Twisted by Hannah Jayne(44)
That snowy day in Raleigh crashed back on Bex. It wasn’t the boots. It was the game. “It’s my game, Bethy. I make them up. I make them all up.”
Bex went to her computer, though everything inside her told her to stop. She clicked the message icon.
GAMECREATOR has requested a private chat.
????
GAMECREATOR has logged off.
Twenty-Four
“Hey, Bexy!”
Denise gave her a kiss on the top of her head, and Bex smiled at the linoleum. She felt silly for liking the way Denise sometimes babied her.
“How’d you sleep?”
Bex couldn’t remember if she’d slept, but she found that she was getting better and better at stamping down the tsunami of feelings she had every day. The chat request from GAMECREATOR hung on her periphery, but she reminded herself that there were thirty-eight other messages from people with provocative names—like RALEIGHRAIDER and THEREALWC—who seemed to be nothing more than rabid Wife Collector fanboys. There was no real reason to suspect that GAMECREATOR was any different…right?
She’d had thought the same when Detective Schuster sent a text this morning—simple, to the point, very Schuster.
Schuster: Any contact?
Bex had hesitated for a half second before hastily typing, Nope.
Now she absently touched the phone in her pocket as she shrugged at Denise. “Good, I guess. You’re back from your run already?”
“Slow day in the track shoes. Just been puttering around here, baking cookies, doing the nineteen-fifties-wife thing.” She held out a plate stacked with badly misshapen cookies and frowned at them. “I haven’t really perfected it.”
Bex took a cookie. “I never judge a cookie by its shape.” She bit. “Mmm, good.”
Denise handed her a glass of milk and Bex turned, catching a snatch of television screen in her peripheral. She froze, her saliva going sour and metallic. The chill of the glass froze her fingers and the cold went all the way up her arm; then the glass was going down, slow, slow, slow until it thunked on the floor and spattered the icy liquid against her calves, the remainder of the milk pouring out of the now-shattered glass at her feet.
From somewhere, she heard Denise calling to her, but all she could focus on was her father. His smiling face beamed out at her from the television screen. Bex had seen the picture they used a dozen times on screen, then a thousand times in her memory. Every time was a punch in the gut—a pang of memory, a starburst of rage, and that overwhelming, crushing guilt. That man wasn’t a murderer; that man was her father.
The news ticker scrolled underneath his picture:
Breaking News: Possible Sighting of Jackson Reimer, Alleged “Wife Collector” Murderer in Beaufort, South Carolina.
A parade of the Wife Collector’s victims followed his picture as it always had. The girls, blond and smiling, frozen in some other time; then shots of the dump sites; and finally, a body in a carved-out rectangle of earth, bare knees hugged to her chest. The news always blurred out the body, but Bex knew who it was—the Wife Collector’s sixth victim, Amanda Perkins.
Her stomach rolled over on itself. You did that. You let that happen. Just like you let it happen to Darla. Bex was shaking her head, the tips of her too-short hair prickly against her cheeks. “No,” she whispered. “No.”
“Bex!”
She could feel Denise’s hands on her shoulders, leading her to a chair. Bex sank into it.
“What is it, honey?” Denise glanced at the screen, grabbed the remote, and clicked off the television. “Are you worried about that? The Wife Collector? Oh, honey, how do you even know about that? He was way before you would have known about such things. No one is going to get you here. I will never let anything like that happen to you.” She offered a reassuring smile, brushing Bex’s hair from her forehead. “Beaufort is more than four hundred miles away. You’re safe here with us.”
“I-I guess.” Bex stopped, sucked in a long breath, and tried to gather herself. Denise would understand, she thought quickly. Then, Denise can never know. They won’t love you anymore. You are the child of a serial killer…and even if you’re not, you’re the child who drove away her own father when you provided the police with evidence. She gritted her teeth, forcing that voice down. “I guess I just got a little freaked out is all. Let me clean up.”
Denise waved Bex away. “Why don’t you go change? You’ve got milk all over your shoes.”
Bex nodded, hoping Denise wasn’t watching as she took the stairs two at a time, pressing the pads of her fingertips against her temples. Somewhere between the first bite of cookie and seeing her father’s face, her head had started pounding and her stomach roiling. The news was out. Everyone would know. Her father had resurfaced and—and what?
Bex’s eyes started to sting. In the ten years that he’d been gone, her father had never tried to contact her. She used to pretend that he did, that one day she would move a bureau or open a closet and find a stack of old, unopened letters that her grandmother had never given her. There would be birthday cards and Christmas wishes, her dad asking about school and boys, and apologizing. Hoping his daughter was okay. After her grandmother’s death, Bex had scoured the house, both hoping that he’d left her something and that he had not. She could never be sure if it was better that her father distanced himself from her rather than keep her close. For Bex, it hurt either way.