C: It’s a trail but… Listen, that man is going to hurt her. Sometimes you just know things.

  D: Okay, we’ll have an officer swing by to check it out.

  C: No, not to swing by. Hurry, goddammit.

  CHAPTER 25

  Friday, 9:30 a.m.

  I WAS THE GIRL WHO left. Who did not look back.

  I did not knock on the door to my old home, asking to look around. I did not peer into the windows to check for a basement door. After I left the station the previous evening, I got right in my car and started driving. And I did not stop until I was well outside Widow Hills.

  I would not return.

  I was born with a healthy dose of self-preservation. I let it be, just like Emma Lyons told me to do.

  I left it all behind, stopping at the same motel I’d stayed at the night before, then hitting the road again at the first sign of light.

  * * *

  MY SHOULDER WAS KILLING me. The adrenaline yesterday must’ve covered the pain from where Nathan had grabbed me—and pulled. Stretching my arm beyond its capabilities. I took a generic painkiller but had to drive carefully, keeping my left arm down low on the steering wheel.

  I called Bennett on speaker while I drove, knowing he would be up and at work by now.

  He answered right away, and I could hear the overhead announcements of the hospital in the background. “Hey,” he said, “I went by your place last night. I’ve been worried.”

  “So, that’s what I’m calling about. I’m on my way home, but I was in Widow Hills.”

  He paused for a beat. “You what?”

  “I wanted to tell you that I’m okay.” Something I should’ve known to do days ago. “I mean, I was almost hurt. I’m a little bit hurt. Slightly sore. It’s a long story, but I’m almost home now.”

  He listened as I told him about finding the pile of material in Nathan’s things, about going to the reporter in Kentucky, about Nathan following me. But he cut me off abruptly.

  “Who’s Nathan?” he asked. And I realized there were still so many things I had kept for myself.

  “Sean Coleman’s son. He’d been obsessed with me for years,” I said.

  “Jesus, Liv.”

  “Well, I’m okay now.”

  For a moment, I could hear only him breathing. “Heard you called my sister.”

  “Yeah, thanks for that. I think I’m good, though. Nathan’s in custody.”

  “Do they think he killed his father?”

  “I don’t know. I’m meeting with the detective later today. But yeah, seems that way.”

  I promised to call him when I made it back. I kept moving, yearning for home. For the detective to close the investigation, and something more I’d realized on the drive: I’d longed for the permanence of the place, and this house, and these people. Something I wanted to return to.

  * * *

  MY STOMACH DROPPED WHEN I saw the shape of a car as I pulled into my driveway. Imagining the journalists or reporters who might be waiting around, hoping to catch a glimpse. The girl from Widow Hills, person of interest in a murder investigation. How long until their interest petered out again?

  But as I drew closer, I recognized the car—and the person sitting on my porch steps, waiting for me.

  Bennett stood when I exited the car. “Had to see it for myself,” he said, “that you were really still in one piece.”

  “More or less,” I said, hooking my overnight bag over my right shoulder. I looked behind me at the empty road. “Anyone else been by recently?”

  “Just your neighbor, looking for you. Think he saw me sitting out here.” He looked toward Rick’s house, through the trees. “I filled him in. At least with the gist of it.”

  When I passed Bennett, I noticed the dark circles under his eyes, the tension in his shoulders. I unlocked the door and let him in, then immediately dropped my bag. His smile was subdued, and I worried it was me, that I’d missed another nuance of our relationship.

  “Are we okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sorry, Elyse’s family came to the hospital this morning, I didn’t get the chance to tell you earlier. Pretty somber day. I’m just trying to shake it.”

  “Oh, I wish I could’ve been there.” I wanted to tell them that Elyse was my friend; that she brightened my life in the short time I’d known her; that I missed her; that I was sorry.

  “She had a history of abuse, but they thought she’d kicked it. Her family had gotten her help after her previous job, and they swore she was clean… but, I guess…” A shudder, all the things we had missed under the surface of one another.

  “What had she been taking?”

  “From the hospital? Opioids, benzodiazepines. What you might guess. They said she’d had a problem with opioids in the past, after a car accident in her late teens.” Like my mother, then. God, how had I not seen it? Elyse had even told me about her accident, her experience in the hospital that had led her to this career in the first place. She had given me enough to piece together the truth, and I’d missed it. “Best guess, she was selling the rest.” I’d thought I knew her better than that. But we all had our secrets.

  Bennett stretched, working out a kink in his neck. He moaned. “I got someone to cover for me now, but I have to work the evening shift.”

  “You okay to work?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna have to be. We had to ask the ER to lend us some help from their department to cover Elyse’s position, and apparently, her replacement just quit, too. She was friends with Elyse.” He sighed. “It’s hitting the whole hospital hard.”

  “Yeah.” I could feel it coming on here, too: the grief, mixed with the guilt.

  He looked around the house. “Will you be okay here?”

  Nathan was being held in Kentucky, and Rick was home, presumably watching. “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m so glad it’s over,” he said, voice lower. “That you’re okay.”

  My stomach sank. “It’s not over. It’s going to be chaos.” In a way, it was just getting started. Nathan might be gone, but people were still watching. The girl from Widow Hills was a victim, a witness—if there wasn’t a deal, I might have to testify. I’d have to ask the detective about that, but one thing was certain: It was not over yet.

  He frowned. “I meant the part where someone was… watching you. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I left you alone here.”

  I looked at him. “None of us knew,” I said. None of us guessed at the reach of that story—across time and distance. Across a generation. Stories like this, they didn’t end. They only grew.

  He smiled when he left. A promise to see me this weekend, to catch up, like everything was normal now. I let him believe it. His hope was contagious.

  * * *

  RICK DIDN’T COME OVER after Bennett left, though I knew he’d been looking for me.

  I crossed the boundary between our yards, sidestepping that black hole of gravity where Sean Coleman had waited and died. I could hear movement inside Rick’s house, something dragging against the wood floor, and I knocked. “Rick? It’s me. It’s Liv.”

  “One minute,” he said, before opening the front door.

  He looked the same as always, but behind him, there was a duffel bag on the wood floor. His hands hovered just over my shoulders before dropping. “Been waiting on you to get back. Your friend, there, he told me what happened. Nina, too. But I wanted to hear it from you, that you’re okay.”

  I leaned against the doorjamb, able to be honest here. “It was horrible,” I said, the word scratching at my throat.

  He nodded, gesturing for me to come inside. “He’s locked up now, though?”

  I walked across the living room and sank into his couch, staring at the bag on the floor, trying to process. “Yes. He’s being held in Kentucky.” I gestured to his luggage. “What’s going on, Rick?”

  “Well,” he said, and now he was looking off to the side, out the window, his throat moving. “I thought I might try to talk to my son.” He shuffled his feet. “He’s in Atlanta, it’s not too far.”

  “Now?” I asked. “Today?”

  “Well,” he said. “As long as you’re okay. I was waiting on you.”

  It seemed that the events of the last few days had shaken something loose in everyone. Like we could all see the potential for harm—how the past inevitably snowballs into the present. But that this moment, in turn, would soon enough become the past, the start of a new chain of events. “No, that’s good. That’s a good idea.”

  And then he stepped forward, dropped his voice. “The weapon, is it gone?”

  I nodded once, stoically.

  “I’m not sure if we should’ve done that,” he said.

  I wondered then whether he was leaving right now to avoid the questions, the lingering missing pieces of the investigation that we had disrupted with our distrust for each other—and ourselves.

  “It’s done,” I said. “It’s gone.” Left behind in a hospital room, scrubbed clean and disappeared. Something that I now knew could’ve linked Nathan to the crime instead.

  “Liv, he must’ve been in your house.”

  I froze. Held my breath. Finally putting the pieces together. Rick was right—for Nathan to have used my box cutter, he must’ve been in my house while I slept. He worked in security. He could do it. I shuddered. That feeling of a person who had been inside when I’d returned from the hospital. The noise at the back of my house after I’d found out Elyse had died. How many times had he been in there, watching?

  How close had I come to a very different type of story? Before, presumably, Sean Coleman showed up?

  “He’s gone now,” I said. “Either way, he can’t hurt me.” Though that wasn’t entirely true. He could try to spin his story, tell anyone who would listen. But he was obsessed. He was a killer. He was not to be trusted. And, as Emma Lyons had told me, there was nothing to corroborate his claims.

  “Go ahead, Rick. Before you’re stuck driving at night.”

  “It’s just, I want to be sure. You could hurt yourself still, out in the yard… No one would hear you.”

  I hadn’t had a sleepwalking incident since waking up over Sean Coleman’s dead body, and I was starting to believe that I wouldn’t. That I’d successfully exorcized whatever trauma had taken hold of me, whatever had been threatening to resurface. Anyway, I had that extra prescription from Dr. Cal, should I need it.

  “It’s under control,” I said, standing from his couch.

  He nodded. “All right,” he said, dragging his bag out the door, locking up after I followed him outside.

  I wasn’t entirely sure of his reason for leaving right then. Whether it was to avoid having to lie about the box cutter, or because he couldn’t stand to waste another moment. Because I also understood how the present could suddenly seem urgent. That feeling of wanting to rush straight for it. How I’d wanted to come straight home. How I’d known exactly whom to call.

  Rick walked to his car, hefted his bag into the back seat. “There’s a spare key in the shed, Liv. You need anything, you just help yourself.”

  “That’s a terrible place for a key, Rick,” I said.

  He grinned as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Hey, Rick, I was wondering. What was I saying the night you found me outside? You said you heard me?” I had always wondered what I had been yelling the first night Rick found me. If I was calling my mother’s name, the nightmare of being trapped underground, waiting to be found, kicked close to the surface with the arrival of the box of her things.

  He turned his gaze out the windshield, and I saw his throat move, the muscles in his forearms twitching as he settled his hands on the wheel. “Get away from me,” he said, and a chill ran through me. “That’s what you said.”

  I stepped back. A bad dream. A nightmare. Like I could see something coming for me. I ran both hands up my arms, brushing away the goose bumps.

  “Drive safe, Rick,” I said, and he raised his hand one last time before driving out of sight.

  Chances were, it was the nightmare. Calling out into the night to no one.

  But I couldn’t shake the image of Nathan Coleman in my yard even then. Thursday evening, before the murder. I wondered exactly how much he knew. How much he’d be willing to say.

  How much he would be believed.

  OBSERVER ONLINE

  August 28, 2020

  Posted: 2:33 P.M.

  Sean Coleman’s Son Arrested in Widow Hills: New Details Emerge in Murder Investigation

  By Alice Perry

  OBSERVER ONLINE previously shared details about the recent case of Sean Coleman’s death in Central Valley, North Carolina, just outside the property of Olivia Meyer, the woman once known in the media as Arden Maynor, the girl from Widow Hills (link: see previous article). Twenty years ago, Sean Coleman was the man who found Arden Maynor clinging to a storm grate. Arden/Olivia had been viewed as a person of interest in the case.

  However, sources inside the police department are now sharing that Nathan Coleman, Sean Coleman’s twenty-nine-year-old son, has been arrested for stalking and assault in Widow Hills, Kentucky. Per the incident report, charges were pressed by Olivia Meyer.

  There’s no word yet on how this might connect to the active investigation into the death of Sean Coleman, but sources say more charges may be forthcoming.

  CHAPTER 26

  Friday, 4:30 p.m.

  I CALLED DETECTIVE RIGBY MYSELF.

  I knew she wanted to talk as soon as I was back in town, and I was eager to find out what was happening with Nathan’s case. Whether there was closure in the immediate future; whether something was just about to crack open.

  It felt like a delicate balance, like we were one step from everything tipping over again. There was no containing who I was any longer, but I could keep the rest from spinning out of control.

  Detective Rigby’s steps echoed as she walked up my porch. I was waiting for her in the open doorway, and I watched her carefully this time—watched as she took everything in, seeing everything, making assessments, while trying to give away nothing.

  “How are you doing, Olivia?”

  “All right,” I said, holding the door open for her to step inside. “Can I get you something? Water, juice?”

  “I’ll take water,” she said, following me into the kitchen.

  “Any news on Nathan’s case?” I asked. I held my breath as I pulled a glass down from the cabinet.

  “Well,” she said, taking a seat at the kitchen table, “he’s being held in Kentucky on the assault and stalking charges. We can try to build a case in the meantime. These things take time, though.”

  “I thought it was pretty cut-and-dried,” I said. I hoped it wasn’t the lack of a murder weapon. Currently in some hospital disposal holding area.

  “Main problem is he says he wasn’t in town at the time of his father’s death. And we can’t prove he was yet.”

  “Isn’t there a shed back there? At the edge of that property on Haymere?” I asked, gesturing toward the back of my house. “He could’ve been staying there, right?”

  She cut her eyes to me again, in the way I’d come to understand: that I had just given something away about myself. Like she had been trying to unravel me, as I had her. Both of us trying to prove ourselves here.

  I turned on the faucet with my elbow, then held the glass under the sink.

  “Why are you holding your arm like that?” she asked.

  “Oh.” I handed her the glass. “It’s been getting worse. I thought it was okay yesterday, but I can barely move it now.”

  “Did Nathan do that?”

  I nodded. “He grabbed me when he was chasing me. I felt something snap, or pop, but it was okay until this morning.”

  She stood up, stepped closer. “Did you get it checked out?”

  “No. I can take some pain medicine, see if that helps first.”

  She left her glass in the sink. “It can help the case, Olivia. If Nathan harmed you during the assault, it will help in the trial. We need to get it documented.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll get it checked out.”

  She took her keys from the pocket of her slacks. “I can’t let you drive like that. Come on, I’ll take you.”

  * * *

  THE SECOND TIME I was in Detective Rigby’s car, I had a better handle on her.

  She continued the conversation as we pulled out of my driveway. “If there’s anything else you’re not telling me, now would be the time, Olivia.”

  Her tone could be savage; it was growing on me. I thought we might’ve been friends under different circumstances. But I didn’t know how much she knew, or just suspected.

  “Did you find the papers in his hotel? He’s been obsessed with me for years.”

  “We did,” she said. “And like I said, the folks in Widow Hills have charged him with stalking and assault. I’m asking about anything else here.”

  Detective Rigby wasn’t convinced yet, though it seemed she was trying. I knew how it could be, to try to shift your perspective, to allow the possibility of a different truth—and to have someone else do it for you. But I needed her to see that it was neither me nor Rick but an angry Nathan Coleman.

  “I think Sean Coleman was trying to warn me that his son was coming. And that’s why Nathan killed him.” He had motive, he had drive, he had years of pent-up anger, revenge, desire—for himself and what he was owed.

  “Sean Coleman was killed where he stood. There didn’t seem to be a struggle. I think there was an element of surprise,” she said.

  “Look at the size of Nathan.” He’d be able to overpower someone fairly easily. He’d done it to me.

  “Mm,” she said, looking at me briefly instead.

  In my head, I could pull all the pieces together, with him at the center. But Detective Rigby was reluctant. Everything could be explained away by Nathan. He could’ve gotten into my house; he seemed to know the area, kept hanging around. He could’ve taken the box cutter, confronted his father, tried to frame the whole thing on me—another type of story, like he said. A different one, that set him as victim this time, that he could exploit for his benefit.