At least she had had nearly forty years of blissful ignorance. Leah hadn’t managed to even get out of childhood before the truth stripped the joy from her. Lauren wished she could have somehow spared her youngest from the experience. If she somehow could have put Leah into suspended animation that day before they realized Leslie was missing . . . Or if she could have erased any memory of her sister and the hell they had all been put through . . .
But Leah was a victim as much as Lauren was a victim because Leslie had been victimized.
She was so tired of it. Victim was not a word that she would ever have used to describe who she was. She would have said that she didn’t have it in her to be a victim, and yet she was—a truth made all the more bitter considering her reasons for coming to Oak Knoll.
How had he found her? How had he known to come to this house?
How dare he?
The anger that rose up through her was enough to choke on.
It was five after four in the morning. The world was still and dark. The wind had died. The universe seemed to be holding its breath so as not to wake the sleeping inhabitants of Earth.
The shock and fear that had grabbed hold of her earlier in the night had faded as well. A strange calm fell through Lauren now.
She sat quietly, sipping at her drink, thinking nothing would come of Detective Mendez’s good intentions. This was just another verse in a poem of futility, like a nightmare that returned again and again but with different players.
Mendez would try to be helpful, but nothing would come of it. She would become angry and frustrated. Her fury would scorch the earth of Oak Knoll like Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea.
Perhaps this was purgatory, or a living model of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.
Perhaps the time had finally come to take a different path.
Lauren took her wallet from her purse and dug a business card from a zippered compartment. GREGORY HEWITT, LICENSED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. She turned the card over and stared for a long time at what was written on the back. She should have given it to Mendez, but she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She shouldn’t have had it, but she had paid a price to get it. She had held on to it without acting on it because she believed if she did, she would be crossing a line.
But there was no line, she realized. If she had believed in that line, she never would have come here. Her boundaries had been shattered a long time ago by Roland Ballencoa.
She put the slip of paper back in her wallet and turned her attention to the gun on the table beside her bag. Without allowing herself to think at all, she picked it up and felt the familiar weight of it in her hand. It was still loaded, and there was still a round in the chamber.
She checked the safety, then slid the gun inside the special zippered compartment on the side of her handbag. She got up and left the house, got in her car and drove.
The streets were empty and quiet in this last hour before dawn. She felt as if she could almost hear the collective breathing of all the sleeping people in the houses she drove past.
The address she was looking for was in an older, nondescript neighborhood between downtown and the college. She imagined a mix of people lived there—students, people who worked at McAster, people who worked at the lamp factory on the outskirts of town. No professors here. No doctors or lawyers.
The house she was looking for was on a corner, a Craftsman-style bungalow. A plain brown wren of a house, it had a low porch and a detached one-car garage that shielded it from the neighbor.
Her heart beating hard in her chest, she drove around the block, spotting a shed at the back of the property. She went around the block, crossed the main street, around the next block, and parked on the side street with a clear view of the house.
The home of Roland Ballencoa.
21
The windows of the house were dark. There was no porch light on. No vehicle sat in the driveway. The garage door was closed.
Lauren sat parked on the side street heavily draped by huge old maple trees, letting her dark sedan hide in the deep black shadows like a big cat. She sat staring at the house, picturing Ballencoa in his bed, oblivious to the fact that he was being watched. That knowledge gave her a small sense of power, and she wondered if it was anything like what he felt when he was watching her.
The idea that they might have shared the same emotion made her uncomfortable. She was nothing like him, yet here she was . . .
As if her body was not her own, she found herself getting out of her car and walking toward the bungalow. She kept her purse close to her body, her hand inside the pocket, resting on the Walther. Her heart was pounding like a fist against the wall of her chest. She kept her head down, the bill of her black baseball cap low over her face.
She walked down the side street past Ballencoa’s house and turned down the alley.
The property was the size of a postage stamp, blocked from prying eyes by ficus hedges on two sides. A dark, dingy tarpaper shed stood at the back of the tiny yard. It had probably been the original garage for a single car, now used for who knew what. The small windows had been painted black from the inside. The garage door was padlocked down to a piece of metal embedded in the concrete slab.
Lauren crept around the building, one hand pressed to the wall as if she might feel the life force of someone trapped inside. She tried not to breathe. She willed her pulse to stop pounding in her ears. If there was someone inside, she wanted to hear them. She heard nothing but the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of her blood rushing through her veins.
Ballencoa might have kept anything in the shed. It might have been a home to lawn mowers and garden tools. He might use it for his darkroom. It could have been full of boxes, storage for whatever a man like Roland Ballencoa chose to keep with him but never use.
Boxes of keepsakes from his victims (she had always imagined there were more than Leslie). Boxes of their clothes. Boxes of their bones.
It could have been a place to keep a girl or hide a body.
In the theatre of her mind, Lauren played a terrible movie of bondage and slavery, young women hanging by their bound hands from heavy hooks in the ceiling. One of the girls was Leslie. The terror in her eyes was enough to make Lauren feel physically sick.
She tapped her knuckles against one of the darkened windowpanes and strained to listen for a sound, any sound.
Nothing.
She tapped a little harder and pressed her ear against the glass. She waited to hear a moan, a groan, a cry muffled by a gag.
She heard nothing.
She looked for a way to open a window, but they were solid, incapable of opening. There was a regular door on the side of the building that faced the back of the bungalow. It too was padlocked shut.
She glanced up at the house, half expecting to see Ballencoa staring out a window at her, but no face looked out.
A reckless part of her wanted to go to the house and look in at him. She wanted to startle him, stare at him, frighten him. That reckless side wanted to go inside and touch his things and violate his space.
The other part of her was terrified at the prospect of having him catch her.
She gave the butt of the Walther a reassuring squeeze.
Somewhere nearby a car door slammed, and she jumped half a foot off the ground. The sky was beginning to lighten. The neighborhood was starting to awaken. The odds of being caught here increased with every minute. She needed to go soon.