A long pause.
She tore her gaze from his and glanced back out at the lake. “Did you know Riley?”
“No.”
“But you decided to become a police detective because of her disappearance?”
“That was the catalyst.”
“Strange.”
They both fell silent, each lost in thought as night sounds drifted in through the open window. Adam studied her profile from his periphery. She was a coroner, but he didn’t see death when he looked at her—the opposite, in fact. Youth and vitality radiated from her slender form like heat waves shimmering off asphalt. She wasn’t beautiful like Stephanie, but she was far more attractive than he’d given her credit for earlier. And still just as enigmatic.
“Tell me more about your summer here,” she said. “We were all so close to what happened. Riley’s disappearance affected everyone who knew her in one way or another. It’s interesting to hear an outside perspective.”
“Haven’t I taken up enough of your time?”
“No, please. Go on.”
He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. A lot’s happened since then. But I remember when I first got to town that the other girl had just been found wandering down a rural road.”
“Jenna Malloy.”
“Yes, Jenna. She was in such a state she couldn’t tell the police anything about their abductor or what had happened to them. Her trauma and Riley’s disappearance were all anyone could talk about, including my grandmother. Before long, I became caught up in the mystery, too. At some point, I got it in my head that I could do what the local police, the county sheriff’s office, the Texas Rangers and the FBI couldn’t. Find Riley Cavanaugh.”
The note of self-deprecation in his voice didn’t seem to register with Nikki. Resting her head against the window frame, she lifted a hand to tuck back the loose strands of hair at her temple. “Everyone looked for Riley. The search went on for months. They brought in bloodhounds, psychics. No one could find her.” She shook her head sadly. “It was a terrible time for her family. For the whole town. I don’t think Belle Pointe ever recovered.”
“Something like that changes a community,” Adam said. “Especially if there’s never an arrest. People get suspicious of one another. Rumors start circulating.”
“Oh, there were plenty of rumors.”
“People like to talk,” he agreed. “The consensus seemed to be that the abductor was a former psychiatric patient named Silas Creed. Preacher, they called him, because of the fiery sermons he delivered on the front steps after this place was closed down. You said you spent a lot of time here as a kid. Did you ever see him?”
She shook her head. “Not here. Not that I remember. But I saw him around town now and then. He did odd jobs to get by. My grandmother always warned me to keep my distance, but before the disappearances, he just seemed like a harmless outcast to me. I felt sorry for him.”
“Do you think he did it?”
“I don’t know. No one ever saw him again after that night. The way he skipped town certainly seemed suspicious. But I always wondered if he ran away because he was afraid of being blamed. People tend to scapegoat those who are different.”
Adam’s voice softened. “He wasn’t the only scapegoat in Belle Pointe, was he?”
“No.” She lifted her face to the sky. Her skin looked pale and translucent in the moonlight, her eyes dark and unfathomable. Something stirred inside Adam. Something unexpected and completely unwise. Maybe even dangerous, considering the circumstances.
“You looked a lot different back then,” he said.
“Which is why my friends and I were scapegoated.” She scowled into the night. “If you were around that summer, you must have heard those rumors, too.”
“About satanic cults and devil worshipping? Yeah.”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “You aren’t afraid to be alone with me out here?”
“Not for a second.”
His conviction seemed to rattle her. “Maybe you should be.”
He pointed to the scar at his scalp. “Foolish or not, I’m not that easily spooked.”
She turned back to the lake. “The police targeted us because of the way we dressed, the books we read, the music we listened to. People started calling us the Belle Pointe Five.” She shrugged, though it was obvious the memory still stung. “Small towns can be rife with narrow minds.”
“The city, as well,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I never believed those rumors.”
“Why not? You didn’t know me.”
Because I found your journal beneath that loose floorboard. Because I learned from reading your innermost secrets that you and your friends were also harmless outcasts.
Harmless...but not altogether innocent.
“I wanted to form my own opinion about what happened,” he said carefully. “In my spare time, I scoured online news sites and social media for accounts of the disappearances, gathering whatever bits of information I could find. It was like putting together a puzzle. I dug it. After pounding nails all day in the hot sun, I’d sometimes take a dip in the lake and then hike down here to poke through the rubble, hoping to uncover something that had been missed by the local authorities.”
“Did you?”
A loaded question.
He hesitated. “Nothing that would lead me to Riley Cavanaugh.”
She fell silent once more, leaning through the window into the breeze. The reflection of the moon on the lake was magnetic, drawing Adam’s gaze down into those dark, murky depths. All their talk about an old disappearance had made him momentarily forget why he was really here. Something strange is going on in this town. Something dark. I think it has been for years.
“Someone’s down there,” Nikki said.
The comment startled him out of a deep reverie. “What? Where?”
She pointed toward the bank. “He’s there, just beyond that large cypress tree. You can barely make out a silhouette. I’ve been watching him for the past minute or so. I thought it was a bush or a limb at first. But then I saw him move down toward the water. Now he’s just hunkered there behind that tree as if he’s
