29. Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
Henry
J uliet stayed uncharacteristically quiet during the ride back to my house, but I resisted the urge to ask how she was doing, recognizing how idiotic it would sound. Her pain was palpable, coursing through my veins as surely as my own blood. As soon as we walked inside, she pulled the sketchbook from Libby out of its bag near the door and settled down at the kitchen table with her phone displaying the drawing from the station.
I kissed the top of her head and moved to the living room sofa to give her some space.
Muffled curses punctuated the silence, along with the occasional sound of paper crumpling. I fielded texts from not only Libby and Mark, but from my brother as well, who’d apparently been roped in and updated on the entire situation.
I wasn’t sure whether my grandfather or my ex was to blame for that development, but I appreciated Aaron’s concern, nonetheless. The more people looking out for Juliet, the better.
The inn was safe in the immensely capable hands of Mrs. Gregson, Sally, and Gramps, who were all shaken up after the fire but assured me they’d feel better if I stuck close to Juliet instead of coming in to help. They would hold down the fort as long as necessary, knowing one of their own was grieving.
Juliet was family—it hadn’t taken long for them to recognize that, certainly less time than it had taken me. I had only my own stubborn pride to blame for that. The irony of my appreciation for her acceptance into the Lakeside Inn family didn’t escape me, given that it was a source of annoyance for me before Juliet’s arrival.
Now, I was simply grateful.
It was only a matter of time before my parents started blowing up my phone, too, now that my brother knew what was going on. I wondered if Juliet had updated her friend from Minnesota about any of this. If telling Sarah about her fall could have resulted in her friend rushing to her side, Juliet was probably even more hesitant to mention the fire.
Or the serial killer who could also be her father.
As far as I was concerned, she was much too used to fending for herself. Hopefully, with time, she’d come to accept the support of the people who loved her.
The doorbell rang and the scratch of Juliet’s pencil abruptly halted. I glanced out through the glass pane at the top of the door, grinning despite the hell of the past eighteen hours, and swung the door open.
“Thought you might need a hearty meal,” Sally said, shoving a wicker picnic basket into my hands, followed by a bottle of wine.
I stared down at them, so moved I had to take a moment to just breathe, which drew the scent of Sally’s signature roast chicken into my lungs. After everything, all the ways I’d fucked up from the moment Juliet got to town, family—this family, our family—kept showing up for both of us.
“Thank you,” I finally managed, just as Juliet slipped around me to greet the chef with a hug.
“Can’t be living off pizza like you usually do.” Sally’s voice was gruffer than usual and a light sheen of tears glazed her eyes. “There’s some things in there from Mrs. Gregson. Trinkets and photos Nan brought over from the cottage to keep in her office back when she was spending more time at the inn.”
Juliet’s breathing audibly hitched, but she managed a smile. “Thank you.”
“You need anything else, you just call. Got it?”
“Got it,” I confirmed, clasping her hand tightly when Juliet stepped back.
For a long, quiet moment, we stayed there by the door, watching as Sally got into her midnight blue Subaru and drove back toward the inn. Juliet took the wine from my hand and tucked herself under my arm.
“Doing okay?” I asked against the top of her head.
“As okay as can be expected, I guess. That smells heavenly, but I’d like to keep working on the sketch for a bit. I think I’m getting closer.”
“Of course. I’ll unpack everything and keep it warm.”
Mark and Libby arrived just after five with Blue in tow. The dog raced past them into the house, ignoring me completely to dance circles around Juliet at the table.
“Damn, dude, you’ve been replaced,” Mark said with a mournful shake of his head.
“I’ll try to accept my fate,” I joked.
Blue wagged her tail at me as I entered the kitchen but didn’t move from Juliet’s side. Almost unconsciously, Juliet set her hand on Blue’s head, much as she had that day in the forest. I leveled a mock scowl in the dog’s direction.
“Yeah, yeah, just remember who feeds you, silly mutt.”
Juliet rubbed at her bleary eyes when I came to look down at her efforts. Only three sketches seemed to have made the cut as possibilities. They were arranged in an arc on the table before her.
“Portraits are not really my strength,” she said wearily. With one finger, she tapped the sketch to her right. “This one looks a little familiar, the same way Nan’s did when I first saw it, but I don’t know if these are anywhere close to what Tom Heller would actually look like now.”
Libby peered over Juliet’s shoulder. She cocked her head thoughtfully as she studied the sketches. Mark and I looked at each other over their heads—if anyone would recognize the man from around town, it was likely to be Libby. Her clinic treated most of Spruce Hill’s residents at one time or another.
“Can you give that one some facial hair?” Libby suggested, pointing to the sketch Juliet had indicated.
With the three of us clustered around her and Blue’s head resting on her knee, Juliet added first a mustache, then a goatee, and finally a full beard.
“Oh, no,” Juliet whispered, horror dawning on her face before she even finished shading. “I recognize him now. The beard changes his appearance dramatically. No wonder he only looked vaguely familiar before.”
“I recognize him, too,” Libby said. “I think he lives just outside of town. He came in for stitches back when I first opened the clinic. I’ve only seen him in town once or twice since.”
Juliet’s gaze met mine over her shoulder. “I ran into him at the grocery store when I first got here. He asked if he knew me from somewhere. Totally played up the harmless, small town guy routine, but he creeped me out. If he knew both my mother and Nan, there’s no way he didn’t recognize me right then and there. He’s known I was here since the day after I arrived.”
When she shuddered, I laid my hands on her shoulders and squeezed, fighting the urge to pull her into my arms—or to swoop her up and take her far away. I forced myself to think logically, lifting my hands away to take a picture of the sketch.
“I’m sending this to Roberts,” I said.
Juliet dropped her attention back to the drawing, looking so damned fragile that it broke my heart. Over her head, I gave our friends a look and Libby immediately dropped into the chair next to her.
She started speaking to Juliet in the soft, quiet way she used with her younger patients, clearly trying to take her mind off the events of the past twenty-four hours. Mark gathered up the discarded papers on the table and set them in a tidy pile on the kitchen counter to make room for dinner.
Once the image had been passed along to Chief Roberts, I handed out plates of Sally’s chicken and side dishes, which garnered unenthusiastic nibbling at best. I sat on the other side of Juliet and draped my arm over the back of her chair while we ate, occasionally stroking over her spine with my fingertips.
That physical contact between us, however slight, had a calming effect on us both.
“Do you think he’s been here this whole time? All these years, I mean, since my mother left town?” she asked quietly.
My hand slid up the back of her neck and into her hair before I puffed out my cheeks on a long exhale.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him around, but Anne Zoratti said he left the area when your mother did. Maybe he went looking for her, tried to follow her trail. Maybe he was hiding out, waiting for the uproar to die back down after Melissa’s departure, which was a pretty big deal in this town. If he came back later on with that beard, older, a new name, I can see how he might have flown under the radar.”
“Or maybe he came back after Nan died. Waiting for my mother to show up again.” Her eyes lifted to mine. “And when he found out she wasn’t coming, waiting for me.”
When Chief Roberts arrived an hour later, his grim expression matched our somber moods. Without preamble, he said, “We got a hit on the sketch. Tom Heller is wanted for questioning about a string of missing girls outside of Rochester starting in 1987. The county sheriff’s department is stepping in to help. If he was responsible for those murders here back in the eighties and nineties, I want that son of a bitch nailed to the wall as soon as possible.”
“He must be using an alias,” Libby said quietly. “I think he signed in at the clinic as Ted something or other. I’ll check my records for the last name.”
“That’d be much appreciated, Doc,” Roberts replied.
He introduced the four of us to the officers who would be keeping an eye on the house, shook our hands, and left to go meet with the sheriff.
Though she looked pale enough that I worried she might collapse, Juliet seemed calmer and more focused after that conversation. It was like uncovering the identity of the boogeyman gave her something concrete to focus her energy toward, especially as the fury at this man for causing the rift between her mother and Nan—the chasm between them and Nan—began to fuel her.
The change came over her, bringing with it a new sharpness in her eyes, a stubborn set to her jaw. A mixture of relief and curiosity filled me, wondering what was going through her beautiful head.
Libby and Mark decided to head home as well, taking Blue with them. Each of them embraced both me and Juliet.
“You hang in there,” Libby whispered in Juliet’s ear as they hugged one another tightly. “They’ll catch the bastard, I’m sure of it. And I’ll be ready with champagne to celebrate.”
A ghost of a smile lingered on Juliet’s lips once I locked the door behind them and turned to her. When I opened my arms, she pressed her face to my chest and inhaled deeply, absorbing the calming scent of the soap she loved so much.
“What do we do now?” she asked quietly.
“Whatever you want, sweetheart,” I murmured, brushing my lips across her forehead. “It’s a waiting game now, I think.”
She nodded and wrapped her arms around my waist, whispering, “I want to get my mind off Heller or whatever the hell his name is. I don’t want to think about the past or my mother or the cottage.”
“I have just the thing.”
I guided her to the couch, positioned her so she was spooned in front of me as we stretched along its length, and found a romantic comedy for us to watch. It took longer than I would have liked, but eventually Juliet’s body relaxed and she snuggled deeper in my arms.
By the time the movie ended, she was half-asleep, dozing with her head on my arm. It didn’t take much coaxing to get her up to bed, where she burrowed into a cocoon of blankets around us and fell asleep curled against my body.
Just before dawn, I awoke to Juliet weeping into the pillow, her entire body wracked with sobs.
“Hey, hey,” I said, drawing her close.
I opened my mouth to promise her everything would be okay, but the words caught in my throat. She deserved honesty. In the end, I simply held her and let her cry. Once her tears were finally spent, she sighed against my shoulder.
“I feel so selfish,” she whispered. “I want him to pay for whatever he did to those missing girls, but I just can’t stop thinking about what he took from my mother. Everything else feels so abstract to me still, everything except him splitting my family apart.”
“That’s not selfish, Red. You’ve lost so much. If he committed those crimes, the police will take care of it. We don’t know who those victims were—hell, most of them were killed before you were even born. It’s not selfish to grieve for what he took from your mother and Nan, for what he’s taken from you.”
My own chest twisted with pain, whether it was my place to grieve alongside her or not. I stroked her hair, wrapping a curl around my finger. We fell silent after that, tangled up in each other’s arms, offering and accepting some small degree of comfort.
When she finally drifted back to sleep, I let myself doze, holding her tight against my chest. Several hours later, my eyelids peeled reluctantly open to late morning sunlight streaming through the open curtains. My arm was still wrapped around her soft, sleepy form, and I pressed a kiss to her forehead.
It felt like a lifetime had passed over the last forty-eight hours. Juliet stirred, grumbling sleepily before she clasped a hand over her eyes.
“What time is it?” She peeked out between her fingers, blinking at me dazedly. “What year is it?”
I laughed. “I was thinking the same thing. Then I figured, who cares? I could stay here forever with you.”
In painful contrast to the words, my phone started buzzing on the bedside table and I groaned as I reached for it to read the series of texts.
Juliet’s face drained of color. “What now?”
“No need to panic. Everyone is okay. The computer crashed over at the inn,” I said, typing out a quick response and tossing the phone down so I could collapse back onto the bed.
“Stupid real world,” Juliet muttered. “I was hoping you’d be up for providing some morning distraction.”
With her hand still over her eyes, I couldn’t see her full expression, but there was no hiding the tinge of pink creeping along her cheeks. That meant she wanted distraction, not another made-for-TV movie.
“They can wait another half hour,” I said, then I grinned, stretched out along her body, and laid a fiery path of kisses across her collarbone.
A husky laugh escaped her lips, then a low moan as my mouth reached its destination.
“Yes, they can,” she gasped, welcoming one last glorious interlude before the real world beckoned.