I pull into the driveway with both Lilly and Jack amped up to new heights. I swear on all that is holy, Richard E. Moss feeds them buckets of icing just before they deposit them in the pick-up line. A class action lawsuit should be issued, and knowing the snobbery and Nazi-like parent police there will be. I’ll be cheering them on from the sidelines. From divorce court. From the den where I’ll sequester myself while my life lies in pieces all around me. If everything is true, and Bram was simply an illusion this entire time, then I am irrevocably broken. Irreparable beyond measure. It seems cruel of the universe to plant me in a monster’s womb, only to land me in front of another twenty-four years later. It’s unbearable, unfathomable. A shitstorm of bad luck that seems to be interwoven right in my DNA. In the back of my mind, an angry mob of voices screams you are not a victim. The hell I’m not.
The kids bolt straight to the backyard, right along with Dawson barking happily in their wake, but a tiny package catches my eye at the door and I take it to the kitchen.
My name is written across the front in all capital letters, no address, no evidence it ever went through the postal system. I spin the small package in my hand looking for clues, something that suggests foul play. It’s from my mother. I have no doubts about it. My gut says make a spectacle of throwing it into the trash. I know she’s watching. But my heart is leaping out of my chest, my curiosity far too powerful to nullify this exchange. There is no heft, no significance whatsoever to this box of misery my mother planted on my doorstep. Throwing it away without looking inside could breed years of nightmares, years of a morbid desire to have at least taken a single peek. It’s better that I look. I’ll leave the box on Lena’s doorstep when I’m done with it. A grown-up version of ding-dong-ditch. Lena can inspect the contents for herself when she gets home. She and my mother can work on the details of which landfill they’d like to grace it with. This is their problem. Not mine.
I pull a knife from off the counter and trace along the outer seam, popping it open, only to be met with a putrid stench. It’s dark and murky, something gray, and then I see them.
My entire body seizes as I inch back, and before I can run, an impromptu paralysis hits me.
A scream locks itself in my throat. Can’t breathe. Can’t move. And then, like an aria, the scream releases, lusty and primal as it rises to the ceiling without my permission.
A box of fingers. Four, eight, six—hell, I can’t count them, severed fingers. Curved little fingers with a crown of dried blood at the base. The one sitting on top is fresh, the fingernail painted a cheery shade of yellow. Something black and hairy sits to the side, and it takes a moment for my mind to identify it as a feather. Everything in me seizes once again. One slap of shock after the next, and I can’t catch my next breath.
A feather. Black feather. Shit, shit, shit.
The front door loosens and jingles before opening and shutting.
“Ree?” Bram’s voice fills the house right up to the rafters, and a small part of me is warmed to hear it.
A shot of adrenaline rockets through me as Bram enters the room, his eyes wide with wonder. That handsome face looks as if it’s begging for mercy.
“Ree—we need to talk.” He takes a step forward, and I slap my hand over the knife on the counter before lifting it between us.
“Keep away.” My voice is threadbare, my chest convulsing with every breath I take.
His hands float up, his eyes wander momentarily to the box.
“Ree, it’s not what you think.” His voice is loud and curt, his agitation growing by the moment. “Hell, I don’t know what you think, but whatever has you shaking, holding a knife like you’re not afraid to use it… I think I’m being framed.”
“Framed,” I parrot the word back to him. Could it be? My mother in her infinite wisdom, her unbridled wickedness has taken her game to a whole new level? The knife slips from my hand. Bram doesn’t miss a beat. He pulls the box over and peers inside. A guttural noise escapes him. He retches hard before jumping back.
“Shit!” He steps forward again and examines the box, scrutinizing its contents before mobilizing. Bram pulls a trash bag from under the sink, wraps the box in it, and walks it into the garage before reappearing. His eyes glazed with shock.
“Ree,” he breathes my name out like a sad song. “In addition to all that sick, there was a black feather in that box. Do you know what that means?”
“That you struck again?” There’s not a note of humor in my voice.
His eyes close a moment. “Brace yourself. It only goes down from here.”
Bram
A waking nightmare. My life had been reduced to that so very long ago. There are only so many terrors a human being can undergo before the body decides to shut the shitshow down. That stark numbness I’ve become so familiar with has transcended into something deeper, something perhaps far more meaningful, and it’s as if I’m watching all of this sublime misery from some place up in the clouds. The Peter Woodley Show. A horror flick that hasn’t quite hit its climax yet. A story of misfortune embedded in sorrow and rolled in misery for good measure. It’s overwritten, overdone, over-the-top, but ironically, it is not over. In fact, it might just be far from that.
In a strange ballet of what feels like choreographed moves, Ree and I head out front. The howl of a man comes from down the street as our footsteps quicken. We find ourselves in the Montenegros’ backyard, only to meet up with a deluge of black feathers. A stark naked woman—Astrid herself sits stuffed in a tire swing, her neck cinched with a wire, her mouth agape, stuffed with a bloody stump with dark feathers pluming out.
Ree gags on sight, screams so loud and long she sounds like an opera singer working her vocal cords. But my eyes flit to the poor woman’s left hand, bloodied as if a finger were severed, and I know which one.
Miles Montenegro lets out a low guttural cry, one after the other while I call 911 on my cell in a panic. The panic is what they expect, so I know to give it. And although the panic is indeed very fucking real, it’s not entirely of the new tragedy unfolding.
“God, the kids. I’ll make sure they’re not watching.” Ree staggers toward the house and in through the back door.
Miles falls to his knees, his face pitched toward the heavens as he shouts the word why over and over again. Astrid swings in the breeze, every inch of her folded body as disturbing as the next. Across the yard lie scattered pieces of that bird, that damned bird she lugged around with her everywhere she went. It looks as if it was torn apart with bare hands.
Who in the hell could do this? If Astrid saw someone so much as give a crooked look to that creature, she’d have them on a spit. Her adrenaline would have kicked in. There was probably a struggle. But that calling card. I have no doubt in my mind that a body part from that poor woman now sits in my garage in a box like some twisted trophy.
The fire department arrives on the scene, their faces white with shock, vomiting ensues. One retch inspires the next. The cops show up, and I’m shuttled out front, asked a million questions before I’m left to stagger back toward my own house. A crowd thirty deep congregates around the Montenegro home, providing an impromptu vigil.
Ree comes back out and pulls me to the side. “I called Tessa. She took the kids to her house. She’s letting them spend the night. They wanted Lilly and Jack, so I sent them, too.” Her voice shivers. Her body convulses as if she were having a seizure.
“It’s okay.” I wrap my arms around my wife, sink a kiss over the top of her beautiful head, and wonder how in the hell we will ever survive this.
Darkness falls, and the crowd dissipates. No sign of Lena or Ree’s mythological mother I’ve yet to meet, and I was fully expecting both.
Ree lures me to the shower, undresses me robotically, undresses herself, and it’s a relief, a pleasure. I would do anything to forget the last twenty-four hours, the last entire decade. She runs the water and takes me in with her, our bodies inadvertently slow dancing under a prickling of heat. Hellfire and
damnation. The water’s too damned hot, but it feels necessary as if it were stripping us of something horribly demonic, a past we can never escape.
Her hands cup my cheeks as she pulls me close, her skin beaded with moisture, droplets of water hanging precariously off each and every lash. Ree looks like a fantasy, a mermaid come to life with that long honey-blonde hair slicked back, her ruby lips quivering.
“Peter”—she hisses my name, my real name, and it lacerates open this wound that’s been festering for so very long—“tell me right now. Did you do it? Did you kill all those women?” Her eyes search me for clues that my mouth seems unwilling to give.
“No”—it comes out curt and a touch too loud, breaking the spell for a moment—“but there are some things I need to tell you. Things that I could never have told you from the beginning.”
She gives a brief nod, her gaze magnetized to mine. “There are some things I need to tell you, too.”
Ree
For so long Bram and I coasted. We were on cruise control, autopilot. We had made it through our individual storms, come out on the other side, and we were glowing with love, frolicking through our happily ever after. Isn’t that the reward you get after a bone-breaking trial saps you of all your sanity, of all your strength? You find your way home. The underdog finally gets his prize. The wicked past is decimated, and the light comes pouring into your soul. So, how in the hell is this happening again? Simple. My mother is still alive. The only way to squeeze peace out of this equation is to kill her. And after that, I must do the unthinkable. I must kill Bram.
Bram and I stare at one another while sitting on the bed like a couple of teenagers. The coroner’s van rolled out of our neighborhood an hour ago. There is a box full of severed fingers in the garage, and I’ve been listening as Bram steadily fills my head with things he thinks I should know about Simone. She didn’t write the diaries. Correction—she fabricated their lives. These were not the right vacations. Not the right sentiments. There were pertinent verbs and nouns out of place. She may have killed her own children. She most certainly killed those hookers Peter did not have an affair with. She killed Loretta, a woman Peter did care for at one time, but he was very, very confused. In his right mind, with the right wife—me—that would never have happened. She killed the prostitute I found, the woman from the fundraiser, and baited me toward her. She killed Astrid. A staggering body count, considering Simone has supposedly killed from beyond the grave. The kicker, of course, is that Simone is not dead. She could not be dead. There is no way of telling who was killed because Peter and his former in-laws mutually decided to have her cremated, and rightly so since there was hardly anything left of her head.
As if perfectly timed, Bram’s brother calls and drops a bombshell. Meredith, Simone’s sister, has not been seen since before Simone’s murder.
“It was her.” Bram nods into this lunacy.
“What about dental records? Even siblings have different teeth. Surely the coroner—”
“Her teeth were obliterated. We went off DNA and matched them to her parents.”
My heart drums wildly. A blast of anxiety rockets through me, throws me off balance and makes the room feel as if it’s starting to spin.
“Ree”—he reaches over and picks up my hand, rubbing small circles over my palm like he did when we first met—“I love you. I swear, I would never lie to you.”
I pluck my hand away as if pulling it from the flames. “You just keep things from me. You painted your relationship with Simone as perfect. You never demonized her until now. Why now?”
His eyes bulge with a strangulating stare. “Because we have a box of human digits smelling up the garage. Why would I send those to myself? To you?”
I shake my head, my gaze flitting through the north wall to that demonic place where my mother’s sick mind resides.
“She’s been here. She’s been in the yard. Lena probably let her in the house. Wherever you’ve had them hidden, she’s known about them for months.” My mother must have hit her zenith once she found that box of severed human remains. It was right up her twisted alley. “I’ve been getting these emails.”
“What emails?” His voice is curt, a little too loud for my liking.
“They have nothing to do with it. Not really,” I say, inching back on the bed. For the first time since we’ve met, I want to get away from this man, this enigma who I not only thought I knew but who I thought I understood on a deep, intimate level. It was all a joke to him. I was the easy wife, so gullible, very willing to buy whatever he was peddling.
I ate my way through his bucket of bullshit and asked for more. Thank you, Bram. May I have another?
Even his name is a lie. My children are born from this half-truth. My God, we’re going to have to get away, far away from Percy, and this time there will be no Lena, no old Bram, no support whatsoever to help me navigate my way through this difficult, difficult world. And worse than that, I’ll have spent my life looking over my shoulder for Bram of all people. My own husband, the murdering monster. But that’s not happening. That is simply not where this is headed. It’s a good plan C or D, but it’s not my first choice.
No. Bram is proving to be wily, but I will prove to be far more deceptive. I have always believed that if necessary I could kill someone. If absolutely necessary—if I truly put my mind to it, I can get away with it, too. None of this I’m a woman with a broken mind defense either. This will have to be a bona fide murder, just not by my hands. I need someone with a history of violence and, lucky for me, I have my mother. What a strange victory to rid the world of my mother—and place the blame of my husband’s own unfortunate demise on her shoulders. And if Lena dares get in my way, she will have to go, too.
“Ree”—he pulls me back into the room with the firm command of his voice—“what emails?”
“My mother sent them.”
I pull my phone forward and show him every last one.
Bram’s features mold into a permanent look of disdain.
“It’s not fair.” His chest bucks. “It’s not fair that you have to bear the burden of your cold-hearted mother, and I have to bear the burden of a psycho bitch ex-wife.”
“Wife,” I correct. “You never divorced. If she’s alive, she still belongs to you.”
His gaze penetrates mine. It says please believe me. I would never lie to you. I would die for you.
Yes, Peter, Bram, whoever you are.
You will most assuredly die for me.
It’s time to put a call in to my mother—and then do what I must do.
Bram
Hello, Bram. Do you want to play a game?
I stare down at the text from a number I don’t recognize an inordinate amount of time before putting a call to my brother and relay the new—the old nightmare blooming before me.
“What the hell?” Mace pants into the phone as if he ran a mile to get there. “Get Ree and the kids, and take off for the night. Somebody is fucking with you. Hell, it could be her, and, if it is, she’s stalking you.”
“The kids are gone for the night. They’re staying with friends. Ree looks as if she’s about to turn me in. Simone has done a fantastic job of infiltrating her mind. Dead or alive, she’s still got it.”
“I hear that. Give me the number. I’m going to try to get a read on where she is.”
“How the hell are you going to do that?”
“I might just call and ask. She’s the one who said she’s up for a game. I say we give her one.”
I send Mace the number and get off the phone before heading back inside the house to be with Ree. To comfort Ree. To tell her there is yet another sinister plot twist that’s guaranteed to keep us up at night. She’s not in the kitchen, the dining room, or the living room.
“Ree?” I call out just as she comes bounding down the stairs, a wild look in her eyes, her jacket and shoes on, a purse slung over her shoulder. “Where are you going?”
Her glassy eyes settle over mine. Ree look
s chemically altered, slightly deranged, stoned. “It’s time you met my mother.” She holds her hand out to me. “Come, Peter. She would love to meet you.”
I have seen my wife through every measure of pain, emotional—especially when we spoke of Isla and Henry, physical—giving birth to our own children, and yet this glazed look she’s wearing like a mask, I don’t recognize it at all. It’s as if she’s fractured. This is it. Peter Woodley strikes again. I’ve killed her on the inside where it truly counts, and I can only pray she recovers.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I say, trying to steer her to the sofa, but she jerks my hand away.
“I do.” Her gaze burns like fire over me, her voice curt and angry. “You will love her. The two of you have so very much in common.” She ushers us out the door without bothering to shut it, and I glance back at the open mouth, the burst of light beaconing into the night that lets the rest of the neighborhood know there is something amiss. But on a night like tonight. Tonight, of all nights, it might not register a wayward blink.
Lena’s home is dark, save for the soft flicker of light emanating from the television in the living room. I haven’t been a regular guest at Lena’s rental the way Ree has, but I’ve been over enough to know the layout, to realize where the exits are in the event I need to escape the madness, and something tells me I will.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I stop in the middle of the street to fish it out. Ree goes on ahead and waits by Lena’s walkway. Ree would never intentionally put herself in harm’s way. That’s exactly what I love about her. Not only is she safe, but she prefers to keep herself that way. Her fierce level of self-preservation is the only reason she’s with us today. And the monster behind those walls is the reason she almost didn’t make it.
I glance at the screen. It’s a text from Mace. I know in general where she or whoever is at. Get the hell out of Percy and do it tonight. If you don’t assure me you’re leaving, I’m calling the police.
Psychological Thriller Boxed Set Page 13