Page 129 of Trapper Road

I don’t even realize she’s ushered me to the waiting room until I’m face to face with the police officer from earlier. He gestures to a chair. I sit, for no other reason than I don’t know what else to do. I don’t notice when he steps away, but a moment later he’s back in front of me, offering me a cup of coffee.

It’s an unexpected gesture from a man I told to shoot me earlier.

Minutes later, the fourth ambulance arrives. I can hear her before she even enters the ER. It’s Mandy, still wailing about her poor friend and the ordeal they endured at that monster boy’s hands.

Before I even realize it, I’m on my feet. Apparently the police officer is surprised by my sudden movement as well, because I’m already halfway across the waiting room before he even moves to stop me.

He’s too late. I reach Mandy and without even thinking I reach out, wrapping my fingers around that stupid scale necklace and ripping it from her throat. She screeches in protest.

I hold it up, dangling it in her face. “You think I don’t know what this is? You think I don’t know everything about you and Willa and Juliette and the sick games you liked to play?”

Something shifts in her eyes. Shock. Followed by fear. She blinks, trying to feign innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looks past me at the cop. “She just assaulted me. You saw that. Aren’t you going to stop her?”

I lean in closer. “I found the texts on Juliette’s phone. She never deleted them. Never deleted the hidden app.”

Her mouth opens and closes, like a fish dropped on solid ground.

“Oh, and we discovered Juliette’s body,” I inform her. I decide to follow my gut and add, “I spoke to the forensic pathologist at the scene. It was staged to look like a suicide, but she plans to rule it a homicide. Something about the position of the body proving she didn’t kill herself.”

Her eyes go wide and she sucks in a gasping breath. “It was Willa,” she says. “Everything was her idea. I swear it was. She told me she’d kill me if I didn’t go along with it.” She turns to the cop. “You have to believe me. She was the one who planned the fake kidnapping. She tied herself up, used the knife to make it look like she’d been injured. I swear, I had no idea what she was planning until I got there.”

* * *

Recovery from trauma isn’t fast, I learned that the hard way after Salah Point. Both Vee’s and Connor’s injuries were more severe than first anticipated and both ended up being airlifted to the nearest level one trauma center, which happened to be Duke University Hospital in Durham. Connor spent a week in a coma after being diagnosed with a middle meningeal artery bleed, while Vee endured multiple surgeries to repair the damage the bullet wreaked on her intestines.

But they will recover. As Sam reminds me, our kids are strong. They’ve endured before, and they will continue to do so. Thank God the Norton DA declined to press charges so that Sam and Lanny could come to Durham as soon as I called. I’m not sure I could have made it through those agonizing days waiting for Connor to wake up without the rest of my family by my side.

As the reason for his decision, the DA cited the lack of a body and therefore insufficient evidence to determine the exact nature of the crime committed. As several newspaper articles pointed out, that doesn’t mean a man wasn’t murdered in our house, it just means we were clever enough to hide the evidence.

Which of course makes absolutely no sense. If we were clever enough to kill a man and hide his body, we’d have been clever enough not to leave so much evidence behind. But both of us are aware of what went unsaid, but was very clearly implied, in the DA’s announcement: the minute there’s a body, there would likely be an arrest, and Sam continues to be their only suspect.

So the threat remains, but we’ve gotten used to living with threats. We have no other option.

At least the threats against Connor died down somewhat. After my tip to Mike about the hidden app, he and his team at the FBI were able to get a court order forcing Kevin to unlock the app on his phone. It was filled with incriminating discussions with several online friends that were apparently quite chilling to read.

The FBI used the evidence to convince Kevin to take a plea deal. As part of the arrangement he took full responsibility for the shooting, recanting everything he said about Connor’s involvement.

When I break the news to Connor I expect to see relief, and it’s there, but there’s also sadness. I sit at the edge of his hospital bed. “Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.

He thinks about it for a moment, then shakes his head. “Not now. But maybe later?”

I squeeze his hand in agreement. I hesitate a moment before saying, “There’s something I wanted to ask about what happened in Gardenia.”

His expression turns wary. We’ve talked about the events of that night several times since he woke from his coma. There have been an array of local, state, and federal police officers through his room since then, interviewing him to get his side of the story. Thanks to Mandy’s outburst in the hospital, as well as the chats on Juliette’s phone, there’s not even a hint of doubt about Connor’s innocence in the matter.

Nor about Trevor’s either, thank goodness. The entire case against him fell apart and he was finally released after they got a search warrant for Willa and Mandy’s electronics and found all the evidence they needed to prove they’d set the poor boy up. Apparently, he’d become a target of Mandy’s after he’d snubbed her advances at a party earlier in the year. As payback, she’d decided to use Trevor’s identity to catfish Juliette in order to test her loyalty.

The prevailing theory is that Mandy and Willa wanted to know if Juliette would keep their secrets— if she’d choose them over a guy. When she chose the guy, she became a liability to Willa and Mandy. They figured it was only a matter of time before Juliette turned on them and ratted them out. So they got rid of her. They set her up to meet “Beau” in the woods off Trapper Road, and they killed her, staging it like a suicide in the off chance her body was ever discovered.

It’s been a lot for Connor to take in, and I’ve tried to give him space. But there’s something he said the night of the fire that’s been bothering me. “At the Shadow Shack, before you collapsed, you told me you weren’t like your father. That you weren’t a monster. Do you remember that?”

He nods slowly.

I squeeze his hand tighter. “You need to know — you’re nothing like your father.”

He starts to protest, but I cut him off. “Look, there are monsters in this world. The existence of your father, of Willa Devlin and Mandy Strickland — that’s proof that monsters exist. But you’re not one of them.”

He glances toward the window, and I notice a tear gathering in the corner of his eye. I want to reach out and brush it away, but I have a feeling it would only embarrass him. “How do you know?” he asks, his voice so small and quiet it cracks my heart.

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