Chapter 30
THIRTY
I’min a rush leaving Lucy’s school, knowing Evie is waiting for me at my office. She never answered her phone last night, so now my mind is going wild with the reasons she came to see me. I imagine her propped up on my desk with her stretchy maroon skirt and gray tee, her perfectly pink lips plumped and ready for me. A quickie before work. I can get behind that, considering I couldn’t get her out of my mind as I was falling asleep last night.
A bunch of parents volunteered to bring breakfast to the classrooms as a coordinated act of kindness, and I didn’t want to miss it. I’m so appreciative that Lucy has a great place to spend her days while I’m working and while Francine is off doing Francine things, but breakfast has been over for a solid hour.
It seems like every time I start to leave, someone tries to stop me to talk to me about the upcoming field trip to Deep Creek Campground. The school is organizing a nature day there on Friday where they take the kids to picnic, swim, and check out the wildlife, which is bad enough, but they’re also trying to organize a community firefly walk that same night.
“We’re all going to be chaperoning, Lincoln. We’ll all keep an eye on Lucy,” one of the moms says with encouragement. “She can stay and watch the fireflies with us too. She would love it.”
Lucy hears this and clings to me with adorable puppy-dog eyes. “Please, Daddy. I want to see the fireflies.”
I shake my head, hating that I must disappoint my daughter. “We’ll go another time, Lucy.”
“But I want to go with my friends.” She frowns, eyes brimming with disappointment. “All my friends get to go.”
Lilith comes up beside us and places a hand on Lucy’s back. “You heard your daddy. He’ll take you another time, sweetheart.”
I give Lilith a grateful smile, but it doesn’t help with Lucy’s obvious sadness over the whole ordeal. She pouts even harder, folds her arms, and stomps away from all of us.
Sighing, I thank Lilith and wave to everyone else before jetting out the door.
Given this town’s history with Deep Creek Campground and firefly walks, allowing Lucy to join in the festivities and even get tempted to join in the nighttime activities is a definite no. I can’t help but question the daycare’s judgment with continuing to plan for this field trip. Then again, I’ve come to realize that while the people of Bryson City are not desensitized to the fact that the Firefly Man has murdered here, they seem to make a concerted effort to not let it impact their lives and choices. Just because the Firefly Man never returns to the same place to kill, doesn’t mean he won’t.
I shiver thinking about the day Evie and I went tubing by the campground and Evie completely froze. Just seeing the way she reacted to the memories of finding Carley continues to haunt me. If I could have told her who I was then, I would have. Sooner than that, even. She deserves to know. She deserves to find peace after all this time.
To avoid any further conversation about Lucy’s field trip, I crumple up the permission slip and shove it into my pocket as I make my way out of the building. I don’t even want to talk to Francine about it. If she doesn’t see the permission slip, then she won’t ask.
Francine doesn’t know about Carley or my ties to that fateful night. No one in my life does, and that was always the plan. I was sworn to secrecy—something I didn’t hesitate promising in hopes of finally catching my sister’s killer.
“Lincoln,” Lilith calls after opening the door to the building behind me. “Willow was asking for a playdate with Lucy this weekend. I know you’re against the field trip, and that’s completely fine, but what if I brought Lucy to our house after daycare on Friday? Then maybe she won’t feel so terrible about missing the field trip with her friends. I’ll make the girls my famous spaghetti.” She gestures to me, as if in afterthought. “And you’re welcome to come too.”
Her suggestive eyes are blatant, and I try not to let my annoyance show. “Aren’t you going on the firefly walk after the field trip?”
She shrugs. “We don’t have to.”
Then I frown, figuring I might as well ask the question that’s been on my mind. “Why Deep Creek Campground? You could take the kids anywhere. Why that awful place?”
Lilith crosses her arms, her expression telling me she’s considering my concern. “Deep Creek Campground itself isn’t an awful place, Lincoln. If these kids grow up in fear because of something that happened fourteen years ago, then we are doing them a disservice. Why not teach them how to feel comfortable with nature and defend themselves rather than avoid something that will never happen to them.”
“You don’t know that,” I snap. She flinches like I’ve just slapped her, causing guilt to swarm my chest. “I’m sorry, Lilith.”
She shakes her head, her hand landing on my arm. “Don’t be. I completely understand your concern, but I hate that you think I’m making a reckless choice with these kids. Their safety is my number one concern. Most of the parents will be there, so we’ll have one chaperone for every two kids, at the very least. Besides. The Firefly Man has never killed in the same place before. I would think Deep Creek Campground is the safest place of all.”
I want to chuckle at her logic, but there are too many other emotions swarming my chest. “Alright, well I appreciate you inviting Lucy over after daycare, but we already have plans.” I pinch out a smile. “Sorry to cut this short, I really need to get back to the office.”
I ignore her disappointed stare as I leave. Lilith is the least of my concerns right now.
As soon as I cross the parking lot, I take longer, faster strides. The distance between Lucy’s school and my office is only six blocks, but I’m wishing I had brought my car now that I’m in a hurry. I pick up my pace to a light jog.
Doreen greets me at Calm Waters with a warm smile. “How was your daughter’s event?”
I return her smile. “Oh, you know. All the kids fought over the chocolate-frosted donuts with sprinkles. Same old, same old.”
She chuckles. “I’m sure the kids just loved getting a celebration for no reason.”
“That is correct.” I point to my office. “Evie in there?”
Doreen nods. “Waiting patiently.”
A sigh of relief whooshes through me. “Great. Thank you, Doreen.” Then I stop and stick my hand in my pocket, fishing around for my wallet, then I hand it to her. “Why don’t you head next door for some coffee on me?” I wink. “For being so great.”
Doreen’s eyes widen, and she takes my wallet from my hands. “Thank you, Doctor. That’s so sweet of you. Can I get you anything?”
I pat my belly. “Just ate. Thank you.”
I wait for Doreen to leave and then walk the rest of the way to my office. At least now Evie and I will have complete privacy. Grinning, I open the door, my eyes aimed at my desk where I already fantasized she would be sitting.
And that’s exactly where she is. What I’m not expecting is to find her with tears streaming down her face, my desk covered with my personal notebooks and the hard case filled with documentation of the Firefly Man killings.
Her accusing stare bores into mine. “What is this, Lincoln?” Her eyes narrow into a glare. “Or should I call you Foster?”
Fuck fuck fuck.
I rush forward, eyes wide as fear fills every pore in my body. “Evie, that’s not…” I stop myself before I can lie to her. It’s probably exactly what she thinks it is. So instead, I say the only thing I can think of. “I can explain.”
She chokes out a laugh. “Explain what? That you’ve been lying to me for months?” She stands, her knuckles turning white against the pressure of her fists as they press into my desk. “That you’ve known who I was from the very first day I sat on that fucking couch?”
I stop a few feet away from my desk, now terrified to come any closer. Squeezing my eyes closed, I try to give her some time to realize that it’s just me. That I’m not the threat.
“What is all of this? What does it mean?” She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Is it you? Are you the killer?” She picks up the stack of newspaper clippings and drops them back down on my desk. “Are these your souvenirs?”
A ball of anger bursts in my chest at her accusation. “You think I did that to Carley? To any of them?” It’s my turn to glare. “No, Evie. I’m not the fucking killer. I’m just a broken man who lost his sister in the most horrific way possible—who then got locked away for nothing. I couldn’t do anything for nearly a year. I was helpless. On top of that, I lost everything. My home, my family, my fucking sanity.”
I draw in a deep breath to settle my emotions as much as possible. “By the time I was released, I knew what I had to do. I’ve been trying to track down Carley’s killer ever since.” I hesitate to tell her this next bit even though she’s already figured it out. “That’s why I came back here.”
“But you brought your daughter here.”
That comment is a punch in the gut I know I deserve. I fight the urge to jump to my own defense, knowing that once again, I need to be careful. “Lucy is safe.”
Evie’s jaw drops, her eyes flaring in anger. “How can you possibly know that, Lincoln?”
I hate the way I feel right now. Guilt stirs again, but this time it’s mixed with anger. My eyes close tightly as a hiss of breath streams between my teeth. “I just know, okay?”
“Because she doesn’t match the victim’s profile? I hope that’s not what you’re thinking, because Carley didn’t match the profile, either.”
“Stop,” I say, unable to take any more. “Lucy is safe.” I open my mouth then close it again, debating my next words. “There’s someone watching over her, okay? Someone I trust. I just…” I search her eyes. “I can’t say more than that. I’m sorry.”
I see the pain spread from her eyes to her entire expression. I’m not the man she thought she fell in love with, I know. But I’m still the man that’s loved her for far longer than she can ever imagine.
“Did you think, in some sick, twisted way, that being my therapist could help you?” she asks. “Is that why you wanted me to remember more about that night?”
More guilt riddles my insides. “Initially, yes, my plan was to get to know you as my patient, and to uncover details about that night that no one but you knows. But Evie… I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with you. That was never part of the plan.”
Seconds turn into minutes until the flame of her anger begins to die down. Now, she seems more like a rain shower of curiosity. “Why didn’t you just tell me who you were? I would have understood. I would have…” She sucks in a deep breath. “I told you that I’d been searching for you. I told you I had a crush on you way back then.”
Her chin quivers, and she swipes at another tear. I can’t stop myself from walking around my desk and wrapping my arms around her. When she doesn’t push me away, I bury my face in her neck. “Evie, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t say anything.” This is the part when I might just lose her. “There’s much more to this. But you need to know my feelings for you are very real.”
She trembles in my embrace before placing her palms on my chest and pushing me away. “I don’t know how I can possibly believe you now. I… I don’t even know what to call you anymore. Are you Lincoln? Are you Foster?” She shakes her head.
Another dose of guilt injects my veins. “Lincoln is my name. It always has been. Foster was a nickname.”
Evie’s forehead wrinkles at the center. “What?”
I swallow hard. There’s so much I’ve never told another soul, but here I am spilling my guts to the one person who might just hate me for it. “I told you about how I moved from foster family to foster family. That was the truth. When I came to live with the Pruitts, Carley started calling me ‘Foster,’ as in her foster brother, and it just caught on. When it came time for the adoption, the Pruitts changed my entire name.”
She blinks at me, unbelieving. “Then you changed it back?”
My jaw clenches, and I nod, the pain bringing me right back to the day I found out I would never have a relationship with my adoptive family again.
“I didn’t have a choice. My adoptive parents didn’t want me anymore after Carley died.” I sigh. “They filed for separation of my adoption while I was in jail, and the paperwork was finalized the day I walked out of there, leaving me without a home, without a place to go. Without a family.”
Evie’s gaze exudes a sympathy I don’t deserve. “The Pruitts thought you did it.”
My jaw tenses again. “The entire world thought I did it. Some still think so. Even you questioned it.”
Evie tilts her head then shakes it as another teardrop falls down her cheek. “I know you didn’t. I just didn’t understand why you felt the need to lie to me about all of this. I still don’t. Especially after we…” She blinks hard before pushing out a huge breath. “How could you expect for us to have a relationship when you were hiding your identity the entire time? Would you have ever told me?”
I hesitate, hating the pain that lances through her eyes. “I… I don’t know. I couldn’t risk you knowing any of this, Evie, especially if I was going to help you regain your memories. You need to understand—I did this for Carley.”
Evie’s shaking hands cover her face briefly before she lets them slip away. “But you were writing about me. In there.” She points.
I look down at the familiar notebooks and nod. “I was.”
“Why?” The anger in her voice tells me she’s sick of asking questions.
“I told you about writing my dissertation on the Firefly Man killings. I’ve wanted to elaborate on it for years. It wasn’t until I got here that I felt… inspired.”
Her eyes widen, and I jump to say more.
“I would have never published it without your permission. Hell, I probably would have never published it anyway. As much as I always looked up to Dr. Rohls, I’m not him.”
Tension squeezes my head, and I bring my hands up to massage my skull. “I’ve always used writing to cope with what happened that night. Living in a jail cell for months, not knowing when I’d ever get out, gave me a lot of free time to think. I had to get the feelings out somehow. Between the poem, my journal entries, and my dissertation, it’s my therapy. It’s all I know.”
Evie’s anger seems to have faded. Her cheeks are stained with dried tears, and her eyes have even softened, but I don’t mistake any of that for forgiveness. How can she forgive me when I’m only sorry that she found out about my lie?
“You said you came back to track down the Firefly Man.” She squints. “Why here?”
I cringe, knowing this is where I need to be very careful. “I’ve been pulling together clues over the years. Studying the path of his killings, the details of the… act.” I swallow, knowing I’m already passing my own boundary lines. “I can show you if you want.”
Her eyes search mine before she nods.
I pull out my chair and gesture for her to sit. After she does, I open my laptop and enter the password. “If this gets to be too much, you have to let me know.”
She looks from my screen to me then nods. “I will.”
I reach forward and click around with the mouse to find the electronic whiteboard I’ve been working on for years. The file has multiple pages, revealing maps of the Smoky Mountains that point out all the locations of each killing. It contains details of each crime, each victim, and every single documented person in the nearby vicinity at the time of the murders.
“I’ve been looking for common threads. Patterns. Suspicious activity in and around the area before, during, and after the crimes were committed.”
Evie seems to be scanning the documents I’m clicking through, her eyes shifting around rapidly. “The media has already called out some of the links,” she points out. “Like the force of the attacks, the positioning of the bodies after the murders, and the fact that they’ve all taken place at or near campgrounds in the Appalachians—specifically in and around the Smoky Mountains.” She lifts her eyes to meet mine. “Is there more?”
Nodding, I reach over her to zoom in on one part of the whiteboard. “Did you know my sister was the only female victim? She was also the youngest. But look at this.” I illuminate a section that highlights the demographics of the murders. “Look at the ages of the victims in the order of the killings.”
Evie looks closer for a second before her eyes widen. “They get older.”
“By the same number of years between events.”
She shakes her head before looking back at me. “What do you think that means?”
“I can’t be sure, but I believe that means the killer likes his victims at or around his age. He also likes the element of surprise. He sneaks up on them and bashes them in the skull before they even have a chance to fight. In most cases, the one strike does the trick.”
“But Carley screamed,” Evie points out.
Another fact that’s haunted me. “She must have seen him before the attack. Reports say she must have taken off and started running, then she was attacked from behind after she screamed.”
Evie shudders, and I wish I could wrap my arms around her and tell her everything is going to be okay. I’m going to find the Firefly Man if it’s the last thing I do. Then, just maybe, Evie can forgive me for the lies.
“You still haven’t said what brought you back here, Lincoln. We haven’t had a murder here since Carley.”
I nod, knowing this might be the secret that makes her hate me the most. “I wanted to revisit the original murder, spend time here, with some of the people who were there that night. I thought maybe I could uncover some details that were missed back when they only had their eye on me.”
She frowns. “That’s true. They weren’t even investigating anyone else. They probably missed so much.”
Anger rumbles through me again. “They absolutely did.” Again, I reach over to click through the documents pulled up on my website to get to the map of the Appalachians, zoomed in on the Great Smoky Mountain National Park—this one overlayed with dots and lines that showcase the Firefly Man’s path. It’s not a perfect route, and at first, it just looks like a bunch of curved and straight lines with no sequence whatsoever.
Until I pull up the next semi-transparent layer with a firefly drawn on top that perfectly connects the dots.
A gasp is wrenched from deep in her throat, and she leans closer, placing her finger on the last connected dot. Then she drags that finger right back to where the connections begin—on Carley Pruitt. She frowns, dragging back to the last kill location. “If you’ve been tracking this then why weren’t you able to stop the last murder?”
“Evie…” My heart pounds furiously in my chest, despite the weight crushing it. “Tracking the killer to his next kill spot has proved to be impossible. There are dozens of campgrounds and miles of woods in all these areas. But this map does give me an idea of the direction he’s heading next.”
Her eyes go back to the map where her finger is, then her finger slowly draws a line down to finish the firefly symbol, landing on the original site of the killings. All the color drains from her face. “He’s going to kill here again?”
“It’s possible, but this town is shit at heeding any type of warning. Not even the media can instill the fear necessary to keep people out of the woods.”
She leans back slightly. “Do you think it was the Firefly Man who left that note in my bar?”
“Whoever wrote it certainly wanted you to think so.” There’s no point in lying now. I search her eyes, worried what this next bit of information might do to her. “Which leads me to wonder…”
Evie looks pale as she begins to realize what I’m saying. “W-what?”
“If the killer wrote that note and that firefly map is accurately assuming the killer is returning to the original kill site, maybe the Firefly Man isn’t just returning here…maybe he lives right here in Bryson City.”