Rowan rolls out onto the street, water droplets clinging to her windshield. At this rate, she’ll use up her punch card by midweek, if not sooner.
She will never be clean. That much is apparent. No matter how many times the bear claw locks onto her tire and pulls her vehicle through a gauntlet of soaped-up scrub brushes, the filth of Black Harbor will remain. It’s deep-set and everywhere, like lymphatic cancer. There’s no cutting it out, no blasting it into atoms too infinitesimal to matter.
Moments ago, she closed her eyes and meditated, inhaling and exhaling a series of calming ocean breaths to the rhythm of the brushes. The word BITCH glared angrily at her, as though it had been scratched on the insides of her eyelids instead of Madison’s lip.
Liz believes it’s the killer’s handiwork, done very last. After the strangulation. After smashing the victim’s teeth with a rock.
“Like a signature?” Rowan wondered.
Liz peered at her through the fog that had collected on the inside of her face shield. She lifted it to breathe. “I guess we’ll see, right?”
The chill that seeped into Rowan’s bloodstream, then, was so frigid, it felt as if someone injected a syringe of liquid nitrogen into her bone marrow. She knew what Liz meant: that if more bodies popped up with slanderous words carved into their skin or the inside of their mouths, they could be dealing with something far more sinister than a crime of passion.
“Police suspect a male aggressor,” she mentioned, remembering what Kole had said Thursday night at the scene. Statistically, you and I both know this was a male.
“Yeah.” Liz pouted thoughtfully. “They were definitely larger—at least large enough to overpower our victim, who’s fairly tall. But honestly … it’s anyone’s game. Whoever strangled her knew what they were doing, I can tell you that.”
Her insides thawed just a bit. Chloe was smaller than Madison. She wouldn’t have been able to overpower her. Unless she’d had help. Rowan dismissed the notion as hastily as it had come.
But, the safety pins. The cuts were too superficial to be from anything much more substantial. And lately, Chloe had taken to wearing them all the time, pierced through her ears or the cuffs of her sweatshirts, even stuck through the knit fabric of her stocking hat.
“As in … they’ve done this before?” she asked, returning to the conversation.
“Or practiced. You know, humans aren’t all that hard to kill. One wrong kink of the neck and we’re”—she snapped her fingers—“kaput.”
The low, vibrating yawn of her garage door lets her know she’s home. She was so lost in thought, she doesn’t even remember driving the short distance from the car wash to Belgrave Circle. Her body has switched to autopilot. Dread gnaws at her brain stem. That’s when bad things happen.
It’s why all this has come about. She knows it without a shadow of a doubt. Her past has come back to haunt her in true karmic fashion.
Slowly, Rowan presses the brake to pause in her driveway. The front porch is empty, the jack-o’-lanterns she and Chloe carved last week gone. Her vision blurs. Her jaw quivers as she fights back tears and remembers the quiet conversation they’d had while plopping handfuls of guts into a mixing bowl. How the tip of Chloe’s pink tongue peeked between her lips while she carved the faces of the tragedy and comedy masks on the gourd’s curved surface. They had names, Chloe informed her: Melpomene and Thalia, though now she can’t remember which is which.
Why would someone take them? She checks her mirrors to see if their smashed bits are strewn in the street, but it’s only copper- and rust-colored leaves that collect in the curtilage.
Rowan parks in the garage. The engine purrs. Exhaustion settles over her like a weighted blanket, and she feels suddenly as though she could fall asleep. It reminds her of when Chloe was a baby and the only way to get her to nap was to take her for a drive or set her bassinet on the dryer. There was some magic in the subtle vibration coupled with Rowan’s singing that soothed Chloe to sleep. “Skidamarink a dink a dink, skidamarink a doo…”
With a shaking hand, Rowan reaches for the glove box.
Click.
The door falls open and the cigarette box she’d stuffed precariously back inside yesterday morning tumbles out. She doesn’t go for the cigarette this time. Instead, she pinches the corner of newsprint and draws it out. Holding it taut but gently, she studies it.
On the right-hand side is a black-and-white thumbnail image of a girl. She’s forever fourteen, if Rowan remembers correctly, with a heart-shaped face and long, straight hair. Rowan caresses the picture with the edge of her thumb. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
The tang of salt awakens her taste buds. A glance in the rearview mirror reveals trails of tears streaming down her cheeks, disappearing into the seam between her lips and into the folds of her scarf. She can’t stand to look at herself. Her gaze falls back to the obituary, and she’s trapped in a simulation wherein “I’m sorry” are the only two words that remain of her vocabulary.
She doesn’t know whether she’s apologizing to Chloe or to the girl she killed eighteen years ago.
Katelynn Diggory was admitted for laryngeal surgery after recurring bouts of strep throat left the girl’s vocal cords badly damaged. Rowan was the attending anesthesiologist. The procedure of opening the airway and repairing the laryngeal framework took seven and a half hours, during which Rowan monitored and administered the anesthetic.
However, that meant she’d been working for twenty-six hours—awake for almost forty, as she’d been studying for exams. She’d already smoked an entire pack of Marlboros and her ride on the nicotine train had come to a crashing halt. She fell asleep right where she stood, and when she awoke it was to the high-pitched shriek of a flat line on Katelynn’s heart monitor.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers again. The air is thin and insubstantial. She can hardly get enough oxygen for a full breath. A pressure squeezes her temples, and in her mind, Katelynn’s face merges with Chloe’s, until she cannot determine which girl she is seeing.
The familiar heaviness takes over her now. Keeping her eyes open is too strenuous, even sitting upright seems an impossible task. She slumps forward, her cheekbone nestled into the curve of the steering wheel. The newsprint flutters out of her hand, and an indeterminate amount of time later, she is wrenched back into the waking world by the cacophony of slamming doors and her husband shouting at her to turn off the engine.