My world was a kaleidoscope of pain. Everything was spinning. I managed to send my foot hard into Billy’s left knee. He stumbled just a bit, but that was all I needed. I got to my hands and knees and charged at him. He raised the board with a roar, and I collided with him just as he brought it down. It bounced off of my back, and we went sliding into the mud.

I wasted no time delivering a punch to his stomach and one to his face, crushing his nose. He bellowed and threw me off with an elbow to my chest. I let out a whoosh of air as I stumbled back, slipping in the mud and falling on my ass. I tried to get up, but the damn rain made the ground too slippery and my ankle was shot.

I got to one knee, but not before Billy’s full weight came charging at me. With a sickening crunch he landed a kick to my ribs, and fire erupted in my chest. All the air left my lungs and agony overcame my body. I tried to move, to escape, to do anything, but my gasps of breath came ragged. I was pretty sure I tasted blood.

I was only half aware when Billy picked the board up again and this time brought back like a baseball bat.

I was dead.

My body just hadn’t realized it yet.

I tried to climb to my feet, but the muscles in my arm had given up long ago, and I collapsed to the rain-soaked dirt. The comfortable numbness of defeat welcoming me.

“Get down.”

As I lay there, thunder rumbling and icy droplets stinging my face, I stared at the twisted form of death above me, and I knew the painful truth. This was it. All of my searching, all of my fighting was for nothing. I’d have laughed if I could have remembered how.

Then the voices came again, calling for me to surrender my struggle against the inevitable, dragging me from consciousness.

“Give it up,” they echoed.

I glanced to the bitter rain clouds as colored stars wheeled overhead and time slowed to a crawl. The monster lifted his arm to finish me, and I watched him swing the weapon at my head, beckoning me beyond.

“Blume?!”

Then it all went black.

I’d known that was it. The board was going to hit my face, breaking every bone above my neck—and maybe my neck itself.

Then I saw it. Billy had stopped. His feet locked up, and his eyes went wide. It made no sense to me at first, but then I noticed that he was spasming. I strained to look all around as the giant dropped to his knees, in obvious pain. He gave me a confused look and then fell face down in the mud, the board still in his hands.

Then I spotted them behind Bennett’s twitching body. Two police cars, with flashing colored lights painting the rain in brilliant hues of red and blue.  Two officers sprinted through the mud, but everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.

The police were shouting something. One of them held a stun gun, the hair-thin wires stretched out to where they had attached themselves to Bennett’s back.

Were they shouting to me?

“Blume?!”

I waved them off and pointed into the shed. “The house,” I gasped as best I could. “And there are…graves… bottom of the hill.”

They said something to me, but I didn’t catch it. All I heard was the pouring torrent as it dumped down on me. I lay in the mud and didn’t move for quite some time. I tried to stay awake for what seemed like hours. It might have been seconds.

Eventually I surrendered to the darkness and the steady rhythm of the rain.

ELEVEN

Breaking the habit.

An hour later, I found myself propped up on a stretcher in Billy Bennett’s living room, getting patched up by the medics. Several police were milling around, looking through his belongings, including, I noticed, the two detectives who had harangued me at my apartment. They simply passed by with a grudging nod.

I was drinking stale coffee with my left hand. My right hand was bandaged up. So was my chest. My ring finger and pinky had been broken and my palm had swollen to the size of an apple from warding off Billy’s board. At some point in the skirmish, I had also taken a blow to the side of my head, which had now been dressed by the ambulance crew.

After Billy had been taken into custody, the police had found three bodies in the poorly covered mounds that I had stumbled on. The corpses were too decomposed to identify them at the scene, but one thing was for sure: all three had been children. And with the discovery of Jack Ellington’s Who T-shirt, I was willing to bet he was one of them.

The police were also looking through the journals in the shed.  Judging by the muted conversations I overheard, they were pretty sure there were at least two more bodies elsewhere on the property.

It’d been too late to save them, but there had been one saving grace of my fumbling heroics. Charlie Haines, the missing schoolboy, was alive, if not well. The kid had been whisked off to hospital. He had been bruised, catatonic with fear, and would probably require years of therapy, but the cops told me he was expected to make a full recovery in time.

“That was some timing,” I told the officer in charge of the investigation as he passed through.

“It was. It was a weird tip, too,” he said.

“How so?”

We got the call from a former Chief of Police. Bloke hasn’t even been on the force for five years. Then, 30 minutes later, I see him in the station in cuffs. It’s a damn shame.”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. Secretly thankful for Atkinson’s last minute act of bravery. He may have been a self-righteous asshole, but it seemed Henry Atkinson had finally had a crisis of conscience and turned himself at the last minute, saving my life, Charlie’s life, and probably many more. Whether it had been my confrontation with him that had caused Atkinson to do the right thing, or pure guilt, I would never know. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that Charlie Haines’ mother would get her son back tonight. She would never know the pain that Elizabeth Ellington had felt. The pain that I had felt.

Amir had been right. In my determination to solve my own family’s murder, I had accomplished nothing but a spiraling descent into boozy self-pity. When I had tried to help someone else though, someone who still had a shot at happiness, I had actually been able to make a difference. Considering how much pain I was in, that felt pretty good.

Though there were still holes in my theory, I had put most of it together after seeing the notebooks. Bennett was not Atkinson’s nephew as he had told me. Atkinson had been raised by a foster family, so at some point he and his wife had wanted to give back to the process. They had adopted a troubled kid, probably one with a history of abuse and mental issues; William Hudson. He was their adopted son.

At least for a few years. It wasn’t long before Billy left his foster home. Whether Billy had run away or had been kicked out due to his disturbing tendencies remained to be seen. However, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Atkinson had gotten rid of the troubled child, worried that custody of such a kid might taint his exemplary reputation.

Either way, Atkinson must have been shocked to see his son again years later. Had Billy blackmailed him into covering the whole thing up, or did Atkinson just feel guilty for his absent offspring? In the end, I figured it didn’t matter.  Both were in cuffs, and the truth would soon be out.

A flicker of light caught my eye, and as I turned, I felt a flash of pain in my side. Outside the window, the rain was still coming, but a tiny break in the clouds pierced the drab sky. In the distance, sunlight broke through for the first time in days. I looked out of the glass towards the woods where I had found the mounds.

I thought of Sarah and Tommy, knowing that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to completely forget about their case. If anything, catching Bennett and finding Charlie Haines had only served to make me more confident in my skills as an investigator. I would find out who killed them, I resolved. I would find them and punish them.