“What game?” he asks.
The rattle of the stretcher behind me makes me move out of the way, and I look to the side to see Vincent’s bloodied body strapped down, and a responder frantically pumping an oxygen bulb over his face to keep him alive.
“You can’t honestly think I would have anything to do with this,” he says. “I might have come up with a million different ways to get Vincent Lam out of my life, but I’d never do something like this.”
“Not even to impress Valerie?”
He didn’t hurt the children. I know he didn’t. But there’s something I need to hear from him.
“I would do anything for her. I love Valerie. I have for years. There was a time when I really thought we would be together, but she wouldn’t leave Vincent. She said it would look too bad. She couldn’t stand going through a divorce. Having that label. But I couldn’t just have an affair with her that would last into perpetuity without any thought that maybe someday we’d actually be together. I hated sneaking back and forth to Sherwood and only getting bits and pieces of her. I want her to myself. That’s the reason I was so excited about this story. If I could impress her with the fame and success an exclusive on a story like this would bring, she would finally know I’m the one she’s supposed to be with.”
“Then you found out about the clues being sent to Vincent,” I say.
He holds up his hands innocently. “I had nothing to do with that. It sickened me to think about Vincent being the one to hurt those kids, but…”
“It also meant he would be gone soon, and you could stake your claim on Valerie again.”
“Yes,” he says aggressively. “Is that what you wanted to hear? If he had finally cracked and was making all this shit up so he could finally get the push he wanted into being a big name, she wouldn’t have any reason to stay with him. But I didn’t do this. I talked to her yesterday, and she said she wasn’t going to divorce him. Even with all this, she wasn’t going to.”
Sam comes out of the house behind me and immediately descends on Jennings, but I push him back with a glare.
“We need to go to the station,” I tell him. “I need to look at the evidence we took from here again.”
A squad car pulls up to the front of the house, and officers emerge to start processing the scene. I push Sam away from Jennings, but he resists long enough to stick a finger in the man’s face.
“Get away from here. I don’t want to see a single word of any of this printed. You already fucked up bad, and I’m just looking for any excuse to wipe the floor with you,” he growls.
Sam’s shaking as we drive to the station, pedal to the floor and blowing through stoplights with a siren on.
“He knew we were getting close. We were right all along and were going to figure out that he did all this. His son was the tipping point, and he tried to kill himself to cover it up.”
“He’s alive, Sam. And he’s going to talk,” I say.
We get back to the station, and I go directly to the room I have spread with all the papers, notebooks, clues, and books. I look at each one of them, noting the time they were written and what was happening in the ones I could identify. Sam has to meet with the rest of the task force to check on their progress with the children still missing and how he is going to move the investigation forward. I stay in the room, walking around the table, my mind going a hundred different directions, and yet always coming back to the same thing.
I take out my phone and send Sam a text.
We were wrong.
Making sure the GPS is activated on my phone, I take a picture of the map of Sherwood with notations of where the children went missing and where they were found and run out of the station.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Fear threatens to keep me away. It drags me, pulling me backwards as I try to make my way through the woods. I parked as close as I could, but the old access road is closed, forcing me to walk the rest of the way. Every step gets harder as panic builds in my stomach and crawls up my throat. It blurs my eyes and burns at the tips of my ears. My hands tingle, and my legs sting. My body is doing everything it can to keep me in place, to stop me from going any further.
But it’s not fear of what is ahead of me. It’s fear of what’s behind me. I remember each step through the woods behind the cabin. I remember the crunch of the leaves and hearing steps coming toward me through darkness I couldn’t penetrate. I dove into the danger, into the unknown, and I’m going to do it again. This time there’s more at stake. Three children are still missing. One is dead, another still barely clinging to life, another with damage she will carry with her every day. I carry my own damage in my heart, in the back of my mind, and on my hand. I can’t take their burden from them, but I can stop it from getting worse.
Twilight fills the spaces between the trees as I make my way through them. Thank god for long summer evenings and the pureness of moonlight. I don’t want to think of any of those children passing a night in the darkness.
The walk isn’t as long as it feels, and my feet finally follow the end of the access road to what used to be a parking lot. It’s broken and overgrown now, only small bits of the blacktop visible through the tall grass and small trees that have overtaken it. I cross over it toward the hulking building. It looks more frightening in the half-light, but seeing it makes hope rise in my chest. I didn’t know for sure it would still be here, that it was still standing. I’ve only seen it once, many years ago, when it wasn’t in as bad of condition as it is now, and there were more people around me to take away the edge of foreboding.
The old school hasn’t been open in decades. Its square brick structure and large steps leading up to the front door hearken to another time when children flocked in their nicest clothing and the pursuit of good grades was paramount. Not like it is now. The hallways of schools have changed. The people who come out of them changed for it.
I walk past the dirty white stone steps and the boarded-up front door to the crumbled sidewalk leading around to the back of the school. Down the slight slope at the back is one of the modern additions added to the grounds during the last-gasp years of the school. A playground has been broken down to its skeleton, swings gone, jungle gym dismantled, only metal frames and a slide visible against the horizon. The only time I came here, that playground rang with the sound of preteen laughter.
We shouldn’t have been here. I was barely old enough to be out of the house by myself and should have been afraid the moment the older kids led us into the woods and brought us here. But Sam was there. Older and more confident, a leader even when he didn’t realize it. He ushered me here, and we ran around the ruins of the school grounds, laughing for no reason, relishing the freedom, wanting it to never end.
Beyond the playground, a running track added for the short time this school was converted into a private high school winds in a circle against the grass. I can’t see it, but I can make a guess if I go down there, I’ll find a shoe sitting on it.
I turn back around and head for the rear of the school. The doors are boarded up, but there’s a broken window. Several of the panes have been removed, and the glass smoothed to create an easy entrance for anyone willing to make the climb. I do and drop down onto the dusty floor of the school’s gym. Footprints mar the thick dirt coating the once-polished floor, and I follow them, letting them bring me to the doors at the end that open out into the hallway. The rusted hinges of the door scream loudly as I push the door open, but I don’t care. Let them hear me. Let them come.
I’ve only taken a few steps through the shadowy space illuminated only by the evening light filtering in when I see movement ahead of me. A figure steps into view. The black silhouette makes my palms sweat as my nightmare replays in my mind. But it isn’t the grotesque burned image of Jake coming toward me. I hold my ground, steadying my stance.