The kitchen is wrong, but it isn’t dangerous. I move on.
The hall is filthy, streaked with mold. Drywall bulges and leaks. There are still framed photos on the wall, but rot has obscured what used to be a loving family, cute children. This house, I think, is a map of Jonathan’s destroyed brain. Pieces partly there. Pieces rotting. Some weirdly perfect.
His room is destroyed. Not by the elements, though the window’s broken out and the carpet has wrinkled and molded. This seems . . . deliberate. Someone’s taken what looks like an ax to the furniture, left it in silently screaming pieces. Books ripped apart. Bedsheets and clothing shredded.
He hates himself. Or someone else hates him this much. I could weep for the boy he used to be, the one who lost his little sister, but the monster that he is now has to be treated differently.
You held a mother who killed her children, I tell myself. But it’s different. Somehow . . . somehow, it’s different. I can’t define why; unlike Jonathan, I don’t really want to understand.
I just want it to stop.
The next room is his sister’s, and it’s heartbreakingly perfect, a shrine, clean and neat and waiting for a dead child to walk in the door, sleep in the frilly pink bed, wear the neat white nightgown that’s laid out on the covers. I look at the boy band posters on the wall, at the stuffed animals, the games. My heart aches for her, not just because she’ll never see this but because so much harm has been done in her name.
He isn’t here. Kez isn’t here. I check every place she could be kept, but there’s no trace of her, or Jonathan.
That just leaves the lighthouse.
I go.
26
SAM
Gwen’s right about the lack of real, solid evidence, but I try anyway; I call the TBI and get the investigator Javier saw at the hospital, Heidt. I lay it all out for him. I tell him that the man he’s looking for is in Salah Point, North Carolina. That he’s a serial killer, a predator who took Sheryl Lansdowne and now has Gwen and Kezia too. I make it as urgent as I can, and . . . he says he’ll look into it.
He thinks I’m bullshitting him. And I am, but only a little. The facts are there. He’s just not looking. Or, at least, not moving fast enough if he is.
I call my friend at the FBI, but I’m told he’s on a case and unavailable. Can’t be reached. I leave him a long message, and then I ask to talk to someone else.
I know what I have to do. Exactly what I have to do. And there will be consequences.
So I tell them that there’s a terrorist cell in Salah Point, that I have personal knowledge of a plot involving multiple individuals, and the threat is imminent. I know the language to use; military training embeds that deep. And the agent I’m talking to pays attention. Close attention. I give him Tyler Pharos’s description, tell him the alias of Leonard Bay. I link Tyler to all kinds of things, including the abduction of Sheryl Lansdowne and the disappearance of my wife and Kezia Claremont. I throw everything that might stick at the wall, true or not. I know I’ll be in the shit for it. I don’t care. By the end of it, I’m practically begging them to get there, just get there.
I have no idea if it will work.
I call the North Carolina state police and try the same thing. I can tell they write me down as a crank. There’s going to be no help coming from that direction. The FBI, maybe. But they’ll call North Carolina, and North Carolina will take their sweet time checking anything out. I’m just some nut from out of state.
The only thing that holds me back from just going is the knowledge that I need to stay here for the kids. That Gwen trusted me with that, and I have to treat that as what it is: a sacred responsibility. A level of letting go that I never imagined she could manage.
I have to be worthy of that trust, even if it hurts. Even if it’s agony sitting here and waiting.
I’ve told the kids everything. Vee’s here, too, huddled on the couch with Lanny and Connor. Nobody’s saying much. Every once in a while, Vee tries to lighten the mood, but none of us are having it. Javier’s stormed out; I’m sure he’s going to be burning rubber to North Carolina, and I don’t try to stop him. He won’t get there in time, but at least he’ll get there to pick up the pieces. Man, that hurts.
I wait with the kids, and it’s sheer torture.
It’s two long, tense hours later when my cell phone rings. “Mr. Cade? I’d like you to go to your computer, please. I need you to be a witness.”
I feel like I recognize the voice, but at the same time I don’t. Something’s familiar and different at the same time. “Who is this?”
“My name is Jonathan Bruce Watson,” he says. “Go to your computer. Do it now. I sent you a link. Please click it.”
I go to the office, and as I come around my desk, I see that my laptop’s awake, and there’s a text message alert. I click it, and the link appears.
“Don’t do it,” Connor says. He’s come out of nowhere, and he looks angry. Anxious. Afraid. “Dad, don’t.”
The voice on the phone says, “You know who I am, Sam. You know you need to click that link.”
It hits, then. The voice. Tyler. MalusNavis. The puppet master. He sounds different, though. Maybe this is the real voice at last.
“Where’s Gwen?” I ask him. “I know you’re behind all this, Tyler.”
“You can see her if you click the link,” he says. “We’re going to play a game. It’s called Would You Rather. Do you know it?”
“I’m not playing.” I
