Nice Girls(74)

“Fuck off,” I blurted, but I buried my face in my hands.

Carly, the murders, the funeral, the firing—it was overwhelming. I wanted to be alone in the dark and left to rot.

But Jayden was right. There were certain things that didn’t make sense even with Dwayne locked away. He wasn’t the killer—I knew it. And now I was afraid.

I had screwed up again—and sent the wrong person to jail.

The real killer was after me.

My chest was heaving as I hiccuped for air, my eyes closed shut. After a while, I felt a hand awkwardly patting my shoulder.

“You need me to call Charice?” Jayden asked gruffly.

I shook my head.

A group of women walked by the car, staring at us. Jayden and I probably looked like a couple, and I was the girlfriend who’d just been dumped.

“Uh . . . you okay?” Jayden asked.

“I don’t know, I’ve just been doxed—”

“Doxed?”

“Kind of,” I stammered. My voice got quiet, as if I were afraid someone else would hear me. “I think it’s the killer.”

Jayden frowned. He peered behind us at the parking lot.

“How do you know?”

“The killer doxed Olivia Willand with her nude photo. Now they’ve leaked my private info at work. It’s the same email address—”

“Dwayne sure as hell didn’t do it,” muttered Jayden.

I nodded, wiping my face with my sleeve.

“You know who it is? You got any enemies?”

“I don’t know.”

Carly hated me. After what I did to her, other people at school also hated me. But as far as I knew, none of them had links to Olivia Willand. They didn’t even know where I worked . . .

I froze.

At Goodhue Groceries, there was one person who would have wanted me to get fired. Two weeks ago, he’d scared me after I left work. He once mentioned his background in computer science. And when I turned down the invitation to his Halloween party, he’d blown up at me. In his anger, he had brought up Olivia: And you see what happened to her? That slut went missing.

It was a threat.

I felt my stomach drop. I could picture his pale, scrawny face and his beady blue eyes. There was always a tension around him. He was hostile to me and Dwayne. Dwayne had intimidated him. I had rejected him. Then he’d leaked Dwayne’s incriminating photo of Olivia. Now I was being punished.

I spent so much of my life being uncertain, but I wasn’t uncertain about him. I knew exactly who he was.

Ron.

“You okay, Mary?” Jayden asked.

I shook my head.

“But I know what I need to do,” I said softly.





36




After Jayden left, I sped home. I wasn’t heading out until night, but I could already feel the anxiety building in my bones.

Dad was gone. I was relieved. I didn’t want to lie to him about Goodhue Groceries, but it was easier that way. If he knew I’d been fired, he’d be furious. I just needed time to deal with Ron. Then I’d find a different job. Dad wouldn’t need to worry.

In the living room, I wrapped myself in a blanket on the couch and turned on the TV to a reality show rerun. It was one of the Real Housewives spinoffs. I liked hearing the women’s voices in the background, the excited peaks and lulls that filled the room. It made me feel safe. I stayed still on the couch, my eyes closed, slowly drifting off to sleep.

Among the voices that prattled, I suddenly heard Mrs. Willand’s from the church bathroom:

I’m afraid she did something illegal.

I saw it . . . Her phone . . .

. . . Doberman . . .

I sat up slowly.

At the time, I’d been confused. The Doberman reference was random, but Mrs. Willand had seemed concerned. There had to be something more to it.

On my laptop, I searched for anything that mentioned both “Olivia Willand” and “Dobermans.” No results. I looked for news stories of Dobermans in Liberty Lake, but there was only one article about a local Doberman attack on a child in the late 1980s. Nothing else.

I tried another search for “Dobermans” and “illegal.” Instead, I found articles about laws that had banned the dog breed. But none of it was relevant to Olivia.

I sighed. Mrs. Willand had been distressed at her daughter’s funeral—it seemed likely that she’d misspoken. Or I had misheard her completely.

It was all hearsay. She and Mr. Nguyen had both mentioned strange things about the girls. I wanted it to be useful information, but I was clinging onto nothing.

I nearly closed my laptop.

Then I stopped.

I was holding my breath.

At the bottom of the screen, there was one search result that looked different from the others.

It was a link to a website called Doberman Productions. Beneath it, there was a single snippet: “Porn videos so good they’re almost illegal.”

I pressed the link. My chest felt tight.

The loading screen featured a logo at center—a black silhouette of a Doberman howling in front of a mustard-yellow moon. The logo looked fitting for a dog rescue group. But as the site loaded, a grid of videos buffered at the center while the Doberman hung in the top-right corner.

I clicked out of the ads that began to appear: some promising penis growth, others offering sexy local singles. I got rid of them and hoped that the laptop’s antivirus was turned on.