Twisted by Hannah Jayne(2)
Bex felt her mouth drop open. “I’m sorry, what?”
Denise tucked a strand of deep-brown hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry, Bex. That’s such a cool name, by the way. I’m probably just talking your ear off. We’re just really happy to have you here. I know it can’t be easy for you…”
The familiar lump started to form in the back of her throat and Bex shifted in the car seat, working the seat belt strap between her fingers. Her grandmother’s face flashed in her mind, and the familiar smells of the house where Bex had lived since she was seven years old filled her nostrils—her grandmother’s powdery, lavender smell; the sweet, cloying scent of night jasmine when it wafted through her bedroom curtains; the earthy smell of hot grass as she tromped barefoot through it.
But that was a world away in another life. Her grandmother had passed seven months ago and Bex’s home had been sold. She’d been shifted into a “temporary care situation,” which basically meant she was stuck in a cross between an orphanage and juvenile hall until a foster home willing to take her opened up.
And when one did, it was across the state in the Outer Banks with Denise and Michael Pierson, a couple in their early forties who only knew that Bex had lived with her grandmother.
They didn’t know the truth.
They didn’t know that Bex’s own mother had disappeared when Bex was only five years old and still called Beth Anne Reimer. They didn’t know that Beth Anne was doted on by a father who lavished her with costume jewelry and funky purses.
They didn’t know that all the gifts Beth Anne’s father gave her had once belonged to women in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Women who Beth Anne’s father—dubbed the Wife Collector in the press—had murdered.
Allegedly. The word gnawed at Bex’s periphery.
It was Beth Anne herself, a shy, moon-eyed seven-year-old, who had pointed a chubby finger at her own father when the police came to her house. Yes, she knew the pretty blond woman from the photograph, she had said to the police officer. The girl had been with them for two days before getting into the car with Beth Anne’s daddy. No, she didn’t know where they had gone. All she knew was that the blond lady never came back to the house, never came back for the nubby scarf she had wound around Beth Anne’s neck, so Beth Anne had kept it for herself.
It was just a few days later that Beth Anne’s daddy was locked in that police cruiser and scuttled down to the courthouse. The newspapers and local news station splashed headlines everywhere and that single word—allegedly—seemed to grow smaller, to fade into the enormous text around it.
Jackson Reimer, Alleged Wife Collector Murderer, Held in Local Jail
Whenever one of the coifed and pinched news anchors said her daddy’s name, that word was always attached: “Jackson Reimer allegedly murdered these women in a fit of rage…”
The memory still nagged her—her father, a murderer, and she barely a second grader, thrust in front of the media as “The Devil’s Own Daughter” who did a noble thing by turning him in. Back then, she didn’t have any idea what that meant. Back then, she wasn’t able to decide if what she saw and what she was told she saw were the same thing. Back then, she didn’t know her words would be used against the one person who had always taken care of her: her father. But he had never been tried, never been convicted, because he had disappeared. Then the news anchors started to drop the alleged all together.
Denise flipped on her blinker, the click-click-click bringing Bex back to the here and now. “Are you hungry?” Denise asked.
Bex shifted, pushing the memory—the broken look in her father’s eyes, the sound of his shackles scraping on the cement as they led him away—as far out of her present mind as she dared. “A little bit.”
“Well, Michael’s at home. He’s a master chef—at least he thinks he is. Really, he’s lousy in front of anything but an open flame, and even that’s iffy. He’s doing burgers. I hope that’s okay?”
Bex nodded. Her head was an absolute mess, the events of the last twenty-four hours humming in her brain like the whir of the plane’s engine. Since Tuesday, everything had been new. The first time she had dyed her hair. The first time she had cut it more than an inch. The first time she had been on a plane. The first time she ever had real hope that she could put her past behind her and never again be the Wife Collector’s daughter.
She swallowed hard when Denise aimed her car between the two huge, brick fences of the Kill Devil Hills beachfront neighborhood. Brush grass and trees lined the sidewalks, yawning into the night and softening the edges of the comfortable, cookie-cutter homes on either side of the street. Denise reached out and gingerly patted Bex’s knee. “Home, sweet home, hon. You ready?”
Bex didn’t know how to answer.
? ? ?
Denise was right. Michael wasn’t much of a cook, but he piled Bex’s burger with three kinds of cheese to make up for the half-charred puck of ground beef and talked relentlessly about the university where he worked as a professor of anthropology, and Bex kind of liked him. He was funny and animated, and by the time Bex’s burger was reduced to crumbs, she and Denise were holding their stomachs and wiping tears from their eyes.
When Bex’s eyes flicked to the clock on the stove—it was nearly nine by then—she realized that the last two hours of her new life had been just that: brand-new. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten a terrible burger, laughed so hard it hurt, and not ached inside, missing her grandmother. She couldn’t remember the last time she was this carefree, this happy.