Third Interlude Gwen, Under the Shadow #4
fairy tales long enough, maybe one of these days I’ll write a happily ever after for the one that’s got hold of us.” He narrowed
his eyes. “I don’t have to ask how you cope. How many lives is it now? Do you keep track?”
“Nope,” she said.
“Is it possible you’ve saved as many as a thousand lives, Gwen?”
“If it wasn’t me in the ambalance, it would’ve been someone else.”
“But it was you.”
She made a face. “Speaking of Ted Bundy . . . did you know Bundy worked on a suicide hotline for a few months? Say he talked
a hundred people out of topping themselves. How many murders does that make up for?”
They stood with the inner tube between them at the top of the hill. He looked down the slope. “Take another run?”
“Skip it. We aren’t kids anymore. We keep testing our luck, it’s liable to fail us. Any idea who Donna’s going after?”
“No,” he said. “Maybe Allie knows.” He tightened his jaw. “Do you know Donna only drinks bottled water now? She’s worried the government will put a sedative in the tap water, knock her out and take her away again.”
“Who can blame her? Someone really did come for her once. They might again. They could come for any of us.”
“No. That’s over. Colin made sure of it. Got them off our back somehow.”
She squinted at Arthur in the dark. “Yeah. I guess. You ever wonder how, though?”
Arthur shrugged. “He’s a security consultant for half a dozen agencies and half a dozen senators. They all use his software.
They depend on him. Colin is the most dependable person I know. Before I had a dragon, I had him. He saved my ass from Jayne Nighswander.
He saved all of us.”
“Is that what we are, Arthur?” Gwen asked. “Saved?”
4.
In the space between his car and hers, Arthur leaned in and brushed his lips against her cheek, and she leapt back as if he
had come for her with a knife, her heart thrumming in her chest.
“No,” she said, and he retreated, a wounded look in his eyes.
Your kiss, Gwendolyn, will condemn your beloved to death, she remembered King Sorrow telling her, and she was thinking Oh, God, oh, God, too late, I just murdered him, I just murdered my best friend in the whole world, and it was always going
to end this way—but then she caught her breath. Your kiss, Gwendolyn. YOUR kiss. The exact phrasing always mattered to King Sorrow . . . if they had learned anything by now they had learned that. Arthur
Oakes was safe. Still.
She expected anger—resentment—but instead Arthur looked away, very calmly. “For what it’s worth, I don’t forgive me either. Not for Tana and not for pulling you into this mess.” He squeezed her arm. “See you for drinks in a while? With the rest of the gang?”
“In a while,” she promised, her heart still beating too quickly. She could still feel his mouth on her cheek.
She drove away first. Before she turned into the road, she looked into her rearview mirror and had a glimpse of him in the
glow of the taillights. He rolled the tube down the hill and stood there watching it as it leapt away into darkness.
5.
Gwen texted Allie a few days after Arthur flew back to England: We should talk about the iguana—wondering where it’s going to spend Easter. How’s Donna doing? I’m worried about her.
Her phone rang a few minutes later. It was Allie’s number on the caller ID, but when Gwen answered, it was Donna.
“If you want to know how I’m doing, Gwen, why don’t you call me?” Donna asked.
Gwen was sitting outside the hospital, on the loading dock, with a Styrofoam cup of weak coffee. “I didn’t like to trouble
you, Donna.”
“You mean you wanted information and decided to go behind my back to get it.”
“I suppose that’s the most paranoid way to put it. How exactly did I text Allie and wind up getting yelled at by you?”
“Because she brought her phone right to me. Because she isn’t a fucking collaborator. I won’t be spied on. Not by the US government, not by a foreign government, not by the UN Security Council, not by the G-7, not by
the billionaires who get together at Davos every year to carve up the world, and not by you. You want to know what King Sorrow is going to do next? Buy a newspaper on Easter morning.”
Donna hung up and that was that.
6.
But Allie did tell. A text came in the night before Easter morning, three words.
Francine Trout. Confession.
7.
Gwen fired her Dell up—the Dell was another of Colin’s Christmas presents, he always made sure they all had the latest tech—and
listened to the modem screech. She sat in her father’s old blue terrycloth robe, hair sticking to the nape of her neck, navigated
to Yahoo, and typed francine trout confession into the search box.
The story was in the Boston Globe and the Miami Herald, and on a message board called Have-A-Cold-One-On-Me. The Globe and Herald stories were only partially readable—you had to have an online subscription for the full articles—and dated to August 2001.
The Herald story was titled “New Leads in Twenty-Year-Old Disappearance,” while the Globe proclaimed, “A Confession Provokes Skepticism and Curiosity.”
But she didn’t need to read either article to get the gist, because it was all on Have-A-Cold-One, a true crime message board with threads on hundreds of unsolved cold cases .
. . including one on the abduction, rape, and murder of little Cady Lewis, who was snatched from the front yard of a friend’s house.
A friend who would grow up to become talk radio firebrand Donna McBride.
As she read about Cady Lewis, Gwen was overcome with a feeling of sadness—and understanding. It was the first time her angry
friend Donna had ever really made sense to her. Gwen was sorry for Cady Lewis, who had a bad end before her life had even
begun. But one way or another Cady’s sorrows were over. It was Donna who Gwen pitied most. Donna, who would never get even
with a world that kept taking good people away from her, destroying them before her eyes. Donna was not furious because she
hated but because she loved.
Cady had been abducted in the early summer of 1977, during a visit to Donna’s house. A man had told Cady Lewis that her dog
had been hit by a car and that he had been sent to pick her up. The only living eyewitness, Donna herself, was sure there
had been someone in the passenger seat as well, although she was at the wrong angle to see a passenger. In fact, Donna’s description
of the man in the driver’s seat had wavered across the years, which opened her to quite a bit of ridicule among the posters
on the Cady Lewis thread. As a child, Donna said she had seen the driver’s left arm, hanging out the open window of his vehicle,
and described a dark tan. Later she would revise her statement to suggest the driver might’ve been Black; still later, she
suggested it was possible he had been Latino.
I swear to God this bitch was looking through some kind of racism kaleidoscope when Cady Lewis got snatched, one woman had posted on the thread.
Cady’s profoundly decomposed body was found months later, in a drainage ditch overgrown with weeds. A sexual assault could
not be proved after so much rot, but her pelvis had been shattered in two places, which suggested blunt force trauma to her
sexual organs.
The amateur crime-solvers on Have-A-Cold-One had identified over a dozen possible suspects without coming to any consensus.
It didn’t help that the only eyewitness had been eight at the time and could not even give the color of the van for certain.
Had it been black? Or a dark evergreen? Or even navy blue?
Was it even a van at all??? It might have been a truck with a hatchback on the flatbed!
Men had been arrested, investigated, and released for lack of evidence.
No one was any closer to finding out who had killed Cady Lewis today than they had been on the day she was abducted.
The posters on the Have-A-Cold-One message board were in a constant state of trench warfare with one another, defending their pet theories while launching merciless assaults on the favored hypotheses of others.
And the latest lines of battle had been drawn up around the claim that Francine Trout had been present during Cady’s last hours.
Trout was serving life in a maximum-security prison in Tennessee. She had, with her husband, Ezekiel Trout, fostered seven
children over seven years, offering them a clean, spacious farm, a kindly but stern Christian upbringing, and intense homeschooling.
They were making almost a hundred thousand dollars a year to look after the children and had even been profiled in a local
paper in a glowing article titled “School of Trout: Loving Locals Offer Foster Children Faith, Fellowship, and a Future.”
They were both arrested for murdering one of the kids and burying the body in the cellar so they could continue cashing checks
from the state. After the arrest, the other children described a life of terror and abuse. Zeke routinely sexually abused
boys and girls alike. He punished children by chaining them in the unheated basement, sometimes for days, leaving them to
sleep in their own filth. He escaped a life sentence by hanging himself while awaiting trial. His wife and accomplice wouldn’t
meet with her parole board until she was seventy-one.