Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)

Good luck with your treatment, Burning Girl.

The second she steps back inside, Luke’s words slap her across the face. Maybe because she’s standing in roughly the same place she was when he spoke them.

There’s a rustling off to her left. Blinking back sleep and holding one of the biggest guns she’s ever seen, Marty emerges from the bedroom, hiking up his jeans with his non-gun hand.

“You OK?” he grumbles.

“Fine. Just bringing the guys some sodas.”

Marty nods, gives her a thumbs-up. Draws his bedroom door gently shut behind him, leaving her once again with other men’s voices ringing in her head.

First Dylan. Now Luke.

Well, if she’s being technical about it, first Luke, then Dylan, then a second version of Luke, who claimed to be better than the first Luke. But in the end, they’re both men who barged their way into her head, insisting they know her better than she knows herself. Trying, she suspects, to bend her behavior to suit their own fears. She knows what makes Luke tick, or at least she’s pretty sure. For now Dylan remains a mystery, and she’s afraid if she learns too much, she’ll start making excuses for the bastard. Because sometimes that’s easier than admitting you’ve been betrayed.

There’s only one way to keep the voices of both men from hijacking her every other thought. She has to make sure her own voice is louder. In her mind, at least. And she can think of only one way to do that right now.

In a corner of the living room, there’s a compact desk Marty’s turned into an office area. It’s just a square piece of wood attached to the wall that folds up almost like a Murphy bed. Underneath it are some file boxes he’s pushed into a crazy arrangement that must give his legs some room to move. It’s more than enough for her. In the desk drawer she looks for some paper. She’s pleasantly surprised to find a couple of Mead college-ruled notebooks, one of which is completely blank.

When she opens the cover to the first blank page, the impetus to turn her thoughts into ink gets lodged somewhere just above her wrist.

The reason she’s never kept a journal is because she grew up terrified her father would find it and publish it somehow. By the time she moved in with Luanne, this fear had spoiled the act forever. Privacy, she was convinced, existed only inside her head. Diaries were for normal girls.

But now her need to tell her own story is stronger than it’s ever been. Maybe because Luke tried to force his own definition of that story on her, and Dylan’s trying to bend it to an ending he’s designed.

The memories overwhelm her now.

Where does she begin?

Maybe with the road trip she took after she won the settlement from her father.

It wasn’t exactly a restful vacation. After the victory, and after she’d staked out a little town in Arizona as her new home, she’d driven to the grave sites of every Banning victim who’d died on the farm while she was there, including her own mother.

If she couldn’t find out what the victim’s favorite flower was, she brought them white roses, and she sat with each of them for a good, long while, as if her new name, her new identity, gave her the space and the quiet to grieve them the way they deserved. They were all from the South, either tourists who’d unwittingly wandered into the Bannings’ hunting ground in the Chattahoochee National Forest or, like her mother, were on their way to visit family in a nearby city or town like Atlanta, Chattanooga, or Asheville.

She started in New Orleans, with Cassie Murdoch and Jane Blaire, best friends buried together in one of those aboveground tombs so popular in the city. Cassie loved yellow roses; Jane was a big fan of peonies. She left them a little vase of each.

Then she headed due east, to Pensacola and the grave of Jennifer Albright, a flight attendant from Augusta, Georgia. If the Dateline special was to be believed, the fiancé Jennifer left behind ended up being a wonderful father to her two kids from her first marriage, but he didn’t respond to any of Charlotte’s e-mails about Jennifer’s favorite flower, so she got white roses. She shouldn’t have been surprised by his silence. The families of the victims had always resented her father for the Savage Woods films. She’d hoped the lawsuit she’d won against him might change their opinion of her, but maybe they just saw it as her own grab for profits, and not an attempt to break free and build her own life.

Next stop, Knoxville, Tennessee, and the grave of Emily Connolly, a CPA who’d decided to take the scenic route to Gainesville, Georgia, for her first meeting with a man she’d been chatting with online. When she never showed up, the man she was scheduled to meet, Zach Pike, remained a suspect in her disappearance up until her body was unearthed on the Bannings’ farm. Charlotte and Zach had traded e-mails over the years—no surprise, given that in her own way she was also wrongly accused, by Hollywood, if not law enforcement—and that’s how she knew Emily liked tulips.

Next stop, Atlanta. Her mother’s grave, which she’d visited countless times before, but since it was on the way to her last stop, she brought her another vase of stargazer lilies.

Lilah Turlington and her boyfriend, Eddie Stevens, were the only mixed-gender couple the Bannings killed, but that’s not why Charlotte saved them for last. They were both buried in Asheville, North Carolina, and unless she wanted to go out of her way by several days, the drive there would take her closer to the “Murder Farm,” as the press had dubbed it, than she’d been since her rescue at age seven.

She remembers the drive now.

The mountains, low, rolling, and green, gentler and more inviting than the coastal peaks near Altamira. But within the seductive folds of their threadlike valleys, a place of nightmares had endured and thrived.

She knew the farm’s main house was still standing, but the root cellar, where the victims had been held captive and raped, had been dragged from its foundation by the FBI during their search for buried bodies.

The house was a near ruin, of course, but dark-hearted hikers regularly posted pictures of it online, pictures in which they posed with serious expressions next to crumbling walls pockmarked with satanic graffiti. The owners of the neighboring pig farm bought the land after the investigation was concluded, and while they claimed publicly they were repulsed by all the attention, the rumor was they’d give you a guided hike to the place for a small, under-the-table donation. Her father had told her years before the only reason they hadn’t shot the Savage Woods films there was because the new owners had demanded an exorbitant fee, a fact he’d relayed with a shake of the head, as if they were just bad businesspeople and not greedy profiteers.

It wasn’t quite the stuff of horror movies. It was the stuff of people who, for whatever reason, thought it would be cool to live in one.

The temptation to visit the place, if only to demystify it in her mind, plagued her for most of the drive to Asheville. But she knew she wasn’t up to such a visit alone. She never would be. Still, the urge was strong as thirst on a hot day.

She remembers how hard she gripped the steering wheel for that last leg of the journey. How she forced herself to stare at the winding highway ahead. How she kept the windows rolled down just a little so the wind could make a sound like a flag flapping on the prow of a speeding ship. A sound that drove out her thoughts.

Lilah Turlington’s favorite flower had been the calla lily. Charlotte had no trouble finding some as soon as she got to Asheville.

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