everything for the first time—and how he had listened, so intently. Lena and her belly-button ring, a single firefly glowing in the dark. My father, a shadow in the trees. The box in the closet holding his secrets.
And my house. I had told him about my house. The epicenter of it all.
After my father went to prison and my mother was no longer able to care for the property, the responsibility had landed on us—on Cooper and me. But just like we had abandoned my mother to Riverside, we chose to abandon this place, too. We didn’t want to deal with it, didn’t want to face the memories that still lived inside. So instead, we just left it here, sitting empty for years, our furniture still arranged in the exact same way, a thick layer of cobwebs probably coating everything inside. That wooden beam in my mother’s closet still snapped from the pressure of her neck, the ash from my father’s pipe still staining the living room carpet. All of it—a snapshot of my past, frozen in time, dust particles suspended in the air as if somebody had simply pressed Pause. Then turned around, closed the door, and left.
And Daniel knew. Daniel knew it was here. He knew it was empty—ready and waiting for him.
My hands clench the steering wheel, my heart pounding in my chest. I sit in silence for a few seconds, wondering what to do. I think about calling Detective Thomas, asking him to meet me here. But what would he do, exactly? What proof do I have? Then I think about my father, making his way through these very woods at night, a shovel slouched over one shoulder. I think about myself, twelve years old, watching through my open window.
Watching, waiting, but not doing anything.