Twisted by Hannah Jayne(39)
“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?