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  PRAISE FOR UNSPEAKABLE THINGS

  “Set in Lilydale, Minnesota, in the 1980s . . . the suspense never wavers in this page-turner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The atmospheric suspense novel is haunting because it’s narrated from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old, an age that should be more innocent but often isn’t. Even more chilling, it’s based on real-life incidents. Lourey may be known for comic capers (March of Crimes), but this tense novel combines the best of a coming-of-age story with suspense and an unforgettable young narrator.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Part suspense, part coming-of-age, Jess Lourey’s Unspeakable Things is a story of creeping dread, about childhood when you know the monster under your bed is real. A novel that clings to you long after the last page.”

  —Lori Rader-Day, Edgar Award–nominated author of Under a Dark Sky

  “A noose of a novel that tightens by inches. The squirming tension comes from every direction—including the ones that are supposed to be safe. I felt complicit as I read, as if at any moment I stopped I would be abandoning Cassie, alone, in the dark, straining to listen and fearing to hear.”

  —Marcus Sakey, bestselling author of Brilliance

  “Unspeakable Things is an absolutely riveting novel about the poisonous secrets buried deep in towns and families. Jess Lourey has created a story that will chill you to the bone and a main character who will break your heart wide open.”

  —Lou Berney, Edgar Award–winning author of November Road

  “Inspired by a true story, Unspeakable Things crackles with authenticity, humanity, and humor. The novel reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Marsh King’s Daughter. Highly recommended.”

  —Mark Sullivan, bestselling author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky

  “Jess Lourey does a masterful job building tension and dread, but her greatest asset in Unspeakable Things is Cassie—an arresting narrator you identify with, root for, and desperately want to protect. This is a book that will stick with you long after you’ve torn through it.”

  —Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse

  “With Unspeakable Things, Jess Lourey has managed the near-impossible, crafting a mystery as harrowing as it is tender, as gut-wrenching as it is lyrical. There is real darkness here, a creeping, inescapable dread that more than once had me looking over my own shoulder. But at its heart beats the irrepressible—and irresistible—spirit of its . . . heroine, a young woman so bright and vital and brave she kept even the fiercest monsters at bay. This is a book that will stay with me for a long time.”

  —Elizabeth Little, Los Angeles Times bestselling author of Dear Daughter and Pretty as a Picture

  PRAISE FOR THE CATALAIN BOOK OF SECRETS

  “Life-affirming, thought-provoking, heartwarming, it’s one of those books which―if you happen to read it exactly when you need to―will heal your wounds as you turn the pages.”

  ―Catriona McPherson, Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Bruce Alexander Award–winning author

  “Prolific mystery writer Lourey tells of a matriarchal clan of witches joining forces against age-old evil . . . The novel is tightly plotted, and Lourey shines when depicting relationships―romantic ones as well as tangled links between Catalains . . . Lourey emphasizes the ties that bind in spite of secrets and resentment.”

  ―Kirkus Reviews

  “Lourey expertly concocts a Gothic fusion of long-held secrets, melancholy, and resolve . . . Exquisitely written in naturally flowing, expressive language, the book delves into the special relationships between sisters, and mothers and daughters.”

  ―Publishers Weekly

  PRAISE FOR SALEM’S CIPHER

  “A fast-paced, sometimes brutal thriller reminiscent of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.”

  ―Booklist (starred review)

  “[A] hair-raising thrill ride.”

  ―Library Journal (starred review)

  “The fascinating historical information combined with a story line ripped from the headlines will hook conspiracy theorists and action addicts alike.”

  ―Kirkus Reviews

  “Fans of The Da Vinci Code are going to love this book . . . one of my favorite reads of 2016.”

  ―Crimespree Magazine

  “This suspenseful tale has something for absolutely everyone to enjoy.”

  ―Suspense Magazine

  PRAISE FOR MERCY’S CHASE

  “An immersive voice, an intriguing story, a wonderful character―highly recommended!”

  ―Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Both a sweeping adventure and race-against-time thriller, Mercy’s Chase is fascinating, fierce, and brimming with heart―just like its heroine, Salem Wiley.”

  ―Meg Gardiner, author of Into the Black Nowhere

  “Action-packed, great writing taut with suspense, an appealing main character to root for—who could ask for anything more?”

  ―Buried Under Books

  PRAISE FOR MAY DAY

  “Jess Lourey writes about a small-town assistant librarian, but this is no genteel traditional mystery. Mira James likes guys in a big way, likes booze, and isn’t afraid of motorcycles. She flees a dead-end job and a dead-end boyfriend in Minneapolis and ends up in Battle Lake, a little town with plenty of dirty secrets. The first-person narrative in May Day is fresh, the characters quirky. Minnesota has many fine crime writers, and Jess Lourey has just entered their ranks!”

  ―Ellen Hart, award-winning author of the Jane Lawless and Sophie Greenway series

  “This trade paperback packed a punch . . . I loved it from the get-go!”

  ―Tulsa World

  “What a romp this is! I found myself laughing out loud . . .”

  ―Crimespree Magazine

  “Mira digs up a closetful of dirty secrets, including sex parties, cross-dressing, and blackmail, on her way to exposing the killer. Lourey’s debut has a likable heroine and surfeit of sass.”

  ―Kirkus Reviews

  PRAISE FOR REWRITE YOUR LIFE: DISCOVER YOUR TRUTH THROUGH THE HEALING POWER OF FICTION

  “Interweaving practical advice with stories and insights garnered in her own writing journey, Jessica Lourey offers a step-by-step guide for writers struggling to create fiction from their life experiences. But this book isn’t just about writing. It’s also about the power of stories to transform those who write them. I know of no other guide that delivers on its promise with such honesty, simplicity, and beauty.”

  ―William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author of the Cork O’Connor Series and Ordinary Grace

  OTHER TITLES BY JESS LOUREY

  THRILLERS

  Unspeakable Things

  Salem’s Cipher

  Mercy’s Chase

  MAGICAL REALISM

  The Catalain Book of Secrets

  Seven Daughters

  YOUNG ADULT

  The Toadhouse Trilogy: Book One

  COMIC CAPERS

  May Day

  June Bug

  Knee High by the Fourth of July

  August Moon

  September Mourn

  October Fest

  November Hunt

  December Dread

  January Thaw

  February Fever

  March of Crimes

  April Fools

  NONFICTION

  Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Jess Lourey

  All rig
hts reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542016315

  ISBN-10: 1542016312

  Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson

  To Amanda, who’s the real deal

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART I

  A woman’s scream . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  The lemon-yellow room . . .

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  Gritty eyes. Paste . . .

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  PART II

  CHAPTER 17

  The effort of . . .

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  “Wake up, honey . . .

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  I come to . . .

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  PART III

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  Clean. Rested. Hydrated . . .

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  Minnesota Town Shaken . . .

  CHAPTER 70

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREVIEW: UNSPEAKABLE THINGS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On September 5, 1944, six-year-old Victor John “Jackie” Theel of Paynesville, Minnesota, walked to his first day of morning kindergarten wearing a blue sailor suit with a square-cut collar. The matching long pants were secured at the waist, a safety pin replacing the back button. Towheaded Jackie sported new black shoes and a fresh scratch below his right eye. His older brother held his hand on the walk. At lunch, Jackie’s teacher allowed him to leave school despite instructions otherwise from his mother.

  He never made it home.

  Soon after Jackie left school, a woman claimed to have seen a boy weeping as he walked along Highway 23 on the other side of town. A group of teenagers testified that they spotted something similar later that day. The Civil Air Patrol was brought in for search and rescue. A bloodhound tracked Jackie’s route, wandering from the school to the nearby Crow River, before losing his scent. Other leads were followed, but Jackie was never found.

  Mrs. Harold Theel, Jackie’s mother, stated in an interview conducted a year after her son disappeared that she had “several theories” about what happened to Jackie but couldn’t prove any of them. The most chilling statement in response to Jackie’s disappearance came from Sheriff Art McIntee, local lead in the 1944 investigation, who had this to say about Paynesville: “[T]here is something in the community we haven’t figured out.”

  But outside Paynesville—my hometown—the world moved on.

  In 2016, in response to developments in another abduction with Paynesville roots, Kare 11 News reached out to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for an update on Jackie’s then decades-old case. The BCA claimed to have never investigated it. In addition, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office had purged all pre-1960s reports.

  There was no official record of Jackie’s disappearance to be found.

  However, Jackie’s mom never gave up on finding her son. She had kept tucked in her Bible the original BCA circular, which featured his case number—32719—above a photo of Jackie wearing his sailor suit and smiling shyly.

  Bloodline was inspired in part by Jackie’s story and the mystery that still surrounds it.

  PART I

  A woman’s scream wakes me.

  I whip my head and—hunh—pain ricochets, a blistering agony. My skin’s been peeled off, my bones scraped clean.

  Breathe.

  Where’s the pain coming from?

  Everywhere.

  Move slowly.

  Blink. Blink again.

  I’m lying down.

  The room. I recognize it. Crown molding. Walls painted lemon. A dresser and next to it a vanity, both in matching oak. The heat is oppressive, the air thick as wool. And the smell. Sweet Jesus. It’s turgid and salty, the rank odor of a heaving animal, cornered, at the end of the hunt.

  Get out.

  I try to move, but my legs are strapped down.

  Or paralyzed.

  My breath catches—lord please no—and even that tiny movement amplifies the stabbing torment, but (the struggle makes me weep) . . . I can move my toes. At least I think I can. I must see to believe. I raise my head just enough, swallowing against the brown-green waves of nausea, my eyelids flapping to hold the pain at bay.

  I cling to consciousness, promising myself that I am me, that I know things.

  I’m Joan Harken. I’m a reporter.

  My neck trembles with the effort of holding up my head. Triple images condense to double, and then the vertigo passes, and I can see. A leg pokes outside the bed coverings, a slab of white against the blue-and-red quilt.

  My leg. Toes wiggling.

  I’m not paralyzed.

  This smallest sip of relief is immediately swamped by a sudden clarion panic.

  Something’s missing.

  The missing is crucial, I know this in my scraped-raw bones, but what is it?

  My head drops onto the pillow, skin fish-clammy. I must check the contours of my body, locate the absence. I drag my other leg, the one still tucked under the quilt, a few inches to the side, and the scratch of sheets against flesh assures me.

  I have two legs.

  I struggle my arms out from beneath the blanket, hold them up, study them as if they belong to someone else. They’re unmarked despite the deep ache at their centers. I wave my fingers, a magician about to perform a trick. They work.

  I probe my head. It’s tender, logy but unmarked.

  Good. I need my head.

  A wheeze, a sort of laugh, hikes my chest, but the motion sets cold worms of nausea squirming across my flesh. I must move slowly, or I’ll black out.

  Gently, inch by inch, my hands slip beneath the quilt and travel south.

  They find my breasts. Swollen and aching. Damp.

  Intact.

  Except . . . their peculiar pain licks at something, sharp and bloody.

  What is it?

  Farther south. My hands don’t want to go there, they’re hot with pushback, but a morbid need to know forces them.

>   They reach my stomach.

  It’s soft, quaggy.

  Empty.

  My baby is no longer inside.

  That’s when I understand.

  I am the woman screaming.

  CHAPTER 1

  Minnesota, 1968

  “They’re going to love you, Joanie.”

  I smile at my fiancé, grab his hand. Pray that he’s right. It’s been so sudden, this move. My editors had passed me over for the promotion. That same day, Dr. King was murdered in Memphis, where he’d traveled to march peacefully for the rights of mostly Negro sanitation workers.

  The nation descended into chaos.

  In DC, marines guarded the Capitol steps with machine guns while buildings were torched. Baltimore’s protests overwhelmed the National Guard. Paratroopers and artillerymen were called in. Cincinnati fell under siege, and Chicago’s West Side burned. Decades of festering tension, fueled by black poverty and racism and war resistance, exploded to the surface.

  Getting mugged had been the final kick.

  Let’s move to Lilydale. Deck’s words the night of the mugging were soothing, his face bright. He held me as I cried, releasing me only to clean my wounds. We’ll be sheltered there, safe from the world. Promise. You won’t believe how perfect it is.

  I didn’t agree right away, not by a long shot, but then he mentioned preserving his life by avoiding the draft—his dad was the head of the county draft board and had the power to save Deck from Vietnam; he was also mayor of Lilydale, a postcard-perfect town as Deck described it, nestled two and a half hours northwest of Minneapolis—and what could I say?

  I’m sitting on one leg as I grip Deck’s hand, perched in the Chevelle’s passenger seat, hurtling toward my new home, a place I’ve never been. My cat is curled on my lap, and with my free hand, I’m caressing the itchy stab wounds through my pantyhose. Leftovers from the mugging. They’re angry red scabs, halfway to healed. They weren’t deep, and if not for them, and for Deck’s reaction, the mugging would have already faded into the shadows of my mind. Why dwell on what you can’t change?

  Deck was shocked, though, horrified, swore that strangers didn’t assault women in his hometown. Lilydale was peaceful, friendly. Everyone knew everyone, looked out for one another. The world outside might scream and swirl like a tornado, but Lilydale floated in a bubble, outside of time, as safe as a smile. The town even had a newspaper, Deck said. The Lilydale Gazette. I might finally get my byline.