“I wish we were there with Emily Shaw,” I said absently.
“Where?” Eli asked, looking up from the tangle of wires and plastic that was my second-favorite mic.
“The click. You know?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew exactly what I meant. He nodded. “So far, all we’re getting are more questions.”
“Where are we going tomorrow?” I asked. “What’s next? You said you’d tell me later—and it’s later.”
“We’re going to Hollow Creek, South Carolina,” he said.
“Where Emily Shaw grew up,” I filled in, sitting back and staring up at the ceiling, delving into my memory. “Shehadn’t been back to Hollow Creek in years. As far as I could tell, she didn’t have anything to do with South Carolina after she went to college.”
“I’ve found, often when you don’t have anywhere else to go, you have to start back at the beginning,” Eli said. “We tracked down her parents’ house. That’s what I was doing this afternoon. She still owned it, though it’s vacant. I’m not sure how much of Emily Shaw is real and how much is construct, but from the information that exists—and I’m not sure if it’s real or she put it there—she had parents at some point, and they lived in a house in Hollow Creek. The power bill is consistent, indicating no one lives there, the heat and air on only just enough to preserve the house itself.”
“But you found a variance?” I asked, guessing that was where Eli was going with this.
“We did. Someone’s been there. Maybe it was Emily. It seems worth checking out. It’s a thin lead, but it’s a lead.”
Eli didn’t look excited about it. He should have been, as this was pretty much all we had to go on as a next possible step. The fact that he wasn’t, told me I was missing something.
“What?” I asked. “You don’t want to go to Hollow Creek? Is it that we just got back from Knoxville and you don’t want to leave again?”
He picked up a set of tweezers and concentrated on aligning a wire with the tiny circuit board from inside the mic housing. I waited. I’d learned from interviewing people that sometimes it was good to press with questions, and sometimes you got more if you let them fill the silence.
Chapter Twelve
SYLVIE
“Ihaven’t…” He stopped. “It’s…” Another pause.
This was not like the Eli I knew. He was a lot of things, but hesitant wasn’t one of them. “Just rip the bandage off,” I suggested.
He raised his chin in agreement. “I grew up in Hollow Creek. My entire family was killed in a car crash when I was twenty-two. I haven’t been back.”
“Oh, fuck,” I said, the agony of what he described washing through me.
Tears filled my eyes, and I squeezed them shut, sensing Eli was having a hard enough time talking about this. He didn’t need my sudden grief. But damn. I was close to my family. My little brother. I couldn’t imagine all of them gone in a blink. I’d been avoiding them for the past few days, not sure what to say about my current situation. Now I wanted to hear my mother’s voice, to feel her tight hug.
“Oh, Eli,” I said. I reached out and closed my hand over his, wrapping my fingers tight. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” he said, his throat thick. “It sucked. They were…they were great. They were really great. My little sister was… God, she was so smart. She was obsessed with chess. When that show about the female chess player came out a few years ago, all I could think was, man, Annie would have loved this. She was like the only girl in the high school chess club, and she did not give a fuck. She annihilated those boys and laughed. She was so awesome.”
His fingers tightened on mine, and I swallowed hard, trying to will myself not to cry at the way he described his sister.
“My mom and dad were just…cool,” he went on. “I was never a A student, not like Annie, and they didn’t care—they encouraged me when I wanted to join the military instead of going to college. They didn’t love the idea. My mom was a teacher, so she took it particularly hard, but they made it clear that they wanted me to be happy. And they knew I was the kind of person who learns with his hands, not with a book. They always had my back. And then they were just gone.”
I didn’t know what to say. It felt like my heart was tearing open in my chest. “Thanks for telling me.” I squeezed his hand again before letting go.
He nodded, and I suspected his throat was as tight as mine.
“Do we have to go?” I asked. I hated to walk away from a lead, but if he hadn’t been back in so long, it was going to be tough.
“I can’t keep running forever,” he said. “And this isn’t about that. I don’t have anyone there anymore. Nothing except their graves. No friends, no family. It’s just a town. And we have a lead, so…”
“Eli, it’s not just a town, this is—” I felt my eyes well up again and blinked hard. “Maybe we can get somebody else to go.”
“No,” he said. “We’re not doing that. This is the only lead we’ve got right now. We’re going to follow it. I’ll deal.”
