Twisted (5 page)

Denise slowed in front of the high school on Monday morning, Bex’s eyes widening as she leaned forward, taking in the U-shaped drive that was now bumper-to-bumper cop cars. Her stomach fluttered but she sucked in a deep breath when Denise patted her shoulder.

“Are you going to be okay with this, hon?”

Bex licked her parched lips, not taking her eyes off the squad cars. “What do you think they want?”

Denise shrugged. “They might be asking questions, or maybe they’re here to answer them. Look, Bex, I know you didn’t know Darla, but if you want to stay home, I understand. All of this”—she waved her hands, and Bex wasn’t sure if Denise meant the cop cars or the events of the last two days or life in general—“is a lot to take in.”

Bex briefly considered going back home and tucking herself underneath her cheery mint-green comforter, then spending the day with Denise doing mom things—which were what, exactly? Bex didn’t know. The offer was almost tempting but at home, tucked in the drawer of her nightstand, was the white box with the silver heart necklace set neatly inside. It had taunted her all night—
A kind offering? Some kind of joke?
—and Bex didn’t want to be near it.

“No thanks, Denise.” She steeled herself and forced a smile that, when she caught her reflection in the rearview mirror, looked more like a bared-teeth grimace. “I’ll be okay.”

The vibe on campus was somber. Everyone seemed to move in slow motion. Where there were usually groups of chattering, joking teens, there were red-eyed mourners walking aimlessly and clutching the straps of their backpacks. Bex saw Trevor walking in from the student lot and detoured directly into the girls’ locker room, her heart thundering in her throat, her shoulders pressed against the cold brick wall. She didn’t want to see him, didn’t want to see the “Are you crazy?” look on his face after last night’s phone call.

“I heard Laney and Chelsea
found
her,” came a rough whisper from between the lockers.

White-hot heat started at the base of Bex’s spine.

“They practically stepped on her,” another female voice added. “They were with that new girl too. Beth or Rec or something.”

Bex’s heart thundered in her ears and she held her breath, straining to hear.
Were they going to accuse her?

“I heard poor Darla had actually been missing for a week. No one even went looking for her.”

Tears pricked at the base of Bex’s lashes.

“It’s so sad. And now there’s some crazy psychopath on the loose.”

Bex was breathing hard, teeth gritted, trying to block out the images that came at her full speed. They were newspaper headlines, television snippets from another time, another world that wouldn’t leave her alone no matter how far away she was.

“…Isabel Doctoro had been missing for more than fourteen days before her body was found…”

“…need to find this psychopath…”

“No one knew to look for her.”

“Hello? Hell-ooh?”

Bex snapped out of her daymare and blinked at the two girls standing in front of her. They were both decked out in black-and-red Kill Devil Hills basketball sweats, with their long hair pulled back into slick ponytails topped with black-and-red hair bows. They were school spirit through and through, right up to their made-up lips, now tugged down into deep frowns.

“Were you listening to our conversation?”

“N-no,” Bex stammered. “I-I just walked in.”

The girl who hadn’t spoken—the one with the glossy, black hair and blue eyes that took up half her face—stepped in front of her friend, scrutinizing Bex. “Hey, aren’t you the new girl?”

Bex nodded, suddenly mute.

“You were with Chelsea and Laney when they found Darla.”

Again, Bex’s heart started to thud. Her stomach folded in on itself and she briefly glanced toward the bank of bathroom stalls to her left, wondering if she would make it there before vomiting.

“What was it like?” The dark-haired girl’s lips quirked up just the tiniest bit, her expression a macabre mix of interest and sheer fascination.

Bex shook her head, unable to form the words as images bombarded her—images that no child, no one at all, should have to see: graying faces, unseeing eyes; the photographs of bodies strewn across an overhead projector; beautiful girls, alive and vibrant on one side, their desperate, empty shells on the other, supposedly carved by her father’s hand.

“He was a butcher…”

“An animal…”

“These young women were nothing but things to him, things to take and use and ruin and then discard like so much trash…”

She saw Darla’s toes, half-buried in the sand.

The girls were still staring at Bex, the dark-haired one practically leering, leaning in to her. Bex stepped between them, silent, and pushed open the doors of the locker room, letting the warm, outside air wash over her cheeks.

She didn’t realize she was crying.

• • •

No one had followed her, but Bex couldn’t shake the image of Darla or of the girls pressing into her in the locker room, sucking her air, wanting Bex to tell them what she knew.

The thought made her stomach lurch.

When she saw Chelsea and Laney coming out of their classroom up ahead, she cut down the nearest hall. She didn’t want to talk to them.

“Are you waiting to see someone?”

“What?” Bex blinked and noticed the woman in the hall.

She was standing in front of Bex, smiling lightly and holding a clipboard to her chest. She was dressed in a nondescript navy-blue pantsuit, her graying hair pulled back in a severe bun.

“Did you want to see one of the grief counselors? You don’t have to sign in. It can be completely anonymous.”

Bex glanced through the windows, her eyes scanning the library. It was slightly dim and seemed blessedly quiet, an easy escape from people asking her questions.

“Do I have to talk?”

“No.” The woman shook her head. “You don’t have to talk about the event.”

Bex briefly wondered when they stopped calling it a murder and started calling it an “event.”

“You can just take some quiet time in the library if you feel that’s what you need.”

Bex nodded, stepping inside. Another woman, this one slightly taller and without a clipboard, made a beeline for her.

“Hi, I’m Renee. Can I help you?”

Bex opened her mouth but her tongue felt weighted.

“Why don’t you come over here and sit? We can chat awhile.”

Renee led Bex to a tiny office and began chattering in calm, soothing tones as she poured Bex a glass of water and sat down across from her.

“How are you doing today?”

Bex was silent for a beat. “I didn’t know her.”

She knew that Renee was trying not to look judgmental or surprised, but her eyebrows rose.

“Are you talking about Darla?”

“I didn’t know her. I…” Bex’s fingers found the straps of her backpack, and she worked the thick, woven material back and forth. “I’m new here.”

Renee sat back in her chair. “You didn’t have to know her to be upset. It’s okay to have a lot of feelings. The circumstances are tragic and rather terrifying.”

“Circumstances?” Bex looked up.

“You know that Darla was murdered.”

Her blond hair was fanned out on the sand, a few strands bouncing up on the wisp of ocean breeze.

“I know.”

“We don’t know exactly what happened to her yet, but someone out there does. Do you want to talk about that? Is the uncertainty bothering you?”

Bex blinked. “Are you a real doctor?”

Renee seemed slightly taken aback. “I assure you, I’m qualified to help. And yes, I’m a real doctor. I’m a psychiatrist, which means I have my MD.”

Bex licked her lips, which suddenly seemed Sahara dry and cracked. “So you know about mental…diseases.”

Renee seemed to reset her professional smile. “What can I help you with?”

“The person who”—again, Bex couldn’t say the word—“hurt Darla. He…he had to be crazy, right? Sick?”

“Well, there are a lot of reasons people kill, and yes, mental disease can be one of them. Psychopaths do exist.”

“Is that…” Bex shifted in her chair but kept her eyes on Renee’s shoulder. “Is psychopath—psycho—”

“Psychopathy.”

“I mean, you don’t catch it. The psychopathy. Either you are or you aren’t, right? It’s just in you?”

Renee nodded carefully and Bex was spurred on.

“Is it hereditary? Can it be passed along?”

Renee cleared her throat. “Well, some psychiatric diseases are, in fact, inherited, but that doesn’t mean that if someone did something while suffering a—we call them breaks, psychotic breaks—if someone did something during a psychotic break, that doesn’t mean you would do the same thing, even if you inherited the same psychopathy.”

Bex lost her breath. “Not me. I didn’t do anything.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you… What’s your name? I didn’t mean you in particular. I meant the global”—she made air quotes—“you.”

Bex could feel her temperature ratcheting up, could feel pressure at her temples. Her saliva soured in her mouth. “But it’s possible.”

“Theoretically. Are you worried about something, honey?”

Bex stood quickly and slung her backpack over one shoulder. “No, no, I’m fine, thanks.”

Renee stood too. “We can continue to talk. Are there other questions you have?”

“No, I’m good.”

Renee may have still been talking, but Bex didn’t hear. Her blood was pulsing with Renee’s answer, with the possibility that if her father was a psychopath, there was a chance that Bex was one too. She walked straight through the library, eyes focused directly ahead, not stopping when she saw Zach at the door to Renee’s office, not thinking about the shocked look on his face.

“Hey, Bex!”

She had gotten through her morning classes without seeing Chelsea, Laney, or Trevor, doing her best to blend into the swarm of kids moving from class to class. Anytime anyone looked at her with the somber look of grief, Bex flinched, guilt welling up inside her.

She remembered Dr. Gold, the court-appointed shrink they made her see after her father disappeared and her gran took custody of her. Dr. Gold had watched Beth Anne for a long time, the two sitting in companionable silence while the woman fingered the tiny, silver bird that hung from a chain around her wrist. It had jeweled pink eyes, and Beth Anne couldn’t help herself. She reached out to touch the tiny head of the bird, and the doctor smiled.

“It’s a finch,” the doctor said.

Beth Anne said nothing, playing the smooth body of the bird against her fingertips. “The eyes are tourmalines.”

Beth Anne still wouldn’t speak, not at first, but every session started the same: Dr. Gold unclasping the bracelet and re-clasping it on Beth Anne’s arm without a word. Beth Anne would color, letting the silver bird glide over her paper.

Bex remembered the soothing sound of the doctor’s voice as Beth Anne colored one day in her office—long strokes of purple bleeding into blue, bleeding into yellow, into pink—a rainbow. Dr. Gold prattled on about all sorts of things: her daughter was only two, but she was already a handful; her husband was forever thinking he could fix things that he couldn’t. Week after week, Dr. Gold spoke and Beth Anne colored silently, learning to relax into the rise and fall of the doctor’s kind voice. And then, one day, Dr. Gold laid her hand on Beth Anne’s arm.

“It’s not your fault, Beth Anne. None of it.”

Beth Anne had a crayon in her fist—red, glaring, and angry, the heat from her hand making the wax weaken in her grip.

“They don’t blame you.”

She eyed the crayon and smelled the scent of the wax. It didn’t smell red; it smelled like a crayon. All crayons smelled the same.

“He didn’t do this because of you.”

When Beth Anne held the point of the crayon against the paper, the point flattened.

“He gave you things because he loved you—not because you were a part of this.”

A red tail arced from the plane of the crayon. Bright, bloodred.

“This wasn’t about you.”

Beth Anne put the crayon down carefully and turned, her eyes fixed on Dr. Gold’s.

“Yes it was,” she said.

Dr. Gold gave Beth Anne a humorless smile. “Why don’t you tell me why you think this was your fault?”

Beth Anne’s hand went over the crayons all lined up at the edge of her paper and selected a blue one, pressing it hard so the color was dark, dark.

“Beth Anne?”

Her name was Isabel Doctoro, and she had been sleeping in Beth Anne’s father’s room for three nights. She had a big, soft leather purse that she threw on the couch before she’d disappear with Beth Anne’s dad, and once the bedroom door shut, Beth Anne would rifle through the bag, through Isabel’s world. Inside, there was lipstick the color of cherries. A frosted-glass, finger-sized vial with a roller ball on the end that Beth Anne pressed against her skin, breathing in the oily, lavender-laced scent it left behind. A compact with a broken mirror. And a scrollwork bracelet with a hunk of real turquoise.

Beth Anne slipped on the bracelet and promptly forgot about it until that night at dinner. The three of them were eating pizza straight from the box when Isabel grabbed Beth Anne’s arm with her clawlike fingernails.

“Where’d you get that bracelet?”

Beth Anne glanced at her wrist, feeling the heat burning on her cheeks.

“That’s mine, isn’t it? You took it from my purse!”

“Now, now,” Beth Anne’s father said, trying to calm Isabel.

“No, Jackson, that was in my purse. It’s mine. She stole it from my purse!”

Through lowered lashes, Beth Anne watched her father’s gaze rake over her. “Did you take that bracelet, Bethy?”

Beth Anne wagged her head from side to side, still studying her pizza slice.

“She’s lying! She’s lying! She’s out-and-out lying, Jackson. You’ve got to punish her!”

Isabel snatched the bracelet from Beth Anne’s wrist and pinched her cheeks with one hand, making Beth Anne’s lips pucker. “Your daddy’s gonna teach you that it’s not right to steal.” She slapped the bracelet on her own bony wrist, and Beth Anne thought the richness of the stone made Isabel’s yellow-hued skin look that much more sallow.

“Go to your room, Bethy.” Her daddy’s voice was even, relaxed.

Isabel didn’t spend the night that time. When Beth Anne woke up the following morning, Isabel was still gone, but the bracelet was sitting in the center of the kitchen table.

It took fourteen days for the police to find Isabel Doctoro’s body.

“Bex!” Trevor was moving toward her at a dizzying speed. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He squeezed her arm, then pulled her into a hug.

Bex stiffened. The feeling of Trevor’s warm, muscled body pressed up against hers was both intimate and weird.

“Hey”—he didn’t let her go, his mouth a hairbreadth from her ear—“it’s okay. I’m here.” He squeezed her a little tighter and Bex felt herself melt into him, exhaustion crashing over her in white waves. She wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, if it was a minute or hours, but however long it was, it felt too short.

“I’m so sorry. Jeez…” He looked away and raked a hand through his hair. “I feel like I’m kind of responsible.”

Heat ricocheted through Bex, exploding like gunfire in her ears. “W-what?”

“I don’t know. I feel like…” Trevor looked down at his feet, the tops of his ears flushing a fierce red. “I feel like I should protect you. Like, I don’t want you to have to experience anything bad.”

Bex was frozen, rooted to her spot in the hall.

“I know that’s stupid, but”—Trevor looked up at her, his eyes finding hers and pinning her there—“I really like you, Bex.”

She blinked at the small smile that played on his lips, every synapse in her brain firing simultaneously, random triggers flailing:
He likes me! Run! It’s a trick. It’s a joke. I like him. Someone actually
likes
me! A boy, a boy likes me! He’s lying. Everyone’s lying.

Something overrode the wild clatter in her brain and Bex’s lips were moving, sound coming out. “I like you too, Trevor.” Heat grazed the back of her neck, and her palms started to sweat in that millisecond between her answer and his response. Her stomach started to lurch, then flutter.

“So, we like each other then,” Trevor said, a wide smile pushing up his red-apple cheeks.

The bell cut through Bex’s response while Trevor’s hand found hers, his fingers intertwining with hers.

There were grief counselors in all the afternoon classes. Bex saw Renee slip into the class across the hall from hers and shrunk back in her seat, hoping that the doctor wouldn’t turn around and see her, wouldn’t announce that she had talked to Bex about the heredity of mental illness.

At half past the hour, all the classes filed into the cafeteria ten minutes early for lunch. A long line of adults stood behind a podium, all with somber faces and wearing every shade of navy-blue pantsuit imaginable. Bex figured that black must have given off too dark a vibe so the official color of teen grief must be navy blue. She wasn’t certain why skirts were off-limits and let her mind wander while the principal tapped a microphone and waited for the clattering of dishes and lunch bags and Starbucks cups to die down.

“If we can all just take a moment of silence,” Principal Morse started.

Chelsea and Laney looked at each other and then at Bex, pulling her into a crushing embrace while they bowed their heads. Bex chanced a glance up and met Trevor’s eyes. He was sitting across from her, staring. They both bowed their heads for one enveloping moment of pulsing silence, Bex staring at her kneecaps under the table and listening to the
thud-thud-thud
of her heart. She remembered a story that her only Raleigh friend, Mel, had told her about, something that Mel was reading in class. It was about a man who killed another man and was driven to admit it because he could still hear the dead man’s heart beating—“The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Bex hoped the heart she heard was her own.

When she looked up, she was met with Darla’s pale-blue eyes staring down at her from a huge photograph projected on the cafeteria wall. The girl was smiling, head cocked, blond hair in corn-silk waves over one shoulder, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.

They were dull but accusing.

“Darla’s dad took that picture. We were there. It was Corolla Beach last summer.” Laney was whispering in Bex’s ear, her chin jutting toward the picture of Darla. Bex was immediately pulled back to that North Carolina courtroom, to that twanged voice dripping with anger and hate:
“She should have to sit here and see what her daddy done. What he done to my little girl.”

“I have to go.” Bex stood up and tried to extract herself from the table and the cafeteria as quickly and quietly as possible, keeping her eyes trained on the floor. But she knew they were all looking at her, wondering how she could so callously get up and walk out while the principal memorialized a dead girl.

A noose was tightening around her neck as Bex escaped the cafeteria and burst into the hall. It was hard to breathe, each thread of rope tightening against her throat. She pushed out into the commons, dropping to her knees and sucking in air, coughing, sputtering.

It wasn’t him
, she told herself.
There was absolutely no indication that Darla was killed by the Wife Collector.

The jaunty image of the postcard emblazoned with the Research Triangle flashed in her mind.

Daddy’s home.

Bex tried to shake out the image, the memories, the voices, but they crawled and picked at her like fire ants on her skin. She fished out her cell phone and with shaky fingers dialed a number she’d hoped never to have to dial again. It rang twice before a jaunty voice greeted her.

“Dr. Gold’s office. This is Maria. How may I help you?”

Bex was silent for a minute, letting Maria’s voice soak in.

“Hello?” Maria said again. “Dr. Gold’s office?” Her voice rose at the end of the greeting.

“I’m sorry,” Bex pushed out. “I’m sorry. I need to talk to Dr. Gold.”

Maria paused on the other end of the line, and Bex could hear another line ringing in the office. “May I ask who’s calling, please?”

Bex froze.
Beth Anne Reimer. Bex. Bex Andrews. That’s who she was. That’s who she was now.

“Bex Andrews.”

“Ms. Andrews, Dr. Gold isn’t in at the moment. Were or are you a patient of hers? I can schedule you an appointment or take a message—”

Maria’s pleasant, all-business voice was cut off when Bex hung up the phone.

• • •

Bex sat in the coffeehouse until the sky went from crystal blue to a low, muted gray, the sun beginning to set. She nursed a single cup of coffee, sipping slowly, refreshing it constantly so that each time the liquid burned her lips. The pain somehow satisfied her.

“Oh, oh thank God, there you are!” Denise rushed toward her and nearly toppled the chair, throwing her arms around Bex. She let Bex go, then looked her up and down, the relief in her face quickly dissolving to anger. “Bex, you scared the hell out of me and Michael.”

Bex looked up at Denise and noticed Michael over her left shoulder. He put a hand on his wife’s arm and muttered something in her ear. She shook him away. “No, Michael, she needs to know that she can’t just run off.” Denise looked down at Bex again. “Bex, the school called and said you missed your afternoon classes, and when I got to the school, no one knew where you were. You can’t run off like that. You just can’t.”

Her voice wavered between anger and sadness, and Bex shrank back in her chair, unsure of what to do. “We must have called you thirty times. And your boyfriend said you ran out of the cafeteria at lunchtime. You didn’t even tell him where you were going. Why, Bex?” Denise leaned on the table, palms pressed down, eyes blazing.

“Honey!” Michael pulled her back, and she crumpled in his arms. “We were incredibly worried about you, Bex.”

“I’m sorry,” Bex said. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

Michael stroked his wife’s hair as her shoulders rocked. “Come here.” He stretched out an arm for Bex. When she dutifully went to him, he engulfed his wife and his daughter in one tremendous hug. “It’s going to take some time for us all to get on the same page. Come on.”

They filed out of the coffeehouse in a straight line, silently getting into Michael’s car. Bex kept her eyes on her sneakers as he pulled out into traffic. Denise turned around in her seat. “I’m not mad. Well, actually I am. You can’t walk out of school like that.” She glanced at Michael’s profile. “We understand that today was probably really hard for you, but you have to talk to us. You can’t just act out, okay?”

Bex heard the words but couldn’t process them. Didn’t they know who she was, why this had happened?

No, because you’re Bex Andrews now. Beth Anne stayed in Raleigh. The Wife Collector stayed in Raleigh. You’re normal now. You have to be normal.

She cleared her throat and made the effort to look into Denise’s eyes. “I’m really sorry, you guys. I just—I kind of freaked out, I guess.”

“We can dig that.”

Both Bex and Denise shot Michael looks.

“What? I’m just trying to say that we understand. Man!”

Denise turned back to Bex. “We’re not going to punish you this time, but skipping school is not okay and not letting us know where you are is definitely not okay. If you want to talk about this—about anything—we’re here for you. Okay, Bex?”

Bex nodded.