“Did he arrest her?”
“No,” Ollie said.
“But I’m guessing you didn’t see her anymore.”
“He forbade me from seeing her, which wouldn’t have worked, except it wasn’t necessary. I think Erika was embarrassed.” Ollie turned his face away from hers. “She didn’t want anything to do with me after that.”
Erika. The name pierced Makani’s heart. “Does she still live here?”
“Yep. Comes into Greeley’s a couple times a month. She’s married now. Cuts hair. We don’t speak,” he added. There was something in his tone.
“You liked her a lot, didn’t you?”
“I thought I loved her. I was an idiot, but that’s what I thought.”
The sadness expanded inside her, enough for the both of them.
“A few days later, I reached the genius and original conclusion that life was shit. I drank two forties and waded into the river. I was going to kill myself.”
Makani sucked in her breath. She’d been severely depressed, but she’d never been suicidal. It was upsetting to learn that Ollie had stood so close to the edge.
“I stumbled and fell,” he said, “and as I was flailing in the water, realizing that I didn’t want to die, the manager of Sonic drove past. By some miracle, the guy saw me. He pulled over and dragged me out. The river was only a few feet deep—I was just scared and wasted.” Ollie gave a regretful laugh. “It’s probably the real reason I hate Sonic. Reminds me of my dumb-ass self.”
An old pain distorted within Makani as she pictured Jasmine vanishing, also scared and wasted, into a different body of water. The situations were so different, yet eerily similar. She didn’t have the strength to let her thoughts linger there. “Well, it makes me like Sonic more. I’m glad he saw you. I’m glad you’re still here.”
Ollie bit his lip ring. “I’m glad you’re still here, too.”
Recalling a rumor associated with the river, Makani blurted, “Were you naked?”
He glanced at her with surprise. “What? Do people say that?”
She nodded guiltily.
“No,” he said. “In that particular brush with death, I had my clothes on.”
It was so tragic and absurd that it made them both laugh. “I can’t believe that happened,” she said.
Ollie shook his head in amazement. “I know.”
“You were naked.”
“I know.”
Her smile grew. And then faded. “What happened after the guy rescued you?”
“I wasn’t arrested—thank you, nepotism—but I spent some time in a psychiatric unit. After that, Chris sent me to a therapist in Norfolk. But, by then, I wanted help. I stopped drinking and doing shit.” He gave a loose shrug. “And that’s it.”
“Is that what Zachary meant when he said you’d hurt your brother?”
The lightness disappeared from his voice. “Yes.”
Makani was relieved that nothing worse had happened. And Ollie hadn’t even done anything truly awful; most of the disappointment was inside his own head. She could tell that, for Ollie, having worried his brother was the worst thing he could have done. Instead of pressing him, she backtracked. “When you said you got high . . .”
“Weed.”
“You never did any harder drugs? Pills or opioids or anything?”
He shook his head.
“And you never sold them?”
Ollie sighed. “Cool. You heard that one, too.” He shook his head again. “The only thing I’ve ever sold is produce.”
“Did you sleep with anyone else?” Please say no.
“Only in my dreams,” he said. “Only you.”
It was cheesy—definitely a line—but Makani didn’t mind right now. She smiled at him as they stood in front of Greeley’s. “Hey, Ollie?” she asked softly.
“Yeah?”
“You know how you said that I’m a good granddaughter and friend?”
He smiled back. “Yeah.”
“Do you think I could be a good girlfriend?”
Ollie’s hands reached for hers through the dusk. Their fingertips touched, and the streetlights flickered on behind them. “I think you’re already a good girlfriend.”
They kissed while they waited for Chris. It felt absurd, kissing in public. Kissing after a memorial. Kissing when they’d been so close to being actual subjects of the memorial.
It also felt euphoric, rapturous, and profound.
Ollie’s nose was cold, but his arms were warm as they slipped around her back. It was the thrill of summer, revived—making out beside the grocery store when they shouldn’t be doing it. Except infinitely better, because the questions between them had been answered.
Their lips parted to catch their breath. Makani laughed, glancing aside. And that’s when she noticed the blood.
Red handprints. Beaten fists. Dragged fingers. The fine lines of the skin that had touched the glass were shockingly clear and shockingly human.
Makani stiffened with fright.
Ollie followed her gaze, and they startled apart. They stared at the bottom left side of the store’s automatic entry doors. The blood was on the inside.
Their limbs reached for each other again, clinging, as they frantically checked their surroundings. Except for the cars, the parking lot was empty. The traffic had unclogged, and only a few people remained on foot. None of them were close by. None of them were Chris or any other officer. And none of them appeared to be David.
Makani’s heart raced. Ollie cupped his hands to peer inside the dark store, while she kept her eyes on the street. “Is he in there?” she asked.
“I think somebody was dragged toward the checkout lanes. But I can’t see them.”
“Oh God.” She ripped his phone from his pocket, bouncing anxiously on the balls of her feet. “I’m calling your brother.”
“The whole place is ransacked.”
“Shit! What’s your password?”
“9999.”
“What? Why would you do that? Somebody could guess that!”
“You didn’t,” he said. “Shit! Something just moved.”
Makani lurched against the door. He pointed toward a shadowy area, a pile of . . . she couldn’t tell what. “I think there’s someone there,” he said. “Someone on top of that.”
It was impossible to tell. But there was definitely something that might be a person.
Chris’s number rang emptily in her ear. The shadows shifted again, and Makani gasped. Before she realized what he was doing, Ollie unlocked the door. As a longtime and trusted employee, he had a key. “Someone’s still alive!” he said.
The overhead sensor picked them up. The doors whooshed open. They rushed inside and then staggered backward, stunned by the true destruction. Overturned vegetables, boxes, cartons, bags, and cans were everywhere—an abundance of food, splattered like congealing fireworks across the linoleum.
Ollie yanked her aside so they wouldn’t track through the blood, the streaks of a body hauled across the floor. They ran toward the shadows and then crashed into a halt. Makani clamped her hands over her mouth to mute her scream.
In front of the checkout registers was a permanent display of merchandise whose profits helped support the football team, something Makani had once found incredibly strange but she’d slowly grown used to. Now that she knew Osborne, it made sense. But tonight, it had been razed to the ground. And in the center of the debris of jumbled sweatshirts and flags and tchotchkes was Caleb Greeley.
The boy lay atop the heap like another item of garish memorabilia. His feet and knees were splayed outward. His face was on its side, and a swollen tongue protruded out from between his front teeth. The chest and stomach had been mutilated. Long incisions slashed through his blood-drenched band uniform, but, despite the clothing, the unnatural splaying of his limbs made him look more like one of those realistic sex dolls than a human being. It was his body’s complete and utter lack of dignity.
But that still wasn’t the worst
part.
The worst part was the hands.
Caleb’s fingers had been laced together, and then his hands had been severed. They rested over his heart in prayer position. Red gore and white bone.
But if Caleb was dead . . . someone else was the moving shadow.
Makani and Ollie backed into the cereal aisle, each placing a protective arm across the other person’s chest. They pressed against the yellow Corn Pops and green Apple Jacks. Their hearts slammed against their rib cages.
The air was sharp. Acidic. It stung their nostrils and watered their eyes. Caleb must have been chased down the condiment aisle, one over. The vinegary fumes from the smashed jars of pickles and olives were ghastly. Makani covered her nose. She was still holding Ollie’s phone, and Chris was shouting at them through the speaker.
The metallic thud of a push bar echoed throughout the building.
Their hearts stopped.
And then a heavy door settled closed.
Makani whispered into the phone, “David Ware just went out the back exit.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The can of tuna fish had been bothering her all week.
Katie Kurtzman had discovered it last Friday as she was moving a load of whites from the washing machine into the dryer. The flat can was eye level and sitting on the sill of the basement’s only window. The long, narrow window was closed, but its latch didn’t work. It was just big enough for a slender body to squeeze through.
The tuna had been cheap. A discount brand. The lid’s edges were sharp and crude, as if the tin had been cut with a hand-cranked opener, not the electric one that they had in the kitchen. The can was empty, but it was still damp inside. That’s how she’d noticed it.
That faint underpinning of fish underneath the cloud of bleach and detergent.
She’d asked the twins, but they claimed not to know anything about it. She didn’t think they were lying. They were afraid of the basement, so they never played there. Her mother didn’t know about it, either. She supposed that it had fallen down from one of the ceiling beams—a trash relic left behind from the previous homeowners. But that didn’t make sense to Katie. The can was far from its stamped expiration date, and they’d been in this house for five years now. Plus, there was the dampness.
And the smell.
Katie knew she was being paranoid. She hadn’t known any of the victims, not really. She’d never had any personal connections to them, and she’d only ever been friendly to David. Still, as she applied stain stick to her sleeve where the blue drink had spilled, she eyed the window ledge. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been here, sitting on top of the dryer, listening to her family upstairs. Eating tuna fish.
She undid the first few buttons of her blouse but then, thoroughly spooked, decided against it. She could wash the shirt tomorrow. Hurrying toward the planks that served as stairs, Katie glanced over her shoulder for one last look. She stopped.
A quart of latex paint sat on the floor beside her mother’s old treadmill. She picked it up and placed it on the ledge against the window. And then she felt foolish. How could that protect her from an intruder? But she was scared enough to leave it. Perhaps it would be the magic charm that warded off the evil spirit.
Upstairs, Leigh and Clark were spread out on the living room carpet, reading comics. Leigh noticed her first. “What’s for dinner?”
“What’s for dinner?” Clark parroted.
Katie hurried past them toward their shared bathroom on the second floor. Her arm felt gross and sticky, and her cramps were getting bad again. “Mac and cheese.”
“With hot dogs?” the twins asked.
“Only in Leigh’s half,” she said, and the twins cheered. Clark hated hot dogs. He also hated hamburgers and pizza. For a child, his eating habits were baffling.
As Katie bolted up the stairs, her mom thumped down them. She worked the twelve-hour night shift at the hospital. Three days on, four days off. She was currently on, without the option to take off any shifts to watch over her children. The staff was doing mandatory training in preparation—anticipation—of further attacks. “Do you have everything you need? What happened to your shirt?”
“I’m fine, we’re fine,” Katie said.
“Keep your phone in your hand. Don’t open the door for anybody.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I love you!” she called out.
“Love you, too.” Katie didn’t look back as she said it. Her mom kissed the twins goodbye as Katie grabbed a clean T-shirt and pajama pants and locked herself in the bathroom. She removed her blouse to scrub her arm with a warm washcloth and Sesame Street–branded soap, and then she swallowed an Advil and peed.
Leaning over to grab a new tampon from under the sink, Katie startled. All the toiletries were in the wrong place. The tampons and extra rolls of toilet paper were out of reach and had been rearranged entirely with her makeup caddy, flat iron, and hair products in the back of the cabinet, and the twins’ old bath toys in the front.
Katie’s first thought was scary and irrational: David.
She’d heard a rumor at the memorial that he liked to mess with his victims before he killed them. That he moved their stuff around to make them think they were losing their minds. The man she’d overheard swore that he’d gotten the information from a county deputy, though there hadn’t been any mention of it in the news.
Her second thought was much more realistic: Mom’s been guiltcleaning again.
Katie usually cleaned, because her mother worked nights and took care of the twins during the day. Her off-days were for catching up on sleep. But as Katie pushed the toys onto the bath mat and stretched for the tampon box, she noticed dust inside the cabinet. Mom cleaned, but she couldn’t even do it right. Katie groaned.
Her mom claimed that Katie had obsessive-compulsive disorder. As a nurse who’d spent her early years working in psychiatric units, she was always diagnosing everyone.
Outwardly, Katie denied it. Inwardly, she knew it was true.
Katie worked long hours, too. School and the twins’ bedtime routine, in addition to college applications, student-loan applications, extracurriculars, and volunteering at the hospital—all the while worrying that she still wasn’t doing enough to get out of Osborne. Ritualistic cleaning and straightening and checking and organizing made her feel calmer in a world that was out of her control. Six years ago, everything had blown up when her dad stormed out only a few weeks after the twins were born.
Antisocial personality disorder, her mom had diagnosed.
Katie refused to go back to the way things had been.
As she moved everything back to its correct location, her eyes snagged on a fresh droplet of blood. It was on the alligator-shaped bath mat, near the toilet—and it was her own. Katie swore under her breath. She blotted it with a tissue and scoured it with cold water. There was a thunk downstairs. “Hey,” she yelled. “What was that?”
“We don’t know!” the twins said.
“What’d you guys do?”
“Nothing!”
Katie sighed. Sure. She changed into her pajamas and hustled toward them. Ninety minutes later, she tucked their warm, sleepy bodies into bed. She turned on their matching night-lights, closed their door, and sighed again. Time was hers, at last.
She headed back downstairs to work on an essay for the University of Southern California. All the universities she was applying for required a flight—or, at least, a lengthy car trip—to get there. She loved her family, but she’d love them more with distance.
Night had spread its bat-like wings. Katie turned on the porch lights and the overhead light in the kitchen, where her work was laid out across the table. As she reflected on a time or incident when she’d experienced failure (tonight’s essay topic), it took all her willpower not to check the news. She wished that she could have walked to the school with everybody else. Even Zachary—Zachary, who smelled like stale cigarettes and unwashed clothing, who’d never giv
en a crap about his grades and pretended not to give a crap about anyone—was in attendance.
Katie suspected that he actually cared about other people a lot, but he hadn’t had enough people in his life who cared about him. Despite Zachary’s abrasiveness, she had a soft spot for him. He was smart, and, if he applied himself, he could go on to do great things. It was frustrating to know that he probably wouldn’t. Most likely, he’d drop out and get a job on the floor at Nance, the town’s only manufacturer. It built machinery for food-processing plants. Or maybe he’d become a day laborer, detasseling corn and castrating piglets. Either way, it was unlikely that he would ever leave Osborne.
There was a creak on the basement stairs.
Katie’s heart juddered as she whirled around in her seat. Beside her, the refrigerator hummed and the dishwasher sloshed. Above her, the twins’ white-noise machine whirred. But below her, the basement remained silent. She picked up her phone—ears pricked—but set it down after another minute.
It’s just the house.
She tried to refocus on the essay. She read her last sentence five times, but she couldn’t shake . . . a feeling. Katie stared at the basement door.
Another creak.
She jumped up, the wooden chair legs scraping against the floor. Her pulse beat violently as she grabbed her phone and dialed 911.
Connecting, her phone said. Connecting. Connecting.
Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs. Katie’s senses exploded with terror as she threw herself against the door, which could only be locked from the other side. At the same instant, another body landed against it full force—just enough to open it.
They struggled. Open, shut, open. An arm and shoulder wedged through, and a knife slashed toward her body.
Katie pushed the door against the arm with all her strength. The arm flailed. There was another weighty thrust, and her side gave way. She fell, and her phone slipped from her grasp. It skidded across the floor as David Thurston Ware burst into the kitchen.