Page 68 of The Souls of Lost Lake
“True.” Eddie leaned away from the computer. “Still, I don’t understand Wayne’s tying a situation from ten years ago to the current one. And it’s a bit suspicious he’d bring it up the same day we find Trina’s body. Don’t you think?”
“I agree.” Wren tapped the table with her finger. “But it’s not like Wayne knew she’d be found while we were talking to him.”
“Even so, outside of some similarities, Trina and Jasmine are unrelated and separated by ten years. To be super picky, all three of you are unrelated.” Eddie sighed. “I’m not trying to be insensitive, but I don’t see any connections—unless you’re a conspiracy theorist trying to create one.”
“My name on Redneck Harriet’s foot?”
“What do we have then?” Eddie appeared open to considering it all. “Ten-year segments, a doll with your name on it, two missing girls with one of them now deceased ... someone Ava Coons had nothing to do with.”
“But the doll was at the Coons cabin, and Trina wasn’t found far from Lost Lake.”
Eddie blew out a breath, running his hand over his mouth. “Man. I don’t know.”
“Lost Lakeisa connection.” Her insistence was met with a chocolate-eyed look of doubt.
“All we can do is share Wayne’s story with the police.”
Wren opened her mouth to argue.
Eddie held up a hand. “If the cops think they need to look into Wayne Sanderson, they can. I think you’re better served helping with the search party as it stands and looking up your birth records.”
Wren bit back a sigh, alt-tabbing back to the original screenshe’d been working on. Wisconsin’s database. Birth records. She blew out a puff of air, and a napkin on the table skipped across the top.
“’Cause that will explain why I feel so misplaced?” Wren asked, but it was rhetorical, and Eddie knew it. Being misplaced as a child—whether lost or taken, whichever way it was spun left dark and unsettled shock waves in the life of an adult who’d lived it. If Tristan Blythe wasn’t Wren’s father, then who was? And was she making a ludicrous jump of logic to assume it really washername that was written on the doll from the Coons cabin? Right now it didn’t feel much different from if she’d been putting a puzzle together and someone came along and swept their arm across the table, sending the pieces flying in all directions, mixing them with pieces from other puzzles. Puzzles that had nothing to do with each other, and yet they seemed as if they were supposed to fit together.
27
Ava
She cowered in the cellar’s corner. It smelled dank, and the ground was cold. Damp earth clung to her already wet clothes, and Ava shivered uncontrollably. Her knees pulled up to her chin, she wrapped her arms around her legs, holding them tightly to her chest. She couldn’t see much. The cellar was darker—if that were possible—than the night sky. It had to be nearing dawn. Had to be! But then she wasn’t sure she was concerned that morning ever came. Here, in the corner of the cellar, glimpses of horror and grisly remembrances came back to her. They were things the morning light would not evaporate. The sun could not erase a nightmare.
“Ava.” Noah’s voice was soft. Coaxing. Not unlike someone who had cornered a petrified kitten and hoped to earn its trust.
She sensed him nearing her. Smelled him. Lake water. Night air. Something distinctly Noah. His fingertips touched her knee. Ava jerked back, squeezing closer to the hard-packed dirt wall of the cellar.
“What is this place, Ava?” he asked, but Ava knew he had already surmised the answer.
It was her home. The place she had lived until the day she’d wandered into Tempter’s Creek.
“Do you remember? What happened here?”
Another pressing question she had no desire to answer.
Noah moved, his body making shifting noises in the darkness. Ava felt his shoulder as he settled in next to her, his back also against the wall. “We’re going to have to find our way back home. I’m afraid we’re not going to find Jipsy’s body, and we’re both sopping wet.”
“I don’t care.” And she didn’t. Not about Jipsy. Not about being wet. Not about a potential chill setting in. Nothing.
“I know.” His two-word acceptance made Ava’s heart still. She turned her head to look at him but could barely make out his form in the darkness. It felt safer that way. Having Noah faceless. Just a person in the dark with her, sharing in the hovering gloom of wickedness that lived here.
“This is your home?”
“Sure is.” Her entire chest ached. It hurt with the weight of it.
“I’m sorry.”
“Ain’t your fault.” And it wasn’t. It never made sense to Ava, people apologizing for things they didn’t have a hand in.
“I know. I’m empathizing with you.”
