Page 56 of The Hanging Dolls (Zoe Storm #1)

FIFTY-FIVE

Ryan Hunter.

Zoe repeated his name over and over in her head. She was afraid to ask the question that was sitting on the tip of her tongue.

Are you related to Travis Hunter?

She didn’t need to. The resemblance was unmistakable. She knew Travis had a son but she didn’t know his name.

The ambulance and squad car lights cast colored beams all over their faces and on the greenhouse, their sirens piercing the still air.

Lucy was being lifted into an ambulance with two patrol officers on guard.

Two more squad cars were parked. One of the patrols was talking to Ryan who stood defiantly, his face crumpled somewhere between annoyance and pain.

A group of officers were whispering among themselves. The locals must recognize him.

“How did you know to bring the cavalry?” Zoe asked, seeing Aiden round the corner. He was out of breath, his face twinged with confusion as he searched the space for someone. “What happened?”

“I looked up the address and it was in the middle of nowhere, and at this time of night I was worried.” His face fell when his eyes landed on a handcuffed Ryan.

“I need to talk to him.” Aiden shouldered past her, but she was right behind him.

Ryan shifted uncomfortably and averted his gaze. He didn’t want to talk to them. He kept blinking like he was fighting back tears.

“Is Travis your dad?” she asked.

Silence.

She sighed and leaned her elbow on the roof of the car. “You have to cooperate, kid. You were caught with a missing girl in a basement. What did you expect me to do?”

Ryan looked at her. “I didn’t hurt her.”

“I haven’t told your father, but I bet someone here made the call.” She hitched her thumb at the clusters of people surrounding them. The news was going to spread like wildfire. But for just one moment, Zoe wanted to focus on the lightness coursing through her body.

They had saved Lucy. Reality washed over her, loosening all those tightly wound muscles.

“Why did you do it?” Aiden finally asked. All this time he had been watching Ryan, like he was trying to figure out what would be the best way to cut him open.

Ryan’s eyebrows pulled together like he was deep in thought. There was a cut on his lip. Zoe tried a different approach. “Who does the greenhouse belong to? Your dad?”

“My mom. She passed away a few years ago, so no one really takes care of it. I come here from time to time.”

“We have you on video stealing desserts from that bakery. There’s no way out of this.”

He opened his mouth but then an officer interjected. “Agent Storm? The victim is crying. Do you think you can help?”

“Stay with him,” Zoe muttered to Aiden and went to the ambulance where Lucy was strapped to a gurney with tears streaming down her face. She looked so tiny, Zoe just wanted to cradle her. “Lucy, I’m here. You’re safe now.”

“Where’s Mommy?” she asked, hiccups jolting her body.

“We have let her know, and she’s coming straight to the hospital.” Zoe ran a hand over her head, soothing her.

“I just want to go home.”

“You will.” Tears bubbled in Zoe’s eyes as she realized that the home Lucy would return to was about to change forever. Now that she was found alive, Zoe was obligated to inform the CPS of Carly’s crimes against her own daughter.

“We have to take you to the hospital to make sure you’re okay and that boy didn’t hurt you.”

“He didn’t hurt me.” Lucy was fading away, her blood pressure dropping.

“What’s happening to her?” Zoe asked the paramedic.

“She’s okay, it’s exhaustion and mental duress.” The paramedics checked her vitals. “But we should take her to the hospital right away.”

Zoe gave them the go-ahead. She hopped off the ambulance when she saw Aiden approaching. “What was Lucy doing with Ryan when you found them?” he asked.

“She was eating ice cream and he was just standing there. Why?”

He licked his lips and ran a hand through his hair. “Was she scared? At all?”

“Not until I pulled out the gun. For a moment. But why? We know he feeds them well and takes care of them before it’s lights out. That’s what he did with Lily.”

“Storm, Lucy is eleven years old.” Aiden’s voice was thick with frustration. “Even if she’s given all the toys and candy in the world, she’s not going to be relaxed in an underground bunker away from everything she knows. And there’s no way that that boy matches the profile.”

Zoe was puzzled. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Aiden hesitated and then said something that made Zoe’s blood pound in her ears.

Zoe stared at the doors to Travis’s office. She still remembered the first time she’d burst through them. She almost expected to Scott to be in there again too. But in the last few days, the entire landscape of Harborwood PD had shifted.

And one last piece of the puzzle was yet to be slotted into place.

Travis Hunter was sitting at his desk. Behind him it was pitch black outside, no sign of rain or thunder or wind. Like a still painting. His desk was clean—all the clutter cleared out. Only one thing remained—a glass of whiskey.

Zoe and Aiden moved forward to sit across from him. The air was soupy and viscous. She felt like this space existed in another plane. Travis didn’t look at them. As he stared into empty space, he picked up the glass and took a sip from it.

With bated breath, she waited for him to puncture the silence with words.

But the silence stretched between them, filling it with a tension that could be cut with a knife.

There was a peace to this moment, like the calm before the storm or those seconds before a vase comes crashing down.

The truth hung between them; Zoe could feel it.

But without acknowledging it, she could pretend for a few more seconds that it wasn’t there.

She waited for Aiden to say something. But he was too absorbed, observing Travis’s apparent calmness.

“Do you know your son was arrested after being found with Lucy in the basement of a greenhouse?” Zoe said.

He nodded, his expression unchanged. “One of my guys called me.”

“He refuses to cooperate without a lawyer. I confronted him but he didn’t deny anything,” she said.

Travis’s eyes flitted to Zoe, a zing of confusion. “He didn’t?”

“No. I thought it was him. He was wearing that hoodie from the video, which now I realize you could have easily borrowed. Lucy told me that she’d never met him before today and that he was trying to help her escape.”

She didn’t want to ask him if there was even a faint possibility that this was a mistake.

“He’s trying to protect someone he loves but doesn’t understand.” Aiden leaned forward, pinning him with a hard look.

“My mother had it.” Travis finally gave in, his hand swirling the glass in which the burgundy liquid sloshed.

“Munchausen by proxy. She liked to keep us sick. Not my father. But he was a weak man. He just did what my mother told him to do. After a while, I think he… lied to himself and pretended that everything was fine. My mother was a vicious woman. Unhinged. Thought we were the devils but still loved us. Someone found out and reported them.” His gaze drifted into empty space, taking him somewhere else.

“She panicked. I remember coming home after school one day to find her force-feeding my sisters milk. She ordered me to drink it too. I knew what it was, probably something that would give us an upset stomach or make us drowsy. It was easier to do as she said rather than resist. It made her worse if I argued. Except this time I was wrong.” A lone tear trickled down his cheek.

He took a big gulp of whiskey. “My sisters passed out first. I was tired but still half-conscious. I watched my mother prepare three ropes, curling their ends into nooses and hanging them from the ceiling fan. My eyes were closing, my energy fading as she took my sisters and placed them in the nooses. I couldn’t move. And then it was my turn.”

Zoe recalled the story Dr. Parsons had told her at the hospital.

“She did the same with me. I didn’t resist; I guess I was too afraid, too shocked.

She left the room. The door clicked shut.

I remember that very well. That door clicking shut and somehow how I found my strength again.

As soon as she left the room, I felt this last speckle of strength surge through me.

And that’s when I escaped from my noose.

Something that morning told me to grab a pocket knife and hide it up my sleeve.

But it was too late for my sisters. I checked.

They were younger than me and much smaller in size.

My mother must not have accounted for that when she roofied us so it didn’t hit me as hard.

I had enough strength to crawl out the window and never look back.

” He finished his drink, his hand trembling as he wiped his lips.

He finally gazed at Zoe. “I was thirteen. I took a bus to my aunt’s place.

She never liked my mother but was fond of us kids.

I never told her about the things Mother did to us.

She raised me and gave me her name. It was so long ago.

With time, it felt unreal. Has that ever happened to you?

A part of your life so different and immensely confusing that it feels like a distant dream? ”

Zoe didn’t respond but her face gave it away.

“You do know. It’s okay, that’s your story.

I forgot about mine with time. Locked it away somewhere deep inside.

” He pounded his chest and winced. “That is until I was at the hospital one time for my symptoms. You see they come and go. I hallucinate sometimes. I see my dead sisters and mother. I never really dealt with what happened so they still exist somewhere inside me and come out from time to time. I overheard Parsons talking about Lily to someone on the phone. He was crying, saying it reminded him of that case all those years ago.”

That was the pivot Travis’s life took. That one nudge that had sent him back down the path he had managed to avoid.

“That’s when I started seeing them again more often.” His eyes glazed past them. “My sisters and my mother. They’re standing behind you, Agent Storm and Dr. Wesley.”

Zoe went cold inside.

“But you won’t see them,” he said calmly.

“Only I do. Thank God, Ryan doesn’t. I was worried about him, worried that he was like me, seeing things he shouldn’t.

I even followed him once. Turned his room upside down.

But I found pictures… pictures of me talking to Lily.

” He laughed without humor. “He knew. He knew what I’d done and that’s why he hated me.

But he didn’t say anything. And I said nothing too. ”

“Ryan went to the greenhouse to save Lucy,” Aiden said.

A smile that made his eyes twinkle. “I’m proud of my boy.

I’m so proud. He’s not like me. He’s like his mother.

It’s a powerful bond. No matter how much we hate our parents, it’s hard to turn on them.

He didn’t turn on me; the same way I couldn’t turn on my mother.

But he tried to do the right thing. He must have figured out where I was keeping Lucy. ”

“What was your endgame, Travis?” Zoe’s tone was caustic, her mind still ticking over his words.

He looked past her at the ghosts of his dead family.

“Because I left them. I abandoned my sisters when I was supposed to die with them. I was their older brother; I should have protected them. Instead, I climbed out of that window and left them hanging.” The corner of his mouth curled into a sneer filled with self-loathing.

“And when I found out about Lily, it all came flooding back. I needed to die with them. This time.”

“The three nooses. Lily and Lucy to represent your two sisters. The third noose… was for you,” Aiden stated.

He nodded. “I was always the third victim. But when Tara went missing, it threw me off. I had no idea that Connor would exploit this for his political gain. She wasn’t supposed to die.”

“But Lily and Lucy were?” Zoe argued hotly. “How could you do this to them?”

He played with the phantom ring on his ring finger. “Their mothers would have killed them either way. I just got there first. But I was very gentle. Isn’t it better to die at the hands of a stranger than your mother?”

Zoe didn’t know how to feel. She was drowning in everything. Travis’s confession settled over her but there was no clarity. It filled her with a sense of hopelessness. Were people really forever slaves to their trauma? She knew she was—it was why she hunted for pain in illegal, underground fights.

“You could have ended the cycle, Travis.” Aiden couldn’t hide the disappointment in his voice. “You were raising a good son, you were doing good for the community. Why didn’t you just open an investigation into Lily’s parents? You aren’t that little boy anymore?—”

“But I am!” His voice bubbled with lodged tears in his throat.

“I’m still that little boy and I always will be.

We don’t shed our childhood when we grow up.

We grow around it. It’s our core. And I knew what Lily’s future was—dark and guilt-ridden.

She was going to grow up to be like me. Dysfunctional and messed up.

Maybe she would have been better at hiding it but there would always be something rotten living inside her.

She was born to be ill-fated. They both were. ”

“Why didn’t you kill Lucy? You held her captive for longer than Lily.”

“When Scott told me that he wasn’t the father… I suspected I might be. Carly and I got involved around then. But I’ll never know.” Travis stood up and cleared his throat. “I’m turning myself in. I won’t need a lawyer. I’ll sign my confession.” There was an air of serenity around him.

“Do you feel guilty?” Zoe asked.

“No.” And then his voice cracked. “I feel nothing.”