38 HUDSON

He hadn’t been to Garrison’s house since Christmas Eve. Now, less than eight hours after returning Persephone to her terrarium, he was sitting in an old computer chair, in the spare bedroom that doubled as a home office. Pictures stared at him from the shelves. To his right was a photo of Garrison’s motorcycle parked in front of Hart’s Pass, where he’d almost lost his life six years earlier. On his left, a photo of Hudson and Garrison with their wives at a backyard party, all holding bean bags. Who would have thought when that photo was taken, that two of them would be dead?

Life had a way of surprising you.

Noelle leaned in the doorway. She wore a flannel shirt rolled at the sleeves that he recognized as Garrison’s. Lilah was at work. “Are you sure I can’t make you a cup of coffee, Ryan?” The ceramic mug she cradled in her hands was white with the type I ♥ meetings.

“No thanks,” he said again. If Noelle had been at the Fast Mart, and smelled the coffee mixed with Garrison’s blood, she’d never touch the stuff again either. But who was he to take that away from her? Coffee was probably one of few comforts for her nowadays.

She’d asked him three times if he wanted coffee in the ten minutes he’d been there. “Widow brain” it was called, the brain’s built-in coping mechanism for protecting people from more pain than they can bear, such as the loss of a spouse. He’d experienced it after Nandalie. Many days, he still felt the familiar fog settle over him, felt as though he were moving through life blindly, arms stretched out in front so he didn’t run into a wall. But it did nothing to save him from falling into a hole like the one he found himself in now. A hole Garrison had dug, no less.

Hudson jiggled the mouse. The computer woke slowly. A blank box prompting for a password appeared on the screen. “Can you get into his computer?” he asked. After interrogating Muntz last night, a new urgency to look deeper into Christopher Reynolds burned a hole in Hudson’s head. He’d started backtracking, ruminating on what he would have done if he were Garrison investigating Clive’s case. He would have started as he had, checking the old reports for who had been interviewed and who hadn’t, for anything that might have been missed or misconstrued. Everything Hudson had had been given to him by Kole, inherited from the investigators before him. But now that he knew Garrison’s connection to Eleanor, he knew that Clive’s widow must have given Garrison something that put him on a path to The Ruins.

Biting her lip, Noelle came forward. “Let me tell you something about my husband,” she said, picking up the keyboard and flipping it over. The flat underside revealed a notebook page cut in half, with every login and password Garrison could ever have used, taped to it. “He absolutely hated remembering passwords.”