“How old were you?”
“Four when the nightmares started. Five when she told me not to tell. I remember she wanted me to have tutors. And she told me never, ever to tell Daddy I knew.” Because it was so fresh in her mind and her heart was racing, her mouth dry, she forced herself to recount the visit to the zoo and the terror she’d endured. She’d believed she held another little girl’s body in her hands to feed to the lion.
Sam was silent for so long she thought he wouldn’t speak. He simply held her, rocking her in his arms, his face in her neck. She could feel his warm breath on her shoulder. When he lifted his head, he gently brushed a kiss along her pulse and then her ear and temple.
“You must have been a very brave child, Stella. You were alone and terrified. You still wanted to do the right thing. Over the years, the things I saw, my moral compass wasn’t always the best, although I can honestly say I tried to always have justice in my mind, not revenge.”
His words warmed her a little when she was so cold inside. There was true admiration in his voice. Still, she couldn’t shake the nightmare and the aftermath that always came with it.
Sam took another deep breath as if he were fighting down demons and reached for the bottle of water on her nightstand, uncapped it and handed it to her. “Did you ever say anything to your father?”
She tried to control the tremors that wracked her body. “No. The images I saw in my nightmares were horrific. He tortured his victims. I was a child and those images were burned into my brain. I became terrified of him, and the last thing I would ever do would be to talk to him about what I saw. My mother had to figure out ways to explain why I was afraid of him when he came back from his business trips. Fortunately, he wasn’t all that interested in children.”
Sam didn’t try to get her to tell him anything else. She didn’t know if she could have. She hadn’t told anyone about her mother telling her not to speak of her nightmares or that she came into her room at night and coached her over and over not to talk. She’d forced herself to forget.
“I didn’t want to remember,” she murmured. “The things my father did were bad enough, but now, as an adult, I can see that by my mother’s silence, by forcing me to be silent, she was complicit. She didn’t want to give up her status. She knew, better than I did, what would happen to the family of a serial killer, and because she didn’t want the taint of that, she let people die.”
She laid her head back against his chest. “That’s what I’m doing now. Staying silent so I can keep my resort and my happy place. My safe haven. I’m doing exactly what she was doing. I hate myself right now. If I don’t go to Griffen and tell him who I am and that I’m having these nightmares, that there’s a killer here, we won’t catch him, Sam, and more people are going to die. He’s making his kills look like accidents. If he hadn’t been so upset at missing his first intended murder, he wouldn’t have used the exact same method killing James Marley.”
“At best they can say his death is suspicious at this point because of the attack on me,” Sam said. “But it does look like an accident. This killer is good. Had he not missed, no one would be the wiser. Our ace in the hole is you. He doesn’t have a clue that you’re onto him. If it got out that you are who you are, that goes away. If you do tell Griffen, we can’t let this get out to the media or anyone else, and you know it would. They already know murder’s a possibility because of the attack on me. They just can’t prove anything. This situation isn’t the same, Stella. We need to be silent in order to have an edge or we don’t stand a chance of catching him.”
That was fine by her. She didn’t want it to get out. The more people who knew, the more her life would be turned upside down. Griffen Cauldrey was a friend, at least she had come to know him pretty well over the last few years and she felt he was a fair man, but he would have to inform the sheriff, and the sheriff would have to call in the FBI.
She took a deep breath. “Sam, I have to tell Zahra. She’s my best friend and she’d be very hurt if I didn’t tell her who I really was. I’ve thought about sharing a million times, but didn’t because …” She trailed off, remembering the feel of her mother’s fingers biting into her cheeks. She hadn’t realized until just now that those childhood memories had played a part in deterring her. “I have to tell Zahra.”