I didn’t knock. I didn’t check in at the front desk. I walked through the precinct like a storm front, the kind that snaps power lines and tears roofs off houses.
The station was buzzing with the low-level hum of a murder investigation in full swing—phones ringing, printers churning out reports, the squawk of radios. But I tuned it all out. I had a target lock on the glass-walled office at the back of the bullpens.
Julian was inside, standing by a whiteboard covered in crime scene photos. Sarah Miller’s sleeping face. Ms. Albright’s tea party. He was tracing a line between them with a dry-erase marker, his posture slumped with the weight of the dead.
I shoved the door open. It banged against the stopper with a violence that made half the squad room look up.
Julian spun around, the marker slipping from his hand and clattering to the floor.
“Elara? What the hell are you doing?”
“You lied to me,” I said. My voice wasn’t loud, but it was vibrating with enough heat to crack the glass. “You sat in that diner, looked me in the eye, and told me the feral boy was a ghost story.”
“Lower your voice,” he hissed, glancing at the open bullpen where Officer Miller and the others were pretending not to listen. He crossed the room in two long strides and slammed the door shut, clicking the lock. “You can’t just barge in here and—”
“Elias,” I said.
The name hit him like a physical blow. He flinched, his eyes widening, the pupils blowing out until the green was swallowed by black. He took a step back, hitting the edge of his desk.
“Who told you that name?” he asked, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper.
“Does it matter? Was it Higgins? Was it the library archives? Or was it the wall in my bedroom where your brother lived while you were sleeping in a warm bed?”
“Stop it,” he warned.
“No, I won’t stop. You knew. When I told you about the Sandman, about the boy in the walls, you knew exactly who I was talking about. And you let me think I was crazy. You let me doubt my own mind because you didn’t want to admit that your family’s dirty secret is currently murdering women in my backyard.”
“He’s dead!” Julian shouted.
The sound echoed in the small room. Outside the glass, heads turned again. Julian didn’t care this time. He ran a hand down his face, dragging the skin, looking suddenly ten years older.
“He’s dead, Elara,” he repeated, the anger draining out of him, replaced by a hollow, aching exhaustion. “He died twenty years ago. In the flood of ‘99. I was there. I saw the river take the shed.”
“Did you see a body?” I challenged, stepping closer. I was in his space now, breathing the same stale air.
“The river was cresting at twenty feet. It took trees. It took cars. You think it would give back a fourteen-year-old boy?”
“Show me,” I demanded.
“What?”
“The file. The report. If he’s dead, there’s paperwork. Show me the proof, Julian. Or are you too afraid of what isn’t in there?”
He stared at me for a long moment, his jaw working. I saw the conflict warring behind his eyes—the cop versus the brother. The investigator versus the griever. Finally, he turned to a filing cabinet in the corner. It wasn’t the standard metal issue; it was a locked drawer in his personal desk.
He fished a key from his pocket, unlocked it, and pulled out a thin, battered manila folder. It looked like it had been handled a thousand times. The edges were soft, the tab bent.
He threw it on the desk between us.
“Read it,” he said. “If you think I’m a liar, read it.”
I opened the file.
It was pitifully thin. A Missing Persons report filed by a social worker, not a family member. A statement from Julian’s father, barely three sentences long, claiming the boy had “run off” before the storm. And then, the recovery report.
I scanned the page, my eyes snagging on the photo stapled to the back.
It was a picture of a sneaker. A beat-up, mud-caked Converse high-top, black canvas, size nine. It was resting on a riverbank, tangled in drift wood.
“A shoe?” I looked up at him, incredulous. “That’s your proof? You declared him dead because of a shoe?”
“It was his shoe,” Julian said softly. He was looking at the photo, his expression unguarded and raw. “I bought them for him. With my allowance. I hid them under the porch of the guest cottage because my dad wouldn’t let him have new clothes. He wrote his name on the inside of the tongue. Elias.”
“People lose shoes, Julian. Especially in a flood.”
“We searched for weeks,” he said, his voice thickening. “I searched. I walked that riverbank every day for a month. I called his name until I lost my voice. He never answered. He never came back.”
“Because he wasn’t in the river,” I said, slamming the file shut. “He was in my house. He was eating Snickers bars and watching me sleep. He didn’t die, Julian. He hid. He hid from the town that treated him like a stray dog. He hid from your father. And maybe… maybe he hid from you.”
“Don’t,” he whispered.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my anger softening into something sharper, more painful. “Back then. We were together. I told you everything. Why didn’t you tell me you had a brother?”
Julian walked to the window, staring out at the rain-slicked parking lot. He crossed his arms over his chest, a defensive shield against the past.
“Because I was ashamed,” he admitted. The words hung in the air, heavy and ugly. “I was the golden boy, right? The Thorne heir. And he was… he was the mistake. My father made sure we knew the difference. I was allowed in the front door; Elias had to stay in the shed. I had dinner at the table; Elias got leftovers on a paper plate.”
He turned back to me, his eyes wet.
“I loved him, Elara. I did. But I was a kid, and I was a coward. I didn’t stand up for him. I just… I brought him shoes. And when he died, I felt relieved.”
The confession sucked the air out of the room.
“Relieved?”
“Because I didn’t have to feel guilty anymore,” he said, his voice breaking. “I didn’t have to look at him and know that my life was built on his misery. I could just mourn him. Mourning is cleaner than guilt.”
I looked at him, and my heart broke a little. I saw the boy he had been—trapped in his own kind of glass house, forced to watch injustice and do nothing.
“But he’s not dead,” I said gently. “And that relief? That was a lie, too.”
“You don’t know that,” he snapped, the defensive walls slamming back up. “You found a candy wrapper and a hole in the wall. That proves you had a stalker, Elara. It doesn’t prove it was Elias.”
“Who else would it be?” I asked. “Who else knew the games? Who else hated us—the ‘Hill Toppers’—enough to turn our childhood fantasies into torture chambers?”
“It could be anyone!” he shouted, pacing the small office. “A drifter. A psycho who found your old journals. Hell, it could be someone obsessed with you.”
“It is someone obsessed with me,” I said. “Elias. He carved our initials into the trees. E + E. Mrs. Higgins told me.”
“Higgins is a poisonous old bat who hasn’t been lucid since the Bush administration.”
“She was lucid enough to know about the shed,” I countered. “She was lucid enough to warn me that you’d protect your family name over the truth.”
Julian stopped pacing. He looked at me with a cold, hard stare.
” Is that what you think I’m doing? Covering it up?”
“I think you desperately want him to be dead,” I said. “Because if he’s alive… if he’s the Sandman… then everything he’s done, every drop of blood he’s spilled, is on your family’s hands. You created him, Julian. You and your father and this whole rot-infested town.”
“Get out,” he said.
“Julian—”
“I said get out!”
He grabbed the file off the desk and shoved it into the drawer, locking it with a savage twist of his wrist.
“You’re a civilian,” he said, his voice trembling with suppressed rage. “You’re a witness. You are not an investigator on this case. If you go near Higgins again, or if you try to contact the press with these… theories… I will arrest you for interference. Do you understand?”
I stared at him. The boy I loved was gone. The ally I needed was gone. Standing in front of me was a Thorne. A man protecting the fortress of his denial.
“I understand,” I said coldly. “I understand perfectly.”
I turned to the door.
“Elara,” he called out just as my hand touched the knob.
I stopped, but didn’t turn around.
“If he is alive,” Julian said, his voice barely audible over the hum of the station. “If it is Elias… then he’s not just killing people. He’s punishing them. And you know who he’s going to punish last.”
“Me,” I said.
“No,” Julian whispered. “Me.”
I walked out.
The squad room was silent as I passed. Officer Miller watched me go, his eyes wide. I didn’t care.
I walked out into the rain, the water mingling with the heat on my face.
Julian was wrong. Elias wasn’t going to punish Julian last. He was saving him. Just like he saved me from the dog. Just like he saved me from the fear.
But his version of saving people involved burying them.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the burner phone. It was silent. A black brick of plastic.
“Call me,” I whispered to the gray sky. “Come on, Elias. You know I’m listening now.”
I needed to go back to the motel. I needed to regroup. But as I unlocked my car, a thought snagged in my mind like a hook.
Julian had hidden the shoes. He had bought them for Elias and hidden them under the porch of the guest cottage.
The guest cottage that washed away.
But the foundations of those old buildings were stone. They didn’t wash away.
If Elias had survived, if he had lived in the woods for twenty years… he would need a place to store things. A place that belonged to him.
I looked toward the ridge, toward the Glass House. And then I looked toward the river, where the ruins of the old logging camps lay rotting in the mud.
Julian was looking for a ghost. I was looking for a boy.
And boys always have a hideout.