Chapter Seventy
Midge is trying to understand the rambling details that spill from Talia’s mouth, with interjections from Ben. It sounds like Hayley was here alone while they were at the beach. She stopped answering calls and texts. They came back, and she was gone.
Gone, like Sarah Greene and Junia Stanton and Sienna Harmon.
Gone, and Mason Bauer’s son is out there somewhere.
So is Caroline’s daughter.
Are they working together? Ceto and her half brother Mason?
“Talia, we’re going to find her,” Midge says. “I’m going to find her.”
She radios for backup, then opens the door and peers out.
She sees a flash of lightning and hears the wind in the trees as the storm blows in.
Then she hears another sound and knows, with a sickening feeling in her gut, that it isn’t thunder.
“What was that?” Talia wails. “Was that a gunshot? Midge? Was that—”
“Stay here!” Midge is already running.
“I’m coming!” Ben is right on her heels.
“No! Stay! With Talia! Do not leave her alone, Ben!”
She races outside, across the terrace, down the rain-slicked stone steps. She couldn’t tell from which direction the shot came, but she instinctively heads for the woods. The pool site.
If it’s Ceto, that’s where she’ll be.
If it’s Ceto . . .
Why would she hurt Hayley?
Gordy makes sense. If she thought he was her father, she’d have a motive. But Hayley? Hayley isn’t—
No. Stop. She’s going to be okay.
She needs to believe it. Deep down, she does believe Hayley’s fine.
Just as deep down, she’s certain that Sarah Greene and Junia Stanton are not.
If Ceto thought Mason Bauer was her father . . .
What if he’s the one she’s after, just like she was after Gordy?
Or what if Mason’s son is after Ceto, who, like Junia Stanton, was the product of his father’s bad behavior? Junia went looking for her biological roots.
Maybe Ceto did the same.
Maybe, instead of the father, they found the son.
She hears another gunshot. This time she’s certain it came from the woods by the pool site.
She quickens her pace, racing across the expanse of lawn. As she reaches the mock orange bushes that mark the trail toward the pool, she hears thrashing in the brush up ahead. She flattens herself against a massive tree trunk.
The sound comes closer. Someone is barreling in her direction.
She sucks in a breath, poised with her weapon, eyes on the path.
The figure that comes into view isn’t Mason.
Nor is it Ceto.
Hayley.
She’s barefoot and bleeding. Her expression is sheer terror. But she’s in one piece.
Midge steps out from behind the tree. Hayley cries out, then realizes who she is and sobs out her name.
“Shhh!” Midge pulls her off the path, positioning herself as a shield between Hayley and whoever’s chasing her. Eyes on the terrain, she asks in a low voice, “Are you okay?”
“Yes!”
“Who’s up there?”
“A man. He tried to—” She covers her mouth as if she’s just realized what happened, or perhaps what could have happened.
Mason Bauer.
“Shhh, just . . . We need to be quiet, okay? Are you hurt? Did he hurt you? You’re bleeding.”
“I’m all right. I fell. He pushed me down.” She’s breathing hard. “He had a knife.”
“He’s still up there?”
“Yeah, but I think he’s dead. He got shot.”
“He has a gun, then? Not a knife?”
“He has a knife. She has a gun.”
“Who has a gun?”
“The girl. She saved me. She shot him.”
“Who—”
“I can’t tell you. You won’t believe me.”
“I will, Hayley. Tell me.”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“Hayley, I can’t promise you that.”
“But they’ll think I’m a stupid little child if you tell them. And I’m not! I know what I saw.”
“Are you kidding me? No one could ever think you’re a stupid little child. You . . . you’re like a superhero. You’re one of the most . . . epic young women I’ve ever known.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously, Hayley. Just tell me who it was. Who else is up there? Who shot the man?”
“It was a ghost. It was the girl who drowned on prom night. Caroline Winterfield.”
No, not a ghost.
Not Caroline.
Her daughter.
Ceto.
“She has a gun?” Midge asks, eyes peeled on the path.
“Uh-huh. I didn’t think ghosts needed guns.”
“What did she look like?”
“She looked like her. Like Caroline Winterfield. I’ve seen pictures, and I know it was her ghost. I mean, she wasn’t white and glowing or anything like that. She was all in black, with a black cape, I think, and a hood over her head. But I could see her face.”
“Did she say anything?”
“She just told me to run. So I ran.”
“And the man? Did he say anything?”
“I think he thinks I’m someone else. He was talking about a DNA match, and I thought he was my grandfather.”
“Why would you think—”
“Because I took a DNA test! But I didn’t hear back yet. And he said he did.”
A DNA test.
Another piece of the puzzle falls into place.
It’s as Midge suspected. Mason Bauer must have matched with Junia Stanton.
And with Ceto.
But this time, it seems, the predator met his match.
“Get back to the house,” she tells Hayley. “Run. Your parents are there.”
“Wait, Midge, come with me, please?”
“I’ll be there in a bit.”
“But my parents are going to be so mad.”
“Your parents,” Midge says, shaking her head, “are going to be so happy to see you that they’ll forget all about being mad.”
“You don’t know my mom.”
“Oh yes I do, kiddo. I knew your mom first. Now go.”
At that, the girl takes off running.
Midge quietly radios for backup confirmation as she watches Hayley rush back to the house. The door opens before she reaches the porch. Talia and Ben are there. They’ve got her.
Midge whirls away and darts up the trail.
It’s been several minutes since she heard the shot. By now, Ceto will have fled, unless Bauer, too, had a firearm. Or got ahold of hers and turned it on her.
Midge slows her pace as she approaches the clearing, moving stealthily now, weapon in hand. She can see the pool site, still cordoned off with yellow tape, and the newly rebuilt colonnade, and the pedestals carved with names of water gods and goddesses.
Kelly was tempestuous Poseidon, Talia was noble Oceanus, Midge was benevolent Hydros, and Caroline was Ceto.
“A sea monster?” she exclaimed.
“A primordial sea monster goddess,” Midge reminded her, because she was the one who’d looked up the stories behind the names.
“But why do I have to be the monster?”
“Because typecasting is boring,” Talia said.
“I like boring! Boring is good!”
From Kelly, “No, it isn’t, Caroline. But trust me, good is definitely boring.”
They were laughing, all of them. Four friends, laughing in the dappled sunshine of a long-ago summer.
Today, there’s no sunshine. There are no carefree young women perched on their pedestals. There’s no laughter.
Thunder rumbles and rain pours down. The yawning pit that was once a pool, and then Caroline’s grave, fills with mud.
Midge isn’t alone here.
Seeing movement, she ducks behind a tree. She waits a moment and peeks out. Someone is beside the stone that belonged to Caroline, the one that bears the name Ceto.
Midge slips closer, moving silently from tree to tree, as the rain falls all around her.
The figure is wearing dark, shapeless, hooded clothing and has its back to Midge, bent over a large object on the ground, poking at it. A clump of leaves? A fallen branch? What is that thing?
No—that isn’t a thing. That’s a person lying there, very still. A person streaked with red . . .
Blood.
The figure—a woman, it’s definitely a woman—straightens and takes a step back like an artist inspecting her handiwork. She reaches down again as if to make one last tweak.
She isn’t cloaked, as Hayley said. She’s wearing an oversize black sweatshirt with the hood tied tightly around her head, black jeans, black sneakers, black gloves.
Midge steps into the clearing with her gun drawn. “Mulberry Bay Police! Raise your hands where I can see them!”
The figure remains motionless.
“I said raise your hands! Above your head! Now!”
The woman follows the order, arms up.
“Turn toward me! Slowly!”
She pivots with painstaking care until she’s facing Midge.
Midge’s breath snags in her throat and her legs threaten to liquefy as she takes in the young woman’s face, with the sweatshirt hood tightly puckered around it.
The first startling glimpse feels like peering through a portal into the past.
This young woman has Caroline’s delicate features and pale complexion. She’s virtually identical.
Then Midge meets her gaze, and . . .
No. The eyes are strikingly different from Caroline’s. They aren’t a soft, velvety blue. They’re a much paler shade, cold and hard as ice.
“Ceto.”
Midge sees her flinch, barely perceptibly. A slight lifting of the chin, as if she’s determined to maintain her composure.
“You figured it out,” she says, with a hint of amusement.
It isn’t the sweet, soft laughter that often rippled in Caroline’s voice in the early years, before her parents sent Mary Beth away, before Gordy came along . . .
Before Bauer.
This is derision laced with mockery. “You’re the brilliant detective, though, aren’t you? Detective Sergeant Imogene Kennedy?”
“Call me Midge. You know who I am as much as I know who you are.”
“All right, Midge. I understand you knew my mother. And my father.” She tilts her head to indicate the prone figure on the ground.
Midge knows better than to shift her own gaze in that direction. It, and the gun, are fixed on Ceto.
“Wow. And here I was all set to say, ‘Made you look.’ Very impressive. You must be well trained. But then, of course you are. Your father was the police chief, right?”
Midge says nothing, fighting the urge to look over at Bauer. He’s motionless. Hayley said he was shot; she thought he’d been killed.
If he’s still alive, every second matters.
Midge hears sirens in the distance.
“It’s just too bad your father didn’t do his job when my mother disappeared. I wonder if he was protecting you and your friends? Or was he protecting him?” Again, she indicates the bloody man. “I hear he was a good guy from a good family.”
“No, Ceto, that man isn’t Mason Bauer,” Midge says. “He’s—”
“His son,” Ceto says. “I know exactly who he is. Mason Bauer Junior. My half brother. Do you read the Bible, Midge?”
“I have.”
“I guess we do have something in common after all. Do you know John 5:19?”
“Refresh my memory.”
“‘The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner.’ What does that tell you?”
“It tells me you decided to find him and punish him for his father’s sins.”
“And vice versa.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning, we found each other.”
“How?”
“How does anyone find anyone these days?”
“DNA. And you arranged to meet?”
“We did. Yesterday. I canceled. I don’t think he liked that very much. He likes to have the upper hand. So do I. It must run in the family. It was just a matter of who was going to beat the other to the punch.” Again, she gestures at the wounded man. “I won, obviously. I always win.”
“What about Gordy Klatte?”
“Oh, he lost. That was unfortunate. When I asked him to meet, he was expecting my mother, and—”
“He was expecting your mother because that’s who you claimed to be.”
“Very good. He didn’t even know I existed. When he saw me, he was shocked . . . I think he thought I was her ghost.”
“When he saw you . . . that night in June? The night he died?”
She ignores the question, talking on, but Midge knows the answer.
“He kept saying he couldn’t possibly be my father, and boy, did I believe him. You’ve met the man, haven’t you, Midge?”
“I have.”
Another derisive chuckle. “Then you know there’s no way he was the one. He was so lame, so dull—”
“You killed Gordy.”
“—so clumsy.” She shrugs. “After that, I knew I had to find my real father. The closest I could get was Big Brother here.”
The sirens are much closer now. They’re here.
Ceto turns her head, listening. “Time for me to go, Midge.”
“Don’t move.”
“Oh, come on. You’re not actually going to shoot me. I’m Caroline’s daughter. See ya.” She lowers her hands and turns away.
“Stop right there!”
Ceto whirls back toward Midge. She, too, has a gun. Midge sees it the instant before she fires.
If Midge wasn’t anticipating it—if she didn’t see the weapon the instant before Ceto fired—if Ceto had a decent shot . . .
So many ifs.
But the bullet misses. Midge takes cover behind the colonnade and fires. Too late. Unscathed, Ceto ducks into the woods and is gone.
Chasing after her, Midge is quickly overtaken by the arriving backup officers.
“Up there! She’s armed!” she shouts, and they fan out into the woods ahead of her.
“Detective Sergeant Kennedy!”
She turns to Lieutenant Carlos Figueroa, an investigator with the state SVU. He’s been working the Sarah Greene case.
She briefs him, matching his long-legged stride as they return to the clearing and come to a stop a few feet away from the man on the ground.
“Is he—?”
“Yes,” Figueroa says. “He’s got multiple GSWs, one through the heart. No pulse. Any chance you can make a preliminary ID?”
“Yes. Mason Bauer Junior.”
He radios it in. “We’ve got a 10-66 . . .”
It’s a summons for the medical examiner, meaning a dead body has been discovered.
As he asks for further assistance, investigators, forensics, Midge takes in the scene.
It’s clear that Mason Bauer didn’t die on the spot where he lies.
He’s been dragged here.
He’s posed, lying on his back with his legs out in front of him and his hands folded over the bloody hole in his stomach, clasping a blue hat. The granite pedestal etched Ceto is at his shattered head like a tombstone.
Like a signature.
Ceto . . . Caroline’s child.
Ceto . . . a monster.
Figueroa’s radio crackles. She hears confirmation that the ME is on the way.
Nap was here at Haven Cliff just last night, enjoying a meal, some laughs with friends.
Nap was at Haven Cliff on that terrible night in June, when they found skeletal remains in the cordoned pit just steps away from where Midge now stands.
She thinks of the lost summer that lies between that day and this one. Of other summers. Of sweet childhood summers.
Of Caroline, long gone.
Of Kelly and Talia, returned to her, and Hayley, safely in her mother’s arms.
Midge walks back toward the house to find them as the cold, hard rain scrubs sweat and tears from her body, and blood from the ground.