Page 115 of Reading Between the Lines
I sobered.
There was that word again. How could it be so heavy and so light at the same time? How could four letters, strung together in a certain order, carry such power and substance? It had poured from the very depths of my soul the previous day after Tallus had escaped what I’d perceived as mortal danger. The fear of losing him had consumed me. It was a scary feeling and an even scarier word. But it felt right like nothing in my life had ever felt.
It would take practice to repeat it, but I pulled Tallus against my mouth and told him with my heart instead. Intimacy, affection, and now love.
We were doing all right. I was figuring this out.
***
“Have you found anything?”
Tallus and I sat in the parking lot outside the diner, intending to have a late lunch after a phone call back home.
The wind howled and shook the rental. Dark clouds on the horizon promised a new winter storm before sundown. The forecast called for six inches of snow.
It had taken a song and dance learning how to hook my phone to the rental’s Bluetooth, but the second I sorted it out, I contacted the one person who could help us.
Doyle cursed on the other end of the line. “Why are you harassing me? I can’t do this in five minutes. You know that. I have a call out to the team in Port Hope, but they haven’t got back to me. As for—”
I cut him off. “We know who Ambrose Whitaker is, and the stories are one hundred percent real. The truth is plainly stated in the details of the books, modified enough to maintain anonymity. We didn’t see it until we started properly reading one of them.”
Doyle went silent.
“We can prove it too,” I added. “What I need is backup from the Port Hope police because this motherfucker has tried to take us out twice, and we’re not confronting him alone lest we end up playing the starring role of DBs in his next bestseller.”
“Talk to me.”
I explained what Tallus had found, told him about finding a particular book in Weston’s room after he’d checked it out of the library, about the marked pages we hadn’t read, and our theory that Weston must have put the pieces together as well, landing him in the river.
“It’s too speculative,” Doyle said when I finished.
“It’s not,” Tallus said. “We’ve gotten to know these people in Port Hope. It’s in the details. Ambrose Whitaker tells us all we need to know. We didn’t see it before because the other seven books were less personal.”
“And how are you going to prove it?”
“We’re going to give you another victim, one with a personal attachment to your killer.” Tallus had a cheeky look about him again, and when our gazes met, he winked.
“How? Who?”
I explained. “You’re going to start by finding out if an unidentified woman in her late thirties with blonde hair, wearing a crimson gown and veil, was discovered at Holy Oak cemetery in the past five years.”
“Why unidentified? We have advanced resources that—”
“No fingerprints. They would have been burned off, and her teeth would have been smashed in, so no dental records. Plus, she wouldn’t have been reported missing, so she wouldn’t be on a list.”
“In the past five years?” Doyle asked.
“Yes. This book was published about three years ago, but we don’t know if our killer does the act then writes the book or writes the book then does the act.”
I listened to typing on the other end of the line. “Where the fuck is Holy Oak?”
“It’s an unused cemetery north of Sylvan Glen conservation area not far outside Port Hope. It was established in the late 1800s but ran out of room at the turn of the century, so they closed it. According to my research, less than fifty people were buried there, so my guess is they don’t maintain it anymore. It’s on a county road in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.”
“Okay. Hang on.”
The anticipation in Tallus’s eyes made me reach for his hand. He wanted to be right. I wanted him to be right.
Wewereright. Either the body had been discovered, or it was still rotting away in a place no one had been in years.
