“Hi, Mrs. A,” I say. She looks annoyed.
We went on holiday. I think he wanted to get away from his disappointment at failing the degree I had passed. He booked it on a whim, I didn’t know. He didn’t have the money, because I had been able to get a job and he hadn’t, so he used mine. We went to Disney World in Florida. It was a childhood dream of mine. He liked me dressing up in Minnie’s clothes, acting the kid. One day he went out in the rental car for a drive. I knew something was wrong, because we did everything together. The only times during the holiday we were apart were when he would say I’m going for a walk, and I’d say can I come with you? and he’d say I just want some time to myself. Those were the times he would go to see the women.
So I thought he was going to find a woman. An American woman, with a crass accent and big, fake boobs. I went out shopping, angry at him. I bought makeup and underwear, I braided my hair on either side, which I knew he liked, to make him want me. When I got back to the holiday home he was there. He met me in the living room. He seemed nervous. And then he told me he had brought a girl home. She was up in his room. A little girl. What do you mean? How little? I asked. Little, he said.
I walked up the stairs with him, quietly. She was half-dead on the bed. He had given her some drugs he got from the pharmacy, American ones you can’t get over the counter in the UK. Her mouth was open, and her jaw-length baby-blonde hair was messed up and sweaty. She was wearing a pink-and-purple top and flowered leggings. There was a pony doll on the bed. He put it in her hands and stroked her hair. He sat down next to her and started crying. I don’t know what to do, he said. She won’t wake up. The police will arrest me, and maybe I’ll get the death penalty. I’m so scared.
It was the first time I had seen him so vulnerable. I was horrified, but I was also touched he had come to me. For the first time, I realized I had some power in our relationship. You’ve no idea what a revelation that was for me, to know he had that admiration, that respect for me; to know that he needed me. I saw how I could be close to him, how I could still be that special girl, more special than all the others, the girl I had seen in his eyes in that room at university when I was young. I said, I’ll take care of it, and he looked at me so gratefully I felt like a queen deigning to do a favor for a subject. I folded her up into a large shopping bag and dropped her off a bridge late at night.
It has been almost two months since I found Billie. Weeks of trying to piece together what happened, of the girls hounding me for answers that seemed so obscure and out of my reach.
What little evidence there is about Billie’s death has amounted to the murderer having a jeep, and being a man, a fact that, of course, threw me off the scent of the true killer. To be fair, I did note that Mrs. Adamson had a jeep filled with items used at the crime scene…but what would a woman want with a little girl? I dismissed her as a suspect and turned my attentions to making sure Dad couldn’t be the killer, wondering about Mr. Kent, trying to bait the walker and, just briefly, suspecting and planning to kill Nathan.
When I managed to find Nick in the village, his aura, the feeling I got from him, confused me. He was sweeter to me than most adults. How could I imagine him killing me when he so obviously wanted to make everything okay? Later, after I realized he had shown me photographs of the dead girls, I had to admit he must be the killer. And yet…it didn’t feel right, in my gut.
A gut feeling is a difficult thing to explain. It’s not based in logic, although it’s influenced by facts you pick up, here and there, and your experience of people in general. Mostly, however, it’s intuition. Imagination, even. I have always had a big imagination. I had imaginary friends and I could always make up stories about people, with fantastical but convincing ideas embedded in them. But Nick? Nick didn’t have the character of a killer. I couldn’t extrapolate the story of a murder from his soft eyes and gentle hands.
And then Nathan told me what Nick said to him and Billie, about “Mrs. Adams.” Mrs. Adamson, my teacher. It was too close to her name to be a coincidence. Perhaps, knowing what was in her trunk, I would have figured it out sooner or later. But Billie’s message made everything click into place. Mrs. A is selfish, strange, and oddly jealous. She looks out for herself and seems to blame everyone else for her own problems. And she said she would do anything to be with her husband. Maybe she can justify killing if she feels it is necessary. The only thing I can’t figure out was why she was always nice to Billie. She even said maybe Billie could visit her house, quite recently. At the time, we thought it was cool that a teacher would ask Billie over. I wasn’t sure why, but I thought I was right about the rest of it, and I figured I could get in their house and ask.
Luckily, it doesn’t take long to find out. When Nick looks up at her, Mrs. A rearranges her face from annoyed to hurt. “Sweetheart, I’ve only been up there five minutes.”
Nick gets off me and sits up next to me. “I know. I’m sorry. The feeling is so strong.”
“But you said you liked Billie. I thought after her this might all stop. You said you’d try, Nick, you said.” She is on the verge of tears. I raise my eyebrows, listening. She looks over at me and I look away, pretending to be upset. “I said that when we…” Nick looks at me and tousles my hair. “…We thought Billie would become my friend, for the long term.”
“But, Nick—”
“You’re the one who decided that couldn’t happen, Eve.”
“She could have been your friend if you hadn’t gone too far that first time. If you had just talked to her, and not done what you did, she would have become your friend and then eventually you could…” She wipes her tears away. “Oh my God, how are we having this conversation? Why is this my marriage? This is so unfair!”
“It’s your choice to be in it,” I say.
“You—!” Mrs. A—Eve—turns on me, but then she stops. She wants to explode at me, scream, call me names. But Nick is here. And in front of him she has to perform the good-girl act too. Only, for her, it’s become the good-wife act. She has been playing it all her life, just going along with what he says, letting him have what he wants. Suddenly all this knowledge is arriving in my head like a series of big obvious signs. I feel like I am expanding to take in the whole universe. I understand everything.
And just like that, the dead girls are inside me.
I am having an out-of-body experience. I am on the ceiling, looking down at myself. I am in the woods as Billie, with Nick moving inside me. I am Ellie, in Florida, meeting Nick in a mall. I am Kerry, and Nick is stroking my hair. But I am other girls too, girls I haven’t met yet. I am on a farm somewhere in Scandinavia, running around a wooden building away from someone, when I trip and fall on a piece of farming machinery and my foot is bleeding. I am in a desert and a man wrapped in towels is dragging me through the streets. I am somewhere hot and tropical and a man who speaks with an American accent is giving me money and my arms are brown. I’m in Nigeria, and men are coming at me and my sisters with guns. I’m in Washington, DC, under a bridge, choking on water. I’m in Germany, trapped in a cellar. I’m in Iraq, carrying a baby I resent because it’s his. I’m back in England, wearing old-fashioned clothes and bleeding from the temple.
I am drowning in a lake. I am locked in a fridge at a dump and no one can hear me screaming. I am Billie, being strangled. I want to stay with her but quickly I move, assimilating the next ghost. I am small, under rubble. I am buried underground and when I breathe the dirt gets in my throat. I am fighting back, I am being stabbed with a knife in my belly, I am writhing my way out of ropes but I’m too late, I’m struggling, I’m scratching, I’m getting his skin under my fingernails.
I hear my breathing loud because it is joined by other breaths, and then suddenly they are all extinguished, yet still I know they are with me. I can feel their strength in my body.
The Scandinavian is strong and tall. Kerry is here; she is smart. Between them, the girls can speak 137 langua
ges and I feel as if I could open my mouth and any one of them could come out. In there somewhere is a boxer. She’s been doing it since she was four. When she died he tricked her, but together we will see them coming this time. We have eyes that see from every angle of my skull. Alexandra is a gymnast. Phoebe can drive, she learned with her dad, he owns a race track in a paddock; it’s muddy and fun. They each died alone, but together we have a chance. On our own, we are small, vulnerable, naive, slower, weaker, younger, helpless; but together, with so many voices and minds and skills and the years of many lives in one body, we have power; we can overcome Nick, rape, pain, even death.
Together, we are eternal. Nick is just one man. And Eve is just one woman.
When I get ahold of myself, I am on a double bed upstairs. It’s like my eyeballs have been looking straight back into my head, but they shift a bit down so they are back in the right place, between my eyelids. I can see the ceiling. My breathing is steady, but I can hear it loud in my ears. It’s the breathing of a hundred or more girls, maybe a thousand. My eyeballs ache. My ears hum. I can’t move. I look left and right. “Nick?”
“Shh, it’s all right, sweetie,” Nick says. “Just getting ready.” I hear sounds of splashing. “Washing up. I want to be clean for you. You’re so pure and clean, baby.”
My eyes roll around in my head and the words of an argument come back to me, as if from far away, down a long corridor in an echoey building, although I must have heard it downstairs, just moments ago.
“I need this. You know that. What I want doesn’t hurt anyone. They love me too.”
“You’ll be locked up if anyone finds out, and every time you do it is another chance of you getting caught.”
“I know, baby, I’m sorry. But I don’t deserve to get locked up, and you knew I fall in love easily with young, beautiful women when you married me, because I fell in love with you, didn’t I?”
My eyebrows rise, remembering the words that filtered through my ears when I was absorbing the power of the dead girls. Nick tricked her too. Eve was one of them. Kind of. But I don’t feel sorry for her.
“And I’m not the one who thinks we need to do away with the evidence,” says Nick. “That’s what they would really lock me up for.”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. A whines.
“Well,” Nick says softly, “it’s not like I’d let you go to prison, would I? You wouldn’t last a day. I’d tell the police I killed the girls.”
Sniff, sniff. “Would you really go to prison for me?” This is whimpered so pathetically by Mrs. A that I want to pretend to be sick to make a point.
“Of course I would. I’d do anything for you, just like you do for me. I just need you to be respectful of my needs. I don’t think you’re being fair by crying.”
“Shh. Shh.” She nods and wipes tears from her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Okay.” Nick murmurs this soothingly. “Okay, baby.”
I can just see them through a blur of light and colors and scenes from the girls’ lives. Mrs. A is clinging onto Nick like she is actually a baby and he is her mum. She looks at me with her lips all trembly and then buries her face in his shoulder. “Nick,” she says. “Nick, I can’t lose you.”
“I know. I know you can’t.”
“I get so scared.”
“It’s okay. I’m here.”
Mrs. A looks back toward me. “I have to take her away, Nick.”
“No!” He sighs. “She’s here now. She could become my friend. Like I wanted Billie to be. If I just have one, that I can be with when I need, then there wouldn’t need to be this…these sad occurrences.”
“When they die,” I whisper. We whisper, me and Billie and the rest. Nick looks at me as if we understand each other. We nod my head at him, as if we did.
“But the police are already on high alert!” Mrs. A screams. “As soon as they hear she’s gone missing, they’ll be blocking all roads to the area. They’ll be searching every piece of woodland. This isn’t a good idea. I have to…” She looks at me. “To take her home.”
“Stop being loud!” Nick snaps. “I’ll be quick,” he says, and then he stands up and lets go of her.
“No, Nick!” she cries, and tries to grab hold of him. He slaps her away, hard on her face, and points a finger at her.
“Hey! Be good,” he says sharply.
She goes quiet and looks at me resentfully.
Nick turns to me. “How about it, kiddo?”
“I don’t really know what you’re asking me,” I reply calmly.
“It’s too dangerous. They’ll come for you,” Mrs. A whispers.
“Stop being a silly bitch, Eve,” Nick says.
I’m no fool. When he held out his hand for me, I stood up. The energy and anger and intelligence of all those girls pushed against my skin. My legs felt supercharged. I stumbled toward him.
“Oops, too much rum,” he laughed. But it wasn’t the rum. It was the ghost girls crashing through my blood. I went with him, instead of staying there with Eve. My bag was beside her. I realized I wasn’t going to die. Death was near, but not mine. I was going to finish what I came here to do. I’d be coming back for that bag in a minute.
I suddenly move from the memory of their argument to the present, on the double bed. The girls are inside me still. I hear them all breathing, even though this is something they don’t do anymore. Nick sits down on the side of the bed. He places his hand on my stomach. It’s so large it covers it. He pats me gently. “Well,” he says, smiling knowingly. “Thera.”
He leans toward me.
When I come back downstairs, Mrs. A is sat on the floor, her knees tucked up to her chest and her neck bent over them.
“He said he didn’t want to be my permanent friend.”
“What?” she says, surprised.
“He said I did the wrong thing and to take me home right now.”
I pick up my backpack and walk past her without further comment. It’s like I’m made of supernatural steel. The ghost spirits run through me. They carry me along. We move together, we talk together. Mrs. A is frowning, but when I walk out the door she grabs her keys and runs after me so I won’t tell anyone. I open the car door, which is unlocked, and sit in the passenger’s seat. I put my backpack on my lap and make sure to open it slightly before she gets in. She starts the engine. “He said that?”
“He said I hurt his thingy,” I say, and turn to look out my window. “He told me to fuck off. He said I wasn’t worth the trouble.”
I’m not looking at her, but with my ghost powers I can feel her satisfaction. We back out of the drive, with her arm on the back of my seat. She looks at me and smiles, in a fake way. “Not long ’til you’re home now, Thera,” she says.
I smile back. “That’s right. Not long.”
We sit in silence for a little while, but my head is full of voices.
“I died when I was nine.”
“He gave me a Barbie and told me to come with him.”
“We saw him in the sandpit.”
“I lost my life for a shrimp candy. I loved them. Now I don’t taste. I don’t touch. I just feel everything in my heart, so loudly that if I could scream it would kill a man.”
“This is it.”
“This is it.”
“This is it!” The last one is Billie’s voice. Mrs. Adamson heads out of town.
“You know, you and me have actually got a lot in common, Thera,” she says quietly, but sort of meanly, once we’re in the countryside. I look over at her. There is makeup all down her cheeks from crying. I don’t think we have a lot in common. I’m too brave not to have run away from a marriage with Nick. I’m too independent to need someone else just to exist. I wouldn’t hate another girl like Mrs. A hates the girls Nick likes—hates them enough to insist on killing them, and to be able to do it herself.
That’s not girl power. I look at my wrist and touch the two bracelets on it. Mine and Billie’s. I found hers on Nick’s bedside table while we were up in his room. But I know how she died. Mrs. A killed her and she told Nick it was out of fear that Billie would tell and he would go to prison, but it wasn’t. It was out of jealousy.
“We do?” I answer politely.
“Yes. We’re both second place.”
“Oh.”
“Second place for Nick,” she mutters angrily. “He wanted you before me.” She says this like this is preposterous and I’m disgusting. “But he wanted Billie before you. We both cared about Billie. She betrayed us both.”
“No, she didn’t,” I say, with Billie’s voice in my head, her smile in my mouth. “She didn’t betray me.”
“She was there with that little traveler boy from the village, wasn’t she? The one Nick says he’s seen around you.”
“She didn’t know he liked me.”
“They were kissing. Nick told me.”
“We were practicing,” Billie says in my head. “I wouldn’t have kissed him if I’d known you liked him.”
“I know,” I tell her silently.
“They were practicing,” I say out loud, and curl the fingers of my right hand into the hole in the zip of my bag.
“We both wanted the best for Billie,” Mrs. Adamson continues, not paying attention to me. She sounds so sorry for herself. “I know how you feel about her death, in a way. Because of how Nick treats me. Left behind…discarded.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I say. “And Billie didn’t leave me.”
“I know.” She turns to me. “Nick killed her. He’s a really bad man, Thera. You young girls ought to steer clear of him.”
Dead Girls Page 27