We Are All Trapped Here (eBook)

A Small Town Psychological Thriller

Pearl E. Jenkins (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
294 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-110518-8 (ISBN)

Infos

A small town. A dead girl. Secrets that refuse to stay buried.

In Millbrook Hollow, everybody knows everybody. That's the problem.

When seventeen-year-old Sarah Hendricks is found dead at the town's annual Harvest Festival, Detective Lena Carver thinks she's investigating a tragic murder. She's wrong. She's uncovering a conspiracy that's been killing girls for twenty years.

The bridge is out. The town is trapped. And someone is making sure the secrets stay buried-one body at a time.

Lena returned to her hometown three years ago to prove she wasn't the liar they'd called her at seventeen. Now she's the only detective standing between justice and a coverup that reaches into every corner of this seemingly perfect community. The victim's phone reveals a disturbing investigation into local corruption. Her missing laptop could expose everyone. And the deeper Lena digs, the more she realizes Sarah's murder is connected to another girl's death-one that haunted Lena out of town two decades ago.

Katie Whitmore. Dead at sixteen. Ruled a suicide. Lena never believed it.

Now, with three hundred witnesses trapped by flooding and a killer operating in plain sight, Lena has 72 hours to solve two murders, expose a decades-long conspiracy, and confront the ghosts that have been chasing her since she was seventeen years old.

But in Millbrook Hollow, the deadliest secrets are the ones everyone already knows.

And the people who tell the truth don't survive.

Textauszug

Chapter One

 

The Harvest Festival

 

 

Friday, October 27th — 9:47 PM

The ferris wheel groaned against the October wind, its rusted joints protesting every rotation. Lena Carver watched it from the edge of Riverside Park, her hands buried deep in the pockets of her police-issued jacket, her breath forming small clouds in the suddenly cold air. Three years back in Millbrook Hollow, and she still stood at the margins of every town gathering, an observer rather than a participant. Old habits, she supposed. Or maybe old wounds.

"Detective Carver!" Mayor Richard Ashford's voice boomed across the festival grounds, performatively jovial. "Shouldn't you be enjoying yourself? The corn maze is exceptional this year. Martha Pemberton outdid herself."

Lena offered him a tight smile, the kind that didn't reach her eyes. "Just keeping an eye on things, Mayor."

"Always working," he said, shaking his head with practiced disappointment. "You know, your father used to say the same thing. 'Just keeping an eye on things.' Right up until the day he left town."

The barb landed exactly where he'd intended. Lena's jaw tightened, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of a response. Ashford waited a beat, then moved on with a politician's instinct for knowing when to press and when to pivot, his hand already extending toward a cluster of tourists admiring the craft booths.

The festival sprawled across the park like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life—if Rockwell had painted the slow decay of small-town America. White string lights sagged between vendor tents, their bulbs flickering intermittently where the connections had corroded. The Copper Kettle Diner's booth sold apple cider from thermoses that had seen better decades. Children shrieked on carnival rides that had traveled the rural circuit since Lena herself was young, their safety inspections likely as fictional as the town's cheerful façade.

She checked her watch: 9:47 PM. The fireworks would start at eleven. Until then, she had nothing to do but watch Millbrook Hollow pretend to be something it wasn't—a community, a family, a place where neighbors actually cared about each other rather than collected ammunition for future gossip.

The crowd had swelled as the evening progressed. Lena estimated three hundred people, maybe more. Half were locals she recognized from her childhood or her three years back on the force. The other half were leaf-peepers—tourists who descended on northern Vermont every October to photograph nature's death throes and spend money in towns desperate enough to smile through the intrusion.

Near the gazebo, she spotted Emma Hendricks refilling coffee urns at the church booth, her waitress efficiency evident even in volunteer work. Emma's daughter Sarah stood beside her, checking her phone with the universal teenage expression of beautiful boredom. Seventeen, blonde, ethereal in the way that made adult men look twice and then hate themselves for it. Sarah Hendricks was everything Millbrook Hollow pretended to protect—young, innocent, full of promise—and everything it would inevitably destroy.

Lena looked away. She'd been back long enough to know better than to care.

"Cold front's moving in faster than they predicted." Dr. Marcus Kim appeared at her elbow, holding two paper cups of cider. He offered her one without asking if she wanted it. Three years of working together had taught him she always said no to kindness, so he'd stopped asking permission.

She took the cup. "You checking the weather or the crowd?"

"Both." Marcus's dark eyes scanned the park with the same clinical precision he brought to autopsies. "Doppler shows severe thunderstorms within the hour. River's already high from last week's rain. That bridge—"

"Has survived worse," Lena finished, but her gaze drifted toward the Crossing Bridge, barely visible in the darkness beyond the park's lights. The only road in or out of Millbrook Hollow. She'd driven across it that morning and felt the whole structure shudder under her cruiser's weight.

"The forecast says—"

"The forecast said light rain," Lena interrupted. "The festival committee doesn't cancel the Harvest Festival. Not for weather, not for common sense, not for anything. This is Millbrook Hollow. Tradition trumps survival instinct."

Marcus sipped his cider, steam rising past his glasses. "You sound bitter."

"I sound accurate."

A burst of laughter erupted from the beer garden—technically a roped-off area where the Rotary Club sold overpriced domestic beer in plastic cups while pretending they were building community rather than funding their annual golf trip. Lena recognized Tyler Carmichael at the center of the commotion, the quarterback turned homecoming king turned provincial prince. Eighteen years old and already wearing his father's entitled smirk like an inheritance. His friends surrounded him with the practiced sycophancy of small-town royalty's court.

"Carmichael kid's drunk," Marcus observed.

"Carmichael kid's always drunk." Lena watched Tyler stumble, catch himself on a friend's shoulder, then laugh too loud at his own near-fall. "His father will make a donation to the town's general fund on Monday. Sheriff Brennan will personally drive Tyler home. No arrest, no record, no consequences."

"That how it works here?"

"That's how it's always worked here."

Thunder rumbled in the distance, a low warning that no one seemed to notice. The ferris wheel kept turning. The craft vendors kept hawking hand-carved signs that said "Home Sweet Home" and "Gather" and other lies people bought to hang on their walls. The volunteer fire department kept grilling bratwurst on a propane setup that violated at least four safety codes Lena could cite from memory.

 

 

Her radio crackled. "Detective Carver, you reading me?" Deputy Jake Reeves, eager as always.

Lena unclipped the radio from her belt. "Go ahead, Jake."

"Just did another perimeter check. Everything's quiet. Brennan's at the dunk tank if you need him. Guy's getting soaked." Jake's grin was audible through the static. "Reverend Patricia's got an arm on her."

"Copy that. Stay visible."

"Will do. Hey, Detective? Think we'll actually get those fireworks in before the storm?"

Lena looked at the sky. Clouds were moving in from the north, blotting out stars. The wind had teeth now. "No," she said. "But we'll try anyway."

She clipped the radio back, took another sip of cider that had already gone lukewarm. Marcus had drifted toward the medical tent—a card table with a first aid kit and a sign reading "Dr. Kim Available for Emergencies." Three years as the town's medical examiner, and they still made him volunteer at community events like a general practitioner. That was Millbrook Hollow too: everyone had to play their assigned role, even when the script made no sense.

 

Lena's phone buzzed. A text from Sheriff Tom Brennan: Stop lurking at the edges. Mingle. That's an order.

She typed back: That's not how orders work.

His response came immediately: Then consider it fatherly advice from someone who gives a damn.

Lena pocketed her phone without responding. Brennan meant well, which somehow made it worse. He'd been the one who convinced her to come back three years ago, who'd created the detective position specifically for her, who treated her like the daughter he'd never had. She appreciated it. She resented it. She didn't trust it.

Trust was something Lena had left behind when she'd left Millbrook Hollow the first time, at seventeen, in the back seat of her parents' car, refusing to look back at the town that had called her a liar.

Movement near the gazebo caught her attention. Sarah Hendricks had separated from her mother, phone pressed to her ear, walking quickly toward the tree line that bordered the park. Even from a distance, Lena could read the body language: tension, urgency, secrecy. Sarah glanced over her shoulder twice before disappearing into the shadows between the oaks.

Probably nothing. Teenage girls had phone calls they didn't want their mothers to overhear. Secret boyfriends or friend drama or college application stress. Normal things that felt like life-or-death at seventeen.

Except Sarah looked back a third time, and her expression wasn't teenage drama. It was fear.

Lena found herself moving toward the tree line before she'd consciously decided to follow. Old instincts kicking in, the ones that had made her a good cop in Boston before she'd burned out and come running back to the only place that had ever broken her.

The festival noise faded as she entered the trees. The string lights didn't reach here. Lena pulled her flashlight from her belt, swept the beam across the darkness. "Sarah? It's Detective Carver. Everything alright?"

No response. Just wind in the branches and the distant thunder getting closer.

Lena keyed her radio. "Jake, you see Sarah Hendricks leave the festival? Emma's daughter?"

Static, then: "Negative. Want me to check with Emma?"

"No, I've got it. Probably nothing."

But Lena kept walking, following a path that led toward the gazebo on the far side of the park, the Victorian structure where couples got engaged and wedding photos got taken and, apparently, teenage girls made furtive phone calls.

Her flashlight beam caught something white near the gazebo steps. A phone, screen cracked but still glowing. Sarah's phone case—she recognized the glittery purple.

Lena's pulse quickened. She climbed the gazebo steps, flashlight sweeping the enclosed space. Empty. No...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.11.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-00-110518-3 / 0001105183
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-110518-8 / 9780001105188