I saw an empty table and herded our group toward it. Quickly because someone else was making a run at it as well. I beat them and pulled out a chair. “Sit,” I said to Officer Pierce. “And explain.”

17

By reading this, you have given me brief control over your mind.

—T-SHIRT

“I was in the Boy Scouts,” Wyatt explained, “staying the summer with my grandparents in Elida, and my troop had gone on a camping trip to Billy the Kid Springs.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said, pulling out my phone to look it up.

“Don’t bother. I’ve looked on every map out there, trying to find it. I’m not sure it was an official name or anything. That’s just what everyone from the area called it. It was this little cove out in the middle of nowhere with a pond inside. I remember the water glowed a lime green color.”

“Lime green? Is it near Roswell? They have a lot of alien stuff down there.”

“Yes, it is, but I don’t think aliens had anything to do with the water there. Anyway, we were out there camping and I woke up in the middle of the night. I had to take a leak, so I put on my shoes and walked over to the top of the cliff above the cove. The water was glowing. It was amazing. I sat there and watched it, looked at the stars, the full moon, all that nature crap. Then I thought I heard something. Like scraping and whimpering. I called out but no one answered. So I lay on my stomach and looked into the cove from up top. There was a girl.”

“She was in the cove?” I asked.

“No, she was trying to climb up the side of the cliff, kind of around the cove part.” He bowed his head in thought. “Looking back, I think she may have seen our campfires, been trying to get to them. Anyway, I reached down to give her a hand. I kept telling her to take it, but she didn’t even know I was there until my hand touched her. She jumped, looked up at me, her eyes huge. She was terrified.”

I felt a wave of anguish surge through him. Even after all these years, it affected him deeply.

“I kept trying to get her to take my hand, but she wouldn’t at first. I thought she was going to climb back down, but then she must’ve realized I wasn’t a threat to her. She put her hand in mine and I pulled. But she slipped and swung to the side.” He took a sip of water before continuing.

Gemma put a hand on his arm. “This is what you couldn’t talk about with me,” she said. “This part.”

He nodded. “She was hanging over the cove and pulling me with her. She tried to get her footing again, but then she cried out. She was falling or being pulled. I couldn’t be sure. I lunged for her and she put out her other arm to me, but she missed.” He bit down. “I missed. Her fingernails scraped across my face and she fell.”

“I’m sorry, Wyatt,” Gemma said.

But he had succumbed to his memories. He stared into the water as they resurfaced and took hold. “There was no sound,” he said. “The cliff wasn’t that high. Maybe twenty or so feet. I should have heard her fall.” He withdrew inside himself and I realized this wasn’t just a painful memory but a traumatic one. “I realized someone else was there. In the dark. I heard breaths echoing in the cove and I was scared to death it was a mountain lion or something.”

“What did you do?” I asked, knowing full well it wasn’t a mountain lion or something. But he knew it, too. Even then, he could tell the difference.

“I ran for help,” he said, an agonizing pain evident in his expression. The wounds he had inside were much deeper than any scar he carried as a reminder of that night. “I left her there.”

Gemma squeezed his arm as Uncle Bob got up to answer a call.

“Officer Pierce —,” I started, but he interrupted.

“Please, just Wyatt.”

“Wyatt, this may sound really weird and I can’t explain how I know this, but I am absolutely certain that there is a connection to this girl and the mass graves that have been found down south.”

He blinked at me in disbelief. “How can that be?”

“You say you were nine?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re thirty-one now?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

God, I hated math. “Okay, that means that dump site is at least twenty-two years old. I’m wondering if the girl you saw wasn’t the first of the killer’s victims.”

“Why would you even make that connection? The springs are over two hundred miles east from here. And hundreds from the mass grave site south.”

Uh-oh. The sticky part. I looked at Gemma, then at Uncle Bob, who didn’t care because he was still on the phone, but it was Cookie who set him straight. “Look,” she said, throwing down some attitude, “you just have to trust her. She solves a lot of cases based on her hunches because they are never wrong.”

That was a bit of an overstatement, as Wyatt pointed out. “She was wrong about me,” he said.

“Almost never,” she corrected.

Gemma nodded. “Cookie’s right, Wyatt. Charley just kind of knows things. It’s weird. Like supernatural or something.” She snorted. “Not that she’s supernatural. That’s absurd. It’s not like she sees ghosts or talks to dead people or anything.”

She never quite got the concept of stopping while she was ahead.

“And she has issues. Like she’s always in trouble.”

I gasped. “I am not. And besides, you’re dating a guy who could have been a serial killer. What were you thinking?”