Gun Shy(33)

We stare at each other as I grip the metal Absolut lid in my palm, hard enough so it cuts into my skin and blood springs forth.

“Cassie,” he says, and his gun is still in his hand. “That bitch bit me. I’m sorry. Okay?” And he really does look sorry.

I start sobbing again. Not okay. I fall to my knees. There are splinters in the wooden floor, and it hurts when they dig into my knees.

“Come on,” he sighs, holding out a hand. “Let’s get you upstairs. I’ll run you a warm bath and get you some milk. You’ll catch a cold if you stay on the floor like that.”

“I don’t want to go upstairs,” I say, drawing my knees to my chest.

Damon kneels down, taking my arm and looping it over his shoulders. He pulls me to my feet, bearing most of my weight, and steers me to the hallway on reluctant legs. “I wasn’t asking,” he replies, pulling me upstairs.

The bath is hot. The milk is warm. Outside, I imagine Rox’s body is already cold. As cold as Damon’s gaze as he watches me shiver in a cast-iron bathtub full of scalding water, as I wash bits of blood and dog fur from my skin.

Damon’s phone rings while I’m washing blood from the ends of my hair; at the same time, I hear the crackle of his two-way radio downstairs. He looks at me as if torn between staying in the fogged-up bathroom and answering the call. He answers after three rings, his eyes trained on me.

“Chris.”

Chris speaks loud enough for me to hear; Damon and I hear the news at the same time. Jennifer Thomas is missing. She went to work, she left her shift right on time, texted her mother to say she’d be home late, and she hasn’t been seen since.

That was last night.

There’s another girl missing in Gun Creek. It’s been nine years since Karen, but the feeling in my stomach is the same as it was the moment I laid eyes on her in that well. It’s the feeling of a knife blade floating in your gut, waiting for you to move, waiting to cut you to ribbons from the inside.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN





CASSIE





On Saturday, we eat breakfast in silence. I’m not hungry, but I get cereal served again anyway, Cinnamon Toast Crunch this time. I swear Damon only buys cereal so he can get the free toys. A grown man, and he collects shit from cardboard boxes and fast-food meals. They’re like trophies for him, lined up on top of the refrigerator, above the fireplace, on the windowsill that looks out from the kitchen into the yard.

Damon’s been gone all night. Missing girls tend to demand the presence of the town sheriffs, especially when her family is high-profile like Jennifer’s. He looks exhausted, his blue eyes rimmed with red, his clothes creased. He’s only here to change his shirt and take me to the diner, fifteen minutes of calm in a case that could last days. Weeks. Months. Maybe they’ll find her today. Maybe she ran away. Maybe she’s dead in a well. Maybe she’s gone forever.

“I’m not leaving Rox out there all day,” I say, my words level and clear despite the panic bubbling up inside my stomach. I can’t face her body. I can’t face my fucking life anymore. I can’t face the shit show I know I’ll be walking into at the diner. I need a shot of vodka or a handful of pills, or both.

Damon turns his bleary eyes to me. “Well then, you’ve got about three minutes to go and bury her,” he snaps.

A small portable television sits on the kitchen counter, switched on to the local news filling the room with static-edged chatter. I hear the words missing girl and my ears prick up, something to take my attention away from this kitchen and the unbearable tension that fills it. I pick dry squares of cereal out of my bowl and crunch them between my teeth slowly, at least giving off the appearance of trying to eat something.

The news. It draws me in, greedy moth to overhead light. MISSING GIRL. A picture of Jennifer flashes up, her bleached-white smile dazzling, dressed in her cheerleading uniform. I have a matching outfit upstairs, though I haven’t worn it in years. The reporter keeps talking about Jennifer, how she vanished after her shift at Dana’s Grill on Thursday evening, how there are no suspects. The police aren’t sure if it’s a kidnapping or a runaway teen. She’d been fighting with her parents on Thanksgiving morning, took herself off to work in the afternoon, and then she was just gone.

“They used to put missing kids on milk cartons,” Damon says, gesturing at the television. “Now everybody’s got a TV and a cell phone.”

He’s right. I imagine everyone in Gun Creek will be glued to their phones today, refreshing the local news websites, sending frantic messages. Did you see Jennifer on Friday? She will be revered, her cheerleading photo plastered across town. I already know this — I’ve lived it once before when Karen went missing.

There are so many people passing through our tiny town each day that Karen’s death was blamed on a passerby, a trucker, probably. It made everyone in our town feel safer when all we had to do was watch out for the people we didn’t know. Nobody wanted to believe that one of our own was capable of such a horrific crime. But now, nine years later, it’s happening again.

Predictably, the reporter shifts to talking about Karen’s case — Karen Brainard, seventeen years old, dead before she’d ever lived.

They gloss over the real Karen. The deeply flawed Karen.

She fucked anything that moved, including the entire football team.