Celine continued her exploration of the skull, nodding slightly. As Sloane rattled off more measurements, Celine reached for the sketch pad she’d laid on a nearby exam table. Within seconds, she had a pencil in hand and it was flying across the page.
As Celine drew, she stepped back from the rest of us. You’ll show it to us when it’s ready. When it’s done.
It was several minutes before the sound of Celine ripping the paper out of her pad cut through the air. Without a word, she handed the picture to Sloane, set down her notepad, and turned her attention to the second skeleton.
Sloane brought the picture to me. I brought it to Agent Sterling. The woman staring back at us from the page was in her late twenties, pretty in an ordinary kind of way. A creeping feeling of familiarity tugged at me.
“Recognize her?” Agent Sterling asked me quietly, as Celine continued to work on the other side of the room.
I shook my head, but inside, I felt like nodding. “She looks…” The words hovered, just out of grasp. “She looks like Melody,” I said finally. “Ree’s granddaughter.”
The instant that statement was out of my mouth, I knew. I knew who this woman was. I knew that Ree’s daughter—Melody and Shane’s mother—hadn’t skipped town after a brief stop at Serenity Ranch.
She’d never left.
I tried to remember anything else I could about the woman—anything I’d heard, anything I’d seen. Instead, I remembered what my mother had tried to keep me from seeing at the bottom of the stairs.
Something big.
Something lumpy.
Blood on my mother’s hands…
I couldn’t make out the face on the body. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female.
Kane. Kane was there. The knowledge swept over me. Wasn’t he?
Feeling like the world was falling out beneath me, I walked toward Celine, who’d picked up her sketch pad again. This time, I couldn’t stop myself from watching as she drew.
She let me.
She let me watch over her shoulder, and slowly, a man’s face emerged. Jawline first. Hairline. Eyes. Cheeks, mouth…
I took a step back. Because this time, there was no creeping feeling of familiarity, no searching the banks of my memory for some clue of who this body had belonged to.
I recognized that face. And suddenly, I was standing at the top of the steps again, and there was a body at the bottom.
I see it. I see the face. I see blood—
The man in the picture—the man in my memory, crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, the skeleton on the exam table, a decade dead—was Kane Darby.
YOU
The Masters find you sitting on the floor, the knife balanced on your knee. Five is in pieces beside you.
You look up, feeling more alive—more like yourself—than you ever have. “He was not worthy,” you offer.
You are not weak. You are not Lorelai. You decide who lives, who dies. You are judge and jury. You are executioner. You are the Pythia.
And they will play your game.
Impossible. That was the word for what Celine had drawn. Hours later, as I sat down across from Kane Darby at the nearest FBI field office, Agent Sterling on one side and Dean on the other, I found myself staring at his face—at those familiar features—my throat dry and my mind reeling.
You’re alive. You’re here. But it was your face in that sketch.
It was his face in my memory, his body crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, his blood on my mother’s hands. There was an explanation, and I knew in my gut that I could make Kane give it to me, but just looking at him, I was frozen, like a diver standing at the edge of a cliff staring down at rough waves breaking against the rocks below.
“Did my mother ever mention the BPEs to you?” I asked Kane, somehow managing to form the words. “Behavior. Personality. Environment.”
“Lorelai was teaching you the tricks of her trade,” Kane said. A decade on, I could still hear an echo of emotion when he said her name.
“She taught me well.” I let that sink in, sounding calmer than I felt. “Well enough that the FBI finds my skills useful on occasion.”
“You’re a child.” Kane’s objection was predictable enough to steady me, grounding me in the here and now.
“I’m the person asking the questions,” I corrected evenly. I knew instinctively that Agent Sterling had been right—if we’d tried this tactic without having identified our victims, I wouldn’t have been able to get anything out of Kane.
But Celine’s facial reconstructions had changed the game.
You’ll know, in a moment, that this is real. That your family’s secrets are coming out. That there’s no use in fighting it.
That the power of penance pales next to confession.
“We’ve identified the bodies found at Serenity Ranch.” I gave Kane enough time to wonder if I was bluffing, and then I glanced at Agent Sterling, who handed me a folder. I laid the first picture on the table, facing Kane.
“Sarah Simon,” I said. “She joined your father’s cult and then—by all accounts—skipped town when it wasn’t what she’d hoped.”
“Except she didn’t.” Dean took over where I stopped. “Sarah never left the property, because someone killed her first. Based on the autopsy, we’re looking at asphyxiation. Someone—most likely a male—slipped his hands around her neck and choked the life out of her.”
“Strangulation is about dominance.” I was all too aware of how strange it must have been for Kane, who’d known me as a child, to hear me say those words. “It’s personal. It’s intimate. And afterward, there’s a sense of…completion.”
For the first time, Kane’s expression faltered and something else peeked out from behind his light blue eyes. I didn’t need Michael to tell me that it wasn’t fear or disgust.
It was anger.
I laid the second picture down on the table, the one depicting a man with Kane’s face.
“Is this a joke?” Kane asked.
“This is the face of the second victim,” I said. Impossible—but not. “It’s funny—no one in Gaither ever mentioned that you had a twin.”
That was the only explanation that made sense—not Kane crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Not Kane covered in blood.