***
The support group met several times a week. The most prominent one was after hours, on Wednesday and Thursday evenings according to the placard in the window of Room 3A of the Etheredge Community Center. As Avery’s luck would have it, today’s meeting was at noon just twenty minutes shy of the moment she and Kellaway parked in front of the building.
Kellaway had called the center to get the name of the group leader. Luck was on their side there, as well. The primary lead counselor for the weekday group was already in the meeting room, brewing the coffee and setting up chairs. She said she’d be happy to meet with Avery and Kellaway before the meeting.
When they entered Room 3A, the coffee was brewing and a very pretty middle-aged woman was setting up a tray with crackers, cheese, and chips on a table in the back. The room and the way it was set up was what Avery imagined Alcoholic Anonymous meetings might look.
The woman turned to them and gave a bright, genuine smile. They knew her name from the call—Delores Moon. She was fifty-one but looked significantly younger. She was dressed professionally, as if she might be heading back to her office when the group was over, but also not too stuffy. She looked warm and welcoming—probably a necessity for an environment like this.
“Thanks so much for meeting with us,” Avery said. “I know it must be stressful to lead something like this.”
“It can be at times. But the weekday crowds tend to be small. And I thought about it after speaking with you…people with phobias aren’t like the majority of people that attend support groups. With most other issues that require attention or support, people are typically hesitant to share about their problems. But people that suffer from intense fear of things tend to want to talk about it. It makes them feel like they can maybe better understand it and, as such, get a grip on it.”
“That makes sense,” Kellaway said.
“I say all of that,” Moon said, “because I think the people that will start coming in here in a few minutes wouldn’t mind you sitting in on the meeting—especially not if you tell them why you’re here. Especially Alfred’s case…it’s been a point of conversation with a few of the regulars. I’ve gotten several calls and emails. Alfred wasn’t much for sympathizing with others, but he was really starting to make progress towards overcoming his fears. It seemed liked it, anyway.”
“And what about Abby Costello and Janice Saunders?”
“Well, Janice has been struggling with hers for a while. She was truly embarrassed by it. At first it was just scary clowns. She was literally traumatized for about a week when one of her childhood friends made her watch It—you know, the Stephen King movie with the clown? But more digging revealed that she’d seen a clown on stilts fall at a carnival. When he got up his face was all bloody and he was screaming. Something about that moment altered something in her mind and she was legitimately terrified of clowns. It hurts my heart to hear that she died.”
Avery nodded, fully aware that Moon had not yet heard about how Janice Saunders had died. She almost told her then and there but the murder was so new that it would almost feel like a security breach. Of course, given why they were here, Avery assumed Moon could probably figure it out easily enough.
“So, you just said that people with phobias tend to want to talk about their fears,” Avery said. “But based on the cases we’ve been seeing, a lot of family and friends say that the victims were usually hesitant.”
“Yes, admitting it to those closest to you can be hard. It’s embarrassing for some. But once you get around people you know can sympathize with what you have always thought of as irrational fears…it makes you feel safe. It makes you feel normal.”
Avery thought of Alfred Lawnbrook, escaping to the butterfly garden at the museum. Had he been escaping or maybe looking for someone who knew about spiders to ask them questions in the hopes of better understanding them? It would certainly explain why he entered into the relationship with Stefon Scott.
“Do you think some of them would be open to having us ask questions about the victims?”
“I think they’d actually invite it,” Moon said. “With what Alfred and Abby experienced in their deaths, these are people who feel that the victims are being targeted because of their fears. It’s quite personal to them.”
At that comment, a man with a scraggly beard entered the room. Moon welcomed him warmly and when she introduced them, she was very careful not to provide the man’s name. Avery got it; in her profession, confidentiality was very important. Avery let it go. She didn’t think she’d need names unless someone was able to provide something really concrete.
His arrival broke up the conversation. Within a few minutes, another person entered the room, an overweight woman of about sixty. Again, Moon made introductions without giving the attendee’s name. She did make it clear, however, that Avery and Kellaway were here from the Boston PD Homicide Division, trying to find the person who had killed Alfred, Abby, and, most recently, Janice. No one had heard the news of Janice yet and two of the people that filed in as noon approached seemed to take the news like a punch to the gut.
By 12:02, there were seven attendees in the room. They had grabbed their cups of coffee and their plates of snacks and sat in the semicircle of metal folding chairs Moon had set up prior to their arrival. Three of the attendees did not seem all that thrilled that there were outsiders present. They’d said nothing during introductions and Avery could read in their body language—crossed arms and all but pinned to the backs of their chairs—that they would be no help. One of these three had been thoroughly devastated by the news of Janice’s murder.
Delores Moon was unfazed, though. She stood in the center of the semicircle like a teacher in front of her class. And the seven attendees all looked up to her with reverence and hope.
“Today is going to be different,” Moon said. “I’ve introduced you to our guests. And I know that we have all felt the losses of our three friends. We may not have known them all very well, but they shared a heartache that you all have in common. We’ve discussed this and know the importance of it. So today, I want those of you that are confident and self-assured to help our guests—Detective Black and Officer Kellaway—to understand the nature of what you go through on a daily basis. How do your fears affect your lives? What would you tell someone off the street what it’s like? How would you describe your fears and their effects on your life?
“The hope is that they can use your descriptions to better understand the mindset of someone who preys on people with genuine fears. So please don’t hold back. So many of you have been admirable in how open and vulnerable you’ve been. Please…help these courageous women to bring this horrid killer to justice.”