Page 34 of Bitter Falls

I deliberately chose something nicer this trip. Clean, well lit, relatively modern if not fancy. J. B. probably would have paid for something really upscale, but I’m more comfortable here, and it’s the best place that’s close-ish to the Landry family home. I haven’t gotten a call back yet, but I’m hoping Joe Landry will reach out in the morning. If not, I’m prepared to doorstep him. For tonight, we pile into our rooms—one for me and Sam, one for Lanny and Connor, though Lanny’s already making mutinous noises about wanting her own room and why does she have to share a bathroom anyway. But they’re okay. She’s relieved, I think, to be away from Stillhouse Lake right now. So is Connor.

Sam and I settle in, but I find I’m restless in the heavy humidity. I can’t get comfortable. I give up and coax a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the room—the results are surprisingly good—and open up my laptop to check messages.

There are quite a few, which is odd. I’ve put in certain keyword filters, so anything that containsrapeorfuckorkillgoes into a folder called RADIOACTIVEunless it’s from someone I already know. But these have bypassed that filter setup. They’re all from anonymous accounts, most just strings of numbers.

The message contents are nothing but pictures.

It takes a lot to shock me these days, to be honest. I’ve seen gruesome crime scenes, in real life and in vividly colored high-resolution photographs. I’ve seen mutilations and violations and so much more; a lot of it has been forced on me through accounts just like these, designed to horrify and incite terror.

But these are still disturbing. One’s a crime scene photo—God knows from where—in saturated color so the blood is a distinctively bright hue. A woman lies on the ground. She’s got no face, just a ragged mashed hole where it ought to be. One eye lies on the ground next to her. It’s a cloudy brown.

The caption on the picture saysSoon, bitch.

I brace myself for the next message. And the next. And the next. It’s all bad, but some stand out. One’s a direct death threat against Sam. I put that one aside. I linger, horrified, over threats to both my children. There have always been assholes who fixate on me. But threatening to rape and murder my children just to makemefeel the pain is beyond monstrous. They don’t care about Lanny and Connor; to these sick bastards my kids are just flesh dolls they can rip apart for effect. It makes me rage inside, and shake with fear, which is what they want. I know that and still can’t help it.

I tell myself this is normal, that panic comes in waves and it’ll subside again soon...but even if it does, this avenue of attack never closes. There’s always someone new stumbling upon a message board, a thread, a call for action. They feel powerless. It makes them happy to lash out.

The internet enables and organizes hate very effectively; it lets people believe they’re righteous warriors for justice when in reality they’re just clicking keys. All the emotional hit of adrenaline, none of the risk. Most of them will never do anything else; one shot, and they’re gone.

But there’s always a possibility that one of these messages is from a stalker with time and inclination to travel. To shadow our family until an opportunity presents itself. And that terrifies me, because I know better than anyone that safety is an illusion.

I stop at the thirty-fourth message, because that one is a picture of the four of us together. Me, Sam, the kids. We’re in front of the cabin, talking as we carry in groceries. Lanny’s smiling. I’m wearing my favorite red sweater. There are targets on each of us.

This picture isrecent, within the last month, because I just bought that damn sweater when the weather started to turn.

The caption feels like a knife at my back.You don’t get to be happy.How many times have I heard that? From the lips of victims’ families, former friends, perfect strangers.

Often enough that I have to work not to believe it.

I archive all the emails, complete with all the header information, onto a thumb drive, and then I dive into the radioactive folder for another unsettling swim in the sewer. It’s even worse, but at least most of it is just words, not pictures. I put those on a separate drive. Close to two hundred of those.

Sam’s hand falls on my shoulder, and I flinch. “You’re quiet,” he says.

“Yeah.” I shut the lid on the computer and turn with a smile. But my smile dies at the serious look on his face.

“I need to talk to you,” he says. “Got a minute?”

“Sure. Remy’s father hasn’t called back yet anyway.” I let a second go by before I ask the question I’m kind of dreading. “What is it?”

He sits on the edge of the bed across from me and rubs his hands together. That’s a tell of his; it means he’s feeling very uncomfortable, working himself up to something personal. “I’ve been contacted by the Lost Angels,” he says.

Contacted.Not targeted? I don’t answer, because I’m not sure what to say. He doesn’t, either, for a moment.

“They wanted me to know that they’re about to do a podcast. You know how popular those are right now.”

They are. Listeners in the millions. I even subscribe to some myself.

“About me?” I ask. He shakes his head. He’s looking down now. It alarms me more than the rest of it.

“Not directly,” he says. “It’s about me. They believe I had something to do with Miranda’s death.”

Miranda Tidewell and Sam had a...relationship. Not the traditional, sexual kind as far as I’m aware, though she was possessive of him; she and Sam shared a deep trauma. Miranda’s daughter had been murdered by my ex-husband. And so had Sam’s sister. She’d been the one to help him through that grief, not me. She’d been the one who’d channeled Sam’s grief into a pure, burning rage against Melvin, and against the woman she believed had enabled Melvin to commit his crimes.

Me.

Miranda had sharpened Sam and pointed him at me like a spear, and I thank God that he’d had enough of his soul left to recognize that he’d been used. And that I was innocent.

But Miranda hated me to her last breath, and she blamed Sam for turning on her and protecting me. I wasn’t there when she was killed, but Sam was. The official verdict was that he didn’t have a thing to do with it...but that wasn’t about to satisfy the conspiracy-hungry anger addicts on the Lost Angels website.

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