Page 83 of Firefly Effect

“I told you about writing my dissertation on the Firefly Man killings. I’ve wanted to elaborate on it for years. It wasn’t until I got here that I felt… inspired.”

Her eyes widen, and I jump to say more.

“I would have never published it without your permission. Hell, I probably would have never published it anyway. As much as I always looked up to Dr. Rohls, I’m not him.”

Tension squeezes my head, and I bring my hands up to massage my skull. “I’ve always used writing to cope with what happened that night. Living in a jail cell for months, not knowing when I’d ever get out, gave me a lot of free time to think. I had to get the feelings out somehow. Between the poem, my journal entries, and my dissertation, it’s my therapy. It’s all I know.”

Evie’s anger seems to have faded. Her cheeks are stained with dried tears, and her eyes have even softened, but I don’t mistake any of that for forgiveness. How can she forgive me when I’m only sorry that she found out about my lie?

“You said you came back to track down the Firefly Man.” She squints. “Why here?”

I cringe, knowing this is where I need to be very careful. “I’ve been pulling together clues over the years. Studying the path of his killings, the details of the… act.” I swallow, knowing I’m already passing my own boundary lines. “I can show you if you want.”

Her eyes search mine before she nods.

I pull out my chair and gesture for her to sit. After she does, I open my laptop and enter the password. “If this gets to be too much, you have to let me know.”

She looks from my screen to me then nods. “I will.”

I reach forward and click around with the mouse to find the electronic whiteboard I’ve been working on for years. The file has multiple pages, revealing maps of the Smoky Mountains that point out all the locations of each killing. It contains details of each crime, each victim, and every single documented person in the nearby vicinity at the time of the murders.

“I’ve been looking for common threads. Patterns. Suspicious activity in and around the area before, during, and after the crimes were committed.”

Evie seems to be scanning the documents I’m clicking through, her eyes shifting around rapidly. “The media has already called out some of the links,” she points out. “Like the force of the attacks, the positioning of the bodies after the murders, and the fact that they’ve all taken place at or near campgrounds in the Appalachians—specifically in and around the Smoky Mountains.” She lifts her eyes to meet mine. “Is there more?”

Nodding, I reach over her to zoom in on one part of the whiteboard. “Did you know my sister was the only female victim? She was also the youngest. But look at this.” I illuminate a section that highlights the demographics of the murders. “Look at the ages of the victims in the order of the killings.”

Evie looks closer for a second before her eyes widen. “They get older.”

“By the same number of years between events.”

She shakes her head before looking back at me. “What do you think that means?”

“I can’t be sure, but I believe that means the killer likes his victims at or around his age. He also likes the element of surprise. He sneaks up on them and bashes them in the skull before they even have a chance to fight. In most cases, the one strike does the trick.”

“But Carley screamed,” Evie points out.

Another fact that’s haunted me. “She must have seen him before the attack. Reports say she must have taken off and started running, then she was attacked from behind after she screamed.”

Evie shudders, and I wish I could wrap my arms around her and tell her everything is going to be okay. I’m going to find the Firefly Man if it’s the last thing I do. Then, just maybe, Evie can forgive me for the lies.

“You still haven’t said what brought you back here, Lincoln. We haven’t had a murder here since Carley.”

I nod, knowing this might be the secret that makes her hate me the most. “I wanted to revisit the original murder, spend time here, with some of the people who were there that night. I thought maybe I could uncover some details that were missed back when they only had their eye on me.”

She frowns. “That’s true. They weren’t even investigating anyone else. They probably missed so much.”

Anger rumbles through me again. “They absolutely did.” Again, I reach over to click through the documents pulled up on my website to get to the map of the Appalachians, zoomed in on the Great Smoky Mountain National Park—this one overlayed with dots and lines that showcase the Firefly Man’s path. It’s not a perfect route, and at first, it just looks like a bunch of curved and straight lines with no sequence whatsoever.

Until I pull up the next semi-transparent layer with a firefly drawn on top that perfectly connects the dots.

A gasp is wrenched from deep in her throat, and she leans closer, placing her finger on the last connected dot. Then she drags that finger right back to where the connections begin—on Carley Pruitt. She frowns, dragging back to the last kill location. “If you’ve been tracking this then why weren’t you able to stop the last murder?”

“Evie…” My heart pounds furiously in my chest, despite the weight crushing it. “Tracking the killer to his next kill spot has proved to be impossible. There are dozens of campgrounds and miles of woods in all these areas. But this map does give me an idea of the direction he’s heading next.”

Her eyes go back to the map where her finger is, then her finger slowly draws a line down to finish the firefly symbol, landing on the original site of the killings. All the color drains from her face. “He’s going to kill here again?”

“It’s possible, but this town is shit at heeding any type of warning. Not even the media can instill the fear necessary to keep people out of the woods.”

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