“Anyway,” he continues, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, “he wouldn’t let it go. And Tallulah . . . well, Tallulah had left Mulligan that same year. He had a way of beating her into submission, threatening everyone she cared about if she ever talked, but after seeing what happened to those boys that night, that was it. She took her kid and got the hell out of there.
“She refused to have any contact with her husband at all, in fact,exceptwhen it came to this case. Eventually, she contacted him privately, blackmailed him to close the case. Said she’d stayed quiet about his abuse far too long. Now that she had gotten her daughter far enough away from him, she would do whatever it took to see that the boy, too, was free from that life. Let the report show Enzo Hawkins as being dead with the others, and allow him to live the new life he deserved. Otherwise he’d be spending who knows how long defending himself, and more than that, he’d always have his past tying him down in some way.”
That’s the second time he’s mentioned Grams in relation to these boys. My mind feels like a cogwheel, turning and turning until it hurts, trying to keep working even as more info is dumped onto the cogs. “What did Grams have to do with the Hawkins family?”
Another scoff, another grunt. He shakes his head, taking a step closer to me. “Tallulah was those brothers’ savior, child. They never could get to a hospital for their wounds, and with your grams being a nurse, she did the best she could for them. Stitching them up, about saving their lives every other week since their mom started taking off. Tallulah was practically their mother, for all terms and purposes. Even tried to report the abuse on several occasions but, well, you can imagine how that turned out with her husband as the chief.”
It’s then that a vivid image flashes in my mind. A piece of a dream. A piece of their memories.
We sneak around the back of the garden, as always, and I pray the shed’s unlocked when I reach for its handle. Thankfully it opens on the first try. I wince as I carefully lower Tommy onto the dusty cot, then turn to him with a questioning look. He nods, and I don’t waste any time before darting back outside, picking a small handful of rosemary from the garden and setting it on the neighbor’s window ledge as practiced.
We all know the drill. Now all he and I have to do is wait.
I race back to the shed, weakly collapsing beside my little brother. “See now?” I hear myself whisper, my eyes heavy as I rest my head against the hard wall. “We’ll be good and fixed up in no time. Nothing at all to worry about.”
“Grams,” I mutter, almost to myself. “She was their neighbor, wasn’t she?”
Mr. Blackwood only nods. My body feels heavy, the full weight of me sinking into the mattress as another piece of a dream dawns on me.
“There, there,” a gentle voice coos. The tension in my body eases as I remember where I am. The shed. Our neighbor’s land.
“Tommy,” I murmur, my voice wrangled as I try to lift my head.
“Shh.” The hand guides me back down. I manage to turn, just enough to see the boy lying beside me. Tommy’s bare waist is wrapped in white cloth, his eyes closed, chest rising and falling in his deep sleep.
He’s okay.
We’re okay.
For now.
“As I was saying,” Mr. Blackwood’s voice yanks me back again, and I have to shake my head to snap out of it completely, “Enzo Hawkins was not seventeen when he died. He had moved out of state, started a life of his own, and he was a good and grown twenty-seven years old the day of his actual death.”
Twenty-seven. I swallow, my throat suddenly painfully dry as I begin connecting more pieces together. “What . . . what happened to him? How did he die?”
The bed shifts as Mr. Blackwood lowers himself beside me. He’s quiet for a long moment, and I’m almost about to repeat the question when I hear his voice, soft and distant. “It was a car accident. Would have been, oh, forty-five, fifty years ago now.”
I turn my head at that, looking carefully at this man who sits beside me. This man with his cane, who lost his leg years ago in a car accident. “He was with you, wasn’t he?”
He doesn’t say anything right away, but he doesn’t need to. I know the answer. Eventually, once the room is filled with the heaviness of his silence, he speaks. “He wasn’t onlywithme, child. I was the one responsible for his death.” He looks at me solemnly, nothing but guilt and sadness in his eyes, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much torment written on a person’s face before. It practically eats him alive right in front of me, making my own chest want to cry. “I’d been drinking—go figure—and he didn’t know. Got behind the wheel thinking everything was just dandy, ‘cause shit if I don’t know how to handle my liquor, right?” He lets out a dark, sardonic chuckle. “But it gets worse.”
My stomach twists, the anticipation hurting enough in itself. My throat’s so dry that my voice is barely a croak when I ask, “What happened?”
“After the vehicle flipped, we were both in bad shape, but he—” He stops, swallows. “He was the worst. A piece of metal had lodged itself right in his chest and . . .” He closes his eyes, squeezes them hard like it could force the memory from getting too close. I’ve never seen the town’s angry Mr. Blackwood so pained, so vulnerable. “We weren’t as lucky with paramedics back then as your generation is now, but a passerby saw us and came to help. They tried to pull Enzo out first, but he wouldn’t let them. Straight up refused, insisting they get me first. All I had was a goddamn torn leg, but the bastard insisted the guy pull me out first anyway. So he did.”
He coughs as he takes another sip of whiskey, but he chugs right on through it. I don’t know how much he manages to drink before he finally puts the flask down. “The guy barely got me settled onto the sidewalk when the whole thing blew to shreds.” He pauses, shakes his head, his next words weak, broken. “It should’ve been me.”
I can hardly breathe as I try to process all of this. Last night comes crawling back into view, images ofhim, his bare chest and torso, all of those scars. My dreams, it can’t be a coincidence they’d begun just after he saved me in that lake. Just after the night my bond to him had been formed.
And in every dream, I’d felt everything the boy had felt. It’s Enzo’s mind I’d been inside. Enzo’s memories.
If my heart wasn’t quite literally broken right now, I’m certain it’d be in a frenzy, slamming against my chest and trying to beat its way out.
Chapter 41
“Tell me about the notes,” I demand. My lungs are losing oxygen as desperation for more answers consumes me.
“The notes, right.” Mr. Blackwood rubs his face with his palms, exhaustion taking over his expression as he seems to gather his thoughts. “Like I said, I tried to ignore Enzo’s calls to me. Even started seeing a therapist, convinced I was losing my mind. But one night, as I sat at my desk writing up a report on my latest case, the pen in my hand suddenly . . . well, it took on a life of its own.” He shakes his head, mindlessly tracing over the folder with a finger. “That’s the only way to explain it, really. My hands still held the pen, sure. But suddenly, I wasn’t the one writing, controlling the motions. One after another, the notes wrote themselves. I about had a heart attack. There was no way for me to deny it at that point—not when I saw the damn words, clear as day, right in front of me.”
