Read Once Gone (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #1) Page 35

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  Riley drove through city streets that transitioned from Georgetown’s elegant homes to a ramshackle neighborhood in a once-thriving industrial area. Many buildings and stores were abandoned, and the local residents were poor. The deeper she drove, the worse it became.

  She finally parked along a block that consisted entirely of condemned row houses. She got out of the car and quickly found what she was looking for.

  Two vacant homes flanked a broad, barren area. Not very long ago, three deserted houses had stood here. Peterson had lived as a squatter in the middle house, using it as his secret lair. It had been the perfect spot for him, too separated from living inhabitants for anyone to hear the screams coming from beneath the house.

  Now the space had been leveled flat, all evidence of the houses cleared away, and grass was starting to grow there. Riley tried to visualize what it had looked like when the houses had been there. It wasn’t easy. She’d only been here once when the houses were standing. And then it had been night.

  As she walked into the clearing, memories started to come back to her …

  Riley had been trailing him all day and into the night. Bill had been called away on an unrelated emergency, and Riley had unwisely decided to follow the man here alone.

  She watched him enter the wretched little house with boarded up windows. Then, just a few moments later, he left again. He was on foot, and she didn’t know where he was going.

  She briefly considered calling for backup. She decided against it. The man had gone away, and if the victim was really inside that house, she couldn’t leave her alone and in torment for another minute. She walked up onto the porch and squeezed her way between boards that only partially blocked the doorway.

  She turned on her flashlight. The beam reflected against at least a dozen tanks of propane gas. It was no surprise. She and Bill knew that the suspect was obsessed with fire.

  Then she heard a scratching below the floorboards, then a weak cry …

  Riley paused the flow of memories. She looked around. She felt sure—uncannily sure—that she was now standing on the very spot that she both dreaded and sought. It was here where both she and Marie had been caged in that dark and filthy crawlspace.

  The rest of the story was still raw in her mind. Riley had been captured by Peterson when she set Marie free. Marie had staggered a couple of miles in a state of complete shock. By the time she was found, she had no idea where she had been held captive. Riley was left alone in the dark to find her own way out.

  After a seemingly endless nightmare, tormented repeatedly by Peterson’s torch, Riley had gotten loose. When she did, she had beaten Peterson nearly unconscious. Every blow gave her a great sense of vindication. Maybe those blows, that small vindication, she reflected, had allowed her to heal better than Marie.

  Then, crazed and maddened with fear and exhaustion, Riley had opened all the tanks of propane. As she fled the house, she threw a lighted match back inside. The explosion threw her all the way across the street. Everyone was amazed that she’d survived.

  Now, two months after that explosion, Riley stood looking around at her grim handiwork—a vacant space where nobody lived or was likely to live for a long time. It seemed like a perfect image of what her life had become. In a way, it seemed like the end of the road—at least for her.

  A sickening feeling of vertigo came over her. Still standing in that grassy spot, she felt as if she were falling, falling, falling. She tumbled straight into that abyss that had been yawning open for her. Even in broad daylight, the world seemed terribly dark—even darker than it had been in that cage in that crawlspace. There seemed to be no bottom to the abyss, and no end to her fall.

  Riley recalled once again Betty Richter’s assessment of the odds that Peterson had been killed.

  I’d say ninety-nine percent.

  But that nagging one percent somehow rendered the other ninety-nine meaningless and absurd. And besides, even if Peterson really had died, what difference did it make? Riley remembered Marie’s awful words on the phone on the day of her suicide.

  Maybe he’s like a ghost, Riley. Maybe that’s what happened when you blew him up. You killed his body but you didn’t kill his evil.

  Yes, that was it. She had been fighting a losing battle all her life. Evil, after all, haunted the world, as surely as it did this place where she and Marie had suffered so horribly. It was a lesson she should have learned as a little girl, when she couldn’t stop her mother from being murdered. The lesson was hammered home by Marie’s suicide. Rescuing her had been pointless. There was no point in rescuing anybody, not even herself. Evil would prevail in the end. It was just as Marie had told her over the phone.

  You can’t fight a ghost. Give it up, Riley.

  And Marie, so much braver than Riley had known, finally took matters into her own hands. She’d explained her choice in five simple words.

  This is the only way.

  But that was not courage, to take your life own life. That was cowardice.

  A voice broke through Riley’s darkness.

  “You all right, lady?”

  Riley looked up.

  “What?”

  Then, slowly, she realized that she was on her knees in a vacant city lot. Tears were running down her face.

  “Should I call someone for you?” the voice asked. Riley saw that a woman had stopped on the nearby sidewalk, an older woman in shabby clothes but with a concerned look on her face.

  Riley got her sobbing under control and rose to her feet, and the woman shuffled off.

  Riley stood there, numb. If she couldn’t put an end to her own horror, she knew a way that she could numb herself against it. It wasn’t courageous, and it wasn’t honorable, but Riley was past caring. She wasn’t going to resist it any longer. She got into her car and drove toward home.