An Honest Lie(80)

His torso jerked and then he turned around. He was smiling, one side of his mouth jerked up like a cartoon character.

“Hey, Summer.”

Something was different, wrong. Not wrong—right. That was it: he’d shaved. Without the beard, he looked a lot more like a kid. She could still see that kid in her memories, tripping over his words and his feet...being tripped. Looking like he’d explode every time Taured paid attention to him.

He’d been on the receiving end of Skye’s right arm, just like her. At the time, she’d only heard the rumors about what had happened to him; it hadn’t been out in the open, in front of most of the compound, like with her. Some of the boys had seen it, and then there was Sara, who, when taking her father his dinner tray, had seen Ginger in the infirmary.

“But why?” Summer had asked. Sara hadn’t wanted to tell her, but Summer had pressed her, so she had: Taured caught Ginger touching his thing. Looking at something bad and touching his thing. Taured said it was a terrible sin. So he had Skye hit him so hard his jaw dislocated.

That had been a few weeks before Skye had launched the baseball at her own face. After that, everything had snowballed, and Ginger had receded to the back of her mind with everything else that happened at the compound. To be happy was to forget, but something had changed in Rainy. Remembering hadn’t felt painful when she went back to Friendship. That had surprised her. She’d expected to feel depleted being there and, instead, felt energized, furious. She’d stayed away for so long to protect Summer, not realizing that it wasn’t Summer who’d be going back: it would be Rainy.

She had just disfigured his face further by breaking his nose. Ginger wasn’t going to poison her anymore, she realized. She’d changed the course of her punishment.

“Skye got you, too,” she said, and his smile dropped. “Do you remember when he broke my nose?”

“He didn’t break your nose,” Ginger said quickly. “Taured broke your nose.”

“He was too much of a coward to do it himself.” Rainy laughed. It was a genuine sound, and Ginger looked startled. “He used kids to do his dirty work.”

Ginger was visibly upset now. “He was the coach—the one in control.”

“And now what? You’re the one in control?”

“Looks like it.”

He was still drunk, she realized, swishy on his feet. He took a step toward her and thought better of it. Turning his back to her, he opened the bag. The zipper was loud. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Braithe move. Ginger saw it, too, and his head snapped sideways. She saw the twisted side of his face where his jaw had never quite healed properly, more visible now. He’d used his beard to hide it, like wearing a mask, but today he wanted her to see. Why?

He’s going to kill you, and he wanted you to know who he is first. The thought came in clear and sharp. She watched him take a hammer out of the bag, set it neatly on the table. He glanced at her, and then kept working. Another hammer, and then another, and he was organizing them. Not by size: he took out a small hammer painted entirely gold and set it next to a silver one with a black handle. He was lining them up like a collection. It felt like there was an anchor in her intestines: the drop and pull hurt. Oh my God, he’s going to make you suffer...

The sweat beaded at her hairline and trickled down the side of her face.

Derek’s face had paled when she’d asked him how his mother passed. She’d sworn she could see his heart pounding beneath the polyester of his shirt and had immediately regretted asking. She’d expected him to say cancer; that had been a hopeful thought on Rainy’s part, wishing for Sara to have died of something...normal? Cancer seemed safer than what he’d said; she could understand cancer.

“It was a homicide,” he’d mumbled. “They’ve never found her killer.”

This is what she’d known in her gut ever since he’d told her Sara had died. But she’d thought right away that it was Taured. He’d killed her mother; why not Derek’s?

Until she got back to the hotel in Vegas and had opened the Ziploc bag—the floppy disk, the photos, the driver’s licenses, both her mother’s and Feena’s dad’s—and she’d put it all together. Taured was a killer, but his insanity had created other killers. The one standing before her was working his way through the floppy disk, punishing the women Taured had already punished by taking those photos in the first place. But why?

“Isn’t it enough that I—that Sara—had to live through that place? That he drugged teenage girls and photographed them naked to blackmail them and their parents? That he destroyed our lives? Now you want to hunt us down and kill us?” Spittle flew out of her mouth, clinging to her chin. She’d screamed the last part and now Ginger was red with outrage. But he seemed to collect himself, and in the next minute he was smiling again. God, she wished he hadn’t shaved his beard. What he said next made the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention.

“Don’t be stupid. I never had to hunt Sara. She was a lamb. I just took her while she was visiting that cactus you girls used to love. Do you remember how you’d get all horny for that cactus?”

She opened her jaw and screamed at him in anger, her neck extended as far as it would go. That did it. He stalked toward Braithe, the little gold hammer in his hand.

“No! No!” Rainy knew she shouldn’t have screamed. “I won’t yell again—”