Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
Wren watched as Nora’s thumb hovered over her phone screen another moment. Then finally, she lowered the device.
Wren relaxed her shoulders. She’d been bracing herself for a fight and trying to figure out a way to soothe things when it got tense. Maybe she wouldn’t have to.
“How did you get here?” Nora asked, her voice still tinged with skepticism. “Today. Right now. How did you end up on this road? At this house?”
The man-boy’s eyes unfocused a second, almost as if he was searching for something that wasn’t there to find. Marlowe kept one arm around him but moved to his side.
“I don’t—” He pressed his fingers against his knees. “I don’t know. I remember running through the dark. I fell and hit my head on something. Then I was just . . . here. Walking. I don’t know how long I’d been walking before that. It’s all . . . it’s all a blur.”
“What else?” Wren could hardly breathe as she waited for him to continue.
“I . . . I don’t know. I’ve been trying to remember since I woke up on that road, but my brain won’t work. Pieces come back, and then they’re gone again.”
“Pieces of what?” Marlowe’s voice sounded thin with hope.
“Sounds, mostly. A room. Someone’s voice. But I can’t—I don’t remember most of it. Just flashes.” He began to tap at his forehead with his fist—harder and harder.
Nora stepped toward him. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. You don’t have to do that.”
Wren braced herself as she waited for his reaction.
Nora’s calm demeanor seemed to work. He lowered his hands, but his eyes were watery with tears and frustration.
“Listen, you could have a concussion,” Nora said. “Or worse—you could have head trauma. With memory gaps like that, you need to be seen by a doctor.”
“I’m fine.” He swung his head back and forth again.
“You don’t know that. You just told us you don’t know anything.” Nora’s voice sounded clinical, but Wren heard the fear beneath her words. “For all we know someone gave you something. Drugged you. Disoriented you on purpose. That would explain the memory gaps.”
He went still. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“How do you remember your name?” Marlowe asked. “And us? But nothing else?”
He shook his head. “I . . . I don’t know. So many of my memories are just . . . darkness right now. Blank spaces.”
“Selective amnesia is a real thing.” Nora glanced at her sisters. “He could be telling the truth.”
“Ten years ago today is when . . . when everything happened.” Marlowe stared at him in awe.
“That can’t be a coincidence,” Nora said.
“I don’t know.” For the first time, his voice had an edge of something that might have been fear. “I don’t know why today. I don’t know anything!”
Then he began to sob.
Something about the sound broke something inside Wren.
Christian used to cry like that.
It was never loud. He only cried when he couldn’t stop himself anymore, like when he’d fallen off something he wasn’t supposed to be on and waited until he got inside the house to fall apart.
She’d sat on the bathroom floor with him more times than she could count, putting a bandage on a knee that didn’t need one, waiting him out.
He’d always stop as soon as she sat down.
Her feet moved before she’d decided anything.
She crossed the yard and threw her arms around him.
Tears flowed down her cheeks as she held him. Nora joined them. Then Marlowe hugged all of them.
They were all one big sobbing huddle together.
When Wren finally pulled away, she glanced at his arm.
She hated to do it. But she had to know.
Her breath caught when she saw the scar on his forearm.
Christian had been five or six, and he’d tried to whittle a stick into a fish.
The knife had slipped and opened up his forearm. Dad had driven him to urgent care with a dish towel wrapped around his arm while their mom started a prayer chain. Christian had cried more about ruining the stick than about the six stitches.
This really was Christian, wasn’t it?
Her brother . . . he’d come home.
More tears poured down her cheeks.
“Come on. Let’s get inside,” Nora said, her voice gravelly with emotion. “We’ll figure out the rest of it later.”
Nash Hendricks was lacing up his boots for the walk his physical therapist kept insisting he take every day when Tank’s low growl came through the screen door.
Tank was his pittie mix, a dog with more muscle than manners. People misunderstood the canine and feared him. But the dog was a teddy bear.
Nash didn’t need to look outside to know what was going on.
Three weeks in this house, and he could already read that growl the way other people read weather.
The property he’d found was three acres, most of it woods, with only a narrow stretch of trees separating his place from the property to the east.
He’d quickly learned that no distance was too wide for one determined dog who wanted to be overly friendly.
Bo had come for a visit.
The labradoodle loved to bound into his yard and stir up trouble. And Tank couldn’t stand his new neighbor. Tank found Bo to be aggravating, to say the least.
Nash understood the sentiment.
He blew out an annoyed sigh.
He crossed the porch and went down the steps, grimacing at the ache flaring in his knee when he moved too fast. The pain was a souvenir from the case that had changed his life.
His doctor in Nashville had recommended he go someplace quiet to recover. Someplace slow. Someplace, presumably, that wasn’t infested with a labradoodle who treated the property line like a polite suggestion.
Fog Lake hadn’t been Nash’s first choice.
He’d looked at the coast, at a cabin outside Asheville, at a rental in the Keys that would’ve cost him half his disability check each month.
He’d landed here mostly because a buddy from the academy had a cousin who managed properties in the area and the price was right.
Another part of him had secretly wanted mountains instead of ocean. He’d felt drawn to something that didn’t move. Something that had been standing in the same place for thousands of years and would still be standing there long after he’d sorted out whatever was left of him.
Then he’d visited Fog Lake and fallen in love.
The town was full of life. The people were friendly. The area was currently gearing up for all the upcoming fall festivities. Tourists loved to visit the area, especially when the leaves started changing to orange and red.
If he’d come here under different circumstances, he might have called the place charming and peaceful .
. . if he could ignore the haunted history surrounding the town.
There was a native American massacre, a lake that was perpetually foggy, and the fact that the area was a hunting ground for more than one criminal.
Then there were the locations like Dead Man’s Bluff and the general mountain lore in the area.
Being here, he was learning that he wasn’t actually good at doing nothing. He kept trying to talk himself into it anyway. He kept telling himself relaxing was a skill like any other, something he’d get better at with practice.
But he still felt restless.
Tank’s growl hadn’t let up by the time Nash reached the trees between the two properties, and sure enough—the labradoodle now bounded away from them.
He had to talk to that dog’s owner again. This couldn’t keep happening.
All he wanted was peace, and that dog was the antithesis of peace.
“Bo!” he called. “Come here!”
The dog—all eighty pounds of him—bounded back over as if expecting to play.
Instead, Nash caught his collar. “I’m going to have a talk with your mama.”
Bo barked as if he understood. In fact, he barked right at Nash, almost as if fussing at him for not being enthralled with his visits.
Nash should be honored at the dog’s presence. That was the vibe this dog was giving off.
Nash didn’t feel honored.
He crossed onto the neighbor’s land, one hand fisted on Bo’s collar and his complaint already loaded before he’d even reached the porch.
He and Bo’s owner hadn’t gotten off to a good start.
He’d introduced himself his first week here with what he’d thought was a reasonable, neighborly wave, and she’d looked at him like he’d wandered off a most-wanted poster.
Her arms had been crossed, and she’d frowned, making it clear he wasn’t welcome.
He didn’t fully blame her. He’d seen a lot of bad things in his day, and she was right to be cautious. But that dog of hers . . . the rambunctious labradoodle drove him crazy, and the dog appeared to have free reign of the property.
That wasn’t going to work. Dogs needed boundaries.
Nash needed boundaries.
He climbed the porch steps to the main house—he assumed that’s where she lived—and knocked on the door a little harder than probably necessary.
The voices on the other side went quiet. Then people began speaking again, though he couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Bo barked as if he wanted to be included. The little rascal.
The door opened, and Nash wasted no time starting into his reason for being here. “You’ve got to take control of this—”
He froze.
Bo’s owner stood in front of him, dressed in dark jeans and a colorful flannel. Her dog shot past her into the house, his hind legs working as if he couldn’t wait to get inside and stir up more trouble.
She didn’t react to the dog.
That was the first thing that struck him as wrong. The other times, she’d had her hand on that collar before Bo cleared the doorframe.
Brown hair, chin-length, pushed behind one ear on the left and doing whatever it wanted on the right. No shoes. The flannel buttoned wrong at the bottom.
He’d registered the first week he moved here that she was pretty. He’d also known he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Right now, her face looked wrecked. She didn’t appear to be crying, at least not anymore. But he could see she had been. Her red eyes and nose made that clear.
Behind her, past her shoulder, Nash saw the other woman who lived here.
They’d never met, but he recognized her, and he’d assumed the two women were sisters.
She paced near a window with a phone in her hand.
A disheveled young man sat at the table with some food in front of him and a blanket around his shoulders.
Another woman—one who looked like a slightly younger and wilder version of the other sisters—stood near the window.
“Can I help you?” Bo’s owner quickly swiped beneath her eyes as if more tears might be escaping.
“Your dog got into my—” He couldn’t bring himself to finish.
It was obvious that these women were going through something difficult, and he’d just intruded.
“Again? I’m sorry.” The woman’s apology sounded automatic. “He’s a handful, and he thinks he’s the boss.”
“You keep saying that.” His irritation flickered, just for a second, before compassion pushed it back down. “About the dog, I mean.”
“I know.”
Nash should have left the conversation there. He almost did. But something about the moment caught him by surprise and wouldn’t let go.
He took a breath before asking, “Look, I know it’s not my business, but is everything okay?”
She met his eyes, and for a second she looked as if she were deciding how much to say. Finally, she said, “It’s fine. Just fine. But thanks for asking.”
Nash nodded. But he didn’t believe her.
Nobody in that room had looked at the young man at the table. Not once. Three women in a house with a stranger wrapped in a blanket, and every one of them kept her eyes somewhere else.
But they were watching each other. A glance here. A hesitation there. As if every word had to pass some unspoken test before anyone dared say it aloud.
Maybe this family had more going on beneath the surface than he’d realized.