Dead Girls

by Abigail Tarttelin

  “She doesn’t know. She works ’til late, or stays out or whatever. I don’t usually watch it but…I’ve been keeping up with the news about Billie. They did a big story about her every night this week on Look North.” Look North with Peter Levy is our local news program. It comes on after the important news from London.

  “What about your dad?”

  “He doesn’t live with us.”

  “Why not?”

  Nathan looks away. “I don’t wanna talk about him. He’s a fucking bastard.”

  I’m shocked by the swearing, so I don’t know what to say. Poor, rougher people do swear more. That’s what Nan says. She knows, because her dad was a worker on the railways. Nathan probably doesn’t know better, so I politely ignore it. “Oh, right. So what do they say about Billie? Have they arrested the killer yet?”

  “No, they haven’t arrested anyone yet.”

  “Not even the walker?” I say, dismayed. “For questioning?”

  “Nope,” he says, kicking at the ground and not looking at me. “Anyway, did you want to go with me to the memorial?”

  I wrinkle my nose. “It’s not a social event.”

  “I know,” he says. “You don’t have to.” He sounds offended.

  I think about it. I really want to keep my eyes out for Billie, but I like Nathan and, what with Hattie head-butting me in the stomach and everything, I don’t actually have many friends anymore. Well, not living ones. I have Sam, but he has to be my friend because he’s my brother. “Sure,” I say, eventually. “Shall we meet at the gate?”

  “Yeah, okay. Cool.”

  We walk along the line of gravestones. I frown, thinking. “Why would you kill someone?”

  “I wouldn’t,” he says quickly.

  “No, but if you did. Revenge? Hatred? Anger? Jealousy? Maybe it’s more complicated than that. Do you think it could be the same killer? He could be going after people with one-syllable middle names? Jenny Ann Welder…Billie May Brooke…”

  We stop at a grave that has a little angel carved into the stone. Her name was Elizabeth Locke and she died in 1889. We pat the stone. “You think it might be a serial killer?” Nathan asks quietly.

  “A serial killer.” I swallow, nervously. “Of little girls.”

  He bites his nails and looks around, then twizzles the football on one finger.

  I want to tell him about the ghost girls, but I don’t know if I can trust him yet. Instead I say, “Girls about our age die all the time. You always hear about them. Sometimes younger ones, and some that just go missing. Sometimes they’re never found. And sometimes they’re found dead.” I climb onto the edge of a stone tomb and walk along it, looking around at the countryside. It’s a humid day, and the heat haze makes the fields in the distance fuzzy. Flies and bees buzz around us, and an occasional bird flaps by above. “But why girls? And why those girls? What do they all have in common?”

  “Well, they’re all really pretty, aren’t they?” says Nathan, absentmindedly.

  I turn back to him, my eyes wide. The dead girls are all very pretty.

  “That’s a really good point, Nathan. But why would someone want to kill pretty girls?” I stroke my chin, as if I have a beard and I’m Sherlock Holmes or something. I do this thinking of Billie. All my humor is geared toward making Billie laugh, but she’s not here to see it. Just Nathan, who doesn’t seem to find it funny. He’s jiggling his legs, like he needs the toilet. He tries to bounce the ball on the ground, but it just rolls. Footballs don’t bounce.

  “That’s what pervs do, isn’t it?” Nathan says.

  I freeze. “Billie’s mum said the walker was a pervert.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait. How do you know it’s a pervert?” A warning light is going off in my brain. “You seem to know an awful lot about it.”

  “I told you. I watch it on the news. Anyway, it’s obvious. Billie was pretty. She was found dead in a ditch. Pretty girls get killed by pervs and dumped in ditches.”

  There is a strange feeling in my stomach. Pervs do weird things to girls, like have sex with them. Did the pervert do anything to Billie? Did he have sex with her? Or did she die before he could? The thought makes me feel really sick, like I’m about to throw up. Suddenly I want to be out of my physical body, so I can’t be killed or touched too.

  Nathan is watching me. He pats me on the back, consolingly, then goes back to messing around with the football.

  I feel like, if I open my mouth, vomit will come out. But I have another question. “Have you ever felt like that about a girl?”

  Nathan frowns. “What? Wanted to kill one ’cause she was pretty? No!”

  “Good,” I say quickly. The vomit is settling on the bottom of my stomach. “Okay, good.”

  Nathan wrinkles his lip and turns away from me. He mutters something.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I’ve fancied girls before. Obviously. That’s normal.” He mumbles this, still with his back to me.

  “Have you had a girlfriend before?”

  “Sort of. I’ve done things. With Lauren, mainly.”

  Now suddenly the sick feeling is back. “Hattie’s sister?

  What things? Kissing?”

  “Stuff like that. Whatever she wanted.”

  Nathan turns around and shrugs uncomfortably. “I told you, she’s bossy. Sometimes we went to the den and I touched her boobs.”

  I feel physically sick. Hattie’s sister is awful. Now Nathan is tainted. “Do you still?”

  “No. I never really liked her, she just liked me. She said she’d say things to people at school about me if I didn’t.”

  “What things?”

  Nathan is chewing his lip and not looking right at me. He kicks the ball up into his hands. “I better be going now.” I follow him back to the gate. I don’t want him to go. “Do you have to be home for tea?” I ask, hoping he’s not gone off me. “We have tea at five thirty.”

  He looks at me weirdly, almost meanly. “Yeah,” he smirks. “I’m sure Mum will have tea waiting on the table when I get back.”

  “Me too,” I say uncertainly. Nathan hands me the football.

  “You can borrow it if you like,” I say. “You can bring it back at the memorial.”

  He smiles, considering it, but shakes his head. “Thanks. But I don’t think I could keep it neat.”

  We walk back to the end of my street. Nathan has to keep going, to the trailer park. When we get there, I say, “So, maybe a serial killer killed Billie. Why do you think Mrs. Stephenson would know for sure it’s a man, unless she had something to do with it? I’ll have to think about that. Find out if other people think it’s a man—”

  “It’s a man,” says Nathan, nodding.

  “How do you know?” I say suspiciously.

  He looks back at me blankly, and shrugs for the umpteenth time today.

  “Because…Oh!” I realize. “Perverts are men?”

  “Yeah,” he sighs impatiently. “Because men are perverts. Men like girls, don’t they?”

  I nod. Nathan must think I’m really slow. Of course the killer is a man. Because whoever it is, whether it’s the walker or not, if someone kills a pretty girl and leaves her in a ditch…then that’s a pervert. And perverts are men. “Right. So I’m looking for a male pervert, possibly a serial killer.”

  “Well, the police are.”

  “Um, yeah.” I blink at him. “The police are.” I’m not sure whether today with Nathan went well and I feel like he wants to leave, so I say, “Bye,” and start to walk off.

  But then I hear him calling after me, and when I turn he runs up to me, and hugs me, with his hands on my back. It’s not a bear hug like Dad, it’s like the one Nathan gave me before, really gentle. He pulls out of the hug, but then he darts in and kisses me on the cheek, a big smacker. “Bye,
” he says quickly, and then he runs away from me, around the corner down the main road. I watch him as he runs. I press my hand to my cheek and get the kiss on my fingers, and then I clasp my hand to my heart.

  Oh, boys. They are so weird.

  And then I take my hand away. For a minute, I forgot about Billie. It’s a minute too long.

  I failed when I tried automatic writing again the other night. I felt ashamed of myself. I wanted to talk to Billie, but when I did it everything went unnaturally quiet, and then I felt an icy breeze on my neck, and then, I’m not sure if I was mistaken, but I heard a low growl. I leapt up screaming. Dad came in and asked me what I was doing. I said, “Nothing.”

  He frowned at me for a moment and said, “Just get back to drawing nicely, now.” I looked at my pad and pen, and put them away. I try again the night I meet up with Nathan, but there is no icy breeze, and no growl, and no word from Billie. I hope it’s only because she is disappointed in me after the other night, and not because the walker is the killer. If he is, I definitely led her to her death. I pray to her, and whisper to her that I’m sorry, and I’ll be braver. I swear to her that if I led her to her death I didn’t mean to, that I would switch our places if she wanted me to. I say I hope she’s okay, wherever she is. Tears fall down my cheeks and I wipe them away with the cuff of my T-shirt. Billie’s not okay. She’s dead. I sit in the dark for a bit, imagining how I would have saved her if I had been there. After I’ve stopped crying, I go down to the kitchen to get supper, and accidentally overhear Mum and Dad talking.

  “…make sure they aren’t affected by it.”

  “…total overreaction,” says Dad. “I’m not sending Thera to a psychiatrist.”

  “Christ! It’s just a counselor. She’s clearly disturbed by what’s going on. And Sam.”

  “Sam’s doing all right.”

  “He’s started wetting the bed again.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “You’re never here, you’re always at the workshop.”

  “I have to be, it’s a new business!” Dad shouts, and then Mum shushes him.

  “I found a book in her room about Ouija boards,” says Mum.

  I almost gasp. What was she doing snooping ’round my room?

  “Thera has always been…” I strain to hear, but Dad mutters it, whatever it was.

  “I think…” Then Mum mutters something.

  “She’s just different!” Dad exclaims in a burst. “She’s different from other children.”

  There is a long pause. I sit down against the door, my back to them. I want to tell them: I like that I’m different. Billie always liked that I was different. Billie was the only one who ever understood me. I was pathetic not finishing the automatic writing. I should try harder, for her.

  “We’ve got to shield them from the details of the investigation,” Dad says. “That’s all. Mitigate their exposure to it.”

  “Agreed,” Mum says, “but we’re keeping so much from them at the moment.”

  “Whatever’s going on between us has nothing to do with them.”

  What’s that all about? I shake my head. I don’t like being kept in the dark. It’s not in my nature. I like to know everything. I make a decision. I’ll do the automatic writing and I won’t be scared. I want to know what happened, even if it was my fault Billie died.

  I crawl slowly back up the stairs, and then clomp down them loudly and ask for some milk and cheese on toast.

  After supper, Mum and Dad tuck me in, and then at midnight I get back out of bed. I hold the pencil loosely over my drawing pad. The light is off and I’ve opened the windows again, so everything is how it was the first time, when it worked. I whisper Billie’s name and I ask her to come to me, for her spirit to enter my body and use my hand, and tell me about the night she died. The iciness comes and slips around my neck. I tense, and struggle to breathe normally. The cold is inside me. It creeps down my arms and sits in my fingers.

  I have no memory of the pen moving. The cold grips me for a few minutes and then disappears. When I open my eyes, I see one of the black dogs in the corner, squatting down by the bookcase. Its haunches are muscular and its short fur shines in the moonlight. The dog growls, and I have to hold my lips shut to keep from screaming, but then it becomes a girl. She turns her head to look at me, and it’s so creepy I can’t help myself: I jump up and run to switch on the light, but when I look back she’s gone. It was the one who was about nine, with the ginger hair. I look down at the paper on the floor. My eyes widen. There are letters written on it. None of them spell words, they are not Billie’s handwriting and I don’t remember writing them, but there are loads.

  T H G O O I E O M T N A W

  S E A D H I E L K I M L E U N T H W L O D

  A G S T T C P R A O E E Y O U T M S E N J T N H I E

  Now she’s off to university. The freedom of the halls, and the possibility of a new beginning. Sweaty-palmed, she tries to make friends. She sits in the library. She is meek. She is boring. Her opinions are not interesting. She is not well educated. There comes the slow, sad realization that she is still the same person. Still weak as water. Still a B student.

  And then. Him.

  He walked into the room. It was a party, at the student halls of residence, but it could have been any room in the universe. It was fate. He was tall, handsome, with almost blonde hair. He was charming. Everyone loved him. But in this room, as he walked in, he looked at her. Their eyes met, right away, and reflected back in his perfect blue irises there she was, the right one. The girl in his eyes was an angel, still quiet and pale and fragile, but adored. He came over, said hello, offered to get her a drink. Later that night he told her there was something inside him that recognized something in her, some need he could not yet articulate. It was so fast it was frightening. Everything she ever wanted to be she was to him, in the instant they met. Everything she was crystallized in that moment, and she was never the same. (How right it felt, what a relief it was, after a lifetime of being lost, to find myself. I wasn’t even broken. I was whole and perfect.)

  She is eighteen and has nothing else to hold onto. Her parents never call, and when she comes home for holidays they ask her why she hasn’t found a place she can live over Easter, why is her father paying so much for “halls” when she can’t even live there outside term time? He’s not paying, the government is, but she knows he’ll come after her with the hand that carries that glass of whiskey if she says anything. They complain she is taking up a bed they now use for her sister. She sleeps on the floor, in the living room, so Ginny can be rested for her exams. She is up by six every day so she doesn’t anger Dad. She makes breakfast, she sits in their small garden. She tends the vegetables. She uses the old outdoor toilet. She avoids her parents. At university, she wanders the corridors like a ghost. She’s not even teased anymore, just a ghost of the girl who used to be teased.

  When he looks at her now, and he murmurs to her, and he tells her how extraordinary she is, she feels like she has miraculously been thrown a life jacket in a sea empty of other people, where she was drowning.

  She can’t let that version of herself walk out of the room. She can’t let the man who sees her, who sweeps her up without touching her, who knows her beauty and caresses her body with those intelligent, piercing eyes, leave.

  She’ll do anything to be with him. Anything.

  “Why do you think ghosts haunt people?” I ask Hattie on Monday at school. We are eating our sandwiches in the playground at lunch and talking about Billie. I haven’t told them about the dead girls yet. I think Hattie would just think I was going nuts.

  “Because they have unfinished business. Duh.” She always has to make me feel stupid.

  “I thought so. But what if you think their business is finished?”

  “You’re wrong. They probably have some unfinished business that you don’t know about.” />
  “Like…seeking revenge on their murderer or something?”

  “Yes. Do we have to talk about this? It’s morbid.”

  School is ending soon, so we are making an effort to be friends. Or we’ll grow apart when we grow up and are married. I guess that would be kind of sad. If Billie were here, we probably would all stay friends naturally, because we would all want to be friends with Billie. It’s good, at least, when I am with Hattie and Poppy, that I can talk about Billie, because I can’t stop thinking about her anyway, and about those letters. What did they mean? Were they a code?

  We are quiet for a few minutes as we all feed our Nanos, and a thought occurs to me. “Guys.”

  “Yup?”

  “Just…What’s a pervert?” Hattie rolls her eyes and I put my hand up. “I know, I know. A pervert is an old man with a white van, who tries to snatch girls into it. And I know they are, like, creepy,” I say, uncomfortably. “But what about the other stuff? Why specifically did he pick Billie? What did he want?” I hesitate. “What…what stuff did he do to her?”

  “I don’t know!” Hattie exclaims. “It’s horrible to think about that. Stop being weird.”

  “You should know about this stuff.”

  “What? Why would I know?”

  “Because of your sister,” I blurt out.

  Hattie frowns. “What’s my sister got to do with it?”

  “Nothing,” I say, thinking of Nathan. I grit my teeth and try another tack: appeasing her. “You’re really grown-up, Hattie, I bet you know more than me.”

  Hattie looks around, to see who’s listening. “I don’t mean to be really protective, but they are too young to hear this.” She points to the Year Fives, who are sitting nearby. They are only ten.

  I nod, and we stand up, walk over to the hopscotch corner and sit down next to each other on the big rubber tractor tire.