I inch around to the side of the tree to put myself in a better position to run for the door. Fear creates droplets that slide down my face like ice and pool in my palms as I ready my shaking body for the sprint. My phone tucked away in my pocket to free both of my hands; I release the old metal hook on the top of another ornament. This time I aim for the corner of the room diagonal from him. I throw it, but it doesn't sail directly into the wall the way I intended. Instead, it hits the game board set up on the table and sends pieces skittering down onto the floor.

  Jake draws in a sharp breath and takes a protective step toward the scene. That movement is my cue. I dart out from behind the tree, heading for the door.

  But Jake has already stepped away and released it, allowing it to swing shut.

  I throw my body toward it. I just need to get out. It doesn't matter how. I hit the ground and scramble toward the opening in the door. A second later, the door crushes down on my hips, sending a sharp pain through me.

  His rough hands grab my ankles. I cry out, thrashing against Jake's grip. I take hold of the doorknob and use it for leverage to pull myself up, but his hand moves to my thigh, keeping me from moving the rest of the way out of the door. I snap my elbow back, striking him as hard as I can. In the brief second his hold on me loosens, I try to shove myself the rest of the way through the door. I know he has a key, but all I need is a chance.

  I don't get it. The door falls on my fingers, crushing them. I scream and pull my hand back, making the door shut and lock. Pressing my hands flat to the door, I drop my forehead against it and let out a sob.

  Jake's hand runs up my thigh and onto my hip, then traces its way over my waist until it brushes my hair away from my neck so he can touch a kiss to my sweaty skin.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Don't touch me,” I say, my voice calm and even.

  I don't want him to mistake for a second what I'm saying to him.

  “But, Emma, I'm so happy you're here,” he croons.

  I almost don't recognize his voice. It sounds different than it ever has, but I can't put my finger on exactly why.

  “Let me out, Jake.”

  “I can't. I've been waiting too long to have you here with me,” he says.

  The door remains firmly closed, but he at least relents and steps back from me so I can turn around. A large bandage wrapped around his arm has tinges of red at the edges. Despite everything, a surge of worry rushes up in my chest. I'm sickened by my own reaction.

  “The blood in the bar,” I say, gesturing with my eyes toward the bandage.

  Jake nods and runs his hand along it.

  “I've been slowly collecting it for a while now, but I knew I needed as much fresh as I could spare when it was time. But don't worry, the cut will heal. I've gotten very skilled at stitching up wounds.”

  The comment makes bile roll into my throat.

  “There was too much blood,” I tell him. “Everyone thinks you’re dead.”

  He smiles. “They do? That's perfect. It's exactly what I want.”

  “I don't understand. Why fake your own death? Eventually, you're going to be found,” I say.

  “That's just what I intend to happen. But I won’t need to be found. I'm going to make it easy on everybody and show back up in Feathered Nest in a few days.”

  “Why? Why would you go through all this if you were just going to give yourself up?” I ask.

  I shift to the side, and my crushed hand hits the door. Hissing at the pain, I pull it against my chest and cover it protectively with the other. Jake rushes up to me; concern etched on his face.

  “Oh, sweetheart. Does it hurt? I'm so sorry. That wasn't supposed to happen. Nothing was supposed to happen to you. I would never want to hurt you,” he says. “That was never what I wanted.”

  “You shot at me,” I spit. “You tried to kill me.”

  “No,” he frowns, shaking his head. “No, I never would have let you get hit. Those bullets were nowhere near you.”

  “Then why?” I ask.

  “To keep you guessing. So you felt like you were on the right track. From the very beginning, I knew you were suspicious of LaRoche. It was perfect. I couldn't have even planned it that well. That's what all this,” he gestures at the bandage on his arm, “was for. You weren't supposed to come after me. You were supposed to be in Feathered Nest with the others, searching for me, and be the one I dragged myself to when I escaped.”

  “Escaped?” I ask.

  “Yes. You see, when you showed up, it was like I was being given a new chance. I could have a life again. Have everything I've wanted. But that meant ending the mystery for good. When you started digging around into it, the ideal solution just showed itself. If you already thought LaRoche was responsible, I would make sure everyone agreed with you. The dots were already there. I just had to help connect them.”

  “You didn't write Cristela in your notebook the last night she was at the bar,” I say. “But you drove her.”

  Jake laughs. “No one else knows that. How do you?”

  “The piece of metal under your passenger seat. It snagged my pants the day we went to the cemetery. When I was looking at a picture of Cristela's body, I noticed a cut on the back of her leg in the same spot. She caught her leg on that piece of metal when you dragged her out of the car and tied her up in the woods.”

  “It would have been so much easier for her if she had just cooperated. She would have been perfect,” he says. “But it turns out she still was. Just for a different purpose than I could have imagined.”

  “Did you know she was pregnant?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “No, she wasn't. At least, not that night. She decided to do away with her baby. It was too much of a hassle for her, and she didn't want to have to deal with raising a child she didn't want alongside someone like LaRoche. She confided in me when she first found out. Of course, I told her I thought she should keep it. That she would enjoy being a mother, no matter what. But she didn't listen. That made it easier for me to choose her. If she hadn't made that choice, she would still be alive.”

  I want to steer the conversation away from the terrifying, damaging rhetoric. I don't need to hear it, and it changes nothing.

  “You said she was perfect.”

  He nods. “She was. When I first considered her, I wanted her for one of the scenes. But when it didn't go as I planned, and everyone realized the disappearances were connected, suspicion started ramping up. You connecting her to LaRoche has actually created the ideal foundation. So, this new plan was born. I'm sure by now, the police have called in a forensic team to investigate the bar.”

  “Yes.”

  “They'll examine the blood and do swabs to test it, hoping they find traces of DNA other than mine they might be able to use to link to my killer. And they're going to find other DNA. A lot of it. They'll also find that much of the blood around there isn't exactly… fresh.”

  “It's been frozen,” I say.

  Jake smiles and nods. “You're catching on. See, people like predictability. They like formulas. So, when someone disappears, the first thing anyone does is find the last place they were and start trying to find the path from there. But if they don't really know where that last place was, they can't find the path. Blood splattered around in conspicuous places is always good for starting an investigation in the wrong direction. I've kept extra blood frozen, not knowing what to do with it until now. When they realize the DNA isn't all mine and the scene has been staged, they're going to look to the person who has the most experience with crime scenes and what investigators look for.”

  “LaRoche,” I murmur.

  “It will seem like he contaminated the scene purposely to throw off the search and confuse people. It won't take much for people to start making connections and finding the same threads you did. I'm sure Andrea will be more than happy to come forward when she thinks one of the men she trusted is dead, and the other one killed him.”

  “You're the one who sat at the bar watching her. Not LaRoche.”

  “A couple times a week. He wanted to make sure she wasn't cozying up with anyone else. Of course, she didn't want anyone around to know who I was or that I was bringing her to see him so often. I don't know what this hold he has over women is, but he's able to convince them it's for the best that they keep any connection to him totally hidden,” Jake explains.

  “I don't understand. Why would you do that for him? Why would you go out of your way to help him have these relationships and keep the women a secret? I thought it disgusted you.”

  Jake shrugs. “Keep your friends close.”

  And your enemies closer.

  “What happens when Andrea does come forward and people start to suspect him?” I ask.

  “That's where you were supposed to come in. I knew you would keep searching. You wouldn't just take what you saw for face value. Already convinced it was LaRoche, you would keep digging and tying up those threads. After a few days, I would emerge from the woods, battered, starved, and tormented, but alive. Safe again in your arms. I would tell the harrowing story of LaRoche blackmailing me because of a secret he knows about my past. He used it for leverage to get me to cooperate with his affairs, but when I found out about the killings, he put me on his list. He abducted me, dragged me out into the woods, and kept me hostage there. But I managed to escape. It's a convincing story, especially with someone like you standing beside me, telling them everything you already suspected about him.”

  “And the town would be desperate to put the case to rest. It wouldn't take much to convince them.”

  “As confused as your version of the events is, it makes enough sense to warrant an arrest and keeping him in jail during a long, drawn-out murder investigation. And you probably know what happens to lawmen in jail,” he says.

  “They'd kill him,” I confirm.

  “Most likely. But if he did happen to survive, he would likely be convicted. Even if he wasn't, he'd never be able to show his face around here again. I'd have everything I ever wanted,” Jake tells me.

  “What is it that you've always wanted?” I ask.

  Jake turns around to face the vignettes. He gestures to them, gazing at them with an affectionate smile on his face.

  “This,” he says warmly. Like he’s talking about a family. My blood is ice.

  “To kill people?” I ask. “Innocent people, who have done absolutely nothing to wrong you? Why would you want that?”

  The smile fades as he looks at me. “No. No, no. That's not it. This is an evolution, a discovery. What you don't know is this isn't all of them. No one else knows that. There are others. Scattered in fields and woods, floating in the water. Across five states, there are others. I started with them for the sheer purpose of elimination.”

  “What were you eliminating?” I ask. I look around the room and back at him. “It was all a lie, wasn't it? Everything you told me. All those stories were lies. That's what this is about.”

  Jake gives a short, mirthless laugh and walks over to the edge of the Christmas scene. He stares at the older man.

  “My family was horrible. My father was a cruel, abusive alcoholic raised by a cruel, abusive alcoholic. Most of the time, he wasn't even home. He stayed at the bar and crawled his way up to the apartment at night.”

  “I went to the cemetery. There are no graves for your mother or any siblings. Are they real?”

  “Oh, they're real. They aren't buried there. I don't know where they are. My mother preferred my sister. She was the only thing that mattered. She got everything she wanted, including every existing drop of my mother's love. There was nothing left for the rest of us. My brother was distant and cold. He stayed away most of the time. We grew up here.”

  He looks around like he's gazing up at the entire house. “This was my home. No one knew that, of course. Nobody in town realized people still lived all the way out here. Few people in town even knew my siblings existed, and only Cole Barnes ever met my mother. They knew me because my father dragged me to the bar to put me to work by the time I was old enough to wash a dish.”

  “What happened to them?” I ask.

  Jake leaves the Christmas scene and walks over to the dinner table. He runs his fingers along the hair of the woman, and my body shudders.

  “The only solace I had when I was young was my grandmother.” He looks up at me with a smile. “She was very real.”

  I nod. As much as everything inside me wants to lash out, I'm staying in control. Keeping Jake calm is the only way I can hope to stay alive another minute, another hour, and find out what I need to know. Building his trust back up will be what gets me out of here.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  It sinks in there are no elderly corpses in the room. No women over slightly older middle age. Just the men and women, the young men and women, and the girl with the baby. Jake's mother and father. His sister and brother. And someone else. But no grandmother. He didn't need to create her because she was real.

  “I know. The quilt in the cabin. My favorite one. She made that, didn't she? It has fabric in it from the dress she was wearing in the picture of Easter morning.”

  “Yes. But that wasn't Easter. We never celebrated any holidays as a family. At least, not my parents and siblings. My grandmother would try to do things for me when I got shoved with her. I spent as much time with her as a possibly could, and when I was lucky, my parents would just leave me with her for days at a time.”

  “Why did no one in town mention to me the cabin I'm staying in belongs to your family?” I ask.

  “Because they don't know. My mother was my grandmother's only child. She loved her, but she also knew the type of person she really was. She saw that my mother only truly cared about my sister and didn't want anything to do with her sons, especially me. Pretty quickly, it became obvious any acknowledgement of me or affection toward me meant my mother took me away, and my grandmother didn't see me for a while. I was always in worse condition the next time she saw me. So, she stopped talking about me. Stopped asking about me or showing any sign of caring about me. Until my mother would leave. Then she showered me with love, fed me as much as I could eat, and encouraged me to play. I never got any of that any other time. Whenever my parents would show up to get me, I pretended to be miserable. If they stayed for dinner, my sister sat at the table with my mother and grandmother while my father put me downstairs with the dog. He barked if I got near the door. They didn't want me running out and going into town. But the better I got at acting like my grandmother's house was hell, the more time I got there.”

  “But then your grandmother died,” I guess.

  Jake nods.

  “When I lost her, everything was taken away. What I thought was a bad life was nothing compared to the way things got after that. It got worse and worse until finally, everything shattered. My brother walked away, and we never heard from him again. One day I came home from school, and my mother and sister were gone. They had just packed up everything and left, abandoning me here with my father and nothing else.”

  “If you went to school, how did nobody know what was going on? How did nobody know where you lived or the type of family you had?” I ask.

  “This town has secrets, Emma. And it keeps them for others. People believe what they're told and close their minds off to everything else. It means I don't have to confront things I don't want to think about, and they can protect what they don't want other people to know about themselves.”

  “The entire town failed you,” I frown. Even if he did horrific things, I still have to keep up appearances that I care about him. “Someone should have protected you.”

  “But they didn't. After my mother left with my sister, my father just got drunker and angrier. More often than not, I was the one running the bar because he just couldn't do it. He died when I was nineteen. I inherited the bar, and I've been living my life ever since.”

  He's had his back to me as he speaks, but now he turns and looks over his shoulder with a hint of a smile. “Do you really believe it was that simple?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “Good. You're catching on.” He turns back to the dinner scene, then moves over to the board game, leaning down to clean up the pieces scattered across the floor by the ornament I threw. “The first time I killed someone, it was a man I watched get drunk at the bar and then hit his wife. It brought up all the memories of everything I went through with my family. I hated the idea of anyone else hurting their family the way mine did each other. I held him back as his wife jumped in the car and drove away, then let him stumble down the street, making sure people saw him leave. Then I went around the opposite side of the building and down the alley so I could meet him a few blocks down. When they found him, they called it a mugging. That started my habit.”

  “You became a vigilante.”

  “In a way. I told you, it was about elimination. I eliminated those people who hurt others and were perpetuating families that were toxic and destructive. I hated the idea of any other child having to go through what I did, or more being born into paths that would just lead them to being the same type of people as the parents who came before them. Each killing cauterized the wound. I stopped it before it could happen. But after a while, I realized I wasn't really doing myself any good with it. I wasn't moving forward in my life. Killing those people was still me having to give something up, still doing what was right for other people rather than what was right for me. So, two years ago, I decided to change that.”

  He looks me straight in the eye.

  “I never had a happy home or a happy family. I never got to make any of the memories children are supposed to make. If you ever look through all the photo albums in my house, you'd see a lot of pictures of my grandmother, my sister, some of my father. But there are only a few of me. They are all at my grandmother's house, and she hid them away so my mother would never find them and know she took them. I found them in the cabin years after she died, and my mother didn't step forward to claim the property. I wanted to take the quilt with me, too, but something told me to leave it. It's like still having her there.”