Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (books to read in your 20s female TXT) 📕

like Sheryl suffered. The corpse is handcuffed to a thick U-bolt driven into the floor.

I don’t speak. I just step back and shut the door. Jonathan’s disembodied voice says, “Do you want to know?”

“Just tell me where you are. Let’s get it over with.”

“That man abducted young women, some of them barely into their teens. He raped and killed them and made harassing phone calls to their loved ones,” Jonathan says. “I gave him a choice of dying of starvation or gnawing off his hand like an animal in a trap. He chose to starve.”

I lift my head and see the small, beady eye of a camera tucked in the corner of the hall. “I don’t care about your justifications.”

“These people weren’t unknown,” he says. “If the police had worked harder, they could have put the pieces together. They could have stopped him. But they didn’t. He did have a judge and a jury once. They arrested him for an attempted abduction. The case was dismissed.”

“You’re not omniscient. You can be wrong.”

“I let them tell me who they are. What they’ve done. What they’re capable of doing next.” He sounds calm, of course. Certain. “What you’ve done tells me who you are, Gina. If you want to find me, go to your left now.”

“Are you going to keep telling me your stories? Because I’d rather just die.”

“Go to your left.”

I take the other end of the hall. More offices. More blank, blinded windows. Three of them.

“Did you ever find him?” I ask.

“Who?”

“The man who killed your sister.”

There’s a very long pause. I wish I could see him, the way he can see me. I wish I could understand him better, because then I’d know how to stop him.

“Three doors,” he says. “Pick one. I’ll give you a clue. I’m in one of them.”

I feel my stance shift, getting ready for battle. A fierce, cold wind blows through me. He’ll be armed, I think. I still have the ankle gun, and I bend down and get it. There’s one bullet, and I need to make it fucking count.

I start at the far left. It’s empty.

So is the middle one.

I kick the last door open, smashing glass, blinds flailing wildly at the air, and leap forward in a flat-footed hop while the glass is still falling like sharp ice from the frame. My aim is steady.

I fire at his face. Right in his forehead.

He doesn’t blink. Glass cracks. He picks up a mug and drinks from it, and I realize through a sick, bewildered sense of disorientation that I’ve just shot a huge, flat television screen. It’s still working, despite the bullet that I’ve put through it. Jonathan sips again, staring at me with cool, empty eyes. “I didn’t lie,” he says. “I’m right here. It’s the only place you’ll find me in the building, Gina. There are twenty-one more rooms I’ve used. You can look in all of them. As you do, I’ll tell you why. And you’ll agree with me. They all deserved it. Every one of them.”

I scream at the monitor. I can’t help it; I feel a savage upwelling of rage, so deep that it tears something inside me. I can’t put words on it. I can’t reach him. I can’t stop him.

He’s a ghost. And this is just his graveyard.

That’s when I hear Kez’s voice. Not here, with me. From the screen. “Gwen, get out, he’s fucking crazy, he took me to the—”

Jonathan’s head swivels to his left, and then the picture and sound both die before she can finish that sentence.

He’s got Kez.

I don’t go to the other rooms. I don’t want to see more of Jonathan’s brand of justice. I’m barely holding on to myself as it is.

I need to get to Kez.

And this needs to end.

I shove myself under the still-stuck loading dock door and run across the broken, pitted parking lot. The Honda is still on the other side of the fence, and I wriggle under the chain link, earning bloody scratches on my face I barely feel. I pop the trunk and grab another gun—one of Kezia’s, a Smith & Wesson semiauto, loaded and ready—and I see another knife at the bottom of the pile. I take it, and an extra clip, and I slam the trunk.

There are only two choices: his family home, or the lighthouse. I choose the house because it’s closer.

The place must have been beautiful once. Now it’s warped, weathered, half-burned, and left to ruin. The front door gapes open on a blackened, charred entryway. I step inside and go down the hallway that leads left to the part that hasn’t been destroyed.

It’s what I suppose in the 1970s would have been called a sunken living room; there’s a step down, then another, then an octagonal carpeted pit in the middle. Matted shag, filthy and rotten. Animals have nested here. When I look up, I see jagged holes in the roof where rain has poured down.

Apart from that, it’s still intact. Books rotting on warped shelves. A silver artificial Christmas tree leans in the corner, loaded with dirty, still-vivid ornaments. Presents scattered like stones, all still wrapped but misshapen from water and time.

The octagonal pit in the middle of the room is full of sludge. Pillows float on top, bleached pale like dead fish.

I move past it, past the dull, dirty white piano in the corner. Something rustles in the strings, and I flinch, but whatever it is, it stays hidden.

The next room is a kitchen. It’s weirdly neat, like the cannery: counters clean and empty, floor shining. Off-green appliances have been polished. I open the refrigerator, afraid that I’ll find another body, and gag at the stench of rotten food. I will my heartbeat to slow down, my ears to stop the incessant ringing that hasn’t faded yet from that stunning sonic assault at the cannery. I can hear. Just not as clearly as I should.

At least my pulse obeys, coming down to