Swallow Lane (A Liars Island Suspense) Read online

  Swallow Lane

  A Liars Island Suspense

  Marie Snow

  THE SWALLOW

  By Marie Snow

  FIND MARIE HERE

  Copyright © March 2021 by Marie Snow

  First E-book March 2021

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: The unauthorized reproduction, transmission, or distribution of any part of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  This literary work is fiction. Any name, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or establishments is solely coincidental. Please respect the author and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials that would violate the author’s rights.

  Contents

  Synopsis

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  It was supposed to be a fresh start.

  A new life.

  That’s what I told myself anyway when I moved with my son Matthew to Liars Island from Stillwake.

  Too much conflict and heartache had been a constant in our life, especially with my son. And although my Matthew was grown, I’d always see him as my little boy and the one person I needed to protect above all else.

  With tragedy, drama, and darkness surrounding us, it was time to start over, to try and have a life that was… normal.

  And it seemed like we were headed in that direction.

  But things changed rapidly.

  Liars Island was supposed to be a fresh start, but it seemed the town had its own secrets that were threatening to tear my tightly woven world apart.

  1

  Michelle

  “It’s dark,” Matthew said in his deep, almost monotone voice. “It’s empty.”

  I stared at my twenty-two-year-old son as he looked around. At six-foot-three, he was a large and imposing man, with his jet-black hair cut short and his piercing blue eyes that I loved and hated at the same time.

  Hatred... such a strong word and emotion to have toward my child.

  I loved my son. He was my world, the one light in my dark life when I thought everything was spiraling out of control. But at the same time, he reminded me of so much bad, so much uncertainty.

  It was in his eyes, in the exact makeup of his face, that I saw the man I once loved, the man who wasn’t who he said he was, who killed people, terrorized them… who lied and frightened me all while he made me fall in love with him.

  My life had become a nightmare. My son’s life had become a nightmare. And that’s why we moved here to Liars Island, just packed up all our shit two weeks ago—when he’d been released—and decided to start fresh, to be new people.

  I looked around the living room of our new home. A new beginning.

  Our new place wasn’t what I’d call “small”. With a large living room that had one complete wall that was nothing but windows, it showed the gorgeous lake at the back of our home. It was open and airy... a breath of air from what we were both used to. Living in Stillwake, despite the small home I’d been in since well before Matthew was even born, there was still that city feel that surrounded the place.

  Sunlight poured into the empty living room, one that would soon be filled with furniture. Just as soon as we unloaded the moving van.

  A home. Our new home.

  A fresh start.

  I repeated that in my head over and over again as if it would actually make it a reality.

  “It won’t be empty long.” Although I knew he hadn’t been talking about decor with his comment. “I think this will be good for us,” I added, focusing on the positive. That’s all I could do any more, all I could think about if I wanted to move forward.

  Our lives hadn’t been easy, not before I had Matthew, and certainly not after.

  I walked up to Matthew and stood beside him, my head not even reaching his shoulder. He stared out the large windows at the lake. The scene was serene, peaceful, and calm. It was the main reason I’d rented this home in particular. Matthew and I both needed to relax, to disconnect from society and everything we’d known.

  We needed to just leave our old lives behind.

  I tipped my head up and looked at my son, a grown man now, with dark scruff starting to line his cheeks and jaw. He might be beautiful on the outside, but deep, deep within he was troubled.

  Matthew was the silent type, calculating and intelligent. He analyzed things before he spoke, chose his words wisely, and it was that part of him that tended to have people uneasy and on edge.

  But if they got to know him, really got to know the man who was once a little boy and liked his crusts cut off his sandwiches, who gave me hugs every night and told me I was his best friend, they’d see that sometimes we could be surprised.

  Sometimes the mold society puts us in wasn’t what had always been carved out. We weren’t permanent fixtures. We could change. We could morph from that caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly.

  But the thing about Matthew was his wings were damaged, crippled around the edges. So, as much as I hoped and prayed that he could change, the reality was sometimes a person could be forever broken.

  But being his mother meant my son never had to go through his problems alone. Matthew never had to be alone. I’d always be there for him. I’d always make sure he was close and had someone to lean on.

  That’s what mothers were for, after all. To pick up the broken pieces, glue them back together, and wipe the tears away.

  It had been several hours since we’d unpacked most of the moving truck, and as we sat around the small two-person folding table that was temporarily serving as our dining room table, I couldn’t help but notice Matthew was even more quiet and withdrawn than usual.

  “Just give it some time,” I said, assuming he was so forlorn because he was almost culture shocked with the abrupt change in scenery.

  Matthew had been released from Stillwake Mental Hospital just two weeks ago, and although he’d had years of therapy, years of talking about how his mind worked and handled things, he always shut down and never really delved into my background or past experiences.

  I know that my personal trauma had somehow seeped into him, as if, while in utero, he’d absorbed my fear and gathered my loss and longing.

  See... Matthew’s father was the only man I’d ever loved, the first person I’d connected with after moving to Stillwake. I'd made another sudden life change decades ago, right after my mother passed away and I’d wanted a change. It had been the best decision of my life, but also the worst.

  I’d jumped headfirst into my feelings for Johnny, a simple man who owned a landscaping company, who fixed my yard because he wanted me to have something nice to look at, who made me feel... loved.

  Matthew leaned back in his chair and exhaled, lifting a hand and running it over his jaw, the sound of his palm scraping over the light scruff on his cheeks seeming overly loud.

  “It’s an adjustment. But I’ll survive. I just have to get used to
another town.” He gave me a smile, but it didn’t seem to reach his eyes. He never mentioned Stillwake, probably because it brought up too many harsh memories.

  “It’s hard for me too.” I looked at my plate of food and started pushing pieces around with my fork, the tines of it scraping along the ceramic. “Stillwake was all I knew for the longest time. It was my home, your home. Lots of memories there,” I whispered the last part. I continued to push my food around. “It was more of a home than I’d ever had, including the one I grew up in with your grandmother.”

  The pain from my mother’s death all those decades ago had since eased, but every once in a while there were twinges of that loss that filled me, sharp stabs that reminded me I was truly alone in this world.

  Except for my boy.

  Matthew was all I had. And because of that, I was protective of him, as any mother would be toward their child.

  He watched me, his expression not showing his emotions. He was good like that. Another trait he got from his father. Another stab of longing filled me as I thought of the first and only man I’d ever been in love with. God, I missed him.

  “You know I don’t want to talk about Stillwake,” he said and ran his hand over his jaw again. I heard him grinding his teeth together.

  Even now, bringing up the city I’d spent so many years living in, the city I’d thought of as my home, and the only city Matthew had ever known, left a combination of bitter discomfort, but also a longing sensation moving through me.

  It had been my new life after my mother had passed. It had been where I found and lost my first love. I’d experienced emotions and feelings that I’d never thought possible for me in that city. It could’ve been a dream come true. I thought it had been. Until my entire world was plunged into darkness because of all the events that had transpired.

  Love. Loss. Fear. Anger. Murder.

  Despite over twenty years passing since I’d been intimately tangled with the man who had changed my life—maybe for better and worse—I couldn’t regret ever being with him. He’d given me my Matthew, after all.

  I thought about Matthew’s father. I’m still in love with him. I didn’t think you could ever stop caring for someone, least of all your first love. But Matthew was a light in my darkness. The pregnancy and his birth had brought me from the depths of my fear and made me see life was still worth living.

  I pictured Matthew being the very best part of his father. But, as the years passed, I realized that was far from the truth. Because, at times, my sweet, sweet boy seemed to be the very darkest parts of humanity.

  But both of us kept fighting that. It was all we could do.

  I stared at Matthew as he ate in silence, his wide shoulders taking up a good part of my view, blocking out the living room behind him. He’d been committed to the mental hospital at the age of seventeen.

  But after his girlfriend was murdered, everything in him had changed for the worse.

  She’d been the person he’d fallen in love with, the girl he’d talked about marrying, having a family with.

  Matthew had problems emotionally and mentally before Sofie, but after they started seeing each other, I saw that she brought out the good parts in him, the parts that reminded me of his father.

  There were times it felt like I was getting my Johnny all over again. I loved those moments, but when tragedy struck in the most brutal of ways, Matthew was left fractured.

  And for five years he’d been locked up, his mind so deteriorated after Sofie that I hadn’t even recognized the son I’d watch grow.

  The one person I loved more than anything on the planet was… just a shell.

  He’d gotten better, worked through that darkness, and they’d finally released him. But we had to get away from all those horrors.

  Mine. His. The tragedy of Sofie.

  “When do you start at the landscaping place?”

  Matthew’s deep voice pierced through my thoughts and I blinked, looking up at him, while thinking about his question. “What?”

  He stopped eating and glanced at me. “The landscaping place. What’s it called? Eco-Island Landscaping?”

  I nodded and licked my suddenly dry lips. “Yeah. I start in a couple days.” He nodded. “Are you still thinking about getting a job in Liars Island?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. I can’t hang around the house mindlessly all day.”

  “I think that would be good for you. You can meet people.”

  He nodded but looked less than thrilled. “It’s not like I have a huge skillset or work history, so my options are going to be pretty damn limited.”

  I smiled but even I felt it was sad. I was glad he wasn’t currently looking at me to see it.

  A thick stretch of silence moved between us before I broke it up by saying, “I’ve been researching some therapists here and will call them in the morning and see if any have openings for new patients.”

  He shifted on the seat and nodded. “Good idea. I’d rather get that squared away. Although I can call them myself, Mom.” He looked at me, his vivid blue eyes seeming distant. “You’re always taking care of me. I need to start standing on my own two feet, especially with this new beginning.”

  Tightness pressed around my heart. I knew he was an adult and needed to be independent. But I’d been looking after him for so long, been making sure his life was as easy as possible because I knew he struggled, that “letting him go”—in a sense—was hard.

  “Okay,” I said softly. “I’ll give you the numbers I found, and you can call them in the morning.”

  “Thanks,” he murmured and gave me a smile, and it was one that actually reached his eyes, that actually seemed genuine.

  I didn’t know what our futures looked like, but I hoped Liars Island was where things would start looking up for us.

  2

  Matthew

  I had driven for an hour and learned some of the backroads that existed on Liars Island. I didn’t have a reason or a purpose. I just did it. Sometimes driving allowed my brain to zone out enough that the thoughts in my head stilled. There were times it worked better than the medication.

  Today was not one of those days.

  I’d dropped Mom off at Eco-Island Landscaping for her first day. She wanted me to have the car because I was supposed to look for a job. I was also supposed to call the therapists that she’d found. I didn’t do any of those things, though. I knew I was just putting off the inevitable, but I was just so damn tired.

  It seemed I’d been tired for as long as I could remember. I would have thought moving to Liars Island would have made me feel energized, helped me in some small way. New surroundings. New start. That didn’t seem to be the case.

  When the little warning light and buzzer went off signaling that the car needed gas, I retraced my drive back to the gas station that I’d passed down the road.

  Once I pulled up to an empty pump, I got out of the car and slammed the door shut with a resounding thud. My body felt kinks and aches that I was pretty sure someone my age shouldn’t feel. I figured it was the meds. I fucking hated taking them, but they made me… stable. Normal.

  The temptation to stop them was always a strong one. I probably would have if my mother wasn’t the one in charge of them. She worries constantly, then again with a fucked-up son like me, I couldn’t blame her.

  My attention was pulled when a girl about my age came out of the convenience store. She was wearing a pair of overalls that were faded and worn, smudges of grease along the legs. She had a tank top underneath that was a vibrant blue and showed off more skin than it covered, and as she got closer, I could see that it matched her eyes.

  She was beautiful, although not classically, her facial features were a little too harsh and defined for that, but she was beautiful, nonetheless. She had long blonde hair that was all loose curls, and she wore it clasped on top of her head letting it messily flop, as if it had a mind of its own. I liked that she clearly didn’t care about her appearance.

  Her face
was devoid of makeup, but her skin was a beautiful, flawless golden hue that appealed to me in a way that confused and concerned me.

  She reminded me of summer, even if the inside of my body felt like the dead cold of winter.

  “Hi,” she said with a wide smile on her face. “What can I get you?” she asked, stopping a few feet from me.

  I couldn’t help but notice that her voice was overly cheerful, but it was… genuine. That intrigued the hell out of me, which confused me even more because I didn’t notice people. I avoided them.

  “I’m sorry?” I said, startled, because something about this girl drew me and that was never good.

  For her or me.

  She pointed up to the sign over the pumps and I looked up and frowned.

  Full Service.

  Until that moment, I didn’t realize those types of stations still existed.

  “Um,” I mumbled and felt my brows pull low. “Fill it up,” I told her, and I leaned uselessly against the fender of Mom’s beat up Toyota Prius.

  “Sure thing.”

  I watched her go about her task, feeling weird not doing this myself, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I enjoyed watching her.

  “You aren’t from around here,” she said, not phrasing it like a question, while still pumping the gas.

  She was chewing gum, and my eyes were drawn to her jawline. It was graceful and feminine, delicate looking even. She blew a bubble, popping it loudly. Normally I would have found that annoying as hell, but for some reason, at least while we talked, I didn’t.

  “No, not from here,” I confirmed. I didn’t ask how she knew, but I figured because Liars Island was kind of small, that she assumed I was new, or at least passing through.