Page 44 of Bad Blood
“Going to go out on a limb,” Lia said, her eyes locked on the oncoming confrontation, “and guess thatthose peopleare emissaries from the friendly neighborhood cult.”
Those people. That was the phrase the man playing chess had used to describe the murder of Mason Kyle’s family, thirty-some-odd years before.
Michael tossed three twenties on the table, and all five of us made our way out the door.
“Mel.” Shane tried to sidestep the man with the graying hair.“Melody.”
“It’s all right, Echo,” the man told the girl Shane had addressed as Melody. “Speak your truth.”
A girl I almost recognized—the way I’d almost recognized Shane—stepped forward. Her eyes were on the ground. “I’m not Melody anymore,” she said, her voice light and wispy, barely more than a whisper. “I don’t want to be Melody. My second name—my true name—is Echo.” She lifted her eyes to her brother’s. “I’m happy now. Can’t you be happy for me?”
“Happy for you?” Shane repeated, his voice catching in his throat. “Mel, you can’t even talk to me without glancing at him to make sure what you’re saying is okay. You gave up college—college, Melody—to join the soul-suckingcultthat stole our mother away from us when we were kids.” Shane’s fingers curled into fists. “So, no, I can’t behappyfor you.”
“Your mother was lost.” The man in charge addressed those words to Shane, his manner almost gentle. “We attempted to provide solace, offer her a simpler way of life. I was as grieved as you were when she chose a different path.”
“You’re thereasonshe left town!” Shane exploded.
His opponent’s demeanor never wavered. “Serenity Ranch is not for everyone. We cannot help everyone, but those we can help, we do.” He glanced at Melody, so subtly that if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed.
“I’ve found my Serenity,” Melody recited, her voice expressionless, her eyes glassy. “In Serenity, I’ve found balance. In Serenity, I’ve found peace.”
“Are you on something?” Shane demanded before whipping back around to the man he’d confronted. “What did you give her? What have youbeengiving her?”
The man stared at and into Shane for a moment or two and then bowed his head. “We must be going.”
“We’re about three seconds away from Draco Malfoy over there throwing a punch,” Michael said, his voice low. “Three…two…”
Shane punched the man. As the cult leader wiped blood off his lip with the back of his hand, he looked at Shane and smiled.
It didn’t take Agent Sterling long to dig up information on Serenity Ranch. The man in charge was named Holland Darby. He’d been investigated by local authorities dozens of times going back more than thirty years, but no proof of wrongdoing had ever been established.
The earliest complaints dated to the establishment of the Serenity Ranch commune on the outskirts of Gaither more than three decades earlier. According to the files Agent Sterling had acquired, Holland Darby was a collector of drifters and strays, but over the years, he’d wooed more than a few young, impressionable locals to his side, too.Never anyone under the age of eighteen. Never any males.
That told me what I needed to know about Holland Darby.You dot yourI’s and cross yourT’s. If you harbored minors, you could run afoul of the law, and whatever you’re doing out at Serenity Ranch, the last thing you want is cops on your property. Your followers include both men and women, but when it comes to locals, you prefer females—the younger, the better, so long as they’re legal.
“He brought Melody to town as a test.” Lia’s tone gave no clue to the fact that this was personal to her, that Holland Darby had raised memories she kept buried deep. “Darby wanted Shane to see his sister. He wanted Melody to make it clear thattheyare her family now.”
The less contact Melody has with her family, the easier she is to manipulate, but the more times she looks them in the eyes and chooses you, the more certain she’ll be that they won’t forgive her. That theycan’tforgive her, and that even if she wanted to leave Serenity Ranch, she could never go home.
“Clearly,” Lia said, standing up, “the Gaither Hotel is only passingly familiar with proper air-conditioning.” She pulled her hair back and off her neck. “I’m going to change into something cooler.”
Lia’s expression dared us to argue that her need for a wardrobe change had nothing to do with the temperature. Beside me, Michael watched her walk away. No matter how good she was at hiding her emotions, he was better at reading them.He knows what you’re feeling. You know that he knows.
After another moment, Michael followed her into the bedroom. I could see exactly how this was going to play out—the push and pull between them, Michael trying to bring her emotions to the surface, Lia throwing the fiasco with Celine in his face.
“I believe,” Sloane said, filling the silence, “that there is approximately an eighty-seven percent chance that Michael and Lia will end up making out or otherwise engaged in acts of physical—”
“Let’s turn our attention back to the case,” Agent Sterling cut in. “Shall we?” She fell into lecture mode. “There were dozens of complaints filed about Serenity Ranch when Holland Darby first began buying up large chunks of property on the outskirts of town thirty-three years ago. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the complaints were baseless or manufactured—no one wanted drifters, runaways, and former drug addicts taking up residence on what used to be family farms.” Agent Sterling set those complaints aside and opened the thickest file. “Approximately nine months after the establishment of Serenity Ranch, the local sheriff’s department opened up an investigation of the group’s involvement in the murders of Anna and Todd Kyle.”
“Nightshade’s parents?” I asked. Sterling nodded. For the next hour, she, Dean, Sloane, and I pieced through every bit of evidence the investigation had managed to obtain.
It wasn’t much.
At the time of the murders, Anna and Todd Kyle were a young married couple with a nine-year-old son. Anna’s father, Malcolm Lowell, lived with them. Reading between the lines, I inferred that Malcolm was the one with money—the one who’d owned the house, the one who’d refused to sell his land to Holland Darby when the interloper was buying up all of their neighbors’. There had been some kind of altercation involving the two men. Words were exchanged. Threats were implied.
And that night, someone had broken into Malcolm Lowell’s house, butchered his daughter and son-in-law, and viciously attacked Malcolm, stabbing him seventeen times and leaving him to bleed out on the floor. According to the police report, nine-year-old Mason had been home the whole time.
Did you hear them screaming? Did you hide?The old woman at the diner had said that most people in Gaither believed that Mason Kyle had seen his parents murdered, but the report gave no such indication.
