Bex and her father were back at the Black Bear Diner. She was still seventeen but dressed in the heavy, navy-blue dress that she always wore when her father took her out. Bex looked at her feet and saw her folded, lace ankle socks and Mary Janes.
“You never could sit still, Beth Anne.”
Her father shook his head, and Bex could see that he hadn’t aged at all. The planes of his face were still smooth, still relaxed back into that charming smile. His eyes crinkled at the corners as he looked down at the paper in Bex’s hands.
“You shouldn’t believe everything you read.”
He jerked his chin toward the newspaper and Bex looked down, recognizing the article that Schuster had handed her.
“Nice to see you two again. Ready to order?”
Bex’s breath lobbed in her chest when she looked up at the waitress. It was the same woman who always waited on them, but her skin was ash gray and puckered. Her milky, unseeing eyes gaped in too-big hollows. Dirt and blood were caked in her ear and along her hairline. Bex tried to avert her eyes but they were drawn to the woman’s hands, to her fingers wrapped around the pencil. Her fingernails were filthy—the few that remained—jagged and broken. The nail hung from her middle finger, and her ring finger was gone.
Bex tried to get out of the booth, but her feet no longer touched the floor. She clawed at the vinyl seat, but the waitress cocked her head and smiled a gruesome, skeletal smile.
“Leaving so soon?”
Bex tried to scream but only a soundless puff of air came from between her parted lips. The woman in the booth behind them turned and smiled. She had the same zombie-ish look as she pursed her greasy, black lips and pressed a broken, swollen index finger against her lips and swung her head.
“No, no, no,” she said softly. When she shifted, Bex could see that she was the woman with the scarf and she was wearing it now. But as the woman shook her head, Bex could see that the scarf was covering three thick grooves carved into her neck. The blood was glossy; it bubbled and looked fresh.
“Daddy!” The voice that came from Bex was not her own. It was desperate and breathy, childlike.
Another woman strolled into the diner, her short denim shorts revealing elegantly long, tanned legs. She wore a half shirt and a belly ring, her blond hair flitting around her shoulders. She wasn’t ashy and gray like the others, but her smile was just as gruesome, just as horrifying. She pressed her finger to her bluing lips and shook her head, the action making the silver heart locket around her neck bobble and catch the light.
“Darla!”
Bex’s T-shirt was soaked. So was the sheet wrapped around her. Her hair was wet and matted against her forehead and she shivered.
“Oh my God.” She looked around, taking in her mint-green bedspread, the soothing pale walls, the furniture she had come to recognize as “hers.” She was safe. She was home.
The sunlight started to knife its way through the blinds and Bex threw open the window, staring at the scene outside: a flat driveway. A housing subdivision. Perfectly manicured and cultivated lawns and native plants and chunks of ocean grasses. She was almost five hundred miles from where the police had last seen her father, but now she saw him in every clump of shrubbery, behind every tree. Every sigh of the wind was him, his hot breath on the back of her neck, his finger pressed against his lips reminding her to stay silent.
Bex took the hottest shower she could stand, but she was still shaking when she got out.
• • •
It was midmorning when Detective Schuster called Bex. She watched the phone vibrate its way across her desk, picking it up on the fourth ring. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to the detective—but she wasn’t sure she had a choice. Either way, she didn’t want Michael or Denise to hear her phone ringing and come check on her. She didn’t want this to be her life.
“Hello?”
Detective Schuster’s voice wasn’t jovial or light. He was all business right from the get-go. “Have you considered what we talked about?”
What you talked about? Bex wanted to scream.
“I’m not going public with my identity.”
She heard the detective sigh into the phone and her resolve started to crumble. She needed to go public for Darla. For all the other girls. For her father, if he really was… She wouldn’t let herself complete the thought. But going public meant going back to her old life, to staring at her shoes and pretending she didn’t hear the whispers.
“Is there any other way?”
“Well, we can create a profile for you on the websites. We’ll be monitoring you the whole time, of course, but we could do all the work and all you’d have to do—”
Is wait, Bex finished in her mind. Like prey.
“I don’t know why he would even visit one of those sites, let alone want to make contact or comment on it or whatever.” Bex couldn’t keep the shudder out of her voice. “They’re heinous.”
“Do you know what a narcissist is?”
“I do.”
“Well”—it sounded like the detective was shrugging his shoulders, talking with his hands—“most serial killers are narcissists. To varying extents, of course. They’re intelligent and they often like to see people admiring their handiwork.”
But my father isn’t a narcissist, Bex wanted to scream. He was good and kind, and he would do anything for her and Gran, anything at all.
“Sometimes you’ll see them taunting the police or the victims’ families. They like to believe they’re smarter than everyone else.”
She had heard the stories of legendary killers who sent coded letters to the police working their cases, joining search parties, walking shoulder to shoulder with their victims’ parents and friends while they had the missing person tucked away in some horrible lair or shallow grave. Her father wasn’t like that.
Was he?
“These people are depraved, Bex. These men and women are sick.”
Women?
That struck the black part deep within Bex’s soul that didn’t question whether or not her father was guilty. It scratched like a clawed hand, fingernails dragging through wood, piercing the back of her neck, whispering with hot, moist breath. It’s him. It’s you. His depravity, his sickness, his narcissism, his need to do this runs in your own veins…
She had seen a movie about a female serial killer once, watching it huddled under the covers while her gran slept in her chair. But it was just a movie, and the killer was a big Hollywood star who had gained a couple of pounds and wore fake teeth to look evil and ugly. She said her lines like a Hollywood starlet would, and they used computer-generated images to show a couple of murder scenes. Two weeks later, that actress was on every television station in fabulous dresses and diamond-dripping chandelier earrings because it had only been a story. The thrum of death that coursed through Bex’s veins couldn’t be shed like the teeth and a couple of extra pounds. Bex’s ugly was in her blood.
But if Schuster was wrong…
If Schuster was wrong and her father was innocent—the word stung more than it should have, an aching reminder of what she did—then he wouldn’t be on the sites at all, would he? Bex tried to quell her guilt, tried to remind herself that she was just a child and couldn’t have known that they’d take what she said and use it against her dad.
And then the anger walloped her and the sound of Schuster’s coaxing voice enraged her. He should have known better. He’d manipulated her, and here he was, doing it again. But no one else had ever talked to her. She was a pariah without Schuster. The emotions wheeled through her—dizzying, frustrating, lonely, painful—when all she ever wanted was to be normal.
“Bex?” Michael knocked on the door frame before slightly nudging open the door. “Ready to take a break from homework? I made lasagna. Well, not so much made as thoroughly heated up.” He grinned at her, a floppy, cockeyed Dad-laughing-at-his-own-joke grin, and Bex knew that the only way to get to normal was to wade through this mess with her real father.
She pressed her fingers over the mouthpiece of her phone and smiled back at Michael. “I’ll be right there.”
• • •
“No. No, I couldn’t. I would just die.” Chelsea was shaking her head, her ponytail bobbing against her cheekbones. “I can’t believe you stayed in that house knowing that someone had broken in.”
Bex took a miniscule sip of her coffee and avoided Chelsea’s eyes. “It wasn’t really that big a deal. The cops said it was probably just kids.”
Laney smacked her palms on the table, and both Chelsea and Bex jumped. “Do you hear yourself? The cops are just brushing it off, but our friend was murdered. Shouldn’t they have put up surveillance or put you in protective police custody or something?”
Bex’s stomach roiled. “Why me? I have nothing to do with… I mean…”
Chelsea’s eyes bulged. “Are you kidding? Yeah, you do. You’re a teenager. Darla was a teenager. This guy could be after any of us. Or all of us.” She leaned in, hissing, “There is a crazed killer on the loose and your house gets ransacked and the police think it’s just kids. Oh no, seriously, no. I’d call the brigade or the army or whatever. When you die, you should seriously sue for negligence or noncompliance or something.”
Laney rolled her eyes. “I’m sure Bex is fine, Chelsea. It’s not like they took anything, right, Bex?”
Bex didn’t trust herself to talk so she meekly shook her head, her hands going to her backpack. She touched the zippered pouch where she had stuffed the Black Bear Diner menu, the gentle crunch of the paper giving her a strange sense of calm.
“Ladies!”
Both Chelsea and Laney groaned when Zach approached the table, but Bex was happy for the distraction. He had his GoPro camera in front of him, the red Record light glowing.
“Do you have any comments that you would like saved for posterity? Perhaps some advice or information for the incoming freshman of, say, 2089?”
“Hopefully, the people of 2089 will be so advanced that they’ll have done away with high school.”
Laney cocked an eyebrow. “You realize 2089 isn’t that far away, right, Chels?”
Chelsea batted at the air. “Whatever. We’re all going to be dead by then.”
“Anything to add, Bex?”
Bex had suddenly gone cold, the din of the cafeteria noise overwhelming.
“I-I’ve got to go.”