Chapter 36
thirty-six
“The fucker hasn’t said a word.”
Greta tightened her hands around the coffee mug and glanced up at the second-floor window where the curtains were still drawn.
Fourteen days since Alice had come home, and her sister was still sleeping for large chunks of the day.
It was good for her, and for Atlas, who cuddled beside her in the bed and also needed the healing sleep.
But Greta still worried.
The morning air carried the scent of pine and distant wood smoke. A horse whickered from the barn where Bear and Logan had been since five, mucking stalls. The porch railing was cold under her elbows, the weathered wood smooth from years of hands resting on it.
She looked back at Naomi. “Not a thing?”
“He’s playing games. He wants attention.” She blew out a breath that ruffled her black hair. “The state troopers are certain there are others besides Alice and the bones we found.”
“Any luck identifying them?”
“None. They managed to extract DNA, but all it told us is she was a white female. She wasn’t in any databases.”
Greta’s stomach turned. Another woman. Another family somewhere who’d buried an empty casket or kept a candle burning or stood at a window every night waiting for a headlight that never came. She knew that grief.
“How old are they?” she asked.
“Hard to tell, but best guess is she died right before or right after he grabbed Alice.”
Greta looked down at her coffee. The surface had gone still. She hadn’t taken a sip in five minutes. “So he’s been at this for a long time.”
“Longer than anyone wants to think about.” Naomi leaned against the porch rail beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched.
“They found things at the cabin. Older personal items that couldn’t belong to Alice.
The property records show he bought that cabin in 1994. He was twenty-four.”
And Alice disappeared in 2011.
He bought the cabin seventeen years before that. Greta did the math without wanting to. Seventeen years of a cabin in the woods with a basement and a ring bolted into concrete.
“Jesus.” She swallowed down a surge of bile and faced her best friend. “What happens if he doesn’t talk?”
“He’ll go to trial, and he’ll probably get life. He won’t ever go free, but those other families out there will never know what happened to their daughters or sisters.”
Greta stared at her for a beat. After Alice disappeared, Naomi had been the closest thing she’d had to a sister. She knew when Naomi was holding back.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Naomi shook her head. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
“Nomi, tell me.”
She swore under her breath. “Greta—”
“Tell. Me.”
“Fuck.” This time, the curse wasn’t under her breath. “He said he’d talk, but only to you.”
Everything in Greta went cold, and then flashed hot.
“You don’t have to,” Naomi added quickly. “I’m not asking you to. I’d never ask you to. Nobody expects this of you.”
“I’ll do it.”
The words came out before she’d fully processed them. Her coffee mug was still cold in her hands, the liquid untouched, but her mind was already moving ahead—past the porch, past the ranch, into a room with Cody Simms on the other side of a table.
“Greta.” Naomi’s voice went sharp. “No. That’s not—”
“I’m not asking for permission.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying. He’s playing you. He wants to hurt you.”
“I know exactly what he wants.” She set her mug down on the railing too hard, and the coffee sloshed over the edge. “He wants to look at me. He wants to see my face when he tells me things that will keep me up at night. He wants to feel powerful one more time.”
“Then why give him that?”
“Because I’m not the only one who lost someone. Those other women. Their families. They deserve answers, too. I got Alice back, but they won’t get their sisters back. The least I can do is get them answers.”
Naomi’s jaw worked. Her dark eyes searched Greta’s face, looking for the crack, the place where she might talk her out of this. “What about Alice?”
“Don’t use her as a shield.”
“I’m not. I’m asking you to think about what this will do to her. She just got you back, too.”
Dammit, she hadn’t considered that.
Greta looked up at the second-floor window again, at the drawn curtains, at the room where her sister was sleeping off the years of exhaustion her body couldn’t seem to shake.
Alice had barely spoken since coming home—a handful of words, whispered and hoarse.
The doctors said it would come back. The trauma specialists said she needed time.
Time was what Greta had promised her.
“I won’t tell her,” Greta said finally. “She won’t know I went.”
“What about Bear?”
“I’ll tell him. He won’t like it, but he won’t stop me.”
Naomi’s shoulders dropped. She looked out across the ranch yard, at the barn where Bear and Logan were working, at the mountains rising behind the property. The sun was climbing higher now, burning off the morning mist.
“Tell me you’re sure,” she said. “Because once I make this call, it’s done.”
Greta thought about the families. The mothers who still kept bedrooms ready.
The fathers who still looked for faces in crowds.
The sisters who still searched for answers in every news report about unidentified remains.
She’d been one of them for fifteen years.
She knew how horrible it was not knowing.
“I’m sure.”
Naomi exhaled in a rush. “Okay. I’ll set it up for tomorrow. I’ll pick you up.”
“No.” Greta shook her head. “Not you. Bear will drive me. I love you, but he’s the only person I want waiting for me in that parking lot.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely not.”
Bear stood at the kitchen counter with both hands flat on the surface, his shoulders rigid, his jaw working like he was chewing glass.
She’d expected this. Bear had been steady through everything—Alice’s rescue, the police interviews, the reporters that had shown up on Maple Street before Boone ran them off. He’d kept Logan away from the cameras. He’d sat with Greta at three in the morning when the nightmares woke her.
Of course he hated the idea of her going to see Cody. She’d known that before she even opened her mouth.
“Bear—”
“No.” He didn’t look at her. His gaze was fixed on the counter, on his own hands, on anything that wasn’t her face. “I’m not having this conversation.”
“Then don’t have it.” She crossed the kitchen and stood in front of him, close enough that she had to crane her neck to meet his eyes. “I’m telling you, not asking you.”
His jaw tightened. She watched the muscle work, watched the tension spread from his jaw down his neck, into his shoulders.
“Greta.” His voice came out rough and he squeezed his eyes shut. “He hurt your sister. He hurt you. He put his hands on you and locked you in that basement—”
“And I knocked him the fuck out with his own fucking chain.” She touched his cheek and waited until he opened his eyes again. “I want to get the names.”
Bear’s hands curled into fists on the counter. The knuckles went white, then red, and she watched him fight with himself, watched him try to find the control he was always so careful about maintaining.
“At least let me come in with you.”
“You can’t. Naomi already checked. He said just me.”
His head dropped forward, and the breath left him in one long rush. When he looked up again, his eyes were wet.
“Greta.” Just her name. Just the way he said it, low and rough, and she felt it in her chest like a hand closing around her heart.
She stepped closer. Close enough to feel the heat coming off him, close enough that she had to tilt her head all the way back to keep his face in view. She put both hands on his chest, flat against the flannel, and felt his heartbeat under her palms, fast and hard.
“I need you to drive me,” she said. “I need you to be in that parking lot. I need to know that when I walk out, you’ll be right there to hold me.”
His hand came up and covered both of hers, holding them against his chest. His palm was rough and warm, and his fingers curled around hers like he was trying to keep her from going anywhere.
“I’ll be there,” he said. “But I’m not happy about it.”
The interview room was small and harshly lit by a single fluorescent bar overhead, the light flickering slightly at the edges. The metal table was bolted to the floor, with two chairs—one on either side—and a mirrored window. Greta knew state investigators were behind it, watching everything.
But it still didn’t stop the full-body chill that raced through her when she sat down across from Cody Simms.
He looked smaller than she remembered. His jail uniform hung loose on his frame, the orange faded at the seams. His arm was in a sling under the jumpsuit—King’s work, still healing—and the cuffs on his other wrist ran a short chain to the metal ring set into the table.
“You came,” he said softly, almost as if he were talking to himself. “I knew you would.”
“I’ve come for names.” Her voice came out steady, which was its own small victory. “Who did you bury in Alice’s clothes?”
He smiled. It wasn’t the smile he’d worn at town meetings, at the hardware store, at vigils where he’d stood beside her with his hand on her shoulder.
This was… ugly.
This was the monster hiding under the mask of civility.
“You look so much like Alice,” he said in a reverent tone. “How is she? I miss her.”
Greta’s stomach churned. She wanted to lunge across the table, wanted to wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze until his face went purple and his eyes bulged, and he understood what it felt like to be helpless.
Instead, she folded her hands on the table and kept her expression neutral.
“You don’t get to ask about her. You don’t get to know anything about her ever again.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping to just above a whisper. “You lost that privilege when you chained her to a wall for fifteen years.”
That ugly thing inside him flashed across his face again. “I saved her.”
“You tortured her.”
“I protected her.” His voice rose, and a guard shifted position near the door. “She was going to run away with Daniel Goodwin. He would have destroyed her. He would have—”
“That was her mistake to make.” Greta’s fingernails dug into her palms. She could feel the heat rising in her chest, the anger that had been simmering since she woke up in that basement. But she needed to stay calm. Needed to get what she came for.
She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Tell me about the bones we found.”
Cody’s expression smoothed into something almost pleasant. “Tasha,” he said. “Her name was Tasha McLaughlin.”
Greta’s breath caught. A name. A real name, with a family somewhere, with people who had been searching. “Who was she?”
“She was a mistake.” His voice grew distant, as if he were remembering something from a long time ago. “I thought she looked like Alice. From a distance, in the right light, her hair was the same color. But up close...” He shook his head. “She wasn’t Alice. She was just... wrong.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“You killed her because she wasn’t my sister?”
“No.” Cody looked almost offended. “I never meant to hurt her. She was supposed to stay at the cabin with me. But she fought. She kept trying to escape. And then she got sick.”
“Sick?”
“Fever. I couldn’t get it down. I tried everything—medicine, cold compresses, even praying over her.” His voice cracked on the last word. “But she died. And I had to put her somewhere.”
“So you buried her in Alice’s clothes.”
“I needed people to think Alice was dead.” He leaned forward, the chain pulling taut. “I needed you to stop looking.”
Greta’s vision went white at the edges. She had to press her hands flat against the table to keep from reaching across it.
STOP LOOKING.
“You trashed my office, didn’t you? It wasn’t Daniel.”
“The office was Daniel,” Cody said with a flicker of annoyance that she’d interrupted his story. “He thought if he scared you enough, you’d go running into his arms. He didn’t count on your running to Bear McKenna instead.”
“He didn’t paint ‘stop looking’ on my wall.”
“He did. I just... helped him along. Gave him the idea.”
Greta’s throat closed. She thought about all the nights she’d lain awake in her house across from Bear’s, listening for sounds, checking the locks. All the times she’d blamed Daniel for the vandalism, for the notes, for the feeling of being watched.
All of it had been Cody. Pulling strings from the hardware store like a puppeteer, using Daniel’s obsession the same way he’d used Tasha for her hair color—as a tool, a means to an end.
“How many other women were there?” she asked. “Before Alice and Tasha?”
Cody looked at her for a long time. His gaze moved across her face like he was trying to memorize every pore, every line.
“Seven,” he said at last. “There were seven.”