But now they had a safe house. They even had a car. It was no Porsche, but at least Avis owned it. She certainly wouldn’t be reporting it stolen if someone decided to take it for a drive. As far as Pier Pointe was concerned, it was the polar opposite of paranoid. This was a laid-back coastal town, ripe for the picking. And they’d expect her to pick it with them. Another initiation. Another way to prove she was worth their time.
“Come on,” he said, his fingers squeezing her shoulders in encouragement. “You can hold your own, can’t you? You’re more than just some fancy congressman’s daughter. Or are you going to run back to Daddy every time the going gets tough?”
Avis squared her shoulders and steadied her gaze onto his. He was right.
It’s not you, it’s them.
She took a breath and gave him a slight nod.
“I know someone who doesn’t lock their doors,” she said. “And I know when she isn’t home.”
30
* * *
THE BOX OF photos that Echo brought over was like something out of a daydream, a time capsule that transported Lucas from the present to 1983.
The photographs made him feel like a Peeping Tom. It was as though he’d stumbled on a family’s most intimate artifacts, inspecting them with a voyeuristic pleasure.
There was twenty-five-year-old Nolan Wood with his startling blue eyes and childlike na?veté. Derrick Fink, with his disturbing intensity and eccentric style, tipping his cowboy hat toward the camera. Georgia Jansen, also known as Gypsy, was the dark-haired girl who didn’t seem to know how to smile; a striking contrast to a nineteen-year-old dewy-faced Laura Morgan with her red hair and wide-spaced eyes. Kenneth Kennedy didn’t look like much more than a class clown, pulling faces or striking poses whenever someone pointed the camera his way. There was Roxanna Margold, who accented her plainness behind stringy hair and homely clothes. The baby of the group, fifteen-year-old Shelly Riordan, fit her group-given nickname of Sunnie by brightening up every photo with a wide, sunshine smile. Chloe Sears, on the other hand, wore a dead-eyed, drugged-out stare.
And then there was Audra Snow, as ordinary as Roxanna and blond like Chloe and Shelly—an unremarkable girl who had stumbled headlong into notoriety. Someone’s Virginia.
He spent hours flipping through the sixty or so photos Echo had stuffed into that old envelope. A picture was worth a thousand words, and the images were telling him a novel’s worth of information. Certain members of the group were always clustered together. Others stood in certain ways when Halcomb was in the shots. Audra was always at Jeffrey’s elbow like an obedient dog. Foresight was a magical thing, having the ability to turn the most innocuous snapshot into a picture of imminent doom. Jeff’s arm around Audra’s shoulders was a dark promise of things to come. The hope Lucas saw in her eyes turned his stomach.
He grabbed for the coffeepot at the corner of his desk and tipped it to pour a cup, but found it was empty. It took him a minute to step away from his desk to get more water; when he finally did, he was struck by just how late it was. Yet another day had faded to a bruised purple. The house felt empty in the twilight. In the kitchen, a half-eaten pizza crust sat on an abandoned plate. Jeanie never did like crusts. Lucas smirked at the habit his daughter had yet to outgrow. He slid his coffeepot onto the island next to her plate and turned back to the living room, then headed up the stairs.
He poked his head in Jeanie’s room. She was in bed and, from the look of it, had been there for quite some time. She’d draped her favorite blouse over the back of her desk chair. He hadn’t even noticed she had been wearing it earlier. Ah, shit. That’s how miserable of a father he had become. He quietly closed the door behind him.
Downstairs, he ate cold pizza in silence, feeling like an asshole for having been so transfixed by the pictures Echo had brought. He’d made Jeanie an offer he had immediately retracted. Caroline had warned him about that—take her into town, don’t lock yourself up. She had been speaking from experience, having suffered through his bouts of nonstop work. When Lucas found himself in “the zone,” he may as well have been an astronaut traveling at the speed of light. He stayed the same while everyone around him aged a hundred years in a day.
Washing down his pizza with a swig of beer, he was just about to head back to his study—the driving impulse to continue staring at those photos and rereading old articles impossible to refuse—when the sound of the front door shutting roused him from his late-evening daze.
Lucas started at the sound of the latch strike clicking inside the frame.
His pulse quickened as he left his plate and half-drained beer on the kitchen table. Peering into the living room, he squinted to see better, his hands balled into nervous fists.
There were a few good reasons to leave this house behind. Jeanie knowing its history was first and foremost. But his nagging suspicion that there were people milling about in the darkness was another.
Lucas crossed the living room, paused beside the front door. It was shut tight, dead bolted in place. Pressing his hands flat against the wood, he looked out the peephole. Nothing.
Except for the sound of two girls laughing behind his back.
Lucas’s eyes widened. He veered around, his gaze immediately darting to the upstairs hall. It was dark. Jeanie’s door was closed. She’s asleep. You know she’s asleep. But before he could make a move toward the kitchen to investigate the laughter, it was gone. There one second, gone the next, as quick and disjointed as a momentary hallucination.
And what he was seeing had to be a hallucination, because he found himself standing at the top of the two brick foyer steps, his attention transfixed.
By some dark magic, the kitchen table was now dead center in the living room. Four chairs arranged perfectly around it. His pizza plate and beer bottle exactly where he had left it. Only, somehow, halfway across the house.
31
* * *
LUCAS SAT ON the stairs with his cell phone plastered to his ear and his thumbnail between his teeth, listening to the pause of unsure silence on Mark’s end of the line. Eventually, his friend spoke.
“So, it just . . . moved?”
“Yes, it just moved.”