Before he could get off on a tangent, Josie said, “He was in the greenhouse when your dad came looking for you?”
“Yeah. He knew that Lorelei didn’t like people to meet him, so he stayed out there. He’s got anger issues. Did you know about that?”
“Yes,” Josie said.
“He’s my friend. I know that he can’t control it when the creature comes.”
“The creature?” Josie said.
“That’s the name we made up for his rage—the creature—because it’s, like, not him, you know? It’s something inside him that he can’t get a hold on. He doesn’t want to say terrible things. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone but sometimes, it’s like there’s this thing inside him that overtakes him.”
He must have seen her brow furrow because he said, “I don’t mean in a split personality way, if that’s what you’re thinking right now. Rory doesn’t have that. It was just this thing we did to make it easier for us to talk about the feelings he gets. Miss Lorelei taught us. He’s got the creature and I’ve got the palterer.”
“The what?”
He gave a small smile. “The palterer. It’s a great word, right? I read it in this super-old book I got from the library. It’s considered archaic now.”
“What does it mean?”
“A palterer is someone who talks or acts insincerely.”
“A liar.”
His smile widened. “Right.”
“Who is your palterer?” Josie asked. “Are we talking about a person?”
“No,” Pax said. “You know how I said Rory gets this rage inside him that he can’t control and he doesn’t want? I get this, like, thing inside me that’s always giving me trouble. Always telling me crazy things that don’t make any sense, but they scare me even though I know they’re wrong, so I have to do what the thing—the palterer—says. Miss Lorelei made us name them so we would understand that they were not the entirety of our identities. Like, that’s not who we are. Rory isn’t just his rage, and I’m not just the palterer. These things are apart from us. Rory even drew his.”
Josie thought of the disturbing drawing in the barren bedroom at Lorelei’s house.
“Yeah, I think I saw that,” she said. “The palterer told you to make sure the boxes on the loading dock this morning were exactly one finger’s width apart, didn’t he?” she asked. “Or something bad would happen.”
His eyes widened. “How did you know?”
Ignoring his question, she said, “But the palterer isn’t an actual voice or identity or person, is it?”
He shook his head.
“You have OCD.”
His entire face changed. He took two steps toward her, his arms opening, as if he were going to embrace her. Instead, he placed them on her shoulders. Josie held still, divining no threat from the boy. “That’s what Miss Lorelei said!” he told her.
If Pax was not a threat to her, maybe he was telling the truth about not having a gun and not having shot at her.
“Emily has OCD as well,” Josie said.
He dropped his hands and stepped back, his look of relief tempered with something else. Something dark and uncertain.
If Pax wasn’t the one who had shot at her, then who?
“Pax,” Josie said. “Remember when you told me that even your father lied?”
His head bobbed in acknowledgment. Even as she watched him and worked out the scenario in her mind, her ears were tuned to the forest around them, listening for even the slightest noise. A soft footfall. The snap of a branch. An exhale.
“Emily is your sister, isn’t she?” Josie asked. “That’s what he’s lying about. He did have a relationship with Lorelei, and Emily was the result of it. That’s why you kept going there to see her.”
His face went ashen. “You can’t tell,” he whispered.
Josie thought she heard something swish through the brush to their right. She surged forward and grabbed Pax’s upper arm, pulling him along. “Come on, we have to get out of here.”
Twenty-Two
Josie found her pistol inside Lorelei’s house, put the toothbrushes in a paper bag she found in the kitchen, threw Pax’s bike into the back of her vehicle, and drove directly toward the stationhouse. It could take hours for the K-9 unit to arrive. They served the entire county and were often out on other calls when Denton PD asked for assistance. Josie would instruct one of her team members to search the house for some personal item belonging to Rory. Right now, she just wanted to get away from the house. In the passenger’s seat, Pax was silent. As they passed the produce market, he looked at it. Josie glanced over as well, noting that one of the vans was missing. Was Reed out looking for him?
As if reading her mind, Pax said, “My dad’s gonna be really mad.”
Josie said, “Pax, does your dad hit you?”
“Only a couple of times,” he said, his eyes still glued to the outside as the market faded into the distance.
“You know you’re eighteen now,” Josie said. “You don’t have to stay with him.”
“Where else would I go? I didn’t even finish high school. This problem I have, it can make things really difficult for me. Miss Lorelei was helping me, and for the first time since my mom died, I started to feel normal. But then my dad found out she was ‘messing around in my head.’ That’s what he calls it. He said I couldn’t see her—or Emily—again.”
Josie glanced over at him to see him shrug his left shoulder twice.
“Do you feel nervous?” she asked him.
“Anxious,” he said.
Josie said, “I can talk to your dad for you, if you want, when we’re done at the station.”
His shoulder shrugged again, but he said nothing.
“Pax, can I ask you a couple of questions that are important to our investigation?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Do you know what
