MY EARS BEGIN TO RING, and I feel the blood draining from my head. I step back from them.
“No,” I say, shaking my head furiously. “No, it can’t be true.”
“It is true,” Doris says. “You were supposed to be the Catalog Killer’s final victim. You don’t even know how close you came, Mac.”
“You don’t know that,” I say. “How the hell could you have learned that?”
“I suspected him from the start,” she says. “The minute the first body was found and rumors started to spread about a weirdly posed crime scene, a picture found with the body, I started to think maybe it was Connor. He was a psychopath, Mac, but nobody else seemed to notice it. Or at least that’s what I thought at first.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” I ask. “Why didn’t you go to the cops?”
“I had no proof,” she says. “How would it have looked if I’d just waltzed into the investigation headquarters and accused one of my ‘best friends,’ based on a hunch? I needed evidence, so I started following him. He was spying on people, always with that stupid sketchbook, as if he were some sort of criminal mastermind. What he didn’t know was that I was spying on him the whole time.”
“But two more people died,” I say.
“You’re right. I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t find proof, couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. I tried hard, I promise, but I couldn’t follow him every minute of every day. But after Joey died…”
“Ben got involved,” I cut in.
She nods. “Everyone likes to talk about how Ben hasn’t been the same since Connor died, but really, it started when Joey died.”
Realization dawns on me. “Joey was seeing you,” I say, turning to Ben. “Not Connor.”
He looks pained. “I met her in late spring,” he says. “She was outside the library, just lying on the grass, reading. She was so beautiful that I had to talk to her. We didn’t tell anyone about it. We wanted it to be a secret. We went to those cot tages one day—we were exploring the coastline, being together—and we found the key just hanging there on a nail above the window. It was like the place was destined to be ours. We started meeting there twice a week. It was…” he struggles to find the words. “It was perfect.”
“Then Connor found out,” I say.
“The day she died,” he says, “we were supposed to meet there, at the cottage. She never showed. I didn’t find out about her until the next day. I was a mess. I was going to talk to the cops, tell them that we’d been seeing each other. Of course I wanted to help them, to find out who had done this to her. But first, I wanted to go back there one last time, to our spot. When I got there, I saw Connor. He didn’t notice me approaching. I saw him through the window. He was busy trying to hide something in the ceiling.”
“A backpack full of drugs,” I say.
“He stole them from Ant,” says Doris. “He was trying to frame Ben.”
“Why?”
“Because he was a twisted monster,” says Doris. “Why else?”
“I think he got with Carrie because he wanted to mess with me,” says Ben, “just like when he told me about Prince. When he realized that I didn’t care about her, that I wasn’t infatuated with her anymore, he broke up with her. Somehow he learned about Joey. After he killed her, he must have broken into the cottage and planted the drugs, assuming I’d tell the cops about us, and they’d find them.”
“He wanted to kill two birds with one stone,” says Doris. “He wanted to incriminate Ben and rub salt in the wound.”
“After I saw him at the cottage,” says Ben, “I knew he’d killed Joey. I knew he was the Catalog Killer. I was going to go to the cops, but…”
“But Doris got to you first,” I finish.
“I was following Connor when he went to the cottage,” she says, “and that’s when I saw Ben. I knew it was just a matter of time before he put two and two together.”
“She came to see me that night,” says Ben. “We walked through everything. All the evil things Connor did when we were kids. The murders.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “The two of you knew what was happening. Why didn’t you go immediately to the police?”
They look at each other, and for the first time I see a hint of regret in Doris’s face.
“We should have,” she admits. “We talked about it endlessly. Instead, we decided to confront him first—to give him a chance to come forward on his own. Against my better judgment.”
The look she gives Ben tells me whose idea that was.
“You wanted to hear him out?” I ask Ben.
“I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him I knew what he’d done,” says Ben, through gritted teeth. “I wanted him to know that I knew who he really was.”
“And that’s how we ended up here,” says Doris.
The two of them regard each other, a mix of sorrow and anger and resignation in their faces. I know they’re both wondering what might have happened, or how different things would be now, if they hadn’t made that decision.
“How did it happen?” I ask.
“We’d been watching him,” says Doris, “covering him, trying to figure out his next move. It wasn’t easy. One of us had to be on him all the time, but we figured out a system.”
“I started basically living at my old house,” says Ben. “My parents were too concerned with their own bullshit to notice how little I was around. It was the perfect place to watch him.”
I think back to Ben’s empty house, to the dark windows that seemed to stare sadly down at the street after his family moved out. Had he watched me from that window, sitting inside a ghostly shadow of his old life?
“Connor was following you, Mac,” says Doris. “He watched your every move, sketched you obsessively. It was hard to believe that he’d target one of his oldest friends, but eventually we both had to agree that you were his next intended victim. We couldn’t let that happen.”
“I knew about the comics,” says Ben. “I knew that you guys had traded them back and forth forever, so when I saw him drop the bag off at your house, I knew that’s what it was. But there was something odd about how carefully he placed the bag; the way he stood and looked at it before he turned and left. I knew something was going to happen, that we couldn’t stall any longer, so we followed him that night.”
“He was waiting for you, Mac,” says Doris. “Right here. Like a spider waiting for its prey to just fly into the web. When we stepped down into the cave, instead of you, he was surprised, but not for long. I could see the wheels spinning, the story forming behind his eyes. I was actually curious to hear what he’d say, but he didn’t get the chance.”
She looks again at Ben, and his face is tight with the memory.
“His face was so smug, so confident,” Ben says. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. I attacked him. I didn’t want to kill him; I wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to suffer for what he’d done. Killing him would have been too easy.”
“But you did kill him,” I say.
“It all happened so quickly,” Doris explains. “It was chaos. One minute we were standing here, looking at him; the next minute, they were on the ground, wrestling. I was screaming for them to stop. They were rolling around on the ground, trying to get in punches, and then Connor was on top of Ben, pushing him toward the ledge. I didn’t think. I just grabbed a rock and—”
She stops speaking, her mouth open as if she’s forgotten the words.
“She hit him in the head,” Ben finishes. “I felt him go limp on top of me and managed to scramble out from under him. We checked to see if he was breathing, and he was. He wasn’t dead; just knocked out.”
I wait for them to go on, to finish telling me what happened. But they just stand there, staring at the edge. Remembering.
“Which one of you pushed him?” I ask, finally.
“We both did,” says Doris. “We didn’t discuss it. We just knelt and pushed him. His watch fell off in the fight, and I took it because I thought I might need it.” She looks at me, her face defiant. “I’d do it again if I had to.”
“His backpack was here,” says Ben. “We found the poison and sprinkled some out to make it look like the killer had been sloppy. Then we found the final catalog picture in the sketchbook and stuck it to the ledge.”
In the distance, I’m vaguely aware of the water still rushing into the cavern, but the thrumming, pounding drumbeat of my mind crowds it out. As the reality of Connor’s death begins to arrange itself into a horrible, logical chain of events, questions begin to tumble out of me.
“What about the Abernathy house and the killer’s lair?” I ask.
“We staged it,” says Doris. “I knew there were a bunch of abandoned houses outside of town, so we found one, planted some evidence, and waited for someone to stumble across it. We didn’t expect it to happen so soon, but a few days later, some kids playing in the woods found it, and the cops jumped at it. They were dying for a break; we just had to hand one to them. Everything would have worked out, and for a year, it did. Then you found that stupid note and started poking around.”
“So when you tried to help me, that was all bullshit?” I say. “Leading me to the house? Finding the watch? Your little show in Parnatsky’s office?”
“I wouldn’t call it bullshit,” says Doris. “I’d call it creative redirection.”
“What about the eyeball?” I ask. Ben looks confused, but Doris smiles lightly.
“There was an eyeball drawn on the window of my car,” I tell him. I turn to Doris. “It was you?”
She nods, giving me a bemused look. I notice that the more she reveals, the more relaxed she seems to get, while the opposite is true of Ben, who is pressed up against the wall of the grotto, shivering miserably. “When you were in the basement at the Abernathy house, I ran back through the woods to the car, then I got back and started yelling for you. Pretended I found the watch.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “What possible reason would you have for doing that?”
“It was kind of a gamble,” she admits. “I knew it would make you think someone was following you, but I also knew that if I could get you to doubt yourself, you might start thinking that you were going crazy.”
“So all that stuff about people in town thinking I was in love with Connor?”
“The only people saying that were me and Ben,” she says. “I needed you to stop thinking there was something to all this, and start believing that you were imagining it. Thing is, it worked, didn’t it?”
I don’t answer her. She knows she’s right. Even in the face of such a horrible reality, I feel myself flush at the thought that I was so easy to fool.
“I needed to get you to back off, Mac,” she says. “For a while, I thought it worked. Until Ben screwed everything up at the parade.”
“So what now?” I ask. “What’s the plan moving forward? You going to kill me too?”
“That’s not what we want, Mac,” she says, and although I believe that she’s telling the truth, there’s also something else in her voice. Something that tells me my safety will come at a price.
I turn to Ben. His face is twisted in on itself, and tears are running down his cheeks. “Why didn’t you just leave it alone, Mac?” he moans.
“We can’t get caught, Mac,” says Doris, her voice calm and controlled, in marked contrast to Ben’s. “Think about this. There’s no reason for you to tell anyone anything.”
“They’ll catch you,” I say. “They’ll know that you did it. There are texts. Phone logs.”
“They’ll only catch us if you tell them,” she says. “You don’t have to tell them.”
“You can’t expect me to keep this secret, Doris,” I say.
“Why not?” she yells, and her composure slips for the first time. “I don’t care how much this stupid town loved him; he was evil!”
“We only loved him because we didn’t know that side of him,” I say.
She laughs bitterly. “Bullshit. Even if you put aside the fact that he was a fucking serial killer, he was pure poison right to the core. Do you have any idea how many girls he screwed over, just for his narcissistic games? How many times he reached inside the minds of his friends and twisted them into knots, for no reason except to prove to himself that he could? But people saw a handsome, charming guy, and they turned a blind eye, because that’s what the world has always done for awful, talented men.”
Her face is tight and pained, the rage in her eyes difficult to look at. In the corner, Ben sits folded in on himself, unable or unwilling to look at us or to contribute to what Doris is saying.
“I’ve spent my whole life studying, volunteering, signing up for every extracurricular thing I could think of,” she goes on. “I had scholarship offers from each of the four colleges I applied to. All four of them offered me full rides! But who noticed? Who cared? Nobody. So please, let’s not give Connor the benefit of the doubt anymore.”
My mind feels like it’s collapsing in on itself. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I can’t keep this up forever, Doris,” says Ben. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”
Doris turns to look at him, her face going wide with fear as she realizes the situation is slipping away from her.
“I am not giving up my future for this,” she says, her voice full of steel. “I’ve worked too hard to let it go up in flames because of the two of you.”
I realize that she’s been slowly, imperceptibly advancing on me, and now she’s just a couple of feet away. I’m horribly aware of the rushing channel of water behind me—the mighty suction the storm has churned up.
With a sudden jolt of terror, I understand what she’s considering, and I take an instinctive half-step back toward the edge of the chasm.
“Doris,” Ben pleads, “you don’t have to do this. He won’t turn us in. I know he won’t. Tell her, Mac. Tell her you understand why we did it.”
I turn around to look at him, and his eyes are pleading with me. This is my only chance to save myself.
“Doris,” I say. “I understand why you did what you did. I do. But if you take this next step, you’ll become as bad as he was.”
Her eyes are full of tears. “I’ll never be like that monster.”
“You’re right,” I say. “You’re not.”
“I’m sorry, Mac,” she whispers, and she reaches out toward me.
I flinch, expecting her to push, to find myself falling back, but instead, her hand grabs my arm and I find myself pulled into an embrace. Doris’s breath is hot on my neck, and her tears are a hot slick between our cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
“I know,” I say.
Above the rushing water and the whistle of wind through the caves, another sound emerges from somewhere in the distance: the echo of a voice calling. Doris and I pull apart and turn toward the entrance to the grotto. As the flicker of flashlights shifts to the cave, a huge wave rushes into the channel beside us, spraying water up onto the ledge. I manage to move away from the edge to the safety of the wall, but Doris stumbles and falls awkwardly onto her side.
Water rushes into the cavity below us with a ferocious roar, and as Doris scrambles to her feet, she slips and loses her balance.
There’s a horrible moment that seems to stretch out forever, where she manages to catch herself, one foot standing precariously on the edge of the chasm. She locks eyes with me, and I see a terror so complete that it chills me through to the bone. Instinctively, I push myself away from the wall and reach for her, and just as she’s about to fall back and be sucked out to sea, I manage to grab her hand.
Her fingers are wet, and her palm is slippery in my grasp. I’m only barely managing to hang on, and as I look into her eyes, I see the kind of terror that must have run through the eyes of Connor’s victims.
Next to me, Ben drops to his knees and reaches out. With one strong hand, he gets a good grasp of Doris’s other arm, and together we are able to pull her to safety on the ledge.
The three of us collapse into a heap, shuddering with stilted sobs, our chests heaving as we catch our breath.
I’m vaguely aware of someone sliding into the cavern and a flashlight scanning the room until it finds us.
“What is happening in here?” asks Patricia Parnatsky, the shock evident in her voice. “Is everyone okay?”
Somehow I stand, reaching down to give a hand to Ben, and then the two of us pull Doris to her feet.
“We’re okay,” I say. “They…they saved me. Ben and Doris knew I was letting my imagination get away from me. They convinced me I was wrong. It’s over.”
“No it’s not,” says Doris, and I look at her, surprised. She steps toward Parnatsky and holds out her hands in front of her.
“I learned that Connor Williams was the Catalog Killer, and I killed him.”