CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #2
That was the problem. The pattern exacted its own hunger. Every time she had tried to pretend the echoes of Cox’s theology were fading, the world found a way to prove her wrong. And now, after months of believing that chapter was closed, here came the tremor again. A note in the dark. A resonance.
Every time, a two-hander. A confrontation involving the killer and me.
But she had to know if that was true this time. That’s why, all the way here, from the mad rush to the airport to the awful, twitching, anxious flight and the agonizing wait at the Hertz desk and beyond, her thoughts had been stuck in the same repeating cycle.
This is crazy. Why are you doing this? I’m doing this because I have to know.
Is he still playing with me? Still making it all about me, about my past?
Am I meant to find the body? Or am I the body?
Is that why the crow was looking out at me in the last drawing?
Ok, if I’m in such danger, why the hell am I driving straight towards it?
Why am I giving him the reaction he wants?
Because I’m crazy. Yes, this is crazy, Kate. Why are you doing this?
On and on, round and round, across the sky, along the miles. Without relief. She felt, at times, as if she’d lost her will. She wasn’t a person, a woman, an FBI agent, Kate Valentine. She was an object, inanimate, a tin-tack being drawn towards a magnet. She had no choice. No power to resist.
She accelerated a little—as if trying to demonstrate that she had any scrap of free will.
The highway narrowed as she left Route 41 and slid onto the smaller county road that meandered toward Forest Lake.
Traffic thinned until the world felt almost private: a handful of long-haul trucks rumbling south, a pair of cyclists drafting each other along the shoulder, a battered pickup loaded with mulch and potted plants. Ordinary life, oblivious and benign.
But the closer she drew to Lake Forest, the more the atmosphere changed.
Wealth here wasn’t flashy or eager to be noticed; it was old, settled, confident, the kind that believed itself inevitable.
Houses were set back from the road behind stone walls or hedges clipped into rectangles so strict they looked like topiary soldiers.
Driveways wound like private lanes toward mansions obscured by trees.
Every mailbox seemed both overbuilt and understated—no chrome, no whimsy, just gravitas and good taste.
She hadn’t grown up in one of the mansions.
But neither had she lived in anything like poverty.
Her parents’ house—Mulberries, though she’d never used the name except ironically—had been one of the older properties built back when Lake Forest was little more than an outpost. A clapboard Victorian painted a thoughtful shade of cream, with a porch that wrapped around like an embrace.
Her father had loved that house. Her mother had made it liveable.
Kate had run from it at eighteen. Not in a dramatic way. Just… a time-to-go way. Too big for her old bedroom, the gymnastics rosettes on the corkboard.
Behind her, the phone buzzed again.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered, even as guilt lodged itself under her sternum like a pebble. She shouldn’t ignore Marcus. Or Winters. Or her mother. Especially not her mother.
But she couldn’t be reasonable right now.
Reasonable people didn’t race toward a crime scene that had no official designation as such.
They didn’t blow off Bureau protocol to visit a house connected to their childhood.
They didn’t ignore the cautionary advice of colleagues who had saved their life—more than once.
Reasonable people didn’t chase the echo of a warning whispered by a man locked in a concrete cage two thousand miles away.
But Kate Valentine had long ago accepted that reasonable wasn’t always a luxury she was allowed.
A car roared past her in the opposite lane—chrome grill, tinted windows, the whole machine shimmering like a fish scale under the full afternoon sun. She watched it vanish in her rearview mirror, the image collapsing into the dusty shimmer of the road.
She exhaled. Tried to steady her breathing. Tried to order the snarl of thoughts into some sequence that would reassure her she’d been right in coming back here.
The right decision?
No.
The inevitable one.
Ever since the moment she’d typed her childhood address into Google earlier that day, something had clenched tight inside her chest. Mulberries.
1508 Clancy’s Drive. The house she had both loved and fled.
The house whose name—its dumb, silly, whimsical name—had always felt like a dare.
Like something that didn’t belong to them, or maybe didn’t belong to her.
Like something a toothy British girl would say in an old novel. Summer at Mulberries? How lovely!
When the search results had appeared—bland realtor photos from the last time the house had been listed, grainy images of the front porch, the yard, the bedroom window she used to crack open at night to listen to the crickets—her pulse had stuttered. Something in the air had shifted.
She’d felt watched.
Not by the house itself. Not by memory.
But by something… expectant.
Something that had already chosen her.
Again.
She swallowed.
The fields gave way to denser pockets of trees—maples and elms clustered in cathedral-like formations, the branches forming ribbed arches overhead. The sun slipped in and out between them, strobing her windshield with light.
Up ahead, a green sign announced the turn:
FOREST LAKE – 2 MILES
She rolled her shoulders, but the tension stuck like tar. Her body buzzed with nerves, fatigue, uncertainty—everything layered on top of the heaviness that had been with her ever since she’d talked to Cox through the bulletproof glass.
“Close to your heart”
She hated the accuracy of it. Hated that he was right, even vaguely. Hated that the mere act of reaching for the past felt like playing on his chessboard.
The road bent. She followed it toward the small lake town that had once shaped her in ways she still didn’t fully understand.
She slowed only a little as the speed limit dropped. A sign announced:
WELCOME TO FOREST LAKE
EST. 1881
Someone had added a decal of a trout leaping out of stylized blue waves. The town might as well have been welcoming her back with open arms. Or baring its teeth.
There were legends. A crock of gold stolen from the local Native American tribe. Emphasis on crock, she thought. A curse placed on the land. A fable more influenced by Scooby Doo, she thought, than the truth.
The phone buzzed one more time. Buzz-buzz-buzz. A desperate, insistent plea.
She slapped her palm over it, not hard, but hard enough that the vibration stopped.
“Later,” she said aloud, as if to convince the phone. Or herself.
There would be consequences.
Winters would tear strips off her.
Marcus would read her the riot act.
Her mother would—for once in her life—be angry in a way that wasn't just worry in disguise.
And then there was the risk she hadn’t let herself consider fully:
Her job.
She was already on thin ice, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
The Bureau wasn’t fond of agents who carried emotional entanglements into active investigations, especially ones linked to cases as notorious as Elijah Cox’s.
And now she had ignored protocol. Again.
Ignored direct instructions. Ignored the chain of command. Winters would eat her for breakfast.
All because she had felt—what? A pull? A suspicion? A ghost tapping on her shoulder?
She knew full well she could lose everything for this.
She swallowed hard.
But she was already committed.
“Worry about that later,” she murmured. “Later.”
She reached the last turn before Clancy’s Drive far sooner than she wanted.
To her right, she passed the old Forest Lake Bakery—its red awning still hanging crooked after twenty years, the windows fogged with flour dust and childhood nostalgia.
She used to walk there on Saturdays for cherry danishes with her father.
The memory hit her unexpectedly hard—sharp and tender, like pressing a bruise.
Across the street lay the playground where she’d broken her wrist at nine trying to impress a boy who later moved to Tennessee and never wrote. The swing set was the same, just repainted. The wooden climbing frame sagged a little at one end, softened by seasons.
She drove past the elementary school—now with a solar panel array on the roof, but still with tiny chairs stacked up on the desks—and the corner where the old pharmacy used to be before it turned into a boutique pet spa.
The whole town felt unchanged and overhauled all at once, like someone had tried to modernize without disturbing the ghosts.
Her heart thumped harder with every landmark.
You don’t get to escape the place that made you.
No matter how fast you run.
She turned right onto Clancy’s Drive.
Her stomach flipped.
The street was narrower than she remembered.
Or maybe she was bigger. Or maybe adulthood had shrunk the dimensions of childhood the way dreams shrank in daylight.
Houses perched on deep lots set back from the road, lawns sloping gently toward the curb like green tongues.
Trees arched overhead, their branches heavy with leaves that whispered in the passing wake of her car.
She slowed, scanning.
1508.
There it was.
Mulberries.
The house rose from the earth like something grown rather than built—an old Victorian with a roof sloping at a thoughtful angle, the kind of architecture that made you think of rocking chairs and iced tea and safety.
The porch railing was painted a warm green.
The hydrangeas along the walk were in early bloom, their pale heads bowed like supplicants.
There was a new name-plaque: laser-cut, she thought, onto a rhombus of gray slate. Rather ugly.
MULBERRIES
est. 1951
Her stomach tightened so sharply she had to lift her foot off the accelerator.