Lies We Bury(73)

Why does something still feel off about the last week? The timeline doesn’t add up—how could he have known I’d even see Petey outside Four Alarm? And the killer’s notes felt personal, beyond a professional desire on Shia’s part to promote the sale of his books.

On the other side of the sushi restaurant, a car honks; then metal crashes against metal. Young female voices erupt in fierce words, too low for me to grasp but clear enough to register their disagreement over who was at fault. Then their dynamic shifts, lightens. One woman admits she was following too closely.

I was following you . . .

My lungs deflate, sucked dry of air, recalling a different voice that spoke those words to me outside a diner I worked at. Certainty snaps like a rubber band down to each of my toes as one of my oldest and original stalkers sparks to mind: Serena Delle.

In a new browser tab, I search for Serena Delle and Eugene, the college town I moved from and the last city I knew she was living in. A few results from Facebook, dated four years ago, pop up, but when I click the link and access her profile page, it appears they are her most recent posts. Clicking on her “About” section, I’m stopped by one update:

Current city: Portland, Oregon.

She’s here.

My fingers fly across my keyboard, and I hope against hope that the sushi restaurant doesn’t notice me click-clacking away for free at their back entrance and cut me off. Not now.

I search Serena Delle again, this time with the phrase Portland, Oregon. The third result shows an address tied to her name. Recalling the TriMet bus pass that Pauline gave me the day I took the marketing department’s headshots, I dig through my wallet and find it shoved behind my expired Costco card. According to the TriMet website, the nearest light-rail station is two blocks over. With that as my starting point, I map the fastest route to Serena.



Thirty minutes pass on a rail trolley mostly empty of people, none of them interested in me. A police car speeds by when we pause at an intersection, but I slink farther down the fabric-lined seat. The space between houses lengthens, and yards become larger, now unfenced. A railroad bell rings somewhere nearby. I exit at one of the stations, then follow the map on my phone west on a narrow street with deep ditches flanking each side. At the second-to-last house on the left, the map displays a message, You have arrived at your destination.

A pale one-story home spreads across the lot, ranch house–style. Naked saplings with only a handful of buds line the perimeter of the front yard, while empty flowerpots frame a gravel walkway, last summer’s contents shriveled and brown. On a metal mailbox atop a wooden post, reflective letters spell out the name Delle.

Adrenaline gushes through me. With each step closer to the rusted cross on the front door, I can feel my heart drumming against my ribs.

I hesitate at the threshold. If Serena Delle really has followed me to Portland and has been wreaking havoc in my life the last week, how did she do it so quickly? Or did she move before I did? She pursued me from Arch, where we went to high school together, two hours west to the college town where I worked odd jobs and began my photography business. I thought after the restraining order was filed that she might have moved back to Arch or stayed where she was and succeeded in building her own life. Judging from the way she sent that letter to the Tru Lives reporter, she’s been keeping tabs on me for longer than I was aware.

If she is behind the murders—with Shia as her partner?—I’d be stupid to come here alone and without a weapon. I withdraw my pepper spray from my messenger bag. The last time I saw Serena, she was wearing a high-waisted flowy dress and her heavy cheeks were flushed. She showed up at my job, uninvited, and begged me for five minutes outside, where she asked that I reconsider our friendship, swore that she’d misinterpreted me in high school and I was the only friend she had. We had been friends—in middle school. I remember bonding over our mutual dislike of Aaron Carter songs and her father’s tendency to hit her mother. As the mayor of Arch, Zeke Delle was untouchable; it was comforting for Serena to meet someone like me, who’d also experienced trauma.

But as I privately battled the depression that reared during adolescence, that came in waves with each photograph I viewed of Rosemary as a twenty-year-old, of Chet as a predatory thirty-five-year-old, and spiraled into days of self-harm, I couldn’t handle anyone else’s emotional needs. I could barely see straight some days, my vision so blurred with tears and the throbbing heartbeat of wounded skin. I never knew if Serena or anyone else at school recognized the self-destructive behavior. Whether, in leaving dead animals for me to find, she thought she was helping me exorcise some genetic compulsion or if she’d simply developed an affinity for death herself.

All I know is that one day during high school, a dead squirrel showed up beside my car. The next month, there was another. And another. Then two more. Serena and I hadn’t spoken in a few years at that point, and I was horrified when I found her depositing the final corpse at my tire. Rather than ask her why, I snatched the body from the ground and threw it at her, splattering her light-blonde hair with squirrel guts and blood. We were both suspended from school for several days.

So why now? Did she and Shia meet somehow, maybe in one of those dark-web forums speculating about my family? When did she graduate from killing small animals to murdering people?

I step forward onto a threadbare welcome mat and lift my fist to the screen door. A cardboard sign beside the doorbell says BROKEN, while another one written on faded paper beneath says NO SOLICITORS.