“Goddamn it,” Teddy said, dabbing at himself with his napkin.
“We were so in love.”
Teddy winked at Amber. “She was besotted.”
“Yeah,” said Ella-May, “I was the one going all moon-eyed. I was the one blushing and stammering and falling over bushes …”
Teddy pointed his fork at her. “Hey. I fell over one bush.”
“But it was a big one.”
“Damn near broke my neck,” Teddy muttered.
“I swear, my husband is brighter than he lets on.”
“I’d have to be,” said Teddy.
“Was your dad sheriff when Dacre Shanks was killing people?” Glen asked Ella-May.
Milo’s smile vanished. “Damn it, Glen.”
“What?”
“Boy, you have got to be the most tactless person I have met that I haven’t punched yet,” said Teddy.
Glen looked confused. “We were talking about cops and sheriffs and stuff. I’d have thought that’d be a natural segue into, y’know …”
“We don’t talk about that man at the table,” Ella-May said.
“Right. Um, sorry.”
She nodded. Teddy shoved another forkful of food into his mouth and chewed. Milo looked pissed. Thirty seconds passed where no one said anything. Amber’s wrist burned. She parted the bracelets and took another peek: 436 hours.
“We’re looking for him,” she said quietly.
“Looking for who?” Ella-May asked.
“Shanks,” she said. “We need to find him.”
Milo watched her, but didn’t say anything. Glen shot her a glare and kicked her under the table. She kicked him back harder.
“Ow! God!”
“We lied to you,” she said. Teddy put down his knife and fork and listened. “My life is in danger. I’m not going to tell you how or why or who is coming after me because, I’m sorry, but you’re safer not knowing. And I’m safer with you not knowing. We lied. We’re not family. We didn’t even know each other until a few days ago.”
“I’m not her cousin,” Glen said, rubbing his shin.
“They don’t care about that,” said Milo.
“But I am dying,” Glen added. “It’s just I’m not dying of lupus. I’m not even sure what that is. I’ve got the Deathmark, see, and—”
“They don’t care about any of that, either,” said Milo.
“Dacre Shanks is dead,” said Teddy. “Shot him myself. Me and three other deputies. One of the bullets caught him in the head. We never bothered figuring out who fired that one. But it took off the top of his skull.”
“We know he’s dead,” Amber said carefully. “But we also know there’s more to it than that.”
“You’ve been listening to too many ghost stories,” Ella-May said, getting up from the table.
“No,” said Amber, “but I have seen too many monsters.”
Amber went to bed and had a bad dream. Her demon-self was crouched over Ella-May’s dead body, and she was scooping out and eating the woman’s insides. Standing behind her were her parents, scooping out Amber’s own guts from a gaping cavity in her back.
She woke up and cried for a bit. When she stopped, she heard a creaking – slow and regular. She got up, looked out of the window, saw an ember glowing in the dark. She put on jeans and a sweatshirt, went out on to the back porch.
“Did I wake you?” Teddy asked from his rocking chair.
She shook her head. “I haven’t been sleeping too well, that’s all. I’ve never known anyone who smoked a pipe before.”
He smiled. “I didn’t used to. Took this up in my forties when my hair started going grey. Thought it’d make me look wise and somewhat distinguished. Does it?”
“Somewhat.”
He nodded, and puffed away.
“I’m sorry for the upset we’ve caused,” said Amber.
“Ah, you seem like you’re going through a lot, so I’m not going to hold it against you. Ella-May isn’t, either, despite her silence earlier. That man has been a plague on our family, so we don’t especially like talking about him at the dinner table.”
“You knew him?” she asked.
Teddy nodded. “Everyone knew him. Nobody knew him well. Probably how he got away with it for so long.”
“How did you find him? How did you figure out what he was doing?”
Teddy tapped the stem of his pipe against the chair, and put it back between his lips. “We didn’t,” he said. “Ella-May did. I’m a smart enough fella. I was a good deputy and I make a good sheriff. But Ella-May is my secret weapon. She paid attention to the little things, the little details. She added things together. She made enquiries. All under the radar. Not even her father suspecting for one moment that what she was doing was gathering evidence.
“Then her dad passed away. Nothing dramatic. He wasn’t killed in the line of duty or anything like that. His heart just gave out one sunny afternoon while driving back to the station. He pulled over to the side of the road and had his heart attack and died. Responsible to the last. His replacement was not a particularly intelligent man. I brought Ella-May to him and she gave him all her evidence, told him her conclusions, and he ignored it all. He didn’t want to imagine that a town like Springton could hold a horror like that. Dacre Shanks was a creepy little guy in a creepy little toystore. Sheriff Gunther, that was his name, was content with that. Creepy was fine. He could understand creepy. But serial killer? That was beyond him.
“So I started an unofficial investigation. My fellow deputies trusted me, and they trusted Ella-May. All the work she’d done meant we hit the ground running. We quickly had enough so that we could call in the Feds. Gunther found out, was not happy, threatened to fire us all. He called the FBI, told them it was all a big misunderstanding. That same night we got word that someone else had gone missing, a boy who fit the profile of some of Shanks’s other victims. We convinced the judge to get us a search warrant – without Gunther’s help – and we raided that toystore.”
“Did you save the boy?” Amber asked.
“No, we did not.” Teddy puffed on the pipe, but it had gone out. He didn’t seem to notice. “We ran in on Shanks standing over him, though. All four of us opened fire. You know the rest. Gunther lost his job after that and I was elected in his place. For some reason, the folks around here have been electing me ever since. I don’t think they’re too smart.”
“And what about after? There were other murders, weren’t there? Ten years later, something like that?”
“Feds came to investigate. Thought there was a copycat. But, by the time they got here, the killings had stopped.”
“Did your daughter have anything to do with that?”
Teddy struck a match, lit his pipe again. Gave it a few puffs. “The world is full of bad men, Amber. Bad women, too, I guess. Some of them hide in plain sight, and some of them don’t. Some of them wear masks, and some of them wear smiles. I thought I’d seen the full extent of evil when we burst in on Dacre Shanks.