The Drifter(92)

“I still hate it. Overhead lighting.”

“And then,” Betsy said, replaying her moves in her head, feeling so completely transported, so present in that apartment in 1990 that she could describe the smell of the place, the exact shade of white paint on the wall. “I walked down the hall to the bottom of the stairs and I looked up, but as soon as I heard that creaky floorboard, you know, the one at the end of Ginny’s bed, I ran.”

She remembered racing through the parking lot, how startled she was by Gavin’s headlights.

“It must have been terrifying,” Caroline said.

“But all I could think, all I’ve been able to think almost every single day since it happened, was ‘Maybe I could have scared him off? Maybe I could have saved her?’ But I ran. I was too high. I was too afraid of getting in trouble, of what my mom would say. I convinced myself I was being paranoid. I called 911, but the story I wanted to tell the operator didn’t make sense, so I hung up. I didn’t have any details. I thought I was making it all up, being high and crazy like always, you know. I didn’t think they’d believe me anyway.”

Betsy started to sob, and Caroline put her arms around her.

“Ginny had a headache,” Caroline told Betsy as she stroked the back of her head. “She’d been struggling with it all day. And she was worried about you. But I begged her to stay and made her promise that she’d go upstairs, grab a blanket and a pillow, and find a dark corner to sleep it off. Instead, she grabbed her bag and snuck out the back door. Once she walked into that apartment, nothing could have saved her.”

“You ladies OK?” called Teddy from the parking lot.

“Oh Lord, would you just fuck off already?” Caroline said, not loud enough for him to hear.

“Say again?” he asked.

“I said, ‘Please, just give us five more minutes!’” Caroline shouted.

“I was convinced I was hearing things, like I was hallucinating and paranoid,” Betsy continued. “So I just ran away. I ran through the parking lot, and I saw Gavin, who’d driven there to find me. And we took off. I didn’t call 911 until we pulled into the Steak ’n Shake. I could have saved her.”

“Oh no, sweetheart, no,” she said, shaking her head, grabbing both of her hands now. “It was too late. You couldn’t have saved her.”

“Wait, how do you know?”

“I was the one who found her the next day, you know that,” said Caroline. “I’ve been over this so many times, sorry if I seem detached. I lashed out in the car at poor Teddy, but this is stuff I’ve been over and over a thousand times.” She took the last drag of her cigarette and flicked it away. “That was disgusting, by the way. So I went to the apartment to check on Ginny, who’d gone home sick from rush the night before. We were watching a movie. I don’t know, it was twenty years ago, right? I can’t remember what I was doing last week, but I remember everything about that night except for what movie we watched. Anyway, she snuck out without telling anybody, because she knew we wouldn’t have let her go. I remember that conversation we had in my car, on the way to Walmart. What were the odds? Like, of all the women in that town, he was coming after us? Early the next morning, I searched the house looking for her. She wasn’t at breakfast. I realized she must have taken off. I thought, That sneaky little bitch, and I called the apartment. Nobody answered, and I started to worry a little. I borrowed somebody’s car. It was a stick shift, I remember that, and I almost left the transmission in the middle of 16th Street four different times on that short drive. All I can remember thinking was that it wasn’t the first time she’d slept through the phone ringing, you know, that she was just sleeping it off.”

“Oh God, I feel sick,” said Betsy. “I always assumed you were the one who found her.”

“You know that pattern the investigators mentioned, of stalking his victims? Well, they said that McRae also had a pattern with his method, the way he killed them. He’d assault them first, you know, sexually.”

Caroline paused.

“Look, I know this is hard. I know that I seem crazy-detached right now, but I have to be. You have to know the facts.”

“No, I get it, Car,” said Betsy. “I’ve been strangling myself with these words for so long, it’s a relief just to hear someone say them out loud.”

“Alright, well, stop me if it’s too much. So he’d force himself on them, and then he’d stab them, repeatedly, and do all sorts of other sick stuff . . . and when he was finished, he’d wash them with dish soap and water to remove all of the evidence before he arranged them in weird poses.”

Betsy turned to vomit in the landscaping behind her.

“Oh God, too much, right? I told you. I’m sorry,” she said. Caroline rubbed her back. The waiter who was smoking nearby pretended not to notice, but nearly sprinted inside.

“I read all of this stuff a long time ago,” Betsy said, “but it’s been a rough day, the bourbon, the nicotine.”

Caroline offered her water bottle.

“I’m just going to tell you the rest because you have to hear it. The police said that McRae must have left in a rush. The dish soap and the bloody rag were left on the floor in a mess. At the other crime scenes, he hung around after to clean up. Sometimes he would eat food from the kitchen. Can you believe it? But it was clear that he left in a hurry that night, like he got spooked and took off. The way I see it, he heard you come in the door and ran. But it wasn’t until after she was dead.”