Nice Girls(57)

A few yards away, a group of people huddled at the crime scene. They were two police officers and a woman. She looked to be an investigator of some sort. They peered down into the sand. A crime scene photographer hovered nearby, taking photos. They were blocking whatever the teenagers had found.

I snapped a few pictures of the scene, but I couldn’t see what they were looking at.

After a minute, an officer finally walked away. I took another photo. There was an object on the ground. It glowed brighter than the sand around it. It was thin and fairly short.

It reminded me of DeMaria’s forearm.

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. I kept taking pictures.

Two new people entered the frame: a police officer being shoved aside by a man with brown hair and a deerskin jacket. The man gestured at the investigators to move, and surprisingly, they did. The man took one look and turned away, staring out into the lake. Then a bob of blond hair stepped in front of him. The woman wore a cream-colored trench coat.

I felt my stomach drop.

I was looking at Mrs. Willand and John Stack. She paused, staring at the sand. She crept forward, inch by inch, and then slowly lowered herself down onto her knees. I saw a speck of fluorescent pink on the object. I lingered on it, confused.

Then I realized: it was nail polish.

Mrs. Willand’s hands fluttered over her face. I could hear her distant wail, the sound cutting through the wind. She’d recognized it.

The camera lost focus. My hands were shaking.

I felt my chest grow hot and tight, as if someone were squeezing my insides. I had to get away. I shoved my phone in my jacket pocket, and I stumbled back into the forest, past the trees and the flecks of light from above. In the dark, I focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

But Olivia seemed to follow me. I kept seeing her in the shadows:

Olivia at age eight in elementary school, finishing a word search at her desk instead of listening to the teacher.

Olivia walking ahead of me on the park trail, her ponytail swinging back and forth.

Olivia in our high school class, as our eyes randomly met from across the room, and I wondered if she ever thought about me at all.

She was nowhere and everywhere.

I stopped, my face wet. I was crying beneath a little crook of light. I looked up to see the clouds so white and opaque, it was hard to imagine any blue beyond them. It was as if God had bleached the sky entirely, washing out the sun, the moon, the stars, everything.

A sky wiped clean, spotless.

All of it bleached out.

And my mind suddenly began to race.

I remembered the sparkly sheen of a bathtub after a wash, the bathroom tiles a blinding white, the lingering scent of bleach near the toilet. It was as if the entire bathroom had been scrubbed recently to remove a large, ugly stain. Like blood.

And I remembered the security guard in the lobby who never watched us, the other security guard who wasn’t there when I slipped by. They’re here for show. Cheaper than cameras, I guess.

And the photo on the phone, received on the day she’d disappeared.

I felt dizzy. But my hand found my phone, pressing a number. The rings sounded faint and far away. The cellular reception was weak.

“Hello?”

My mouth felt gummy, the words already bloating into each other.

“Hello? Mary?”

“I know who killed Olivia Willand.”





28




I planted myself in front of the living room TV that night. My personal vigil for Olivia.

All the news channels covered her. They discussed the body parts that had washed up on the western shore of Liberty Lake. While I flipped between channels, I kept seeing Olivia’s senior-year portrait.

And I kept imagining the headlines that would appear:

suspect discovered in dismembered woman case

arrest made in liberty lake woman’s murder

justice served for olivia willand?

But then the news ended for the night, and I was stuck watching a late-night hospital drama.



The water was dirty. It was a hazy green with small particles that drifted along. Light filtered in from above, almost like a spotlight. I felt something tickling at my feet, and I realized that it was pondweed, rough, yet slimy. I realized that I was underwater, somewhere far below.

As I swam up for air, I noticed a glint of light. It glowed in the murky water. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could finally make out what it was.

A pale leg.

I opened my mouth, screaming, but no sound came out. Instead, water rushed in, filling my lungs. I struggled for breath, my arms moving wildly around me.

I began to notice more things in the water, all glowing.

Dismembered limbs, hundreds of them. Arms and legs and hands and feet and hair that seemed to swirl all around me. And I knew that they were meant for me. They were all slowly drifting toward me.

Something nudged the back of my head.

When I turned, I screamed. I wouldn’t stop screaming as Olivia’s head stared back at me, her gaze empty where her eyes should have been.

I was being shaken with callused hands. I opened my eyes, saw Dad looming over me. I was still screaming.

“Mary, stop it. Stop it, you’re okay,” said Dad, his hands letting go. He moved out of the way, and I could see that the living room was bright with sunlight. It was already Thursday morning. I put a hand over my mouth, trying to stop the noise.