Unlike Trina, who responded to his attempts at honest communication with a restraining order, Abigail replied in great detail to every single letter Jason mailed her at Haddock Penitentiary. She recognized Jason as the vehicle for her adopted daughter’s restoration, a daughter who’d been divinely gifted to her and then cruelly removed by a world that did not understand the spiritual necessity of life taking. Abigail blessed Jason with words he’d been desperate to hear since he’d first laid eyes on Trina.
You will be the Daniel to her Abigail, she’d written. And in so doing, you will become my son, too.
Why hadn’t he read that letter instead of this transcript?
He’s brought it with him, along with several others. They’re at the bottom of his backpack, along with the coil of rope, the rolls of duct tape, and the Ziploc bags in which he plans to put the bullets he’s going to strip from the three different guns she keeps in her house.
Should he read it now?
No, there’s no telling what effect it might have on him.
Instead he searches the diner for corrupters. There’s one sitting a few tables away: pretty and young, with a blonde ponytail and a halter top that reveals just enough suntanned skin to corrupt. She taps at the screen of her smartphone. The mustached man sitting across from her gazes out at the passing eighteen-wheelers with a vacant stare that reveals all the damage she’s done to his soul.
She ignores the man on purpose. Jason knows this. That morning, or possibly the night before, she denied the man sex and took great, silent, delight in the pain this caused him. Right now she’s texting a girlfriend, or maybe several, and they’re reveling in the power she lords over the man, in the pain her withholding creates in him. And she does this because she is a corrupter, one of many. And once Jason has awakened Trina to their combined destiny, she will give herself entirely to their union and help him remove women like this blonde whore from the earth. Trina will burn away the evidence of his work, just like she burned away the detritus of Abigail and Daniel’s victims. But first he has to break down her walls, show her there’s no escape. From her true calling. From her real mother.
From him.
These thoughts, these plans—this vision—finally give him the confidence he’s been seeking since he stopped off at this diner.
He has only a few hours left in his drive, a few hours until he’ll reach the isolated parcel of Arizona desert she now calls home.
Today is a day like no other, and it will require a great deal more strength and confidence than it did to write those letters.
Because a few months ago, all those years of not knowing where she’d disappeared to came to an abrupt end, thanks to a single miraculous e-mail. As thrilled as he’d been to have the information, the knowledge brought with it a distinct challenge: to return to the mission he’d almost given up on entirely—to stoke the flames that would turn Trina into Burning Girl once again.
As for the name she calls herself now, he must never let it pass through his lips. He would be doing her a disservice if he did. His job is to free her of her delusions, not strengthen them.
So he avoids thinking it now. To him, she will always be Trina Pierce. And if he succeeds this time, she will become his Burning Girl.
2
“Charlotte, why don’t you step away from the window?”
She knows it’s a good idea.
Most of Dr. Thorpe’s suggestions have been good ideas, or at least the 30 percent she’s been willing to try.
It’s true. If she doesn’t stop staring at the movie theater across the street, she won’t be able to focus on his advice. But a crazy part of her believes that if she turns her back on the bold cluster of words on the old-school marquee, they’ll somehow strike at her like a snake. They’re the same words that stopped her in her tracks when she first saw them, that have turned every night for the past two weeks into a prolonged battle with terrible dreams.
HALLOWEEN DOUBLE FEATURE—SAVAGE WOODS & SAVAGE WOODS II: THE RECKONING
The Blake is a restored movie house, one of the new jewels of Scarlet, this tiny, once-abandoned mining town in the Arizona desert turned hippie enclave and aspiring tourist trap. Its stucco facade is painted a shade of hunter green that from a distance makes it look like an oasis rising from the parched Sonoran desert. At night the vertical neon sign that spells out the theater’s name is visible for miles around.
At dusk, however, the sign looks skeletal and hungry; the unlit neon letters cast spidery shadows along its length. And then there are the posters flanking the ticket booth; the same blood-dripping art that used to stare back at her from the T-shirts worn by all those horror movie fans who’d pack the house at the events she used to do with her father.
“OK,” Dylan says. “Then describe what you’re seeing right now.”
“A movie theater,” she says.
“Is that all?”
“Invasion. Injustice.”
“Fear?” he asks.
“That, too. The girl on the poster looks very afraid, just like she always does.”
“The girl that’s supposed to be you.”
“Well, she doesn’t look like me. Her hair’s still brown, for one, and I’ve got about fifteen pounds on her. And they changed some of the letters in her name, so there’s that. One in the first, one in the last. My father saw to that part, you know, ’cause he’s such a kind, considerate, selfish, motherfu—sorry.”
“Since when did I say you couldn’t curse?”
“Well, if you had, I’d probably just do it anyway and then leave.”
“You’re free to leave at any time. You know that.”
“I do.”
“But I wish you wouldn’t, Charlotte. I wish you’d keep talking.”
“Honestly, it’s easier when you try to read my mind.”
She sits, looks at him for the first time since she stormed into his cramped office, which always smells of burned coffee from the AA meetings downstairs.
It’s not easy looking Dylan Thorpe in the eyes, and not just because he’s basically appointed himself her psychiatrist now. It’s hard because he’s one of the most astonishingly handsome men she’s ever seen. The kind of handsome that seems two-dimensional and unreal even when it’s sitting across from you, like it might slide from view if you swipe up on your phone.
Another woman, a woman without Charlotte’s walls, might have tried to seduce him after their first chat downstairs. Even after it became clear that he’d sought her out as a kind of pet project.
By his own admission, Dylan had sensed she didn’t truly belong in the AA meetings at the Saguaro Wellness Center. That she gravitated to them because there was something about the sharing—all those honest, unguarded expressions of hopes, insecurities, and fears—that quieted her soul, even though she’d never been what anyone would call an alcoholic.
It would take another few weeks before Charlotte admitted she liked the meetings because they made her feel close to her late grandmother, with whom she’d lived for almost a decade after fleeing her father.
They were both survivors, she and her grandmother. The woman almost drank herself to death following the disappearance of her daughter and grandchild. But even before Charlotte’s rescue—Trina’s rescue, if they were going to be technical about it—Luanne found sobriety and became a pillar of the small 12-step community in Altamira, a little town just south of Big Sur and a short drive inland from the Pacific Coast Highway, a place she’d called home for thirty years. After Charlotte went to live with her, Luanne made a habit of bringing her to the open AA meetings in town, the ones that allowed nonalcoholics to just sit and listen. That’s where Charlotte first heard slogans like “First things first,” “Easy does it,” and her personal favorite, “Keep it simple, stupid.” That’s where she had seen that people really could change. That we’re not all doomed by our genetics or our pasts.
The eight years she’d spent with her grandmother, three of them as an almost-normal high school student and the rest as an assistant manager in Luanne’s pet supply store, were the happiest in her entire life. Idyllic compared with what came before and after. The long walks they took together along Altamira’s rocky coast, the open skies that were often filled by great, towering clouds, the steadiness of her grandmother’s grip, and the quiet wisdom of her recovery, even the biting chill of the Pacific winds—all these things made her time on the Bannings’ farm seem like a memory so distant it might one day fade entirely.
Then one afternoon, walking home from the store, Grandma Luanne died of a sudden, massive heart attack, a quick and painless death, but one that tore a hole in Charlotte so deep she could barely speak for weeks afterward. This is what it means to have real family, she’d realized as they lowered the casket into the ground. This is part of loving and being loved, and without it, you cannot have the other parts, the joyful parts.
In her will Luanne left Charlotte her house and the small pet supply store she’d run for thirty years. Six months later, one of the big chains opened in the next valley over, close to the 101 freeway. Sales dropped precipitously. Her grandmother’s AA friends chipped in what they could, but it was obvious that even selling her grandmother’s house would not be enough to keep the store afloat.