The receptionist gives me a frown as I leave. Protective. Good for her. Landry probably needs a gatekeeper.
I put the box of correspondence on the seat beside me and open up Remy’s digital file. There’s a brief note buried deep that he was a member of the Gospel Witness Church in Knoxville, where he sang in the choir. I pull up the web page, and the church seems pretty standard and bland. I call the number and ask for the pastor.
I get a man with a slow, deep voice who says, “Pastor Wallace, how may I help you today?”
“Pastor, my name is Gwen Proctor. I’m a private investigator, looking to follow up on the disappearance of a young man named Remy Landry. He was a member of your church, and—”
He hangs up on me.
For a second I think my cell phone dropped the call, but no. That was definitely, and deliberately, a hang-up. The pastor doesn’t want to talk to me. Not about Remy.
Well. That’s very, very interesting.
12
SAM
Gwen’s onto something hot, and she needs to follow it. Driving back isn’t an option; neither is abandoning our vehicle, and besides, we’re supposed to be avoiding the Belldenes. So I volunteer to take her to the nearest airport in New Orleans. We see her off, and the kids and I start the long drive back.
I end the drive for the night at a nice upscale hotel and get a small suite; the kids each get their own room and bed, and I get the fold-out couch, which is actually pretty comfortable. Good food, movies on demand. As avoiding the Hillbilly Mafia goes, it’s a pretty great escape.
I make sure everything’s locked down after the kids go off to their own rooms. Connor’s reading a book as thick as my biceps. Lanny’s listening to her headphones, eyes closed. Relaxed and unguarded and happy, they look like the small kids they once were. Vulnerable. Precious. Kids I need to protect.
I’m worried for Lanny. She’s still jumpy, and I don’t want her on the wrong side of the Belldenes. It isn’t a good place to be.
Which is partly why I’ve taken the sofa bed: it puts me between them and the door. Just in case.
I can’t avoid it any longer. I grab my laptop and surf to the Lost Angels tribute site. I helped create this site, back in the early days. Me and Miranda, deciding on layout and colors. She’d drawn the abstract logo, and seeing it hovering there in the corner makes my mouth go dry. I didn’t love her, but we had a complicated, messy history. We knew each other at our worst, our rawest. Never at our best.
I still would have saved her if I could.
My sister’s picture sits last in the row of Melvin Royal’s victims. She’s the one who got him caught; I know she’d take some small satisfaction in that, at least. But justice still feels hollow. And always will.
I’m already dreading it before I click the link that leads to the message boards. It’s secured with passwords, and I hesitate for a long few minutes before I enter my old admin codes and hit the “Enter” key. They still work. Not too surprising—volunteer groups aren’t the best at the little things like that.
I’d halfway hoped they’d cut me off from access.
It’s just a message board, I tell myself. Old-school tech that predates modern social media by a decade. Used by old losers like me. It ought to be harmless.
It isn’t, of course. It’s a boiling sewer of hatred, and I used to swim in it with real delight. I used to believe I was getting justice the only way I could after the courts failed our families. But really, I’d just been trying to fill up a void inside me.
Some people turn to drink and drugs. I got addicted to something just as poisonous. It was only getting away from that seductive hatred, and closer to Gwen, that saved me. I’d been planning to hurt her when I moved to Stillhouse Lake, but watching her with her kids broke that spell. Made her a real person to me, not a paper target. Seeing her protect other people—people she didn’t even know—made me realize how bent my compass had become.
Gwen saved my soul. Not that Lost Angels will ever accept that.
I start reading posts. The new one pinned at the top is in honor of Miranda Tidewell. It starts as a eulogy, but then it turns, as I expect, to anger. Every topic on this board eventually shifts to rage. Their civility is as fragile as flash paper.
There’s plenty of violence here aimed toward Gwen, of course. There’s a whole thread that links together even more murdered women on the thinnest of evidence and assigns the role of serial killer to Gwen, not her ex-husband. Because just being an innocent wife of a monster, a victim in and of herself, isn’t an option.
You started it, asshole. You hated her hard enough to come across the country to torment her.
I acknowledge that, though it stings, and keep moving. And sure enough, I find a whole new thread about me. It’s massive, more than a hundred pages. It started after it became clear I wasn’t betraying Gwen as I’d intended, and though it begins with reasonable posts about how maybe I was playing out a long game, that quickly disappears. My motives, according to the thread, range from being brainwashed to never having been really part of the Lost Angels at all; some even think I was a plant that Gwen, the master manipulator, had placed to watch them from the start. It’s a fantastically unlikely theory, but they leap right on it and ride it for pages. They gather every bit of gossip they can find in the media and online, piling supposition upon wild leap upon outright lie.
Up until Melvin’s death, there’s real speculation that I’m one of his secret admirers, which makes me have to step away from the laptop so I don’t punch the screen. I drink a little bottle of bourbon from the minibar, and when I feel calmer, I go back and keep reading.
Gwen’s right; I need to pay attention to all this. I can’t defend myself if I don’t know what’s coming.
After the media circus that erupted due to Gwen’s appearance on the Howie Hamlin Show, and the subsequent trouble we found in Wolfhunter, the tone of the posts changes again.
They really, really hate me now. I’m a traitor to the memory of all the victims, and to the families. But most of all, I was there when Miranda was killed. And just like they assume about Gwen, my proximity to evil is enough to convict me in their message board courtroom. If I was there, I was responsible. The fact that I was shackled at the time, and had no possibility of saving her . . . that doesn’t matter.
They’re going to run with the idea that I shot her myself, and that the FBI—specifically, my friend Mike Lustig—covered it up. That’s going to be their last podcast episode, of course, not their first. I’m sure every enemy I’ve ever made, from grade school on up, will be given a microphone to set the stage for my culpability before they get down to real facts. They’ll build their case carefully, if completely wrong.
Gwen’s right that I need to get myself locked down for this. Just reading these posts has made me feel achingly tense and devastatingly uncertain. Even when you know better, it’s hard to see so many people agreeing about your guilt. It feels like a losing battle from the start.
I click away and skim through the other posts. Lost Angels doesn’t spend all their time targeting Gwen and me, of course; there are remembrance posts for lost loved ones. Casual conversations. Discussions about the worrying popularity of true crime books, movies, shows, and podcasts. Sanity, in the midst of pathological hatred.