Chapter One one
There’s only two places anyone can find peace—the woods and the grave.

Edmund was almost poetic when he wanted to be, despite his poor grammar and spelling. Lori was actually surprised he’d gotten this sentence out so well. His musings always held some grim underlining, like a black coat of paint beneath a myriad of colors. Or maybe his words just seemed dark because of whose lips they fell from, what he’d done. Lori didn’t mind those crimes so much. After all, had it not been for the murders, they never would have started talking to each other.

She read the letter over again. Edmund’s handwriting was jagged with large loops, and he dotted everything with an X. The letters were coming more frequently now and were longer in length, this one being four pages. She thought they were building to something unique, something special. She wondered if that crazy Niko woman was getting this many.

Maybe he’s writing Niko the exact same ones.

No. Lori couldn’t believe that. She refused to. Niko was one of those bizarre people who become romantically infatuated with a killer who has been sensationalized by the media. Things between Lori and Edmund Cox were too deep and complex to be duplicated with some loon motivated by sexual notoriety and nothing more. Edmund couldn’t possibly converse with someone like that the way he had with Lori, even if Niko was a Japanese American and Lori wasn’t. Everybody knew Edmund’s preference. Thirteen out of his twenty-one victims had been girls of Asian descent—three Korean, three Chinese, one Vietnamese, and six Japanese. The other eight victims could almost pass for Asian, with their dark hair and olive complexions. Lori shared these traits. She was still Edmund’s type. But what she shared with him was different. She understood him in ways Niko never could. Of that Lori was certain.

Slipping the letter back into the envelope, she put it in the shoebox with the others. Once this box had held a pair of boots her parents bought her for Christmas. If they knew the box held my correspondence with Danton’s most notorious serial killer now, what would Mom and Dad have to say?

It was one box of many. The others contained notes, letters, pictures, and emails from various serial killers, mass shooters, and other convicted murderers she’d started a correspondence with over the years. Her interest in true crime books and documentaries was a hobby turned obsession. It was her one escape from the dullness of her own reality, the emptiness of everyday life that suffocated women far stronger than she was. And personal closeness to such human atrocities brought excitement like a pulsing, electrical charge, a feeling she’d grown addicted to. In conversations with those who took life, Lori no longer felt dead inside. Killers, of all people, made her feel alive.

Lori slipped the “Edmund” box into the bottom drawer of the dresser and tucked it under a pile of neatly folded sweaters. She had an irrational fear of a burglar stealing the letters, selling them to a publisher or collector of serial killer memorabilia. Worse than that, she feared someone might discover, through reading Edmund’s letters, just how personal her own letters to him were. They had to be. She had to give these men her stories in exchange for their own because without that intimacy they lost interest. She considered getting a small safe, but money was too tight. She released a long breath. Two in the afternoon and she was still in her house clothes—black stretch pants and a baggy Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. Strands of hair had broken free from her ponytail, lining the sides of her face. She glanced at her reflection in the stained window and thought she looked wan, even gaunt.

You’ll be forty in six months.

She shook the reminder from her head and turned away as a voice from the other room freed her from her thoughts.

“Sissy?”

Abby still called her that, just as she had when they were kids. It was one of the many childlike traits her sister was unable to let go of, even though she was two years older than Lori.

Lori stepped out into the hall. “Yeah?”

“Is it lunchtime yet?”

Lori rubbed the bridge of her nose. She’d been so lost in her thoughts about Edmund she’d forgotten all about eating. Food wasn’t very important to her, but it was to Abby.

“I like sandwiches,” Abby said, as if Lori didn’t know.

“You want grilled cheese or PB and J?”

Abby was still contemplating when Lori reached the kitchen. Her sister always thought too long and hard over the simplest things. Abby twirled her hair in her fingers and chewed at her bottom lip, brow furrowing beneath her bangs. Lori opened the refrigerator too forcefully. It was hard not to get frustrated with Abby sometimes.

“I’m making PB and J,” Lori told her.

“Okay, Sissy.”

Abby shuffled to the kitchen counter, her crooked legs struggling as always, her socked feet whispering on the tile like drizzle. She reached to the cabinet and got down her favorite plate, the one with the butterflies on it. She ran her fingertips along the edge, eyes nearly crossing as she smiled at the butterflies as if they were about to spring to life and fly free from the porcelain. Lori made them each a sandwich, opened the baggie of baby carrots, and poured two glasses of milk.

“You gonna see your boyfriend today?” Abby asked.

“No. Tomorrow.”

“You like him a lot, I guess.”

Lori snickered. Unlike Niko, she felt no desire for the man, only intense curiosity. But there was no way of explaining that to her sister.

“You gonna marry him?” Abby asked.

Lori smirked, unsure if Abby was teasing. “I don’t know. You think I should?”

Abby stopped chewing. Her face soured in deep thought. Lori waited. She could swear her sister’s pupils dilated when she really had to think. It had always been like this, or at least it seemed that way. Lori wiped a dab of jelly from Abby’s chin, just above a scar, one of many.

“If people are in love,” Abby said, “they’ve got to get married.”

Lori looked down into her milk, idly sliding the glass back and forth. Now she was the one who had to think about what she would say next. What she would tell Abby. What she would tell her coworkers and friends. What she would tell herself.

Lori always arrived twenty minutes early to fill out the paperwork and go through the numerous security clearances. She didn’t want any of that nonsense to impede upon the limited time she had to talk with Edmund. It was a miracle enough she was able to get visitations with him. The laws had changed, state by state, and there was talk of in-person visitations becoming a thing of the past in favor of what was referred to as “safer visits” via Skype and other online video platforms. Over the past three months since she’d first visited him in Varden Prison, Lori had gotten the routine down. No revealing clothes; not even shorts. No hats or unconventional garments. No medication, cigarettes, or anything that could be used as a weapon. Lori brought little with her. That way she could get through the screening easily. She only took in her ID and some money for the vending machine so she could get Edmund his Cheez Doodles and Yoo-hoo. Keeping him happy was one of many actions that helped her crush her competition when it came to seeing and corresponding with him.

He was already at the table when she entered the room. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, revealing hairy forearms and faded, amateur tattoos—skulls, roses, daggers, a battleship. His large hands had done so many things most people would never experience. It made her shiver with a strange combination of fear and awed delight.

His gaze fell upon Lori, sending a second shiver through her. Though not what most would call a handsome man, there was an intensity to Edmund Cox that made him very masculine, a pull that came from beneath the pockmarked cheeks and tombstone gray of his eyes. He smiled at Lori, a possum’s grin of yellowed bone. His hair was a tumbleweed and he’d grown two days’ worth of stubble. He was every bit as backwoods as where he’d come from.

“Hello, darlin’,” he said.

Lori tried not to blush as she came toward the table. “Hey, Edmund.”

“Brought me some snackies?” he said. She placed them on the table and uncapped the Yoo-hoo for him. “You’re always real sweet, aintcha?”

“I like to take care of you.”

She knew it was presumptuous but couldn’t resist the chance to flirt. She didn’t want to lead their relationship in a sexual direction, and yet she had no illusions about him being a male convict and her being a free woman. If she could use her femininity to coax out the darkest inner truths of a killer’s conscience, she was not above doing so. It had certainly helped her in her letters. It was a large part of what had gotten her here, sitting before him.

Edmund’s hefty body shook as he chuckled. “You are sweet at that. Yes, indeedy.”

He took a sip of the Yoo-hoo, and when he tilted back his head Lori could see the bullet wound at the base of his neck where a pursuing officer had shot him, putting an end to his killing spree. It made him all the more interesting. His pull was unlike anything she’d ever felt before, an energy that would draw her toward him even when she wanted to resist. It was not charisma or personality; it was energy, raw and visceral and unrelenting, an unstoppable force of nature.

“Ya read my new letter?” he asked.

“Of course.” Lori straightened up. The letter had been more serious than the ones before it. It offered her a special opportunity, a way to one-up Edmund’s other interested parties. “I read it three times, at least.”

He waited for more. “And?”

Lori gripped her knees from the tension, feeling like she was at a job interview, which, in a way, she was. She had never considered herself a writer, but the sort of information Edmund had been exhuming to her about his past could make for a great book deal. Maybe she’d end up being in a documentary like all the ones she binge-watched, a part of true crime history.

“You know I’d do anything for you,” she said.

A glint went into the large man’s eyes, catching a light that did not exist.

“And so you shall,” he said. “You’re willing, Lori. That makes you real special. From the first time ya done wrote me, I knew ya were different from them other groupies.”

Lori resisted the impulse to wince. She hated that term. Groupie. It diminished what she felt she was, or at least aspired to be. She wasn’t like Niko. Lori wanted the story, not the man; the truth, not the illusion. Edmund went on, his voice falling deeper.

“That’s why I allowed ya—and just a few others—to visit me. You ain’t have no idea the amount of mail I get. Much of it’s hate mail, but there’s a good deal of fans too. I never woulda expected that, but the fan letters came pourin’ in pretty much right after I was put in this here cage. I tried to write back to them all, but my writin’ ain’t so good, and there was just too many. But your letter really stood out.”

Lori smiled. She’d spent days working on the letter, drafting and redrafting it on the computer, using what she’d learned from all her previous correspondences with incarcerated men to craft what she hoped would be the best opening pitch. When she was finally satisfied with it, she printed it out and wrote it all in longhand with a Sharpie pen on crisp, firm paper. It made it feel more personal—a letter from the heart. It reminded her of when she was a teenager in the years before texting and the internet, when passing handwritten notes was commonplace and friends wrote long letters when they were away. She missed that. She missed a lot of things.

“So,” Edmund said. “You’re acceptin’ this… quest, I guess you’d call it.”

She took a deep breath. This was it.

“Yes, Edmund. I am honored you trust me to accept it.”

His bulk leaned farther inward. She could almost smell him now. He was a mélange of body odor—armpits and earwax, blood and dead animal flesh. She noticed his fingernails were packed with dirt.

“You’ll find the key in the chest,” he said, reiterating the letter’s instructions. “You’ll find it deep in the low valley of Killen, along the Hollow River, in the shack I done told ya about. The one they never knew about.”

“You can count on me. I’ll bring the key as soon as—”

“Nah. Ya ain’t gonna bring it to me. I ain’t the one that key belongs to no more, see? Ya gotta take it to The River Man.”

That last part had not been in the note.

“Who’s that?”

“He lives down river, on the opposite end of the shore from my shack.”

Lori shrugged. “But… how will I find him? I mean, what’s his name? Do you have an address?”

Edmund curled a smile. “He’s only The River Man. He ain’t on no map. Has a home, but no address. The river is his home. Follow the current downriver. You’ll find him, just as I did; just as he’s gonna find my Lori.”

“He’s expecting me?”

Edmund nodded. “And you’ll know him when ya see him. It’s important to always finish what ya started.”

Lori’s mouth was dry. “Just to clarify, in the letter… you said there would be nothing that—”

He held up a hand to stop her. “I ain’t askin’ ya to continue my murders for me. Ain’t askin’ ya to hurt anyone or transport no drugs or nothin’. You’re returnin’ a key… or passin’ it on. Depends.”

“On what?”

“On you.”

Lori swallowed. Her throat was like sandpaper, as if she were speaking in front of a large audience. The task had sounded simple at first: get a key from a chest in Edmund’s family’s old shack in some place called Killen. That had been the extent of the errand, according to the letter. She wanted to do it to see the shack alone, not to mention the benefit of Edmund coming to believe she truly was his friend, someone he could tell anything to. But now she was delivering this key to a hermit who lived down the river, in some barren woodland. On top of that, Edmund was being enigmatic about the whole thing. There was a pinch of hesitation rising through her she had to fight to suppress. She couldn’t let her reservations spoil her big chance to make Edmund trust her completely. He wasn’t asking Niko to do this, or any of his other, lesser admirers. He’d chosen Lori. She wasn’t about to look that gift horse in the mouth, no matter how sharp the teeth may appear.

“All right,” she said. “Anything you want.”