Page 35 of Forever Dark
It was then that she noticed Connor had gone still.His eyes had fixed on the tower, and some of the ease he usually wore in his body had drained out through his shoulders.
Selena stepped around the hood of the car.“You okay?”
Connor blinked, as though he had forgotten she was there.“Yeah.”
“That didn’t sound very convincing.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Connor, I might not have seen you in years, but I remember that look.What’s going on?”
He kept looking toward the tower.“This street gives me a bad feeling.”
“Why?”Wind moved through the dry grass by the ditch and caught some wind chimes somewhere nearby but out of sight.
Connor blew out a breath.“I suppose it doesn’t matter… A few years ago, a call came in about kids trespassing back there.Climbing where they shouldn’t.”He nodded toward the tower.“By the time I got here, one of them had already gone up.”
Selena said nothing.
Connor’s mouth tightened.“He touched the wrong thing.That was it.”
The image came into her head whether she wanted it or not.A child.A tower.The awful smell of burning flesh.
Connor rubbed a hand across the back of his neck.“I found him at the base.His friends were standing there screaming.He was only fourteen.”
Selena studied Connor’s face.He was not telling the story for sympathy.Connor never looked for that.The memory had the exhausted shape of something he had carried for a long time and never quite set down.
“I’m sorry,” she said.“Law enforcement means we come up against the worst things imaginable.”
Connor gave a small nod.“Yeah.”
It was not much of a reply, but it was enough.Selena felt the urge to say more, to put some softer human thing between them for once, but habit stopped her.Distance remained easier.
She turned toward the house.“Let’s talk to Gus Farley.”
Connor fell into step beside her.
The gate creaked as they opened it.A concrete path led through the yard, cracked in three places and crowded at the edges with weeds.Up close, the house smelled faintly of old wood and the heavier sweetness of flowers gone over in their pots.
Selena knocked.
No answer came at first.She heard movement inside, though.Slow movement.A chair leg scraping.Then footsteps, careful and measured, approached the door.
It opened three inches.
An old man looked out at them.
Gus Farley was frail enough that the door seemed too heavy for him.Wisps of white hair clung to the sides of his head.His face had the fine, folded look of old paper.Thick glasses magnified pale, watery eyes.He wore a cardigan buttoned wrong by one hole and held the door with a hand that trembled.
“Yes?”
Selena lifted her credentials.“Mr.Farley?I’m Agent Selena Raven with the FBI.We’d like to talk with you about Brenda Colter.”
He shook his head.“Sorry, I… I heard this morning on the local news.I’m too upset about it.Can you call another time?”
“We really would like to speak with you today,” Selena said.
“I just don’t feel up to it, sorry.”He began to close the door mournfully.Selena was beginning to feel frustrated with how people were closed off to her in Harlan.
