Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Cole
The fluorescent tube over my head is dying.
Has been for months, buzzing and flickering in its cage like something trapped, throwing a light that makes everything look sick.
Midnight. The concrete under my boots is still warm from the day, breathing heat up through the soles.
The garage smells like the sour note of old coffee from the mug I left out six hours ago and haven't touched since.
I should throw it out. I don't.
The back door's open because it's July and the garage would cook a man alive otherwise. Night air moves through in slow, warm drafts that cool nothing. My shirt is stuck to my back. Sweat runs from my temple down my neck, and I wipe it with the heel of my hand and go back to the notebooks.
They're spread across the workbench in the order I need them — not alphabetical, not chronological, something only I understand.
Hand-drawn maps of Roan on graph paper, the streets rendered with the shaky precision of a man who's driven them a thousand times and still can't get the proportions right.
Photocopied police blotters with whole paragraphs blacked out in marker — Calloway's work, I'd bet my left nut on it, though proving it is another thing.
Newspaper clippings about Annette Coyle's disappearance four years back, the print gone soft at the folds from how many times I've opened the page.
Judy Marsh's clipping beside it, three years back, the photo of her smiling in a way that makes my chest hurt because she has no idea what's coming.
A printed satellite image of the roads out of town. I've marked routes in red — three different paths to the lake, each one circuitous enough to dodge the main road, each ending at the same patch of trees that doesn't look like anything unless you know what you're looking for.
Color-coded tabs along the edge of the main notebook.
Blue for victims. Red for suspects. Green for witnesses, though that section thins every month.
A folded town map lives under the satellite image, creased so many times the paper's going soft.
Voss's house circled in red, pressed hard enough to dent the page.
Calloway's office at the sheriff's department gets a circle too, plus an X through it, because I'm not subtle when I'm alone.
I'm jabbing a finger at the timeline I've drawn across two facing pages.
My own handwriting, cramped and slanting right the way it does when I'm pissed, which is most of the time lately.
The pattern's there if you know how to look.
Both girls — Annette and Judy — went quiet weeks before they vanished.
Stopped showing up at school. Stopped answering texts.
Friends said they seemed off, distant, like something was eating them from the inside.
And the police reports. Jesus Christ, the police reports. Both filed, both assigned a case number, both signed at the bottom by the same hand: Sheriff D. Calloway. Both dead-ended inside a week. No follow-up interviews. No door-to-door. Nothing.
"Fucking bastard," I mutter, to no one, and drive the pen through the margin next to Calloway's name. The point goes through the paper and into the wood beneath, and I leave it standing there like a flag planted in conquered ground.
The garage is quiet except for the buzzing light and, from inside the house, the faint hum of Eileen's concentrator. Her breathing machine, the soundtrack to my life now. Some nights it's the only thing that tells me time is still moving.
I turn to the card pinned apart from the others.
Hannah Brooks. Just her name and what I've scraped together: seventeen, track team, the date I watched her slide into Denny Voss's car outside the high school three weeks ago.
I've written Voss's name beside a question mark so big it eats half the margin.
I stare at it longer than I should. The muscle in my cheek jumps, the way it does when I'm trying not to think about something and failing.
Hannah keeps her auburn hair pulled back.
Slight for her age but wiry, the build that comes from running until your lungs burn because stopping means facing whatever's waiting at home.
I watched her from across the lot. She got into that car like she'd done it before, like it was routine, and the way she moved — shoulders tight, head down, making herself small — lit a fuse in my chest that's been burning ever since.
I pick the card up. Set it down. Square its edge against the grid of the graph paper.
A girl in a car. A bad feeling. A pattern that stretches back years, and nobody in this town will look at it, because looking means admitting something's rotten, and admitting that means doing something, and doing something means risking the comfortable quiet they've built their lives around.
There's a list on the last page of the green section.
Witnesses, maybes, people who might have seen or heard or known something they weren't supposed to.
Most are crossed out. One moved to Ohio last year.
Two shut the door in my face. One — a teacher who used to coach Judy Marsh — transferred to a district outside Harrisburg and changed her number.
The ones who stayed learned the same lesson: in Roan, seeing something and saying so will cost you. So they see nothing. They say less.
The light flickers — a long, slow pulse that turns everything gray before the yellow comes back.
My shadow stretches across the floor, distorted and huge, and for a second I don't recognize the shape of myself.
Just something cut out of bad light, hunched over a bench covered in the evidence of an obsession that's been eating me for two years.
This is what Mick pulled me into. Not the investigation — that came later — but the habit of it.
The method. After Trevor got shot and I spent months drinking myself toward something I couldn't name, Mick found me sleeping it off behind a dumpster and didn't say a word.
Just handed me a wrench the next morning and told me to make myself useful.
The work gave my hands something to do. The investigation gave the rest of me something to hold.
Now it's this. A garage that's half workshop, half war room, and one index card with a girl's name on it that I can't stop looking at.
I put my hand flat on the card. The paper is cool.
Outside, something shifts in the trees at the back of the property — a branch, a raccoon making its rounds.
The house behind me is quiet but for the concentrator and the creak of the old mattress upstairs, where Trevor is sleeping. Or pretending to.
I don't turn around. I keep my eyes on the card, on the question mark beside Voss's name, on the pattern laid out across two notebooks and four years of disappearances that nobody here will call what they are.
The light buzzes. The concrete holds the day's heat. My coffee's cold and I don't care.
The memory hits without warning, the way it does when the house goes quiet enough to let it in. One second I'm staring at Hannah's card, the next I'm ten years back at the upstairs window of this same house, my hand flat against the glass.
Trevor's truck is backing down the drive.
Not the beat-up Ford he drives now — something older, a muffler that rattled when he turned it over that morning.
I can see the back of his head through the rear window.
Dark hair, broad shoulders under a jacket I don't recognize.
His posture perfect already. Not a Marine yet, but built like one — back straight, chin level, eyes forward like there's nothing behind him worth a second look.
My hand is on the glass. I didn't knock. Didn't call out. I just stood there and willed him to look back — one glance up at the window, one sign that the years we'd shared under this roof meant something to him beyond the weight of a bad memory.
He never did. His back stayed straight. His eyes stayed forward. The truck reached the end of the drive, turned onto Cembrook Road, and was gone.
My eyes stung. I didn't let myself cry. Crying was for things you could fix, and Trevor leaving wasn't something I could fix, because I was the reason he left in the first place.
I'd made sure of it. Every barbed comment, every cold shoulder, every time I looked at him across the dinner table and gave him nothing but a flat wall — all of it built to push him far enough back that he'd never see what was behind it.
It worked better than I meant it to.
The glass was cool under my palm. I stood there until my arm went numb.
—
Wade's hand connects with the side of my head in the kitchen.
The sound comes first — a flat crack that lands a half-beat behind the impact, like the world needs a second to catch up.
Then white, then gray, then the kitchen coming back too bright, the linoleum too yellow, the water glass tipping off the counter because my elbow caught it going down.
I don't go down. I've learned not to. Going down means it lasts longer.
His breath smells like cheap whiskey and cheaper cigarettes.
His hand is already drawing back for the second hit before the first finishes registering, and that's when I leave.
Not my body — my body stays in the kitchen, taking it.
But the part of me that feels things checks out, finds a quiet room at the back of my skull, and waits with its hands folded until it's over.
I'm good at leaving like that. I've had practice.
—
The belt across the backs of my thighs in the hallway.
Leather on denim first, then leather on skin when the denim rides up.
A wet crack that lives in the walls long after Wade's moved on to whatever he's shouting about.
I don't remember the words. I stopped hearing words years ago.
It's the tone that matters — the rise and fall of a man who's found his favorite toy and won't let go until it breaks.