Page 22 of Darkwater Lane

My insides deflate. That explains his silence on the ride home.Damnit. I’d been hoping for more time before I had to address it with the kids.

Before I can figure out how best to respond, he adds, “It was weird to hear Dad’s voice after all these years. He sounded so…normal.” He continues staring out the window at the familiar houses of our neighborhood passing by.

One of the most difficult aspects of dealing with the fallout of Melvin’s murders has been reconciling Melvin the serial killer with Melvin the father. The truth is, he wasn’t a terrible dad at times. For the kids especially, there are good memories tucked amid the bad. It’s hard to know what to do with those. Forgetting them means forgetting their childhood, erasing the love they felt from one oftheir parents, getting rid of all the ways in which that parent supported and encouraged them.

“It was weird for me too,” I tell him.Traumaticwould be the word I would use, but weird fits. Connor glances my way, surprised.

“I remember where that video’s from,” he says. “It was a school fundraiser, and Dad volunteered to be one of the targets for the pie-throwing contest.”

The memories flood me. Looking back, it’s inconceivable that Melvin would volunteer for such a thing, given how important control was to him. But the PTO president had begged him when one of the other parents had failed to show and he’d readily agreed. He liked the idea of stepping in as the savior. He’d spent half an hour sitting on a stool letting kids throw tins of whipped cream at him.

He’d ended the shift covered in a gooey mess and chased Connor and Lanny, threatening to hug them both. I can still hear their squeals of laughter as they ran from him; Melvin saying, “I’m going to get you!”in a singsong voice.

That was the clip the podcast played: Melvin calling over and over again, “I’m going to get you!” Taken out of context, it had sounded creepy and out of place, even more so when you could hear Lanny’s screeches in the background.

The snippet had been part of a longer video the school had put together and posted online to advertise how successful the fundraiser had been. When I’d first seen it, I remember smiling, happy to have had the memory preserved. Proud that my family had been included. I’d completely forgotten about it afterward. Never would it have occurred to me that it would be unearthed and used against us.

The Royal Murderspodcast had taken one of our family’s core, happy memories and twisted it into something dark and ugly. Or maybe it had just shown that even the good moments had beeninterlaced with Melvin’s desire for violence. That everything in our lives had been tainted by him.

“That was a good afternoon,” I tell Connor, partly because it’s the truth and partly because I sense that’s what he needs to hear.

We’ve pulled into the driveway at this point and are sitting in the car, idling. “Do you want to talk about the rest of the podcast?” I don’t have to explain that I mean the parts about Sam. The episode touched on Leonard Varrus’s rise in the Lost Angels organization and his drive to uncover the so-called truth and present it in some sort of documentary or podcast.

Mostly, though, it had focused on his disappearance and the allegations against Sam. I hated to admit how compelling Rowan and Madison made it sound. Anyone listening would think Sam murdered Leo and, at least so far, had gotten away with it.

Of course, as always, the podcast brought it back around to me: what was it about me that attracted murderers? How could it be a coincidence that the two loves of my life were both violent, vicious men?

Was it them, or was it me?

I’d found that point particularly galling because I would never refer to Melvin as a “love of my life.” It pissed me off that the podcast claimed he was.

Connor looks at me curiously. “You don’t think I believe the bullshit those podcasters were saying, do you?”

“No, but it still couldn’t have been easy to hear.”

He shrugs. “It’s not like I’m not super-aware of how the media makes shit up. That’s basically been my life since Kevin.”

It’s true. Even though Kevin eventually retracted his statement implicating Connor as part of his plea deal, that hasn’t stopped news outlets from suggesting Connor was still somehow involved.

I start to respond, but Connor holds up a hand. “Before you get all therapist-Mom on me and ask if I want to talk about it, I don’t. I just brought it up to say that, yeah, it sucks. But the people whoknow you won’t believe that crap, and everyone else isn’t worth knowing.”

He pushes open the car door and starts toward the house. I’m left sitting there, thinking that my fifteen-year-old son is far too young to have been forced to learn such truths the hard way. He’s also right.

If only it were that easy.

We manage to make it through the evening without discussing the podcast. It helps that Vee drops by unannounced for dinner. She’s been in our lives as a quasi-adopted member of our family ever since her mother, Marlene, called me from Wolfhunter, Tennessee, asking for help. When I arrived, it was to find Marlene dead and Vee holding the literal smoking gun. I was able to keep Vee from being charged with a murder she didn’t commit, and she was supposed to go live with some family in another state.

But Vee’s never been great at doing what she’s supposed to do. Eventually, she ended up back at our house in Stillhouse Lake and has been attached to our family ever since—even though recently she’s been living in her own apartment not too far away. She was with Connor late last year when he ran afoul of those two psychopathic girls in Gardenia, North Carolina and, like him, she barely survived the encounter.

Something about the experience lit a fire under her ass, though. Before that trip, she’d been a bit aimless and noncommittal when it came to her future. Once she left the hospital, however, she decided to pursue her passion and started apprenticing for a tattoo artist in town the day she turned eighteen and was finally eligible to do so.

I’m pretty damn proud of the woman she’s becoming and love how her eyes light up when she tells stories about work and someof their more eccentric clients and the various art they’ve requested.

We’ve barely finished eating when she pulls out her sketchpad to show us her latest ideas for how to incorporate the bullet wound and surgical scars on her abdomen into a unique design.

“Torrence even said he’d let me do the ink myself once I’m trained up,” she says, full of energy and excitement. “This afternoon he let me work the outline for a Gordian knot someone wanted on their arm. It was super cool. He said I could borrow one of the tattoo guns if I wanted to practice on myself using water.” She turns to Lanny. “I could practice on you too, if you want. It doesn’t hurt all that much. Mostly.”

“No tattoos until you’re eighteen,” I remind Lanny.

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