Before
THE BOY COLORED so hard the black crayon snapped in half in his hand.
This wasn’t uncommon with that color.
He remembered the darkness around those eyes was thick, and only the right amount of pressure could reproduce that deep, dark black.
From his seat on the hardwood floor, he pulled another black crayon from the bucket beside him and resumed coloring, furiously, hurriedly—he could hear that Mother was on her way up.
He’d done something bad, and she was mad.
And when she was mad, she got mean. But he couldn’t remember what he’d done this time.
“Noah,” his mother’s shrill voice called from the stairwell outside his closed bedroom door. “Noah Nichols!”
Her footfalls made the steps groan.
Made his heart feel wrong, sick and swollen and thumpy.
He imagined her knee-length cotton skirt, thick like a curtain, swooshing upon each step, her big feet crammed into heavy shoes.
He pressed hard on the picture.
Had to get it dark.
Had to get it right.
Her voice grew closer outside the door. “Noah, I’m coming up. Someone’s been a baddy boy!”
He imagined the stairs splintering under her weight, her falling through into a dark, dusty hole, plunging into the basement where all the spiders slept, into the cellar with the snakes and guttersnipes, into the earth with the worms and the roots and the dinosaur bones, and he imagined her dying down there.
Decaying into dust.
Like motes.
He colored, hard, broke another black crayon. He tossed it aside with the others, content that he’d finished the picture in time. Finished it enough.
“Noah!” She was right outside the door.
What had he done?
He blew crayon dust from the picture, scattering the black remnants through the dust motes hovering at the sun-touched window. Black slivers settled on the faded floorboards, blending with the dozens of other colors staining the wood like a paint palette, like he imagined a rainbow might if it suddenly blew apart into billions of minuscule pieces.
The doorknob rattled.
“Noah, unlock this door, right now! Right now!”
He wasn’t supposed to lock the door. She had sworn the next time he locked it Father would get out the belt, the one with the globs of hardened glue in each of the holes.
But he didn’t remember locking the door.
He looked down at the colored picture in his hands and it scared him.
It was signed in red crayon at the bottom right corner—Dean.
The doorknob shook like it might snap off. “Do you want the ark, Noah? Is that what you want?” He tried not to look at the closet door in the corner of the room, small like a hobbit door, looming as large as a tunnel now.
The words painted carefully above it.
“Don’t put me in the ark,” he whispered to himself.
He stood, weak-kneed, and shuffled toward the wall, eyeing the expanse of drawings he’d tacked to it, all various versions of the eyes—they numbered in the dozens—after his return from that scary house. The bedroom door shook, and his mother screamed about flood waters and the ark.
“NOAH!”
He grabbed thumbtacks from the Tupperware bowl on the floor and pinned his picture to the wall with the rest of them, hanging there like a giant collage, all signed by names he didn’t know.
Missing Teens Found in Twisted Tree
Month Long Hunt Ends in Tragedy
YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, SHORTLY after 4 PM, the hunt for two missing teens, Grisham Graham and Jeremy Shakes, both seniors at Twisted Tree High School and stars of the football team, came to a sad and disturbing ending. After an anonymous letter was dropped on the steps of the Twisted Tree Police Department hinting at the location of the missing teens, the bodies of both boys were found buried twenty yards from the abandoned Crawley Mansion, a popular Twisted Tree haunt for teenage dares, a stone’s throw from the town’s famous twisted trees. Both boys were found with similar head injuries, fatal blows from a blunt instrument, believed to be a hammer. With the first reports of the two boys missing coinciding with the night of Jeff Pritchard’s arrest four weeks ago, authorities are now investigating a suspected link between the two incidents, as the Crawley Mansion, the last place the boys were known to have been, is only a mile through the woods to Pritchard’s “House of Horrors.” Grisham and Jeremy both had promising college careers …
CHAPTER1
THE PORCH LIGHT was on.
It was ten minutes before nine, and her fourth-grade daughter was still awake—her small silhouette had been at the living room window and disappeared as soon as they’d pulled to a stop at the curb. Four fat raindrops plopped against the windshield, and then a steady drizzle fell.
Tess Claiborne paused before getting out of her partner’s idling unmarked sedan.
“You okay?” Danny Gomes drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs, something he knew drove her crazy—not so much that he’d do it, but because he had no rhythm. No sense of tempo. No hint that it was even a particular tune. And for someone like Tess, born constantly needing to get to the bottom of things, his drumming was like fingernails on a chalkboard. But who was she to gripe? Her car had a dead battery she hadn’t had time to mess with, and she was grateful for the lift.
She said, “Fine,” and looked back at the now vacant window. Truthfully, she wasn’t yet ready to face her own daughter, and she didn’t like how pathetic that felt. If it hadn’t been clear before the breakup with Justin, it was now—the favorite parent was the one kicked out and she was left to deal with the confusion.
And with Danny being her husband’s best friend, Justin was often the favored spouse there as well. Tess glanced at him.
He stopped drumming.
Rainwater cascaded down the windshield. She straightened her white blouse and fingered the shoulder holster that held her 9 mm. “Turn the wipers on. Please.”
He did. The water cleared. “Better?”
She nodded. “I’m talking to a lawyer tomorrow.”
“What? Tess, really?”
“Yeah, Danny, really. You got a problem with that?”
“No, I mean … hell, I don’t know. Maybe. Just seems fast, you know? What about counseling? Eliza gave you that number, right?”
“What about minding your own business?”
Danny shifted in his seat to face her. He had corn nut dust on his shirt from earlier, right above his belly, where he liked to wipe his hands after eating anything powdery. “What about your business is ours and ours is yours? We tell each other everything? The Four Horseman and all that shit?”
“We were joking,” Tess said, remembering back to the night the four of them had said something along those lines, all of them drunk around the firepit, Justin even saying they should make a blood pact, like they were teenagers, Tess crumbling the wrapper of the Dum-Dum she’d just dunked into her vodka tonic and plopped into her mouth and calling Justin an idiot, because it was just that way between them.
Thick as thieves. The two couples, always together.
And now it was all shit because of her husband.
God damn you, Justin.
She looked away from her partner, back to the house, the vacant window.
She couldn’t tell who Danny was more pissed at—Justin for cheating or her for kicking him out. Which she’d had every right to do. Even Danny’s wife, Eliza, a social worker who still somehow made time to properly raise their five kids alongside Danny, had admitted to that. Or maybe Danny was pissed off in general because their world had been disrupted.
The silence between the two of them lately had made their job as detectives in the
Missoula Police Department more difficult and her partner’s habits more annoying, highlighting the fact that Danny was a goofball who often flew by the seat of his pants while she was nonstop serious.
Thunder vibrated in the east, a slow rumble. Tess grew uneasy. Her heartbeat quickened.
A storm was coming.
Danny scratched his thinning brown hair and exhaled like a puffer fish, something he did when he was resigned to something. “You going to be okay tonight?”
Tess nodded. “I’ll be fine.” Her phobia about storms, a problem since her teenage years, back when she’d gone by Tessa, wasn’t his problem.
“What time is the thing, tonight?”
“Midnight. Eastern time.”
“Hopefully it’ll give your dad some peace.”
“Yeah,” she said, thinking of the execution that was to take place across the country in a few hours. “Hopefully.” She watched the rain, opened the car door. “I’ll see you in the morning.” She closed the door, dodged Julia’s pink bicycle in the middle of the sidewalk, and hurried inside.
Tammy and Lincoln Bellings were neighbors who had become regular babysitters since she’d kicked Justin out two weeks ago. They’d raised four children who were grown and out of the house and relished the time with Julia. Tess entered the kitchen and found Tammy with her hands in the sink, suds to her elbows, Lincoln at the table playing checkers with Julia.
Tess said, “Look who’s still awake.”
Julia shot her mother an annoyed look, a staple for months now since she turned nine, and more frequent since Justin’s departure.
Lincoln moved a checker. “It’s my fault. She suckered me into one more game.” He moved a checker and collected the pieces he’d jumped. Julia frowned, studying the board like she was wondering how she could have missed that move. Lincoln said, “I charged your car battery.”
“You didn’t have to do that, but thank you.”
“We do for neighbors, Tess.” He stood from the table, ruffled Julia’s sandy hair, and handed his wife her raincoat.
Tess watched Julia move the pieces off the checkerboard.
Tammy touched Tess’s arm, lowered her voice. “Hang in there. And call if you need anything.” She lowered her voice. “I’ll say a prayer for your father tonight.”
“They’re at the cabin,” said Tess. “Figured they’d need their privacy.”
Tess saw her neighbors out and locked the door behind them. When she returned to the kitchen, Julia had readied the checkerboard for another game.
“Not tonight, honey. It’s already past your bedtime. It’s a school night.”
Julia stood abruptly, shoving the checkerboard to the floor, the pieces scattering. “
Daddy would have let me.” She ran from the room.
Tess called after her, but her daughter was already down the hall, slamming her bedroom door.
Thunder rumbled; Tess’s heartbeat raced. She pulled a glass from the cabinet, filled it with two fingers of Old Sam on the rocks, and sipped until warmth slowed her heartbeat. She’d have Julia pick up the checkers in the morning, she thought. She sipped bourbon. The caramel note reminded her of Twisted Tree, her childhood hometown in Kentucky, where bourbon was not only a drink, but a lifestyle.
Deciding she didn’t want to face an argument in the morning, Tess began picking up the red and black checkers, plucking them piece by piece from the tile floor.
Until thunder sounded again, a fierce clap instead of a rumble.
Tess flinched, then out of annoyance kicked the remaining pieces across the floor and left the kitchen, thinking how she and Eliza always had to be the disciplinarians while their husbands were the playmates. The women loved their children just as much as their husbands, yet it was always Justin and Danny the kids ran to when they returned from work. How Justin, as soon as he’d walked in the door, had dropped his briefcase in the foyer, his symbolic way of leaving his work at the door—something she’d never been able to do—and stood there like a statue with his arms out to either side. He called it the Panda Tree. Julia would come running from whatever room she’d be in and jump at him. Sometimes she’d cling to his chest like she was giving him a hug; sometimes she’d land sideways and cling to him that way. But no matter what angle she’d jump from, she’d cling there like a panda on a tree and there they’d stand stock still, like she was attached by Velcro, until one of them would break character and start laughing.
Tess found herself at Julia’s bedroom door, smiling at the memory despite herself. She nudged the door open and saw her daughter on the bed, pretending to sleep, her arm around her new doll she’d named Dolly. Tess went on to her own bedroom, tried to ignore the smell of Justin’s cologne she’d sprayed nostalgically that morning. Pathetically. Somehow it still lingered, like memories tend to do. She tossed her purse to the floor, kicked off her flats, removed her holster, and locked her gun in the middle dresser drawer. She stripped down to her bra and panties, turned sideways to catch her profile in the vanity mirror. At thirty-three her figure was still athletic, toned. Eliza joked with her about her still having that body, while Eliza, after five kids, had grown somewhat heavier—curvier and more voluptuous, she’d say, adding that Danny, because he was such a good husband, had graciously gained weight right along with her. They’d joke about Tess and Justin still being fit because they only had one child,
hinting, like always, that they were well past due for another.
Hinting that one was easy, when it wasn’t.
Tess would force a smile, but deep down it hurt every time it was mentioned. Not that she couldn’t, but more that she wouldn’t, and it was well known among the four of them that Justin had wanted another child now for years.
Tess turned away from the mirror and did what she’d always done whenever the guilt crept in—think back to how difficult it had been with the first. The rigorous delivery. The problems she’d had breastfeeding. The postpartum depression weighing down on her for nearly a year. The sleepless nights. The constant crying of a colicky baby.
Julia had been a difficult infant.
Danny and Eliza seemingly had gone through none of that, with any of their five, or if they had, never admitted to it.
Eliza just seemed to be better at it. At motherhood.
And this had all become more prominent in Tess’s mind since she’d forced Justin to leave.
Screaming at him two weeks ago because she couldn’t stand to look at him. And now, here she was putting her shoulder-length brown hair into a bun and slipping on one of Justin’s T-shirts, because old habits die hard.
She was starting to miss him.
Rain tapped against the roof, spilled over gutters that needed cleaning. Her wedding ring rested on the dresser.
Tomorrow’s problem.
Lightning flashed outside the window. More thunder, louder this time. She finished her drink and put it down hard on the dresser, still annoyed at how Julia had stormed out of the kitchen earlier.
But it was a school night and she needed to get to sleep.
With Justin not in the house, she wondered if she had what it took to play both roles, good cop and bad.
Her bedroom door creaked open.
Julia stood in the threshold with Dolly in one arm and her frayed pink blanket in the other. “Mommy, does the lightning come first or the thunder?”
Her baby blue eyes reminded her of Justin. Daddy’s little girl.
God damn him.
And now her daughter was inheriting her fears.
At that moment the electricity went out. Tess forced herself to seem calm. “Should I get the candles?”
Julia nodded. “I’ll get the paper.”
The walk-in closet perfectly buffered the storm noise.
It was dark except for their candle glow—this was a Justin idea from years ago, using artwork to take their minds off the storm. But it was the first storm where it was just the two of them. Julia tilted her candle, plopping yellow wax on the paper, adding to the shape that had already dried.
Julia stared at it cockeyed. “Kind of looks like a flower.” She looked at her mother’s paper. A red blob smeared the middle of it. “Is that an elephant?”
paper. A red blob smeared the middle of it. “Is that an elephant?”
“I guess it could be. That does look like a trunk.” Tess added two more drops to form a leg, and then another to make the trunk longer.
Sometimes instead of dripping wax they’d draw pictures. Pictures to form words, like charades but drawing, another Justin idea that Julia favored. Tonight they just dripped wax, but on top of the papers was a picture they’d made in the last storm, showing a Christmas tree and a cookie with a plus sign in between. Christmas cookie. A very simple word game, but Tess liked the wax better. With the wax she didn’t have to think.
Julia leaned forward and tilted one drop of yellow into what could have been the head of Tess’s red elephant. “There. Now it can see.” She blew her candle out and rested on the floor, her hair fanned out like wild grass over her pillow. She closed her eyes as distant thunder rumbled. “You remember when Danny tried doing the Panda Tree with all five of their kids?”
In the dark, Tess said, “Yeah, I remember.”
Then her daughter asked, “When’s Daddy coming back home?”
A lump formed in Tess’s throat. She’d rather talk about the storm. “I don’t know.”
Julia left it at that, and Tess was relieved.
A few minutes later, Julia snored softly.
Tess watched her daughter sleep, watched her skinny chest rise and fall with only a hint of sound. It made her heart swell.
She checked her phone; she’d forgotten to take it off vibrate earlier. Justin had sent a text ten minutes ago.
How U holding up? Candles are in the closet. So is the paper. Talk soon?
She didn’t respond. She placed the phone face down against the floor and the closet went dark again. It was ten o’clock. She wondered how her parents were doing at the cabin. She could see her father in his recliner listening to the radio, waiting for word that it had happened.
Midnight in Kentucky.
The execution.
CHAPTER2
“AN EYE FOR an eye,” a woman in an anti-abortion shirt screamed outside the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville, where low clouds covered the prison grounds like a purple caul. “He deserves to die.”
The lines had literally been drawn across the parking lot hours ago, with white paint, and now death penalty protesters shouted across No-Man’s Land at the supporters, all of them holding signs as riot police struggled to keep them at bay.
FRY FATHER SILENCE
KILLING IS NEVER RIGHT
ABOLISH CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
The state was minutes away from putting a man to death by electrocution, once the most widely used execution method in the US. In seventeen years, exhausting every appeal known to the courts along the way, Jeff Pritchard—a former parochial school janitor who had for years disguised himself as a priest to his victims, to kill what he considered the outcasts of society—had yet to say a word.
He was not a priest and never had been, but the pictures from his arrest at Twisted Tree, with him wearing the stolen priestly garments, had flashed all over the news and internet and had become so ingrained in the minds of the public that they’d taken it as fact. After it was clear he’d gone silent, completely refusing to talk, the newspaper had dubbed him Father Silence.
News crews from every state crowded the woods around the prison, maneuvering to get as close as they could to the wrought-iron gates. Cameras flashed. Many clutched candles. Various religious sects shouted at one another over the morality of what was about to happen; others were irate over how long it had taken.
“Abolish capital punishment,” screamed a suited man.
“Do it for the children!” shouted a woman with her hair in locks.
“Fry Father Silence!”
From every angle it was videoed—by phone, on tripod and iPad, the atmosphere seeming dangerously close to riot.
But inside the prison walls, the execution process moved on.
And all was silent.
The warden followed four prison guards as they escorted Jeff Pritchard to the execution room at the end of No. 3 Cellblock.
So far, all had gone as practiced.
On a humid night in
May 1911, an eighteen-year-old boy named James Buckner had made history as the first electric chair victim in Kentucky, and while awaiting death had been baptized, reborn, and spent his last hours reading the Bible.
Jeff Pritchard had participated in none of those customs. He’d denied the chaplain, refused a last meal. Fellow death row inmates whispered goodbyes as he made the long walk. He nodded, but his eyes never wavered from the black door at the end of the hall.
The execution room that housed Old Sparky was sterile and cold, having not been used in over thirty years, the state having transitioned from the electric chair to lethal injection in the late 1990s. But the new governor, Clinton Bullsworth, was an old-school ball-buster who’d campaigned on finally putting Jeff Pritchard in the ground hot.
Bullsworth knew that lethal injection had the highest rate of botched executions, and he didn’t want to take a chance with Jeff Pritchard. Truth was—and he could be heard saying it in a viral TikTok video—he wanted to see the man sizzle. The electric chair was recommissioned, and Old Sparky was set for a comeback.
Media watched from the adjoining room through shatterproof glass, as the guards helped Pritchard into the chair. After the first strap was fastened, the warden faced the adjoining room. On the other side of the glass sat members of the victims’ families. The executioner. Pritchard’s lawyer, Barrett Stevens. The sheriff, the prison doctor, the chaplain. The only people who declined the invitation were the detectives who’d caught him nearly two decades ago.
Pritchard avoided eye contact with the families, but nodded at his lawyer, then the governor, who took a step back from the glass inside the viewing area. The guards tightened straps around Pritchard’s arms and adjusted electrodes at his calves and wrists. They pulled the thick leather belt across the man’s chest and dropped the wired leather mask over his long hair. Only his lips and nose showed through the holes.
The warden nodded and the guards left the room, faster than they’d practiced.
“Jeff Pritchard, can you hear me?”
Pritchard nodded.
“You have been judged by a jury of your peers, sentenced, and condemned to death by electrocution. If you have any last words before the electrocution is carried out, please state them now.”
In his years on death row the man in the chair had never given the warden, police, counselors, or reporters a word. He’d turned down psychologists, NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox, and Barbara Walters.
But now his lips moved, and he whispered something the warden couldn’t make out—but the guard standing nearby went pale.
The circular clock on the wall read midnight.
The warden signaled the executioner, then joined him in a side room. The first charge of 1,500 volts started with a low whine and a loud snap as current surged into Pritchard’s body.
CHAPTER3
AFTER THE STORM passed, Tess blew out candles, opened the closet door, and lifted Julia from the carpeted floor.
She was almost to the hallway when Julia mumbled. “Sleep in your bed.”
Her daughter hadn’t posed it as a question, more of a statement. Justin always said children in the bed were the best forms of birth control, but he wasn’t here, and Tess didn’t feel like sleeping alone either.
She tucked Julia in on Justin’s side and watched her slip back into sleep. Tess had told herself earlier in the day that she would not turn the television on tonight. Her father had said the same thing, and he and her mother had escaped to the cabin in Lolo National Forest to get away from the media swarm. It wasn’t as bad as the days right after Pritchard’s arrest, but three weeks ago the local media had begun to call, requesting interviews and statements, and her father obliged, until Mother put a stop to it and demanded they go out of town.
But Tess doubted that her father, a decorated former detective who had arrested Jeff Pritchard along with his partner, Burt Lobell, was passively sitting by. He was probably awake now, watching CNN.
Just as they’d made a pact not to do.
But Betsy always said Tess got her stubbornness honest, from Leland no doubt, and if they wanted to do something they did it. In the kitchen, Tess poured bourbon on the rocks, returned to the bedroom, and turned on the television.
A beautiful woman with a microphone spoke to a well-dressed man at the CNN studio.
“… and finally, the controversy came to an end this morning after midnight when Jeff Pritchard was electrocuted in the state prison in Eddyville, Kentucky. As one of the most mysterious serial killers ever to—”
She turned the television off and dropped the remote on the bed. Her heart hammered. Jeff Pritchard. Father Silence. No matter what he was called, he was dead.
However deep they bury him won’t be deep enough.
She considered calling her dad. Leave him alone. He’s fine. Probably drinking Old Sam just as she was. She sent him a text anyway: Well, it’s over. How are you and Mom doing?
She hit Send and waited, doubtful he’d text back—he wasn’t a fan of texting. She put her nose to the rim of the rocks glass, smelled caramel and vanilla notes that reminded her of home, and downed a healthy gulp of the bourbon to bury any memories trying to resurface.
Buried memories from her teenage years that Justin, a professional psychologist, had too often tried to unbury over their ten years of marriage. Hers was a childhood that had been good, up until it wasn’t. But she grew tired of his questions. She wasn’t his patient. She was his wife. And after a while felt like she wasn’t even good at that.
Her phone rang.
She smiled, found her hand shaking slightly as she answered it. “Daddy.”
“Tough detective still calling her old man Daddy?”
Tess paused only slightly “He’s finally dead.”
“As a doornail,” he said.
“How do you feel?”
“On the record?”
“Sure.”
“Relieved.”
“And off?”
“Relieved.”
“You could have texted me that much.”
“Then I wouldn’t have gotten to hear your voice in the middle of the night, sugar.”
The quiver in his voice hadn’t gone unnoticed. Try as he might, her father wasn’t a good actor—he wore his emotions on his sleeve—and the phone did little to mask his unease.
He’s hiding something.
“Mom in bed?”
“Drawing a bath. She has her way of relaxing.” Ice clinked in a glass as he swallowed. “And I’ve got mine.”
She did likewise and the sip went down smoother than the previous ones.
Now that she’d heard the ice in the glass, she realized her father sounded tipsy. But who could blame him on this night? “Have you heard from anyone?”
A pause. Another sip. “Burt called. Talked briefly. He’s hiding too, at least for the night.”
Together Burt and her father had led the charge into Pritchard’s house on the night of his arrest. He and Burt had talked regularly for several years after her family moved to Montana, but now only on occasion. At least they kept in touch. Tess knew that sometimes talking to his old partner made him sad, and she wished now that she hadn’t asked. She had always thought Burt had been hurt when his partner of so many years up and left suddenly, a month or so after Jeff Pritchard’s arrest.
Tess had been a young teen, suddenly struggling to maintain friends when it had never been a problem. Her parents said the move was because of the attention they were getting, to get away from the circus, although by the time they moved out west the media swarm had all but stopped. Not completely, but close enough. The reporters were no longer hounding them; her father and Burt weren’t on the news nightly. But her family pulled up stakes, moving from a distilling town they’d always loved until so much evil got dug up and fears surfaced.
Tess felt it then as she did now—somehow, they’d moved because of her.
That need to protect.
But from what? What had she done? Those were the memories lost to her—the ones Justin knew were in there hiding—from during that time when Jeff Pritchard was arrested.
I don’t need to be fixed, Justin, she’d once screamed at him, not able to admit to herself that her anger was at least partly stemming from the fact that he wasn’t wrong.
“River’s high tonight,” her father said, pulling her back to the present.
The Pattee River snaked behind their cabin in Lolo. Her father liked to sit on the back porch and drink his morning coffee black, and listen to the water flow “You okay, Daddy?”
A long pause. ...
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