Page 9 of Night So Silent
“It’s early.” She shakes her head, trying to downplay it. “There’s not much to tell yet.”
I shoot her a look.Typical Brett.
“Well, Jacob Elordi would make a great Colson,” I comment, passing one of the foam containers across the table. “I would say a young Cillian Murphy, but he’s in solid dad territory now.”
“I’ll allow it,” Colson nods.
“Speaking of which, Barrett asked about Hildy and Wells,” Brett says to Colson as she spoons some mujaddara and shawarma onto her plate.
I shake my head. “We don’t have to talk about it. I was just curious.”
“And concerned?” Brett guesses with a slight twitch of her mouth.
“That, too,” I admit.
Who wouldn’t be? They vanished without a trace and Wells was the only one unaccounted for after the raid on the police department, even though he reported for work that morning. Hildy disappeared sometime around then, but I’m not sure whether it was before or after they executed the search warrant on her and Jay’s house where Emily Fox’s skeletal remains were discovered.
“I don’t think you need to be worried,” Colson replies.
“Why not?”
He cocks his head. “You don’t know what’s in those woods out there in Hellbranch, do you?”
“I thought they lived in Canaan.”
“The creek can’t protect them,” he says with a glint in his eye.
“From what?”
Colson reaches for the manousheh in the middle of the table. “Shadows that move through the trees too fast to see. Tall ones with big claws, pitch black hair, and long snouts full of razor-sharp teeth.”
“Oh, come on!” I chuckle. “Seriously, Colson.”
“Look it up, Barrett,” he shrugs,unbothered. “The Hellbranch murders. Granted, animals can’t murder people. But that would’ve created an entirely different problem, because animals also don’t run on two feet.”
“OK, fine, what happened? Did Wells and Hildy get eaten by monsters in the woods?”
Brett smiles with amusement, but when I glance at Sergei to my right, he’s just watching me with the same stoic expression he’s had since I first saw him from the airport floor. I don’t know why, but it’s bothering me that I can’t read him that easily.Because I’m good at that.
“It’s like all these other cold cases,” Colson continues, “where bodies start turning up in the woods—all young women, torn to shreds.”
I bristle with apprehension at first. It’s not lost on me that he’s describing circumstances similar to his sister’s murder, but his tranquil tone suggests that Evie has nothing to do with this story.
“Rumors abound, people in Hellbranch speculated that they might be connected to other mysterious deaths years before—enough to suspect, but not enough to confirm. But then,one night…” he pauses for dramatic effect, “Joey and Stevie Hunter—Stevie’s a girl, by the way—heard their dogs barking and looked out the window to see a massive black creature in theiryard. They ran outside to find it cornering their dog. It turned on them, but soon enough, their grandfather came running with his gun and shot it. The kids say he hit it with one round from an assault rifle before it took off.”
“What was it? A bear?” As if there are any bears in the flatlands…
“They said it looked like a giant dog with pointed ears and a huge head, but it was standing on two feet and had a growl that sounded like thunder. Nobody believed them, of course.”
And how could they? But, then again, there aren’t any large predators in the Midwest. Not like in the mountains.
“The story goes that one day, Joey was walking through the woods on his way to Palomino Park when he got ambushed by the same creature he saw on his property. It would’ve killed him, but his twin sister, Stevie, came upon them just in time. The police would later say he surprised a serial killer while his sister was being attacked, but both of them swore it was Stevie who saved her brother.”
“So, they survived?”
Colson nods. “Stevie killed it with nothing but an aluminum softball bat.”
“Killed what?”
