Free Eden by Candice Fox

wasn’t—there would be no earpieces, no radio or phone contact, no secret meetings the way there were in the movies. Eden was equipped with five different cameras. She wore one as a short pendant around her neck, a pinhole device disguised in a patterned teardrop made from silver. The other four—hidden in a tin drink bottle, in a deodorant can, a book, a pair of sunglasses—were to be set up somewhere in her new life. On Monday morning she’d get the train back into the city under the pretense of attending to some business and change all the batteries. Until then, she was on her own. She wouldn’t know if she was doing well, if she’d uncovered something connected to the missing girls, if she was heading down the wrong road. She’d only know when she met the team on Monday.
    Eden walked, her head down. There was a lot of pressure on her.
    She reached the gates of Jackie Rye’s farm just as the skin on the sides of her feet gave up and white and pink blisters emerged. Eden hadn’t owned any flip-flops in her other life. She bent down, took the flip-flops off, and hooked them on her fingers, walking carefully on the rocky clay.
    Almost as soon as she breached the rickety wooden boundary three huge mixed-breed dogs bounded toward her, emerging on the horizon as wavering shapes hovering above the land with their speed. They surrounded her, a rabble of howling, growling mongrels, dancing in the dirt. She walked on. At the crest of a soft hill she came into the view of a group of men standing by an open-bed SUV. Big men. They watched, emotionless, as she approached, like hairy mannequins hung with filthy rags. They were near a shed with a leaning bar that was lined with brown beer bottles.
    Eadie stopped.
    “Jackie here?”
    One of the men flicked his head toward a group of caravans clustered at the bottom of the hill. Eadie walked on. The men’s eyes followed her.
    Lamps were lit and moths and mosquitoes were gathering in the gloomy light. When she reached the first caravan she listened but there was no sound. Eadie heard laughter from the next van. She stood outside it for a minute or so and tried to think about the sort of things normal people said and did, the way they looked at each other and the way they moved. Because that was what frightened her most in the end—constructing Eadie Lea as a believable human first and the kind of person who would fit in around Jackie and his friends. She knew she came off a little strange in real life, because she was different, because her true nature, the killer, the monster, was rarely far from the surface.
    Eadie stood in the dark outside Jackie Rye’s caravan and listened to The Simpsons playing on a television inside, people laughing and talking, and forks scraping on cheap china plates. She breathed, then reached forward, knocked, and pulled open the screen door.
    The room was full of smoke. That was the first thing that hit her—lots of people wedged into the half-dark smoking cigarettes, which created a coiling ceiling blanket in hues of royal blue and sunflower yellow lit by the television in the corner. Her eyes wandered over two creatures sharing a tiny foam and crushed-velvet couch by the kitchen counter, one lying in the lap of the other, hairy and thin and pig-eyed in a way that left them sexless to the casual observer. Eadie noticed other sets of eyes in the dark, bodies stretched on the floor in the space between the couch and the wall, crammed in and around a plastic deck chair in a corner, lying on the bunk bed in the tiny annex bedroom. The last pair of eyes she found belonged to Jackie Rye, who was sitting in a green velvet recliner by the sink, looking back at her through the smoke he exhaled.
    Jackie gave Eadie the impression of an emaciated king, the way he was lounging with one leg up over the arm of the chair and the other flopped on the floor, leaving his tiny worn shorts draping open, the darkness in the thigh holes blessedly impenetrable.