Next stop, Atlanta. Her mother’s grave, which she’d visited countless times before, but since it was on the way to her last stop, she brought her another vase of stargazer lilies.

Lilah Turlington and her boyfriend, Eddie Stevens, were the only mixed-gender couple the Bannings killed, but that’s not why Charlotte saved them for last. They were both buried in Asheville, North Carolina, and unless she wanted to go out of her way by several days, the drive there would take her closer to the “Murder Farm,” as the press had dubbed it, than she’d been since her rescue at age seven.

She remembers the drive now.

The mountains, low, rolling, and green, gentler and more inviting than the coastal peaks near Altamira. But within the seductive folds of their threadlike valleys, a place of nightmares had endured and thrived.

She knew the farm’s main house was still standing, but the root cellar, where the victims had been held captive and raped, had been dragged from its foundation by the FBI during their search for buried bodies.

The house was a near ruin, of course, but dark-hearted hikers regularly posted pictures of it online, pictures in which they posed with serious expressions next to crumbling walls pockmarked with satanic graffiti. The owners of the neighboring pig farm bought the land after the investigation was concluded, and while they claimed publicly they were repulsed by all the attention, the rumor was they’d give you a guided hike to the place for a small, under-the-table donation. Her father had told her years before the only reason they hadn’t shot the Savage Woods films there was because the new owners had demanded an exorbitant fee, a fact he’d relayed with a shake of the head, as if they were just bad businesspeople and not greedy profiteers.

It wasn’t quite the stuff of horror movies. It was the stuff of people who, for whatever reason, thought it would be cool to live in one.

The temptation to visit the place, if only to demystify it in her mind, plagued her for most of the drive to Asheville. But she knew she wasn’t up to such a visit alone. She never would be. Still, the urge was strong as thirst on a hot day.

She remembers how hard she gripped the steering wheel for that last leg of the journey. How she forced herself to stare at the winding highway ahead. How she kept the windows rolled down just a little so the wind could make a sound like a flag flapping on the prow of a speeding ship. A sound that drove out her thoughts.

Lilah Turlington’s favorite flower had been the calla lily. Charlotte had no trouble finding some as soon as she got to Asheville.

When she finally reached the grave site, Lilah’s story weighed more heavily on her than the others. Maybe because before her murder, Lilah Turlington, born Lisa Hilliard, had accomplished what she, Trina Pierce, now Charlotte Rowe, was just setting out to do. She had escaped her past, made a new life for herself.

The black sheep of her wealthy family, she’d changed her name after graduating from Bowdoin and moving to Asheville, probably so her new crystal-selling, Reiki-massage-practicing hippie friends wouldn’t know she was descended from a family that built and managed some of the largest oil and natural gas pipelines in North and Central America. While they weren’t married, she and Eddie were raising Lilah’s son together; he was only two years old when they left him with friends before going camping and met the Bannings on the Appalachian Trail.

If Lilah knew the identity of her son’s birth father, she never let anyone know. After her disappearance was reported, her older brother, who at that time was poised to become chief executive officer of the evil empire Lilah had fled, took custody of her son and whisked him out of the country. Either to Canada or Mexico, no one in the press was ever sure. Morton-Hilliard Corp. had projects in both countries, and a press office capable of managing far more complex scandals than a missing hippy-dippy backpacker who might have abandoned her son.

Charlotte had always envied Lilah’s little boy. Envied what she saw as his fairy-tale ending: the wealthy family whisking him off to a foreign country, protecting him from the dark repercussions of the tragedy that had befallen his mother. So different from what her father had done for her.

But it wasn’t until that sunny afternoon, sitting on a stone bench beneath the branches of an oak tree in an Asheville cemetery, that she’d realized it was Lilah Turlington who’d given her the idea to remake herself. That by turning toward her heart and away from her family’s money all those years ago, Lilah had planted a seed of hope in the mind of Trina Pierce, and the bloom was Charlotte Rowe.

Maybe this is why she’s never kept a journal. By the time she felt comfortable enough to begin, there was too much damn material to know where to start.

Now it comes to her all at once.

The sight of the pen in her frozen hand, which she’s been staring at now for who knows how long, confirms it. But she hasn’t wedged herself into this corner of Marty’s trailer to write her memoirs, only to find her voice. She’s got no plan for whatever ends up on these pages.

This is for her and only her—something between a letter and a prayer.

So she can’t begin with Lilah, or that cemetery in Asheville. She has to begin with the precise moment her nightmare began.

They didn’t plan to kill my mother, she writes. She wasn’t like the others, the ones they stalked and captured.

By the time the sun starts to outline the bottom of the window shade next to her, she’s still writing.

30

“Who’s bored?” Mona Sanchez shouts from her office.

Luke looks up from his desk. Peter Henricks, the only other deputy at the station, is tentatively raising the hand he’s not using to refill his coffee mug.

Judy Lyle, who’s both reception and dispatch, swivels in her desk chair and glares at Mona’s open office door as if a polka band just started up a set inside; it’s an expression that doesn’t quite match the Pepto-pink sweater she’s tied around her neck and draped over her back like a cape. Like many of Altamira’s senior residents, Judy’s a woman of stark contrasts, the kind who reads syrupy-sweet romance novels before bed but curses like a drunk sailor the minute someone cuts her off in traffic. Luke’s a fan.

As for Peter, his best quality, as far as Luke’s concerned, is how quickly he volunteers for crappy assignments, and Luke’s pretty sure that’s exactly what this random question of Mona’s is shaping up to be. One seriously crappy assignment.

Reach for the stars, Henricks. Come on. I’m rooting for ya!

It’s not like Luke’s silence is a lie. Boredom isn’t quite the word he’d use to describe his current mood, or any of the moods he’s suffered since he stormed out on Charley two days before. Defeat. Despair. Angst. Those are more appropriate. That said, the only real excitement in his life since then has been talking Stanley Morrison’s wife out of running over his skis with her truck because she caught him texting an old girlfriend. So if they’re being entirely truthful, maybe he should raise his hand, too.

But what does he know about things like honesty and truthfulness? He’s just an asshole who can’t make friends. According, at least, to a woman he was trying to keep from getting killed by a madman.

When nobody answers out loud, Mona appears in the doorway to her office. “Seriously, who wants to venture a guess as to why a pharmaceutical company’s buying the old resort?”

“What?” Luke shoots to his feet, all eyes on him suddenly.

Well, that was smooth, hotshot.

“You have strong feelings about this, I take it?” Mona asks.

“Which one?”

“There’s only one resort anywhere near here, and it’s not finished.”

“Which drug company?”

“Graydon. Ever heard of ’em?”

Don’t answer, and don’t mess yourself.

“That’s crazy,” he says. “I mean, why would a drug company want the resort?”

“I believe I just asked that question.”

“It’s still nuts.”

“And you’re jumping in your pants about this why? Did you have an offer in on the place?”

“How’d you find out about this?”

“Mayor’s office called. Says they’re working up a press release. Graydon’s paid off all of Silver Shore’s debt. They’re gonna partner with them on the whole deal, it looks like. They’re even going to retain the same lobbying firm that was trying to get the state to widen 293.”

“Well, that’s gonna suck.” Judy Lyle swivels back to her desk. “How many trees are gonna have to die for that?”

“Says the woman with a job and health insurance,” Peter Henricks grumbles.

“So I take it nobody’s got an answer,” Mona says. “Just a bunch of feelings, it sounds like.”

“I can try to find one for you if you like.”

The words are out of his mouth before he can think twice. It’s a strange offer, and Mona’s stare makes that clear.

“An answer, I mean,” Luke adds.

“I take it Stanley Morrison isn’t filing assault charges?”

“On behalf of his water skis? Give me a break.”

“Well, I gave you a job actually, so I figure we’re square in that department.”