Twisted by Hannah Jayne(38)

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.





Twenty-Two


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.