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“This way then.” He shuffled along the cement floor, one hip angling higher than the other, with the plywood gripped between both hands. The effect curved his spine to one side, and it was then Leigh realized just how much she’d missed this place. The man she’d known—who’d made her laugh with his giant ears—didn’t exist anymore. Not really. No matter how many patch jobs had been done or new structures had been added, time had ravaged him the same as it’d ravaged this town. “Got every kind of drill you might need, but I’d hate for you to spend that kind of money when I have a perfectly good drill sitting in my office. If you’re looking for help, I can follow you back to the house with the supplies to install it.”
“Oh, no. That’s okay. I saw from the sign out front you’re getting ready to close,” she said.
He waved her off. “That sign doesn’t mean anything. My wife made it a few years ago to convince me six o’clock was the end of the workday. After she died, I didn’t have anyone to tell me what to do.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Leigh hadn’t met his wife more than a handful times, but from what she remembered Caroline Rathe had always been nice. “Actually, the house this is going to belongs to a friend of mine. He lost his mother a few months ago. Now he’s trying to fix up the place and recruited me to help. Maybe you know him. Chris Ellingson?”
Henry Rathe manually rang up the plywood on a vintage cash register she recognized from her visits as a kid. “I know Chris. He’s been in and out of here the past few weeks. Hell of a job. First the mold and structural rot in the bathroom. Now the furnace. I told him to hire a contractor. Wasn’t interested. Said he liked to work with his own two hands.”
“I didn’t realize the furnace had gone out.” A lie. Leigh fished her wallet from her coat and handed off her credit card. “Was that recently?”
“Must’ve been last night. Called me, asked me to open the shop. I don’t sleep much anymore anyway. Luckily, I had the supplies he needed.” After swiping her card for the purchase, Henry ran his thumb over the raised block lettering of her name, and her jaw tightened.
“Oh. Chris told me he’d gone to a few different stores. What time was he here last night?” she asked.
“Leigh Brody. I know that name.” Her name left his mouth as a growl. Color drained from Henry’s already anemic complexion and intensified the spots marring his cheeks and bald head. Dark eyes narrowed impossibly further. “You’re Joel’s girl.” The old man’s features hardened. He thrust her card back at her. “Get out of my store.”
“Mr. Rathe, I’m not interested in making any trouble for you.” Leigh raised her hands in surrender, her card pressed into her hand. “All I need to know is what time Chris Ellingson visited your store last night.”
“Why? So you can try to pin another murder on him? I heard about what happened to Michelle Cross. Chris is a good boy. He doesn’t deserve what you and your family did to him, and this town has been through enough.” Henry Rathe reached for the ancient phone on the other side of the register and started dialing. “Now I said get out. Before I call the police.”
Apparently, that hadn’t been an either/or offer.
“Thanks for the plywood.” Raw edges of wood dug into her fingers as she hauled the board out the door and toward her car. Leigh stepped out into the night. The shock of cold slapped her across the face as efficiently as Henry Rathe’s words and dulled her senses.
“Agent Brody, I thought I might find you here.” Chris Ellingson stepped away from her car, a dark outline of something bulky in his hand. “You accused me of Troy’s murder. After what happened to Michelle this morning, I thought it was high time you and I set the record straight.”
SIX
Lebanon, New Hampshire
Thursday, March 11
6:00 p.m.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
He wasn’t supposed to ambush her in front of a hardware store. She was the one who’d wanted to surprise him, to catch him off guard. To finally make him pay for what he’d done. Had he followed her here? Been watching her? Waited until he could get her alone when she least expected it?
“You seem nervous.” Chris Ellingson took a single step forward. The object in his hand solidified under Rathe’s Hardware’s spotlights at the front of the house. A padlock. Old from the look of it. Broken. Sections of hair escaped the frame of lean shoulders and accentuated a long face. “You never really liked me, did you? Even as a kid when I’d come to visit Troy—to help him with his anxieties—you kept your distance. Guess that’s what has made you such a good agent though. Always suspicious, never happy with the answer you uncover. Can’t say it’s a healthy way to live, but I admire it all the same.”
The edge of the plywood cut into her underarm as her brain worked to untangle his motive for being here. Leigh’s attention went to the padlock he fiddled with between both hands. Chris Ellingson wanted one thing: to prove he wasn’t a killer. That meant staying out of prison. He wouldn’t risk attacking an FBI agent in the middle of a public street, but that logic had yet to release the tension in her hands. She might be FBI, but Director Livingstone had brought her into this investigation as a consultant. A consultant not authorized to carry a sidearm. “That’s why you followed me? To talk about my mental health?”
His laugh tendrilled between them. It seemed to wrap around her lungs and squeeze until she couldn’t take her next breath. “No. Just replacing a busted padlock on my garage. And, as you so diligently pointed out this morning, I’m no longer allowed to practice psychology. However, I’m always happy to lend an ear if you want to talk. Maybe about how you’re handling coming back here after all these years. I imagine it hasn’t been easy.”
Ellingson gazed up at the stars, completely at ease. “You and I are in the same situation in that regard, I’m afraid, Leigh. The whispers, the glares, the way people still go out of their way to keep from walking on the same side of the street as you. It’s disheartening, but you’ll get used to it. In time.”
Leigh. Not Agent Brody this time. He was trying to align himself with her, convince her he was on her side. That they wanted the same thing, could maybe even become friends. It was nothing more than a long con, a way to sniff out vulnerability and gullibility in his victims, but she wasn’t either of those things, and she sure as hell wasn’t a mark.
He settled that cold stare back on her. “It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to see you and I have outgrown this town and everyone in it. They’ll never appreciate what we’ve been through or how far we had to go to survive because their brains don’t want to accept evil exists right here in front of them. They’ll never understand us.”
Her defenses rushed to deny the commonality between her and the son of a bitch responsible for upending her life, but she couldn’t actually argue with his reasoning. The people in this town had turned against her and her family at the slightest upset to their routined, isolated lives. Neighbors who’d babysat her and Troy growing up rushed their young kids behind closed doors if she managed to brave going outside after her father’s arrest. Grocery shopping became impossible without coming back out to her car graffitied in spray paint or the tires missing. There’d only been so much teachers and faculty could do at school, and even then, they’d sometimes had to ignore the incessant torment students rained down. Because they were scared. They were scared that two boys’ murders could happen where they felt safest. None of them had thought to stop and ask how scared Leigh had been. How angry. “Then why stay?”
“Same reason you’re holding a piece of plywood to fix up a house that’s been abandoned since your mother died.” His shoulders rose and fell as though she should’ve already surmised his reasoning. “This is home. It’s part of us, whether we want to admit it or not, and what happened to poor Michelle Cross will only end up tearing this town apart all over again. That’s why I thought I might offer my services. Get us what we both want: the truth.”
“The truth.” The words tasted foreign in her mouth, a bad aftertaste. She’d dedicated the past twenty years of her life to finding the truth—to proving who really killed her brother—with nothing but theories and dead ends to show for it. Did the truth even exist anymore? Was there proof? Leigh shifted her weight between both feet to counter the muscle tension from the plywood. “What is it exactly you’re offering?”
“My psychological assessment of the man you’re looking for,” Ellingson said. “I’ll admit, I’m not privy to all the details of your current investigation, but, as you know, I’ve studied the original case. I also have experience of being on the wrong end of an investigation of this caliber. Could help.”
