Page 103 of Trapper Road

Josiah leans forward, hands on his knees. “Listen, you asked me about Juliette. I’ve told you. You can believe me or not. That girl had something wrong with her. If you ask me whether I’m sad she’s dead, I can’t say that I am.”

He pushes to his feet. “All I can tell you is that I underestimated Juliette, and I paid the price. It’s on you if you make the same mistake. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like you to get off my property and never come back.” He turns on his heel and stalks back to his house, slamming the door behind him.

30

GWEN

Sam calls as I’m driving back to town. The moment I hear his voice, I know something’s wrong. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

“We have a problem.”

I pull to the side of the road and set my hazards. My heart starts to thump wildly. “Tell me.”

He blows out a long breath, and I can practically hear his tension through the phone. “Kez called in a favor to the lab. They identified the blood in our house.”

I frown. “That sounds like good news.”

“It’s Leonard Varrus.”

The name falls like lead between us. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” he says. There’s a moment’s pause before he adds, “They think I had something to do with it.”

The notion is so ludicrous, I actually laugh. “Seriously? That’s absurd. There’s no way they can think—”

“They have evidence.”

The laughter dies in my throat. Suddenly I understand why he sounds the way he does. He’s scared. Really scared. Which leaves me terrified.

“Wait. You’re saying the police — and this includes Kez, my best friend — think you killed Leonard Varrus? In our own house?”

“I’m not sure Kez believes that, but yeah, the other Detective — the new guy, Detective Diakos — he seems pretty sure I could have had something to do with it.”

My mind spins. “But you would never —” I don’t finish the statement because I can’t. I was about to say that he would never do anything like that, he would never turn to violence against an enemy, but I’m not really sure that’s true.

He spent years attacking me and my family. He’s the one who designed the targets with our faces on them. He’s the one who stalked us to Stillhouse Lake.

Leonard Varrus was threatening our family. Family means everything to Sam. I’m not sure how far he’d go to protect us. But I can’t count violence out if it came down to it.

He knows what I’m thinking because he says, “Gwen, I promise you. I had nothing to do with this.”

I would never have asked, but I’m glad he tells me anyway. “I know.”

It’s been a long time getting to this place, and it required a lot of work on both our parts, but I love and trust Sam more than anyone else in this world.

Still, I know there are pieces of himself he keeps from me. The same way I keep things from him. He’s never told me what Melvin wrote in his sister’s journal about the way she died. I’ve never told him how close I came to breaking at Heartbreak Bay.

It’s not that I don’t think he’ll understand or that he’d judge me or love me any less. It’s that I have to understand myself before I can explain it to anyone else.

He lets out a shuddering breath, and I can hear the strain and loneliness in it. I should be there. We should be there. As a family. “We’ll leave tonight,” I tell him, making up my mind. “We’ll be there by morning.”

“You can’t—”

I bristle. If there’s anything I don’t appreciate, it’s someone else telling me what I can and can’t do. “Of course I can.”

“The press is already here. I heard from Lanny — they’re all over the house. The minute you come to town they’ll be all over you and that means they’ll be all over Connor. We can’t do that to him.”

My stomach sinks. I think of Connor sitting at the motel and how at ease he seemed after our conversation earlier. I know a large part of that is being here — so far away from everything that happened earlier this week at school. But I also know that we can’t hide here forever. Eventually, we’re going to have to go home, and he’s going to have to face the real world.

---