Page 28 of Her Last Refuge

“I have no idea. Not yet, anyway.”

She stood there a moment longer, taking in the spare room and the quiet house around it. Right now, they were looking at two deaths inside a memory-care facility. And now there appeared to be a third victim across town, strangled in her own home and arranged with the same careful attention to the hand—and all done while her husband was sleeping in their bed.

In terms of the case, Rachel now understood that Ashford Glen was no longer the center of the map. It was only the place the killer had started. Whatever this was, it had already moved beyond those walls.

When the case had been confined to Ashford Glen, it had at least seemed simple, and she’d dared hope the answers would be easy to find.

But this changed everything because now, they had an entire city to search rather than the hallways of a single, mostly-quiet building.

And that not only broadened the playing field, but also provided the killer with many more options.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

He had been dozing again. And as usual, even when he slept for ten or fifteen minutes, he’d dreamed. He’d dreamed of sparkling water and the smell of chlorine. He’d dreamed of long summer days and feet so pruned-up from pool water that they sometimes hurt to walk on.

But after dozing, he opened his eyes and he was back in the workshop. And that was fine with him. It was familiar It was comfortable. It smelled of old oil and sawdust and the faint metallic tang of tools that had been used almost to the point of breaking. Pegboard covered the back wall from waist height to the rafters, and every hook was occupied: wrenches ordered by size, screwdrivers hanging in pairs, a hand saw whose teeth still held the memory of the last cut. A workbench ran the length of one side, scarred and stained, its surface crowded with open boxes of screws, a coil of wire, a coffee can full of bent nails. The overhead fluorescent tubes hummed softly with a white glare that sometimes calmed him and sometimes agitated him.

There were no windows, so he often had no idea what time it was. He assumed it was morning by now. Maybe lunchtime. He wasn’t sure.

He sat on the stool in the middle of the workshop and stared at the notepad sitting open on the bench in front of him.

There were four names written on the sheet that was showing. Three of them had been crossed out with thick black strokes that had nearly torn the paper. The fourth was circled so many times the pen had worn a shallow groove into the page.

George Tremaine

He let his eyes rest on the three crossed names for a long moment. Ruth. Howard. Cecilia. Each one finished the same way: hands folded, quiet, the way a body should look when the work was done properly. He had taken care with them, though he’d had to work faster than he liked with Cecilia. But even then, he’d taken great care. There had been no thrashing, no noise that would carry.

In fact, for all three of them, there had only been the sounds of soft settling of breath that never came back. And once the breaths were done and their wide eyes stared lifelessly at him, he would arrange their hands. He still wasn’t exactly sure why he did it. Maybe so those who found the body would understand that he didn’t want to do this—that the dead, no matter how much they deserved their end, did deserve rest.

His gaze drifted past the notepad to the pegboard. A photograph was pinned there—the same photograph that had been pinned there for years. It was slightly crooked, the corners yellowed and soft from years of handling. It was a picture of a thirteen year-old-boy in a Boy Scout uniform…a boy who no longer existed. In the picture, he was squinting into sunlight that had fallen across a summer afternoon fifty-five years ago. It was the same smile he remembered from that last morning…the same one that had disappeared under the water.

He stood, crossed the short distance, and reached up. For a moment his fingers only rested on the edge of the photo. He mouthed the name without sound.

Danny.

The word sat in his mouth like something he needed to spit out—like a sunflower seed shell or a too-soft bit of fruit. He pulled the pin free, and the photograph came away easily. He held it between both hands, studying the face the way he had studied it a thousand times before, and felt the familiar hollow open within his heart. It wasn’t grief. Not quite. Grief had burned itself out decades ago. What remained was something colder and more useful: the knowledge that the world had simply moved on while a boy stayed thirteen forever, trapped in a single afternoon no one else seemed determined to remember.

He folded the photograph once, carefully, along the old crease. He then folded it again, and then again, until it was small enough to slip into the inside pocket of his jacket. The space on the pegboard looked wrong without it. But that was okay. His work was coming to an end and when he was done, lots of things would change.

Back at the bench he opened the small notebook he kept for mornings. The pages were dense with his own handwriting, the script growing tighter and more cramped the further he flipped. He had started the book three years earlier as a simple record—dates, weather, small errands—but it had changed without him quite noticing.

But he noticed now. Now the entries wandered in the way of a child, an exhaustive string of words without punctuation that really said nothing at all. Some mornings he wrote the same sentence three times in a row before he caught himself. Other mornings the words came out sideways, half-thoughts that made sense only while he was writing them and turned strange the moment he looked back.

He turned to the most recent page.

They are quieter now. The first two went the way they should. The third was harder because of her sleeping husband but it is finished. One left. One left and then the list is clean. Danny will stop asking. I can feel him getting louder but there is love there. He is both sad and excited. The names keep shifting when I am not looking. I write them down every morning so they stay still. If I stop writing them they will move again. George Tremaine. GEORGE. The last one. After that, maybe he will be quiet. After that, maybe Danny will be happy again.

He read the paragraph twice. The handwriting was his, but he could barely remember writing any of it. He closed the notebook and set it aside. There were others stacked beneath the workbench. These were much older, their covers soft with use. He’d started writing in the first one so long ago, about a year after they’d pulled the body out of the water.

He did not open them. He hadn’t opened those older ones in quite some time. He already knew what they contained: the slow erosion of certain dates, the gradual replacement of ordinary observations with the same circling thoughts, the quiet admission that time was no longer entirely under his control. That sometimes, Danny spoke to him even now.

He looked once more at the notepad with its three black lines and the single violent circle. Very soon, he would begin the final stretch. He already knew George Tremaine’s routines and how he lived his life. He had watched long enough. The work was almost finished.

And when it was done, the photograph in his pocket would no longer need to be taken out and looked at. The asking would stop. The list would be clean.

He switched off the fluorescent tubes one by one. The workshop fell into a darkness that seemed to press into him. He locked the door behind him and stepped out into the cool air, finding that he’d been right: it was morning.

The folded photograph seemed warm against his chest. It was almost as if Danny was also enjoying the morning sun.