Dead Girls Don't Lie (31 page)

But Rachel and Manny will still be dead.

Another text from Skyler comes through:

If you don’t believe me I can’t stay here anymore.

I stare at the phone, not sure how to answer him, not sure what he means. Is he still leaving? Part of me is relieved, maybe it’s better if he just goes. But he sends more:

goodbye angel

don’t give in to the demons

I’m sorry

I love you

I stare at the phone.

Don’t give in to the demons
.

Why would he say that? I feel as if I’ve read those words somewhere before but … It hits me like a punch in the stomach. I have read those words before. They’re the exact words his mom wrote to him. He’s not just leaving. He’s going to kill himself.

Whatever he did, I can’t let him do it.

I text back with shaking fingers: Wait! I’ll come with you. Where are you?

He waits a few excruciating minutes before he sends back a picture, the old house, the upstairs bedroom, but I already knew that’s where I’d end up tonight.

I text: I’ll be there.

He adds one last message.

Don’t call the police. Come alone.

I scroll down Rachel’s contact list, praying he’s not too far away, praying the message will get through, praying Eduardo will understand. I send the text.

I hope it isn’t my last.

Chapter 35

I run again, cutting through the fields that separate Rachel’s and Skyler’s houses. All I can think of is what Evan said about Skyler trying to kill himself before. I’m afraid of what I’ll find when I finally get to the house.

Skyler was in love with Rachel—obsessed. He saw her with Manny, took their picture, and what? Did he decide to kill Manny then, or did Manny go after him? Self-defense, like Evan said? An accident? Rachel didn’t think so.

He planned it that way. He wanted it to look like an accident
.

But she didn’t know him like I do.

When I get to the house, I stop to catch my breath and decide what to do. The moon reflects off the broken top window. Everything inside me is screaming that I shouldn’t be here, the way it was a year ago. I can’t change what happened that night, I can’t bring Rachel back, or Manny, but maybe tonight I can finally do the right thing. Maybe there’s one person left I can save.

I slip through the back door, the way Eduardo showed me. “Skyler?” I say it quietly. No one answers. I look around the room, my eyes searching the shadows, but I don’t see him. I take another step inside. “Skyler?”

We shouldn’t be here
.

I pause as my eyes adjust to the dim moonlight coming in from the dust-covered windows. The window is reflected in a big mirror on the wall across the room. That’s what I saw that night, the reflection of the window in the mirror, the reflection of the curtains, the reflection of a number—81 instead of 18. Skyler was in the curtains, not Evan. It was so dark and the mirror is so big that I couldn’t tell the difference.

The wind catches the door, and it slams behind me. I jump and scream, my own voice scaring me as much as the slamming of the door. I look at the closed door, every instinct telling me to open it and run away.

Don’t be such a baby, Jaycee, it’s just an old house
.

I take a breath—dust, mice, but no spray paint. I turn toward the stairs. Something moves above my head.

Did you hear that? I don’t think we’re alone
.

I stop, listening for any other sounds, but all I can hear is my own breathing and my heartbeat in my ears.

Are you coming?

I start up the stairs. Each step creaks with my weight. The dark presses in behind me, but I force myself to keep going, I force myself not to look back.

I push against the closed door, my hand leaving a print in the dust over the faded red symbol for the Cempoalli. It swings open without a sound. “Skyler?”

I step inside. Little bits of moonlight reflect off the broken mirror on the floor. In the middle of the room is a pile of pictures and negatives. I step closer. Most of the pictures are of Rachel, but there are a lot of me too. I bend down and look at them. There are pictures of me running in the fields, playing with the little kids from church, even standing alone in the cemetery after Rachel’s funeral. I wonder how long he’s been taking pictures of me.

“Skyler!” I yell it this time, desperate. Maybe I’m too late, maybe he—Something glints at the edge of the pile. I pick it up. It’s another SD chip.

I slide it into my phone. The file comes up, Rachel’s face. I hit play and she says, “After you watch this, you’ll know everything I know.”

“Turn it off,” Skyler says from behind the curtains. He’s hiding there, just like he was that night. “I don’t want to hear her voice again.”

I stop the video and look up at him. I almost wish I could be mad at him, hate him or something, but he looks so sad, so all alone. Now I know he’s been sick this whole time. “You kept that from me. Why?”

He keeps his head down. “I couldn’t let you see it. I didn’t want you to know what a monster I was.” He tugs at his shirt sleeve, like he’s trying to hide something, but blood is seeping through. The legs of his jeans are shredded, and he’s holding a long piece of glass in his hand.

I move closer. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing.” He folds his arms against his chest.

I tiptoe through the shards, my throat choked with pain.
I stop before I get too close, afraid of what he’s become. “It’s okay. I came to help you.”

He shakes his head. “It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late.” My voice comes out gentler and calmer than I feel.

He stares at the blood coming from his wound. “I’m not a freak, Jaycee. I’m not crazy like Mom was. I don’t even know how any of this happened.”

“You were in love with her.” I swallow away the bitter taste the truth leaves in my mouth. “You were in love with Rachel.”

He doesn’t answer.

I need him to talk to me, confirm or deny it, something. “You were in love with her, and Manny got jealous, so you …” But I’m not sure how to finish that. I start again, “Evan told me what happened to Manny.”

Skyler closes his eyes. “He was so mad. He wanted me to leave her alone, to stop taking pictures of her, to stop following her, but I was only trying to keep her safe.” The red stain on his sleeve looks like it’s getting bigger. I need to do something to stop the bleeding.

I take another step closer. “Keep her safe from him?”

He nods. “Eric told us about him, that he was a gangbanger from L.A., that he was dangerous. I got that she didn’t want to be with me. I got it when she freaked out after I gave her the picture I took, but I couldn’t let her be with him.”

I swallow away nausea. “So you killed him.”

He finally looks at me. The wind blows through the broken window and the curtains billow on either side of him. His
whole face gets animated, pleading his case. “It was an accident, self-defense. They could all see that it was self-defense. I wanted to turn myself in, but Evan said we couldn’t tell anyone or the football team was over. That everyone would know about the cuts. He said that Coach had been warned about it once already.

“They wanted to make it look like a gang hit. They went a little crazy trying to make it look real. The whole scene was a mess, but no one doubted it, not the police, not even that FBI agent. So I let it go. I made myself forget.” He finishes the story, his face drained of energy as quickly as it came.

“But you didn’t forget.” The cuts on his legs look bad, but I don’t think they’re deep. But the one on his arm … I open my backpack slowly and pull out one of the T-shirts I’d packed, all the time moving closer to him. “You dug the number out of your arm. You cut yourself, like tonight.” I take his arm. He barely flinches when I tie my T-shirt around his arm and press it between my hands to stop the bleeding.

He watches me. “Thanks, Jaycee. You’re the nicest person I’ve ever met.” He brushes my hair away from my face. His hands are covered in blood. I close my eyes, but I manage to stay steady.

I’m afraid to ask, but I have to. “What about Rachel? What happened to her?”

He shakes his head. “She was getting too close to finding out what really happened. They said they were going to shoot up her house and make it look like a drive-by, just to scare her. She wasn’t supposed to be home. The tracking thing on
her phone said she was at my house. I checked before they left to make sure she wasn’t home.”

“But she was.”

He keeps his head down. Part of me wants to comfort him, tell him that everything is okay, that it wasn’t his fault. But I know it was. I finger the phone in my pocket, Rachel’s phone. “That’s why you got her that phone.”

He jerks up his head.

I keep my voice even. “You were the one who sent her the phone, so you could keep track of her.”

He shakes his head. “No. I did it because I heard Claire making fun of her, telling her she was poor, off-white trash, that she couldn’t even afford a phone. I wanted to help her. I wanted to give her something to make her smile. I made it look like her dad sent it because I know what it’s like to wait for a present from someone who doesn’t care.”

“Then why did you get me the phone?”

He doesn’t answer.

“To keep track of me so you’d know when I was getting too close? So you’d know when it was time to kill me too?”

“No!” His face comes back to life, and he jerks his arm away. “I’d never hurt you. I love you. You aren’t like her at all.” He reaches out and rolls a piece of my hair between his fingers. I cringe but I don’t move, afraid that running away right now would make things worse. “You have to believe me. I wanted to tell the truth, but they wouldn’t let me. I never meant to hurt Manny. I never meant to hurt Rachel. I never meant to hurt anyone. You believe me, don’t you, Jaycee?”

I want to believe him, that it was all an accident, but there are still a couple of things that don’t make sense, like the third picture from the negative I developed. The picture of Rachel and me at her house. Someone was watching us from the window of the old house the night Manny died. “Who texted Rachel and told her to come here that night?”

His expression twists, and I back away as his eyes go dark. “I don’t know. Manny, probably.” Until now his voice has been carefully measured, but he says “Manny” like it was the foulest word he could utter and he stares at me with a hardness I’ve never seen in his eyes before.

He planned it that way. He wanted it to look like an accident
.

I cover my mouth as I realize what Rachel meant by that. Skyler didn’t kill Manny in self-defense. He killed Manny to keep him away from her. He planned it.

“But Manny was already dead by the time she got the text. You texted her. You wanted her to see that he was dead, that the gang had caught up with him. You wanted her to see that she’d made the wrong choice. You wanted her to be afraid.”

A shudder runs through his body, and I know I’m right. “She couldn’t forget him, even though he was dead. She couldn’t let it go. She had to keep digging and digging, doing things she shouldn’t have done. She destroyed herself trying to find out what happened to him.” His voice is different, low and creepy with an edge of hysteria. I’ve never seen him like this. I remember what Eric said in the car,
Rachel was shot at close range
. If she was killed by accident, in a fake drive-by shooting, why would he say the bullet that killed her was fired at
close range? Maybe he was trying to scare me. I look at Skyler. Everything about him feels dark, like he’s a completely different person.

I think Eric was telling the truth.

I speak slowly, “After Manny was gone you watched her go through all those other guys, all the guys you couldn’t stand, to find out the truth. But she didn’t ever come to you. You were forgotten again, just like after Manny came. You couldn’t have her, so you killed her.” My voice comes out as a whisper.

“No, it wasn’t like that.” He grabs my shoulders. I shrink away from him, but he holds me tight. “Jaycee, listen to me. I was done with her. I’d already found someone else, someone better.” His voice goes tender and he touches the side of my face. “I’d already found you.”

I hold still, afraid to stay but more afraid to leave. “Is that why you took my phone at the party?”

“It wasn’t me. Not at first. Peyton stole it when you came in, as a joke. You were so nervous that you didn’t notice, but I did, because I was watching you. I took it from him. I was going to give it back. Then Rachel’s message came through. She’d finally found out the truth.

“I couldn’t let her tell you about Manny. I couldn’t let her tell you what I really was. If you knew what had happened …” He closes his eyes. “How could you see me as anything but a monster?”

Everything inside me turns to liquid pain. “You killed her because of me?”

He doesn’t answer.

“You drove me home, knowing that she was trying to call me, knowing that she wouldn’t give up. After you dropped me off, you went to her house and you—”

He steps back, gesturing wildly with his hands. “I just wanted to talk to her, to tell her that I was sorry. That she needed to forget Manny, that he wasn’t worth it, that she needed to let it go, but she wouldn’t listen. She kept screaming at me to stay away from you. I tried to tell her that I was in love with you, that I would never hurt you. She said she would make sure I never came near you again. I couldn’t let her keep us apart.”

“So you killed her.” I wait for him to deny it, but he nods his head yes.

He grabs my wrists, hard, so I can’t get away. “You understand, don’t you? Please tell me you understand. You’re the best person I’ve ever known. When I saw you that night at the party, I knew you were better than any of them, better than Rachel would ever be. You’re the only person since my mom who’s ever loved me. You have to come with me. We’ll leave here and never come back. Please, just say you’ll come.” He pulls me against his chest and buries his head in my neck. “Don’t make me hurt you too.”

My blood runs cold. Up to this moment, up until he said that he didn’t want to hurt me, I didn’t believe he
would
hurt me. Even when I knew he had killed Manny and Rachel, I thought I was safe because he loves me. Now I know I’m wrong.