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“I wrote them letters, begging them to send me information and pictures of you. When they would answer my calls, all they’d say was to stop calling them.” Kyle paused on the landing of the second floor and turned to her, pointing the knife in her face again. “What kind ofparents turn their back on their child and refuse to give him what he wants?”
“What kind?” She asked because she’d really like to know what he thought. He didn’t seem to understand the pain he’d caused. In his mind, he’d done nothing wrong.
“The kind who liked to punish me for every little thing.”
Eliza stood beside her with her face buried in Shelby’s thigh and Shelby’s hand pressed to her back. She hoped Eliza couldn’t feel her hand shake.
“I’m sorry they mistreated you.” She hoped a little sympathy calmed him down.
He pinned her in his angry gaze. “They’re sorry now.”
She caught a whiff of something that drifted on the stale air in the house that had been closed up for nearly three decades. It wrinkled her nose. “This place looks abandoned. Are your parents even here?”
“Of course they are. I told them to wait for us. They didn’t think you’d come. They told me not to even try. But I needed to show them that I would get my family back.” He waved her forward with the knife again. “Come. They’ve wanted a reunion for a long time. They told me they hoped to one day meet you and Eliza.”
His agitation turned to a kind of euphoria she didn’t understand as she followed him down a long hallway. The odd smell became more pungent as they passed two closed doors and stopped just outside the second to last door. Light filtered in through the dirty window at the end of the hallway. Too far away for the police to see them. If they’d even found them yet.
The knots in her stomach tightened with every passing moment.
Kyle put his hand to the door and stared at it, smiling.
She nudged Eliza behind her legs and backed them both up as far away from the door as possible in the wide hallway.
“I was a mischievous boy.” He tapped the tip of the blade against the dead bolt, completely out of place on an interior upstairs room, with the lock on the outside of the door.
“They didn’t like the games I played. I could only do what they said and go along with what they wanted for so long. And when they didn’t approve or got tired of me, they locked me in here to teach me a lesson.” He kept his hand on the door and turned his head to look at her over his shoulder, his eyes menacing. “What did they think I’d learn in the dark?”
Looking into his cold, dead eyes, she saw the answer. He’d learned to not feel.
And it had warped his mind and turned him cruel.
“Stay here with me. Be the family I know we can be, and I will never put you in the dark.” He unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door wide.
Light from the window spilled into the small space, a walk-in closet about five-by-five, with Kyle’s parents sitting in two chairs staring out at her, their faces gray, eyes closed, their bodies sagging and desiccated.
How long had they been dead? Weeks? Months? A long time by the looks of them.
Eliza whimpered from behind her, startling Shelby out of her shock. She used both hands to hold Eliza at her back, hoping she didn’t see anything.
Kyle put his hands on his hips. “See. I told you they’d come.”
Shelby looked from Kyle to his dead parents and back.
“I told you I’d get what I wanted.” He paused. “No. I won’t let them go. They want to be here.” He shook his head. “Yes, they do.”
Shelby trembled.
Kyle actually believed he was having a conversation with his dead parents.
Oh God, this is bad. Really,really bad.
So much worse than she, Chase, or Hunt thought.
“Shelby understands. She wants us to be a family.” Kyle looked at her, then turned back to his parents. “Stop. Just stop.” He put both hands to his head, the knife still firm in his grasp. “I don’t want to hear it anymore.”
She wondered if that’s what he’d said to them before he killed them.
Her gaze drifted to the door as something caught her eye. Dark smears and jagged lines carved into the wood. Dried blood and claw marks, most likely from a young Kyle trying to get out.
