“Hey, Bexy!”
Denise gave her a kiss on the top of her head, and Bex smiled at the linoleum. She felt silly for liking the way Denise sometimes babied her.
“How’d you sleep?”
Bex couldn’t remember if she’d slept, but she found that she was getting better and better at stamping down the tsunami of feelings she had every day. The chat request from GAMECREATOR hung on her periphery, but she reminded herself that there were thirty-eight other messages from people with provocative names—like RALEIGHRAIDER and THEREALWC—who seemed to be nothing more than rabid Wife Collector fanboys. There was no real reason to suspect that GAMECREATOR was any different…right?
She’d had thought the same when Detective Schuster sent a text this morning—simple, to the point, very Schuster.
Schuster: Any contact?
Bex had hesitated for a half second before hastily typing, Nope.
Now she absently touched the phone in her pocket as she shrugged at Denise. “Good, I guess. You’re back from your run already?”
“Slow day in the track shoes. Just been puttering around here, baking cookies, doing the nineteen-fifties-wife thing.” She held out a plate stacked with badly misshapen cookies and frowned at them. “I haven’t really perfected it.”
Bex took a cookie. “I never judge a cookie by its shape.” She bit. “Mmm, good.”
Denise handed her a glass of milk and Bex turned, catching a snatch of television screen in her peripheral. She froze, her saliva going sour and metallic. The chill of the glass froze her fingers and the cold went all the way up her arm; then the glass was going down, slow, slow, slow until it thunked on the floor and spattered the icy liquid against her calves, the remainder of the milk pouring out of the now-shattered glass at her feet.
From somewhere, she heard Denise calling to her, but all she could focus on was her father. His smiling face beamed out at her from the television screen. Bex had seen the picture they used a dozen times on screen, then a thousand times in her memory. Every time was a punch in the gut—a pang of memory, a starburst of rage, and that overwhelming, crushing guilt. That man wasn’t a murderer; that man was her father.
The news ticker scrolled underneath his picture:
Breaking News: Possible Sighting of Jackson Reimer, Alleged “Wife Collector” Murderer in Beaufort, South Carolina.
A parade of the Wife Collector’s victims followed his picture as it always had. The girls, blond and smiling, frozen in some other time; then shots of the dump sites; and finally, a body in a carved-out rectangle of earth, bare knees hugged to her chest. The news always blurred out the body, but Bex knew who it was—the Wife Collector’s sixth victim, Amanda Perkins.
Her stomach rolled over on itself. You did that. You let that happen. Just like you let it happen to Darla. Bex was shaking her head, the tips of her too-short hair prickly against her cheeks. “No,” she whispered. “No.”
“Bex!”
She could feel Denise’s hands on her shoulders, leading her to a chair. Bex sank into it.
“What is it, honey?” Denise glanced at the screen, grabbed the remote, and clicked off the television. “Are you worried about that? The Wife Collector? Oh, honey, how do you even know about that? He was way before you would have known about such things. No one is going to get you here. I will never let anything like that happen to you.” She offered a reassuring smile, brushing Bex’s hair from her forehead. “Beaufort is more than four hundred miles away. You’re safe here with us.”
“I-I guess.” Bex stopped, sucked in a long breath, and tried to gather herself. Denise would understand, she thought quickly. Then, Denise can never know. They won’t love you anymore. You are the child of a serial killer…and even if you’re not, you’re the child who drove away her own father when you provided the police with evidence. She gritted her teeth, forcing that voice down. “I guess I just got a little freaked out is all. Let me clean up.”
Denise waved Bex away. “Why don’t you go change? You’ve got milk all over your shoes.”
Bex nodded, hoping Denise wasn’t watching as she took the stairs two at a time, pressing the pads of her fingertips against her temples. Somewhere between the first bite of cookie and seeing her father’s face, her head had started pounding and her stomach roiling. The news was out. Everyone would know. Her father had resurfaced and—and what?
Bex’s eyes started to sting. In the ten years that he’d been gone, her father had never tried to contact her. She used to pretend that he did, that one day she would move a bureau or open a closet and find a stack of old, unopened letters that her grandmother had never given her. There would be birthday cards and Christmas wishes, her dad asking about school and boys, and apologizing. Hoping his daughter was okay. After her grandmother’s death, Bex had scoured the house, both hoping that he’d left her something and that he had not. She could never be sure if it was better that her father distanced himself from her rather than keep her close. For Bex, it hurt either way.
It was Christmas Eve, and Beth Anne had just turned thirteen. Everything around Raleigh was decorated with swaths of pine, red bows, and giant, round ornaments, and bell-ringing Santas were outside stores. Every commercial on TV showed a family rushing into one another’s arms, having been separated by long flights or college or snow. Not one of them showed a father in a holding cell, gathering up his motherless daughter in his arms. Not one showed a little girl fingering an old, knitted stocking, wondering if she should bother to put it next to hers.
Every day the world reminded Beth Anne that her family wasn’t normal, but it was always worse in December. There were no holiday cards in the mailbox, no Christmas letters to read, no snow-laden family pictures to tack up. There was a flimsy Christmas tree wrestled from the attic and adorned with a string of half-working lights. A couple of brand-new ornaments bought from the Walgreens because Beth Anne’s family had nothing to hand down. And there was one photograph that Gran trotted out every year and put on the mantel.
From a distance, it looked like a normal—if slightly stiff—family portrait. Gran stood on one side of Beth Anne, her father on the other. Her mother, like a shadow, hovered behind. It almost looked like they were smiling but there was no joy in the slightly upturned lips. Every year Beth Anne studiously avoided the portrait, but that year, she rolled up on her tiptoes and pulled it from the mantel, scrutinizing it. There was something sad in her grandmother’s eyes. Something empty in her mother’s. And her father’s…well, they were sharp and black, searing and defined, daring you to look away.
Beth Anne, six, at best, was clutching a square gift box wrapped in red and green, the only indicator of the season. Her grandmother’s hand rested gently on her shoulder. Her mother’s hands were clamped around Beth Anne’s arms as if holding on for dear life. And her father had his hands by his sides, slightly fisted, two inches of space between him and his family. Beth Anne wondered why she had never noticed the distance before.
In her room, she tried to block out the images of the victims, but they flashed in front of her eyes, seeming to lurk in every corner: Amy Eickler with a necklace of ligature bruises in the closet; Isabel Doctoro, bloodshot eyes wide and accusing, hunkering by the bed; Melanie Harris, hands bloodied as she clawed for her life in that Food Lion parking lot. Even as the sunlight streamed in through the windows, Bex turned on every light and pushed open every drape until her bedroom nearly glowed. She could still hear their voices. She could still hear his. She pressed her hands against her ears.
“Stop, stop, please stop,” she whispered.
Dr. Gold had talked to her about “the phantoms” once. Had told her that they were figments of her imagination, manifestations of her guilt for not turning her father in sooner. Then why was he talking too? Why was he begging me to remember, to set them straight?
Suddenly Bex was shaking.
“Maybe he’ll want to tell you his side of the story.” She remembered Detective Schuster’s trailing words.
Maybe…
Bex sat down at her laptop, her fingers hovering over the keys.
“W-W-W,” she started. She paused, tapping her finger against her bottom lip, everything inside her a churning mass of confusion. She wanted to talk to her father. She wanted to tell him to run. She wanted to tell him to disappear, to never bother her again, to never have been in her life. She wanted to see him locked up. She wanted to never exist.
“W-W-W,” she said again, her voice soft, “W-C-F-A-N…on fire.”
It was the same page from the night before, but this time there weren’t a dozen others blocking out the home page. It popped up immediately, joy and terror populating her whole screen. There were pictures, screen grabs of old headlines and newspaper clippings. Repeated shots of her father glancing over his shoulder, his eyes fierce and black, his lips pressed together hard, the slightest hint of a contemptuous grin.
Bex wasn’t sure she was breathing. She wasn’t sure her heart was still beating.
Her mouse hovered over the main menu, page titles like “Kills,” “Court,” and “Crimes” magnifying. She knew she should go straight for Forums because she was doing what Detective Schuster had said: she would find her father and trap him. The overzealous “Dangerous Serial Killer Surfaces in Beaufort” headlines would vanish, and maybe, if she was fast enough and smart enough, she could disappear back into her life as Bex Andrews, back into Michael and Denise’s family, back into her plain high school social life at Kill Devil Hills High.
A girl was murdered there after you came, that horrible voice hissed. You’ll never be normal. You’ll never disappear…
Bex didn’t even try to blink back the tears.
“You and me, Bethy girl. We’re special. There ain’t any like us. We stick together. We take care of each other. We’re special, Bethy. You and me.”
Her father’s voice was a smoke-filled whisper in her ear. The memory of her sitting on his knee, his big palm wrapped around her rib cage, was just a slice, a tiny vision.
“I’m helping Detective Schuster,” Bex said, jaws clenched.
But was he really the one who needed help?
Bex knew she should drop another bit of bait, but the page Beginnings caught her eye. She wasn’t sure she had seen it the night before. She clicked and the photo-heavy page loaded slowly. As the connection lagged, the picture came up incrementally, half-inch-thick bars creeping horizontally across the screen. She saw the top of her father’s head first, some caught-forever-on-film breeze casually lifting a few strands of hair that used to be the same color as Bex’s.
The page kept going and she was struck still, staring at a photo of her family—mother, father, daughter—that she never remembered seeing. There was another photo inset, a smaller one of her father and Gran, and finally, the same picture that had sat on the mantel every Christmas. This one had text across the front and a bold, red circle around Bex’s smiling mother with her hands protectively gripping her daughter. Someone had scrawled “Victim zero?” with three big question marks and a typed parenthetical: “(first wife).” The text along the bottom read:
Did our serial have a practice vic or “victim zero” in his own wife? He married nineteen-year old Carrboro, NC, resident Naomi Lee who he met at his job at Joe’s Tires. Lee was pregnant. The couple moved to Raleigh where daughter Beth Anne was born.
Bex’s heart began to thud. She scrolled with the text, and a black-and-white square popped up showing a picture of her parents, younger than she ever remembered, smiling while sitting on the back of a car. In it, her mother held a tiny bouquet against the slight bump at her belly. Bex had never seen the picture, had never known that her mother was nineteen or from Carrboro, or that she herself had been a bump straining against her mother’s lacy, white shift dress the day her parents married. She didn’t know any of this but a stranger with a fake name did. A complete stranger was filling in the gaps in her history, stocking it with pictures, even.
Bex felt sick. She continued to read.
Naomi “abandoned” her family when her daughter was barely six years old. Or did she? She shares a lot of the same physical traits as the Wife Collector victims.
Bex couldn’t read anymore. She slammed the lid of her laptop down, pacing. She tried to turn on the TV, but every channel was running and rerunning what seemed to be the same photo series of her father and the victims. Doe-eyed anchors looked concerned while news reporters peppered the broadcast with general serial killer “facts.” She started to play music but every song seemed to be specifically chosen to make her feel guilty, to remind her that she was no good. She couldn’t be good; she likely shared the blood of a serial killer.
The tiny ribbon of hope inside her, that inkling of thought that maybe he wasn’t guilty, was beaten to a pulp by the websites, the pictures, the reminders that she didn’t really know him at all. That should have made her feel better. It should have made her more resilient, more determined to send him to prison where he belonged. But all it did was turn her into a quivering heap lying on her bedroom floor and feeling hopeless and horrible.
She was through crying and half-asleep when Detective Schuster called.
“I guess you’ve seen the news.”
Bex nodded, then mumbled, “Hard not to.”
“Have you gotten anything from him?”
A sob lodged in her throat and burned at the edges of her eyes. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
The detective paused on his end, and Bex could hear him suck in a long, slow breath. “I know this is hard, Bex. But this is so, so important. Especially now. He knows that the world is looking for him. He’s going to need help. He’s going to be looking for someone who will sympathize with him. Your dad’s smart. You could very well be our only hope of catching him before…”
Bex knew what he was going to say: before he kills again. He had to say it, had to pin her with it because all she wanted to do was tuck her head in the sand and fall into a dreamless sleep that would last until the whole ordeal was over. But saying no was as good as becoming a monster herself.
“Let me think about it,” she whispered.