Chapter I
I.
ERGOT
Yates
Sometime later . . .
August 26th, 7:59 am
PALO SANTO.
That’s what burned in the half-moon incense holder we found in the evidence bag in Sam Porter’s car, according to the lab report. It’s what lingers in the air in the living room of Autumn Bower’s cottage, as though it’s seeped into the plaster walls.
Perhaps I should be grateful to Sam and Vinny. They discovered what I had been unable to see: that Harper Starling was more than just an echo of the daughter I took from Arthur. She was someone else’s ghost entirely, and the woman who has been living in her shroud is much more than she seems.
A burst of thunder rattles the windows as I stop in front of the photograph of Autumn as a young girl with her parents.
I pick it up off the shelf with gloved hands.
There’s no dust on the edges. No smudge on the glass.
She was the picture of innocence. A pristine blank canvas on which all the horrors and losses of our world have since been painted.
I’ve consumed every video of Autumn Bower. Dissected every news article. I’ve cut through every mask she’s worn to peer beneath her shell.
The fact that her past eluded me is not only a timely reminder of my own fallibility, but further proof that Autumn Bower deserves her place in Cape Carnage.
She is ripe for metamorphosis. But that’s the thing about a chrysalis.
It can get a little . . . stuck. Sometimes, you must surgically peel the layers away and force the new creature into the light.
I set the photo down, and pivot to examine the next one on the shelf.
It’s of Autumn in the disguise she’s worn since the day she showed up in Cape Carnage.
Dark hair. Black overalls. A measured smile.
She stands next to Arthur Lancaster, the gardening trophy held aloft between them.
Lancaster Manor has a gravitational pull.
I can feel its molten core as I look into Arthur’s hazy eyes, frozen in time.
Not my daughter, his desolate cry rises from memory.
I can still see him clearly, as though I’m peering through the cottage window, just like I did that day nearly thirty years ago.
He was as formidable then as he is now—but all those long years ago, he was nearly broken on the floor, twisted by grief.
He rocked with his daughter’s lifeless head cradled in his arms, her naked body covered in my poetic, bloody script as her infant son cried upstairs. Not my beautiful Poppy.
I’m grateful for that moment. Not only for the satisfaction I still recall from the art I created from death, but for the course it set me on.
I look away from Arthur and to the next photo. Autumn with Mr. Nolan Rhodes. The unenthusiastic leader of the farce of a Search and Rescue operation. The rabid protector. The final layer of a chrysalis.
I catch the reflection of my grin in the glass.
My gaze pans to the chessboard on the table beneath the shelf, the pieces set for a new game.
And then I pick up the black knight on b8 and slip it into my pocket.