Down the Darkest Road

20

Lauren waited for a long time after Mendez left. She sat at the table in the great room, drinking and looking at her photograph of Leslie the night before she was taken.

She was a beautiful girl. Leah was pretty. Leslie was beautiful. There was such a fire in her, and it glowed out of her blue eyes and shone in her long dark hair. That spirit had been a force of energy everyone in the room would feel when she turned it on as part and parcel of a strong emotion.

Leslie would have done something extraordinary with her life.

Sometimes Lauren wished she could feel that energy when she thought of her daughter or when she looked at her photograph. Sometimes she thought that would be a sign to her that Leslie was still alive somewhere. Sometimes she feared it would mean she was gone and her spirit was visiting in an attempt to offer her mother some kind of comfort. It was a torment either way.

God, why can’t this ever be over? she wondered for the millionth time.

And for the millionth time she thought Because there is no God to end it.

There had been a time when that thought would have left her feeling upset and adrift. The belief system that had been the platform of her life had suddenly dropped out from under her. Now she just felt sad. Life had been so much easier when she was naïve to the cruel realities of the world. With experience came wisdom—also known as disillusionment.

At least she had had nearly forty years of blissful ignorance. Leah hadn’t managed to even get out of childhood before the truth stripped the joy from her. Lauren wished she could have somehow spared her youngest from the experience. If she somehow could have put Leah into suspended animation that day before they realized Leslie was missing . . . Or if she could have erased any memory of her sister and the hell they had all been put through . . .

But Leah was a victim as much as Lauren was a victim because Leslie had been victimized.

She was so tired of it. Victim was not a word that she would ever have used to describe who she was. She would have said that she didn’t have it in her to be a victim, and yet she was—a truth made all the more bitter considering her reasons for coming to Oak Knoll.

How had he found her? How had he known to come to this house?

How dare he?

The anger that rose up through her was enough to choke on.

It was five after four in the morning. The world was still and dark. The wind had died. The universe seemed to be holding its breath so as not to wake the sleeping inhabitants of Earth.

The shock and fear that had grabbed hold of her earlier in the night had faded as well. A strange calm fell through Lauren now.

She sat quietly, sipping at her drink, thinking nothing would come of Detective Mendez’s good intentions. This was just another verse in a poem of futility, like a nightmare that returned again and again but with different players.

Mendez would try to be helpful, but nothing would come of it. She would become angry and frustrated. Her fury would scorch the earth of Oak Knoll like Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea.

Perhaps this was purgatory, or a living model of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.

Perhaps the time had finally come to take a different path.

Lauren took her wallet from her purse and dug a business card from a zippered compartment. GREGORY HEWITT, LICENSED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. She turned the card over and stared for a long time at what was written on the back. She should have given it to Mendez, but she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She shouldn’t have had it, but she had paid a price to get it. She had held on to it without acting on it because she believed if she did, she would be crossing a line.

But there was no line, she realized. If she had believed in that line, she never would have come here. Her boundaries had been shattered a long time ago by Roland Ballencoa.

She put the slip of paper back in her wallet and turned her attention to the gun on the table beside her bag. Without allowing herself to think at all, she picked it up and felt the familiar weight of it in her hand. It was still loaded, and there was still a round in the chamber.

She checked the safety, then slid the gun inside the special zippered compartment on the side of her handbag. She got up and left the house, got in her car and drove.

The streets were empty and quiet in this last hour before dawn. She felt as if she could almost hear the collective breathing of all the sleeping people in the houses she drove past.

The address she was looking for was in an older, nondescript neighborhood between downtown and the college. She imagined a mix of people lived there—students, people who worked at McAster, people who worked at the lamp factory on the outskirts of town. No professors here. No doctors or lawyers.

The house she was looking for was on a corner, a Craftsman-style bungalow. A plain brown wren of a house, it had a low porch and a detached one-car garage that shielded it from the neighbor.

Her heart beating hard in her chest, she drove around the block, spotting a shed at the back of the property. She went around the block, crossed the main street, around the next block, and parked on the side street with a clear view of the house.

The home of Roland Ballencoa.