The girls, they’d had it worse than him. Not that any of them ever talked about it. In their particular community that kind of treatment was expected, was normal. People would probably even say he had gotten off light, considering.
It was never named for what it actually was.
But in the darkness, that cabin had carried the terror of being trapped in the crawl space that as a boy he’d thought was a coffin. His fingers had itched constantly with the need to caress the beads of the rosary, which had been the one thing that had kept him tethered to reality when locked away for days on end.
At two months and one day of living out in the mountains, he’d packed his belongings—the three plaid shirts, the jeans, the two pairs of boots, the three boxes of books—into the back of his pickup and found the first house in town that was for sale.
It was a quirky old Victorian, dropped in the middle of ranchers and generic Americana and nothing like the house people thought Hicks should live in.
He loved it.
Now, he sat on the back porch with a bottle of beer in one hand, as he rocked in a chair he’d built himself. Being out beneath the open sky kept the gnawing ache at bay.
It had been a long day—they’d been searching for Noah Dawson for hours—and Hicks was just contemplating a second beer when he heard the rustle. Clothes, man-made fabric. So not an animal. Idly he shifted so that his gun was in easy reach, but he wasn’t worried.
Hicks relaxed completely when the figure moved close enough to the house for the pale kitchen light from the window to catch her skin. Lily white.
“Hey, Short-Stack,” Hicks called out, though he made sure to keep his voice pitched low. The wind told secrets, carried them through neighbors’ open windows. He didn’t want to cause trouble for Eliza.
“Hicks.” She came up the stairs, her arms wrapped around her narrow frame, her chin down close to her chest. She was trying to hug the shadows. Something was wrong.
“What’s up?”
She looked up, met his eyes. Hers were just deep pools of darkness, and for a shameful moment he thought about the demons he’d been taught about as a child. Then the moonlight shifted, and she was once again Eliza.
“I need a favor,” she whispered.
He almost said, Anything, because he would do anything for this kid. Cora’s kid. But he knew better than to make that kind of promise. “Okay. What is it?”
Eliza licked her lips, her gaze slipping to the side, and Hicks was glad he hadn’t agreed easily. “You can’t ask me that. I just need a favor, and you can’t ask me why.”
The words were rushed, falling between them, the tint of mania in them underlying the request for complete trust. “Short-Stack . . . ,” he started, stopped. What was there to say? His mind snagged on Noah Dawson. But she couldn’t know . . .
“I’m not in trouble,” Eliza said, and everything about her swayed into pure teenage annoyance. He blinked, and she was back to the haunted girl she’d been seconds earlier. “I just need your truck. Until tomorrow afternoon. Maybe tomorrow night.”
“Josiah would give you keys to one of his.” Hicks knew she’d used it before to drive up to that clinic she visited sometimes.
“I didn’t ask to use Josiah’s truck, did I?” Eliza snapped, unlike anything he’d ever heard from her in the past. She wasn’t bratty. Quiet. Too smart for her own good, maybe. Not this, though.
“Try again,” he said evenly, but his mind was spinning out into every worst-case scenario, despite the fact that he thought they’d already gone through that a couple of months ago.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Eliza backpedaled immediately. Maybe the tears were real, maybe it was an act. Hicks didn’t care. If she was this desperate, he couldn’t refuse.
He stood up without saying anything, stepped inside, and grabbed the set of keys off the ring he kept nailed up by the door. When he got back outside, he tossed them to her.
“Take it.”
She stared at them, her hair sliding forward to curtain her face, hiding her expression. But when she looked up, it was pure relief, pure gratitude that was written there. “Thank you.”
“Hey,” Hicks said, already regretting whatever this was. “If you’re in trouble . . .”
“It’s not that,” Eliza said, more gently this time, shaking her head. “Don’t. Don’t worry about me, okay?”
“Like telling me not to breathe, Short-Stack,” he said, leaning back against the house so as not to rush forward and hold her close, protecting her from the Big Bad in the world if only for a few heartbeats. Like he had when she’d been a baby.
Her smile was a ghost of her normal grin, and it fell quickly from her lips. She nodded, once, and then turned, only to stop with her foot on the stairs. “Uncle Hicks.”
When she didn’t continue, he prompted, “Yeah?”
Eliza’s chin touched her shoulder, so that he could see the sharp line of her profile in the starlight. “I’m sorry.”
By the time Hicks found the composure to try to respond, she was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
LUCY THORNE
Saturday, 9:40 p.m.
“Is there a chance we just came from a serial killer’s lair?” Lucy asked Zoey, a bit punchy from the potent combination of high emotions and a long day.
Zoey glanced at Lucy from the driver’s seat of her monster SUV and laughed like she was supposed to. “Peggy? Nah.”
Lucy tapped the files Peggy had let her take. Handing them over would have been a rather large sign that these weren’t her souvenirs except for the fact that it was easy to have copies stashed elsewhere. “She cares a lot about the Church. Too much.”
There were grudges, and then there was this.
Obsessions get people killed.
At least from what Lucy could tell, Peggy’s commitment seemed to veer more toward that extreme than the helpful Good Samaritan. And when people were operating in the extremes, their behavior could easily slide into dangerous territory.
“That’s what it’s like here,” Zoey said, her voice light still. Clearly not buying the Peggy-as-a-serial-killer theory. “Even the ones who say they hate it can’t escape talking about it all the time.”
Lucy shifted enough to rest her temple against the headrest so she could watch Zoey’s profile. The road they were on was winding, isolated, and there were few cars to cast any light on Zoey’s expression.
“Why’d you come here? To Knox Hollow,” Lucy asked, curious for the first time. There were too many other questions to focus on to worry about Deputy Zoey Grant. But her mind needed a rest, and they had forty more minutes of a dark drive ahead of them.
“Not exactly an obvious destination, huh?” Zoey threw back without missing a beat.
Lucy just waited, used to this tactic that the Knox Hollow sheriff’s team seemed to deploy as their first line of defense.
After a few beats of uncomfortable silence, Zoey finally broke. “Honestly?”
Lucy smiled a little because usually when people said that, they were about to be anything but. What had been mild curiosity before sharpened, sliced through some of the tired fog she’d let slip in. “Hmm?”
“It was the farthest bus ticket I could afford,” Zoey said. “All the way up from New Mexico.”