Verhoo

Tuesday arrived without ceremony.

Indigo had slept on the Forzone sofa — not because anyone had asked her to stay but because leaving felt like the wrong decision and the sofa was available and she'd slept on worse things in worse situations. She woke at five forty three with a crick in her neck and her arm doing its thing and the particular grey light of early morning coming through the living room curtains.

She lay there for a moment and listened to the house.

Tom upstairs. Hannah upstairs. The particular sounds of a house with people in it who were sleeping or trying to sleep or lying in the dark doing what you did when sleep wasn't coming and you'd run out of ways to pretend it might.

She sat up.

She looked at the itinerary on her phone. She'd been through it three more times last night after Tom had gone to bed and Hannah had gone to bed and the house had settled around her. Three more times looking for the thing she was missing, the detail she hadn't clocked, the piece of it that would tell her what came next.

The G. Cain contact at the Harwick venue was the clearest thing — Chloe setting up a false trail, pointing everything toward Wednesday in Harwick while Jacob stayed in Millhaven and did what he was doing. But there was something else in the itinerary that she kept coming back to. Something small.

The hotel booking for Millhaven. The Millhaven Inn. Booked for four nights — Friday through Monday. But the tour itinerary had Millhaven as a two night stop. Sunday signing and done.

Four nights. Not two.

Chloe had booked four nights and the tour only needed two.

She looked at that for a while.

Then she looked at the extra two nights and thought about what they were for.

She put her phone down. She looked at the ceiling. She thought about Jacob Cain and patience and the particular way he operated — building, collecting, preparing, letting everything come to its right moment before he moved.

She thought about what the right moment looked like.

She thought about the book tour. About what the book tour was. Not just a schedule of towns and signing tables — a public event. A thing that had been announced and advertised and put on social media and in newsletters and in the events sections of local papers in each of the towns on the itinerary.

Public.

Announced in advance.

With a specific time and a specific place and a specific person who would be there.

She sat up straighter.

She picked up her phone.

She went back to the Millhaven section of the itinerary. The signing that hadn't happened — Sunday morning, Page and Spine, nine o'clock. Which had been rescheduled. Which Claire had rescheduled to — she went to her emails, found the one from Claire sent Sunday afternoon — Tuesday. Today. Eleven o'clock. Page and Spine.

Claire had rescheduled the signing to today because the tour had to continue and the Millhaven signing had to happen and Tuesday was the next available slot before the tour moved on.

Claire had sent the rescheduled details to the Page and Spine mailing list and the tour social media and the local paper events section.

Public. Announced in advance. Specific time and specific place.

Indigo put her phone down.

She looked at the ceiling.

He wasn't waiting for the right moment. The right moment had been handed to him.

She called Detective Marsh at six fifteen.

He answered on the second ring with the voice of someone who hadn't been sleeping either.

"The signing," she said. "Today. Eleven o'clock at the bookshop. He knows about it."

A pause. "How."

"It was rescheduled publicly. Anyone who knew to look would know." She looked at the living room window. The grey morning outside. "He's been watching the tour since before I arrived. He knows every public detail."

"We can cancel it," Detective Marsh said.

"Yes," she said. "Or we don't."

A longer pause.

"Ms Derby—"

"He's been building toward something in this town," she said. "He has the axe and the gun and whatever he took from the washing line and fireworks. He has a daughter who set up a false trail pointing to Harwick. He's been making himself visible in a way he never has before." She paused. "He wants the signing. He wants the specific scene of it — me at a table in that bookshop with people around me and whatever he's planned ready to go."

"Which is exactly why we cancel it."

"Or," she said, "it's exactly why we don't. We know where he's going to be. We know when. We know the venue." She looked at the itinerary on her phone. "We've spent four days reacting to him. Chasing the east side while he went to the bookshop. Going to the garden while he was somewhere else. We have one chance to be where he's going before he gets there."

Silence on the other end of the line.

"That's using you as bait," Detective Marsh said.

"I've been bait since the envelope on the window," she said. "At least this time I know about it."

Another silence. Longer.

"I need to talk to Cole," he said.

"I know," she said. "I'll be at the station at eight."

She hung up.

She sat on the Forzone sofa in the early morning and looked at the living room and thought about eleven o'clock and the bookshop and the signing table and thirty two copies of her book in the window.

She thought about what she was proposing and whether it was the right thing.

She thought about Patricia Weller who had been at the outdoor theatre with her husband and had gone into the forest and hadn't come out. She thought about Scott Michal in the third row. She thought about Greta Halloway on the floor of Page and Spine with the open book above her head.

She thought about what happened if she cancelled the signing and Jacob Cain found another way to create the scene he was building toward. Another Patricia Weller. Another bookshop. Another ordinary person who had come out for an ordinary evening and hadn't come home.

She thought about what happened if she didn't cancel it and she was wrong about what he was building toward.

She sat with both of those for a long time.

Then she heard footsteps on the stairs.

Hannah came into the living room in her school clothes — dressed, hair done, the particular presentedness of someone who had decided that presentedness was still something they controlled. She looked at Indigo on the sofa and at the phone in her hand and at the expression Indigo was wearing.

She sat down on the other end of the sofa.

"What are you thinking," she said.

Indigo looked at her.

She told her.

Hannah's response was not what she expected.

She'd expected argument. She'd expected the protective instinct that Tom had shown, the parental fear that Daphne had shown, the version of this conversation that ended with someone saying you can't do this and Indigo saying I'm going to do it anyway.

What Hannah did was listen. All the way through. With the inventory-taking eyes and the particular quality of attention that processed information rather than just received it.

When Indigo finished Hannah was quiet for a moment.

"He wants the scene of it," Hannah said. "The signing. You at the table. The books." She looked at the wall. "It's the thing he's been building toward. The public event. The most you."

"Yes," Indigo said.

"So if you're not there—"

"He finds another way," Indigo said. "Another town. Another public moment. More people in the wrong place."

Hannah thought about this.

"If you are there," she said slowly. "And the police are there. And everyone knows he's coming." She looked at Indigo. "It's a trap."

"For both of us," Indigo said. "Yes."

"But you think it's worth it."

"I think it's the best option available," Indigo said. "That's not the same thing."

Hannah looked at her for a long moment.

"What do you need me to do," she said.

"Stay here," Indigo said. "With your dad. Not at the bookshop. Not anywhere near the bookshop."

Hannah looked like she wanted to argue.

"Hannah," Indigo said. "Your mum is in hospital. Your dad is in this house alone. The best thing you can do today is be here with him."

Hannah looked at her hands.

"Okay," she said. Very quietly.

"Thank you," Indigo said.

Hannah looked up. "Come back," she said.

Indigo looked at her.

"Come back," Hannah said again. Just that. The same two words Anastasia had said in a kitchen in Bushwick seven years ago. The same weight in them. The same particular ask.

"I will," Indigo said.

She meant it. The way she always meant it. With the full acknowledgement of what meaning it cost.

The station at eight was the two detectives and Officer Reeves and two officers she hadn't met who had driven up from the county overnight and had the particular quality of people who were fresh to a situation and were catching up fast.

She laid it out.

The signing. Eleven o'clock. Page and Spine. The public announcement of the rescheduling. The itinerary and the G. Cain contact in Harwick and what it meant about where Jacob was and where Chloe was. The resources he'd gathered. The pattern of visibility he'd established.

She laid it out and let them respond.

Detective Cole spoke first. "You're proposing we use the signing as a controlled environment."

"Yes," Indigo said.

"With you inside."

"Yes."

He looked at Detective Marsh. Detective Marsh looked at Officer Reeves. Officer Reeves looked at his desk.

"He's armed," Detective Marsh said. "We have to be clear about that. The axe, the gun from the Cleader scene, possibly a harpoon gun if he retrieved it from the garden — we don't know what his full inventory looks like."

"No," Indigo said. "We don't."

"And he has an accomplice," Detective Cole said. "Chloe Verhoo. Who is currently unlocated."

"Yes," Indigo said.

"So we're proposing a controlled environment with an unknown number of armed individuals and an accomplice whose location and role we don't fully understand," Detective Marsh said.

"We're proposing a controlled environment where we know he's coming instead of reacting after he's already been," Indigo said. "Yes."

The room was quiet.

Officer Reeves looked up from his desk. "The bookshop has a back entrance," he said. "Through the storage area. And the building next door is empty — it was a letting agency that closed last year. We could use it for positioning."

Detective Cole looked at him.

"I know the town," Officer Reeves said simply.

Detective Cole looked at Indigo.

"If we do this," he said. "And I'm not saying we do. But if we do — you follow every instruction. You stay behind the table. You don't improvise."

"I improvise," Indigo said. "I'm not going to tell you I don't. But I improvise intelligently and I've been in worse situations than a bookshop."

Detective Cole looked at her for a long moment.

"That's true," he said. "Unfortunately."

Detective Marsh looked at his notepad. He looked at the clock on the wall.

"Three hours," he said. "We have three hours to set this up."

He looked at Detective Cole.

Detective Cole looked at Indigo.

"Okay," he said. "Let's talk about how this works."

They talked for two hours.

The positioning — officers in the empty letting agency next door, Officer Reeves in the back of Page and Spine through the storage entrance, two plain clothes officers among the signing attendees. The communications — earpieces, specific signals, the particular choreography of a controlled operation in a civilian space.

The signing itself — it would proceed normally. Claire had been briefed, Greta Halloway had been briefed, the twelve people who had registered for the event would be contacted and given the option to not attend. Eight of them, when told there was a potential security situation, declined. Four did not — three women and a man who had various reasons for not being deterred that Officer Reeves had assessed and cleared.

Indigo would be at the table. The books would be in the window. The signing would look exactly like a signing.

And if Jacob Cain came through the door of Page and Spine at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning in Millhaven he would find exactly what he'd planned to find and something he hadn't planned for at all.

She listened to all of it and contributed to the parts she could contribute to and kept the parts she was thinking but not saying in the place she kept those things.

She was thinking about Chloe.

About where Chloe was and what Chloe's role was in whatever came next. About the itinerary and the G. Cain contact name and what it meant that Chloe had put her own name — her real name, the name she'd been hiding — into a document that anyone could read if they looked closely enough.

She'd been thinking about that since last night.

There were two explanations. The first was that Chloe had made a mistake — that the discipline of hiding had slipped, that she'd entered the contact name automatically using the name she'd been told to use by Jacob, her own name, without thinking about what it revealed.

The second explanation was that it wasn't a mistake.

That Chloe had put her real name in the document deliberately. That she'd wanted someone to find it. That the Harwick false trail was Jacob's plan and the G. Cain contact name was something else — a message, a signal, a small deliberate deviation from the plan she was supposed to be following.

She thought about that second explanation and what it meant about Chloe Verhoo and where she was and what she was doing there.

At ten o'clock she excused herself from the station for ten minutes.

She walked around the block. She stood on the pavement in the October morning and breathed the cold air and thought.

She took out her phone. She found the tour email chain — the long thread of logistics emails between her, Claire and Chloe that stretched back eight months. She scrolled back through it. Looking for something she'd missed. Something small.

She found it six months ago. An email from Chloe about the Millhaven stop — the hotel booking, the venue arrangement, the details. At the end of it, after all the professional logistics, a single sentence that she'd read at the time as nothing more than a publicist being personable:

I hope Millhaven feels like a good place to end things.

She'd read it as the tour stop. The chapter of the book that dealt with the aftermath. The particular resonance of being near Vicrock for the first time.

She read it again now.

I hope Millhaven feels like a good place to end things.

She put her phone in her pocket.

She went back to the station.

At ten forty five she walked to Page and Spine.

The main street of Millhaven on a Tuesday morning. The shops open, the ordinary weekday traffic of people going places. The delivery van. The diner. The pharmacy with its skeleton in the window still wearing the bow tie.

She walked through it with her bandaged arm and her eyes moving and the particular focused quality of someone approaching something they've decided to approach.

Page and Spine looked exactly as it always looked. Greta had replaced the pyramid of books — it had been disturbed the previous evening, one or two copies knocked sideways, and she'd straightened it first thing. Thirty two copies. Her face on the cover repeated.

The tape marks from the envelope still faintly visible on the glass.

She pushed the door open.

The bookshop smell. The particular combination of it. Greta at the counter looking up with the expression of someone trying to look normal and mostly managing it.

"Morning," Indigo said.

"Morning," Greta said.

The signing table was set up in the middle of the shop — a fold out table, a chair, a stack of books, a pen. Completely ordinary. The kind of thing that existed in bookshops on signing days all over the country.

She sat down behind the table.

She picked up the pen.

She put it down.

She looked at the door.

The earpiece in her left ear was so small it was invisible. Detective Marsh's voice occasional and low through it — positioning confirmed, plain clothes in place, rear entry secured.

She looked at the door.

She thought about sitting at this table and waiting for Jacob Cain to walk through it and what that felt like and whether it felt like anything she hadn't felt before.

It didn't. That was the honest answer. It felt like every other time she'd waited for something she knew was coming and couldn't stop from coming. The same cold focused quality. The same steadiness that arrived when the situation was clear enough that fear became irrelevant.

She thought about Hannah on the sofa this morning.

Come back.

She thought about Anastasia in a kitchen in Bushwick saying the same thing.

She thought about what coming back looked like from here.

The door opened.

Not Jacob Cain.

The first of the four attendees — one of the three women, early fifties, a canvas bag, the look of someone who had come for a book signing and wasn't going to be deterred by a security situation she'd been told was precautionary.

"Good morning," the woman said. She looked at the table. At Indigo. "I've been waiting to meet you since the book came out."

"Thank you for coming," Indigo said.

She picked up the pen.

She opened the cover of the top book on the stack.

She signed her name and wrote something she meant and handed it across the table and the woman smiled and the ordinary machinery of a book signing proceeded and the clock on the wall of Page and Spine moved toward eleven.

The four attendees arrived by ten fifty eight.

The three women and the man. They arranged themselves in the small space of the bookshop with the particular negotiation of strangers in a contained area — a couple of them looking at the shelves while they waited, one standing near the window, one near the door.

Greta made tea from the small station at the back of the shop. The smell of it mixed with the bookshop smell and Indigo signed books and said the things you said at signings and watched the door.

Eleven o'clock arrived.

The door didn't open.

Eleven oh one. Eleven oh two.

Detective Marsh's voice in her ear. Quiet. Steady. Nothing on the street.

Eleven oh five.

Indigo signed the last book in the stack for the man who'd come despite the security situation and who turned out to have a specific and detailed question about chapter seven that she answered honestly and in full.

Eleven oh eight.

The door still closed.

She looked at Greta. Greta looked at the door.

Eleven ten.

She thought about the two explanations. The mistake and the not-mistake. About what it meant if Chloe had deliberately left her name in the document. About the sentence at the end of the email six months ago.

I hope Millhaven feels like a good place to end things.

She thought about a daughter who had spent eight months building toward this and had then put her own name in a place where it could be found.

She thought about Lucas. About what it had cost him to not do the thing his father had sent him to do.

She thought about Jacob Cain killing his own son.

She thought about what a daughter might feel watching her father kill her brother.

She picked up her phone under the table and opened her messages. She found the tour email chain. She scrolled to Chloe's number. She typed a message.

I know who you are. I know what your father did to Lucas. If you want to talk I'm at the bookshop.

She sent it.

She put the phone down.

She looked at the door.

Eleven fifteen.

Eleven sixteen.

Her phone buzzed.

A response from Chloe's number. Four words.

I'm already here. Outside.

Indigo looked at the door.

She looked at Detective Marsh's position — invisible, next door, watching through a gap in the wall that Officer Reeves had identified and made use of.

She looked at Greta.

"Can you take everyone to the back," she said. Quietly. Calmly. "The storage area. Right now please."

Greta looked at her. Understood immediately. Began moving people without explaining why, with the efficient calm of someone who had been briefed and was following the briefing.

Indigo waited until the back door closed behind the last of them.

Then she stood up from the signing table.

She walked to the front door of Page and Spine.

She opened it.

Chloe Verhoo was standing on the pavement outside the bookshop.

She was wearing the dark jacket from the Forzone washing line. The one that had been hanging closest to the back fence when he'd been standing there. She was wearing it over her own clothes and it was slightly too large for her and she was standing with her arms at her sides and her face doing something complicated that Indigo couldn't immediately name.

She was twenty three. Indigo registered that — she'd known it from the background check the detectives had run yesterday, twenty three years old, Jacob Cain's daughter, Lucas's half sister. Twenty three and standing on the main street of Millhaven on a Tuesday morning in her father's plan wearing a jacket she'd taken from a washing line.

They looked at each other.

"He doesn't know you're here," Indigo said. Not a question.

"No," Chloe said.

"The itinerary. The G. Cain contact name. You wanted someone to find it."

Chloe looked at the window. At the books. At Indigo's face repeated thirty two times on the covers.

"I read your book," she said. "When Claire sent the advance copies for the tour planning." She looked at Indigo. "All of it. Every chapter."

"Okay," Indigo said.

"The chapter about Lucas," she said. "You wrote about him like he was—" She stopped. Started again. "You wrote about him like he mattered. Like he was a person who mattered and made choices that cost him something."

"He did," Indigo said. "He was."

Chloe looked at the pavement.

"He called me," she said. "Before — before the end. He called me and he said he couldn't do it. He said he'd tried and he couldn't and he told me to stay away from Dad." She looked up. "Two weeks later Dad called me and told me Lucas was gone."

Indigo looked at her.

"He said Lucas had made a mistake," Chloe said. "He said it with the same tone he used for everything. Like it was a logistics problem. Like Lucas was just—" She stopped. "Lucas was my brother. He was my half brother and I never knew him properly but he was my brother and my father killed him because he chose you over the plan."

The main street of Millhaven went on around them. Ordinary Tuesday morning. Unremarkable.

"And you still helped him," Indigo said. Not accusatory. Just accurate.

"I thought—" Chloe looked at the window again. "I thought the book was going to destroy what was left of him. What was left of his name. And I thought if I could stop it — if I could stop the tour, if no one read it, if it just went away — then at least there'd be nothing left of him in the world except what we knew. What I knew."

She looked at Indigo.

"But you wrote about Lucas," she said. "In chapter nine. Two pages. You wrote about who he was and what he chose and why it mattered. And I read it and I—" She stopped.

Indigo waited.

"I didn't want to do it anymore," Chloe said. "Whatever he had planned. I didn't want to be part of it."

"Where is he," Indigo said.

Chloe looked at her.

"He's been watching," she said. "He's been watching the bookshop since six this morning. He knows the signing was rescheduled. He's been waiting for—"

She stopped.

Her eyes went to something over Indigo's shoulder.

Indigo turned.

Jacob Cain was at the end of the main street.

Not moving. Just standing at the far end of the block, two hundred meters away, in the dark jacket and the burlap mask and the axe in his right hand dragging on the pavement beside him.

Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.

Carrying all the way down the empty main street of Millhaven on a Tuesday morning.

He'd seen Chloe.

He was looking at his daughter standing outside the bookshop in his jacket talking to Indigo Derby.

Indigo felt Detective Marsh's voice in her ear — target acquired, main street, two hundred meters, do not engage until—

She didn't hear the rest of it.

Because Chloe had turned around.

She was looking at her father at the end of the street and her face was doing the thing that Indigo had seen on Lucas's face in the kitchen — the complicated exhausted thing of someone who had been two things at once for too long.

"Chloe," Indigo said. Low and urgent. "Get inside. Right now. Get inside the bookshop."

Chloe looked at her father.

"He won't hurt me," she said.

"Chloe—"

"He won't hurt me," she said again. "He never—"

Her voice stopped.

Because Jacob Cain had raised the bow.

Not the axe — the bow. Something Indigo hadn't known about, hadn't been in the inventory she'd been building. An old compound bow, the kind that existed in hunting shops and sporting goods stores and had a draw weight that had nothing to do with the improvised rope string she'd used in the burning forest.

He drew it back with one arm.

One arm.

Like the arrow in the shoulder in the clearing hadn't happened. Like the burning forest hadn't happened. Like the things that had been done to his body across three encounters with Indigo Derby had simply been absorbed and filed and were not a relevant factor in what he was doing right now.

He aimed at his daughter.

"Chloe get DOWN—"

The arrow flew.

It went through Chloe's stomach on the left side. The exact same place — the same left side, the same angle, the same terrible geometry of it — as Elizabeth Jack in the firelight at ScreamForHell eight years ago.

Chloe looked down at it.

She stood on the pavement outside Page and Spine with the arrow in her stomach and the dark jacket that wasn't hers and her father's name and she looked down at what he'd done and her face did something that had nothing complicated left in it.

Just understanding.

Just the particular understanding of someone who had been told something was true and had not believed it until this moment.

She looked up at Indigo.

"He killed Lucas," she said. Her voice was strange. "He actually — he just—"

She went down.

Indigo caught her. Or tried to — she got one arm under her and they went down together, the pavement hard under her knees, Chloe's weight against her, the arrow between them.

"I've got you," Indigo said. "I've got you. Stay with me."

Detective Marsh's voice in her ear saying things she was and wasn't processing simultaneously. Officers moving. The sounds of the main street changing around her.

Chloe was looking at the sky above the main street of Millhaven. The ordinary October Tuesday sky.

"My dad," she said. Very quietly.

"I know," Indigo said.

"He was supposed to—" She stopped. "I was supposed to—"

"I know," Indigo said.

She looked up.

Jacob Cain was walking down the main street toward them. Not running. The axe in one hand, the bow in the other, walking with the even patient stride he'd had since a campsite in Vicrock eight years ago. The mask. The jacket. The two dark eye gaps finding her over his daughter's body.

Detective Marsh's voice.

Sirens starting.

Chloe's hand found Indigo's arm.

"I read your book," she said again. Like it mattered. Like she needed Indigo to know it had mattered.

"I know," Indigo said. "I know you did."

Chloe looked at the sky.

"Lucas chose right," she said.

Then she was quiet.

Indigo stayed where she was on the pavement with Chloe's weight against her and Jacob Cain coming down the main street and the sirens getting louder and the October morning being what it was and she breathed.

In.

Out.

She looked at Jacob Cain walking toward her.

She looked at his daughter on the pavement.

She breathed.

Then she stood up.