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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2022 by Joshua Moehling

  Cover and internal design © 2022 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Ervin Serrano

  Cover image © Gabriela Alejandra Rosell/Arcangel Images

  Internal design by Holli Roach/Sourcebooks

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Moehling, Joshua, author.

  Title: And there he kept her / Joshua Moehling.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, 2022.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021023658 (print) | LCCN 2021023659 (ebook) | (hardcover) | (epub)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. |

  Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.O3344 A85 2022 (print) | LCC PS3613.O3344

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023658

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023659

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Chris

  Chapter One

  4:30 a.m.

  Rain lashed the boy as he ran from his car back to the old man’s house. It was cold enough that he could see his breath. Water dripped from the ends of his shaggy hair, ran down his scalp and under his shirt. At least the clouds had hidden the moon. The news had called it a supermoon. All night it had followed everywhere he went, an ivory face watching him, reading his mind.

  The road was gravel and getting muddier by the minute. Jesse tried running along the edge, but the ground was soft and soon his feet were as wet as his hooded sweatshirt.

  On his left, houses faced the lake. He ran by a mailbox that said MILLER in faded letters and then by another mailbox that said MADIS N, this one pitched forward with its door hanging open like it was about to be sick. He stopped in front of the small gray house set back from the road and realized he was looking right through a hole where the door should have been and out the other side at the water beyond. He looked back at the MILLER house and noticed it was missing most of its roof and all of its windows.

  Jesse ran on, already wet to the skin. He turned off the road and followed two muddy ruts past a stand-alone garage. The house ahead of him was a dark-brown rectangle without a straight line or a sharp corner. A wooden staircase went up the front to a sliding glass door and small windows with the blinds drawn.

  Jesse stopped to catch his breath. In the dark, the house looked like it had climbed out of the mud or was sinking back into it. No part of him wanted to be here, to have to pay back his debt like this.

  “In and out. Get it over with,” he muttered.

  He bypassed the staircase, pulling up his hood as he skidded down a muddy set of uneven steps alongside the house.

  The lower level of the house was cement block. A narrow yard widened in the direction of rusty metal chairs overturned around a fire pit before gradually descending to the lake. The house had another deck on the back. Underneath were the remnants of a depleted woodpile and a battered storm door with access to the basement.

  Jesse pulled open the storm door and set the clip that propped it open. The back door had individual glass panes set in a crosshatch pattern. Jesse hit the window closest to the dead bolt with his elbow. The sound of breaking glass made his breath catch in his throat. He counted to ten, waiting for lights to come on. Nothing happened. He reached inside, undid the bolt and the twist lock on the doorknob. Thunder rolled overhead as he pushed the door open and stepped over the broken glass.

  It was pitch-dark inside. A clock radio on a shelf flashed red numbers 12:00…12:00…12:00. It smelled like cigarettes and garbage and wet, rotten things. Jesse took a penlight from his back pocket and used it to sweep over a workbench on his left littered with scattered tools and boxes of nails and spools of wire and plastic grocery bags. A telephone with a tortured, twisted cord hung on the wall. On his right an old refrigerator droned. He pulled open the door hard enough to make the beer cans inside dance on their wire racks. The light reached all but the basement’s darkest corners. He left the door open.

  Shelves made from concrete blocks and long sagging planks split the room in half lengthwise. In front of the shelves he saw a rocking chair with cracked leather on the seat and on the back. A sawed-off section of tree trunk was being used as a side table. He saw an enormous ceramic ashtray filled with cigarette butts and a garbage can overflowing with beer cans and crushed cigarette packs and boxes from microwave meals. On the floor behind the chair, a damp cardboard box had split its seams and let slide an avalanche of magazines. Nearly nude women stared up from the covers. Jesse picked up one closest to his foot—a moldy Penthouse from August 1981. More than twenty years before he was born.

  He circled behind the shelves, past a wall-mounted sink and an o
pen toilet in one corner. The other corner of the basement was built out into a small room with a metal door. It could have been for storage, but his gut told him it was something else. Jesse shivered at the threshold, his skin clammy and prickling with a million hairs. He made a sideways fist around the door’s sliding bolt and pulled it backward, stepping out of the way as the heavy door swung open on silent hinges.

  He thumbed the penlight again. He wasn’t sure but he thought the walls were painted…pink. The color had peeled away in places, leaving discolored spots that looked like scabs. He saw a thin mattress covered in dark stains on a metal frame. A heavy chain hung limply through a steel ring bolted on the wall at the head of the bed.

  Nothing about the scene in front of him made sense. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but he knew the last thing he’d ever want was to be left alone in this room, in the dark, with the door shut. He blindly reached for the inside door handle to pull it shut again and found there wasn’t one. He shined the penlight on it just to make sure.

  This was a prison cell of some kind. A cage. How else to explain a door with no handle, no way to get out from the inside?

  He shined the weak penlight across the blistered pink walls again. He felt like he was staring into the mouth of something that wanted to swallow him. When he killed the light, the darkness inside seemed to go down and down to a place that had never known the sun.

  Behind him, the furnace made a loud ticking sound, then whoomped to life. Jesse turned away and shook off the bad thoughts. He stuck the light in his pocket and headed for the stairs that went up to the main floor. At the bottom, he stared at the closed door above him. He’d been told the old man would be drunk, at least. Passed out, if Jesse was lucky.

  He labored up the first three steps, pausing on each one to talk himself out of turning around and making a run for it.

  He turned one last time toward the dark room in the corner and thought about the stained mattress and the door with no handle.

  Someone stepped on the broken glass by the basement door.

  Jesse crouched and froze like a rabbit with no cover. The refrigerator door was still open, spilling light into the room. Behind it he saw a dark silhouette through the window in the basement door. The shape paused with one foot on the broken glass, then took another step into the room.

  Jenny.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Jesse hissed. He took out the penlight and flashed it at her so she could see where he was standing against the wall on the stairs.

  “I got worried,” she whispered.

  Jenny was much less wet than Jesse was, thanks to the oversize letter jacket with sleeves that went down past her fingertips and made her look like she had no shoulders. In the dark he couldn’t see her freckles, or her green eyes, or the eye tooth with the twist to it, the imperfection that made every one of her smiles perfect.

  “Where’s the car?”

  “I moved it a little closer. I have the keys.”

  She came over and stood by his side at the bottom of the stairs. They both looked up at the door overhead. “We shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “I don’t have any choice. He’s threatening my family.”

  “We can figure out something else.”

  “No, we can’t. He doesn’t want money. It’s this or something bad happens to my sister.”

  “Jesse, come on. He’s messing with you. If you go back and say—”

  The floor creaked over their heads.

  They stared at each other, wide-eyed, frozen. One second passed. Another. There was only the sound of the furnace blower and the drum of the rain, coming down hard again at the open basement door.

  Jenny put a hand on Jesse’s arm and eased him a step backward.

  The door at the top of the stairs crashed inward with enough force that it hit the wall and tried to bang shut again. The double-barreled shotgun leveled down at them kept it from closing all the way.

  Jenny screamed and ducked behind Jesse. Jesse raised his hands in a pleading gesture. He waved the penlight at the fat, naked man standing above them with the shotgun and an oxygen mask over his mouth.

  “Hold on, hold on! We made a mistake. We were just leaving,” Jesse pleaded. He felt Jenny’s body small and hard against his back, her hand tight around his arm.

  The shotgun boomed like the end of the world. The light went out and fell from Jesse’s hand. Jenny screamed again when Jesse crumpled without a sound, all his weight falling back against her. They went backward down the steps, Jesse on top of her. Jenny hit her head on the concrete with the bright crack of a glass jar breaking.

  The fat, naked man stepped down through the cloud of burning gunpowder and fired the second barrel.

  Chapter Two

  7:00 a.m.

  The call about the bear came over the radio as Ben Packard was on his way to see the sheriff. He listened as dispatch directed it to another deputy on duty. “Caller says she and her husband were walking their dog when a large black bear came out of the trees and charged their animal. Her husband grabbed the bear around the neck to make it let go of the dog. The husband has a bite or a scratch on his belly. He’s bleeding but not seriously wounded.”

  Packard picked up the mic. “This is 217.”

  Dispatch came back. “Go ahead, 217.”

  “I’m 10–8. I can take the bear.”

  “You’re not on the schedule, 217.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m suited up and nearby. Let me take it.”

  “Copy, 217.”

  The bear was gone by the time Packard arrived at the address. The house was a boxy, manufactured home on a grassy lot with a ring of ornamental grass surrounding a flagpole. Packard stood with an elderly man and his wife in a kitchen that smelled like lemon dish soap and coffee, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. The old man had taken his shirt off and was holding a wet paper towel to his wound.

  The wife looked in the fridge and asked Packard, “Can I make you a breakfast sandwich? Eggs and bacon on a biscuit. I could wrap it up and you could take it with.”

  Packard said, “No thank you. That’s very kind of you to offer.”

  “You can make me a breakfast sandwich,” the old man said.

  “Hush. You’ll get your sandwich after the ambulance looks at you.”

  “They better not think they’re taking me to the hospital.” The old man pulled the pink paper towel away from his sunken chest to look, then put it back. “There’s nothing wrong with me. They’ll do a bunch of tests and send in three doctors to ask me questions so each one can bill me. That’s how they fund Obamacare. Charging guys like me three times.”

  Packard hmmed, trying to sound sympathetic. “How’s your dog?”

  The wife turned from the fridge, put the tips of her fingers over her mouth, and shook her head. The old man stared out the window over the sink and kept blinking.

  “I’m sorry,” Packard said. “I know how hard it is to lose your dog.”

  After that, the wife continued her verbal inventory of the fridge. He politely declined a slice of pie, a piece of fruit, and a cup of coffee to go—she had real cream if that’s how he took it.

  When the EMTs arrived, Packard excused himself and left to find the bear. He drove slowly with the window down, watching the trees and the ditches for the animal. There had been a full moon the night before, followed by a fair amount of rain. The bear’s tracks were easy to follow in the soft ground on either side of the road.

  A half mile later—thin, shrubby trees on one side, small homes spread far apart on the other—he came upon two men standing at the end of a driveway. One had a bloody rag wrapped around a hand he was holding against his chest. A blue pickup was backed into the driveway next to a chop saw and a pair of sawhorses set up outside a partially sided garage.

  “Is that from the bear or the saw?” Packard
asked as he rolled to a stop.

  “Bear,” the bleeding guy said. “We were just getting started. I was up on the ladder when the bear come across the road. I yelled but Jim was running the saw and had his ear protection on. I came down and tried to chase the bear away. Got too close and got raked across the back of my hand.”

  “Where did the bear go?”

  “It’s in the garage,” said Jim.

  Packard could see a boat on a trailer, a four-wheeler, and a riding mower packed into the two-car garage. “What’s in there that a bear would want?”

  “Fifty-pound bags of dog food and birdseed.”

  Packard parked the county SUV. There was no chance of making it to the sheriff’s house by 7:00 a.m. He texted the sheriff’s wife to let her know he was running late, then asked dispatch to have the ambulance at the old man’s house sent to his current location when they were done. He had the number for the county conservation officer in his phone. He called her to confirm what he should do about the bear.

  “Any idea if it’s a male or female?” Theresa Whitaker asked.

  “Haven’t got that close yet,” Packard said, keeping an eye on the garage, watching for any sign of movement.

  “Cubs?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  “You have to put it down,” Theresa told him. “It’s attacked two people. I’ll call the university and have someone come pick up the carcass. They’ll test it and see if they can find a reason for the aggressiveness.”

  Packard gave her the address and then got out of the vehicle, taking the twelve-gauge shotgun from the rack behind his seat. He asked the men if there was anyone else on the property. Both shook their heads. Packard told them to stay where they were. “Where’s the dog food?”

  “Back right, behind the boat,” Jim said.

  “Is there a garage door opener in that truck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s get it.”

  The guy with the bloody hand followed Packard to the truck in the driveway and unclipped the opener from the visor. Packard asked him to shut the garage door once he was inside.

  “Try not to shoot my boat,” the guy said.