Katharine quickly wiped up the sauce as her children stepped into the kitchen. Both of them blinked at the red flecks, and both seemed to sag a little with relief when they figured out what it was.
“You okay?” asked Suzette.
Katharine smiled thinly and nodded. “You forgot the milk, I see.”
A fter dinner, the three members of the Close family sat on the couch and watched the news.
No one said anything as the newsreader reported that Elliot Neville Guyatt, a thirty-seven-year-old cleaner recently moved up from Coffs Harbor, had presented himself at the Torwood Police Station and confessed to the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Dylan Oscar Thomas. The overlay pictures showed a slim paperclip of a man looking thoroughly confused as police escorted him from the paddywagon into the watchhouse. Guyatt made no effort to hide his face. He walked as if he were caught in a dream.
N icholas lay on the creaking single bed in his old room. He was awake, listening to the feminine lilt of his sister and mother talking. The wood walls filtered out the detail of words but left a melody that spoke of shared blood.
His old bed. The family together. Childhood again.
The shops remained the same. The woods remained the same.
Only now, he could see they were haunted.
Tallong children were still dying.
He was suddenly wide awake.
Elliot Guyatt had confessed to killing the Thomas child, and the boy’s body was found in the river, miles from Tallong. Winston Teale had confessed to killing Tristram two suburbs distant, hiding his body at the construction site. Nicholas had always thought his memory of seeing Tristram’s drained, dead body floating past was a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by sheer terror and the thump of the tree branch.
But Suzette said she saw Tristram after he died, running from Carmichael Road into the woods. And Nicholas himself had seen the Thomas boy’s ghost dragged into the trees.
The boys didn’t die miles away. The boys had been murdered in the woods.
Nicholas rolled to look out the window.
Jesus. He wondered if Tris had been trapped down there for twenty-five years, his ghost caught in that awful loop, experiencing over and over the mind-tearing fear that had wrenched at every cell in their bodies as Teale had chased them. Twenty-five years, running in terror between those dark trees. The thought tightened Nicholas’s throat.
For a long while, he stared at the stars. Without knowing when, he slipped into sleep and dreamed that gnarled, shadowy hands were carrying him away through dark curtains of silk.
Chapter 7
K nocking. It wrenched him up from a scuttling black dream that lost all its detail as his eyes opened.
Heavy knuckles rapping on wood. Someone was at the front door.
The sea gray of predawn stole between the venetian blinds. Nicholas rolled over and checked his watch. Quarter to six. Who knocked at quarter to six in the morning? He licked his dry lips and got out of bed. As he pulled on tracksuit pants, he caught sight of himself in the duchess mirror. A pale man with straw-blond hair, bleary eyes, and a distracted expression. The look you saw on shoeless men in tube stations and on sparrow-fingered street- corner preachers-a face you’d give wide berth to because it seemed one ill-aimed word away from crazy. So it’s come to that, he thought: avoiding my own eyes.
He pulled on his T-shirt as he lurched like a newly docked sailor down the narrow hallway toward the insistent knocking.
His mother’s door was shut. Once again, hefty snores came from behind it. Suzette’s door was shut too; from behind it rumbled snores a half-octave higher but equally lusty.
“How about I get it?” asked Nicholas.
Twin snores answered.
More knocking. The patient raps of a visitor who knows that someone is home.
Nicholas passed the kitchen. The sky outside was low and pregnant with rain.
He unlatched the front door.
A man stood there. He was perhaps forty, but his face wore fifty years’ worth of miles. His suit was expensive but rumpled. His tie was neatly knotted and his hair carefully combed. He’d shaved, but small tussocks of whiskers sat out like reeds in a gray swamp. The skin under his eyes looked as thin as old chicken meat; the eyes themselves were blue and overly bright.
“Can I help you?” Nicholas asked carefully.
But the man said nothing. He simply stared at Nicholas, fighting a smile and winning. The look on his face was desperate, starved, and hauntingly familiar.
The man finally spoke. “Nicholas.”
Nicholas blinked. The voice had a timber that opened up memories. Then the little smile bobbed again on the man’s lips, a brave boat in drowning seas, and years fell away. Nicholas recognized a face hadn’t seen for twenty- five years. It was a face he literally used to look up to. A Boye boy-Tristram’s older brother.
“Gavin?”
Gavin grinned. It was a skull’s rictus.
“Wow. Gavin. You look…” Nicholas put out his hand. Gavin looked at it as if he’d never seen an outstretched hand before. After an uncomfortable pause, Nicholas let it fall. “Right. Um. Listen, do… will you come in?”
The smile sank away and the years slipped back onto Gavin’s face like the tide returning. He shook his head, and his gaze on Nicholas was unblinking. He was big, easily six-two, and Nicholas suspected he could move fast. “Is everything okay?”
Gavin didn’t answer. Instead, he looked slowly over his left shoulder and then over his right at the empty street. Above pine trees in a distant park, a dozen or so crows wheeled and dipped in the gray sky like windblown black ash. Gavin’s movements sent a sudden chill flood through Nicholas’s gut. That’s exactly what Winston Teale did before he chased Tristram and me into the-
“Woods,” said Gavin.
Nicholas stopped breathing. Pins and needles pricked the soles of his bare feet and his neck pimpled cold. He could see past Gavin’s shoulders that the street was empty, not another soul in sight.
“It’s kind of early, Gavin.” Nicholas wanted it to sound casual, but the words came out cracked, his mouth suddenly dry as sand. “Do you want to stop by for a visit a little later?”
Gavin shook his head slowly, once. Nicholas noticed that he carried in one hand something wrapped in a black garbage bag.
“I was told you were back,” said Gavin. His voice was soft. Dreamy. He nodded, as if a subtle milestone had been reached.
Nicholas found it hard to drag his gaze back up to Gavin’s face; it was like looking at the sun, painful and dangerous. Gavin was unhooked, a boat adrift in rapids and rushing for the falls-but still afloat.
“Yeah. I’m back. What’s in the bag, Gavin?” But Nicholas thought he already knew.
Gavin twisted his head, as if he hadn’t heard the question. He was casting back in time. Remembering. He smiled-another death’s-head grin. “You know, Mum had tutors for us both. Tris really didn’t need one. Mum only got him one so that I wouldn’t feel stupid.”
“That was a long time ago, Gavin. Listen-”
“Tris…” interrupted Gavin, his voice drifting far away. “Trissy was the smart one.”
Nicholas watched the big man stand there, his eyes decades away. Nicholas knew this was his chance to shut the door. He reached slyly for the edge.
That instant, Gavin’s eyes flicked and locked on Nicholas’s. “I have a message,” he said.
In a motion so fast and fluid that Nicholas could hardly register it, Gavin pulled a gun from the bag. It was a hunting rifle, sawn off so short that the ragged cut sectioned through the front of its walnut stock. The severed barrel was ugly and raw as an eye socket. What a waste of a good Sako, thought Nicholas, and was instantly
