Kill You Twice

by Cain, Chelsea

He was on the right track.

  “That’s about how old you were here, isn’t it?” he said, touching the shadow of the girl. His hand was on the photograph; the photograph was on her upper thighs. Touching the girl in the photograph was like touching Gretchen. He was aware of her breasts, rising and falling with her breaths; her breathing quickening. He said, “That day, when I went through that stop sign, it changed everything. My life is before that day, and after that day.” He could feel the burn where their knees made contact. She was pressing her knees out against his, or the other way around. “Just as there is my life before you, and after you.”

  He traced his fingertips over the girl’s shadow, her long limbs exaggerated by the angle of the sun, her elbows, the silhouette of her skirt. “This girl”—he tapped his finger on the photograph—“hadn’t killed anyone yet.” Archie moved his finger to the image of James Beaton. “You said that he was your first victim.” Archie held the photograph up, showing it to her. “What was the thing that changed? What happened to her?”

  “She’s dead,” Gretchen said. “You couldn’t have saved her.” Her fingers curled around the arms of the wheelchair. “There’s a stream that runs next to a red barn off Gilman Road on Sauvie Island, past the pumpkin patch—I buried what remained of her there under a grove of oak trees.”

  He saw her then. Archie had only caught a glimpse of her a few times. He didn’t know who it was. Something changed in her posture, behind her eyes. It was as if, for a moment, she let the mask fall. He didn’t know who was on the other side. But he was willing to take advantage of it.

  He pointed to the teenage boy in the photograph of the Beaton family. “Is he Ryan Motley?”

  Gretchen fixed her eyes on the boy and nodded slowly.

  “I need to hear you say it,” Archie said.

  She looked at Archie. “Yes.”

  Archie pushed the chair back, brought his knees together, and stood. His head was already out the door, ready to get back to the investigation, ready to find Colin Beaton.

  He heard Gretchen ask, “How is the dog?”

  He turned. She was still where he’d left her. Strapped to the chair—unable to move. Her head was twisted in his direction.

  “The dog is missing,” Archie said.

  A warm sweet smell filled the room, and Gretchen turned away from him.

  “You can go,” she said.

  There was something wet on the floor.

  Archie walked back around to her chair. A dark stain was growing on the lap of her gray pajama bottoms. The seat of the chair was slick with wet, something dribbling along the metal frame and down her pants leg.

  “Are you okay?” Archie asked.

  Gretchen’s eyelids fluttered, her nostrils flared. Her hair was back in her face again. “It’s the medication,” she muttered. For a moment he didn’t recognize her. She looked helpless. “I’m peeing myself,” she said.

  A stream of urine ran under her chair and formed a scribble of dark yellow on the linoleum.

  CHAPTER

  43

  Don’t panic,” Bliss said. She held an earthenware mug, and was wearing drawstring tie-dyed pants and a T-shirt with the slogan this is what a feminist looks like across the chest. Her thick blond dreadlocks hung loose over her shoulders. The sunlight was streaming in behind her, illuminating every stray fuzzy hair so that her head looked like a bundle of frayed ropes.

  Susan roused herself. She had finally invested in a futon, so she didn’t have to sleep in the hammock her mother had installed in Susan’s old bedroom the day after Susan had left for college. It was now a meditation/yoga room. The hammock was for guests.

  Bliss wasn’t leaving. Whatever she had in the cup smelled like the compost pile.

  Susan sat up on the futon. It wasn’t one of those fancy futons with the natural wood frames. This futon sat directly on the floor. With futons, you got what you paid for.

  Susan’s neck hurt.

  “Promise me you won’t freak out,” Bliss said.

  Susan’s mother had a habit of overreacting. When Verizon had tried to put in a cell tower in their neighborhood, Bliss had protested by chaining herself to the front door of the building where the rooftop tower was supposed to be erected. Never mind that it was a retirement home. Bliss got on the evening news, and Verizon relented. Susan reminded her mother of that every time Susan’s cell phone dropped a call because of bad reception. “Were you reading The New Yorker again?” Susan asked. The New Yorker always sent Bliss on a terror. Some people clipped coupons or funny comics. Bliss clipped stories she read about famine or child trafficking or household items that could kill you.

  One time, after reading a story about the dangers of BPA in plastic products, she threw away all the plastic in the house, including toothbrushes, the produce drawers and shelves from the fridge, all the Tupperware, and Susan’s brand-new professional featherweight ceramic ionic hair dryer.

  Bliss still wore gloves to the ATM machine so she could avoid touching the BPA-coated ATM receipts with her bare hands.

  In normal circumstances, Susan was the kook—in the presence of her mother, Susan was the voice of reason.

  “Don’t overreact,” Bliss said. “Until you know the whole story.”

  “Did you throw away something of mine again?” Susan asked, feeling her lip start to curl.

  “We have a guest,” Bliss said. She squatted and put the mug in Susan’s hands. It was hot and smelled even ranker close up. “Drink this.”

  Susan held the mug as far away from her face as possible. “What is it?”

  “Kindness tea. It’s calming.”

  Wait a minute. Susan narrowed her eyes at her mother. She could be sneaky sometimes. “A guest?”

  Bliss was wearing her serene look now, the one she wore when she was charging people fifty bucks an hour to teach them how to meditate. Her forehead was smooth, she had a dippy smile on her face, and her eyes looked sparkly and spacey, like an anesthetized rabbit. “She spent the night on the couch,” Bliss said in a calming tone. “She’s scared, and I’ve told her she can stay.”

  None of this was making any sense to Susan. “What is it, like a cat or something?”

  “Noooo,” Bliss said. She fiddled with the sash of the black kimono she was wearing as a robe. “Not a cat.”

  The screen door had been unlocked, banging in the wind. It had been that way for hours before Susan had locked it. She was wide-awake now. “You found someone asleep in our living room?” she said, incredulous.

  “My living room,” Bliss said lightly. “My house. You’re a guest.”

  Susan was looking around the room for something she could use to bludgeon an intruder to death, but everything there was too goddamn tranquil. Soft pillows. Tapestries on the walls. A poster of some freaky Indian guru.

  “What are you looking for?” Bliss asked.

  “This person’s down there now?” Susan asked. Where was her phone? Downstairs on the couch where she’d left it, that’s where. How many people had been murdered in their homes because they couldn’t get to the room where’d they’d left their cell phone? Bliss’s landline was in the kitchen.

  “You’re not being calm at all,” Bliss pointed out.

  Susan looked down at her hands. The mug. She smacked the mug against the wall. It exploded into pieces and smelly golden tea splashed everywhere. It dripped down the wall, splattered their feet, and scalded Susan’s bare thighs.

  Bliss stammered something about vintage pottery.

  “Stay here,” Susan said.

  She took a good-sized piece of broken ceramic and held it in her hand like a shiv, or at least how she imagined people held shivs.

  She had one goal: get to the landline.

  She peered out of her bedroom into the hall. No intruders. Only the hardwood floor and the open doors to the bathroom and to her mother’s room. George McGovern smiled at her from a framed campaign poster across the hall from her room. COME HOME, AMERICA, 1972. She could see her r
eflection in the glass, superimposed over George McGovern’s huge head as she tiptoed past toward the stairs. Susan could smell blueberry pancakes.

  “She’s not dangerous,” Bliss said from behind her.

  Susan jumped and nearly shivved her mother in the gut. “Shh!” she said.

  Bliss said, “She says she knows you.”

  Susan stopped. Her thighs stung where the tea had burned them. She says she knows you. Bliss had a habit of burying the lead. Susan lowered the shiv. George McGovern looked at her wisely. Susan groaned. The landline. She had given it out one time. She had written it on the back of her business card. In case of an emergency. If you Googled a landline number, you could get the street address that went with it pretty easily. Any teenager would know that.

  “Pearl?” Susan called.

  It was quiet.

  Then a small voice from downstairs answered, “Yes?”

  “Un-fucking-believable,” Susan said.

  “She told me everything,” Bliss said. “Over breakfast.”

  “You made blueberry pancakes for our home invader?” They were Susan’s favorite.

  “I didn’t want to wake you up,” Bliss said.

  “I’m calling Archie,” Susan said. She stormed back into her room and pulled on a pair of sweatpants from the pile in front of the closet. “The police are looking for her. She ran away from a halfway house. She’s a witness to a murder. We’re turning her in.”

  Bliss knelt down and started picking up shards of the mug. “Just talk to her,” she said.

  Susan pushed her hair behind her ears and, very purposefully not helping deal with the mug, headed down the hall. She would call Archie, and then she would give this kid a piece of her mind.

  Bliss was a pushover. Susan knew that. But if Pearl thought that she could sell Susan a bill of goods, she had another thing coming. Because telling-lies-as-a-teenager-to-get-out-of-trouble? Susan had invented that.

  But before Susan could storm downstairs, Pearl appeared at the end of the hall, her mouth stained with blueberries.

  Susan froze, stunned by the sight of her.

  Archie had told Susan that Pearl looked different. When Susan had last seen her, she had been a pierced, angry steampunk moppet. Now the facial jewelry was gone. She was taller. Prettier. She looked like a street hippie, long hair, gypsy skirt; like those girls who sell beads off of blankets on Hawthorne Boulevard while their boyfriends play guitars for change.

  “Someone’s trying to kill me,” Pearl said.

  CHAPTER

  44

  Susan took a sip of Stumptown organic Holler Mountain Blend black coffee, collected her thoughts, and looked gravely over at Pearl. The table was cluttered with the remnants of the breakfast that they had enjoyed without her. Bliss started clearing dirty dishes.

  “So tell me what happened,” Susan said.

  Pearl’s lips flattened into a little frown and her eyes darted toward Bliss.

  “Just tell her what you told me,” Bliss told Pearl.

  Susan took another sip of coffee. She didn’t need this. Pearl was lucky she hadn’t called the police already. In fact, she was lucky Susan hadn’t stabbed her with a mug handle.

  “He said he was a cop,” Pearl said.

  Susan put down her coffee cup.

  Pearl ran her finger along the lip of the glass in front of her. The glass was coated with the last of the orange juice. A few sips remained at the bottom of the glass. A fruit fly was drowning in it.“He had a badge,” Pearl said. “I was smoking outside, and he said he was there to take me to talk to Sheridan.” Her eyebrows twitched together. “He didn’t look like a cop. He was wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt. And he didn’t have a gun or anything.” She stopped moving her finger along the glass, but kept it there, touching the lip. The fruit fly had stopped moving. “And he didn’t have a cop face.” She looked up at Susan for affirmation. “You know, that face cops put on when they’re pushing you around. Even Archie has it. I had a foster dad who was a cop, so I know.” She was quiet. Then the finger started again, around and around the glass.

  “He didn’t have the face of a cop,” Pearl said again. “So I said I had to go ask Miss Bea. He said, ‘Get the fuck in the car, Margaux.’ ” She looked up at Susan, like she expected a reaction.

  Susan didn’t know what to say.

  Pearl blinked. “He called me Margaux,” she said, emphasizing the name. “No one calls me that.”

  “Oh,” Susan said.

  “Then he grabbed me by the arm.” She put her left hand over her right upper arm to illustrate, and said, “I socked him in the balls.”

  “Way to go, girl,” Bliss said with a fist pump from the sink.

  “Mother,” Susan said. “Let her talk.”

  “I guess I got him good,” Pearl said, “because he let go and I pulled away and ran inside. I went straight upstairs, got a few things from my room, and split out the side door.”

  “Why did you leave your phone?” Susan asked.

  “They can find you with those things,” Pearl said. “I didn’t want him to triangulate me.”

  Susan didn’t know whether to believe Pearl or not, but she knew enough to know that if she was telling the truth, it was serious. “You have to go to the police, Pearl,” Susan said. “You saw this guy. What if he’s the killer? They can catch him.”

  Pearl looked stricken. “You don’t get it,” she said. “Margaux is my legal name. It’s the only place I use it. I’m registered at the center as Margaux Clinton. My juvie record is under Margaux Clinton. The police reports would have used that name. What if he was a cop and he knew my name because he had access to those records?”

  “You said he didn’t have a cop face,” Susan reminded her. Pearl leaned forward, eyes wide, suddenly looking like a scared teenager. “Maybe he’s a bad cop.”

  “Two people have been murdered,” Susan said, and that wasn’t even counting the widow Beaton and who knew what the hell had happened to her. Then she realized that Pearl might not even know about Gabby Meester. Susan tried to sit up straight, to channel her inner grown-up. “A woman was murdered after Jake Kelly. Burned to a crisp. They think it’s the work of a serial killer. You might be able to help find the killer before he strikes again.” Before he strikes again? Had she really said that?

  “I didn’t see anything that morning,” Pearl whined. “I barely knew Jake Kelly.”

  “You might have seen something and not known it,” Susan said. It sounded like something that Archie might say. “You certainly were a witness to your own attempted kidnapping. Unless,” Susan added, “you’re making that up.”

  Pearl looked authentically offended. “I slept on the street the night before last,” she said. “Under a bridge.”

  Bliss gasped and came around behind Pearl and put her hands on Pearl’s shoulders. “Poor thing,” Bliss gushed.

  This, from a woman who had lived on a beach for three months in the sixties.

  “Oh, please,” Susan said, groaning. “It was seventy-five degrees last night. It’s like camping.”

  Bliss gave Susan a scathing look.

  “You said it,” Pearl said to Susan. “This guy killed two people. And now he’s after me. It doesn’t matter if I saw something or not now, does it? I’ve seen him. Now he has to kill me.” She looked up at Bliss, her eyes all wide and Bambi-like. “Please let me stay here.”

  “Mother,” Susan said sternly.

  Bliss patted Pearl’s shoulders. Her dishwater hands had left suds on Pearl’s T-shirt, but neither of them seemed to notice it. “You go upstairs and take a long bath and clean up,” Bliss told Pearl, “and then we’ll get you into some of Susan’s clothes. We’ll figure things out down here.”

  Pearl nodded and, with one last pitiful gaze at Susan, got up, grabbed a last piece of toast for the walk, and then trudged off upstairs.

  “She’s not some Bosnian war orphan,” Susan said, crossing her arms. “She’s a teenage hustler. She Tasered Archie so her boy
friend could hang him from meat hooks.”

  “Ex-boyfriend,” Pearl called from halfway up the stairs. “And I said I was sorry.”

  “You did some foolish things when you were that age, too,” Bliss said.

  “I never Tasered a cop!” Susan said, exasperated.

  Bliss sat down in the chair Pearl had been in. “She’s safe here,” she said.

  “I’m pretty sure this is illegal,” Susan said, hunching forward. “Harboring a fugitive. Custodial interference.” She searched her brain for other scary-sounding charges, but couldn’t come up with any.

  “She’s not a fugitive,” Bliss said. “She’s wanted as a witness, not a material witness, and she’s not a suspect. She’s an emancipated minor. That’s how she got out of the foster care system. She elected to stay at the center as a transition to independent living, and she can elect to leave. She says she didn’t see anything the morning this dishwasher was murdered, and I believe her.”

  “She saw something two days later,” Susan pointed out, “when a man came to murder her. Assuming her story’s even true.”

  Bliss nodded sagely. Susan knew what she was trying to do. Bliss was trying to play the responsible adult. She even dabbed her mouth with her cloth napkin, which she never did. “And she is safe from that man here,” Bliss said. She sat up straight and tightened her kimono sash. “End of discussion.”

  “Excuse me?” Susan said, barely able to contain her sudden urge to break another cup. “No. If she’s telling the truth, the guy who came after her is probably the guy who killed those people. Those articles I printed out the other night, about all the child murders, Archie thinks it’s the same guy.” She said it again, in case Bliss didn’t get it: “Archie thinks the guy who killed those two people killed all those kids. This guy is a serial killer—if Pearl’s telling the truth about this man attacking her, that means she can identify him. She needs to work with a sketch artist. If the cops have his picture, they can find out who he is. They can catch him.”

  “And what if this freak is a cop?” Bliss said.