Twisted (11 page)

“Excuse me!”

The kids at the party—about forty that Bex knew or recognized—reluctantly stopped talking and laughing to give Chelsea their attention. Someone even turned down the speakers when she cleared her throat and pinned them with what Bex was beginning to recognize as Chelsea’s patented glare of death.

“As we all know, a very dear friend passed away recently just a few dozen miles from here.”

The sweet warmth and comfort Bex had been feeling dissipated as quickly as mist on the waves. Trevor must have sensed it because he pulled her in to him again, but her entire body was stiff.

“The police haven’t caught Darla’s killer yet, but they have some good leads. They even think they have a suspect.”

Bex’s heart began to thud in her throat.

“The timing, the victimology are right…”

“But we’re not here to talk about her killer, we’re here to celebrate her life. Since Darla touched everyone here, we thought we would send her memory out with the waves. Everyone take a flower and think of your best memory with Darla, and we’ll throw them out into the water.” Chelsea beamed while Laney began handing out the single-stemmed flowers.

There was some grumbling, some muffled laughter, but all Bex could focus on was what Chelsea had said: “…they even think they have a suspect.”

She broke away from Trevor and zigged through the crowd to Chelsea, blindly taking the flower Laney handed her.

“The police have a suspect?” she asked, her stomach in a vice. “Who?”

Chelsea scanned the dunes as though everyone were listening. “There was a witness who saw a car pulled over on the side of the road the…the night just before we found her.”

“What kind of car?”

Laney shifted the few remaining flowers. “Just like an old truck or something, but the witness got a pretty good look at the guy and actually recognized him.”

“You know that weird security guy from the mall?” Chelsea asked. “He was always around us when we were with Darla. Like, always for the last six months. He was totally obsessed with her.”

“Well,” Laney clarified, “Darla did shoplift.”

“Yes.” Chelsea crossed her arms in front of her chest and jutted out one hip. “That could be what drove him over the edge, you know? Like, here’s this perfect little rich girl
stealing
.”

Relief flooded Bex’s system. “Oh.”

“Anyway, that’s kind of what the police are saying.”

Bex nodded and numbly followed Chelsea and Laney to the edge of the water. It lapped at the tips of her bare feet, the water so frigid it was nearly painful—but feeling something she could actually identify felt good.

There was a lot of murmuring and sniffling as the white flowers were flung through the air and caught on the dark water. Bex held hers, spinning it around and around in her hand until her palms were heady with the carnation’s sweet perfume.

“I didn’t know you, Darla,” she said in her head, “but…” She didn’t know how to finish. If Darla was murdered by the security guard, that meant Bex’s father didn’t do it. He hadn’t come back to taunt her, to hurt her, to murder everyone she loved. She blinked away tears. It also meant that he hadn’t come back for her at all.

• • •

Trevor and Bex drove home in silence. When he reached out for her and laced his fingers through hers, Bex wanted to feel that same velvety, stomach-tingling twitter that she had felt before, but she was numb and empty. As they turned the corner, a spark of anger started low in her belly—low but big enough to fill the void. Her father wasn’t going to come back for her. He probably never thought of her, while she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Two hundred miles and ten years later, he was still invading her life, still snuffing out any hint of normalcy she reached for.

Bex squeezed Trevor’s hand, and when he slowed to a stop and grinned at her, she leaned across the center console and pressed her lips against his, stamping out her self-consciousness.

He kissed her back. All her embarrassment faded into an incredible, heart-pounding zing that engulfed her whole body, making every inch of her feel alive. Her fingertips were vibrating as she laced them behind Trevor’s neck. His were warm and comforting as his hands snaked behind her back. They would have kept going, lost in the churning surf of that kiss and of each other, but the person in the car behind them starting wailing on the horn.

Trevor snapped away and stamped on the gas, and Bex laughed, jolting back in her seat.

“I wouldn’t have done that if I’d known it would break traffic rules.”

He shrugged and shot her a half smile that was as wonderful as his kiss. “Nothing in the driver’s ed manual about kissing at stop signs. At least, nothing against it.”

Bex’s head was spinning when Trevor turned into her neighborhood. If memories of her father were still playing in her head, they were layered over by the look in Trevor’s eyes, the way his hand felt in hers, the way his lips felt on hers.

“You’re my first boyfriend,” Bex blurted out. She immediately slapped a hand over her mouth. “I can’t believe I said that.”

Trevor smiled his easy smile and brushed a lock of her pale-brown hair from her forehead. “I find that hard to believe. I bet all the guys at your old school wanted to date you but were too nervous to ask. Just my luck, huh?”

Bex thought of those days when she’d curl up on her bed, filling out workbooks that were supposed to pass as “school.”

“Not really. I bet you’ve had a ton of girlfriends though.” She worked the strap of the seat belt with her fingertips, focusing intently on the grain of the blue fabric.

“Not a ton. Just one serious one…before you.” He flipped on his blinker, waiting for traffic to pass. “Darla.”

Bex felt her heartbeat speed up. “I didn’t know you—?”

“Bex, your house.”

They were still four houses down, but the flashing lights from the police cruisers illuminated the entire front seat of Trevor’s car. She stared, mesmerized, mouth slightly open as two officers strode from their car and up the walk to her house. The front door was open, the lights inside blazing like day. Around them, neighbors were coming out of their houses in their bathrobes and slippers, carefully picking the way to the edge of their lawns or gathering on the sidewalk to see what was the matter.

“I wonder what happened…” Trevor started.

“Let me out.”

“What?”

Bex unclicked her seat belt and tried the locked door again. “Let me out, Trevor. I have to go. I have to see what’s wrong.”

The sound of the doors unlocking echoed in her ears and Bex flung open the door, reminding herself to breathe as a hot lump tightened her throat.

Please be okay, please be okay, please be okay
, she begged in her head
.

Behind her, Trevor was yelling her name. In front of her, a looming man in a Kill Devil Hills police uniform was yelling at her to stop. Bex tried to dart past him to find Michael and Denise, but the man caught her roughly. She slammed into his chest, the itchy feel of his uniform triggering another old memory.

“Relax, little lady,” the cop said, his drawl thick and drawn out.

“I won’t let you take my family away again,” Bex said through gritted teeth.

The man blinked at her but didn’t let her go. “This is a crime scene.”

“Bex! Oh thank God!”

When she saw Michael jogging down the walk, then beelining toward her, something inside Bex broke. She was coughing and crying and hiccupping as Michael held his arms out to her. She fell into them, suddenly unable to support her own weight.

“It’s all right, Officer. She’s our foster daughter.”

“What happened, Michael? What happened? Is Denise okay? I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

Michael cradled Bex’s chin in his hand. “You have nothing to be sorry about, Bex. Denise is going to be fine. She’s right inside. We’ve been trying to call you, but you weren’t answering your cell.”

Bex nodded, gulping. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “What happened?”

“We had a little break-in.” Michael shrugged his shoulders almost apologetically and squeezed Bex’s shoulder.

“Oh.”

Michael led her into the house, and Bex looked around. Denise was sitting on the couch, pinching the back of her hand while she talked. An officer loomed above her, writing down everything she said in his little black pocket notebook.

“Oh, there’s our daughter now.” She beckoned for Bex to come over, then nearly crushed her in a tight embrace. “We’re so glad she wasn’t here alone.”

Bex didn’t have time to dwell on the fact that both Michael and Denise had referred to her as their daughter before the officer turned his notebook on her.

“What time did you leave, miss?”

Bex looked around her, trying to remember what happened before the bonfire. Then she thought of the detective lieutenant and felt exhausted. She found Denise’s hand and squeezed. “A little after seven, I guess. Is this—did he do this?”

The living room where they were seated was a disaster. Pillows were strewn everywhere, drawers dumped. It was chaos but it didn’t look like anything was gone.
Then again
, Bex considered,
how would I know what Michael and Denise had?

The cops’ eyebrows went up. “Who are you referring to?”

“The…the… Whoever did this… Did they…” She gestured to the mess around them.

“Yes. At nineteen hundred hours—”

Denise stood up, putting her arm lightly on the officer’s arm to stop him. “Are we done here? With all due respect, I don’t want to frighten Bex any more than she already has been. She wasn’t even here.”

The officer looked around Denise and pinned Bex with a stare that made her certain he knew exactly what she was hiding. “Did you notice anything suspicious when you left? Did you see anyone around the neighborhood?”

She wagged her head. “No, sir.” Bex said it in her mind, but wasn’t sure she had actually said the words out loud.

It didn’t take long for the police to file out and the commotion to die down. When the last neighbor left after wanting to hear the story again, Michael closed the front door and flipped the bolt.

“Fat lot of good that thing did,” Denise huffed.

“What happened?”

Michael pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sometime around nine o’clock, someone slipped into the house.” He glanced back at the door. “We’re not sure how. Everything was locked when we came home.”

Denise shuddered, then looked at Bex. “Are you sure you locked the door behind you when you left?” Her stare wasn’t accusatory, but Bex’s blood ran cold.

Bex cleared her throat. “Um…”
Did I?
It was hard to remember what had happened. The afternoon seemed a million miles away. “I think so.”

Michael snatched up a pillow and handed it to Denise. “The police think it was just some kids or something. Not much was taken. Just a few trinkets, mainly, and some jewelry that Denise had lying around. They didn’t seem to go for any of the big stuff—TV, laptops. Seemed almost like they were just screwing around.”

Denise’s eyes were saucer wide but blank. “Or trying to send a message.”

• • •

Bex tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable in her bed. She tried to think of the bonfire, to relish every moment of her date with Trevor, especially their kiss. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw Detective Schuster and that yellowed newspaper clipping.

“He might try to contact you…”
Schuster’s voice reverberated through her head. Then Denise’s voice:
“…Trying to send a message.”

“No.” Bex gritted her teeth and clamped her eyelids shut. She pressed her palms over her ears, but the voices rolled over and over, slightly muffled by the sound of the waves on the beach and images of Darla.

“They said it was the security guard,” Bex told herself. “It wasn’t him. It was a couple of kids ransacking the house. Not”—she felt the familiar lump growing in her throat—“him.”

Bex was starting to nod off when a gentle rustling made her sit bolt upright. She glanced around the darkened room, sure that the ransacking kids or her father or Detective Schuster or any other manner of boogeyman was waiting for her in the blackness. Bex clicked on her bedside light, and a hollow laugh twittered in her chest. Her bedroom window was half-open, the night breeze whistling in and lifting the gauzy curtains. The wind had peeled a couple of loose pages from the top of her desk.

“I’m so paranoid.”

Bex slammed the window shut and gathered up the fallen papers. When she saw the one on top, her saliva soured. Her head throbbed. She tried to focus on the page in her shaking fingers.

“Black Bear Diner!” Beth Anne slammed the heavy door of her father’s old truck and ran across the dusty parking lot. She pulled open the door to the restaurant and was immediately hit with warm, familiar smells. Waffles. Pancakes. Thick maple syrup. Bacon.

“You two here again?” The blond waitress had her hand on her hip and her lips pursed, but the edges curled up into a provocative smile.

“I guess this is kind of like our place,” her father said, talking to the waitress over Beth Anne’s head.

“Our place!” Beth Anne repeated, helping herself to one of the coffee-stained menus.

She hadn’t seen a Black Bear Diner menu in ten years, but the one in her hands was authentic, coffee stained. It smelled vaguely of maple syrup and had that sweet pancake-batter smell. It was old and crisp, the ink smeared and faded. She had no idea how it came to be on her desk, in her room.

She thought again of the ransacked house, the tortured look on Denise’s face.

Detective Schuster.

The yellowed newspaper clipping.

“Our place,” Bex muttered, her blood going ice-cold.

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.”