Chapter 67
Sarah Kachinski was standing outside the DAL when Ivy pulled up. Her doughy face was strained, and her hands were locked on her hips.
Ivy thought, She spends more time waiting for me then she does waiting on my dad.
She didn’t get out of the car right away; she just sat and stared.
It was too much.
Too much death.
Too much murder.
Ivy was tempted to just drive away. And she almost did, too. After all, this was no longer her responsibility—Abby’s words. Maybe it never was.
A shuddering sigh coursed through her, and Ivy finally opened the door.
“He’s gone,” Kachinski almost whined. “Slipped out during lunch. No one has seen him since.”
Ivy felt for this woman.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Kachinski said, shaking her head.
Ivy was sick of people saying that. It made her almost physically ill to hear those four words. People viewed the world, their lives, as this series of random events. Luck, chance.
Odds.
It wasn’t like that. It was more like the Queen Anne’s lace flower.
Fractal, predictable.
In essence, life was a math equation. A complex one, sure, but everything you experienced was part of this equation. Figure out all the variables, the terms, the operations, and you could predict the outcome with a fair degree of certainty.
This was her fault.
Gene had called her, not Wendy. She’d gone to the house first. Dialed 911 after.
“I couldn’t—” Sarah sighed. “They know, Ivy. Management knows. They saw the cops last time and I managed to sneak Gene in, but—”
“I just want to find him.”
Déjà vu—how’s that for predictable?
“Me too. I already checked the field. He’s not there.”
“We need to spread out. I’ll start with the field, just in case.”
“Okay.” Sarah hesitated.
“Sarah. If you want to stay, I’ll—”
—understand.
“No.” Sarah said. Ivy had misinterpreted the pause. “It’s just that today is the anniversary of the fire.”
This surprised Ivy.
She checked her phone.
June 5th. Three years to the day. That, too, in a way, was predictable. She’d just missed the pattern.
“I know,” Ivy lied. She hadn’t known.
“Do you want me to ask more people to help with the search? Call the police?”
Definitely not. Ivy pictured Darnell stomping around, getting everyone worked up, ruining any chance, however slim, that they’d accept the missing resident back.
“Not yet. I’m going to check the field, okay?”
Ivy hurried off before Sarah could convince her otherwise. Found the path, although it was more difficult today. Most of the bent stalks had recovered, their stems straightening.
The flowers were in full bloom. The size of dessert plates. Fractals. Repeating sequences from a central, radiating point.
Beautiful.
Ivy spent the next hour searching the field, softly calling her father’s name. Kachinski was right; he wasn’t here.
Where are you?
Ivy returned to her car, drove bleary-eyed to where she’d found the missing man in the middle of the night.
No sign of him.
She made her way to the barn.
After the events at the Thomas Clarke House, police had vacated the area. They’d left signs up, warning would-be hikers or nosy journalists that this was a crime scene. Trespassers would be prosecuted, blah, blah, blah.
Yellow tape surrounded the entire structure. A hint of egg smell still hung in the air.
Ivy ducked under the tape, stepped into the first room. Her vision no longer distorted from the gas mask, it looked very different from the first time she’d been here.
The table and chairs were gone. The buttons and digital display also bagged and tagged and removed. A hole in the drywall.
The prisoner’s dilemma.
Someone had built the interior precisely for the game.
No, it wasn’t Zeke. Zeke couldn’t plan for a simple quiz. He had . . . what did the kids call it? TikTok brain. Couldn’t focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds. Swiping up—or sideways, or however the hell the app worked—to move onto the next fifteen-second dopamine-releasing video.
Next, Ivy found her way to the first crime scene. Recalled the approximate location from conversations she’d overheard between Vaughn and Darnell.
CiCi’s Pizza. The Cedar Ridge Preserve.
It wasn’t hard to find—the excessive use of yellow crime scene tape made it noticeable from a quarter mile away. This barn was larger than the first, and the interior was different from the photo that Vaughn had shown her, too. For one, there were no bodies on the ground.
The 100 prisoners problem.
No boxes, no numbers. But there had been numbers. Prime numbers.
Ivy peered through the hole that someone had crudely cut from the drywall. He wasn’t there. She returned to her car and sat in the driver’s seat.
Why prime numbers?
That wasn’t part of the game. And Vaughn—or was it Darnell?—was right; using prime numbers made the game more complicated. They had to mean something. It was a message. Her mind went to the letter with her name on the envelope.
Neither 8001 nor 8128 were prime numbers. But the missing value—127—was.
Ivy took out her phone. Abby hadn’t called yet—still at work.
Her eyes fell on the date again: June 5th. Five . . . a prime number. The anniversary of the fire. That fucking night.
Years ago, her father had taught her what it meant to learn something. Explained the process, the frustration. That’s where Ivy had been lost for the past three days: in a state of frustration.
This vanished now, however. In a blink, a moment of clarity.
And Ivy Reeves knew exactly where the missing DAL resident was hiding.