CHAPTER 12
WREN
Eli finds me at the feed store two days later, and I know before he says a word that he’s crossed into the part of this where good men start to die, because he has the look. The look of a decent man who pulled one thread because it was his job and watched a whole wall come apart in his hands.
He doesn’t do it where people can hear. He waits until I’ve loaded the truck, and then he leans on the tailgate next to me, both of us facing the white street so it looks like nothing, two people talking about the weather, and he says, low, “I need you to tell me to stop, Wren. Because I can’t make myself stop, and I think you’re the only person who could. ”
“Stop what.”
“I pulled the parole file. Like I said I would.” He turns a paper coffee cup in his hands, not drinking it.
“Somebody greased it, that I already knew. What I didn’t know is whose name is on the petition that got sealed.
It took me three weeks and a guy I went to the academy with to crack the seal.
” He says the name quietly, like it might hear him.
“Silas Frost. Lazarus’s brother. The respectable one.
He’s the one who spent two years and real money getting your, getting Lazarus out early. ”
I keep my face the way I keep my face. The best work I’ve ever done.
Inside, every alarm I own is going off at once, because of course it’s Silas, I’ve known it was Silas since the radio, but hearing a cop say it out loud means it’s real now, means it has a paper trail, means it’s the kind of thing that ends with somebody in front of a judge, and the only somebody this town has ever been willing to put in front of a judge for the Frosts is me.
“People get family out of prison, Eli. That’s not a crime.”
“No.” He’s quiet a beat. “But here’s the part I can’t put down.
I went looking into why a man would spend two years engineering his own brother’s release, and I started pulling the old Frost paper, the estate, the wards, and Wren.
” He turns and looks at me, and his decent face is gray.
“There were other girls. In that house. Before you. Going back, God, going back decades. The county’s got them filed under runaways.
Wards of the Frost estate who ‘left.’ No forwarding, no follow-up, no bodies, because nobody chases a runaway foster kid, that’s the whole point of using them, isn’t it, they picked the children nobody would come looking for.
” His voice cracks on it. “There’s a pattern, Wren.
There’s a fifty-year pattern walking around under a respectable name, and I think the old man was the start of it, and I think somebody covered it every single time, and I have got four names so far and I have not slept since I found the second one. ”
Annie, I think, before I can stop myself.
Marguerite. Sophie. Dorothea. Iris’s pencil.
Iris’s tin in my dresser drawer. A dead twelve-year-old’s count, surfacing now through a deputy’s case file, fifty years late, the way the truth always surfaces, sideways, through the one decent person too stubborn to look away.
And I understand, standing at my tailgate in the snow, the exact shape of the trap I’m in, and it’s worse than Silas’s deadline, it’s worse than the tape.
Because Eli is good, and the law is finally, accidentally, walking toward the truth, and if it gets there, it clears Lazarus.
It lifts the thing off the man I love. The real story comes out and the wrong Frost stops being the monster.
But the truth doesn’t come clean. It never comes clean.
The same truth that frees Lazarus drags me out into the light for what I did with a poker when I was eighteen, and worse, it goes hunting for a girl I carried out a burning door and told to disappear, a girl who’s seventeen now and alive and a stranger to her own danger, and a paper trail with a cop on the end of it will find her long before I can.
The truth Eli’s pulling at is a live wire with everyone I’ve ever tried to protect on the other end of it.
And the cop pulling it is standing six inches from me with his decent gray face, and Silas has already shown me a photograph of my own kitchen.
Good men don’t survive a Frost. I knew it at sixteen. I’m watching it start.
“Stop,” I say.
He blinks.
“You asked me to tell you to stop. So I’m telling you.
Stop, Eli. Put it back in the file. Forget the names.
” Every word costs me something I’ll never get back, because the names are the one thing that should never be forgotten, Iris died refusing to forget them, and here I am asking a good man to.
“These are people who will burn down anything that gets close. You have a kid’s soccer team and a green truck and a whole life that hasn’t been ruined yet, and you have no idea, you have no idea, what you’re walking toward. ”
“And you do,” he says slowly. Not a question. Watching me. “You know exactly what I’m walking toward. Don’t you.”
I don’t answer. I get in my truck. It’s the kindest thing I can do for him and it’s nowhere near enough, and we both know it, and his decent ruined face in my side mirror as I pull out is going to be one of the things I see when I close my eyes on the longest night.
I drive home shaking. Not for me. I gave up being afraid for me a long time ago.
For all of them. For the wolf I can’t let move, and the deputy I can’t keep out of it, and a seventeen-year-old girl somewhere with my secret in her bones, and four dead names in a child’s pencil, and a fifth name on a doorframe that stops at four feet eleven.
Silas wants me to think I’m the one with everything to lose.
He’s about to learn I’m the one with nothing left but the losing, and that there is no creature on earth more dangerous than a stray who has finally run out of things she’s willing to watch get taken.