Girl One(69)

Cate and I hurried down the hallway. The walls were scuffed and bare, all the doors closed. I caught a noise, a weak mewl, a sound of distress, and I opened the nearest door.

It was a bedroom, floral wallpaper, untidy piles of clothes clotted around the baseboards. Black Shoes was with Isabelle. They were together on the bed, Isabelle on his lap, skirt hiked up to expose those tender, skinny thighs. I took in their bodies together, the way Isabelle lifted her head up to look at me in surprise through tangled hair, Black Shoes’s stare that met my own without wavering or apology as he sat against the headboard, surrounded by the frilly bedding of Delilah. The girl he’d murdered.

It took me a moment to realize that Black Shoes was dead.

Isabelle adjusted her dress on her shoulder, smiling at us. Black Shoes’s skin was already lifeless and slack. Looking at him, drained empty, I felt my own hard pulse drumming through me. Alive, alive.

Isabelle rose off his lap and came toward us, smoothing down her dress. “Are you okay?” she asked, and reached up to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You look upset.”

I couldn’t stop staring at Black Shoes. The first corpse I’d ever seen outside of a medical setting; the heavy slump of his body. Those dark, gleaming shoes, shining more brightly now that he was fading. A deep and savage relief passed through me. As I watched, a thread of blood drooled down his chin.

“How did you do that?” I asked Isabelle quietly.

She shrugged like she didn’t know what I meant. Turning, she wandered toward the dresser, Delilah’s dresser. She ran her hands over the balled-up socks, lip-gloss tubes rimmed with glittery crust, library books, crumpled receipts. She picked up a book with a bright pink cover, flipped through it. Her eyes widened.

“Isabelle, don’t touch Delilah’s stuff,” I said, queasy. “Don’t touch anything.”

“This could be important,” Isabelle said. “It’s her diary.”

Cate had gone to the window and pushed aside the blinds, hands shaking as she scrabbled with the lock. She managed to hoist the window open. She stood for a second, head cocked, listening, then slid the screen free of its frame. The night air that came in was chilly, throbbing with the sounds of insects. Cate slid her way through, dropping to the grass below. I followed. As I reached up to help Isabelle, taking her small hand, I marveled at the flexible lightness of her body. Such a tiny thing, to have left behind a death. She’d kept the book with her: I didn’t press it. All I wanted was to get out safely.

Moving together, close enough to hear each other’s breathing, we crept around the side of the house. The Volvo was still sitting where we’d left it hours ago, as if nothing had changed between that moment and this one.

The front yard was empty.

Cate whispered: “Does Tom have the keys?”

I cursed under my breath. “He does.” For a moment escape had been so close that I could feel freedom on the back of my tongue, light and cool. “Maybe there’s a spare set.”

But I wondered what they’d done to Tom in the woods. Would he be as easy to discard as the three of us? Or was he on their side now? I wasn’t even sure what I wanted for him after he’d betrayed Cate. My anger and fear roiled in my gut.

After a silent consultation, we ran across the grass toward the Volvo. I heard shouting from inside the house, only a few windows illuminated. Isabelle tried the car doors—locked, all four of them. Cate slumped against the side of the Volvo, exhausted. We were stuck here, in this strange town, at night, bloodied. How far would we get with no vehicle?

“I’ll have to go back for Tom.”

“Forget him,” Cate said. “Please, Morrow. You’ve seen what those men are like—” She reached for my hand, held on so tightly it almost hurt, and I understood that she was transmitting something to me that went beyond just our survival. But I had to focus on getting us out of here.

“We can take them on. We just have to find the Tom and get the keys—”

“If he’s even alive,” Isabelle said calmly.

“Morrow—please. We have to look out for ourselves. We told him not to call anyone, but he did what he wanted, and now look—”

Before I could answer, the crunch of footsteps approached from the side of the house. Two forms emerged from the shadows, one loping casually, the other hunched and bent. Tom. As they stepped into the light from the windows, I saw that Tom’s face was bruised and swollen, a starburst of blood against one eye. His hands were tied behind his back with thin yellow ropes. The man behind him held a gun to the back of his neck. Tom’s role as a betrayer flickered. So they’d hurt him too. I softened.

His captor was tall, his lower face obscured with a heavy beard. The stranger stopped, said something too low to hear, and Tom fell to his knees. I realized, with a strange shock, that Tom was the most defenseless of the four of us right now. While the stranger was distracted, I gestured to Cate, frantic, holding out my hand at hip-height: she understood, passing me the gun, the soft click letting me know she’d undone the safety again. I stepped into the light. I held out the gun, faking my certainty, letting the confidence I felt in my own power extend into this weapon.

It took Tom a moment to catch on to my presence and look up. His face tightened with panic—I watched him begin to frantically mouth, Get away, run, but I ignored him. Instead I looked directly into the stranger’s eyes, catching his gaze as he looked up. I pushed myself through into his skull, settled in there. As easily as winding my fingers through strands of hair and tugging. “Drop the gun,” I said. “Untie him.”