There was an echo of Lucy’s conversation with Hicks in there. “You were running from something?”
“Not really.” Zoey’s voice had gone wistful. “Running from nothing, is more like it. I came from a big family. Wasn’t the baby, wasn’t the oldest. Wasn’t the one they were proud of. That pretty much just left . . .”
“A night bus to Idaho?”
Zoey pointed at her, cheeky grin firmly back in place. “Exactly.”
It was a nice, pat story. It might even be true. Or at least some of it. But it felt rehearsed and easy in a way that spilling actual secrets shouldn’t. “And Hicks hired you straight out?”
The amusement that had sparked in the air around her extinguished at the mention of Hicks’s name. “Yeah, he took a chance on me.”
And yet Zoey had been so quick to turn on him. “How well do you know him?”
“Hicks?” Zoey clarified as if she needed to. A tactic to buy time? “Not well. We see each other at the bar sometimes, grab beers.”
“You think he had something to do with Noah’s murder, though?” Lucy asked, losing any attempts at subtlety. Zoey had all but said it in the office anyway.
“Just—” Zoey stopped, cleared her throat. Didn’t continue.
“Or Molly’s disappearance?”
Zoey didn’t answer at first, her eyes locked on the stretch of road illuminated by her high beams. “I can’t make it fit.”
“Hicks’s involvement?”
“Right. Molly, she . . .” Zoey paused, but this time kept going. “Molly thought it had something to do with him.”
“But you can’t make it fit.”
Zoey threw her a look, the wryness back. “I’m a shit cop, remember?”
“You’ve never suspected anything from him, though?” Lucy clarified. “Until Molly Thomas mentioned his name.”
When Zoey didn’t answer, Lucy straightened. “Did you?”
“I hate this,” Zoey muttered, just loud enough to be heard. “Okay, look. I don’t think this means anything. It doesn’t. But . . .”
The exhausted fog had been completely eaten away. Lucy was watching every twitch of Zoey’s hands, each swallow and eye flicker. “But?”
“After Molly contacted me, for the hell of it I kept a closer eye on Hicks’s activity log for the next few weeks.”
The time period Molly Thomas would have gone missing, the time period when Noah Dawson was killed. “And?”
Zoey huffed out a breath. “This doesn’t mean anything.”
“All right,” Lucy agreed easily.
After only one more slight hesitation, Zoey dropped the hammer. “He went out to see Darcy Dawson. Only a few days before Noah Dawson was taken.”
“What?” Lucy asked, but it was barely out before she was reaching for the door handle as they took an unexpected hairpin turn too wide. A horn blared from the other lane, and Lucy’s vision whited out for a terrifying three seconds. Then there was darkness once more.
“Sorry, sorry,” Zoey said, though she didn’t seem shaken. Driving backcountry roads could give you nerves of steel. So could planning and then implementing a distraction. Lucy shook off the suspicion.
“He told you that? Hicks?” Lucy asked, not ashamed of the slight waver that adrenaline had pumped into the question. “That he visited Darcy.”
“No.” Zoey shook her head. “But the code he used for the log was a check-in. We do those a lot out here.”
Lucy absently leaned forward to test the resistance of the seat belt. “Interesting that neither mentioned it.”
Interesting that Zoey had.
Zoey hummed a little in agreement but didn’t say anything further. As they finished up the drive to Knox Hollow, Lucy was left wondering if Hicks had taught Zoey the swerve move or if she’d picked it up from him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
MOLLY THOMAS
Three days earlier
Believing in God had never been a choice for Molly. It simply was, in the same way her heart beat and her lungs drew in air. The world turned, and God existed, and so did his wrath and his glory. Sundays were for Church, as were most of the rest of the days. Living and believing were synonymous.
And then she’d met Alessandra.
Molly had been worried at first that Alessandra and Eliza were destined to be adversaries, like fire and ice. Alessandra was dramatic gestures and loud laughs and lips that were too big for her bone structure and ideas that were too big for small-town life. Eliza crept like the frost, tidy and contained and nearly translucent, but reaching, reaching, reaching ever forward. They shouldn’t have gotten along. But they did.
Sometimes Molly had wished they hadn’t, jealousy a pungent thing that had crept into Molly’s soft spaces more often than not in those early days. But Alessandra wouldn’t allow it. We have to stick together, she’d whisper to them at one of those awful socials the Cooks threw every month. No matter what.
It was addicting, being around Alessandra. She had a way of talking that made Molly believe like she never had before. Not in God, but in life.
That was why it had taken Eliza and Molly months to realize something was wrong. The idea that Alessandra could be anything but brilliant and glowing was almost blasphemy itself.
They’d finally caught on, though, and Alessandra had shrugged off their concerns. Then she’d disappeared without warning.
People knew it wasn’t normal. Molly had started grasping that only when she’d noticed no one would look at the empty pew where the Shaws had sat, avoiding it in a way that could be nothing but deliberate. Molly had started watching more closely after that. The rigid shoulders, the unsettled eyes, the white-knuckle grips on children’s arms. People knew it wasn’t normal.
“It’s one of us, isn’t it?” Eliza had whispered one night at the post a week after Alessandra had disappeared. “Who’s doing it. It’s one of us.”
Oh, if Molly could go back, if she could stop herself, if she could lie and pretend she didn’t know what Eliza was talking about, if she could stop that train before it was put in motion. She would, she would, she would. In an instant. But Molly wasn’t there at the post; she was in a hole in the ground that smelled of her urine and vomit and fear. She couldn’t stop the inevitable.
“Yes.”
CHAPTER FORTY
LUCY THORNE
Saturday, 10:30 p.m.
Lucy tracked down Hicks at the Laundromat.
He was easy to spot through the row of half windows that lined the entire storefront. Tucked into a corner, his boots on the table, he stared at the far wall as the dryers tumbled behind him.
It was 10:30 at night and there wasn’t anyone else in the place.
Lucy pushed through the doors.
Hicks’s eyes tracked her progress as she made her way down the aisle of washers, but he didn’t acknowledge her arrival in any other way.
The light was the cheap, yellow kind, and threw shadows onto his face. He was sans cowboy hat for once, but even without its presence, he was still somehow able to hide.
Lucy grabbed one of the extra chairs at the wobbly table and swung it around so she was straddling it backward, her forearms leaning against the top of it. “I met Peggy.”