“That’s the problem, Colorado,” Michael replied, leaning toward me. “You want me to tell you what you feel. I want you to know.”
Slowly, my hand crept toward the door handle. Michael leaned across the seat toward me. “You were always going to go after him,” he told me, his lips so close to mine that I thought at any minute he might close the gap. “The thing you need to figure out is why.”
I could still feel Michael’s breath on my face when he leaned across me and pushed open the car door.
“Go on,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.”
But this time, I heard an underlying edge in his voice—something that told me Michael wouldn’t be waiting for long.
I caught up to Dean outside a picket fence. It might have been white once, but now it was dirt-stained and weatherworn. The siding on the house behind it was the same color. A bright yellow tricycle lay on its side in the yard, a stark contrast to everything around it. I followed Dean’s gaze to a patch of bare grass just outside the fence.
“They tore down the toolshed,” Dean commented, like he was talking about the weather and not the building where his father had tortured and murdered all those women.
I stared at the tricycle on the lawn, wondering about the people who had bought this place. They had to know its history. They had to know what had once been buried in this yard.
Dean started walking again, halfway around the side of the house. He knelt next to the fence, his fingers searching for something.
“There,” he said. I knelt beside him. I moved his hand so I could see. Initials. His and someone else’s.
MR.
“Marie,” Dean said. “My mother’s name was Marie.”
The front door to the house opened. A toddler came barreling toward the tricycle. The little boy’s mother stayed on the front porch, but when she saw us, her eyes narrowed to slits.
Teenagers. Strangers. On her property.
“We should go,” Dean said quietly.
We were halfway back down the dirt road before he spoke again.
“We used to play Go Fish.” He stared straight ahead as he spoke, walking at the same steady pace. “Old Maid, Uno, War—anything with cards.”
We. As in Dean and his mother.
“What happened to her?” That was a question I’d never asked. Daniel Redding had told Briggs that his wife had left—but I hadn’t processed the fact that she hadn’t just left Daniel Redding. She’d left Dean, too.
“She got bored.” Dean walked like a soldier, eyes straight ahead, pace never faltering. “Bored with him. Bored with me. He’d brought her back to this small town, cut off all contact with her family.” He swallowed once. “One day I came home and she was gone.”
“Did you ever think—”
“That he killed her?” Dean stopped and turned to face me. “I used to. When the FBI dug up the bodies, I kept waiting for them to tell me that she hadn’t just left. That she was still there, in the ground.” He started walking again, slower this time, like his body was weighed down with cement. “And then my social worker found her. Alive.”
“But…” That one word escaped my mouth before I managed to clamp down on the question on the tip of my tongue. I refused to say what I was thinking—that if Dean’s mother was alive and they knew where she was, how had Dean ended up in foster care? Why was it that the director claimed that if it weren’t for this program, he wouldn’t have anywhere else to go?
“She was dating someone.” Dean scuffed a foot into the dirt. “I was Daniel Redding’s son.”
He stopped there—nine words to explain something I couldn’t even fathom.
You were her son, too, I thought. How could a person look at their own child and just say “No, thanks”? Go Fish and Old Maid and carving their initials into the fence. I knew then that Marie Redding was the reason Dean had come back here.
It’s not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It’s the good ones.
“What was she like?” The question felt like sandpaper in my mouth, but if this was what he’d come here for, I could listen. I would make myself listen.
Dean didn’t answer my question until we’d made our way back to the car. Michael was sitting in the driver’s seat. Dean walked around to the passenger side. He put his hand on the door, then looked up at me.
“What was she like?” he repeated softly. He shook his head. “Nothing like Trina Simms.”
When we got back, Judd was sitting on the front porch, waiting for us. Not good. I spent about five seconds wondering if we could claim to have spent the day in town. Judd held up his hand and stopped the words before I could form them.
“I always believed, you give kids enough space, they make their own mistakes. They learn.” Judd said nothing for several seconds. “Then one time, my daughter was about ten. She and her best friend got it into their minds that they were going to go on a scientific expedition.”