Twisted (6 page)

“And if you don’t think you can talk to us, there are always the grief counselors, or Michael or I can find you someone else for you to talk to.”

Bex nodded again, the lump in her throat too big to allow her to speak.

Denise squeezed Bex’s knee. “We love you, honey.”

“I love you too.” It was barely a whisper, but one of the truest things Bex had ever said.

Bex slipped her cell phone out of her backpack when she got home. She had thirteen missed calls between Michael and Denise, plus missed calls from Trevor, Chelsea, and Laney. Then, there were the texts:

Denise: Where are u?

Trevor: U OK? U bolted.

Chelsea: ????

Laney: T tore out after U. TruLuv <3 <3 ;)

Denise: Pls check in

Trevor: W8D 4u

Bex deleted them all, her thumb hovering over the garbage-can icon when she got to the last text. There was no name attached to it, just a phone number: 919–555–0800.

Something dark and black hung on the edge of her periphery, weighing down her shoulders and slicing through her gut.

She remembered rolling the numbers on her Gran’s old-fashioned rotary phone, her nine-year-old finger dipping into the hole over the number nine. She remembered swiping the wheel, the way it sounded as it clicked back into place. She poked her finger into the number-one slot, flicking the wheel a short half inch. Then back to nine again. She could see herself dialing the rest of the numbers, but she couldn’t remember what they were. What she did remember was the fuzzy sound of the phone ringing against her ear, then the flat voice of the woman who answered: “North Carolina Central Court House. Holding department.”

Bex glanced down at the number on her phone, at the little smiley “You have a new text!” bubble. She swiped it.

919–555–0800: Hello.

That was it.

Hello.

The numbers and the word blurred in front of her. The soft green of the chevron stripes on her comforter fell away, the mint-colored walls turning a deep, mossy green before they went gray as cinder blocks, like the walls of a cell. The message was innocuous. The number was terrifying. The area code, 919, was Raleigh.

Did he know? Does my father know who I am now? Where I am? He couldn’t still be in Raleigh…

An involuntary and sudden lump formed in Bex’s throat. Had her father been nearby her whole life but never bothered to contact her?

If he was in Raleigh, he couldn’t have killed Darla…right?

Who…

Bex pinched her eyes closed, and in a moment of strength, she highlighted the number and hit Dial on her phone.

It rang.

Once, twice.

Her heart slammed against her ribs, the thuds as loud as Mel’s story, as loud as “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Three, four.

Thud, thud.

Simultaneously, the chimes started on the phone and her heart stopped beating.

“Bex, hon, dinner’s ready.”

Denise was standing in the doorway, head cocked, wearing heavy shoes that had
thud-thud-thudded
up the stairs.

“You have reached a number that has been disconnected. If you think you have reached this number in error…”

Sick itched at the back of Bex’s throat, and sweat stung as it dripped into her eyes.

“Oh, honey!” Denise was at her side, gathering her up and pressing a cool palm to Bex’s forehead. “You look sick, and you’re all warm and clammy. How do you feel?”

Denise pried the phone from Bex’s hand and dropped it on the bed. Bex stared at the phone’s lit-up face, her eyes drawn to the icon of the red telephone hanging up, text blaring out Call Dropped. Denise seemed to follow her gaze and picked up the phone. “I’m sorry. Cell service is so bad out here. Probably for the best.” She slid the phone onto Bex’s dresser. “You should just get some rest. I’ll have Michael bring you up something to eat.”

• • •

It was pitch-black in her room when Bex woke up. She was still dressed from school, her backpack on the floor where she had left it, her cell phone on the dresser where Denise had set it. There was a half-empty bowl of chicken noodle soup on the nightstand, and Bex’s head was pounding like a like a bass drum. She pulled the ponytail holder from her hair and massaged the throbbing spot on her head, lost in the dark haze of just waking up. It took her a second to remember what had happened, for the day to come crashing back on her.

She grabbed her phone, nestled deep in bed, and texted her friends, thinking a blanket text would be the least painful.

Bex: Srry I bailed, guyz. Sick. Barf. Gross.

Chelsea texted back immediately.

Chelsea: Nice 1, barf breath. T’ll B all over that!

Bex rolled her eyes but checked her phone, hoping that Trevor wouldn’t respond with anything that referenced her barf breath.

Chelsea pinged again.

Chelsea: Y u up?

Bex glanced at the clock.

Bex: 2am?! LOL Just woke up. U?

Chelsea: Cnt sleep

Bex: Y?

Chelsea: Thnkin. Darla. No1 missed her 4 a week.

Bex: U did. U called everyday.

Chelsea: Didn’t do anything tho. Her parents didn’t kno she was missing. Scary. Do u think ur parents miss u?

Bex paused, about to respond, when another text from Chelsea broke through.

Chelsea: I mean ur real parents.

The breath caught in Bex’s throat and she felt her lungs collapsing, constricting.
What did Chelsea know?
Her eyes were watering, and she could hear the sad wheezing as she clawed at her chest and tried to breathe.

The Wife Collector.

Her father.

Do U think ur parents miss you?

Her mother.

What did Chelsea know?

The scream was out of her mouth before she knew it.

“Bex, Bex!” Michael flicked on the light and Bex cringed from it, the brightness burning her retinas. He and Denise flew to her bedside, eyes wide, concerned.

“Relax! Relax, look at me.” Denise kneeled in front of her, her hands on Bex’s, squeezing. “Keep your eyes focused on me. Try to breathe slowly.”

Bex felt as if she were breathing through a pinhole. The tears were streaming down her face and her lungs screamed, sending a searing heat up the back of her throat.

I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going to die.

An image burned in front of her eyes—another headline, another victim:

Amanda Perkins: Wife Collector’s 6th Victim?

Bex was seven when she learned the word “asphyxiated.”

Hands on her throat. Her windpipe narrowing, closing. The searing heat, the struggle to breathe, to live.

This is what it feels like. This is what it felt like for Amanda Perkins.

Bex’s lungs swelled with air and she sputtered, coughed. Denise and Michael were staring at her anxiously, Denise on her knees, still holding Bex’s hands.

“What happened?” Bex squeaked, her throat feeling raw and dry.

“Michael, get Bex some water.” Denise focused on Bex. “I think you may have had an asthma attack. Do you have asthma, Bex?”

Michael returned with the glass, and Bex sucked down every last drop before shaking her head. “No, not that I know of. That’s never happened to me before. I mean, not that I can remember.”

“It wasn’t listed in any of the medical reports, was it, hon?” Michael asked and Denise shook her head.

“I don’t think so.”

Nausea rolled through Bex’s stomach. “You have my medical records?”

A smile quirked the edges of Denise’s lips. “Of course we do, honey. Your caseworker sent them over before you arrived so we could enroll you in school. We needed your vaccination records and all that, because we wanted to be sure that you’d have everything you needed once you”—she paused and bit her bottom lip—“came home.”

Bex was worried that her caseworker hadn’t changed the names on her reports—
was
worried until she heard the pull in Denise’s voice when she looked at Bex, eyes soft, and said, “home.”

She was Bex Andrews and this was her home.

She was
just
Bex Andrews.

The fight to breathe had taken everything out of Bex and she slumped. Her cheeks were flushed, and little prickles of heat and sweat beaded at her hairline.

“You going to be okay, honey?” Denise asked.

Bex nodded. “I think I’m going to take a quick shower.” She glanced at the clock. “Is that okay?”

“Of course it is. Just take it easy, and try to get some sleep.”

Bex turned the water on lukewarm, half-certain that the droplets would sizzle on her fiery skin. Instead, she broke out in gooseflesh, her teeth chattering as she let the water pour over her head for what seemed like hours. When she stepped out of the shower, the house around her was uncomfortably still. She knew it had to be her imagination or the whoosh of her own blood pulsing in her ears, but she swore she could hear Denise’s and Michael’s breathing—a steady in-out, in-out—and it felt like the house breathed with them. The walls pulled closer, then pushed out slightly, the whole house a live entity that gave Bex the creeps.

“I’m safe, I’m safe, it’s okay,” Bex chanted as she slipped into a fresh pair of pajamas, hoping for sleepiness that wouldn’t come.

She pushed her hair back and glanced out the sweeping bay window that overlooked the drive and the street out front. The sky had gone from an inky black to a wistful gray blue, almost promising but still shrouded in shadows. One of those shadows—a twitch from it, actually—caught Bex’s eye. A car was parked across the street, one of those ancient sedans that made her think of old cop movies. It could have been the flick of the streetlight or a trick of the dark, but she thought she could see someone sitting in the driver’s seat.

Bex squinted, expecting her imagination was conjuring monsters.

The light didn’t switch, but the shadow did.

Now she could make out hands resting on the top of the steering wheel and the darkened outline of a baseball cap and wide shoulders in the front seat. The driver was leaning forward, head tilted, looking in Bex’s direction.

She dropped onto her hands and knees, heart thundering in her ears. She stayed like that for a quick beat before peeking up again, just enough to glance out and see that the man—she could tell now that the person was a man—was still looking at her window.

He’s probably just a neighbor
, Bex scolded herself.
And he probably thinks the Piersons are fostering a lunatic child!

She waited for the soft purr of an engine coming to life, something to tell her that the man sitting in his car had been about to go to work on the graveyard shift when he thought he saw something in the neighbor’s window. He would look again, assume it was nothing, then drive his car away, and Bex could be left with her hammering heart and her paranoia.

The engine didn’t sound.

Bex wanted to shrug off the phantom car, but her subconscious kept replaying a scene.

It was from another time, another place.

The smell of pine and moist earth was overwhelming, and Beth Anne didn’t like the way it tickled her lungs when she breathed deeply. She wouldn’t say anything though. She hadn’t seen her daddy in almost two weeks and he was here with her now, just him and her in the woods. They had driven for what seemed like ages, Beth Anne bouncing on the front seat of her daddy’s pickup truck while they loudly sang along to the old songs Daddy liked to listen to. Crooners, he called them, “the ole’ crooners.”

She liked the way the word sounded on her tongue and she repeated it under her breath, wanting to remember everything about the afternoon when it was just her and him: They had stopped at a diner called the Black Bear that Beth Anne had never heard of and was sure no one would ever find. It was at the end of a long, cracked road but they had served her ice-cold sweet tea, and even though the waitress in her pink uniform was flirting with Daddy, she brought Beth Anne a single, perfectly round scoop of white vanilla ice cream when she hadn’t even asked for it.

The waitress had slipped something to her daddy too, something she put in the palm of his hand and that made him smile in a weird way—not the kind of daddy smile that he flashed at Beth Anne. Afterward her daddy sang louder in his deep, smoky voice, until he cranked that old behemoth truck to a stop so quickly it kicked up dust all the way to the windows.

“We’re here, Bethy.”

Beth Anne looked around, sliding her knees underneath her on the hot vinyl seat so she could get a look around. “What are we doing out here?”

“Come on out and see.”

She pushed open the car door and the heat rushed at her. Humidity clung to the trees and their drooping pale-green leaves. It dampened her hair and the skin behind her ears and seemed to push in on her chest. It wasn’t anything Beth Anne didn’t know though. North Carolina could have heavy heat that clung through the dead of fall.

Her father came around the side of the truck, and Beth Anne’s eyes went wide. He was carrying a shotgun.

“We’re going to go hunting.”

Beth Anne blinked. She didn’t want to hunt. She didn’t want to kill anything, ever, not even the ugly black spiders that crawled through the kudzu or poked through the crack in her bedroom window. But she wouldn’t say anything.

Her daddy took her by the hand and suddenly stopped, pulling her quickly down beside him. She loved being close to him, shoulder to shoulder and sharing something mysterious.

“What are we looking for?”

It seemed like hours had passed and Beth Anne was getting bored. The heat was sticky, and mosquitoes the size of biplanes were slamming into her calves and making her itch.

“I’m bored, Daddy.”

He pressed a finger to his lips and shooshed her. Then, “Hunting isn’t quick work, Bethy. It’s not a dumb man’s game. First, you’ve got to watch and get to know your prey. Watch them where they live. You gotta be so quiet they don’t even know you’re there.”

He jutted his stubbled chin forward and Beth Anne saw where he was looking. There was a tiny shift in the tall fescue grass, something low to the ground that stopped, then shifted again. Beth Anne held her breath, her heart starting to beat.

“What is—?”

“Shh.” He held his finger to his lips. “Just watch. Always watch. Longer than you think you should. That way, they won’t even know you’re coming.” He pulled his gun closer to him, leveling it.

Beth Anne turned her eyes back to the twitch in the grass and lost her breath. A rabbit, not much bigger than one of her stuffed animals, scampered toward the clearing. His nose twitched against his nut-brown fur and he pushed back, standing on his haunches, the fur of his belly a pale, pale brown.

“No, Daddy.” Beth Anne’s protest was so soft she wasn’t even sure if she had said it out loud.

Her daddy cradled the butt of the gun and squinted one eye. “Don’t worry, Bethy. He won’t even know what hit him. He’s doing us a favor, and I promise, it won’t bother him none.”

The entire world slowed down. The rabbit’s ears poked straight up. His nose swished back and forth, the tall grass moving around him like ripples in a puddle. The click of the gun’s safety switching off was as loud as the shot.

“Beth Anne!” Her daddy’s voice roared in her already-ringing ears. Her eyes burned. Her nose was assaulted with the wicked stench of hot metal, of exploded gunpowder.

The gun dropped, flattening the grass, and Beth Anne’s daddy grabbed her hands in his, his palms cool against her singed ones.

“NEVER put your hands on the muzzle of a gun, you hear me? You could have gotten us both killed pushing away like that. What were you thinking? Look at your hands. Look at how red your palms are!”

But Beth Anne wouldn’t look at them. Her eyes were stuck on the rabbit as it scampered safely away.

Bex pressed her forehead against the carpet, trying to push the memory out of her mind. Her father had taken her hunting. Her father had told her that killing that rabbit “wouldn’t bother it none.” Bex shuddered. Did that prove anything? Did that prove her father was a murderer?

“Just watch. Always watch…”

Bex clenched her eyes shut and counted slowly until her breathing was at a normal cadence before pushing herself up and glancing out the window. The sedan was gone; the man watching her from the driver’s seat was gone—so why wasn’t the sickening feeling in her gut?