Within These Walls (17 page)

But if they promised her . . . if they swore she was safe . . .

Vee swallowed against the lump that had built up in her throat as her gaze shifted toward her bed. There, on the floor beside her mattress, her laptop glowed. The image of Jeffrey Halcomb smiled up at her. And as if by magic, the panic that had been clawing at her insides began to subside.

It was his eyes. They promised to dissolve Vee’s fears. All that anxiety about her parents, about fitting in, about what was lurking in the dark . . . he’d make it go away, if only she believed.

If only she believed in herself.

If only she believed in him.

22

M
ORNING. LUCAS DROPPED
a cardboard box onto his desk chair. For such a small container, the thing weighed a ton, packed full of papers and manila envelopes and computer printouts of articles he’d found online or in the library.

Despite the media circus that surrounded the eighties Halcomb impasse, the information that was readily available was a lot like listening to the same song on a loop. Raised by a pair of fanatical Protestants back in Veldt, Kansas, Jeff Halcomb had been seen as a prophet. When he got too bold and started messing with the young minds in town, he got the boot, courtesy of his own father. That’s when Jeff started collecting his own congregation up and down the Pacific coast. But when it came to his true motivation, nobody knew. Lucas had read the few crappy, dated biographies that existed on Jeff more than a handful of times, but they only raised more questions. The reason as to
why
Jeffrey Halcomb killed Audra Snow while his hard-earned adherents lay dying around him remained little more than a question mark.

Speculation had shifted from the why of the crime to that of Halcomb’s silence through the years. Some thought his refusal to speak was a simple case of him not having a compelling enough answer to such a loaded question. People expected the explanation to be mind-bending, infused with satanic worship, weird rituals, and terrifying beliefs. Except that, perhaps, Jeffrey Halcomb had been a
lunatic who ended up killing those who had come to trust him most. No spooky motivation. No nightmare reasoning. Just mental illness. Maybe that was why Halcomb had never said a word about what had happened that March afternoon. It wasn’t exciting enough, and Halcomb’s narcissism wouldn’t allow for dissolving the mystery that surrounded him with an answer that didn’t live up to the hype.

Others thought that Halcomb’s silence was because of exactly that: the devil worship, the strange rituals. Halcomb refused to talk because his inspiration was somehow sacred. If he dared to speak of the event, he would give away a secret that demanded being upheld.

A lot of Lucas’s accumulated research material claimed that Halcomb’s Faithful were his only true followers. Other articles insisted no, that couldn’t possibly be the case, but it wasn’t an angle readers wanted to entertain. Back in 1983, the majority of folks cared for nothing more than to know that the crazy ones had killed themselves off and their insane leader was behind bars.

But a handful of Halcomb’s estranged believers slowly bubbled to the surface after everything had died down . . . willing to come forward after they were sure they wouldn’t be implicated in any of Halcomb’s crimes.

January Moore had been close with the deceased Georgia “Gypsy” Jansen and Chloe “Clover” Sears, and she was still out there somewhere. From hours of tracking her down on the web, Lucas had narrowed his search to either Tacoma, Washington, or Salem, Oregon. Last he could find, January was the co-owner of a novelty boutique specializing in handmade soaps and candles.

Then there was Sandra “Sandy” Gleason, whom Jeff called Sunrise. She had been as young as Shelly “Sunnie” Riordan—only fifteen—when she met Halcomb for the first time. In the only interview she ever gave, Sandy confessed that Jeff had tried to impregnate her on multiple occasions. When Sandy came to realize that Hal
comb was courting her for a baby and not her charming personality, she made a break for it. She hadn’t been followed because Halcomb had since deemed her a waste of time. Lucas narrowed Sandy’s location down to somewhere in Vallejo, California, but she proved to be even more elusive than January Moore.

Back in New York, he had tried to reach out to the citizens of Veldt, Kansas, but none of them wanted to talk. Even Mira Ellison, who’d given a vivid account of what Jeffrey Halcomb had been like while still living in their hometown, refused an interview. Lucas had managed to get her on the phone, only to have the woman insist he never call her again.
I don’t know any Halcomb,
she’d said, then immediately hung up.

He couldn’t find anything on the Gate of Heaven, not a number or a location in Veldt. The only speck he managed to glean off his endless Google searches was that Veldt had suffered a bad fire in the spring of 1984. There was no tracking down Pastor Gregory Halcomb or his glossolalia-gifted wife, Helen. It was as though the Halcomb clan and the church they founded had simply vanished . . . and, for whatever reason, the folks of Veldt seemed too terrified to speak about where their church and its parishioners had gone.

Lucas tried to reach Trevor Donovan and Susanna Clausen-King, two other characters who had breezed in and out of Jeff Halcomb’s life after his exile from Kansas. He had circled their names in red marker on a long list of potential interviewees, but all searches resulted in dead ends. Janessa Morgan—Laura Morgan’s mother—had been an option, until her name ended up as a hit on an obituary site. Washington State congressman Terrance Snow and his wife, Susana Clairmont Snow, would have been an ideal source, but the couple had passed away in a fatal US 101 crash in 1986, just north of Olympia’s Schneider Creek.

When it came to the ghosts of Halcomb’s past, January Moore and Sandra Gleason were Lucas’s only leads.

And then there was the neon-blue sticky note he’d slapped onto his legal pad full of unanswered questions. The names “JOSH MORALES” and “EPERSON” were scribbled across it with the number for Lambert Correctional printed below. Josh—despite being a little starstruck—had made a good point: Lucas had written a book about the Black Dahlia, and he hadn’t had a killer or witnesses to interview then. A book was a book. If he had been able to pull it off a few years ago, he had a decent chance of a repeat performance.

But that was all over now. He could have worked around Halcomb, but Jeanie was altogether a different matter. She’d found him out. He couldn’t, with any semblance of a clear conscience, stay in that house any longer, even if it meant breaking his end of Halcomb’s already defunct deal.

Lucas stared at his box of papers, then allowed his gaze to travel across the expanse of his study. He’d pushed a folding table against the far wall, the wood paneling above it blocked by a corkboard. Computer printout pictures of nine dead people were pinned to it in three neat rows. He had hoped to get to know those people more intimately than he could through newspaper articles. He wanted to know how a group of kids—who, as far as he knew, weren’t much different from his twelve-year-old daughter—had been duped by one man. How could they have simply given up their lives because they were asked to do so? What had Jeffrey Halcomb promised them? Or had it been more like the Jonestown Massacre—had he made them poison themselves? And where had they gotten the poison? Had it been something as standard as rat poison or a pesticide from a gardening store?

He shook his head, looked away from the photos of the nine that had died far too young.
It doesn’t matter,
he thought.
It’s done.
Over.
He didn’t know where he and Jeanie would go or how he’d afford it, but they couldn’t stay on Montlake Road. Lucas wanted his life back, wanted to recapture the success of his career—it was why he had omitted the details of the house in the first place. What Caroline didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Stupidly, he hadn’t stopped to consider that Jeanie was the one who would be most affected if the truth came out. He had sorely underestimated his kid’s intelligence.

He scooped up the papers on his desk, straightened them with a quick tap against the varnished top, and dropped them into the box that sat on his chair.
You’re living in the past,
he told himself.
Maybe it’s time to move on, find something new.
Maybe taking a job as a reporter for a news site wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe, rather than being stuck in one place, he could find a gig as a travel writer for a big-time blog and traipse the world, become the interesting person he hoped his daughter would see him as. Maybe, someday, instead of Jeanie seeing photographs of her mother in front of the Colosseum, she’d be looking at photos of her dad in Tibet, in front of the Taj Mahal, on the beaches of Fiji, on top of a snow-covered mountain in the Austrian Alps.
Maybe it would be better.
Defeat was a bitter pill, but perhaps it was the very medicine he needed to fix his broken life. Sloughing off his old self would give him a new start. He could only hope that Jeanie would see his moving on as strength rather than weakness.

“Okay,” he murmured into the quiet of his study. “I surrender.” Except that, even after saying it aloud, he didn’t believe it. Not for a second. A part of him wanted to give in, to forget the fight. But the other half of him knew that this was what he was born to do.
You’re a writer, Lou.
Not a journalist and not a goddamn travel writer—a
true-crime
writer, chasing the darkness.

But Jeanie.

He couldn’t.

Not like this.

The doorbell chimed.

Lucas blinked away from his box of research and stepped around his desk to the window. Parting the slats of the blinds, he spotted an old VW Microbus parked behind Mark’s Honda. Which reminded him: he had to get up to Seattle soon, return Mark’s car, and pick up the Maxima.

Jeanie’s steps thumped down the stairs. The moment that had passed between them the following night had been strange. Jeanie had left him standing in the dark, the girl in the orchard forgotten, his gaze fixed on the empty doorway. He wondered if it would have brought them closer had he told his daughter the truth, and so he’d tried to talk to her. He had knocked on her door for what felt like an hour before giving up. Having gone to bed shortly after, he hadn’t seen her since.
Give her space,
Caroline had once suggested.
You don’t have to fix every fight before it’s done being fought.
This fight promised to be a long one. He only hoped they could resolve it in the end.

Lucas stepped out of his study to catch sight of Jeanie at the door. Had he seen the woman his daughter was greeting standing outside his house in New York, he would have taken her for a vagrant. She had long brown hair that reached for her waist, her clothes a patchwork of hippie fabrics topped off with cowboy boots and a mismatched scarf. She was grinning at Jeanie. When Lucas stepped to the front door and cleared his throat, she turned her attention to him and gave him a
Peace, man
kind of smile.

“Hi there,” Lucas said, lifting his hand in greeting. “Can I help you?”

“I live down the road a ways,” the woman announced. “I saw the moving van rolling around a few days ago, and I keep seeing cars coming and going. Figured I’d come and introduce myself like a
good neighbor.” She extended her right hand, her fingers heavy with costume jewelry. “I’m Echo.”

“Lucas.” He took her hand and shook it. “Good to meet you.”

“And you are?” Echo fixed her eyes on Jeanie in a way that made him uncomfortable. Echo seemed a little too interested in Jeanie’s answer, a little too curious.

“Vee,” Jeanie said.

“Virginia,” Lucas corrected, nudging his kid away from the door.

Jeanie frowned at her dad edging her out of the conversation. “
God,
Dad. Whatever,” she mumbled with a roll of the eyes. A moment later, she left her father to handle their visitor alone.

“Nice to meet you. Vee,” Echo singsonged as Jeanie stalked up the stairs to her room.

“Virginia,” Lucas corrected a second time. Echo didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy looking over his shoulder at the house, shaking her head at an idle thought.

“Man, this place . . . you know where you’re living, right?”

He cast a quick look up the stairs, remembering Jeanie’s words.
I know what this place is.
Regardless, he didn’t want her anywhere near anything that had to do with Halcomb talk. He already felt like shit for having dragged Jeanie here in the first place, but he’d fix it. They’d pack up their stuff and go.

“Okay,” he said, giving Echo a questioning glance. “Is that what you came over to talk about? Are you selling something? With the Pier Pointe voters pool? What?”

“Oh, no. Sorry.” She held up her hands. “I’m not here to make trouble. I just wanted to say ‘hi’ and ‘welcome to the neighborhood,’ all those neighborly things my mother would have insisted I say if she was still around.”

“Yeah.” Lucas was skeptical. “Well, thanks for that . . . but we’re not staying.”

Echo looked surprised. “No?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” she said. “Aren’t you a writer?”

He raised an eyebrow. Who
was
this chick?

“Small town.” She gave him a smile. “People talk.”

“No kidding. Thanks for stopping by.” He began to close the door, but Echo stopped it with an outstretched hand.

“I guess you moved here for the inspiration?” Holding the door open, she cast a glance along the interior walls once more. “Not ­everyone can handle living in a place with such history.”

I can handle it.
The retort simmered on the tip of his tongue, but he fought the temptation to spit it at her.

“It’s a shame, though,” she said. “There’s a lot of material here.”

Oh really?
He nearly snorted at that.
Maybe if the mute bastard that promised me the world hadn’t screwed me over, sure. Maybe
then
there’d be a lot of material.
Echo seemed to notice his aggravation. He was too tired to disguise it. He wasn’t quite sure he cared to disguise it at all.

“Did I say something wrong?” she asked, looking concerned.

“Just having a bad day,” he muttered, casting a pointed glance at her hand, still pressed against the wood of the door.

“Any particular reason?”

He shook his head at her.
How about minding your own fucking business?
Did she really think he was going to confide in her? “It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Anyway, I really need to get to packing up.”
Get lost.

Echo’s expression fell with the mention of moving. “Yeah, of course,” she said. “I’m taking up your time. Sorry.” She pulled her hand away and took a backward step, canting her head as she gave him a final once-over. “But if you want my advice, I’d give this place a fair shake. Places like these have a way about them. This one hums. Listen for long enough and you’ll hear it, I promise.”