I am, but you don’t judge me. There are things I need to say, things I need you to understand. You see a lot, but you don’t see everything.
I will tell you that I did not kill Sarah Meyer that night. But I’d killed her a hundred times already in as many different ways. I want to tell you that I loved her and that I thought about her all of the time. A lot of times, like you told the police, I followed her. I was nearby when she died. It was an accident. She was with some boys, I won’t say who, and there was a fight. She ran from one of them. And then she fell, hit her head on a rock. They left her there, alone in the dark. So I took her. She belonged to me. I wanted her warm and screaming. But I took her as I found her, so cold and so quiet.
You know what I did to her. You were there. I felt you even though I didn’t understand it at the time. I won’t write those things here. They are nightmares. I hate who I am. I always, always have.
There was pressure to confess. They were at me for hours and hours. But that’s not why I said I killed her. I said I did it because I would have one day. And if not her, then someone else. I couldn’t keep the animal in his cage much longer, especially not after he’d tasted blood. It’s better that I’m here, caged with the other animals. Don’t feel bad that you got it wrong. You were right in all the ways that count.
This is the last anyone will hear from me. And I know no one will miss me. Everyone thinks I’m a monster. I am. I hope my mom is waiting for me. But I doubt it. I remember how she looked before I pushed her down the stairs. I know she loved me. But when she looked at me she was so sad.
Sincerely,
Tommy Delano
Sorrow seemed to leak from the page into her fingers. Maggie found herself thinking of Marshall, another damaged boy turning into a dangerous, unstable man. She thought of Sarah’s violin in her mother’s attic, Charlene weeping on her couch, her mother and husband lying in their hospital beds. She thought of Ricky going off to college, and she was glad that he was going to be far, far away from this place, even though she knew the loss of him was going to lay her low. There was something about The Hollows that held on tight, kept you here though you’d intended to leave, or brought you back when you weren’t paying attention. It made promises that it didn’t keep-safety, peace of mind, tranquillity-until one day you were too tired to even want to find another place to live.
“Did my mother know about this letter? She must have.”
Eloise nodded. “I shared it with her after some time had passed. Even now, I’m not sure why. It only caused her more pain. But I tend to follow my compulsions; I’ve found that there’s usually a reason, even if I never understand it myself.”
Maggie thought of her mother, her will so powerful, her sense of right and wrong so clear. How could she have lived with this?
“Eloise,” Maggie said. “Do you know who killed Sarah?”
Eloise looked out the window over the metal kitchen sink, then back at Maggie.
“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
Maggie believed her.
27
Henry Ivy rarely locked his doors. When he was a kid, the doors were always open. And even though The Hollows had changed a lot since then, he rarely thought to do it, couldn’t remember the last time he’d used his key to get in. But standing on his porch, he noticed the door was ajar. He wouldn’t have left it that way. It was an old door that stuck, especially on a night like tonight, when yesterday it had been cool and today it was humid. He had to pull the door closed and push it open hard.
He briefly considered leaving, turning around and getting back in his car, using his cell phone to call the police. But then if there was no one in there, he’d look foolish. And while everyone in The Hollows liked and respected him, thought he did his job well, no one thought of Henry Ivy as a tough guy. He wasn’t the guy you called when you needed a hero. In The Hollows, that guy was Jones Cooper. If he called the cops and there was no one in his house, everyone would be very polite about it, but there’d be lots of laughing at the bar after the shift had ended. The story would circulate to wives and girlfriends. Two days later Margie, the receptionist, would be looking at him with a sympathetic smile he didn’t understand.
He pushed the door open and walked into the foyer, stood listening. The air felt different. There was an odd scent, something unpleasant. He walked into the living room to the right of the foyer and saw Travis Crosby sitting in the wing chair by the fireplace.
The room was exactly as Henry’s mother had decorated it decades ago. When his parents had sold him the house and moved to Florida, they’d wanted all new things down there. Henry always thought he’d sell the furniture he’d been lying around on since childhood, gut the house and redo everything. But he never had. Not for any reason other than a kind of inertia that had settled over his life. Everything was fine. It had always been fine. That was what he told himself.
“What are you doing here, Crosby?”
He didn’t feel particularly alarmed to see this wanted man in his living room. In a way, Henry felt as though he’d been waiting for Travis, like they had some unfinished business they’d never gotten around to settling.
“I used to go to AA meetings. On the job, they like you to do that. Promise they’ll treat your addiction like a disease, give you your shield back when you’re cured. But that’s not the way it works. They’ll put you back on the payroll but not on the street. You run the desk or the equipment room, maybe the evidence locker if you’re lucky.”
Henry noticed a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a bag of chips by Travis’s feet. He’d obviously been there awhile, helped himself to things in Henry’s kitchen and liquor cabinet.
“I didn’t become a cop to file paperwork.”
“No,” Henry said. “You became a cop so that you could continue to bully people
Travis issued an annoyed little laugh, rubbed nervously at the sweat on his brow. “You never did know when to keep your mouth shut, Ivy.”
Henry noticed the gun in Travis’s hand then, a flat, black menace. Still, Henry didn’t feel any fear, just a kind of tingling awareness. He felt that same thing rear up in him that had caused him to beat Travis at homecoming. It was something ugly and raw, but not unwelcome.
“What do you want, Crosby?”
“I still think about that day, you know? When you beat me in front of the whole school?”
“So do I.”
“I feel like everything went bad for me starting there. That nothing good ever happened again after that.”
Travis stared at Henry with watery eyes, his face flushed, leg pumping. He looked bloated and filthy, with some kind of dark stain on his shirt and pants. Henry still remembered the lean, terrifying boy he’d been. He’d been all the more menacing for his beauty and charm. The man before him was a ruin.
“You’re kidding, right? You tortured me for years. I finally stood up to you. And now you’re going to blame me for ruining your life. That’s classic.”
Logic dictated that Henry should be talking Travis down, mindful of the gun in his hand. But Henry was tired of being quiet, of doing the right thing, the logical thing. That was what he’d been doing all his life. What had it gotten him, actually? What did he have to show for all that right action? If he thought about it, beating the crap out of Travis Crosby was the only honest thing he’d ever done.
“In rehab, they tell you that you have to make amends, to say you’re sorry to all the people you hurt with your addiction. But I kept thinking, What about all the people who hurt me, who fucked me over? My father, you, my ex-wife. When do
“Seems like you might have missed the point, Crosby.”
“I don’t think so.”
Travis got to his feet quickly, and Henry took an unconscious step back. He saw a predator’s satisfied smile turn up the corners of Travis’s mouth.
