Page 80 of Half the Summer's Night
“I’m sure,” I say. “I’m happy to have someone come take my statement, but I don’t need security.”
At least not for tonight. I can tell Rick I changed my mind tomorrow.
“Very well.” Rick pauses. “I also wanted to let you know I’m sending the body to Magnolia for the autopsy. You don’t need to do that for us again.”
“Thank you,” I whisper. “I appreciate that.”
“Abilene, you really need to be careful,” Rick says. “It’s ugly, what he’s doing to them. Cruel. We’re doing what we can, but we don’t have any leads right now.”
I bite back a surge of bile. “When do you think the officer will come by?” I ask.
“Within the next few hours. And I want you to promise me that you’ll keep an eye out, okay? We don’t know how this guy operates. Don’t know how he’s taking them or how long he’s keeping them.”
“I understand,” I say. “Thank you, Rick.”
“Stay safe.”
I drop the phone in the cradle and take a stumbling step backward. Light pours in through the front door, freshly repaired from the night when I thought this nightmare was over.
“Nameless,” I whisper, like I’m praying to him. “I wish I knew how to find you.”
I’ma wreck the rest of the day. A nervous, pacing wreck. A Rosado police officer shows up around mid-morning, an impossibly young new recruit who smiles thinly at me from the doorway.
“Ms. Snow,” he says, sounding almost apologetic. “Detective Contreras asked me to stop by. We just have a few questions.”
It goes as smoothly as I might expect. We talk in the kitchen because I don’t want to take him upstairs to my living room. The sun is bright and hot and reveals every trace of dust floating through the air. The entire time we’re talking, I think that if the officer went into the viewing room, this glaring sunlight would show how I let a killer seduce me instead of doing the right thing.
Somehow, though, I manage to answer the questions with a calm, clear voice. They’re basic things: Have I seen anything unusual. Have I gotten any threatening messages. Have I had any uncomfortable encounters in the last few days.
It should be yes to all of those questions, shouldn’t it? There are the terrible pictures down in my office. There’s Nameless stepping out of the shadows in his rubber mask. There’s my naked body draped over a corpse while Nameless rams himself inside me and tells me I’m beautiful.
“No,” I say to every question. “No, I haven’t seen anything.”
The whole interview takes maybe half an hour. When the officer leaves, I lock the door behind him and lean up against it and let out long, deep breaths as adrenaline ricochets through my body.
More than anything, I wish I could call Nameless. In the impossibly bright foyer, he feels like some figment of my fucked up imagination. Some trauma response I conjured up out of the hot summer night.
I try to work. Nothing gets done. I stare down at my phone, scrolling through my contacts. At one point, I stop on Rowan’s name, my chest tight. It was nice meeting up with him after Olivia died. But I can’t bring myself to message him.
He deserves someone normal, not someone who’s fucked a killer.
Eventually, though, I do message the group chat. I don’t want to put the burden of my honesty on them, but it’s better than nothing.
Y’all around? I need to talk to someone.
I set my phone down and stare up at the map of Rosado on the wall. All those red pins marking murders-that-aren’t-murders. With the most recent one, the pattern seems even more clear. A message. A conversation.
What other conversations might be happening in this town?
In a burst, I grab two white pins and stick them in place. One at the gazebo on the town square, and one at Pier Fourteen.
I frown, staring at the map. I already know why the killer left Heather at the pier. But why the gazebo? Simply because it was a prominent place?
I study the twelve other white pins. Compared to the red ones, they’ve always seemed random to me. And they still do, if I’m looking at the design they make on the map. But two of them suddenly stand out, because they’re both at town landmarks: one at the historic marker on the beach, where there’s an ugly statue of some town founder. The other at the First Rosado Methodist Church, one of the oldest churches in Texas.
I grab my notebook from my desk and flip through it until I find the details of each case. The one by the statue was ruled a suicide—a gunshot. The other was ruled an accident, although there’s very little information about the death.Laceration to the neck that severed the carotid artery.
How the hell is that an accident?
