Page 9 of He Sees You
Every Tuesday and Thursday, they'd drive Juliette and me to the instructor's house in Lake Placid, then disappear for two hours.
We found out later they were using the time to visit their dealer, maintaining their own addictions while crafting the appearance of cultured children.
The violin was my escape then.
Now it's a weapon, though not in the way people might think.
Music carries in these mountains.
On quiet nights, I play pieces that echo through the valleys—Bach's “Partita No. 2”, sometimes Paganini's “Caprices”.
The locals think it's haunting.
They don't realize I'm playing for an audience of one who hasn't arrived yet.
Practice runs for when she's here, when she'll hear the music and wonder about the man who plays violin in a cabin full of skulls.
My laptop is open to her Instagram.
She posted from a rest stop an hour ago—a photo of snow-covered pines with the caption:Heading home to write about monsters. Maybe I'll find some inspiration in the mountains.
The comments are the usual sycophants.
Heart emojis and fire symbols and people begging for the next book.
One user wrote:Hope you find your darkness again!
If only they knew.
Her darkness is preparing lunch in a cabin three miles from her father's house, slicing venison with the same knife that's been inside four different men this year.
All of them deserved it—wife beaters, child touchers, the kind of men who make the world uglier.
But the sheriff doesn't see it that way.
He just sees bodies.
Patterns.
A killer he needs to catch before his daughter comes home.
Too late for that, Sheriff.
I know things about Sheriff Sterling that would make his jurisdiction question everything.
Like how he's been drinking more since the third body.
Like how he had an affair with the mayor's wife ten years ago, before she died in that convenient car accident.
Like how he sometimes sits outside his daughter's childhood home at night, staring at her dark window like he can will her to appear.
We're not so different, the sheriff and I.
We both want to protect Celeste.
The difference is, he wants to protect her from the world.
I want to protect her from everyone but me.
