Page 64 of The Chain House

On his way out of the room, Beth said, “Wait … please.”

Minks stopped, turned.

“I hear someone typing,” she said. “A typewriter.” He stared at her, said nothing. She said, “At least tell me I’m hearing it and not going crazy.”

He said, “My wife.”

Your wife? Jesus Christ …

He said, “She’s working on a book.”

And then he closed the door and left the room.

CHAPTER29

TREVOR WASN’T SURE why he needed to return to the old Freedom Ranch, but with Lizzie’s full support, and not knowing where else to go, they’d headed straight there.

“It’ll give us time to think,” she’d said on the way. “And regroup.” After a few minutes of driving in silence, she’d said, “I wonder if the house is burned down by now?”

He didn’t know how to respond to that, so he’d just let her talk, let her get out whatever she needed to get out, and once she’d started talking, she talked until they arrived at the Freedom Ranch, or what was left of it. Bottom line was that after Trevor had fled her house with his bat in tow, she’d watched him go, thinking, That man is a hero. When Trevor laughed, she’d said, I’m serious, and then he’d gotten serious, too, because there wasn’t much to laugh about with any of this. But Trevor also remembered when her husband had once told him heroes don’t come in pint-size. And then Lizzie had gone on to say that as soon as Trevor had left with his bat, she’d gotten on her dead husband’s cell phone and went scrolling, and after finding text chains from two different women she’d always thought he’d been tagging on the side, she’d gone straight out to the garage to get the gas can—as if beating the shit out of her wasn’t enough, he’d been cheating on her, too, and she’d snapped. I mean, I just snapped, Trevor, she’d said from the passenger seat as he drove. And now I guess I’m a fugitive, because it sure won’t be hard to investigate that mess. Even if the house hadn’t burned down, Trevor thought, Jake’s body would be, seeing as she’d apparently poured the can of gasoline over his dead body before striking the match.

The first thing he said to her when they arrived at the Freedom Ranch was, “We’ll figure it all out.” He’d thrown his stained Louisville Slugger over his shoulder. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Lizzie.” It felt odd saying it, given his passive history, but he’d so thoroughly stepped into the role of his own fictional childhood hero that now he felt indestructible, and as they walked toward the old, wooded ranch, where most of the barracks had either crumbled or been burned down or vandalized and completely overgrown, it dawned on him exactly why they’d naturally migrated toward the very place he once vowed never to return.

Because that’s what The Raven would have done.

“The Raven,” he told Lizzie as they walked the main trail leading into the camp, “in my comics, as a boy, he’d always fly somewhere and sit and think, to focus, and often it was to a place that had caused him pain. Because with pain often comes clarity. The Raven was always fueled by painful memories.”

They approached the camp side by side, and for the first time Trevor noticed the handgun tucked into the waistline of her shorts. He wasn’t familiar enough with guns to know what kind it was, but it looked good on her. Not out of place. In other words, unlike him, he felt sure she’d fired one before.

“It’s registered,” she said. “I have a license to carry.”

“I’m not judging,” he said, thinking, If The Raven had a baseball bat, The Mongoose could have a gun.

“Is that why we’re here?” Lizzie asked. “So you can relive some painful memories?”

“Yes,” he said with confidence, and at the same time trying to tamp down the anxiety the place was already stirring up inside him. He’d heard stories of what had happened here since the authorities had raided and the arrests followed. It had been under the watch of investigators as they collected their evidence for nearly a year, and then the long, slow process of decay and dilapidation took over, turning it into what it was now—an abandoned nightmare of memory. He’d heard it had morphed into a place for teenage dares and haunts and sex parties and drug deals, but it appeared as if all that had run its course and the surrounding forest had begun, in earnest, to reclaim what had once belonged to it.

It didn’t surprise him to see that Sal Batise’s main house, although weatherbeaten and overgrown with weeds and covered in graffiti, had somehow stood the tests of time. The blue paint had either faded or peeled away. Most of the windows had been shattered, and it appeared a portion of the roof had caved in on the right side near the chimney, where crows squawked and circled.

The front door was missing. Inside the opening, darkness reigned.

And frightened voices from twenty years ago sounded from within.

CHAPTER30

Before

THEY’D BEEN WARNED.

It might be chaos when the authorities came. Iris had asked what authorities were.

Yellow said, The police.

Peter had asked Raven and Yellow what chaos was. Raven had said, It’s a state of utter confusion, and then stammering … lack of organization … lack of order.

And then Yellow had said simply, It’s unpredictability.

And now, as they hurried through the darkness of the Freedom Ranch, fleeing from the burning Kitchen House just as so many ran toward it with buckets of water, skirting the woods where she swore she saw demons watching from the shadows, Jennifer never could have predicted they’d be heading into the blue house, where they all knew the Breaker of Chains lived, and sometimes the man in the mask. But it was also the house she now knew with certainty another boy lived—Steven. The plan was to get him and go.