Within These Walls (24 page)

33

V
EE WAITED FOR
her dad to pull out of the driveway before sprinting up the stairs. She grabbed her laptop, tucked it beneath her arm, and took the risers two at a time down to his study. Flipping open the laptop lid, she paused to peek out the window—just a quick double check to make sure he hadn’t decided to turn back. She tugged the printer USB cable out of her dad’s computer and plugged it into her own.

34

L
UCAS ROLLED UP
to what he assumed was Echo’s house. It was the only place anywhere near Montlake Road for at least two miles. It was a little Craftsman-style house in need of a fresh coat of paint, but the flaking clapboard—once a bright red—gave the place a cozy feel. The faded cranberry color scheme was picturesque against a backdrop of never-ending green.

He climbed the four steps to the covered front porch, cast a glance at an old wooden rocker that sat empty in the corner, and knocked on the edge of the wood-trimmed screen door. What looked to be a homemade wreath of lowercase wooden letters hung cockeyed over the door’s mullioned window, promising him that
all you need is love.

Echo appeared on the other side of the door a moment later, peeking through one of the glass panes before beaming a bright smile at him. “Lucas!” She greeted him with about as much enthusiasm as the oddly starstruck Josh Morales. Swinging the front door wide, she held open the screen door, waiting for him to come inside.

“Hey, I hope this isn’t a bad time.” He stepped into a house far dimmer than he had expected it to be. Mismatched drapes hung from the windows, giving the place a bohemian feel. The scent of burned incense clambered up his nose. He cast a glance at a small table holding a vase, a strange bouquet of pine branches and twigs poking out from the mouth of the vessel.

“No, not at all. I was just reading. Can I get you some coffee?”

Lucas didn’t have time for coffee. Could Echo watch Jeanie or not? He had a long drive ahead of him, and if he got to Lambert early, he could stop by the prison and harass Lumpy Annie about seeing Halcomb before his meeting with Josh and Marty. But he couldn’t be rude, either. He was a guest here, and needed a favor.

“Sure,” he said. “That would be great.”

Echo motioned for him to follow her into the kitchen and he did so, taking in all the kitsch along the way. The walls were covered in various paintings and tapestries—old landscapes in frames of questionable quality, a macramé tapestry with wooden beads hanging from its fringe. A portrait of a woman with cropped dark hair hung just shy of the kitchen’s entrance. A little girl wearing a crown of daisies was poised on her hip.

“Is this your mother?” Lucas asked, pausing to take in the photograph.

“That’s her,” Echo replied from the depths of the kitchen. She pushed aside a few drapes to let in some light, illuminating a million dust motes with the motion. Gathering a couple of mugs from a cabinet, she placed a can of Folgers on the counter. “That picture was taken by Derrick Fink,” she said. The mention of Derrick’s name made Lucas’s skin crawl. It was strange to hear it brought up so casually, as though Derrick had been nothing more than a family friend, not a face that had made headlines.

“That’s incredible.” He murmured the words more to himself than to Echo, but she heard him regardless.

“Not really,” she said. “I mean, if you take away all the stuff you’ve read in the papers, they were all regular people.
Good
people.” She paused, scooped a few spoons of coffee grounds into the coffeemaker’s basket, and smiled. “Like you and me.”

That was what got to Lucas the most—the fact that everyone involved with Halcomb had been “regular.” Normal. Not demented.
Not psychotic. Not weird and creepy with inexplicable religious beliefs. They were simply people. Shelly Riordan, Laura Morgan, Audra Snow . . . they had been like Jeanie. And yet somehow, they ended up swept off their feet by a madman’s musings.

“What happened to her?” Lucas asked, drawing his gaze away from the portrait and stepping into the kitchen. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“My mom?” Echo shrugged her shoulders, as though her mother’s fate had no real bearing on her life. But despite the casual response, Lucas could tell the question bothered her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m being way too forward.”

She waved a hand at him. “Oh, please. I’m the one who brought all that stuff over to you. If I didn’t want you asking questions, I should have probably kept to myself.” She filled the coffeemaker with water and flipped the switch, then moved across the kitchen to the little table that sat next to the window. Sliding a mess of mail and books and receipts away from its middle, she took a seat and motioned for Lucas to do the same. “Sorry about the mess,” she said. “I don’t usually have guests.” A pause. “Actually, I don’t
ever
have guests.” She laughed. Lucas cracked a faint smile. “After what happened over at your place, my mom got really depressed. I mentioned that she and Audra were best friends. Well, she took what happened to Audra pretty hard.”

“I can imagine.”

“When all of this was going on, I was staying with my grandmother a lot. She lived just outside of town, a quick fifteen-minute drive.” She shrugged again, gave him a wistful smile. “But something happened. Being so young, I can only assume what. Suddenly I wasn’t staying with Gran anymore. I remember
that
vividly. I just can’t remember if it was Gran telling my mom that she wouldn’t take care of me any longer, or whether it was my mom refusing to take me over to Gran’s anymore.”

“What do you think happened?” Lucas asked.

“I think my grandmother found out about Jeff,” she said matter-of-factly. “She probably got spooked by something my mom told her about the group. I ended up staying with an aunt just outside of Portland full-time after that. All the while, my mom was here. And then things got crazy—the group killed themselves, Audra died, Jeff got arrested. My mom killed herself a few weeks after that.”

“Jesus,” Lucas murmured. “I’m sorry. That must have been hard.”

Another shrug. “Life is hard. Death is easy.”

“What about your dad?”

“Never knew him.” Echo leaned back in her seat. “For all I know, he might pop out of the woodwork one day. That would be a trip, right? So, the photos I brought over . . . they’re helpful?”

Lucas looked away from the pile of junk on the table and gave her a nod. “Yeah, I can’t thank you enough. It’s all incredible. They belong to you? If I wanted to obtain rights to reprint them in the book, who would I ask?”

“Everything in the box that I gave you came from my mom,” Echo said. “All her stuff was legally passed on to me when I turned eighteen. So I guess you’d ask me.” Another smile. “It’s nice to finally have someone living so close by. Weird that you’re writing about Jeff, but I guess that’s what you call a happy coincidence.”

“I guess so,” Lucas said.

“The last family who lived in your house only stayed for a few months. They were a lot like you and Virginia, just a man and his son. But we never did gel.”

“Why’d they leave?”

“Something about work,” she said. “They broke their lease and moved to Seattle, I think. Maybe Vancouver. But I never did believe it was work related.” She paused, gave him a knowing look. “I think it was the house.”

The back of Lucas’s neck bristled. Had something happened to the man and his son that had driven them away? Like maybe the kitchen table magically ending up in the middle of the living room? Had they found people wandering around the property, holding séances and fire-lit rituals in an attempt to speak to the dead?

“Do you know who they were?” he asked. “Their names, I mean? Maybe I could interview them, see what drove them out.”

“Unfortunately, no,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if they took off when someone told them what happened there. I doubt they were aware of the history of the place. Or maybe they picked up on it on their own despite not knowing where they were living. Some people are really sensitive to those types of things. On some level, I think we’re all a little psychic. Maybe they just couldn’t handle it.”

“Handle what?” Lucas asked.

“The shift in energy,” she said.

“I don’t know.” Lucas leaned back in his seat, skeptical. “What’s done is done.”

Echo gave him a thoughtful nod. “Yeah, you’re right.”

The coffeemaker blipped behind her. She rose from her seat and moved back to the counter, poured two cups, and returned to her seat. “Jeff wasn’t a bad guy,” she said. “None of them were. I just hope that your book reflects that rather than rolling with the whole, you know . . .” She frowned, shook her head, and took a sip of coffee. “The
satanic
thing.”

Lucas nodded, though he couldn’t help but wonder where Echo was garnering her sympathy for Jeff. He was a murderer. Except, rather than killing with a knife, he did it with the power of persuasion. If Echo’s mother had been as close to the group as it seemed, she’d been lucky to escape Halcomb with her life, regardless of whether she had cut that life short in the end. If Echo’s mother had had the slightest inkling of what Halcomb would end up doing to
Audra Snow, he doubted she’d have been posing for family photos with Echo in tow.

He tapped his fingers against the rim of his mug, a question balanced at the tip of his tongue. He wanted to ask if Echo’s mother was close enough to Halcomb to be
in
the group, but he wasn’t sure it was appropriate. He didn’t want to push, didn’t want to put her off and risk having her take back the photos.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, cutting him off mid­thought.

Lucas glanced up at her, reflexively feigning innocence.

“There were a lot of people like my mother out there, a lot of outsiders who began to creep in. From what I understand, Jeff never was one to turn away a willing set of ears. He loved to talk about his philosophy and people loved to listen.”

“Your mother—” he began, but Echo didn’t allow him to finish.

“My mother is beside the point,” she said. “What’s important is that the people who died that day weren’t the only ones who believed in what Jeff was preaching. The kids that died here . . .” She shook her head with a knowing look. “I’ve read all the news articles and the biographies, probably as many times as you have. The media spun it so that it was sensational. Demon worship, satanism—all that is a lie. My mother was a good person, just like Jeff and his family were. She would have never associated with the type of person the papers painted Jeff to be. But that stuff sells.” She leveled her gaze on him. “That stuff sells
books
.”

“I only want to tell the whole story,” Lucas told her.

“After the papers scared everyone, they dispelled public fear by saying that Halcomb’s true believers were limited to the kids who died here that day. Everyone seems to think that the ones who were here were the only people who loved Jeff enough to sacrifice themselves for him. But they’re wrong.”

Because there was January Moore, a self-sacrifice thirty years too late. Lucas had no doubt there were others, but how could he track down nameless ghosts? Lucas furrowed his eyebrows, picturing dozens, maybe even hundreds of Halcomb’s Faithful living quietly out in the world. Guys like Charles Manson got mail because they were accessible, they wanted to talk. But Halcomb had become a ghost himself. He refused interviews and TV appearances. Guys like Halcomb were forgotten, their own crimes buried beneath more recent, heinous acts played out by far more vocal criminals. And yet Jeff received stacks of envelopes from a secret fan club. And here, at Jeff’s old stomping ground, Lucas was seeing people in the orchard, he was hearing things, items were being moved. Pictures hung upside down.

“And what was Halcomb’s philosophy? Do you know?”

She shifted in her seat, stared at her coffee cup. Eventually, she spoke. “That if you live right, you can live forever.”

“Literally?”

She lifted a shoulder to her ear.

“Like what he was telling the kids in Veldt?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never
been
to Veldt.”

His gaze settled on her face. “But do you believe it?”

Echo stared at him for a long while, and for a second he could see it in her eyes—the uneasy spark of being found out, of being caught. “I’m just a helper,” she reminded him. “I had what I thought you might want, that’s all. Speaking of which . . .” She placed her cup on the table. “Here I am rambling about my mother without ever asking to what I owe the pleasure of your visit.”

Lucas blinked, suddenly shifting his attention from his mug to his cell. He yanked it out of his pocket and checked the time.
Shit.
He’d been at Echo’s place for over forty-five minutes, and Selma had yet to return his call. “Christ.”

“Gotta run?” Echo asked.

“Yes, I do. But that’s exactly why I came over.”

“Oh?”

“This is going to sound crazy, but I’m kind of out of options here.” He gave her a pleading look. “Would it be possible for you to come over for the afternoon and watch Virginia? I have an interview with a couple of guards . . .”

Echo straightened in her seat. “Guards?”

“Yeah, from the prison out in Lambert.”

She glowered, as if disturbed by the news. “For the book?”

“I’m not sure yet. I hope so. But I have to leave in, like, fifteen minutes.”

Echo’s gaze flitted to her cup, then back to him.

“I can pay you,” he offered, sensing her trepidation.

“No, it isn’t that,” she said. “I’m just surprised. We don’t know each other that well. I’m not sure Virginia would be happy about some stranger babysitting her for the day.”

“She suggested it,” he said.

Echo perked. “Really?”

His gut told him that he should figure something else out. He could take Jeanie with him to Lambert, drop her off at a Barnes & Noble, and go about his business. Sure, Echo had saved his ass with the box of stuff and yes, she was the object of Lucas’s current intrigue, but she was still a stranger. He could trust her to water the plants or check the mail, but not to watch the love of his life.

“You know what? Never mind. I shouldn’t even have asked, putting you out like this . . . It’s insane.”

“It’s okay,” Echo said. Lucas got up.

“Thanks for the coffee. We’ll definitely get together again soon—”

But Echo cut him off.

“No, seriously, I’d love to do it.” She rose from her seat and, with a defined sense of determination, left the kitchen to grab her bag.