Chapter 26
CASSIE
I moved behind the counter at the coffee shop, refilling the stainless canisters with fresh coffee beans, wiping up spills, and stepping in now and then to help Kaylee with the late morning rush.
The shop was packed with tourists getting in one more hike, one more rafting trip, before the warmth of summer gave way to fall. Kaylee and I had been on our feet for hours but I felt happy and energized, still buoyed by the fact that I could be there at all.
By the fact that I could see.
Plus, I’d gotten my cast off a few days before, and having the use of my previously broken arm together with my sight felt like winning the jackpot in the Mega Millions lottery.
I wasn’t a hundred percent. My eyes were still super sensitive to bright light, forcing me to wear sunglasses whenever I was outside — and sometimes even when I was inside — and my arm was still weak from all the time it had spent in a cast.
But I felt closer to normal than I’d felt in weeks, since before my accident.
Being at the shop again felt like a gift and I relished every second.
The bell on the door chimed and I looked up to see a pretty girl about my age walk into the shop. I knew immediately it was Lilah Abbott, both because I’d gone to high school with her and because I’d looked her up on social media before reaching out to see if she’d be willing to have coffee.
She was even prettier than she was in her pictures, with long honey-blonde hair that fell around her shoulders in waves and the kind of delicate bone structure that made me think of the fairies and forest nymphs in my childhood storybooks.
She wore ripped jeans, black boots, and a green hoodie — unzipped — over a white tank top.
I lifted my hand to get her attention, then smiled when she spotted me.
She hesitated, then crossed the coffee shop toward me.
“You made it!” I said when she reached the counter.
She gave me a shy smile and I realized she had an endearing gap between her two front teeth. “Yeah.”
“I’m glad. Can I get you something before we sit?” I asked. “On me, of course!”
“Um… black coffee?”
“You got it.” I pointed at one of the tables near a window at the back of the shop. “Want to take a seat there? I’ll get the coffee and join you in a sec.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
She wasn’t unfriendly, but definitely uncertain, or maybe just shy.
I had only the vaguest of memories of her from high school: a quiet girl who kept her head down, trying to stay under the radar and almost succeeding until the scandal that had pushed her front and center.
I’d been a freshman at the time, sheltered — and protected — by Bram. What had happened to her had horrified me and I’d always been pissed that she felt forced to leave school when the guys who’d fucked her over had stayed.
The fact that she lived with them now — that they were together — kind of blew my mind, but that part was none of my business.
I got her coffee and put an assortment of baked goods on a plate — including one of the double-chocolate chunk cookies from the bakery in Blackwell Hollow — and took it over to her.
“Here you go,” I said. “I’m just going to grab a coffee and I’ll be right back.”
“You good for about a half hour?” I asked Kaylee when I returned to the counter for my latte.
“Totally.” She’d removed the pink from her hair in favor of a shimmery silver that looked amazing on her. “It’s starting to slow down.”
“You’re the best,” I said.
It was true. She’d single-handedly kept things running after my accident, and I’d let her keep the promotion to store manager when I’d returned. For the first time in my adult life, there was someplace else I wanted to be, something else I wanted to be doing.
It was super corny, but I knew now how precious life was — being alive to live it, being able to see it — and I was going to try and do both outside of the coffee shop.
I brought my latte to the table by the window where Lilah sat nibbling on a lemon mini-scone, her gaze on Main Street.
“These are my favorite,” I said, taking one off the plate.
“They’e amazing,” Lilah said. “Do you make them yourself?”
I laughed. “I wish. I get them from a bakery in Blackwell Hollow. Everything they make is to die for.”
“They really are incredible,” she said.
She was so pretty, with a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose like Vigo. On Vigo they looked mischievous and playful but they made Lilah look innocent and I thought again about what happened to her in high school.
I hated that for her.
“Thanks so much for agreeing to meet me,” I said. “I’m sure this is the last thing you want to talk about.”
“I don’t mind actually,” she said. “I still search for news every day, still think about Rain and the other missing girls.”
“I'm ashamed to admit I hadn’t paid much attention to what was happening until pretty recently.”
“It’s so hard,” Lilah said. “Sometimes it’s all we can do just to live our lives.”
“There were flyers on the bulletin board but I didn’t realize until I cleaned it off,” I said. “People are always coming in and putting things up there. I just didn’t notice them before they got covered by all the garage sale notices and church bingo nights.”
“That’s understandable.” She looked round the coffee shop. “It looks like the shop keeps you pretty busy.”
“Do you mind telling me how you got involved?” I asked. “In the… cult thing? Sorry, I don’t know what else to call it.”
“That’s as accurate a word as any, although I think some were in it for the cult and others were in it for something else.
” She took a nervous drink of her coffee.
“As for how I got involved, well, I used to work at this shitty bar, and one night I saw a girl being shoved into a car out back. I think it was Rain, but I didn’t know that until later. ”
I sat up straighter. “You saw her being kidnapped?”
She nodded. “And the people who took her knew I’d seen it and came after me. That’s how I ended up with Rafe, Nolan, and Jude, in case you’re wondering.”
Her cheeks flushed pink.
“I wasn’t wondering,” I said, even thought I totally was because I was only human.
“I know how it looks after what happened in high school,” she said.
“That’s not my business,” I said. “It’s nobody’s business but yours.”
She nodded and took a breath. “Anyway, the guys took me in, and even though I should have let it go, I just couldn’t, so I agreed to go to this… school to try and figure out what had happened to Rain, to the other girls. I mean, there’s a lot more to it than that but that’s the gist.”
“A school?”
She frowned. “That’s what they called it, but it was really a place to groom girls. They’d all been taken from around here and there were all kinds of lessons and rules and weird ceremonies.”
I leaned back in my chair, trying to process what she was saying.
“What kind of lessons and rules?” I would get to the “ceremonies” later.
Because what the actual fuck?
“No offense,” she said, “but you should probably do what I didn’t and let this go. The people who were involved were — are — bad people. Dangerous people.”
I drew in a breath. “I can’t really do that.”
“Why?” she asked, training her green eyes on me. “I mean, I know why I couldn’t let it go, but why can’t you? It seems like you have a nice life, a business, friends.”
She probably knew about Daisy and Sarai, knew we’d been best friends since high school.
“I think the people who are trafficking girls killed my parents.”
She blinked in surprise. “Oh… wow. I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. But they were… I don’t know, I guess you’d call them activists or independent journalists or whatever.”
“And you think your parents were close to something?” she asked. “When they were killed?”
“I don’t know, but I found a bunch of their papers recently and then some…
friends of mine started asking questions.
” I blushed thinking about the Hawks, how ridiculous it was to call them friends when they spent almost every night using me as a test subject for their toys.
“And after that someone ran me off the road on the mountain.”
I moved my hair to show her the scar on my forehead.
“I broke my arm too, and some other stuff.” No point telling her about how I’d lost my sight. “Anyway, I can’t help thinking it’s all related. I thought maybe you’d remember something from your time at the… school that might help me figure out who was behind it all.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “The FBI raided the place and arrested some of the women who were running it, but they won’t say anything about it now. I stopped calling for updates. All they ever told me was that the investigation was ongoing.”
I rolled my eyes. In the years since my parents’ murder, I’d heard the phrase enough to last me two lifetimes.
“You mentioned ceremonies,” I said. “What does that mean?”
She picked at the lemon scone and I felt suddenly sorry I’d contacted her. Sorry I was making her relive what sounded like a harrowing experience.
“Everything at the school was geared toward preparing the girls for sale.”
A knot formed in my stomach and I pushed my scone away, feeling nauseous. “So the school was a front for the trafficking ring.”
She nodded. “The woman running it was kind of a religious nut. She made it sound like the girls would be honoring god or fulfilling some kind of duty by serving the men who would buy them, but really they were just selling them to be used.”
“Was that what the ceremonies were for?” I asked.
She nodded. “It was like… an auction. And there were other auctions too, some of them overseas where men would kind of… trade the girls they’d already bought.”
My stomach turned again. “This is so fucked up.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Did the… buyers come to the ceremony?” I hated calling the men who trafficked girls ‘buyers,’ like they worked for a department store and were procuring inventory for the next season, but I didn’t know what else to call them.
“They appeared on video,” she said. “There were no names. Just faces and bids.”
“Bids?”
“For how much they were willing to pay for each girl,” she said.
“Jesus.” I leaned back in my chair, processing everything she’d said.
“Yeah.” I sensed there was a lot she wasn’t saying, but I hardly knew her. It wasn’t my place to push, especially when she’d already been generous enough to meet me. “There was one thing I noticed. The guards all had the same tattoo.”
“What kind of tattoo?” I asked.
“An ax. Its handle was made out of sticks.”
“Sticks?”
She nodded.
The image teased my memory, like I’d heard of it before, like maybe I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t place it. “That’s… weird.”
“It was all weird,” she said. “I’m sorry I don’t have more to tell you.”
“That’s okay. I just appreciate that you were willing to talk to me.”
She took a drink of her coffee and licked her lips. “You probably won’t listen — I didn’t — but you should think twice about digging into this, especially after what happened to you. You could be putting yourself in more danger.”
“Is that why you stopped?” It wasn’t an accusation. It sounded like Lilah had been through hell and back. She’d done her part to get the authorities involved. No one could expect any more of her.
“Something like that,” she said.
It was obvious she didn’t want to say more, and I didn’t blame her.
Because the people who’d run me off the road — the people who’d had my parents killed — were obviously part of something dangerous and far-reaching.
And Blackwell Falls was somehow right at its epicenter.