Kiss the Girls

matter, Kate? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
    “I left those other women there. I couldn’t find them at first. Then I was so unbelievably confused. I left the others.”
    Her eyes opened and they were filled with fear, but also tears. She had brought herself out. She was strong like that. “What made me so afraid?” she asked me. “What just happened?”
    “I don’t know for sure,” I told Kate. We would talk about it later, but not right now.
    She averted her eyes from mine. It wasn’t like her. “Can I be alone?” she whispered then. “Can I just be alone now? Thank you.”
    I left the hospital room feeling almost as if I had betrayed Kate. But I didn’t know if there was anything that I could have done differently. This was a multiple-homicide investigation. Nothing was working so far. How could that be?

Chapter 56

    K ATE WAS released from University Hospital later that week. She had asked if we could talk for a while each day. I readily agreed.
    “This isn’t therapy in any way, shape, or form,” she told me. She just wanted to vent with someone about some difficult subjects. Partly because of Naomi, we had formed a quick, strong bond.
    There was no further information, no more clues about Casanova’s link with the Gentleman Caller in Los Angeles. Beth Lieberman, the reporter at the
Los Angeles Times,
refused to talk to me. She was peddling her hot literary property in New York.
    I wanted to fly out to L.A. to see Lieberman, but Kyle Craig asked me not to. He assured me that I knew everything the
Times
reporter had on the case. I needed to trust someone; I trusted Kyle.
    On a Monday afternoon, Kate and I went for a walk in the woods surrounding the Wykagil River, where she’d been found by the two boys. It was still unspoken, but we seemed to be in this thing together now. Certainly no one knew more about Casanova than she did. If she could remember anything more it would be so useful. The smallest detail could be a clue that might open up everything.
    Kate became quiet and unusually subdued as we entered the dark, brooding woods east of the Wykagil River. The human monster could be lurking out here, maybe prowling in the woods right now. Maybe he was watching us.
    “I used to love walking in woods like these. Blackberry brambles and sweet sassafras. Cardinals and blue jays feeding everywhere. It reminds me of when I was growing up,” Kate told me as we walked. “My sisters and I used to go swimming every single day in a stream like this one. We swam nekkid, which was forbidden by my father. Anything my father strictly forbade, we tried to do.”
    “All that swimming experience came in handy,” I said. “Maybe it helped get you safely down the Wykagil.”
    Kate shook her head. “No, that was just pure stubborness. I
vowed
I wasn’t going to die that day. Couldn’t give him the satisfaction.”
    I was keeping my own discomfort about being in the woods to myself. Some of my uneasiness had to do with the unfortunate history of these woods and the surrounding farmlands. Tobacco farms had been spotted all through here once upon a time. Slave farms.
The blood and bones of my ancestors.
The extraordinary kidnapping and subjugation of more than four million Africans who were originally brought to America. They had been
abducted.
Against their will.
    “I don’t remember any of this terrain, Alex,” Kate said. I had strapped on a shoulder holster before we left the car. Kate winced and shook her head at the sight of the gun. But she didn’t protest beyond the baleful look. She sensed that I was the dragonslayer. She knew there was a real dragon out here. She’d met him.
    “I remember I ran away, escaped into woods just like these. Tall Carolina pines. Not much light getting through, eerie as a bat cave. I remember clearly when the house disappeared on me. I can’t remember too much else. I’m blocking it. I don’t even know how I got into the river.”
    We were about two miles from where we’d left the car. Now we hiked north, staying close to the river Kate had floated down on her miraculous, “stubborn” escape. Every tree and bush reached out relentlessly toward the diminishing sunlight.
    “This reminds me of the Bacchae,” Kate said. Her upper lip curled in an ironic smile. “The triumph of dark, chaotic barbarism over civilized human reason.” It felt as if we were moving against a high, relentless tide of vegetation.
    I knew she was trying to talk about Casanova and the