Page 1 of Her Last Refuge

PROLOGUE

Ruth Durst hadn’t slept well last night. In fact, she hadn’t slept well in a very long time, but tonight felt worse than most.

First of all, the evening had started badly. She'd been agitated at dinner, picking at her food and asking one of the aides three different times what day it was. By the time Mary, the night nurse, came in to help her get ready for bed, Ruth had grabbed her wrist and asked her to please forgive her.

"Forgive you for what, sweetheart?" Mary had asked, setting down the cup of water she'd brought.

"I didn't mean for it to happen that way," Ruth said. Her voice cracked on the last word. "You have to believe me."

Mary had done this dance before—not just with Ruth and with a dozen other residents at the Ashford Glen facility. She sat on the edge of the bed and took Ruth's hand in both of hers, making sure to keep her touch light. Ruth noticed this and appreciated it more than she could say in that moment.

"It's alright," Mary said. "Whatever it was, it's alright now."

"You don't understand…"

"I know. But you're safe here, and it's late, and you need your rest." Mary smoothed the blanket over Ruth's lap and kept her voice low and even. "Nobody's angry with you. Nobody's going to be angry with you. You’re safe here, Ms. Ruth."

Ruth had quieted eventually. She felt forgiven, but for reasons she couldn’t remember. Had Mary been mad at her? And if so, for what? After a while, even those doubts faded. By the time Mary came in later to check her vitals, Ruth had forgotten all about it. Mary adjusted her pillow and dimmed the lamp on the nightstand before she left, pulling the door most of the way shut behind her.

Alone now, Ruth lay in the half-dark and stared at the ceiling. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. She held them up in front of her face and watched them tremble, and for a moment she couldn't remember if this was new or if it had always been this way. Some nights she knew exactly who she was and where she was. Oddly enough, those nights were almost worse than the ones where everything seemed to sort of slide loose and her head felt like a wasteland.

Tonight was somewhere in between. She knew she was in her room at Ashford Glen. She knew a sweet nurse named Mary had just left. But she didn’t know why the word forgive kept surfacing in her chest like a stone rolling loose on a mountainside. She only knew that it needed saying, and that no matter how many times she said it, it never felt finished.

She thought of her hands again. They still trembled, resting now on top of the blanket, and she watched them for a while without really seeing them.

The room was quiet except for the low tick of the baseboard heater and the occasional soft squeak of someone's cart passing in the hallway outside. Ruth's eyes grew heavy. She thought about closing them and decided she would, just for a minute, just to rest them.

At some point she dozed off, and she supposed that was why she didn't hear the door open.

The hallway noise had gone quiet by then, the cart long past, the hall lights dimmed for the night like they always did after ten o’clock. The door swung inward slowly enough that the hinge made no sound at all. The figure who slipped through it paused just inside the threshold, letting the door ease shut without a click.

Ruth's breathing had already slowed and evened out into the rhythm of sleep. Her hands, still faintly trembling even now, lay loose on top of the blanket. She didn’t stir as the door closed or when the figure started crossing the room toward her bed. Their footsteps were silent against the linoleum.

She didn't understand that this figure had no business being here until it was too late. She tried to get her mind to cooperate, but her already muddied thoughts were too slow, too jumbled. She was too confused to even be properly scared, though she knew somewhere very deep in her head that she should be.

The last thing Ruth Durst was aware of, if she was aware of anything at all, was the room going darker still around her. At some point, she closed her eyes.

She never opened them again.

CHAPTER ONE

The kitchen table was covered in paper by ten o'clock, and by eleven it had spread onto the chair beside her.

Rachel had waited until Paige went up to bed before she brought everything out. It wasn't that she meant to hide it from her daughter exactly, but Paige had latched onto Eleanor's case the way she latched onto everything lately: fully and without restraint. She supposed it was a teenager thing, to give your full attention and passion to one thing for a few months only to drop it and pick up something new and totally unrelated to replace it.

For now, as it had been for most of the past year, Paige was still stuck on her true-crime podcasts. As such, Rachel wasn't ready to hand her more fuel for a real-life case she had inadvertently become a part of. Not yet, anyway. Not until Rachel understood what she was looking at herself.

She'd built her own file on the mystery of that was floating around her old friend Eleanor and her sister, Eve. She understood why it would have such a hold on a fourteen-year-old girl. Eleanor had given Rachel a key moments before her death, after all, giving no indication as to what it belonged to. That was the kind of stuff usually reserved for movies about treasure or deep, dark family secrets. And that lure had only intensified when the key had gone to a lockbox kept hidden in a closet by her sister, Eve.

Rachel had constructed a flimsy narrative over the past several weeks, separate from the brittle clippings, papers, and other items Eleanor had stored in the lockbox. It really only consisted of a single folder on her laptop and a legal pad with her own timeline drawn out beside Eleanor's, cross-referencing dates. She had pulled property records for the old Lewis farm out past Windsor. She'd requested the original incident report from the county, the one that matched the copy Eleanor had kept, and compared them line by line. She’d hoped to see if anything had been altered or left out, but nothing had. It was the same report, word for word, filed the week after Eleanor and Eve's father—Victor Lewis—had died.

She sat now with the newspaper clippings spread in a loose row. The original timeline in Eleanor's handwriting was anchored at the top of the table, and a letter she had found in the box was in front of her.

She'd read it a dozen times already tonight, and she still weighed each word. She was sure there was an abundance of clues in it…she just wasn’t sure which ones mattered.

The letter was addressed to Douglas Farrell, the family's attorney. It was undated, though the paper was crinkled and slightly discolored. Eleanor's handwriting, usually so precise in the timeline, seemed looser in the letter; the words tilted slightly as if she’d written it in one sitting.

She read it again as the microwave clock behind her ticked to 10:22.