The house was quiet except for her footsteps on the loose panels of the hardwood floor. She made her way into the living room, shining her light into every corner. Dust floated like summer gnats in the beam of the flashlight. The room was furnished, but all the furniture was covered in white sheets. Flowered red wallpaper peeled from the ceiling in strips. The house had a musty, shut-up smell. She next went to the dining room, which looked like a room for a family of ghosts in a haunted house. The oak chairs were neatly positioned around the dining-room table, which was arranged with white linen place mats, as if dinner would be served soon. There was a bureau on the east wall, still stocked with wedding crystal and china.
In here, time had stood still. In here, Mort Greeley had never been accused, never lost his family and his job, and never shot himself in an upstairs bedroom.
The deeper she went into the house, the darker it got. The kitchen was empty. So was the main-floor bedroom. Serena kept searching, making her way into a long hallway. Her flashlight lit up a wooden floor, beige-painted walls, and a back staircase leading to the second story. She headed that way, swinging the light back and forth. A mouse scurried.
At the base of the stairs, she pointed the light upward.
It landed on the face of Lori Fulkerson.
Lori’s face was pale and expressionless in the glow of the flashlight. Her curly hair looked flat. She sat on the top step in a sweatshirt and khakis. Her arms were at her sides, and her right hand was curled tightly around a gun. Serena swung her own pistol to point at Lori’s chest.
“Place your weapon on the step, Lori, and then put your hands on top of your head.”
Lori paid no attention to her.
“I used to live here,” she said.
“Lori, I need you to put the gun down right now.”
“It’s been like this for years. Abandoned. My mother owned it, but she couldn’t sell it. No one wanted it.”
“The gun, Lori. Put it on the step.”
“Aimee’s up here,” Lori said, gesturing behind her. “I know that’s what you want. She’s in the box.”
“Lori, it’s time to end this,” Serena told her. “Too many people died for nothing. Including your father. Put down the gun. Let me come up there and help Aimee.”
“I said too much,” Lori went on, as if Serena hadn’t even spoken. “I heard the things she was saying on camera. I knew everyone would realize what I’d done. I knew the truth would come out. But it was more than that. It was like she already knew. I could feel her inside my head. She could see everything I remembered. I needed to stop her, to shut her out.”
“It’s over, Lori.”
“I know. Secrets always come out eventually, don’t they? You can’t run away from them forever. But I can still feel her watching me. It’s driving me crazy. I need to get her out of my head.”
Serena heard noise behind her as someone else entered the house. Then a voice shouted her name. It was Jonny.
“Lori’s armed,” she called back to him. “Stay back; don’t come any closer.”
But he didn’t listen. He came even faster. She heard footsteps, and a few seconds later he was there with her in the hallway. He was directly at her side, the two of them shoulder to shoulder. Above them, Lori tensed at the top of the stairs, with two flashlights trained on her now. Her eyes glistened with tears and lonely fury.
“Save me, Jonathan Stride,” she whispered with bitter irony.
Serena kept her eyes on the gun. If it moved, she was ready to fire.
“Lori, I know you blame me for what happened to your father,” Jonny told her. “That’s okay. I was a young cop, but I should have done more to help Mort. I knew what Art and my boss were doing was wrong. I thought your father was guilty — I was convinced he took that boy at the zoo — but he didn’t deserve to be lynched the way he was. It ruined his life, and it was all a terrible mistake. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“My mother took me away from him,” Lori murmured. “She took me away from my father and didn’t even leave a note. She left him alone. I found out later he sent me letters, but I never got to see them. I wrote him letters, but she never mailed them. My father thought I hated him, like everyone else. He thought I’d abandoned him. My bedroom was upstairs, you know. Just down the hallway. That’s where he shot himself. In my bedroom.”
Jonny nodded. “I know.”
“All he did was go to work that day,” Lori went on. “He went to the zoo. He never even saw that boy. And you made everyone in the city think he was guilty. That he was a murderer and a pedophile.”
Jonny spoke softly, trying to reach her. “You hate me. I understand that. I deserve what you feel toward me. But those women didn’t do anything to you or your father. Aimee didn’t do anything. She’s innocent.”
Lori didn’t seem to hear him. She glanced down the hallway, as if she could see inside the box that was down there and see all the women she’d imprisoned in the past.
“I went to work with my father at the zoo sometimes,” Lori recalled. “He had to clean out the cages for the animals. I kept thinking how horrible it was to be trapped like that. I thought there was nothing you could do to anyone that was worse than that. To put them in a cage. I remember there was this little bird that used to hang out with one of the tigers. It flew around in the cage for days. It would land on the tiger’s head, like they were friends. My dad took me to see it, and I thought it was so cute. And then one day, as I was watching, the tiger simply killed the bird with one swipe of its paw and ate it. I couldn’t stop crying. But my dad told me that’s just what tigers do.”
“Lori,” Serena murmured. “Please stop this. You don’t have to hurt anyone else.”
“So you see, Jonathan Stride,” Lori continued, her voice rising into a shout, “it doesn’t matter whether those women were innocent. That’s just what tigers do. I came back to Duluth to destroy the people who destroyed my father. Art Leipold. And you. I wanted Art to know just what it felt like to be wrongly accused, to be set up for something you didn’t do, to have everyone turn on you, to be hated by every person who looks at you. I wanted him to suffer the way my father did. And I wanted you to be the one to do it to him. I wanted you to feel absolutely helpless, like I did. To know that people died and you couldn’t stop it. I wanted you to carry that with you for the rest of your life.”
“I do.”
“I didn’t want you to rescue me in the box,” Lori said. “I was supposed to die, too. That was supposed to be the end. I was supposed to be with my father when it was all over.”
The gun quivered in Lori’s grip. She looked down the hallway again toward the bedroom and the cage. All Serena could see in the shadows was one eye, fierce and red, like the eye of a monster.
“No one else needs to die, Lori,” Serena told her. “Not Aimee. Not you. Put down the gun. Put your hands on your head and let me come upstairs.”
Instead, Lori stood up.
“Stop stop stop!” they both shouted at her, their voices overlapping.
“I can still feel her,” Lori said. “She’s still inside my head. I have to get her out.”
In one sudden motion, Lori spun away and disappeared into the darkness. They heard footsteps overhead and the slamming of a door. Serena didn’t have time to fire. She thundered up the stairs two at a time, with Jonny immediately behind her. There was no light on the second story, and the flashlight beam showed a maze of closed doors. Then, from the end of the upstairs hallway, came an explosion.
A gunshot.
“Aimee!” Serena shouted.