"No."
"That's not what people believe."
"I don't give a shit what people believe. I'm not in here because of her. I'm in here because they pinned the Ellison girl's murder on me."
"But what about the knife?"
"That was mine. But I didn't kill Ellison. I never met the girl." His voice cracked, just slightly, the first fracture Noah had heard in it. "Look, you said a woman came forward with a picture that you used to find those bodies. Maybe she can prove I wasn't the one. Maybe..."
"That ship has sailed. She won't talk to us. Her therapist made that clear."
The line was quiet. Noah could hear Carter breathing. He could hear the institutional hum of a building designed to hold people until the state decided what to do with them.
"Then I guess I'm out of luck." Carter's voice had gone flat again. The fracture sealed over. "Thanks for nothing."
The line went dead.
Noah stood in the hallway with the phone in his hand. Callie appeared in the kitchen doorway, reading his face.
"Who was that?"
"Carter Lyle. They've moved him to Terre Haute."
Callie didn't say anything. She didn't need to. The clock on Carter's life was running and they both knew it and neither of them had anything to stop it with.
Ruby finishedthe last of her drink and set the cup on the counter. "Thanks again for the free drink."
"Anytime," Lacey said. "I hope you find out about Fiona."
Ruby nodded and grabbed her jacket off the back of the stool. She pushed through the door and out into the evening. The parking lot was mostly empty, a few cars under the lights, the neon from the café sign casting a warm glow across the asphalt. Her car sat at the far end of the lot where she always parked, under the broken light that the owner kept saying he'd fix.
She walked across the lot, keys in hand, her mind still turning over the conversation. Fiona. Samuel. Garrett. Derek. Names that circled each other without connecting, pieces of something she couldn't see the shape of no matter how many times she rearranged them.
She unlocked the car, climbed in, started the engine, and pulled out of the lot without seeing the rag stuffed into her tailpipe.
29
The paintings covered every wall. Landscapes mostly, what tourists bought and hung above their fireplaces. Scattered between them were the other ones. The ones that weren't for sale. Darker in tone, heavier in brushwork, images that felt less like representations of a place and more like memories of something that had happened there.
Callie stood in front of one, a night scene of a road through dense forest, the trees pressing in from both sides, and studied it, trying to decide if she liked it or if it unsettled her.
"You really think the DA will allow her as a witness?" Callie asked. "I mean, psychics aren't exactly considered the most reliable source of truth."
"I don't think she's psychic," Noah said. He was sitting on a bench near the counter when a text from Kerri came in. Ethan had gone out the night before and she couldn't stop him.I'm not his mother, she'd written. Noah had checked that Ethan made it to school that morning. He had. He'd deal with it later.
"You think she had some Godly vision then?"
"No." Noah looked up from his phone and stood. "I think she has suppressed memories."
Callie turned from the painting. "You're telling me that those sketches," she said, motioning to the wall where the bog painting hung in its mismatched frame, "were her recalling seeing the bodies dumped there?"
"I didn't say she saw them. But I do think Bloomingdale Bog holds some meaning to her." He walked to the far end of the gallery and stood a few feet from the same image he'd seen through the window on the day before he found the bodies. The bridge. The water. The landscape that had led him to six dead girls preserved in peat. Standing this close, he could see the brushstrokes, the layering, the way the paint was thicker in the areas around the water as if Seraphine had gone over them again and again, unable to leave them alone.
His phone rang. He answered.
"Whereabouts? When?" He frowned. Callie watched him. "Okay. We'll check."
He hung up and pocketed the phone. "We've been keeping tabs on Tabitha Smith since she was released. She went last night to a place north of Jay and stayed overnight."
