by Harper Shaw
What happened? she asked herself. As if you don’t know. It’s all your fault. Always has been and always will be.
Her body slumped against the pole as she took the phone from the hook. She dialed ‘zero’. “Connect me to the police,” she said when the operator answered.
“One moment.”
The phone rang. “Hilton Head police department,” a voice answered.
Rebecca froze. She hung the phone up instead and peeled herself from the pole. She would have to plod back to the beach house for her rental car and drive to the police station. But she knew there wasn’t any rush at this point.
The Shroud was already gone. Dennis was already dead. And she already knew Faruq was going to try to make her a suspect. In her mind, she tried to piece together what happened—not to get her story straight but just to feel less splintered. When she thought of what she might say, her mind was utterly blank.
All she could think of was Dennis’s name, and the only image that came in her head when she closed her eyes was the Shroud, which wasn’t much of an image at all, just a dark figure with a black slicker, hood, and boots. Just a killer.
She finally got back to her car, sitting beside Dennis’s empty one. She got in the rental and numbly made her way to the police station. Every few minutes, when she got too lost in her thoughts, she was pulled back to reality by a passing car or the sudden appearance of a red light.
When she arrived at the police station, she saw herself in the reflection of the door and realized she looked disheveled. She couldn’t find herself caring about her frizzy hair or the ripped knee of her pants as she opened the door and headed into the department’s building.
Walking up to the receptionist’s desk, she was grateful the annoying receptionist wasn’t there at least, knowing it would only exacerbate things. She found herself slouching against the counter as she spoke to the woman, though.
“You all need to send a unit to the docks over by the beach, the very end.”
“You have an emergency?” she asked. “Those are best directed to the emergency line. 911 dispatchers are more than capable of—”
“Someone drowned there,” Rebecca said, cutting her off. Then she walked away from the desk and sat down in a waiting room that felt familiar but uncomfortable. Despite the cramped nature of the place, she sat still for a long while. Rebecca had started counting the minutes using the clock hung above the reception desk at first, but it didn’t take long for her to fall off and lose her semblance of time and space.
Slowly her shock faded as her mind caught up with the events of late. So much had happened. Bruce got hit by a car. Monica’s ghost appeared. The Shroud attacked her—twice. And Dennis died. The final occurrence hurt her the most, though.
Rebecca’s mind kept drifting to what could have happened had Dennis not tried to lure the Shroud away, had she not distracted him by calling his name. She had caused all of this. No one was getting killed before she came to town. Everyone had moved on but her. And it wasn’t as if she made things any better when she told Faruq.
For all she knew, he would just use that against her in this case, argue that she’d only told him to set herself up to be able to get off and kill the rest of her old friend group. Sure, Bruce was still around, and she knew that meant he was working on something, but to Faruq? To Faruq that could’ve just been a mistake, and Bruce was escaping before she finished the job—or she took him herself and buried the corpse somewhere.
Yep, Rebecca knew she was trapped before even speaking to Faruq. So, when he walked into the lobby to take her to an interrogation room, she had already prepared herself. She didn’t say a thing to him, didn’t ask for her lawyer or argue her innocence. Instead she settled her face into something colder than the metal chair Faruq sat her in and waited for him to make the first move.
She braided her fingers together and kept her eyes downcast. What good would meeting his eyes do for her? Besides, she felt like a husk. Her body was sagged in the chair as her mind churned through everything. When he cleared his throat, Rebecca raised her gaze some, coming to attention.
Faruq took a seat across from her in the other seat. His face was as sober as hers. For a moment, it seemed like he didn’t know what to say at all. Then his eyes flashed to something more focused, and she knew it was the exact opposite. Faruq thought he knew exactly what happened. He just needed to figure out how to say it.
“So, Rebecca,” he started, clearing his throat again as his eyes scanned her form. “I don’t know what brought you and Dennis together—let alone to the pier—but I don’t think I have to in this case. What do you think?” He paused to give her a chance to respond.
Rebecca said nothing and just clenched her jaw.
“So, what happened?”
“He drowned,” she answered.
“It’s that simple, huh?”
“I tried to get him out, but I couldn’t in time. He drowned.”
“Explain the spear in his leg. It only had one set of prints on it. Yours. What do you think about that?”
“I must have touched it after I pulled him out.”
“Or when you were loading it into the spear gun you used on him.”
“Where would I come up with a spear gun? The only weapon I had was my Ruger, and you took that.” Then, she recalled the struggle at the docks. “Wait – I wrestled the spear gun off the Shroud. Didn’t you find it near where Dennis died?”
“No.”
“It must have gone back and picked it up…”
“Conveniently, huh?” Faruq snorted. “Your prints are the only ones on the spear’s shaft, and there’s no evidence of this Shroud character you speak of. Makes me wonder about earlier today, too. Doesn’t it make you wonder?”
“I can’t say it does, no.”
“I have to say, I think it’s quite suspicious that your fingerprints are the only ones. Usually evidence like this makes a case clean cut. Don’t you think?”
“No.”
“Listen, Rebecca, if you just come out and say whatever it is now, I’ll ask them to go lighter on you, to not pursue the maximum.”
“Maximum what?” she asked, playing dumb.
“The max sentence.”
“Hm.”
“I know you’re working with Bruce somehow, but I still haven’t figured out all the details. Tell you what, though, you staged that car accident really nicely.”
“I’m not working with Bruce. Someone else is,” Rebecca said.
“Yeah, yeah…” Faruq stood, showing he was done with her. He didn’t say anything more before walking out of the room.
A few minutes later, a pair of officers entered the room. She heard them talking about recovering Dennis’s body as they took her through the halls of the building, also familiar. Rebecca wound up locked in a holding cell.
As she sat in a corner of the cell, she brought her knees to her chest. She didn’t know much of anything anymore. All she knew was what she had done tonight—failed.
Chapter Forty-Three
It didn’t take long for Rebecca to fully assess her situation. She was stuck in a holding cell, suspected of the murder of almost half a dozen people. Sure, she’d been in a situation similar to this not too long ago, but this time she didn’t have her parents or their lawyer to bail her out. I’ll be here for the night, I guess, she thought.
She had this weird ambivalence toward her own situation, and she found her mind more occupied with how to find Bruce than how to get herself out of here. He was still out there, and she couldn’t even fathom what he may have been trying to do next. Who knew, maybe she and the rest of her gang were only phase one in some long, convoluted plan. He was good enough at getting away with things for that to be a possibility.
Thumping her head against the wall, she tried to force herself to think. She didn’t know what to do. All she really knew in this moment was that her brain felt stalled and fatigued. It obviously had something to do with the recent murders, with other stress
ors, but it was bothering her that she couldn’t think.
After all, Rebecca was a detective. They had trained her to be able to figure things out even when she was tired or distressed. That was half of the job. Yet she couldn’t even string together an accurate timeline of today in her head, let alone unravel some vague murder plot.
Once she had been thinking (or trying to think) for at least an hour to no avail, she took the folded blanket at the end of the cot in the cell and shook it open, wrapping herself in its slight warmth. She decided she would think about things later, tomorrow maybe. It wasn’t as if she planned on getting out of here anytime soon. She laid herself against the thin mattress, feeling the rails of the bare bed against her ribs.
“The truth will come out. And the truth will set you free,” she whispered to herself, warming her clenched knuckles with her words. She didn’t believe them. They were stupid and cheesy. They were also the only thing she could hold onto right now. Rebecca prayed her dreams wouldn’t do her too badly as she drifted to sleep in her cell, her eyelids drooping and gluing themselves to the tops of her cheeks.
The transition in her mind was a white light.
Rebecca’s dreams that night weren’t good ones. They all started as dreams and ended as nightmares, and she woke up clawing at her chest without realizing she was getting out of bed to a new subconscious haunt. She imagined Jennifer’s laugh, the snide snicker that always dragged behind it. Then she thought of Monica’s sweetness. It was all she could remember of her best friend these days.
It had been so long since she looked Monica in the face that Rebecca’s mind filled it in with a blur. Monica’s voice would sound right, and her height and clothes were ones Rebecca remembered, too, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see Monica’s face. She felt something flat and cold when she tried to lean forward and touch it.
In some of her dreams, she was just running. She would dart through dark streets and turn endless corners to see the reflection of the Shroud in the glass sides of buildings and watch his shadow overtake her. And even though she knew it was a dream, she wasn’t able to escape it.
All night she tried and failed to pry her eyes open. Thrusting herself back to the land of the living, to that cold cell where she was safe from Bruce and his fellow assailant, was impossible. Why some outside force insisted on playing with her mind and sanity was beyond her.
The last nightmare was the realest one, though.
In the last nightmare, she was laughing. She was laughing, and her hands were locked with Monica’s. They were swinging each other around the upstairs of the beach house. Rebecca could see swirls of the rest of her friends, and her jaws were feeling sore from all of the smiling. She and Monica collapsed into each other and hugged.
And then Monica pulled her onto the balcony. Rebecca hadn’t noticed as she did, but as soon as she saw the edge she flipped them so her back was to the balcony. She tried to get Monica to go back inside, but Monica wasn’t listening to her at all, too busy laughing and smiling.
Rebecca could see her own concern reflected in Monica’s bright eyes. She continued to push at her friend, but it was no use. Then, all at once, the laughing stopped, and Monica’s face grew serious, her mouth an even line. Gasping, Rebecca closed her eyes and then opened them again, trying to banish the ghost from her mind—or herself from the dream world.
But Monica wasn’t leaving. She continued to smile as her face grew darker and her cheeks lost their pinkness while her neck twisted and blood began to drip from her mouth to stain her chest.
“You’ve had a little too much to drink tonight. Haven’t you, Rebecca?” Monica’s ghost said, the smile returning in an evil grin. “You’ve had a lot to drink. And oh! No one’s here to watch you. You were smoking weed all the way here and chugging beer by the gallon. There was nothing we could do when you fell.”
Rebecca opened her mouth and tried to respond, but no sound came out, just a gargled choke.
“Keep your balance, Becca. Don’t fall,” Monica’s ghost sing-songed. “Don’t fall…” Then she walked up closer to Rebecca. She raised her hands into the air and waved her flat palms at Rebecca. “Oh, look at you, sweetie. You’re so… clumsy.” Monica ran forward at Rebecca and launched her into the sky.
As she fell, Rebecca screamed. She felt herself land with a thud on the sand, her limbs all out of order. For some reason, her heart’s beat sounded like metal banging against itself. Clack. Clack. CLACK.
“Ms. Morgan, wake up.”
With a gasp, Rebecca opened her eyes. She was back in the cell. The blanket she had spread over herself was half on the bed and half on the floor now, mirroring the situation of her own body. Her legs were still in the bed, but she was hanging off of it some. The cot was close enough to the floor that it didn’t look too awkward, but she could already feel the soreness coming on as she pulled herself up to the bed.
The person talking to her was a police officer in riot gear. She didn’t think she was enough of a risk to need someone so armed at her entrance, but a part of Rebecca felt this was an ideal situation out of the possible ones. How was Bruce or the Shroud going to get her if she was with a serious threat of the law, after all?
It was only morning, though. And no one had said anything else to her. Rebecca had questions. Swallowing, she chose to try asking some of them to the riot cop.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Out,” he answered. She couldn’t see his face to know if this was more of a joke or a serious thing, so she scooted back a little on her mattress and spoke again.
“Where are you taking me?”
He didn’t answer this time.
“I have the right to know where you’re taking me. You don’t need my consent, but you do need to tell me where I’m going.”
“Approach the exit and turn around,” he ordered.
“No, where am I going?”
It seemed clear he wasn’t going to ask her twice, so Rebecca acquiesced and stood. She slowly walked over to the door and turned to have her hands cuffed behind her back.
Once he had her cuffed, the officer took Rebecca out of the cell and headed out of the station. Used to being bailed out before it got to this point, she didn’t know the exact protocol, so she didn’t say much more as he shoved her into the back of an unmarked police cruiser.
“Are you with the HHPD or someone else? Where are we going?” Her questions were still being ignored, and Rebecca was beginning to think something was up. The fact that this car didn’t seem to have any of the usual equipment as police cars didn’t assure her any. Rebecca kicked at the back of the seat. “Hey!”
He still didn’t answer her as the car approached a red light.
Propping herself onto her knees, Rebecca kicked out the back window of the car and fled. As she ran, she turned back for a moment and noticed the cop chasing after her, but it only took a few blocks for her to see there was no one actively pursuing her. It all felt too easy, as if the cop let her get away on purpose, but it wasn’t overt enough for her to believe it.
Either way, here she went.
Chapter Forty-Four
Rebecca ran as fast as she could with her hands cuffed behind her back. She needed to get these cuffs off, that was the first thing on her list.
After that thought, a second thought dawned on her. She was a fugitive. She had just escaped police custody. If they didn’t think she was the killer before, now they certainly would.
All of this was strange, and all of it had her unnerved. That cop in riot gear hadn’t been right. It didn’t matter what district she was in, in the United States, a cop in full riot gear didn’t transfer prisoners.
Something fishy was definitely going on, and Rebecca didn’t know where to start.
“Cuffs off.”
That was where she had to start, and she knew a trick or two in order to slip cuffs. It came with the territory of being a cop.
So, she ran into a back alley and found a dumpster. On t
he cool metal of the corner, she pressed the center of the cuffs and made her hands as thin as possible.
The sweat of her flight helped, and she managed to push the cuffs over her hands. That was step one done. Next step, she needed to find a place to stay.
And she couldn’t stay in Hilton Head, not anymore—not after she had run from the cops and escaped custody.
That realization dawned, and the more she ran to the empty streets of Hilton Head, the more she realized how fucked she really was. There would be a manhunt for her. Her picture would be all over the news by mid-afternoon tomorrow. No way could she clear herself of murder, not while she was on the lam.
“One step at a time,” she reminded herself as she ran. “Just deal with this shit one step at the time.”
She couldn’t stay in Hilton Head, but she knew of a motel on the interstate only a few miles away. So, without knowing what else to do, she started walking in that direction.
At least she knew her card number by heart because it wasn’t like she had her wallet with her. So, she hoped the motel was so old it didn’t have the electronic card machine yet. Hopefully, they still just took the number and let her get a room.
The jog was only a couple of miles, but Rebecca found herself getting winded. It had been a long time since she ate, and it’s not like that sleep in the cell counted as rest. Her nightmares reared their ugly heads, and Rebecca had trouble shaking them free from the darkness of the encroaching night.
The lights in the motel guided her, and she ended up walking through the doors with no cars passing on the highway. Which was good, considering she was running from the law.
That still blew her mind. The entire last day was confusing. How could she be arrested for murder? And, more than that, now they would think she escaped. There was something wrong with that cop in the riot gear. That was sure. He hadn’t been normal. There was no way a cop who didn’t identify themselves let her out of prison.
Innocent people didn’t escape custody. So, even if Rebecca had been scared for her life, nobody would care.