Fourteen

Even sitting in the school administration office, Bex couldn’t shake the odd feeling she had gotten from the man in the car or the prickly memory of reporters surrounding her. The smell of office supplies and the hypnotic tapping of one of the secretaries typing should have calmed her, but she jumped each time a door opened, each time a phone buzzed.

“I’m sorry, hon.” A pudgy secretary with cheeks like Red Delicious apples grinned up at Bex. “You needed a late pass, correct?”

Bex nodded.

“Do you have a note?”

Bex shook her head and cleared her throat. “No, my…dad…called about twenty minutes ago. My name is—”

“Bex, Bex Andrews.”

That stripe of heat went up the back of Bex’s neck once more. “Yeah…”

“You’re very popular today, Ms. Andrews.” The secretary leaned over and signed the bottom of the hall pass with a big, squiggly flourish. Bex could read the woman’s name as Mrs. Snowbury. “You have a message.”

Bex raised her eyebrows. “I do?”

Mrs. Snowbury produced another square of paper. “A gentleman called and asked if you were a student here. Naturally, we couldn’t give him that kind of information but he did leave a number.” She handed over the pink hall pass and the phone message, and Bex stared at them like they were about to bite her.

“He said his name was Brewster, I think. Or Schuster. It was a little hard to hear. The connection wasn’t so good. We normally don’t take messages for students, but it was slow and your file shows you’ve recently transferred so I thought…”

Bex couldn’t hear if Mrs. Snowbury had finished talking because her heart was clanging like a fire bell. Who knew she was here? Who knew she was Bex Andrews? Why would anyone call the school looking for her?

She snatched the notes from Mrs. Snowbury’s outstretched hand and may have muttered a thanks or an apology. She pushed out through the administration doors and speed walked in the direction of the nearest girls’ room, a bead of sweat rolling down the middle of her back.

“Hey, beautiful, I hope you’re rushing toward me.” Trevor was in the hallway, a lazy smile on his full lips that should have made Bex swoon. He opened his arms and Bex dutifully hugged him, her whole body stiff and humming, focused on the man in the sedan, the Raleigh-area phone call, and now someone trying to contact her at school.

“You okay?”

“I just… I… No, I’m not feeling so hot. Girls’ room.” She pointed over Trevor’s shoulder.

He looked stricken. “Do you want me to wait for you? I can walk you to the nurse.”

Bex shook her head. “No thanks. Just…excuse me.” She pushed past him and yanked open the girls’ room door, letting out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding when a wisp of cool air washed over her face. The bathroom was blessedly empty, the only sound the gentle whoosh of the breeze coming from the bank of open windows. Bex found a stall and went in.

What the hell is going on?

Her head was swimming with memories, dream images, things she’d made up. It was a consummate mess, and every image just ratcheted her anxiety up more. She stared at the note in her lap. The paper was already soft from having been balled up in her sweaty palm, and Mrs. Snowbury’s swirly cursive message was starting to bleed.

Brewster/Schuster? For Bex Andrews. Please return call at earliest convenience: 919–555–0512.

Raleigh.

“I don’t even know anyone named Brewster or Schuster,” Bex muttered. Maybe a reporter?

She thought back to the slew that had knocked on her door. It had seemed like hundreds at first, before the police made them stand back on the sidewalk. When the arraignment happened, there were fewer, most doing their harassing and postulating from the courthouse steps. The reporters were mercifully glued to the hallways of the hall of justice during her father’s pretrial hearing, gasping when Jackson Reimer pleaded not guilty, all their focus on him. It wasn’t until that night when news broke that Reimer had slipped custody that the cameras turned back to Beth Anne, back to her grandmother—the glare of camera lights flooding the living room from their station on the front lawn, the red record lights, the pointing fingers and hurled accusations.

Bex was going to be sick.

She whirled around, grabbing the sides of the toilet while her stomach rolled over itself.

What day is it? What day is it?

At one time, the dates of every one of her father’s crimes were imprinted in Bex’s mind. She knew the women’s names and their birth dates too, and she carried around guilt that made her shoulders sag and alternated her thoughts between the poor women who lost their lives at her father’s hand and the tiny, niggling possibility that her father was innocent. Either way, Bex had worked long and hard to erase those memories from her mind.

“September sixteenth. Melanie Harris.”

Melanie had been seventeen. She had blue eyes and, in her graduation picture, a wide smile that showed off two crooked front teeth. She had been a tennis player and worked at the sports club where Bex’s father played racquetball. She had gone missing on September twelfth, her naked, destroyed body found by a Food Lion clerk on the sixteenth. Melanie had been placed in her car, which was parked in the grocery store lot, her purpled, warped hands wrapped around the steering wheel.

Bex might have worked to erase the memories but there they were—buried, not gone. She dialed the number on her phone and, with a shaking hand, held it to her ear.

Each ring made the knot in Bex’s stomach pull tighter. She didn’t realize she had been holding her breath until she heard the click of the phone, the gravelly voice of the man on the other end of the line.

“Beth Anne?”

Bex’s fingers were numb. The phone slide through them and fell like deadweight into the toilet. The Call in Progress icon kept dancing and she stared at it, transfixed, until the screen began to blacken. The man’s voice reverberated in her head.

Beth Anne.

No, she was Bex Andrews now. Beth Anne Reimer didn’t exist. Beth Anne Reimer had a father who was accused of killing six women before he took off. Beth Anne Reimer had disappeared right along with him. The man’s voice kept echoing in her head and she tried to focus on it. There was a slight accent. The man had pulled the end of her name up, just barely. He wasn’t sure it was her.

Was he her father? Would she recognize him if he was?

The school bell shocked Bex and she backed into the corner of the stall, suddenly terrified, suddenly certain that whether or not her father had been on the phone, he was at the school. She started to shake, started to plan her escape. She could dye her hair again or maybe shave it off. She could get a wig and glasses and a bus ticket and go—where? She had eleven dollars to her name. Eleven dollars that wouldn’t even buy her a ticket to get across town.

“It’s still weird not having her here, you know?”

“I feel bad for getting so mad at her.”

There was a clamor of chatter as the bathroom door opened and closed, but Bex could pick out Laney and Chelsea’s distinct voices. She should have been calmed but anxiety tightened in her chest.

“Bex!” Chelsea’s hand was on the stall door and Bex cursed herself for not locking it. “Are you okay? You look…not great.”

She wanted to tell them everything. She wanted to run away from Kill Devil High and never return. She wanted to be able to speak. Instead, she pointed to the toilet.

“Phone,” she offered in a croaked whisper.

Chelsea gave a cautious glance toward the toilet bowl, her face breaking into a grin. “Oh, that sucks.”

Laney came up behind her. “Ew, toilet phone. Double ew, public toilet phone!”

“At least the water looks clean. It’s clean, right?”

Bex nodded. “Yeah, I just… I was texting and…” She shrugged. “What should I do?”

“Put it in rice,” Laney said. “Like, a tub of uncooked rice. It draws out the moisture and… How long has it been in there? Like a second or like ten minutes?”

For the life of her, Bex couldn’t remember how much time had passed since she’d been in the office, since she’d received the note, since she’d heard the man’s voice.

“Does it matter?”

“Well, yeah. Had they gotten to the Titanic in the first five minutes, it would have been a bad day instead of an international tragedy.”

Chelsea shook her head, disgusted. “I think this one will be an international tragedy.”

Bex actually felt a small sense of lightness.

“Aren’t you going to get it out?” Laney wanted to know.

“Can’t I just flush it?”

“It’s a cell phone, not a goldfish. And it might still work. Or they could save the SIM card and at least get all your contacts back. But if it’s already synched to your computer, you’re totally fine.”

“No.” Bex shook her head. “Not synched.”

“I forgot you came from the Ozarks or whatever.”

“Raleigh is hardly the Ozarks.”

Chelsea shrugged. “Are you really going to let it sit there?”

Bex slowly pulled up her sleeve, eyeing the drowned phone. Finally, Laney shoved her out of the way, snatched the phone from the toilet bowl, and handed it to her.

“Ew!” Chelsea screamed, running out of the stall. Laney chased her, flicking toilet water in her direction while Chelsea continued to gross out.

“You should wash that,” Laney said.

Bex dumped the phone in the sink and turned on the tap, letting the water pour over it. She imagined the voice and the number with the Raleigh area code slipping down the drain. She’d start fresh again.