Page 75
“Sister Colette’s inside. Are you the one Sister Mary Elizabeth sent?” The woman opened the door, motioning us inside.
Sister Colette was sitting on a wicker chair, humming a hymn under her breath. Her eyes flickered to mine and narrowed. She continued to sing, her eyes on me.
“I’m here to talk about your time at the orphanage. You… you were working at the orphanage when Tany Brooks killed herself.”
“Yes. Sit down, Yara Kent.”
I jerked back. The last one to call me that was Logan, as he died. I shared a quick look with Ryden. He gave me a nod.
“You go by Yara West now? You have always been an odd little thing. Too smart, too stubborn, and irreverent.”
I’m still all that.
“You remember me.”
“I remember everything,” she said. She looked so thin, but her eyes were still sharp as a knife.
“Do you remember Tany’s sister, then?”
Sister Colette stared at me for a long moment, her eyes unfocused. It was like she was flipping through the book of her memory to find out what she was looking for.
“Patty Brooks,” she said, her tone flat. “She was a lonely girl, fighting her own demons. And then Tany died, and Lord knows it shattered her.” There was no softness in her expression, no sympathy in her voice. “There’s no walking away from something like that.”
“I heard she was bullied by some girls while she was in the orphanage. Do you…”
The sister scoffed.
“Bullied! Big word. Ha. It’s girls doing harmless things.”
Bullying was never harmless.
Ryden stiffened next to me. I swallowed my retort back—I needed her to talk. It wouldn’t help if she decided not to say anything at all.
“She was always getting into trouble with the other girls her age. Sister Serena used to give detention to the girls for it like it was something to worry about.” She closed her eyes, shaking her head.
“The girls? You know who they are?”
“Oh, I know. Flora, Erika, Tillie, and Alice. They called themselves the FATE sisters.”
I remembered them. They were cruel and cunning, with just the right amount of charm to get out of their troubles. The other girls were scared of the FATE sisters.
“Flora River,” Ryden muttered next to me, his voice low, tense. Flora River. Meridian, Mississippi. The Strangler’s third victim.
“Tillie Stone,” I said, my stomach twisting as the name left my lips. Tillie Stone, Toledo, Ohio—her first known kill.
At first, the Strangler’s victims were nothing more than tragic coincidences—each one of them a disconnected dot scattered too far apart to form an actual picture. The locations seemed random, the timeline chaotic, with no evident pattern. It had kept the FBI and me… chasing ghosts, looking for meaning in the wrong places.
Before I could say more, Sister Colette’s gaze flickered between us.
“You… are you from the orphanage as well, young man?” She studied him with a smile as I stood up.
“You—you remember anything about Patricia, sister?” I asked.
The letters were important, but so were the messages; so were these girls she first killed.
“As I said, she was a lonely girl,” Sister Colette murmured. “She was willowy, thin, and blonde. Always had this faraway look in her eyes, like she was lost in a world only she could see.” She paused, then added, “She had a scar on her right shoulder—one of many, but that one came from a fight with Alice and Flora. Sister Serena and I took her to the hospital to get stitches. She used to read Frankenstein almost religiously. Every single night, without fail. The book was from her mother.”
So, her first few victims weren’t random at all. She was killing her tormentors. And then she changed. Switched her MO. Became something else. And when she came to Detroit, she changed once again.
