Authors: Chelsea Cain
“When did you know for sure?” Archie asked.
“He had this fascination with eyes as a kid. Used to pop them out of Isabel’s dolls and carry them around in his pocket.” Leo looked in his glass. “The eyes. That’s when I knew for sure.”
“Gretchen came to see me tonight,” Archie said.
Leo looked up from his glass.
“Jeremy’s dead. She killed him. She brought me his eyes.”
Leo was quiet for a long time. Then he drained his glass in one swallow and set it on the sofa. “Just the eyes?” he asked.
“Jesus Christ,” said Archie. “He’s still alive.”
C H A P T E R 61
Susan’s mother was teaching a yoga class at the Arlington Club, and Susan was trying to figure out how to get Project Runway to stream on her laptop, when she looked up to see Archie Sheridan standing at the front door. She was wearing black sweatpants and a threadbare U of O T-shirt that she slept in, and Uggs. It was not the outfit she imagined wearing when she pictured Archie Sheridan showing up at her front door at night.
She closed her laptop and padded to the door.
Her bandage was off, but the two puncture wounds on her face had bruised and swollen, and a black eye was coming in. As she opened the door, she caught sight of her reflection in the glass and winced.
The porch light was on, and gnats batted against the fixture. August was the only month of the year in Portland that Susan felt comfortable outside at night without a jacket.
“What’s going on?” Susan asked. She’d been burning incense. Patchouli. And a cloud of it drifted out around her on the porch. She hoped Archie wouldn’t notice it.
“I need the phone,” Archie said.
She knew which phone he meant. But she was surprised by his confidence in the fact that she had it, that it wasn’t still sitting in her glove box unnoticed.
The only way he’d know that she’d found it was if he knew that she’d used it to try to contact Gretchen. And the only way he’d know she’d tried to contact Gretchen was if he’d been in touch with Gretchen since.
“Sure,” she said.
She left him on the porch, went into the dining room, retrieved the red purse she’d hung on the back of a chair, and returned to the front door. Then she dug out the phone and held it out to him.
He took it, and for a moment their fingers touched. Archie scrolled through the messages. He blinked in disbelief. “You texted her?” he said.
Susan shrugged and looked away. “You were in trouble.” She tried to make up for it. “I plugged it in,” she said. “I have the same charger.”
Archie finished going through the messages. “There’s nothing here,” he said. He dialed a number and walked away a few steps on the porch, the phone to his ear. Then his shoulders fell and he turned back around to face her. “The number she was calling from is disconnected. There’s no way to find her.”
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Archie steadied himself on the doorjamb. “Gretchen has Jeremy.”
Susan had seen his injuries—he had to be in pain. He was probably delirious. “Do you want to come in and sit down?” Susan asked.
“No time,” Archie said, shaking his head. “Gretchen didn’t kill Isabel Reynolds,” he added. “Jeremy did.”
Susan’s hand rose reflexively to her cheek. She flashed on
Isabel—tortured for two days before she died. It couldn’t be true. What kind of thirteen-year-old kid was capable of that?
“How do you know?” she asked.
Archie pressed his forehead against the doorjamb. “She’s going to kill him, if he’s not dead already,” he said. He lifted his head and banged it against the wood. “He played me. He told me that he remembered everything, that Gretchen killed Isabel in the woods. But Isabel was gagged. Wherever Jeremy took her, it wasn’t the woods.” He knocked his forehead against the wood again, as if trying to jog a thought loose. “If they were in the woods, he wouldn’t have had to gag her. But he would have had to take her somewhere private, somewhere he could hide the car. Somewhere people might hear if she wasn’t gagged.”
And suddenly Susan knew.
“Derek said that house on Fargo’s been empty for fifteen years,” she said. “The Rose Garden.PittockMansion. The old produce warehouse. They were all Beauty Killer crime scenes.”
Archie lifted his head off the doorjamb and looked at her.
Susan continued. “There’s a foundation for a garage. Maybe twelve years ago the garage was still there.”
“He parked the car in the old garage and tortured his sister to death over two days,” Archie said slowly. “Three-nine-seven.” He closed his eyes. “March 1997. He practically spelled it out for us.”
“You think Gretchen is there, right now?” Susan asked. “With Jeremy?” She waved a hand. “So call the SWAT team. Call everyone. Drop a bomb on the whole fucking block.”
Archie just looked at her.
“Oh, God,” she said. “You’re going by yourself, aren’t you?”
He turned and started down the steps, one hand held to his side, one hand on the railing.
Susan was filled with terror—terror of Gretchen, terror that she would never see Archie again.
She grabbed her purse from inside the door and sprinted after him. “I’m going with you,” she said. “I’ve been inside. I know the house.” She took him by the elbow, letting him lean on her. “I’m not going to let you face her alone.”
C H A P T E R 62
Gretchen is already there, clad in blue inmate denim and manacled at the table, when Archie walks into the concrete-block interrogation room at the Oregon State Penitentiary.
A month in a medically induced coma, a month of physical therapy, and he still can’t walk across a room upright.
Gretchen smiles when she sees him and the oxygen rushes out of the room as if she’d swallowed it.
Archie can’t look at her. He glances away—at the one-way glass Henry waits behind—but sees only the two of them reflected back at him.
The thick metal door closes behind Archie and locks. It’s an electronic lock, controlled by a set of buzzers near the door and a master board in the adjacent observation room. Two guards stand armed in the hallway outside. But inside, in that room, it’s just the two of them. Those were her terms.
“I’ve missed you, darling,” she says.
The smell of the room reminds Archie of the basement she kept him in, concrete and cleaning solvents. “What do you miss exactly?” he asks, his voice still hoarse from the poison she’d fed him. “The smell of my blood?”
She folds her hands on the table. “I’ve hurt your feelings,” she says.
Archie looks at her, flustered. He has no idea how to respond. “You fed me drain cleaner and cut out my spleen,” he says.
Her look of concern seems unsettlingly genuine. “How are the scars healing?” she asks.
She was still beautiful. Even in these surroundings, in the shapeless prison garb, no makeup, his body still responds to her. He hates himself for it.
“You’re high,” she says.
“I’m on painkillers,” he says. She had fed him pills in the basement, rewarding him with them when he’d choke down the drain cleaner, dropping them down his throat when he could no longer sit up to swallow them.