Chapter 24
Hadley Dawkins
The crime scene had been stripped to faint oil stains and ash-darkened earth.
Hadley stared at the remnants left behind, the autumn wind cutting through her blazer as if testing whether she, too, could be scattered like the dead leaves of the season.
The forensics team had collected everything of value and taken it to the lab, but a sense of devastation remained.
“What did you discover in those journals, Reed?” Hadley whispered, wishing he could somehow find a way to answer her. “Help me out here. Please.”
Hadley lowered her gaze to the map in her hand, tracing her finger along one of the map's road lines, trying to piece together distances and timing.
Five days had passed since she'd stood in this same spot observing the firefighters douse the last embers of Reed's truck. She’d spent most of the hours combing through the remaining journals, but he’d taken the important ones.
Most likely, those had been burned to ash, too. Eventually, she would have to visit Martin Cox to apologize for not keeping her promise to protect Sarah’s journals. Not today, though.
Hadley had already come to the conclusion that the individual responsible for Reed’s death was someone familiar with the back roads. Familiar enough to predict they'd be empty at that hour. Someone local.
The distant rumble of an approaching vehicle pulled her from her thoughts. Hadley could make out Elijah’s truck from her peripheral vision. He’d had the old Ford for as long as she could remember, keeping it running long past its expected lifetime. Much like his reputation in this town.
Gravel crunched beneath his tires as he slowed to a stop behind her. The engine cut off, followed by the creak of a door opening. Still, she didn't turn.
“I had a feeling you’d be back here.”
“Get back in your truck, and keep driving.”
His boots scraped against the gravel as he approached anyway. He never had been one to take a hint when it conflicted with what he wanted. She kept her eyes fixed on the map in her hands, her jaw clenched tight enough to send a dull ache through her temples.
“The funeral was nice, don’t you think?”
Hadley focused on her breathing. She'd attended the funeral, and she stood at a distance while they lowered Reed's casket into the ground. She didn’t talk to anyone there, and she wasn’t in the mood to have a conversation now.
“Gus and Sam are opening the Watering Hole tonight,” Elijah continued, undeterred by her silence. “Special hours for a celebration of Reed's life. Thought you might want to know.”
Something inside Hadley snapped like a branch under too much weight. She spun to face him, the map crinkling in her tightening grip.
“Why would I attend a celebration for Reed’s life?
” The words escaped before she could stop them.
“So half the town can stare at me while the other half whispers about how I'm responsible for Reed's death? How I brought all this on him by coming back? I was at the pub last Thursday, and look how well that visit went.”
“You didn’t exactly help with that, did you?
” Elijah said as he slipped his hands into his pockets.
He was wearing his funeral suit, probably the same one that he’d worn to every other funeral over the years.
“Warren told me that you offered to sacrifice yourself to keep the media off the investigation. Worked, too, so I guess you should get some credit.”
“Don't.” Hadley cut him off with a slashing motion of her hand. “Don't stand there and act like you haven’t manipulated every local in this town to suit your own needs. I went to the prison, Elijah. Mason told me about the tarp.”
A hollow laugh escaped her, the sound brittle in the stillness of the afternoon. She hadn’t wanted to have this confrontation so soon. She wished she didn’t have to have it all.
“You know what's truly pathetic? There was a time I thought of you as a father figure. I believed that you had gone out of your way to protect me back then. And all through my teenage years, I respected you more than anyone in this town.”
“I did protect you, Hadley.”
“That badge you wore meant something to me,” Hadley continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
“I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but I’m pretty sure you were the reason why I became a cop in the first place.
At least Warren Caldwell has the guts to not pretend to be anything other than what he is.
But you? You were supposed to be better than this. "
“Better than what, exactly?”
“Better than someone who would alter a statement taken during an abduction. Better than someone who would allow a teenage boy to go to prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
” Hadley paused when the wind picked up, sending dead leaves skittering across the ground between them.
“Better than someone who'd let young women vanish without a trace.”
The knuckles of her right hand began to ache from her tight grip. She’d creased the map, and she had to force herself to loosen her fingers.
“Go home, Elijah.” Hadley effectively dismissed the man who had once loomed so large in her childhood. The distant call of a crow somewhere in the treeline summed up her despair. “Enjoy your retirement.”
Elijah flushed at her snub, the lines around his mouth cutting deeper as he stepped closer.
His boot heel ground against a charred piece of the earth.
When he spoke, his voice carried the dignified composure of a man unaccustomed to having his authority questioned, especially by someone he'd once considered family.
“You have no idea what you're talking about,” Elijah said, each word practically their own sentence. “And we’ve already been over this. You didn't see what those disappearances did to this town before Emily Esten. Each time a girl went missing, it tore at the fabric of this community.”
“Yes, we have been over this, and it’s clear to me that you decided a convenient narrative was more important than the truth.”
“You think I didn’t care about those girls?
About their families? I spent most nights awake going over every lead, every scrap of evidence.
Do you honestly believe," Elijah continued, leaning toward her, “that I would cover for someone preying on young women in my town? Is that what you think of me after all these years?”
The question hung in the air between them. Two weeks ago, Hadley would have dismissed such an idea immediately. But now, with Reed dead and eight disappearances somehow connected, certainty had gone by the wayside.
“You amended Mason's statement from that night, Elijah. Why?”
“I never amended your brother's statement,” Elijah countered, a defensive edge creeping into his tone. “That was the prosecutor's doing. He had Mason’s statement, but he conveniently left out the last page. I didn’t even know about that until the trial.”
Elijah's irritation manifested until he turned his head and spat onto the ash-darkened ground. When he glanced back at her, his eyes had hardened into something unrecognizable.
“In case you’ve forgotten, your brother had a public defender.
He was inexperienced, and when I brought the missing page to his attention, he thought the jury would misconstrue the resubmission of Mason’s full statement.
Thought that maybe they would believe he was changing his story.
And honestly, looking back, I don’t think anything could have saved your brother from a guilty verdict. ”
Elijah’s barb hit home, but she wasn’t ready to face her part in it all. She refused to allow him off the hook quite yet.
“And Sam? You left out what he saw in the woods that night. Not the prosecutor, but you, Elijah. Care to explain that?”
“A drunk teenager stumbling through the woods, claiming he saw the Threshing Man? You think that would have helped your brother's case? The defense would have torn it apart, used it to paint the whole investigation as incompetent folklore nonsense.”
Elijah’s gaze dropped to the darkened ground.
“Sam was incoherent, babbling about trench coats, arms that were too long, and a figure that glided between trees.
He couldn't tell me which direction he'd been facing, couldn't even say for certain where in the woods he was when he supposedly saw this...thing.” Elijah shook his head in disagreement. “What was I supposed to do? Tell a grieving town that the boogeyman took their daughters? Tell them to hang talismans over their doors to keep the Threshing Man away? They already did that, and it didn’t help. They needed answers, not fairy tales.”
“So, you gave them my brother.”
Hadley’s anger shifted, not diminishing but transforming as she observed the complex emotions playing across Elijah's face. The certainty that had fueled her accusations began to waver, not because she believed him entirely, but because she recognized the human cost of the decisions he'd made.
Weariness washed over her.
The righteous fury that had propelled her through the confrontation ebbed away, leaving behind a hollow ache that could never be filled.
She drew in a deep breath, suddenly aware of the landscape around them.
Not just as a backdrop to their argument, but as a living presence with its own secrets and witnesses.
The trees seemed to lean in, and their leaves rustled with deliberate purpose, whispering conversations just beyond comprehension.
The scent of damp earth rose from the ground where her boots had disturbed the soil, mixing with the sharp tang of pine and the faint metallic reminder of what had happened here. And somewhere in the distance, a woodpecker drummed against a tree trunk, the rhythm irregular yet persistent.
Life went on despite death.
Tension drained from her shoulders. In the quiet that had settled between them, she heard her own breathing.
“Sometimes, I can’t distinguish between what I actually remember and what the prosecutor constructed for me to say on the stand,” Hadley admitted softly.
“He would ask the same questions over and over, phrasing them differently each time, until I started doubting my own recollections. I remember sitting up on the stand while he told me how important my testimony was. How I could be with my mother, but only after I told the truth. How I was being brave.”
“I did try to protect you from the worst of it.”
“Not enough,” Hadley replied, the words carrying no accusation now, just a simple statement of fact. “Not nearly enough. I told the world that my brother confessed to me that he murdered Emily Esten.”
Her confession hung between them.
Her part of the painful equation.
“I testified that Mason came out of the woods and said he'd done something terrible, that Emily wasn't coming back.”
A gust of wind swept through the clearing, bringing with it the distant scent of woodsmoke. Someone was going about their day as if the bad things in life couldn’t touch them. They were sorely mistaken.
“You were a child, Hadley.”
She shifted so that she could view the damage left behind from Reed’s death. Nothing else had changed, though. Mason was still in prison, young women continued to go missing, and the guilty party remained hidden among the community…blending in and allowing an urban legend to explain away his sins.
“Then it’s a good thing I'm not that ten-year-old little girl anymore, isn’t it?”