She glanced at Eliza. “Do you think it will make a difference?”
Eliza stared straight ahead, and the candlelight poured over her pale skin. She was but a thought now, a wisp, a belief more than a person.
“No,” Eliza finally said, then turned, met Lucy’s eyes. “But I had to try, didn’t I?”
And maybe that’s all any of them could do. Lucy shifted closer, not quite touching but not quite as separated.
Lucy nodded.
Together they watched the sun crawl into the room, then slide toward the cross hanging behind the altar, the light catching and then splintering on the fake gold.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
MOLLY THOMAS
The day of the funeral
Molly sat with her back to the post, her face tipped up. She wondered how long it would take before she stopped appreciating the wide-open sky, the light, the air catching at her hair.
Her fingers brushed over the initials she’d carved there almost a year ago now.
AS.
Some things were scary. Some things were worth it.
That’s what she had once believed, at least. Did she still, now? After the darkness, the bunker, the gun in her hand?
There was no answering weight at her back, no quiet, ghostlike girl to tell Molly everything was going to be okay.
Because not everything was. And perhaps it never would be okay again.
There was nothing at her back because the Cooks’ place was still a crime scene. Molly had been following along with the developments as best she could even as her parents tried to shield her from the details. It was a small town, though. Information spread like wildfire, and there was only so much they could do to protect her from it.
Lucy Thorne and the FBI agents had scoured the Cooks’ place and had eventually found Rachel’s jewelry box of souvenirs from her kills. They’d also found an old laptop hidden in a secret compartment at the back of Josiah’s workbench. They couldn’t be sure it was his, but Rachel’s fingerprints weren’t on it.
On the laptop they’d found a single document that detailed Josiah’s growing fears that something was wrong. Josiah had said it had started with Brody, Eliza’s father. He’d refused to marry Cora when she’d been pregnant, and then he’d disappeared. Not in the way people tended to do in ranching towns, but in the way that his stuff was still in his apartment when Josiah went looking for him.
Josiah had boxed everything up, moved it to their bunker, and he and Rachel had never talked about it again.
The entries were few and they were far apart. Josiah concluded most of them with reassurances to himself. You’re just being paranoid, old man. But yet he kept writing them, documenting each soul that went missing under his watch.
He never once mentioned Rachel was a suspect. He’d hidden the laptop in a place she would have probably been unlikely to find it, though.
If he’d lived, would there have been enough to charge him? Molly had asked Lucy Thorne that when Lucy’d come to visit Molly in the hospital. Lucy had watched Molly with eyes that were too sad and weary in Molly’s opinion.
“Don’t play that game,” Lucy had said softly.
The what if game. Molly knew it was poisonous. Knew oh so well now.
What if she and Eliza had simply told Hicks?
What if Eliza had told Molly that Zoey was in on this, too?
What if Molly and Eliza had snuck away in the middle of the night, leaving this behind? The scenario would have played out like those fake notes Rachel had left to make it seem like the victims had run away.
What if, what if, what if . . .
Don’t play that game.
She gripped the handle of the small knife she’d tucked into her pocket on the way out of her house. Most everything was in boxes now. Almost the minute she’d been discharged from the hospital, her parents had told her they were all moving. Leaving Knox Hollow.
Molly wondered how many other families in the Church would follow suit. Would there be a mass exodus following the deaths of the Cooks, or would someone step in, fill the place, reassure the congregation that the evil in their midst had been an aberration? Continue on as if nothing had occurred.
That might happen. But they wouldn’t be able to completely pretend. Molly had already heard buzz about a special session in the legislature, a shield laws bill that might actually get through.
Some things were scary. Some things were worth it.
Molly dug the tip of the knife into the soft wood of the post until initials formed.
EC.
There would be a headstone for her somewhere else, put in the ground by the remaining Cook boys. But this was the one that was important. The one made by someone who knew the reasons Eliza had lived the life that she’d lived.
Molly ran her fingers over the initials as she sat back down, wondering if she’d always miss the familiar weight at her back. She couldn’t ever justify what Eliza had done, the fact that she’d taken a life no matter that Noah had been dying anyway. But who was Molly to judge? She’d fired that gun, knowing exactly what she’d been doing as well.
She still had twenty minutes before she had to head home, though she could see her parents hovering in the distance, watching her carefully but letting her have this. She had a guess they would be doing that for quite some time.
She found she didn’t mind the idea as much as she had before the darkness, the bunker, the gun in her hand.
For now, Molly tipped her face back to the sky.
Then she exhaled. Concentrated on the sweep of lashes against her own cheeks.
Closed. Open. Closed.
It hadn’t been a coffin.
When she finally pushed to her feet, her cheeks were warm from the sun.
She smiled for the first time in as long as she could remember. Some things were worth it.