Page 48 of The Executioners Three
Not that it mattered in the end. Neither the Hangsman nor the Headsman caught up until Freddie and Mrs. Ferris were at the old schoolhouse, and like the night before, when Freddie turned to face them, the shadows peeled away.
Then the two figures converged into one: Theo.
He held out his hand, upon which gleamed the heart.“On n’est jamais si bien servi que par soi-même,”he told Freddie. “This is for you, and only you can break it.”
“Break what?” Freddie glanced sideways. “Your grandmother told me…” Freddie’s voice died.
Mrs. Ferris was no longer there. The schoolhouse was empty. The night sky shone outside.
“You, Freddie,” Theo said. “Only you can break it.”
“Oh.” She angled back to him, frowning, and as she’d done the previous night, she cautiously accepted the heart of iron.
It beat against her fingertips.
This time, though, she realized shedidknow how to break it. Still holding the heart, she stretched onto her toes and she kissed Theo. Like she had at the old mill. So hard it left Freddie’s dream-heart hammering and her dream-lips raw. Andthistime, when Freddie awoke drenched in sweat, it was for a completely different reason than the night before.
Her mouth tasted of honey.
It took Freddie twice as long to get ready that morning. To shower. To pick out clothes (four trial outfits before she finally settled on jeans, a pistachio turtleneck to hide the hickey, and her winter coat because it was getting cold outside). She needed three tries to get her left contact onto its respective eye, and she hadn’t even started to dry her hair when Divya showed up to walk to school together.
“Just go without me,” Freddie said wearily, and Divya—who had never been tardy in her entire life and was determined to graduate with an untarnished record—complied. There was still something Freddie needed to do before school, while the house was empty.
Because Freddie had finally remembered where she’d seen “The Executioners Three” before: in the darkest corner of the family basement, where a secret box of files hid.
A secret box that Freddie’s mom didn’t know Freddie knew about, and that Freddie had only ever looked at once, when she was nine years old.
She’d been pretending to be Nancy Drew—specifically Nancy Drew inThe Secret in the Old Attic,except that her house didn’t have an attic, so to the basement she’d gone. There, she’d scoured and examined and searched for clues about deceased soldiers and missing musical scores.
What she’d found instead was a cardboard box labeledFrank Carter, Desk. Freddie had of course recognized her dad’s name, and in an instant, all thoughts of Nancy Drew had fled. Because right here were answers. Right here was her chance to maybe learn something without opening leaky tear ducts or clogging up throats.
With nine-year-old enthusiasm—and definitely a spike of guilt she had to punt aside—Freddie had torn back the box’s flaps, ignoring all the dustand swatting away the nest (or was it a swarm?) of tiny spiders that had taken up roost within.
She’d found legal pads, a set of keys, a Rolodex, a stack of newspaper articles and printouts, and a bunch of pens that didn’t write anymore. She’d also found her dad’s badge, gleaming and cold. She would have pocketed it right away if she hadn’t been afraid her mom might one day discover it missing. Although, while Freddie had sat there exploring the box, shehadfastened it to the pocket on her T-shirt.
She’d liked the weight of it, and she still remembered how it had felt hanging there.
At the bottom of the box, underneath all the files and pads, Freddie had found the biggest surprise of all: a faded photograph of Dad holding her on the day she’d been born. He’d had a beard then, and he’d been grinning like the happiest man who’d ever lived.
For the next twenty minutes, Freddie had simply stared at that picture, trying to conjure memories of his face. She’d had a handful of her own photos with Dad in them, but he was never smiling—at least not like he’d been here. In all ofherphotos, he’d looked vaguely haunted. Vaguely lost.
Which was the way he lived in Freddie’s memory too. She couldn’t summon him—not precisely—but she could summon the way it felt to be around him: like he was quiet, withdrawn, and with his mind focused anywherebuton the people right beside him.
Freddie hadn’t liked how the photo had made her feel. The cavernous shame. The hardening of her intestines like concrete had been poured in. Some heated anger too, because this guy in the photo wasn’t her dad. Her real dad in all the ways that mattered—that was Steve, and it felt…
Well, disloyal to even wonder about the guy who hadn’t stayed when she had two amazing parents who had.
And it felt even more disloyal to break the unspoken family rule regarding Frank Carter.
So Freddie had decided this was one area where she didn’t want to be the Answer Finder any longer. Where she didn’twantto open Pandora’s box. So she’d closed the literal box, and she’d never gone back into that corner of the basement again.
Tamp down thoughts. Tamp down feelings.
If not for Sheriff Bowman’s comment about her dad on Saturday, Freddie might never have come to this box again. But the comment plus the poem at the archives—they had finally collided in her brain in a greatAha! Eureka and gesundheit!moment.
Nine-year-old Freddie hadn’t cared about all the weird documents; only the picture of Dad and his badge had held her attention. But seventeen-year-old Freddie knew it was the other stuff that might actually be important to her.
So she focused on the task at hand.
