Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(11)

In the days and weeks and months after Mel’s trial, while I sat in jail and endured my own legal torment, Absalom had been one of a huge baying pack of online abusers to go after me, analyzing every aspect of my life for hints of guilt.

After I was acquitted, though, the firestorm really started.

He’d unearthed every detail of my life and made it available online. He’d organized troll armies to relentlessly attack me, my friends, my neighbors. He’d found even my most distant relatives and doxed their addresses. He’d hounded the two cousins that Mel still had living and driven one of them to the brink of suicide.

But he’d drawn the line when the trolls he pushed in my direction went after my kids instead.

I’d gotten a remarkable message from him just after that hideous campaign started, a heartfelt e-mail that talked about his own childhood traumas, his own pain, and how he’d pursued me to banish his own demons. The train he’d started couldn’t be stopped; the crusade had taken on a life of its own. But he wanted to help me, and what was more, he could help me.

By that time we’d been on the run out of Wichita, desperate and uncertain, and having him offer a hand? That had been the turning point. That had been the moment I’d retaken control of my life, with Absalom’s help.

Absalom isn’t my friend. We don’t chat, and I suspect he still hates me on some level. But he helps. He builds false identities. He finds me safe havens. He does what he can to control the constant online harassment. When I get a new computer, he images it from backups he keeps in a secure cloud, so I don’t lose data. He writes the custom search algorithms that allow me to keep track of the Sicko Patrol.

For this favor, of course, I pay him money. No need to be pals. We keep it strictly business.

While the search is running, I make a cup of hot tea with honey and sip it with my eyes shut, gathering myself for the challenge. I always keep certain things within reach as I do this: A loaded gun. My cell phone, ready to speed-dial Absalom if there’s an issue. And last but not least, a plastic garbage bag into which I can throw up, if necessary.

Because this, this thing: this is hard. It’s like sticking my head into a blast furnace, a writhing fury of mindless hatred and vile fury, and I am always shaken and scorched when I back away.

But it has to be done. Daily.

I feel the tension spiral down from my head, slithering like a cold serpent along my spine, my shoulders, and coiling heavily in my stomach. I’m never fully prepared when the search results come back, but today, as ever, I try to be calm, observant, distanced.

There are fourteen pages of results. The top link is new; someone’s opened a thread on Reddit, and now the gruesome descriptions, speculations, and howls for justice are ginning up again. I grit my teeth and click the link.

Where’s Melvin’s Little Helper these days? Would love to pay that church lady hypocrite bitch a visit. They like to call me church lady because our family had been a member of one of the larger Baptist churches in Wichita, though Mel was spotty on attendance. I’d usually been there with the kids. There are plenty of ironic pictures posted on that theme—split screens of me and the kids at church, crime scene photos of the dead woman in the garage.

On Sunday mornings, Mel had usually excused himself by saying he had things to do in the workshop.

Things to do. I have to close my eyes for a moment, because there’s a hidden monster’s joke in those words. He’d never thought of the women he’d tortured and murdered as people. He thought of them as objects. Things.

I open my eyes, take a breath, and move on to the next link.

Hope Gina and her kids get raped and ripped and hung up like meat so people can spit on them. Mutilating Mel don’t deserve a family. That one’s accompanied by a crime scene photo of someone else’s kids shot and dumped in a ditch. The callous hypocrisy is breathtaking. This troll is exploiting someone else’s personal horror to make his point about mine. He doesn’t care about children.

He cares about revenge.

I run through the rest in a sickening rush.

You see his daughter? Lily? I’d bump that til its cold.

Burn them alive and put em out with piss.

I got an idea, find some working outhouse and drown the kids in shit. Then send her directions on where to find them.

How can we make her suffer? Suggestions? Anybody got eyes on the bitch?

On and on and on. I leave Reddit, go to Twitter, find more threats, more hate, more vitriol—just in concise, 140-character bites. Then the blogs. 8chan. The true crime message boards. The websites that are shrines to Mel’s crimes.

On the message boards and websites, the deaths of innocent young women are casual drive-by entertainment. Historical information. At least those armchair detectives aren’t very threatening; Mel’s family is just a footnote to the real story for them. They’re not dedicated to our destruction.

The ones who are more interested in us, in Melvin Royal’s missing family . . . those are the ones who could be dangerous.

And there are hundreds, maybe thousands of them—all competing to outdo one another with terrible new ways to punish me and the kids. My kids. It’s a sick horror show, devoid of even a shred of conscience. None of them recognize that they’re talking about people, real people who can be hurt. Who bleed. Who can be murdered. Or if they do recognize that, they absolutely don’t give a shit.