Page 86 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow
“Do you want an answer to that? Not my opinion, but proof, one way or the other.”
My scowl turns to a hard glare. “Of course.”
“Maybe there’s a faint chance you did cut up the animals, like you said, in some kind of fugue state. Buried psychopathy from your father, surfacing under stress. That must be what your aunt figured. Not that you did it on purpose but that, as you say, you snapped. I’m not a shrink. Your aunt was one, right?”
“A social worker.”
“Whatever. The question is, if you killed her, would you want to know that for sure?”
I meet his gaze. “Yes.”
He takes out his phone and unlocks it, flipping through apps.
I twist to face him. “You have other cameras?”
“No, I have exactly the ones I told you about. But I have something else. Your ankle monitor.”
I shake my head. “That won’t help. I didn’t necessarily cross the boundary even if I dragged my aunt into the lake.”
“I never said it only tracked you crossing the boundary.” He taps his phone. “I didn’t want to freak you out by letting you know I can find you wherever you go. I told the lawyer I just wanted to get alerts, but she insisted I have the full app.”
“So it’s a GPS tracker?”
“Yeah. I don’t look at it even when I might wonder where you are. But it doesn’t just track. It records.” He finds what he’s looking for and grunts. “Here’s the history from the first night you were here, when you found the rabbit in the morning.”
I’m not sure what exactly I’m looking at. It’s just squiggles and then a flat line and then more squiggles.
“You seemed to get up just after midnight, but you didn’t leave the cottage. Then you returned to bed until morning. The following night, you got up again, after one. This time it looks like you went out to the lake.”
I shiver as the memory slides back.
“Sam?”
“The first night I heard hoofbeats and saw the lights out the window, but I didn’t leave the cabin. The second night, I heard hoofbeats again and went down to the lake where I saw…”Your brother. Austin. Dead.I swallow and instead I say, “I saw one of those drowned people. I ran back to the house, and I told myself I imagined it. That I was sleepwalking or something.”
“Well, you went out for about fifteen minutes.” He zooms in on a map that shows my trail. “Straight to the water’s edge, walked around a bit, came back inside. That’s it. In two nights, you made one brief trip outside to the beach. You were not out killing and chopping up small animals.” He meets my gaze. “Or finding dead animals and chopping up the bodies.”
“Okay. But what about—”
“Here’s two nights ago, when your aunt disappeared.” He holds up his phone. “You went to your room and didn’t leave until around five, which is exactly the story you gave.” He frowns at the screen and taps something. “This says you were in bed by five at night?”
“That was after my aunt confronted me about the hatchet. I holed up in my room.”
“Then we have an accurate record of three nights when you did not leave the house for long enough to cut up dead animals… or drown your aunt.” He looks at me. “We saw a man dragged into the lake, Sam. You didn’t do it tonight and, if it happened to your aunt, which I really hope it didn’t, you didn’t do that either. Those creatures did. So I do not want to hear you blurt to Smits that you might have—” His chin jerks up as lights appear down the road. “Speak of the devil. Okay, I’m going to turn the truck around and lead him in.”
When we get out of the vehicles, Ben takes charge. He tells Smits what happened, starting with the encounter in the field, where the camper agreed to leave. Then he skips forward to hearing a scream and coming to check on me. Of course, in this version, it sounds as if the camper only half-heartedly grumbled before leaving and Ben just came to the cottage door and knocked after hearing a scream. He doesn’t say that specifically—he’s very careful not to lie—but he slants the narrative with the expertise of someone who has dealt with law enforcement before.
Ben is correct to do it like that. The camper is dead, and unless necessary, we are not admitting that the man argued with Ben and pushed me down. Nor do we want to sound as if we were in an absolute panic after the screams, Ben bursting into the cottage to find me.
From there, Ben does mention the lights, confirming that he also witnessed them. Then we saw a crumpled form on the beach, thought it was Gail and ran toward it, only to see the camper, who seemed badly injured. There was a figure farther down, at the edge of the woods. Before we could get a look at it, more figures emerged from the water and dragged the injured man in.
“People came out of the water and hauled him in?” Smits says, his gaze on me, as if I’m the one who will clearly tell him he’s mishearing.
“They were…” I take a deep breath. “They looked like my aunt in that photo. Like they’d drowned.”
Smits looks at Ben. At me. Steps back and rubs his forehead before rocking forward again.
“They lookeddrowned,” Smits says.
