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  “You did, yes. Is that an accurate description of what you feel when you look at that marquee?”

  “Yes,” she answers.

  “So it’s safe to say that what you’re feeling now is akin to what you felt when Jason Briffel made threats against you in the past?”

  Like ice water in her face, hearing the guy’s name again.

  “Do we have to use his real name?” she asks.

  “What would you like us to call him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we can come up with some term for him, some nickname.”

  “How about we just call him your stalker?”

  “Maybe something more . . . I don’t know . . . benign.”

  “I’d caution you against downplaying it. Dismissing the seriousness of the letters he sent to you and Abigail Banning won’t make you stronger.”

  “I’m not dismissing it. I just don’t want to say his name, OK?”

  There’s a flash of something in his eyes, an emotion she can’t quite read. Is he offended? Did she bruise his Harvard-educated ego?

  She doesn’t have the energy to apologize just yet, because she’s seeing Jason Briffel all over again. His ruddy-cheeked baby face and his mess of dirty-blond curls. The way he used to linger too long next to the signing table after the events she did with her dad; his hungry, probing looks as he fingered the latest copy of her dad’s book, which he’d just purchased yet again so he could secure a place in line and have an excuse to get close to her.

  How many times had she told her dad she thought the guy was stranger than the rest? When he’d reach the table, he’d fall to a crouch so they could be at eye level with each other, and he’d start asking her all kinds of concerned questions about how she was holding up, as if her rescue had been only months before and not years. And then there was the time he’d tried to reach for her hand. She’d withdrawn it quickly, and something dark had flashed in his eyes.

  Her father had dismissed her concerns, of course. He hadn’t taken them half as seriously as he did the computer hacks they were subjected to by crime scene junkies searching for proof she was lying about what she’d had to do on that farm. When it came to Jason Briffel, her father had just given her some lecture about how they couldn’t control who their work touched. To this day, she isn’t sure if her dad really believed, or still believes, his old pabulum—that those leering horror movie fans were truly concerned with the psychology of serial killers. That they came to their events so they could learn how to protect themselves and their loved ones from psychopaths, not just to savor the gory details of the Bannings’ crimes, to worship the dark mystique in which those awful movies had shrouded her.

  Then Briffel had found their address.

  That’s when the letters started.

  It was her dad’s fault, something with how he’d registered to vote in his district that had made his address available to the public. And as she’d read the first letter, she’d realized where all Briffel’s concerned questions came from. He wasn’t worried she’d been traumatized by her time with the Bannings. In his twisted mind, the trauma was that she had been “removed from the Bannings’ care,” as he put it, her destiny thwarted.

  The letters contained crime scene photos, some real, some fake, all designed to stir memories of her time on the farm, even though she’d never personally laid eyes on any of the victims. He included passages from letters Abigail had exchanged with him, letters in which she’d praised the work he was trying to do to “reawaken Trina to her destiny.”

  If she hadn’t alerted her father’s publisher herself, nothing would have changed. When Stonecutter Books found out about their young star’s stalker, they’d insisted her father relocate them and they’d contributed to the expense of extra security at their events. They’d also provided legal assistance so Charlotte could go about filing a restraining order.

  Now, thanks to the work she’s done in this tiny office with this exceedingly handsome man, she can see that it was her father’s refusal to treat Briffel as a threat that had caused her to go so far off script that fateful day at Burnham College. Because that’s when she’d realized as long as they kept doing those events, there would be more Jasons. That’s when she’d decided she could never set foot onstage with her father again.

  Three years had passed between the evening security escorted Jason out of the event and the sunny afternoon he appeared on Grandma Luanne’s front porch in Altamira. Now it’s been twice that. Maybe Jason’s moved on to a new obsession. If changing her name and moving to the middle of nowhere doesn’t make her feel safe, then nothing will.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to snap like that.”

  “It’s fine,” Dylan says. “How are you sleeping?”

  “Badly. Ever since I saw the . . .” She gestures to the window behind her, to the marquee across the street. “You know.”

  “Is it affecting your work?”

  “I work from home in my pajamas, so not really.”

  “I’m aware your clients can’t see the bags under your eyes, but is it having an impact on your ability to keep up with your call load?”

  “I have bags under my eyes?” she asks.

  “Charley, is it affecting your work?”

  She sucks in her best attempt at a deep breath. It turns into a shallow grunt. “The other day I got a client’s origin city mixed up with the one from the previous call.”

  “What does that mean?” he asks.

  “It means I booked him a ticket from Singapore to Boston instead of Paris to Boston.”

  “I understand those cities are very far apart.”

  “Yeah, well, on a computer screen, they’re just a bunch of letters and airport codes, you know.”

  “Especially if you haven’t had any sleep.”

  “I caught it before he left for the airport. Got him on a flight that left the next day. Put in a comp request for an extra night at the hotel.”

  “Has he complained?”

  “Survey review’s at the end of each month. We’ll see.”

  Dylan nods.

  “I don’t want to take anything, Doc,” she says once the silence between them becomes uncomfortable.

  “All right, well, let’s talk about that.”

  “I don’t want to swallow a bunch of pills just to feel normal.”

  “That’s not exactly an accurate description of the treatment options we’ve discussed.”

  “Please, I just . . . I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “That’s exactly why we should talk about it. It’s not about the medication. It’s about your belief that accepting that kind of help is admitting unacceptable weakness.”

  “There’s no pill out there that’s gonna change my past.”

  “True. But we’re not talking about changing your past.”

  “Then what are we talking about?”

  “We’re talking about a bridge, Charley. A temporary solution that will allow you to get some sleep. That will reduce your anxiety just enough you can leave the house for longer than it takes to come here or run to the grocery store. Maybe for as long as it takes to start forming some meaningful social relationships. Once you get in the habit of those things, they’ll be easier to do in the long term. Any medications we explore would be about helping you take the leap.”

  A bridge. A leap. Which one is it, Doc?

  “How sad is it that making conversation with the checker at the grocery store is taking a leap?” she asks.

  “Charlotte, you were kidnapped as a baby. Your mother was murdered. You were held hostage for seven years by two psychopaths who isolated you from the world, who lied to you about who you were. Who tried to turn you into someone like them. And when you were returned to your father, he exploited you at every turn and without your consent. And, ironically, none of these traumas in your past are the source of your current anxiety.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m not. These events I just listed, they�
��ve made you incredibly strong. Resourceful, even.” Her expression must betray her doubt, because he sits forward, planting his elbows on his knees. “Charley, you emancipated yourself from your father as a teenager after you rejected his agenda for you in front of an audience of hundreds. As an adult, you went on to sue him—successfully, I might add—for money that was rightfully yours, money that allowed you to change your name and relocate.

  “These are not the actions of a broken bird, Charley. You’re tired, for sure. You’re tired, and you’re still grieving your grandmother. Those two conditions have tricked you into believing you’re weak. And the longer you stay barricaded in that house, the bigger this lie becomes in your head.”

  How long has he been waiting to say this to her? It’s the first time she’s seen him look nervous. On edge, even. Maybe he’s afraid she’ll walk out.

  “You can admit that what happened to you made you stronger without celebrating the people who did those things to you. But to do that you’re going to need a bigger push than I can give you in here.”

  Maybe this is why she keeps coming back to Dr. Thorpe. Because he’s the first person she’s met in years who can make her cry just by stating the truth.

  And if I can cry, she thinks, if I can cry, then I’m not the sick and damaged killer those movies made everyone believe I was.

  His expression is fixed as he reaches across his desk and hands her a box of tissues.

  There’s a soft buzz that sounds like it’s coming from her phone, but when she looks to where she thought she left it, on the edge of Thorpe’s desk, it’s not there.

  “It’s mine,” Dylan says. “Sorry, I thought I turned it off.”

  “Where’s mine?”

  “Stay focused, Charley. I think we’re onto something here.”

  “OK. It’s just . . . it’s hard to focus right now.”

  “Because you need some sleep?”

  “Yeah,” she finally says. “I need some sleep. It’s just . . .”

  “What, Charley?”

  “There were pills before.”

  Dylan seems genuinely concerned. For Christ’s sake, it’s not like she’s about to disclose she was molested. But that’s how he’s acting.

  “You’ve tried medication before?” he asks.

  “My father tried medication. On me. When I was ten.”

  Dylan nods, and his expression is grim. “And what prompted your father to put you on medication back then?”

  “I started complaining. About the appearances. The movies.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  “Your father drugged you to silence you, and so you’re afraid that’s what I’m trying to do to you now.”

  “It’s not like it worked. I started hiding the drugs after a few weeks.”

  “But you stopped complaining, didn’t you?”

  “For a while.”

  “From age ten to age sixteen is a long while.”

  “I guess.” Christ, she sounds sixteen. She’s even staring down at her lap now like a sullen teenager.

  “I’m not trying to silence you, Charley. I didn’t reach out to you and offer my ear because I thought what you needed was more silence. Quite the opposite, in fact. And I can assure you that if you decide to go the medication route this time, it’ll be entirely different.”

  “How can you assure me of that?”

  “Because this time the choice will be yours.”

  3

  Access Denied.

  Jason isn’t surprised when these words appear on the keypad’s display.

  He never expected to crack her code on the first try.

  There’s no telling exactly what type of security system she has; she hasn’t posted a sign next to her driveway like a suburban family would.

  She doesn’t really have a driveway. Just a strip of tire-scuffed earth that looks a little smoother than the surrounding desert. It leads to a reinforced-steel garage door that, like the rest of her squat, one-story stucco house, is painted the common colors of the Sonoran. The paint does its job. The house is pretty much camouflaged from the nearest road. But he had no trouble finding the place with the directions the Savior gave him.

  Given his research into alarm systems, he figures he’s got about three more tries before he’s locked out or the alarm company alerts local law enforcement.

  The nearest police station is just inside the Scarlet town line, a thirty-minute drive away. So if he does get locked out, he’ll have time to race back to the dried-out arroyo where he hid his car. Then he’ll have to reassess.

  He has to teach Trina that her defenses against him are useless, and he can only do that by getting inside her house, by showing her that he belongs there, that their union is inevitable. On the basis of his e-mails, the Savior seems to understand this. He sent Jason a list of possible code words—objects and places with a special meaning to her, terse descriptions of her favorite memories—and strings of relevant numbers—her birthday, her birth mother’s birthday—that might be the basis of her alarm code.

  If he cracks the code, he’s in.

  She’s afraid of keys, the Savior told him. They’re too easily lost, too easily stolen or copied. The idea behind a security system like hers is to make sure no door is ever left unlocked by mistake and to eliminate any exposed mechanisms that might allow an intruder access to the locks themselves. The cylinder inside each is several inches deeper than your average dead bolt, too deep to be jimmied open by even the most skilled locksmith. And in the absence of a key mechanism, you’d have to tear apart the door frame or the adjacent wall to even try for access to the lock itself. The code unlocks a specific series of doors for several minutes, and then they lock again automatically. It’s the kind of system usually reserved for vaults or other storage facilities that rarely see human visitors, and Trina’s installed it in her own home.

  Can she not see how desperate this is, how it smacks of someone denying the inevitable?

  Chances are the system includes smoke detectors that disengage all the locks in case of a fire. But what if something else happened to her out here? What if she had a heart attack or was bitten by a snake and she couldn’t enter the code and so EMS couldn’t get to her?

  Stupid. So stupid.

  Not stupid, he reminds himself. Just misguided, that’s all.

  He scans the words and numbers again.

  The meaning of some are clear to him thanks to his study of Lowell Pierce’s book—bluebird, for instance, Joyce Collins, her birth mother’s maiden name—but the others he doesn’t understand. As he reads over them now, he feels a surge of jealousy.

  The Savior knows why these words are precious to her. The Savior knows more about her than Jason’s managed to learn in a decade. Whoever the Savior is, they’ve come to the same conclusion Jason did years ago. That Trina was taught the cleansing power of murder at a young age, and with every day she refuses to put this lesson to good use, her soul dies a little bit more.

  As evidenced by this secluded prison in which she now lives.

  It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, this tiny house, surrounded by parched desert sliced by arroyos and dotted with sparse stands of blue paloverde trees that give only teasers of shade. On his walk in, he’d passed the old fence lines, spotted a few crumbling stakes. His Internet research into the area told him this used to be part of a sprawling housing complex for the workers in the copper mine just up the road, which probably explains its water and electrical lines. But the mine’s been closed for years, and most of the houses were abandoned after a big fire swept through the area. Trina’s is the only one within view.

  A courtyard sits between the solid-metal entry door and the front door of the house itself, which he can’t see from where he stands. The wall is eight feet high. She poured a river of concrete along the top and studded it with huge, jagged shards of glass that give off rainbow reflections in the dusk. Did she set each piece by hand? If so, she didn’t do it to keep out s
nakes; she did it to stop him, and so the sight of all that jagged glass now makes him angry. But if he gets angry, he’ll get distracted, and that’s unacceptable.

  BBIRD474

  It feels like a wild guess. But it isn’t really.

  The code’s the average length of most computer passwords; eight characters, with a mix of letters and numbers.

  And how many times did he sit in the audience and listen to her tell the story of how she came to see the bluebird, the one she didn’t kill, as a symbol of her rebirth?

  As for the numbers, 474 are the last three digits of her mother’s birthday, if you chop off the month, which is March. And in all her years of signing his books, her handwriting would always place the emphasis on the final letters in her name and not the first, as if her hand always needed a second or two to gather energy before exploding with it at the end. That’s why he’s assumed she would cut off some of the first few letters of the word bluebird and drop the number of the month in the sequence of digits in her mother’s birthday.

  And it’s wrong.

  Which shouldn’t surprise him. When it comes to Trina’s life story, bluebird isn’t the most secret of passwords. How many times did he sit in the audience and listen to her tell that story about the bird flying out of her hands right as the SWAT team exploded out of the woods?

  He’s not willing to jettison the rest of his guess—not yet. He refuses to believe Trina has let go of her birth mother, and that’s part of her problem, her inability to see her mother’s death as a necessary sacrifice, a fundamental aspect of her rebirth. When it comes to the code, he just needs a word, a token, a thing from her more recent, and more secret, past. The life she made for herself after she legally changed her name and disappeared from that town in California where her grandmother’s friends had threatened to beat him to a pulp if he ever came back again.

  He consults the list.

  Altamira, Luanne (grandmother), Bayard Rock (Altamira landmark, used to visit with grandmother on her walks), Fisher Pit (copper mine near her house, closed 1986).

  While he’s sure Bayard Rock is probably the most meaningful item on the list, it’s not exactly secret, a local landmark in a town where she’d lived while she was still Trina. And Fisher Pit, which is just up the road, isn’t exactly the most covert, either.