Those people. That was the phrase the man playing chess had used to describe the murder of Mason Kyle’s family, thirty-some-odd years before.
Michael tossed three twenties on the table, and all five of us made our way out the door.
“Mel.” Shane tried to sidestep the man with the graying hair. “Melody.”
“It’s all right, Echo,” the man told the girl Shane had addressed as Melody. “Speak your truth.”
A girl I almost recognized—the way I’d almost recognized Shane— stepped forward. Her eyes were on the ground. “I’m not Melody anymore,” she said, her voice light and wispy, barely more than a whisper. “I don’t want to be Melody. My second name—my true name—is Echo.” She lifted her eyes to her brother’s. “I’m happy now. Can’t you be happy for me?”
“Happy for you?” Shane repeated, his voice catching in his throat. “Mel, you can’t even talk to me without glancing at him to make sure what you’re saying is okay. You gave up college—college, Melody—to join the soul- sucking cult that stole our mother away from us when we were kids.” Shane’s fingers curled into fists. “So, no, I can’t be happy for you.”
“Your mother was lost.” The man in charge addressed those words to Shane, his manner almost gentle. “We attempted to provide solace, offer her a simpler way of life. I was as grieved as you were when she chose a different path.”
“You’re the reason she left town!” Shane exploded.
His opponent’s demeanor never wavered. “Serenity Ranch is not for everyone. We cannot help everyone, but those we can help, we do.” He glanced at Melody, so subtly that if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed.
“I’ve found my Serenity,” Melody recited, her voice expressionless, her eyes glassy. “In Serenity, I’ve found balance. In Serenity, I’ve found peace.”
“Are you on something?” Shane demanded before whipping back around to the man he’d confronted. “What did you give her? What have you been giving her?”
The man stared at and into Shane for a moment or two and then bowed his
head. “We must be going.”
“We’re about three seconds away from Draco Malfoy over there throwing a punch,” Michael said, his voice low. “Three…two…”
Shane punched the man. As the cult leader wiped blood off his lip with the back of his hand, he looked at Shane and smiled.
It didn’t take Agent Sterling long to dig up information on Serenity Ranch. The man in charge was named Holland Darby. He’d been investigated by local authorities dozens of times going back more than thirty years, but no proof of wrongdoing had ever been established.
The earliest complaints dated to the establishment of the Serenity Ranch commune on the outskirts of Gaither more than three decades earlier.
According to the files Agent Sterling had acquired, Holland Darby was a collector of drifters and strays, but over the years, he’d wooed more than a few young, impressionable locals to his side, too. Never anyone under the age of eighteen. Never any males.
That told me what I needed to know about Holland Darby. You dot your I’s and cross your T’s. If you harbored minors, you could run afoul of the law, and whatever you’re doing out at Serenity Ranch, the last thing you want is cops on your property. Your followers include both men and women, but when it comes to locals, you prefer females—the younger, the better, so long as they’re legal.
“He brought Melody to town as a test.” Lia’s tone gave no clue to the fact that this was personal to her, that Holland Darby had raised memories she kept buried deep. “Darby wanted Shane to see his sister. He wanted Melody to make it clear that they are her family now.”
The less contact Melody has with her family, the easier she is to manipulate, but the more times she looks them in the eyes and chooses you, the more certain she’ll be that they won’t forgive her. That they can’t forgive her, and that even if she wanted to leave Serenity Ranch, she could never go home.
“Clearly,” Lia said, standing up, “the Gaither Hotel is only passingly familiar with proper air-conditioning.” She pulled her hair back and off her neck. “I’m going to change into something cooler.”
Lia’s expression dared us to argue that her need for a wardrobe change had nothing to do with the temperature. Beside me, Michael watched her walk away. No matter how good she was at hiding her emotions, he was better at reading them. He knows what you’re feeling. You know that he knows.
After another moment, Michael followed her into the bedroom. I could see exactly how this was going to play out—the push and pull between them, Michael trying to bring her emotions to the surface, Lia throwing the fiasco
with Celine in his face.
“I believe,” Sloane said, filling the silence, “that there is approximately an eighty-seven percent chance that Michael and Lia will end up making out or otherwise engaged in acts of physical—”
“Let’s turn our attention back to the case,” Agent Sterling cut in. “Shall we?” She fell into lecture mode. “There were dozens of complaints filed about Serenity Ranch when Holland Darby first began buying up large chunks of property on the outskirts of town thirty-three years ago. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the complaints were baseless or manufactured—no one wanted drifters, runaways, and former drug addicts taking up residence on what used to be family farms.” Agent Sterling set those complaints aside and opened the thickest file. “Approximately nine months after the establishment of Serenity Ranch, the local sheriff’s department opened up an investigation of the group’s involvement in the murders of Anna and Todd Kyle.”
“Nightshade’s parents?” I asked. Sterling nodded. For the next hour, she, Dean, Sloane, and I pieced through every bit of evidence the investigation had managed to obtain.
It wasn’t much.
At the time of the murders, Anna and Todd Kyle were a young married couple with a nine-year-old son. Anna’s father, Malcolm Lowell, lived with them. Reading between the lines, I inferred that Malcolm was the one with money—the one who’d owned the house, the one who’d refused to sell his land to Holland Darby when the interloper was buying up all of their neighbors’. There had been some kind of altercation involving the two men. Words were exchanged. Threats were implied.
And that night, someone had broken into Malcolm Lowell’s house, butchered his daughter and son-in-law, and viciously attacked Malcolm, stabbing him seventeen times and leaving him to bleed out on the floor. According to the police report, nine-year-old Mason had been home the whole time.
Did you hear them screaming? Did you hide? The old woman at the diner had said that most people in Gaither believed that Mason Kyle had seen his parents murdered, but the report gave no such indication.
Malcolm—Nightshade’s grandfather—was the one who had called 911.
By the time medical assistance had arrived, he had been holding on to his life by a thread. The old man survived. His daughter and son-in-law had not. In the aftermath of the attack, Malcolm Lowell had been unable to provide a physical description of his attacker, but suspicion had fallen almost immediately on the occupants of Serenity Ranch.
“I’ve been working on a time line.” Sloane had made use of the hotel’s complimentary notepad, ripping out page after page and laying them along the floor, scrawling a note on each. She pointed to the leftmost one. “Thirty-
three years ago, Holland Darby establishes his commune on the outskirts of town. Less than a year after that, Anna and Todd Kyle are murdered. Twenty- seven years ago, the poison Master who would eventually go on to choose Nightshade as his apprentice killed nine people, completing his initiation into the Masters’ ranks.”
I followed the logic of Sloane’s calculation: Nightshade had completed his initiation kills six years earlier. The cult operated on a twenty-one-year cycle. Ergo, the poison Master before Nightshade had been initiated two to three years after Anna and Todd Kyle had been murdered.
What’s the connection?
“Scenario one,” I said. “The Master who eventually trained Nightshade as his apprentice lived in Gaither during the time of the murders. We know the Masters favor Pythias who have violence and abuse in their past—it’s possible a similar criteria is used in the selection of killers.” I closed my eyes for a moment and let the logic take hold. “The previous Master knew what Mason had seen and survived, and marked him for recruitment.”
Dean met my gaze. “Scenario two: I’m the Master who recruited Nightshade. I’m also the person who killed Anna and Todd Kyle. I was never caught, and the case got just enough local press to attract the attention of the Masters, who offered to channel my potential into so much more.” He ran the tips of the fingers on his right hand over my left. “I accepted the offer and learned to kill without a trace, without mercy.”
Beside me, Sloane shivered.
“Years later,” Dean continued quietly, “when it was time for me to choose an apprentice of my own, I remembered Mason Kyle. Maybe I didn’t realize he was in the house when I killed his family. Or maybe,” he continued, his voice nothing like his own, “I chose to let him live. Either way, he’s mine.”
Silence fell over the room. If Nightshade’s parents had been murdered by one of the Masters, solving the Kyle murders might lead us straight to the person who’d recruited Nightshade.
Find one Master, follow the trail.
“Scenario three.” Agent Sterling, who had been remarkably quiet as Dean and I had sorted through our thoughts, added her voice to the mix. “The UNSUB in the Kyle murders killed Nightshade’s parents so that little Mason Kyle would be more suited to becoming a killer himself someday.” She stood up and began pacing the room. I’d never seen her so intent. “I know the Nightshade case inside and out. The killer we were looking for was brilliant, narcissistic, with a need to win and to one-up all competitors. And yet, during his last interrogation, Nightshade accepted that the Pythia was going to have him killed. He didn’t fight it. He didn’t turn on the other Masters to save himself.”
“He was loyal,” I translated.
“You think that loyalty might date back to childhood.” Dean lifted his gaze to Sterling’s. “You think our UNSUB started grooming Nightshade to join the Masters when he was just a boy.”
Sloane frowned. “Nightshade’s parents were killed one thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-seven days before Nightshade’s Master completed his own initiation kills,” she pointed out. “Barring anomalies in the space-time continuum, it seems unlikely that someone could have begun grooming an apprentice to take their place before that someone had a place.”
Sloane’s hands fluttered, a sure sign of anxiety. She calmed herself, turning to the remainder of the time line. “Nine years after Mason Kyle’s parents were murdered, Mason left Gaither and never came back. That puts his exodus at roughly twenty-four years ago. About twelve years after that, Cassie and her mother moved to town.” Sloane’s blue eyes darted toward mine. I could see her trying to calculate the odds that continuing would hurt me.
I saved her the trouble. “Six years after my mom and I left Gaither, Nightshade killed nine people, taking his seat at the Masters’ table. Less than two months after that, my mother was taken.”
My mom and Nightshade had lived in this town more than a decade apart.
But one or more of the Masters must have kept tabs on them thereafter. You have a long memory. You have an eye for potential. And you can be very, very patient.
“Assuming the attack on the Kyle family was perpetrated by someone aged sixteen or over,” Sloane said, “we’re looking for an UNSUB no younger than his late forties—and possibly substantially older.”
I thought of the senior citizens back at the diner, the old man who’d invited us into the apothecary museum.
“We need to know what the police didn’t put in the official file,” Dean said. “Gossip. Theories.”
“Luckily for you,” Lia commented, strolling back into the room, “gossip is one of my specialties.” She was wearing a long black skirt and a multilayered top that hung off her shoulders. She’d rimmed her eyes in thick, dark liner, and wore two-inch-wide copper bangles on her wrists. “On a scale of one to ten,” she said, “how psychic do I look?”
“Six-point-four,” Sloane replied without hesitation.
“Psychic?” I asked. I was fairly certain I did not want to know where this was going.
“Lia and I were talking about our little chat with Ree at the Not-A-Diner,” Michael said, coming up behind Lia with a look on his face that made me think they’d been doing a lot more than talking. “And we both seemed to recall Ree saying something about a widow with a big mouth and a penchant for psychics.”
Lia arched an eyebrow at me. I knew that eyebrow arch. It did not bode well.
“No way,” I said. “I spent most of my childhood helping my mom con people into thinking she was psychic. I’m not going to help you do the same.”
Sloane looked at me, looked at Lia, then looked at me again. “There is a very high probability,” she whispered, “that Lia’s about to tell you that you’re lying.”
