Julian didn’t arrest me. He didn’t hug me, either.
After I dropped the bomb—I hid him—he had looked at me with a mixture of horror and professional detachment that hurt worse than a slap. He had put me in his cruiser, driven me back to the Timberline Motel, and told me to stay put until he could “verify the structural integrity” of my story. It was cop-speak for “I think you’ve lost your mind, but I can’t prove it yet.”
He left a uniform parked outside my door. Officer Miller. The Sheriff’s nephew. He was nineteen, looked twelve, and was currently asleep with his mouth open, drooling onto his steering wheel.
I watched him through the gap in the curtains.
“Amateurs,” I whispered.
I didn’t stay put. I couldn’t. My skin was still crawling with the phantom sensation of drywall dust, and my mind was a projector stuck on a loop of the boy in the wall. Elias. The Sandman.
I needed context. I had the pieces of the puzzle—the boy, the candy, the murder scenes—but I didn’t have the box they came in. I didn’t know why Elias was feral. I didn’t know why he hated Julian enough to turn him into a character in a twisted play.
And there was only one person in Oakhaven who knew where all the bodies were buried, mostly because she had helped dig the holes with her tongue.
Mrs. Higgins.
I slipped out the bathroom window at the back of the motel unit. It was a tight squeeze, and I landed in a puddle of oily mud, but I was free. I pulled my hood up against the drizzle and started walking.
Mrs. Higgins lived on Maple Street, in a Victorian house that was slowly being eaten by ivy. The paint was peeling in long, gray strips like dead skin.
I knocked on the door.
It opened immediately, as if she had been standing on the other side waiting for a victim.
“Elara Vance,” she croaked. She was a small woman, shrunken by age, but her eyes were hard, glittering beads of obsidian. She was wearing a housecoat that smelled of mothballs and stale lavender. “I heard you were back. The prodigal daughter returns to the scene of the crime.”
“Hello, Mrs. Higgins,” I said, forcing a smile that felt like cracking plaster. “Can I come in?”
“That depends,” she said, blocking the doorway with a cane that looked like a shillelagh. “Are you selling something? Or are you asking for something?”
“I’m asking,” I said. “About the Thornes.”
Her eyes narrowed. A slow, reptilian smile spread across her face. “Come in, then. But don’t touch the figurines. They bite.”
The inside of the house was a tomb of memories. Every surface was covered. Porcelain shepherds, glass clowns, stacks of Reader’s Digest dating back to the Nixon administration. The air was thick enough to chew, tasting of cat litter and old tea.
She led me to the living room, where a dozen clocks ticked out of sync, creating a chaotic, anxious rhythm. Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick.
“Sit,” she commanded, pointing to a sofa covered in plastic.
I sat. The plastic crinkled loudly.
“You want to know about the Thornes,” she said, lowering herself into a velvet armchair that seemed to swallow her whole. “Which one? The drunk father? The saintly mother who died of shame? Or the golden boy who thinks a badge makes him a king?”
“The other one,” I said. “Elias.”
Mrs. Higgins went still. The smile vanished. She reached for a pack of Virginia Slims on the side table, lighting one with a trembling hand.
“We don’t say that name,” she said, exhaling a plume of blue smoke. “He’s dead. Swept down the river twenty years ago. Good riddance.”
“Was he dead?” I asked, leaning forward. “Or did everyone just wish he was?”
She looked at me sharply. “You’ve got your mother’s mouth, girl. Always poking at bruises.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m writing a story,” I lied. “About the history of the valley.”
“History,” she scoffed. “It’s not history. It’s a tragedy. A Greek tragedy right here in the mud.”
She took a long drag, her eyes unfocusing as she looked at a clock on the wall.
“Old Man Thorne—Julian’s daddy—he was a mean drunk. But he was handsome. Logging Royalty. He married Martha because it was expected. She gave him Julian. Perfect, polite Julian.”
She tapped ash onto the carpet. She didn’t use an ashtray.
“But Thorne had a wandering eye. And he wandered right down to the river, to a trailer park girl named Cissy. When Cissy got pregnant, she didn’t have the decency to leave town. She stayed right there, bold as brass, and popped out a boy.”
“Elias,” I whispered.
“Elias,” she confirmed. “Thorne wouldn’t claim him. Not legally. But everyone knew. The boy had the Thorne eyes. You can’t hide eyes like that.”
I thought of the eyes in the vent. Polished river stones.
“What happened to Cissy?” I asked.
“Overdose,” Higgins said flatly. “When the boy was five. So Old Man Thorne had to take him. Martha wouldn’t let him in the house, of course. Said she wouldn’t raise a bastard under her roof.”
My stomach twisted. “So where did he live?”
Mrs. Higgins gestured vaguely toward the window, toward the woods. “They put him in the guest cottage. It’s a shed, really. No heat. No running water. They fed him, I suppose. But he wasn’t family. He was a stray dog they kept around to keep the rats away.”
I felt a phantom pain in my chest. A boy living in a shed. Watching the big house where his brother slept in a warm bed.
“Did he go to school?”
“For a bit. But he was… wild. He bit a teacher once. Stopped going when he was ten. Just roamed the woods. People started calling him the ‘Thorne Bastard.’ Then, when he got older and weirder, they called him the Sandman. Said he watched people sleep.”
“Did he?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “He was a creeper. Always looking in windows. Wanting what he couldn’t have. A family. A home.”
“He wasn’t a creeper,” I said, my voice hard. “He was lonely.”
Mrs. Higgins laughed, a dry, rattling sound. “Lonely turns to angry, dear. And angry turns to mean. That boy had a darkness in him. Everyone saw it. When the flood came in ‘99 and washed that shed away… well, nobody organized a search party. They just counted their blessings.”
“Julian’s father…” I started. “Did he care?”
“Thorne?” She snorted. “He cared about his reputation. When the boy vanished, Thorne threw a barbecue the next week. Julian was the only one who cried. I saw him. Sitting on the porch steps, waiting for his brother to come back.”
Julian.
“Julian knew,” I said. “He knew Elias was treated like an animal.”
“Julian was a child,” Higgins said, surprisingly defensive. “He did what he could. Used to sneak food out to the shed. But you can’t save someone who wants to be lost.”
“He didn’t want to be lost,” I said, standing up. The plastic on the sofa crackled, sounding like the candy wrapper. “He wanted to be found.”
I walked to the mantle, looking at a porcelain figurine of a shepherdess. It was pristine, untouched by the dust that coated everything else.
“Tell me about the games,” I said, turning back to her.
“Games?”
“The kids in town. Did they play games about him?”
“Oh, sure. ‘Run from the Sandman.’ ‘Don’t Let the River Rat Bite You.’ Cruel things. Children are cruel, Elara. You should know that. You were the Ice Queen.”
The nickname stung.
“I never hurt him,” I said.
“Didn’t you?” She looked at me with those sharp, bird-like eyes. “You lived in the Glass House. The castle on the hill. You think he didn’t look up at you and hate you for having everything he didn’t?”
“I didn’t have everything,” I said. “I had Richard.”
Mrs. Higgins went quiet. Even the clocks seemed to mute their ticking. Richard Vance’s reputation was the one thing darker than the Thorne scandal.
“Yes,” she murmured. “Richard. Maybe that’s why the boy liked you. Monsters recognize monsters.”
I froze. “What did you say?”
“I said, maybe he saw a kindred spirit. A fellow prisoner.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the arm of the chair. “There was a rumor, you know. Right before he died.”
“What rumor?”
“That he had found a girlfriend. A secret princess. Someone high up.” She looked me up and down, her gaze lingering on my expensive boots, my city coat. “Someone who lived in a glass tower.”
My breath hitched.
“He told people?”
“He didn’t speak to people,” she corrected. “But he carved things. Into trees. Into the picnic tables at the park. E + E. We all thought it was just graffiti. But maybe…”
E + E.
Elias and Elara.
“He wasn’t dead,” I said, more to myself than her. “He was in my wall. While everyone was celebrating his drowning, he was living in the crawlspace behind my headboard.”
Mrs. Higgins’ eyes went wide. For the first time, she looked genuinely unsettled. “In the wall? Of the Vance Estate?”
“Yes.”
“Then God help us,” she whispered, crossing herself with a hand gnarled by arthritis. “Because if that boy survived twenty years in the dark… he’s not a boy anymore. He’s something else entirely.”
I turned to the door. I had what I needed.
Elias wasn’t just a serial killer. He was a creation of this town. Oakhaven had starved him, beat him, and wished him dead. And when he tried to find a sliver of light—me—I had eventually left him, too.
I had left him in the wall. Alone. For fifteen years.
“One more thing,” Mrs. Higgins called out as I reached the door.
I looked back. She looked small in her velvet chair, surrounded by her porcelain army.
“Julian,” she said. “Be careful with him.”
“Why?”
“Because guilt is a heavy stone, dear. And Julian has been carrying his father’s stone for a long time. If he has to choose between the law and his blood… well, blood is thicker than water. Even river water.”
I opened the door and stepped out into the fog.
The cold air felt good against my flushed skin.
Julian had lied. He pretended Elias was a myth, a ghost story. But he knew. He knew exactly how real his brother was, and how much reason he had to burn this town to the ground.
I reached into my pocket and touched the smooth river stone.
E + E.
It wasn’t just a childhood crush. It was a pact.
And I was the one who broke it.
I started walking toward the police station. I didn’t care about the fog anymore. I didn’t care about the killer watching from the trees.
I was going to find Julian Thorne, and I was going to make him bleed the truth.