The sky was filled in.
The puzzle had been completed.
Makani dropped the cup. Water splashed onto her jeans as the cup bounced and spilled across the carpet. She scrambled to pick it up.
“Grandma?” she called out. “Grandma, where are you?”
Why had she sent those texts? Was this a test to see if Makani would lie to her? Did she know that Ollie was here? Oh God. She’d probably heard them upstairs, and now she was waiting for him to sneak out so that she could confront Makani. It was something her mother would do. She loved to set up Makani and then punish her for taking the bait. Was her grandmother more like her mom than Makani had realized?
Makani rushed back into the kitchen. “Grandma? Are you home?”
There was still no reply.
She slammed the cup onto the counter, grabbed a dish towel, and returned to dry the carpet around the base of the stairs. Her cheeks burned. Her heart felt as if it would burst from her chest. If Ollie had heard her yelling, he was being smart and remaining hidden. Clutching the wet towel, she headed back to the kitchen and stopped dead.
The cup was gone.
Her mind spun. Unable to process it.
“Grandma?” Makani sprinted toward her grandmother’s bedroom at the back of the house. “Are you in there?” She pounded on the closed door, and when no one answered, she barged into the room. The bed was made. Everything was in its usual place. She even checked the closet—she didn’t know why—but it was empty.
She hurried back to peer out the kitchen window toward the driveway and staggered backward. The cup was sitting in the center of the countertop. And every single drawer and cabinet was wide-open.
Makani felt paralyzed. The driveway was visible from here, but it held no cars.
“Ollie?” she whispered. She forced herself to turn around, half expecting, half hoping for him to be standing behind her.
He wasn’t.
In a daze, she stumbled toward the stairs. Her eyes snagged on the completed jigsaw puzzle, and her body temperature chilled as a new horror settled in.
The killer had rearranged Rodrigo’s living room furniture.
Makani remembered the drawers and cabinets—how many times they’d been left open in the last two months. What if the victims were toyed with before they were murdered? The acts against them could have been almost invisible. Gaslighting. Things that an officer would never notice while inspecting a crime scene.
The police had assumed that Rodrigo’s furniture had been rearranged after his death as a part of the elaborate staging that the killer seemed to enjoy. But what if the killer had rearranged Rodrigo’s furniture before his death?
A hooded figure stepped out from beside the grandfather clock.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Makani’s scream reverberated throughout the house. It rattled the pictures on the walls.
The figure jumped, startled by the volume of her terror, and dropped something. A knife thudded onto the carpet between them.
For a surreal moment, they were both frozen. A beige camouflage hoodie hung low over the killer’s face, but Makani could see that he was male and white. He was also young, a teenager, judging from the slightness of his frame.
Makani glanced at his knife. It was large. The fixed blade was at least seven inches of steel, and it had two cutting edges—one regular and one sawtooth.
Its pointed tip was razor sharp.
She lunged.
Unfortunately, the killer was closer and faster, and as soon as his hand wrapped around the knife’s black rubbery hilt, he thrust upward and sliced into her forearm.
She screamed again, stumbling backward. Suddenly, a yell arose from the landing. Ollie was barreling down to them, naked and at full speed.
Once more, the killer was caught by surprise, and Makani realized—in this millisecond—he had thought she’d been alone. Using his shock to her advantage, she slammed her body into his and knocked him to the floor. The hunting knife fell from his hand a second time as his hood flew back and exposed his face.
Makani blinked.
Recognizing him yet unable to place him.
He thrashed and kicked, and as she struggled to keep him pinned, a flailing limb rammed into her wound. She gasped. He clambered out from under her, snatched up the knife, and swiveled to attack. Ollie grabbed him from behind and hurled him aside.
A new battle cry rang out as a fourth person tore into the room.
Grandma Young launched herself at the killer. They hit the carpet together, and the knife plunged into her lower right abdomen. She cried out. The killer shoved the blade in deeper, wriggling it around. He kicked up his boots and pushed her off.
Makani threw herself over her grandmother’s body.
Ollie chased after the killer, who was already running. The killer sidestepped and smashed into the grandfather clock. It crashed to the floor in a violent explosion of brass and tinder and glass. The carpet absorbed the cacophony into a swallowed silence.
Makani was perched on her hands and knees, panting. Blood coated the skin of her palms. It seeped through the legs of her jeans. Beneath her, Grandma Young’s breathing was shallow and strained. Makani lifted her head cautiously.
Ollie and the killer were both still standing.
With a glance from Makani’s narrowing eyes to Ollie’s tensing muscles, the killer reassessed the situation. And then bolted out the front door.
Ollie shot off—straight through the shards and splinters—to lock it behind him as Makani leaped up and flew to the front window. “He’s running left,” she said.
“Where’s your phone?” Ollie asked.
“Upstairs!”
“Mine too.” He sprinted away. “Watch him!”
The hooded figure vanished behind a neighbor’s detached garage. Makani moaned as she scoured the landscape for movement, any hint of movement. Her legs jiggled. Her arms trembled. There was a landline in the kitchen, but she didn’t remember it until Ollie was already thumping downstairs with a phone at his ear.
“Ken,” Ollie said to the dispatcher. He was still naked. “I’m at Makani Young’s house on Walnut Street. The killer was just here.”
Makani motioned for him to take the window. “He went that way! Around the corner of the garage.”
“We need an ambulance. Her grandmother is seriously injured. She was stabbed in the stomach, and she’s losing a lot of blood.”
“Grandma? Grandma, stay with me!” Makani grabbed the nearest throw pillow and propped it beneath her grandmother’s head. Her eyelids lifted open weakly.
“I’m fine,” Ollie assured the dispatcher. “Makani is, too, but her arm was cut pretty badly. She’ll need stitches.”
Grandma Young’s eyes grew worried.
“I’m okay. You’re okay.” Makani unbuttoned the bottom of her grandmother’s blouse to get a better look at the wound. The shirt was heavy and wet.
“It’s David Ware,” Ollie said into the phone. “The killer is David Ware, and he’s running in the direction of the school right now.”
Makani peeled back the fabric, which shucked against her grandmother’s stomach. Grandma Young inhaled sharply. Petrified, Makani lowered it back into place as Ollie raced past her and up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Makani shouted.
His voice carried down from her bedroom, and she realized he was standing at her window. “No, I can’t see him anymore. . . .”
Ollie’s phone call morphed into an unintelligible buzz. Makani’s heart pounded with fear and adrenaline as she grasped her grandmother’s hand, their skin slick with blood. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to help. The front window taunted her. At any moment, the killer might jump out from behind the bushes.
A gray shadow fell over her.
She shrieked.
“It’s okay,” Ollie said. But his eyes widened when he saw her arm.
She glanced down to discover that her left sweater sleeve was also soaked
with blood. A diagonal slash had ripped open her flesh from elbow to wrist and exposed a throbbing gash of muscle. Her arm didn’t seem like her arm. She barely felt the cut.
Getting on his knees, Ollie pressed a clean hand towel from the upstairs linen closet against her grandmother’s wound. He nodded toward a second towel beside Makani. “Can you wrap that around your arm?”
He’d thrown on his clothes, but his feet were still bare. They were shredded from the glass. Frenzied trails of crimson footprints revealed his path across the carpet.
Blood. From his feet, her arm, her grandmother’s stomach. It was everywhere.
“Here.” Ollie gestured for Makani to take his place and to keep applying pressure.
Grandma Young’s eyes were closed again. The instant Makani had instructions, the instant her grandmother’s life was in her hands, her mind sharpened into focus. She held the towel in place as Ollie wrapped the other one around her forearm. She hissed with unexpected pain. A terrifying flash, a vision, accompanied it—a plain face with a dead expression.
Grandma Young tried to speak. “What did you say . . . his name?”
In the distance, the emergency sirens wailed their approach.
“David,” Makani said. “That was Rodrigo’s best friend.”
David. David Ware. Had she even known his last name?
He’d never been mentioned in the speculation. Not once. He was someone who she and her friends—and Rodrigo—had even speculated with.
Who do you think did it?
He’d asked her that in physics class.
His pleasure must have been so perverse, asking when he already knew that he was going to kill her. Already knowing that he was going to kill his best friend.
The serial killers in her imagination, the fictional centerpieces of innumerable movies and television shows, were colorful and fascinating and impossible to keep her eyes off of. But her eyes had always glossed over David.
Who do you think did it?
She’d looked past him, even when he’d asked her.
She’d looked past him, even when he’d been sitting right in front of her.
Blazing lights. A rush of uniforms. Sense-memory panic swelled inside Makani as her house exploded into chaos. Paramedics in white shirts rushed toward her grandmother. The police swarmed Ollie, and Chris embraced him fiercely. Another officer rapid-fired questions at her. Makani’s responses were a blur as Grandma Young was lifted onto a stretcher. A bearded paramedic peeked beneath Makani’s towel, and she was hustled inside the same ambulance. Neighbors poured from their homes. News vans squealed onto the street. The last she saw of Ollie was a flicker of pink in the front window as the ambulance doors slammed closed.
You’re in shock, they told her. As the nurses and doctor numbed, cleaned, and stitched her arm, the same police officer that had questioned her at home continued the interview.
Officer Beverly Gage. You can call me Bev.
She looked young for a Beverly, only a few years older than Ollie’s brother. She had a large oval face, friendly eyes, and long hair pulled back into a ponytail. Was this the same officer that Darby had found attractive? It seemed so long ago.
Her grandmother had been rushed into an operating room, but the hospital wouldn’t tell her if she was okay, and Officer Bev wouldn’t tell her if David had been captured. Bev’s timeline-related questions were mortifying. At least she saved the most prying inquiries until after the stitching was done, and they were alone.
Makani answered as truthfully as she could remember:
Yes, we had sex.
Um, ten minutes?
Then we talked for a while.
Maybe fifteen minutes?
I don’t know. About music. And some guy who wrote a lot about Morocco . . . Paul something? I don’t know.
Yes, and then Ollie dozed off.
I checked my phone, and then I watched him sleep.
I don’t know. Fifteen minutes? Twenty?
It was humiliating. And now it would go on file, typed up on some kind of awful official document or digital record or both. As Bev made another notation, Makani’s mind boomeranged back to her grandmother. She felt sick with guilt and helplessness. Grandma might die because David wants me dead.
Her thoughts spun again, and she imagined trying to explain herself when—when not if—her grandmother woke up. Makani had lied. Ollie had been naked. Illogically, these two facts felt so much worse than confronting the idea that someone had attempted to kill her.
I barely know him, she kept telling Bev. No, I don’t know why he’d target me.
The first half was true. The second half was a lie.
Makani thought that she had suffered enough—she’d lost everything that mattered to her in Hawaii—but the karmic cycle of life had circled back around. This, at last, was her final punishment.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Officer Bev was gone, and Makani had been abandoned in the single-occupancy patient room to wait for news about her grandmother. She moved to an uncomfortable chair, not wanting to remain on the bed. The air smelled stale but sterile.
Makani didn’t have her phone, so she couldn’t contact Ollie or her friends. Or even her parents. The police and the hospital had been trying to contact her mom and dad with no luck. But a kindhearted nurse with coppery hair kept checking in on Makani and brought her ginger ale and blueberry yogurt. She assured Makani that the surgical staff was brilliant, and their small hospital was fortunate to have them.
Every minute alone increased Makani’s anxiety. She’d been in the hospital for nearly four hours. She turned on the television to pass the time.
This was a mistake.
Standing on her grandmother’s lawn was the same hairsprayed reporter who’d chased her through the school’s parking lot last Friday. The graphic on the bottom of the screen read: FOURTH TEEN ATTACKED IN OSBORNE SLAYINGS.
“Did you hear any screams or unusual noises?” she asked an older man. He had a droopy but upturned mouth like a bulldog. It was the neighbor from two doors down.
“No, nothing at all. I was fixing my gutter when a boy tore across my yard in that direction.” He pointed with a gnarled finger and then pressed the whole hand flat against his face in disbelief. “I shouted after him from my ladder, but he didn’t look at me. He just shot around my carport and ran toward Spruce.”
Back in the studio, the live footage was superimposed above Creston Howard’s shoulder. Creston looked stiff and appropriately serious, though he couldn’t resist a toothpaste-commercial smile as he led them into the break.
No one should ever have to see their own house on the news. Makani wanted to crawl into her bed and hibernate for the rest of autumn. But then it struck her that she might not even be able to go home. Her house was a crime scene.
“The suspect is eighteen-year-old David Thurston Ware,” Creston said when the news returned, and goose bumps prickled her skin.
Thurston.
Now he had a middle name, too. It didn’t seem right that a murderer should be allowed to have anything in common with his victims. Makani supposed it was for the sake of the world’s nonhomicidal David Wares, those few people unfortunate enough to share his namesake. It was like being a Katrina after 2005; it only brought one thing to mind. But at least no one could mistake a woman for a hurricane. Hopefully, the release of his middle name narrowed the inevitable misunderstandings of which David Ware.
Makani’s name wasn’t being reported, most likely because she was a minor. And a survivor. But Ollie wasn’t named, either. Creston kept referring to him as a male friend of the victim. The police must be protecting him.
The news cut to a senior photo, and David’s image leached through the screen like an odious stench. His smile was dopey and innocent, and his hair was brushed to one side as if he were a little boy. He had a faint mustache. There was nothing intimidating about his appearance, but Makani’s stomach filled with caustic acid.
“The suspect was last seen wea
ring jeans and a camouflage hoodie,” Creston said. “He’s considered armed and highly dangerous. If you see him, do not approach him. . . .”
More footage of her house. More interviews with neighbors.
The man whose nose had been lopped off crossed his flannel-shirted arms. “Osborne, all of us, we’re scared for our lives.”
Makani wanted to change the channel, but fear held her hostage.
“It’s like searching for a needle in the cornstalks,” Creston said, and she loathed his inane glibness more than ever. But his coanchor nodded. Dianne’s makeup was so unnatural and extreme that it looked airbrushed by a T-shirt vendor on a beach. “And a reminder that all Sloane County schools have been closed for the rest of the week. . . .”
Did she only report on school closings?
“Good news,” a voice said beside her.
Makani startled at the jarring declaration. The coppery-haired nurse hugged her clipboard and said, “Your grandmother’s out of surgery.”
“Your grandma’s a real trouper.” The surgeon was a thickset man with dark, feminine eyelashes. “She’s lucky. The knife nicked her vena cava, but it missed the aorta. If it had nicked that, well, we’d be having a very different conversation right now.”
Through the room’s windows, nighttime lights illuminated the buildings below—the squat brick library and a lofty brick church. Everything in Osborne was made out of brick. St. Francis Memorial Hospital was on the opposite side of Main Street, not quite a mile from her grandmother’s house. It wasn’t big, but it was the county’s only hospital, and Makani was grateful that it was so close. Grandma Young had gone into surgery within emergency medicine’s golden hour. The rapid intervention had saved her life.
“There was an injury to her intestines, which requires a long antibiotic therapy, and there was a cut to her right ureter,” the surgeon said. “I’ve placed temporary drains, but when she’s more stable, the ureter will need reconstructive surgery.”