Page 66 of Long Pig
“Your mother never made you hot chocolate?” he asked, trying to sound casual.
Her eyes dropped to the table again. “She was an alcoholic. She rarely cooked. I don’t remember her ever being kind to me.”
The sentence hung there heavily. He stared at the top of her bowed head, at the way her hair fell forward, hiding her face. His chest constricted.
“What about your father?” he asked.
She went still. A faint tremor ran through her hands as she set the mug down. “He was worse,” she said. The words came out hollow, scraped clean of emotion, but that emptinesswasthe emotion.
Her voice painted the image for him: a little girl standing before her father, afraid to move or speak. He could almost see it. Something snapped inside him. Not with violence, but with an emotion he’d never felt. He couldn’t even describe what emotion it was.
All at once, his obsession shifted shape. She wasn’t just someone to possess; she was someone broken, and she needed him. All her sharp edges had been carved by her parents, just like it had been for him.
“Did you move out when you were eighteen?” he asked.
Her eyes stayed steady on his. “No. I killed my father.”
He blinked.
“I was fifteen. I went to prison and got out a year ago. My last name has changed, but you can still look up the case. Willow Humphreys. My grandmother Joan Morgan made the news, too. She went to the trial.”
Excitement nearly exploded in his chest.
He didn’t need to fix her. She was perfect exactly as she was.
Chapter Forty-Four
Cindy’s Ghost
Dale
It took seven days before the lab results came in. Dale had been checking his phone every hour.
“Need you to come to my office,” Russel said when he finally had news.
The office was tucked near the pines just off the main road leading to Fool Hollow Lake Recreation Area. It was a squat, weathered building that looked like a typical ranger outpost.
Inside, one scarred desk sat against the far wall, flanked by five-foot metal file cabinets and a wall map peppered with pushpins. An elk’s head loomed on the side wall, its glassy eyes watching as he stepped through the door.
“Will they ever upgrade your heating system in this place?” Dale asked, nodding at the old wood-burning stove that sat unused at this time of year.
Russel looked up from a folder and grinned. “I take it you’ve been here in the winter before?”
“Yeah. Greg Wilson, the ranger before you, was a good guy. We worked a few cross-county cases together. He froze his cajónes off every winter.”
Russel chuckled. “So that’s what happened to mine.”
They shared a laugh that felt good after the last shitty week.
“Take a seat,” Russel said, motioning toward the straight-backed chair against the wall. Dale moved it over.
Russel set a manila file on his desk, opened it, and straightened a few stapled reports. “We got a hit on the DNA.”
Dale’s heart kicked. “You have it back already?”
Russel’s face flushed slightly. “My friend at the lab ran it herself. Fast-tracked it for me.”
Dale didn’t press. There were times when bending the rules meant the difference between finding a body warm or cold.