Chapter 24
IT’S LATE, BUT IT DOESN’T matter. Something tells her to get up and get out.
So she laces up her running sneakers for the first time in a long while.
They feel almost foreign on her feet, reminders that she has let pieces of herself fall apart lately.
She can’t remember when she last allowed herself a night run.
Stepping outside, she stretches each arch, trying to break in shoes that don’t need it.
The air has the faintest hint of crispness with a gentle breeze that makes the leaves dance.
Maybe it’s all in her head, but it suits her just the same.
Everything is beginning to get quiet, the soft hum of life just threatening to penetrate the edges of her solitude but staying far enough away to be a welcome comfort.
The porch stairs creak under her weight, and she carefully covers her ears with headphones, making sure to avoid toggling the noise-canceling option.
She knows never to be distracted, never to be caught unaware.
That’s how people end up dead. It’s how people end up a footnote in the legacy of someone like Jeremy, a punishment undeserved by even the most careless.
Each step feels lighter and lighter, the pavement now a carpet of clouds beneath her feet.
The world around her swirls and changes, becoming an endless expanse of night, punctuated only by the flickers of streetlights and porch lamps.
It’s like being immersed inside a painting. She remembers this feeling now.
The steady pace of the concerto informs her own, the frantic plucking of strings echoing her panicked thoughts.
It builds slowly, urging her to do the same.
She listens, surrenders, finally allows herself to enjoy something again.
The guilt is still there, the shame of feeling anything but a heavy storm of sadness.
But now it’s moving with her, shifting away from a position of permanence.
She turns a corner, finding a canopy of branches covering the street and welcoming her with dangling strings of Spanish moss.
The music hits a fevered pitch, and she mentally free-falls, pushing forward with ease, a feeling she thought she would never find again.
Her nervous system begins to regulate, and she can finally sense the perpetual state of fight-or-flight she has been living in start to ease.
It’s as if some divine force has pressed the pause button on all her problems, all her feelings of crippling depression and hopelessness.
They probably won’t ever be completely erased, but for now she finds it easier to compartmentalize them into places she can manage.
With a little bit of ambient sound filtering in under the soft music in her ears, it’s somehow more immersive, more disconnected from the harsh reality in which she has been living. Lately she’s felt like she’s been treading water, but out here it’s as if the wide-open sea is hers to explore.
Her thoughts begin to wander, traveling away from the present and back, for a moment, to the past few days.
Whenever she closes her eyes, she can’t help but see Beth’s body dangling in the dark.
She can remember that darkness, the same kind she woke up to in Jeremy’s hunting grounds.
She can still feel herself probing the ground, wondering if she was on the edge of a cliff or next to water, with no clues to stop her from tumbling to certain death.
After their last visit with Jeremy, she and John spoke to Beth.
It was a brief interaction but one that will stick with Wren for a long time.
They determined that Beth was likely waiting, strung up in the dark like that, for at least three days.
Before that, she’d been in Wyatt’s sweltering attic for a week.
He had gagged her to keep her quiet and handcuffed her to a rock-solid pipe that ran through the whole house.
All the while, Wyatt had lived his life, cooking and sleeping and going to work, only breaking his routine to brutalize her during surprise visits.
Wren couldn’t help but think about the times he had strolled into the morgue, making small talk, while this young woman was chained up in his home and another was being prepared for a grotesque display.
Melissa and Beth had seen each other. They had spent a couple of days together in that attic before being separated. Beth said she knew Melissa was gone the second he dragged her from the room.
“He was so scary, like nothing I could have ever even dreamt of in my nightmares,” Beth had said about Wyatt.
She called him “volatile,” saying he would explode into dangerous rages and then break down into tears, crying next to her on the floor as she lay bleeding from whatever he had done just moments earlier.
Beth will have to walk a similar road to Wren’s now, healing from the physical wounds before diving headfirst into the emotional ones.
He violated her in the worst ways a human can violate another, leaving her bruised, missing one canine tooth, and with a broken bicuspid.
She also has three broken fingers, abrasions on her wrists from the rope, a swollen black eye, a fractured rib, a furious ring of bruised and inflamed tissue around her neck from strangulation, and a concussion.
Now Wren can see that Wyatt’s awkward friendliness was nothing more than a mask he wore like everyone else, something to get him through his day until he could shed it in the dark.
She tells herself it’s human nature to hide the things we are least proud of, the things we feel the rest of the world won’t understand or appreciate, but like anything, there are caveats.
She’s been told countless times that failure to detect these Trojan horses is a weakness, especially with her history.
Now she knows that’s not entirely true. The willingness to see the good in others isn’t weakness; it’s wisdom, far superior to fear.
Closing herself off to connection and possibilities won’t keep her from pain, but it will ensure that she doesn’t experience the things that make life worthwhile.
Before she falls too deep into the debriefing process, Wren tries to push it to the back of her mind, just for now.
Soon she will have to face the consequences of it all—Beth and Melissa, Philip and Jeremy—but right now she just wants to run.
She wants to concentrate on the things that make everything else go away.
Richard was always that for her, and without him, she has vowed to find it in movement.
Passing underneath a low-hanging branch, she feels the dangling tendrils of moss tickle her shoulder, making her briefly startle.
She chuckles to herself, resenting how jumpy she has become.
Then the music pauses, quickly replaced with the sound of her phone ringing—a truly unwelcome piece of real life bleeding into her attempt at euphoria.
She tilts the phone screen up to see it better.
The number is one she doesn’t recognize.
Instead of screening, like she prefers to do, she decides to answer it on the off chance it’s Leroux calling from one of the random lines at the station.
She doesn’t want to miss an update; this is a fatal and enduring flaw in her DNA.
“Hello?” she answers, her lungs sharp from movement. She lets her gaze fall to a cluster of dragonflies in a nearby bush.
A prerecorded inhuman voice begins: “Hello, this is a collect call from …” There is a pause, and Wren’s breath hitches in the moment of anticipation. The silence lasts only a second. Something she has feared comes next.
“Jeremy,” his voice cuts in, shattering the sense of peace she foolishly believed she had acquired out here.
The prerecorded voice completes the sentence with “… an inmate at Dead Creek Penitentiary. To accept this call, please press or say ‘one.’ To refuse this call, please hang up.”
She stops running and places a trembling hand against a tree, feeling the scratch of jagged bark against her fingers. She digs her nails into it, splinters piercing her skin as another stretch of agonizing silence takes hold.
The prerecorded voice makes one final request, like a finger wavering over the trigger for a kill shot. “To accept this call, please press or say ‘one.’ To refuse this call—”
She ends the call before the voice can finish.
Vivaldi’s concerto plays softly in her ears again, seamlessly picking up right where it was interrupted, as if Wren’s world hasn’t turned onto its side.
Her heartbeat thunders in her ears, and she resorts to trying the breathing exercises she always scoffs at—anything to stop the pressure.
It works, slowing her breathing to something she can manage and her thoughts to a slightly manageable mess.
She looks around, scanning the area like she’ll spot him before quickly reminding herself that it’s an impossibility at the moment. She’s unbelievably angry at the speed with which he shattered her solitude.
“How did he get my fucking number?” she asks out loud.
It’s like an avalanche of trauma hits her all at once.
Someone betrayed her; someone gave him that information.
There is no other way for him to have acquired it.
Her mind races, cataloging everyone who has her personal cell number and trying to quickly access whether they could have somehow shared it.
How could I be so stupid, letting someone in like that again? I’ve been so welcoming, too easy to access at work. Boundaries. Fuck! You need better fucking boundaries, Wren! What does he want?
Her eyes scan again, stopping on any deep, heavy patch of darkness and searching for shapes within it.
She thought Jeremy being in prison would give her the blanket of security she had been craving, but this somehow feels worse.
Now he’s everywhere, like a monster from her nightmares, he’s a bogeyman, a phantom. It’s like he grew, stretched somehow.