He
was coming, and there was nothing any of them could do to stop him.
Chapter Twelve
Devra stood at her mama’s kitchen window and stared into the forest she’d loved to play in as a child. She tried to peer through the thick green plants and oversize ferns, past the trees covered with moss, but she couldn’t see ten feet into the forest. Anyone could be out there…watching. Waiting.
“Devy, come back to the table and finish your soup,” her mama insisted as if nothing were wrong, as if they hadn’t been out of her life for fifteen years. She looked to her papa, then back to her mama again. How long would they sit there acting as if nothing had happened? Acting as if they hadn’t tossed her away, never to be thought of again. Devra sat down, unsure how to broach the subject that brought them there.
Riley took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “That sure was wonderful soup, Mrs. Miller.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling. “Devra used to help me make it all the time, before…”
Before you sent me away?
She wanted to ask them why they’d done it, demand
answers. But she couldn’t, not while Riley was there. She wasn’t ready for him to know she’d spent five years in a mental institution. She didn’t want him to look at her like her papa did, as if she were crazy.
Her mama’s cheeks flushed. “What do you do for work? How do you make your living? Tell me everything about your life, Devy.”
“I need to find out what happened to Tommy, Mama. That’s why I’m here.”
Her mama scoffed and looked away. “We don’t need to bring all that up again. That poor child. God rest his soul.”
“We do need to bring it up again. The man who killed him…he’s back. He’s coming for me.”
Her mother’s face turned ashen. Her grasp on her lemonade glass tightened as her hands began to tremble.
“I know you didn’t believe me,” Devra continued, pushing forward even though she could see her mother’s distress. “After a while, I wasn’t sure I believed me either. When I left—” she glanced at Riley, who gave her an encouraging nod “—that is, when I moved to Seattle, I attended college and tried to make a life for myself. But it happened again, a woman was killed. I moved to Portland, then San Francisco, Miami and finally New Orleans. Everywhere I went, I dreamed of death. And all the women in my dreams were killed.”
“Please, Devy, I can’t go through all that again. I just can’t. They’re the devil’s work, these dreams.”
“Enough!” her papa roared, and grasped the table so hard the tablecloth bunched beneath his fingers.
Devra stared at him, refusing to yield. “The man who killed Tommy follows me everywhere I go. He kills people. Now he’s after me.” She picked up a daisy out of the milk glass vase and threw it on the table. “He leaves me messages. My only chance to beat him is to find out the truth about what happened here fifteen years ago. About what happened to Tommy, before it happens to me.”
Her parents looked at each other, a silent message passing between them.
“How dare you come here and speak to your mama and me about such things? After everything we did for you, after all you put us through.”
“Papa, please.” Lydia stood and rushed to her husband. “You’re turning all red. It’s not good for you. You know what the doctor said.”
“What doctor?” Devra asked, as fear for his health grabbed hold of her heart. “What’s wrong?”
Fire burned deep in his eyes. “You tell him the truth, Devra Ann.” He gestured toward Riley. “You tell him what a sweet child you were, the light of your mama’s and my life.”
Her mother dropped her head into her hand.
“Do you think we wanted to believe our daughter was sick?”
Devra cringed at her papa’s words.
“But things started happening around here—the gas left on, the lug nuts loosened on my car. You claimed it wasn’t you, but I found the tire iron in your room.”
“It wasn’t me. Why would I want to hurt you?” Dread clutched her heart and sickened her. Had the killer been
trying to hurt her family? She turned to Riley. He had that cold, wary cop’s expression on his face. She didn’t like it. He had to believe in her. She wouldn’t have the strength to continue without him. To fight this battle alone.
“The year you turned thirteen, puberty and the devil struck and stole that sweet child right out of our lives.”
“Please, William. Don’t bring all that back up again. I can’t bear it.”
“We have to, Lydia. Don’t you see? It’s happening again. She’s come back because more have died. Death follows her like stink on a skunk. I tried to cleanse her of it, but she’s come and brought the devil back home.”
Tears filled Devra’s eyes. She loved her papa with all her heart, even after all he’d done to “cleanse” her of the devil: the scrubbings with the hard boar brush, the nightly Bible readings until her eyes burned with fatigue. But she knew it had come from his heart. She had tried to understand until he sent her away.
“We brought you back after Tommy died,” her papa continued. “We were determined to fight for you, to fight for your freedom, but then the dreams came. They were brutal. You wrote them down in your diary and your mama found it. Horrific things no young sweet child would even imagine, let alone write. They say puberty does strange things to the mind but we never imagined…”
“We had to send you away. It broke our hearts, but what choice did we have?” Lydia pleaded for understanding.
“There was something very wrong with you. I guess there were signs earlier. There was a kitten once…but you were always such an angel, inside and out.”
Devra couldn’t move. Resentment blurred her vision. “I loved that kitten. I never would have—” She couldn’t even say the words, couldn’t even let her mind flash back to what had been done to her beloved pet. “You really, honestly believed that I was capable of such violence? You are my parents. You raised me. You are supposed to be my advocate, to believe in me when no one else does, to protect me. Instead, you fed me to the wolves.”
Her head was spinning. Tears were closing her throat and threatening to overwhelm her. She wouldn’t get help here. She had been a fool to think she would. She rose from the table and turned toward the door.
“Paranoid delusions. Schizophrenic. Withdrawn.”
She stopped and turned back to her father. Fear commingled with dread and choked any words she might have spoken to stop him.
“Those are just a few of the words the doctors at the sanitarium used to describe your condition. They said they could cure you. They said they could make you better. How could they have let you out, if they’d been so wrong? If more people have had to die? God help me.”
Devra stood rooted to the floor, her eyes focused on Riley’s. He stared at her, with what? Hurt? Confusion? Disgust? She should have told him. She knew the truth would come out. She had only prayed it wouldn’t have.
“I wasn’t sick.” Her voice shook as she said the words. Years of pent-up anger and frustration overwhelmed her. She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, could only feel. “You locked me up in that horrible place and never came to see me. Not once. If you had,
I could have told you the truth. I could have told you that I wasn’t sick. I didn’t need all the drugs those so-called doctors were drowning me with.”
She took a step toward them. “Not that it would have mattered. Not that you would have believed me. I didn’t kill Tommy. I didn’t deserve to be locked up.” Her voice broke with emotion. “I didn’t deserve to lose my family. You were all I had in the world. And you turned your backs on me.”
Her mama looked at her with years of pain and regret distorting her face. Devra couldn’t swallow. Bitterness filled her father’s face. Shocked disbelief filled Riley’s.
“I was a child, a little girl.” Not able to bear any more, she turned from them and left the room, running out the door and into the woods, hoping to get as far away from them as she could. Riley’s shocked expression flashed painfully through her mind. He was as lost to her as her parents were. Now he knew the truth. He knew there was something wrong with her. He knew she wasn’t worthy of his love. How could she be? She was damaged.
RILEY WAS STILL TRYING to process what Devra’s father had said when Devra ran out the door. He jumped up. “Devra, wait!” he called.
“Don’t worry,” her father said. “She knows that forest like the back of her hand. She just needs a few minutes.”
Riley stared at him. “Don’t you understand? She wasn’t exaggerating. There is a killer after her.”
“No, Son, there isn’t. That’s what you have failed to understand. It’s her. It’s always been her.” William shook his head.
His words wrenched loose a deep fear in Riley. No, it wasn’t possible. “Someone has been stalking her, things have happened.”
“Things she could have done on her own?”
Riley thought back to the raspberries smeared across his windshield and the way she disappeared that day when he was in the tree house. He supposed she could have done it. “No. I was attacked at my house.” And there was a man at the hospital speaking with Nurse Jenkins, the man who had Devra’s locket.
“I don’t have all the answers for you,” William said. “I only know what happened here.”
“But you had your own daughter committed to a sanitarium?”
William leaned back in his chair, his eyes hard, his tone cold. “Don’t pass judgment on us. You weren’t here. You didn’t see what she’d done to that poor boy. You didn’t see the state she was in afterward.”
Lydia swiped the tears from her cheeks. “We’ve always done what we thought was best for Devy. That’s all, nothing less, nothing more.” She rose to clear the table.
Riley tried to understand, but he just couldn’t get past the image of Devra thirteen years old and locked in an institution. No wonder she kept herself isolated from people. No wonder she couldn’t trust.
Riley stood. “There wasn’t enough evidence to prove she killed that boy. They released her back to you, back into your care.”
“That’s right. And that’s when her nightmares started. Terrible dreams that would have her sitting up in bed at night, screaming loud enough to wake the dead. Her head full of disgusting visions straight from hell itself. Chief Marshall would come by every few days to check on things, to harass us because we still had our child, while his was buried down at Pearson’s Cemetery.”
Riley looked him square in the eye. “She didn’t do it. If you have any information about what did happen here fifteen years ago, please, help us. Help her.”
William paused and suddenly the years of pain and suffering showed in every line on his face, each fold of his skin, and Riley knew this man had endured more than any man should ever have to bear.
“My daughter isn’t right in the head, son. You heard what she said about the others. Where she goes, death follows. She can’t help it, she was born that way.”
Riley had heard enough. There wasn’t any more any of them could do here. “I feel sorry for you, Mr. Miller. Devra is a warm, caring person with a big heart. She loves children and she loves animals. She volunteers every week at the Children’s Hospital, reading to the kids, helping them through their suffering. She isn’t a cold-blooded killer, and she isn’t mentally insane. If you knew your daughter at all, you would already know that.”
He left the kitchen and followed the path out of the front yard and into the woods, heading toward the river. His head ached and his nerves were fried.
My daughter isn’t right in the head, son.
He’d sounded so certain, so sure of himself.
Devra.
An ache rumbled inside him as her name whispered through his mind. What if he’d made a mistake? What if she really was sick? What if she had to go back to the sanitarium? He closed his eyes, as the image of cold granite and tall iron fences entered his mind. Now he knew why she was so afraid of being locked up. She had been locked up—in a mental institution.
“Devra!” he yelled. The forest swallowed the sound as if it had never been spoken. Riley moved deeper into the shadows. This forest was different than the woods back home—colder, darker. Even the sky above him was a different shade of blue. He felt almost as if he’d stepped into a different reality, one where he was no longer sure of himself, or of her. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure of anything.
He heard the roar of the river before the sparkling waters came into view. He saw her sitting on a rock by its bank, her head bent on drawn-up knees. She looked so small, so beautiful, so much in need of his help. He wouldn’t let her down.
“Devra,” he said softly.
She turned to look at him. The puffy redness circling her eyes broke his heart.
“You okay?”
She sniffed, nodding. “I’m sorry you had to witness that wonderful display of family love.”
“I’m sorry you had to grow up with it.” He sat down next to her. “I don’t know how you did it. How you survived.”
She took a deep breath. “Neither do I.”
“It’s over now. They can’t hurt you any longer.”
She turned to him, wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned her head against his shoulder. “I wish that were true.”
He held her for a moment. “Why didn’t you tell me about the sanitarium?”
“I couldn’t.”
Her simply stated words tore at him. She still didn’t trust him.
“I didn’t want you to look at me like—like I was
damaged.
” The word caught on something in her throat and came out a hoarse whisper.
He squeezed her, holding her a little tighter. “You can trust me, Devra. I hope I’ve proven that to you.”
Something flashed in her eyes and he realized she still didn’t trust him, even after all he’d risked for her. Disappointment tightened his chest.
“I’m sorry. I’m just scared.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes watching the water tumble over the rocks. “Is this where Tommy was killed?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, we were deeper in the forest, farther down that way.” She pointed upriver.
He nodded. “Is it hard for you to be here?”
“No. The river calms me, it always has. The rushing water soothes my nerves, makes me forget.”