Chapter Forty-Five #2
“Yeah,” I tell her before she can finish. I couldn’t hear what he’d done again, seeing it had been enough.
She clears her throat. “I wonder who he was. He was saying something right before the television switched to the breaking news about the girl they’d found.
” Her eyebrows turn in as she tries to recall what he said.
“Something about being doomed and then before he shot himself, he said that all we can do is pray. It was really weird.”
I smooth my hair back from my face, telling her, “He said the same shit to me when I was in the tank.”
Laiken’s spine turns ramrod straight, her eyes flaring open wide. “You were locked up?”
I flick my gaze away from her, drop my chin to my chest. “Yeah, the same night you and Jade—” I swallow my words and shake my head.
“What did you do?” she asks, curiosity weaving stitches through her tone.
I turn toward her, speaking over the top of my arm, “After I got your call, I tried to find you, but the cops got to me first.”
She looks pissed off. “They shouldn’t have thrown you in lockup for that?”
I bite the inside of my cheek, growling, “They can do whatever the fuck they want.”
She doesn’t offer a response.
I tell her, “He said the same shit to me before he ran himself into one of the walls in the holding cell.” I’m shaking my head, trying to clear the picture, then I feel like a pussy because I wasn’t the one that watched him blow his goddamn head off.
“Laik…”
“Mmm?” she counters, looking up at me.
“Are you okay? After, you know, seeing…that?”
She drops her eyes from mine, and I want to reach out and pull her chin back toward me, but I don’t. She keeps it tilted down when she says, “I’ve seen worse.”
My hands start to tremble, and I run them through my hair, closing my eyes, trying not to picture her nightmares, the very ones that stole my sister.
“And now, now he’s back and…” Her voice turns breathless, but I hear the panic, the way she tries to regulate her breath because she was talking about him. “So, no, Chase, I’m not okay. I’m…”
She doesn’t finish, and yet, I hate that I wish she had.
I hate that a small part of me wants her vulnerability.
I reach out and grab the back of her neck, run my thumb across the bone when the door at the deck slides open and pulls both of our attention.
Rusty steps out, a crinkling garbage bag in hand. He looks around at the same time I raise my chin and call out to him.
The old man jumps out of his skin.
“Fuck, son. I think I might have, possibly, just shit myself.”
Laiken chuckles beside me and I can’t help but smile at the sound, how light it sounds in comparison to the words she’d just voiced. I want to play that perfect trill on repeat, and record it for later.
If only.
Rusty counters Laiken’s laughter with his own. “Not really.” He smiles at her, then says with a jerk of his chin, “You kids all good?”
“You know that guy—” I ask, pausing to choose my words carefully when Laiken takes over, filling in the blanks.
“That blew his head off?” she finishes.
The muscles in my throat tense at the way she says it, as though it’s a statement so simple to voice. And perhaps it would be that easy for me too if I didn’t have regular flashbacks of the barrel in my own mouth.
Rusty nods and rests a hand on a chair at the table.
“Do you know who he was?” I ask. “He was in lockup with me and he said some weird shit to both of us about being doomed and needing to pray.”
Rusty drops the bag to his feet and grabs the chair with his other hand, leaning over it with a sigh.
“Yeah, that’s Neil May.” He pauses and shakes his head. “His daughter, Tiffany Anne May was the first victim of Devil’s Peak’s second killer.” He pauses as if there’s more to say. “His wife…the last of the first.”
He doesn’t say Kevin Campbell’s name, he doesn’t have to.
A chill cuts down my spine so deep that I feel the skin pull back from the bone.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, sweet girl.” Rusty is looking at Laiken when he speaks, and she swallows roughly before turning away.
I push my arm against hers. It’s my way of letting her know that I’m here, that I’m not going anywhere.
Rusty continues to speak, though now he’s flicked his eyes on me.
“Losing his wife all those years ago, then his daughter, it fucked up his entire life.” He’s white knuckling the chair.
“I tried to help the guy, but he told me he deserved nothin’ good because of what happened to them, because he couldn’t stop it, because he couldn’t protect them.
” Rusty is shaking his head, his curls breaking loose and echoing the movement.
“Fucking sad. One half of him died with his wife, the other, with his daughter.” He makes a point to drill his eyes into me when he says, “That’s why we have to keep pushing forward, not back.
And why we have to remind ourselves of what the ones that are sitting above would want for us.
Because if we can’t do life for ourselves…
” His blue eyes are glimmering at the surface. “Then we have to do it for them.”
He gives me a deliberate nod, and for some reason unknown to me, I nod back, as though I’m resigned to the path he’d unintentionally just paved for me.