All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 199

199

Saint tore through the town. She woke Michaels and two auxiliaries, pulled Sammy from the gallery, and met Mrs. Meyer on Main Street.

For an hour she near lost her mind, roused half the town and had them moving through every street, the dull pain in her stomach moving up to her head as she recalled two decades before.

From St. Raphael’s to Monta Clare High, she checked her watch as minutes ebbed to the torture of nightfall. She doubled back to the house, saw Norma standing on the porch.

“Jesus,” she screamed it, hating herself fully.

“She’ll turn up.”

“When and in what state?”

She stayed on foot because she knew each and every shortcut.

Saint stopped at the Brayer house and woke Melissa and her parents, did the same at Madeline Collins’s. The only names she could remember the girl speaking. Right then she realized she did not know nearly enough about Charlotte’s life.

Back on Main Street she saw Sammy comforting a crying Mrs. Meyer, the night sobering him cold, the fear they all carried, all of those that remembered Patch and Misty, and the doctor, Marty Tooms.

In the old spot in the woodland she pushed through ropes of vine and looked for tracks with the bright of her flashlight, but the ground was loose dust. She felt the heat of her gun burning her hip like a reminder she was no longer a rookie, that she would shoot first if anyone went close to the girl that was Patch’s and in bourgeoning ways her own.

As she cleared the woodland and jogged down Rosewood Avenue she saw the light burning in the Mad House. Her breath rushed out in a burst of relief when she saw Charlotte sitting in her father’s old chair, staring at the television light.

“Goddamn, Charlotte. Goddamn. I’ve got half the town up and you’re sitting here watching television.”

Charlotte did not turn her head from the screen. “Saturday nights we watched movies together.”

She might have berated her, might have kicked down what little was left between them had she not seen what the girl was watching.

The channel dramatized the moment, two years before, when the girl had been returned to her father, the two of them embracing in such a way that even the reporters fell silent for a moment so rare it had almost been forgotten.

Outside a Texan hospital, on artificial grass, the two held each other while the cameras cut to a single shot of the girl when she had gone missing

two decades before.

Eloise Strike.

Saint gasped not because she recognized the name, but the face. The face she had stared at in the window of Monta Clare Fine Art for three

summers.

“It was his painting,” Charlotte said.

Saint watched as the story unfolded. The reporter told how an Arlington woman had been visiting her sister in New York City when she happened across a painting hanging in the window of a small gallery in Tribeca. She’d stopped dead because she recognized the girl. The same girl she saw at the window of a single-family home by a Fish Creek Linear Park access point back home in Texas. Each morning as she took her walk she saw the girl sitting by the rear window, looking out over the woodland. She had not known the girl was being held, that she hadn’t left that room in near two thousand days. The woman went into the gallery, heard a little of the story,

and immediately dialed 911.

“Jesus,” Saint said.

Only now did the girl and her father, Walter Strike, feel strong enough to share their story.

Saint knelt beside Charlotte, breathed the perfume she wore, noticed her red sandals, her denim skirt and the gold clips she wore in her hair. She had hoped that her first date would have been just that. It didn’t have to be love; it didn’t have to lead anywhere at all. It just had to be a night when she could slip from that long shadow.

She looked up and saw the first tears on the girl’s cheeks. She knew

better than to try and comfort her.

“What you said,” Charlotte began.

Right then she knew Charlotte needed her truth more than Saint needed

her silence.

“Your father, he did it for me—”

She would play that moment back and wonder at a universal network of fate, each decision rippling out from the wings of a butterfly, searching a grid of pattern that had been laid in another life.

She would wonder if it would have made a difference to any of them.

But as she turned and saw Sammy at the door, his cheeks ashen, she knew there was no one at all in control.

“Your grandmother,” he said.

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