Heather blinked, trying to imagine her mother as a rebellious teen. A few weeks ago, that would have seemed laughable, but now her mother seemed to be a shifting presence, someone that could change at any moment.
“This man. Who was he? The owner?”
“I don’t remember.”
That was an obvious lie. Heather ignored it.
“I’ve done some research into the place, read blogs and articles. It sounds like it was quite the party central, if you were part of the gang. A lot of drugs and free love?”
Reave shrugged. She could tell he was losing interest in her.
“Did you meet a lot of people there, Michael? A lot of women?”
“A few.”
“A lot of people think you’re responsible for a number of missing women we don’t even know about yet. Do you want to tell me about that?”
This time he didn’t even shrug, and the expression on his face was flat and very still.
“Mr. Reave … Michael, look, everyone believes you murdered those women. The whole country thinks of you as the Red Wolf.” She thought she saw a flicker of some new emotion in his eyes at that. “Maybe you can think of me as a neutral party.” She shrugged slightly. “Before I found those letters, I didn’t really know anything about you. Not anything beyond the tabloid headlines, anyway. Maybe you could take this as an opportunity to tell me how you saw things. Tell me your story.”
He watched her now, a tiny crease appearing between his eyebrows. He shifted in his chair, and Heather saw that he was considering it.
“My story?”
Heather nodded.
“My story.” Reave leaned back in his chair and looked at the wall. The prison guards shifted; one of them crossed his arms over his chest. They both looked bored. “I was a poor country kid. My father did odd jobs for people, some of them less than legal, I reckon. My mother was an angry woman. She didn’t like me much, but then I don’t think she liked anyone much. She was cold and turned inwards on herself, wouldn’t speak for days sometimes. I remember her stoking the stove up until it was fair spitting sparks, and she would sit by it for hours, until one side of her was all red and mottled, just staring at nothing. When she was angry with me, she would shut me away.” He cleared his throat and met Heather’s eyes again. “When a doe rabbit has kits, Heather, she has to feel completely safe. If she doesn’t feel safe, lass, if she feels that there is a predator in the woods, do you know what she’ll do?”
Heather shook her head.
“She’ll eat her young to save herself. A kit is all scent and hot blood, Heather—it doesn’t know that it’s like a beacon for hungry things. It’ll lead the predator to the mother rabbit, and she can’t have that. She’ll eat her own babies to save herself.”
The prison guard had uncrossed his arms, and was now staring at Reave with a look of open dislike.
“I— ”
“It sounds monstrous, but some things are just not born with maternal instincts. Some things are born scared, rabbits being one of them.”
“Was there a predator in your house growing up, Michael?”
He smiled then, a really genuine smile, and she found herself recoiling in confusion, because he looked vulnerable. He looked lost.
“No one cares about my story, lass. No one cares about poor kids growing up in dirty houses that are never warm, or about what they have to do to live. What they have to do to get out. Not even you, girl.”
I do care. The words were on her lips for the briefest second, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say them. Those words might be the key to getting the rest of his story, yet she found she could only think of the photos of the girls that were forever linked to his name. I do care, she thought. I care about them and my mother. I care about Sharon Barlow and Elizabeth Bunyon.
“Was Fiddler’s Mill your way out, Mr. Reave? Is that where you escaped to?”
He said nothing to that.
Not taking her eyes off him, Heather reached into her bag for the folder in there and pulled out the prints she’d had made. Each of whytewitch’s pictures and photographs had been blown up to A4 size, a little larger than the file could take, it turned out, but something about the graininess of the images made them more impressive. The first photograph she slid across the table toward him. It showed bleak fields, a cluster of tents off to the right, and Fiddler’s Mill House in the distance.
Reave looked down at the picture without moving or speaking. Heather couldn’t be sure, but she felt like he was holding something back again, as he had when he had first laid eyes on her.
“Do these bring back any memories?”
He tipped his head to one side; a noncommittal answer.
“I guess you spent your formative years there, it’s difficult to forget.” She placed the second picture on top of the first; another photograph, this one of more tents, slightly blurry people coming and going, smoke coming from several places. “I found these online, taken by a woman who calls herself whytewitch, would you believe. She was there at Fiddler’s Mill in the ’70s, too. Do you remember her at all?”
He looked away, a flexing in his jaw that told her he was not happy. Not happy. Heather thought of her mother’s body lying broken at the bottom of a cliff, of the faces of the women who came up on a Google image search under his name. With a flourish, she produced more pictures, dumping them one on top of the other. Reave
