He saw the two boys, huddled in a corner near a water fountain in what looked like an old school building. They didn’t know Kenny was lurking nearby, overlooked, ignored, like always.
Then he heard another voice, softer, weak, from the small, thin child. Jed.
You promise, Markie? You won’t ever leave me, will you? You won’t leave me alone with him, down in the dark?
I won’t. You’re my little brother. Brothers are always there for each other. You believe me, right?
I believe you, Markie. But what if they make you? If they get a divorce and your mom goes away, you’ll have to go, too, right?
If they force me, I’ll find a way to come back for you, I swear. Nobody’s gonna hurt you, Jed. If they do, I’ll make them pay.
I’ll make them pay.
The memories shifted, more children, loud and cruel, more of Kenny’s quiet stoicism. He was losing himself in more personal memories. Heartbreaking ones.
Aidan drew back, pulling away from the mist, erecting the wall between his mind and Kenny’s memories. He had what he needed.
There had been a brother—a stepbrother. His mother had been married to Jed’s father. All they needed to find was a marriage certificate, and then they’d have a name.
Aidan rubbed a hand over his eyes, then lifted his gaze to Lexie. “Look for marriage and divorce records on Jed’s father. He remarried sometime after his first wife’s death. And his second wife had a son, called Markie.”
Kenny’s eyes flew open and he snapped his fingers. “Markie! That’s it, Jed’s big brother was named Markie.”
“Are you sure?” Lexie asked.
Kenny answered even before Aidan could, as if the memories had solidified in his mind with Aidan’s words. “Sure I’m sure! Jed was my age, we was in the same class. Markie was older, grade three, I think. Him and Jed didn’t have the same last name, though, ’cause he was already born when his mama got married to Jed’s daddy.”
Aidan nodded once, confirming what Kenny had said.
Lexie hurried back to the desk, obviously intending to look up more information on Jed White’s mother. Aidan focused on the maintenance man, who was proving to be so vitally important to this case. “Kenny, what happened to Markie, do you remember?”
He nodded eagerly. “Yeah! Markie’s mama divorced Jed’s daddy and they moved away. Jed was sad, I can tell you. Talked about his brother for years. Anybody was botherin’ him, he’d say, ‘My brother Markie’s gonna come back one day and make you sorry you were ever mean to me!’ ”
Everything clicked into place with that one sentence, a few words whispered by a little boy over thirty years ago.
He’ll make you sorry you were ever mean to me.
Markie had promised to make them pay. And it appeared he had made good on that promise. If Aidan’s suspicions were correct, Jed White’s long-lost stepbrother had been playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the men he held responsible for Jed’s death.
It was all supposition, guesswork at this point. But somehow, deep inside, Aidan knew he was right.
“Oh my God,” Lexie whispered. “Is this possible?”
Aidan jerked his head to look at her, seeing Lexie literally shaking in her chair. Her face was pale, her mouth open in an O, short, tiny gasps coming out of it.
“What is it?”
She couldn’t speak, merely pointing to the screen. Aidan rose from his chair and hurried to her, bending over her shoulder to look at the monitor for himself.
It was a marriage record, detailing the marriage of Jed White’s father, Jedediah, to a woman named Alice, when Jed was about two years old.
Lexie’s trembling finger was pointed directly at the mother’s name. Her last name.
Young. Alice Young, who had apparently had a son from a previous marriage. Markie.
“Markie would be a nickname, of course,” she whispered. “For Mark.”
He now remembered where he’d heard the name. It had been at the football game, when she’d been pointing out who was who in this town.
One of whom had been vice principal Mark Young.
Chapter 17
Sunday, 7:15 p.m.
“I hear a car. He’s coming back.”
Though they had been lying in the dark, waiting for this moment, ready for their chance to put their plan in motion and escape from here, Taylor couldn’t deny a shiver of raw terror ripped through her body at Vonnie’s whispered words.
The monster was coming. And they thought they could escape him?
She couldn’t do this. Just couldn’t. “Oh my God.”
“Calm down,” the other girl ordered. “I can smell your fear from over here. If he knows you’re conscious and waiting for your chance, he’ll come in here ready to put you down like a dog. Just get back over there where you were, and stick to the plan. You hit him, you take his keys, and you run like hell. Get help, and come back for me.”
“I can’t just leave you . . .”
“We have one shot,” Vonnie insisted. “You can’t waste time trying to find the keys to the lock on these chains, as well as the one to the door, unless you kill the sonofabitch, which would be just fine by me.”
“Me, too.”
“Barring that, the second he goes down, you get outta here and find help. I’ve held out this long, I’ll survive till you get back, and if he gets close enough, I’ll hold him to give you more of a head start.”
Taylor couldn’t help it, she began to cry. She tried to blink away the tears, then did as Vonnie had told her, getting back into her position on the floor, the damn knife still sticking out of her back. Vonnie hadn’t let her pull it out, saying it could be keeping a wound plugged up and if it came out she could bleed to death. Even if that didn’t happen, it wasn’t worth the risk that their captor would see it was out as soon as he returned. No way would he think it had fallen out on its own, not when it had stuck tight throughout the rest of the ordeal. He’d know she had regained consciousness and would be more wary when he entered.
“You back where you were?”
“I think so,” she said, unable to be totally sure in this pitch darkness.
“Good. Stay still. Remember, don’t listen to him; no matter what he says, try not to react.”
A car door slammed. Taylor closed her eyes.
Jenny, help me. Please help me stay calm
.
You can do this
.
Thinking of how rational and smart her twin had always been, she forced herself to take deep breaths, to try to still her racing heart.
Breathe. Just breathe. He’s not a monster; he’s only a man
.
The man who had destroyed her family. The man who had killed her sister. The man who intended to torture her to death.
Her body relaxed, but her mind hardened with resolve.
Maybe she couldn’t do this. Maybe she wouldn’t escape.
But she could try.
Hearing a clink, she figured Vonnie was still frantically trying to work her way out from under the chains. Now that her hands were free of the tape, which Taylor had pulled off bit by bit, working blind in the dark, Vonnie seemed to think she might be able to get herself up without having to wait for someone to rescue her with the key.
Over the past hour, she’d heard the other girl grunt, then whimper as she maneuvered her arms and shoulders into impossible positions. Vonnie was trying to flatten herself, to twist out from between the cot and the restraining chain looped around her.
That would be a miracle. With two of them able to leap on the man, surprising him as soon as he came through the door, they might be able to actually do this.
But Taylor didn’t believe in miracles, not anymore. Not after last night.
She couldn’t rely on Vonnie’s help, not unless she was lucky enough to knock their attacker out and had time to look for all his keys. Until then, she was entirely on her own.
No, you’re not
.
Taylor breathed out, slowly, calm again. She couldn’t see Vonnie in the darkness, but she could see Jenny, still lying there on her stomach, just a few feet away. Reaching for her. Smiling.
Taylor reached, too, pressed the tip of her finger to her sister’s, absorbing her strength and her love.
Ready?
“Ready,” she breathed.
A sound from above made her stiffen. Jenny disappeared, but still, Taylor felt her touch.
From nearby came a heavy footfall. A clang of metal—the outer door.
“Stop moving,” she ordered Vonnie. “He’s here.”
Oh God, help me, he’s here.
Sunday, 7:15 p.m.
“I still can’t reach him,” Lexie said as she slammed her cell phone down onto her lap. She leaned forward in her seat, staring out the windshield, silently urging Aidan to drive faster. “Damned dispatcher says he’s interrogating a prisoner and refuses to be disturbed.”
“Did you tell her why you were calling?”
“I told her it was about Jenny Kirby’s murder, but she didn’t seem to believe me. The chief might have started taking my side, but to everyone else, I’m still the girl who cried wolf.”
She should have made the call anonymously. Better yet, they should have just driven to the police station and raised hell until they got into the chief’s office. But once they’d done a bit more research—enough to convince them Mark Young was, indeed, the Granville Ghoul, they’d both been too fearful for the girls and had driven out to the house, not suspecting they wouldn’t even get their calls put through to Dunston.
“Hell,” Aidan muttered. “We shouldn’t be doing this alone. It’s insane.”
He was right. They had absolutely no business going to find Young themselves. But who else was there? His friends had gone back to Savannah—though he’d called Julia, they were all still an hour away. The other members of the local police wouldn’t listen to a word Lexie said.
Aidan had seen in his vision that the girls were going to try to make a break for it the next time their psychopathic captor came into their cell. And what chance did they have? They would probably both die in the effort.
No, there was no time to wait. They couldn’t just hang around for Chief Dunston to call them back, nor could they call 911 and have them go to the house where they were now headed, without even knowing if it was the place. For all they knew, Young could be at his own home, which was, revoltingly, in the same neighborhood as the Kirbys’.
But she didn’t think so. She had the feeling he was at the place in the country, far from any neighbors. The house where Markie Young had lived as a boy, with his mother, his stepfather, and his stepbrother, Jed White.
The house he now owned.
She’d gone back to the county tax records site before they’d left the office. Young had been the one who’d bought White’s house at auction almost three years ago, right after Jed’s death. That was only a few months after Young had arrived in Granville to take the job as high school vice principal.
Before then, he’d been doing the same job at a school in northwest Georgia. Funny, the minute she read the name of the town he’d lived in before, she’d thought of those other missing persons cases, the ones she’d flagged when researching the story. Something told her Mark Young had not developed his taste for killing after he’d arrived here in Granville. He’d simply indulged it more—and enjoyed the side benefit of psychologically tormenting his enemies.
The urge to return to Granville, to be near his “brother,” must have been a strong one. How the two must have enjoyed the few months of their reunion, when they’d worked together at the same school, no one ever knowing of their decades-old connection. Or their shared tastes.
But their reunion had been short-lived. Jed had died—sometime after introducing his stepbrother into the Hellfire Club.
How long had it taken Mark to find out Jed had been murdered by the other club members wanting to cover up his crime?
That wasn’t hard to figure out—it had probably been around six months. About the same amount of time between Jessie Leonard’s murder and the next one.
Judging by the little they knew of Young, she could only think he was the type of man who liked to pull the wings off flies and watch them suffer. Killing the girls, then leaving clues behind at the clubhouse to mess with the minds of the others in the Hellfire Club, had been his own way of torturing them for what they’d done. His revenge had continued, girl by girl, murder by murder. How easy it must have been. Who would ever suspect him? He probably had been able to lure some of the girls by virtue of his position in the community.
“I wish the sick bastard had just taken the rapists rather than the poor victims,” she said, snarling.
Aidan reached for her hand in the darkness. “Given what Kenny heard the boys say, I suspect there was something very wrong in that house when they were little. They grew up to be two violent, angry men who lash out and brutalize women.”
“Abuse?”
“Almost certainly. So I don’t think killing men would have satisfied Young.”
“You don’t seem to have any doubt it’s him.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t. Do you?”
“No. We got a teensy glimpse of the real man behind the mask Friday night. Do you remember? The way he talked to Kenny?”
“I remember.”
“He’s got a temper. He has the motive, the means. He’s smart enough to have done it. This took a lot of planning,” she said. “I know in my heart that it’s him.”
“Me, too.”
Reaching for her phone again, she dialed the police station, cursing herself for not getting Dunston’s direct number.
“Give it to me,” Aidan ordered.
She passed it over in silence, listening as he handled the call a whole lot more calmly than she’d been about to. Giving the dispatcher his name, he’d gone on to say, “I just left Chief Dunston a short time ago, we were talking to Ed Underwood, whom I assume he is currently interviewing at the station.”
Smart, pointing out something he couldn’t know unless he was telling the truth.