Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
Then there is nothing but road and black water, Lake Washington on both sides of us. Rain hammers the windshield so hard the far end of the bridge disappears. All I can see is the glow of the dash and his hands on the wheel.
I glance at Henry.
He grips the steering wheel so tight his knuckles go white. He drives carefully, keeping the tires out of the standing water where he can. The wipers drag rain across the windshield but never clear it for long. Between their passes, Seattle shows in dark flashes in the distance.
I rest my head against the window. The glass is cold through my hair. Behind us, Hunts Point disappears into the rain.
"Not long now," Henry says. "Once we're across, hopefully we'll have bars. Then we'll get help for Julia and get you seen to." He says it like a route he has driven a hundred times.
I don't answer. My skull aches in a wide band above the ear where the desk found it. Everything past a certain distance has a smear on it, like the road. I am so exhausted the tiredness feels like a place I could lie down in.
Then my phone vibrates against my thigh. Once, then again. I must have switched the ringer off earlier and forgotten. I take it out low, below the line of the window, more from instinct than decision. A message has dropped in as the reception finds us.
It's Cassandra.
Henry's eyes flick to me, then back to the road. “You got bars?”
"No," I say. "Not yet."
The lie is out before I understand why I've told it. I don't decide to tell it. It comes from somewhere older than thought, and only after I hear myself say it do I feel a strangeness settle in my chest. I have no idea why I have lied to him.
I glance at the message.
I ran down those Cascade bylines you asked about.
Most of the coverage is ordinary case reporting, different reporters.
But the deeper pieces, the ones asking strange questions about the victims' homes after the murders, are something else.
They weren't different reporters. They were pen names.
The same hidden freelancer, working the case from different angles.
I never edited these, Mal. I had to call in favors and dig through old contributor records. None of this was public.
A second bubble drops in under it.
Those articles were yours.
I read it twice.
The words don't feel like news. They feel like a key turning in a lock I didn't know was still inside me.
Those articles are mine. I wrote them. I hadn’t put the whole theory of the Cascade Killer in print. I knew better than that. But the questions were mine. The houses. The sales. The pieces nobody would let me join together.
It comes then, not in order, not gently. But like water through a wall that has finally cracked.
Oregon. Rain like this for weeks. A rented room with a corkboard and a map.
Pins dotted all over it. Pushed into towns I'd never had a reason to know before the bodies made them matter. I’m not anyone's wife in that room, not the way I am now. I’m a freelancer with no desk, no boss, and a story nobody will run whole.
So I break it apart. Different angles, different names, anything to get the pieces into print.
The cops are looking at the bodies. The assaults, the DNA, the counties, the timelines.
But I’m looking at the houses. Not the killings.
What comes after the killings. The homes that go up for sale a decent interval later, quiet listings, different agencies in different towns that have no reason to touch the same deaths but do.
One structure underneath them all, if you follow the paper far enough, one owner behind all the others.
That part never ran. That part was mine. Somebody made money on the dying. That was the sentence I could never prove and never stop believing.
Then another memory comes
A bar in Portland. Not the loud kind. There are low lights over the booths, a bartender working a rag around a glass, a couple of men in work jackets at the far end, two women laughing too hard near the door. And I'm at a small table with a man across from me.
I have carried that fragment for weeks, filed it under David, and been wrong every time. It was never David. I was not on a date. I was not remembering my husband. I was working.
I had two trails that should never have met. The houses after the murders, and a genealogy lead tied to DNA the police had never talked about publicly. The houses gave me a name. The DNA gave me something to test it against.
Westburn.
So I found him. Not to accuse him, not then. But to get close enough to carry something away. A glass. A napkin. Anything with enough of his saliva. I wasn't flirting. I was collecting. And the name I went into that bar to prove was his.
I lift my head off the glass. It costs me everything. Henry's profile is dark against the driver's window, the lake sliding black behind him. He’s the man from the bar. He’s the man whose hand I watched around a glass. He’s the man I chased across a whole state and could never make anyone else see.
He’s the Cascade Killer. And I'm in his car.
My breath has changed. I hear it change. I try to pull it back down, but it won't go. The fight to hold it is the thing that gives me away.
Henry looks over at me, and this time he holds it a beat longer than the road allows.
"What is it?"
"Nothing."
"No," he says, soft. "I've seen that look before."
I close my hand around the phone. Then his eyes drop to his phone in the console, the screen lit.
"Look at that," he says. He lifts it just enough for me to see the bars in the corner. "We have a signal."
He sets it down.
My hand tightens.
"Show me yours," he says.
"What?"
"Your phone, Mallory."
He holds out one hand and drives with the other. I don't move. The corner of his mouth shifts, almost a smile.
"It's all right," he says. "You can show me."
I should say no. I should throw it, hide it, do anything but sit there with the phone burning against my palm. But the moment has gone too thin, and before I can decide what to do with it, Henry reaches over and takes the phone from my hand.
Not roughly. That is somehow worse.
His eyes flick down, then back to the road. Down again. He reads enough. He sets my phone facedown in the console, closer to him than to me. Then he gives a small breath through his nose, not a laugh, but almost one.
"I wondered when you'd get it," he says.
"Get what?"
He cuts me a glance. Something moves at the corner of his mouth.
"That look," he says. "You had it in the bar in Portland. I really hoped you wouldn’t remember.”
The bridge hums under us. The wipers cross and cross. On both sides the black water waits.
He knows me. He knew me in that bar. All this time, at the mailbox, at my table, at the door of my house, he has known exactly who I was before the crash took it out of me.
The rescue. The kindness. The patient hand on my head ten minutes ago. All of it was him wearing the good neighbor over what he is.
“But it was the houses. That’s how you found me the first time, wasn’t it?” he says. “You found the houses. That was the part nobody else got near. Not the bodies. Everyone found the bodies. But you, Mallory. You found what came after.”
He’s not confessing. He’s talking about the case, like two people who once worked the same one and are pleased with the clever thing the other one saw. Except the clever thing is him.
“You know, I looked for you after the crash,” he says. “You were hard to find. When things went quiet in Oregon, I thought you’d run, or been warned off, or lost your nerve. It took me a long time to understand you’d simply stopped being her.”
I don’t ask how he found me again. I don’t have to.
“Before I ever moved into that house, I saw you in a shop. You looked straight at me and kept walking. Another time I bumped into you at a café in Seattle. Made you spill coffee all over me.” He almost smiles. “Nothing.”
My stomach turns.
“So I got closer. Moved in down the street. Put those articles with the packages at your door. Your own work, Mallory. I thought surely that would do it.” He looks through the windshield. “Still nothing.”
The wrong mail. The dinner. The party. The mail I carried up the road and handed back to him like a good neighbor.
Tests.
Every one of them.
“Every time I handed you another thread, I thought that would be the one that brought it back. But it never did.” His voice softens. “I could have left then. The crash had given me everything I needed. You didn’t know me. You didn’t know what you’d found.”
He turns his head slightly.
“But how could I walk away from you?”
He almost smiles. I feel it more than see it.
“And now,” he says, “you remember.”
And under the horror of it, colder than all of it, comes the other thing. The thing David kept saying.
David was right. He kept telling me it was Henry. He kept saying it into the dark of the hall while I ran from him. And he was right. I couldn't hear it because Henry had built the whole room around a different answer and guided me into it.
“David started looking at me properly,” Henry says, as if he has heard the name go through me.
“He got close. Closer than I wanted.” The wipers cross.
“That was unfortunate. If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t meant to play out that way.
He was meant to take the fall. I was meant to be there for the fallout.
But we adapt. We adjust. That’s what you and I do, right? ”
He says it like David was another problem he solved while I was unconscious.
Unfortunate. My husband, on the floor of our house. Unfortunate.
I look at the door handle. I look at the black water going past on my side, close under the low rail. I think about the cold of it, but I don't move, because there is nowhere on this bridge to go.
Henry drives us on, giving me the truth he’s been holding back for two years.
Then his voice lowers, as if he has come to the best part.
“There’s one more piece,” he says, glancing over. “One I don’t think you’ve remembered yet.”
The wipers beat. The water waits on both sides.
“The girl on the road.”