“People always find new ways to torture each other,” Sam said. “Physically is the easy part. But mentally? Emotionally? How do you get over being abandoned in the darkness? Unable to move or speak even to call for help? How do you get over being so helpless that someone else has to empty— How do you get over that humiliation, that loss of dignity. How do you get over being so alone, and so untouched. For so long. Alone. In the dark.”
There was a moment of utter silence, and then they could all hear Amy Grimes mumbling to herself nothing that made sense. Nothing that would ever make sense.
“Let’s get some of these lights out,” Lucas suggested quietly. “Leave just enough for the medics to work by. And don’t break them. All these—all these people have bare feet.”
Jonah did his best not to look at them directly, as the level of light gradually diminished, but he eventually realized that none of them were going to open their eyes willingly. Not even Sean Messina, who had been taken barely a week before Nessa had.
None of them wanted to open their eyes even if they could. None of them wanted to believe in the voices they probably thought were imagined. None of them had it in them any longer to believe there could be anything else for them, ever, but the darkness.
—
WITH BOTH HANDS holding the hot coffee cup on the conference table in front of him, Dante said, “Nessa’s the only real survivor.” His voice was dull. “She wasn’t down there long enough. And she found her way out of the dark, on her own. That will count. That will mean something to her, some day in the future if not now.”
Jonah looked across the table at the two most experienced profilers here. They were all here, the feds and Sarah, all with coffee they’d barely touched and eyes that didn’t want to meet anyone else’s. Every one of them had helped carry the stretchers up that long, dark tunnel, only then accepting the silent, respectful help of the officers waiting outside.
Jonah said, “I know enough about profiling to know it’s about damaged people and the reasons people have inside them that give them the ability to damage others. So tell me. How many of the five . . . survivors . . . we brought out of that place are going to have lives worth living?”
Sam was the first to meet his eyes, her own so dark, as dark as they’d been when he’d first met her, dark and unspeakably old in her urchin’s pale face.
She drew a breath and said, “Mrs. Lang’s baby may help her. The maternal instinct is strong enough to overcome almost anything. Amy Grimes is young, and the young are resilient. It depends on how strong her sense of self is. That’s true of all of them. But . . .”
“But?”
“The judge is never going to be the man you once knew, Jonah. He was a man of dignity, and he can never see himself that way again. If he even leaves the clinic, it’ll likely be to go to some kind of mental care facility or at least a residential medical care facility. Maybe Sean Messina too. His sense of self seemed to be very wrapped up in being strong, independent, able to handle himself and whatever else came along. But he couldn’t handle what happened to him. Even the ones that somehow manage to move on, even Nessa, will be marked forever by what they experienced down in that hole in the ground.”
“Because of me.”
She shook her head immediately. “No, because of someone with a sick and twisted mind who wanted to make you suffer. And not just by a blow dealt and then over with.”
“What do you mean?”
“He knows you, Jonah. He knows how you feel about this town, these people. Especially these people. You saved them. Every one of them owed their life to you.”
Jonah started to speak, but didn’t when she held up a hand.
“This is important. This is why everything has happened the way it has. He wants you to suffer. He wants you to spend the rest of your life suffering because of what happened to these people. And even wondering if they would have been better off if you hadn’t saved them in the first place. Blaming yourself for what happened to them. For the rest of your life. That’s what he wants, Jonah. That’s what he needs.”
Lucas nodded. “She’s right.”
Jonah finally took a drink of his coffee, vaguely aware that he had the wrong order, it was too sweet. Not that he cared. “I just . . . I honestly can’t think of anyone who could hate me that much.”
“That’s because he doesn’t hate you,” Luke said.
“What? All that—and he doesn’t hate me?”
“If he hated you,” Robbie said slowly, “it would have been you down there.” She glanced at Luke, who nodded.
“Exactly. He doesn’t want to torture you, he wants to watch you torture yourself.”
“I still don’t—”
“Think,” Samantha urged. “He isn’t someone on the periphery of your life the way we originally thought. At least he wasn’t always. He looked up to you somehow, admired you. But then something happened. Something happened to him, just like it happened to those six other people. Only for whatever reason, you didn’t save him. Maybe you couldn’t. Or maybe you made a choice, and saved somebody else.
“Think, Jonah. You know who this is. Whatever happened to him was so traumatic it turned a normal man into a monster. And he blames you.”
Sarah caught her breath audibly. “Jonah.”
“You know who it is?”
She looked at him, white-faced. “You said it yourself. That maybe you shouldn’t have gotten him out of there. Because of all the pain. Months and months in the burn ward out in Nashville. Horrible, disfiguring scars. And then . . .”
It was Sam who asked. “What happened then? He survived the burns?”
Sarah was looking at Jonah as if she couldn’t look away. “One of the few really bad car crashes we’ve had here. Five years ago. Bast—Sebastian Gettys. He was driving too fast and missed a curve. Swerved, hit a culvert, and the car flipped. He’d been on his way home to cut the grass, and he had a can of gasoline in the back, a can with a loose lid. And the car had a faulty wire, one they’d recall the model for just the next year. The fire was . . . God, the fire. It was an inferno.
“We could hear the fire truck coming, but he was screaming.” Sarah closed her eyes briefly. “I can still hear that screaming sometimes in my mind. You couldn’t stand it. You grabbed a big wrench from your Jeep and somehow pulled the door open. He must have managed to get the seat belt undone, but he was still screaming, beating at the flames.”
“You had a blanket ready,” Jonah said numbly.
“We covered him, and smothered the flames. I’ll never forget that horrible smell of burned flesh. And I’ll never forget . . . when the EMS tech looked at him. You just . . . knew . . .”
“That I should have let him die,” Jonah said.
“Your hands were bandaged for weeks,” Sarah said.
Jonah looked down at strong hands unmarked, and said, “Surface burns. And I never scar. I didn’t have a mark on me. But Bast . . .”
Sam waited a moment, then asked, “When did he come back to Serenity?”
“About a year ago,” Jonah answered. “I went to see him, but he made it plain he really didn’t want company. The car company had settled a fortune on him, took care of all his hospital bills. Set him up in a nice house just on the edge of town, with a great view. And a live-in caretaker.”
“Because of the burns?” Sam asked.
“Some of his fingers had . . . fused.” Jonah was still looking down at his own hands. “It was difficult for him to do some things. So she cooked and did the housekeeping. Supposed to keep him company, but he didn’t want her . . . hovering. He could walk fine even though he limped, and sometimes at night he’d walk around, places he knew he wouldn’t run into anybody else. He said he didn’t need anybody else. He said he liked the night. He felt normal in the dark.”
Lucas knew there was more. “Something else happened, didn’t it? To Bast? Something that was . . . unfair? Something recent?”