Twisted by Hannah Jayne(46)

The page kept going and she was struck still, staring at a photo of her family—mother, father, daughter—that she never remembered seeing. There was another photo inset, a smaller one of her father and Gran, and finally, the same picture that had sat on the mantel every Christmas. This one had text across the front and a bold, red circle around Bex’s smiling mother with her hands protectively gripping her daughter. Someone had scrawled “Victim zero?” with three big question marks and a typed parenthetical: “(first wife).” The text along the bottom read:

Did our serial have a practice vic or “victim zero” in his own wife? He married nineteen-year old Carrboro, NC, resident Naomi Lee who he met at his job at Joe’s Tires. Lee was pregnant. The couple moved to Raleigh where daughter Beth Anne was born.

Bex’s heart began to thud. She scrolled with the text, and a black-and-white square popped up showing a picture of her parents, younger than she ever remembered, smiling while sitting on the back of a car. In it, her mother held a tiny bouquet against the slight bump at her belly. Bex had never seen the picture, had never known that her mother was nineteen or from Carrboro, or that she herself had been a bump straining against her mother’s lacy, white shift dress the day her parents married. She didn’t know any of this but a stranger with a fake name did. A complete stranger was filling in the gaps in her history, stocking it with pictures, even.

Bex felt sick. She continued to read.

Naomi “abandoned” her family when her daughter was barely six years old. Or did she? She shares a lot of the same physical traits as the Wife Collector victims.

Bex couldn’t read anymore. She slammed the lid of her laptop down, pacing. She tried to turn on the TV, but every channel was running and rerunning what seemed to be the same photo series of her father and the victims. Doe-eyed anchors looked concerned while news reporters peppered the broadcast with general serial killer “facts.” She started to play music but every song seemed to be specifically chosen to make her feel guilty, to remind her that she was no good. She couldn’t be good; she likely shared the blood of a serial killer.

The tiny ribbon of hope inside her, that inkling of thought that maybe he wasn’t guilty, was beaten to a pulp by the websites, the pictures, the reminders that she didn’t really know him at all. That should have made her feel better. It should have made her more resilient, more determined to send him to prison where he belonged. But all it did was turn her into a quivering heap lying on her bedroom floor and feeling hopeless and horrible.

She was through crying and half-asleep when Detective Schuster called.

“I guess you’ve seen the news.”

Bex nodded, then mumbled, “Hard not to.”

“Have you gotten anything from him?”

A sob lodged in her throat and burned at the edges of her eyes. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The detective paused on his end, and Bex could hear him suck in a long, slow breath. “I know this is hard, Bex. But this is so, so important. Especially now. He knows that the world is looking for him. He’s going to need help. He’s going to be looking for someone who will sympathize with him. Your dad’s smart. You could very well be our only hope of catching him before…”

Bex knew what he was going to say: before he kills again. He had to say it, had to pin her with it because all she wanted to do was tuck her head in the sand and fall into a dreamless sleep that would last until the whole ordeal was over. But saying no was as good as becoming a monster herself.

“Let me think about it,” she whispered.





Twenty-Five


Bex stayed after school to make up the geography test she’d missed when Michael and Denise let her sleep in. When she finished, she slipped the paper into her teacher’s wire basket, said good-bye, and stepped out into the hallway. It was completely deserted. The floors looked like they had just been cleaned, and the smell of chlorine and industrial cleaning products stung Bex’s nose.

Her footsteps echoed throughout the hall, as did the footsteps of the person behind her. Bex casually glanced over her shoulder, then stopped.

It was the girl from the funeral, the girl who had waved to her.

Tension pulled Bex’s shoulders up to her earlobes. “Can I help you with something?”

Clearly startled, the girl blinked her deep-brown eyes.

“I-I…” The girl swallowed and blinked again. She straightened. “I’m the girl whose mother was killed by your father.”

Someone had sucked all the air out of the room and Bex couldn’t move, her mouth open, eyes wide. In her mind’s eye, she doubled over herself, oofing from the sucker punch to the gut.

“Wh-what did you say?”

“I’m Lauren.” The girl looked as uncomfortable as Bex felt, taking a step and then stepping back, offering a hand, then pulling it away. “I just…”

“Oh. Oh,” was all Bex could say as a million things crashed over her: Apology. Grief. Guilt. Blame.

Blame?

Your mother shouldn’t have made my father kill her.

The thought—a fleeting one that was in as quickly as it was out—made Bex sick to her stomach.

“I just wanted to…see you…I guess,” Lauren was saying, the fabric of her skirt swooshing into a colorless blur.

“My father… He never… It was alleged…”