Look What You Made Me Do

by Elaine Murphy

  “They had to pick one,” I add. “Up or down.”

  I spot the moon, the tiniest spot of light in the darkest sky, and reach out to find the trees with my hand. The night meets the cliff the way the ocean turns into the horizon, impossible and inevitable and all at once. I move slowly, my steps shorter. Just inches. Waiting for my toes to find the edge.

  “What did they choose?” Fiona asks, breaking my concentration.

  “What?”

  “Up or down. Which set of stairs?”

  I think of the book she’d like to write, the story she’d like to tell. Her own version. Scarier, braver. Much better than a girl who disappeared into a hole in the ground, her body never recovered.

  “Down,” I say, my eyes adjusting enough to see where the black of the cliff edge twines with the dark of the night. The trees stop like soldiers, awaiting their instructions to jump as the ground erodes around them.

  I turn to the right, away from the cliff, just a single row of trees separating us from the nothing that waits. The wind is sharper here, colder, but if Fiona notices, she doesn’t point it out. She still wants her story.

  I take a few tentative steps forward, like the house is here. Like there’s anything here.

  “And?” she prompts, her voice a whisper. She bumps into me and mumbles something automatically. An apology.

  I close my eyes.

  “He brought me to the last room,” I say. “There was a small window on the far side, and I could see the sky. I could see the moon. I thought it was the way out.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t know that yet. But Footloose was coming, forcing me into the room. I didn’t want to go.”

  “What was in there?”

  I stop. “Do you know why they called him Footloose?”

  “Because all the bodies were missing a foot.”

  I think of Shanté. “There were holes in the floor. They were covered, and if you stepped on one, you fell in and it sliced off your foot. That’s how people died.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  I turn and face Fiona. There’s a small gap in the trees beside us, and I can see the moon. Its false hope. Fiona turns her head and sees it, too. Registers the emptiness. But she’s not scared yet.

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my sister was dead.” I don’t realize I’m crying until I taste salt on my tongue and feel the tears slipping over my numb lips.

  Fiona looks confused. “So?”

  “So I’d just gotten my life back. It wasn’t fair that this was happening.”

  “Tell me about it.” She scoffs, flipping the flashlight back and forth behind me, trying to find the house where it all began, where it was supposed to have ended.

  “I am telling you,” I say.

  The wind picks up, slicing through my coat, but I’m too numb to feel it. I’ve been numb for a long time.

  “Then what?” She shivers, sounding irritated. “He forced you into that room. How’d you get out?”

  “I pretended.”

  “What?”

  The wind is howling now, like a warning.

  “I pretended,” I repeat. “I pretended I was weak so he would follow me in. So he’d think it was his idea.”

  Finally, finally, realization dawns on her face. The moon doesn’t provide much light, but it’s enough to see this. She grabs onto a tree and looks around frantically, but there’s nothing there. Nobody to help. Nobody but me.

  “Then I killed him,” I say. “I killed him to get my life back.”

  “You—you had no choice.” She’s backing up.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “And then you—you saved me—”

  I think of her pounding on the floorboards, her desperate cries for help. The smoke and the flames and the decision I’d made. The wrong one.

  “I just want my life back,” I tell her.

  “You have it,” she says, stumbling. Her hand comes free of the tree and flails for another one.

  “Almost.” I take a step forward, forcing her to take one back. She grabs another tree, but it’s the wrong one. It’s the last one. Now there’s only empty space behind her. I think of Becca tossing Shanna over the edge, how quickly she’d disappeared. How easily.

  “I’ll stop,” she says, tear tracks glinting on her cheeks. “You can have the money. I won’t—I won’t tell anyone.”

  Becca. Footloose. Fiona.

  They all fed off this power, off someone else’s powerlessness. Mine, in particular. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now. I don’t want to hold this much power over someone’s life. I buried those bodies, went to those funerals, watched Footloose die, saw Becca’s lifeless face. I don’t want to be the last one standing, the sole survivor. But it’s better than the alternative.

  I shove Fiona off the cliff.

  She screams, which I wasn’t expecting. It’s sharp and loud, swallowed up by the wind. It’s too dark for me to see much now, but yesterday when I came here, I’d knelt on this ledge and peered over in the bright sunshine, mentally calculating the sheer drop, the bottom too far away to register, too distant to ever be found.

  I hike back down the mountain, use the tire iron to smash the window of her car, and take back my duffel bag and its thousand dollars in loose bills. Fiona thought she could buy a new life with fifty thousand dollars, but I know better than anyone that the price of freedom is much higher.

  * * *

  I’ve spent most of my life thinking like a sociopath. It’s the only way to stay one step ahead, out of the path of a speeding car, dodging a deadly trapdoor. Now, as the holiday season gets into full swing—houses glowing with decorations, carolers in the downtown streets, men and women in Santa Claus hats soliciting donations in front of the drugstore—I’m thinking about my sister’s dead body and where Footloose may have hidden it.

  I’d already driven out to the paper plant at the edge of town, the lot peppered with frozen clumps of dirty slush, making it impossible to determine if a woman had been murdered recently, but the body wasn’t there. I’d crept around the perimeter with a flashlight, shining it into the waving stalks of dead grass and weeds, but there were no signs of Becca. No lingering sense of malice or mayhem. Nothing.

  I’ve done my best to forget about it. To let it go, to move on. I know what obsessing over vengeance did to Footloose, and he was grieving two innocent people. I’m not. Still, every time I cross the bridge into downtown Brampton, I think of the night I snuck out here and hurled Shanté’s severed foot over the edge, adding one more name to the list of missing people no one’s looking for nearly hard enough.

  They’ve identified five more victims from the bodies buried at Kilduff Park, three women and two men, all having fallen prey to addiction or poverty or sheer misfortune long before crossing paths with Daniel Nilssen and his misguided sense of justice. I’m sitting across from Detective Greaves at his desk at the Brampton Police Department, politely studying the names and photos of the newly identified in case I recognize them, given my curious and unfortunate relationship to Footloose and his crimes.

  The photos are from better times in their lives, people basking at the beach or smiling at a family dinner, their expressions filled with hope and happiness, the way they’re best remembered. I recognize one as the woman from the murder video who’d escaped the poison room and drowned in the pool, but I don’t tell Greaves. It won’t help anything. It won’t help her. And it won’t help me to admit I’d watched home movies at Footloose’s actual home, giving Greaves another thread to tug on. Because it’s obvious he has doubts about my story, that I have too many connections to Brampton’s most notorious serial killer—the one he knows about—and he’d love nothing more than to continue inviting me here and asking me questions until I give myself away. But I grew up sharing a bathroom with a master manipulator, and he’s got nothing on my sister.

  “You’r
e sure?” he says when I return the stack of photos and confirm I don’t know the victims.

  “Positive.”

  He stares at me, his expression neutral. “We’re still looking for your sister,” he says, his idea of give-and-take. He gives me nothing, I give him something.

  “Thank you.”

  He waits, like I might say more, and then nods. “We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

  “I appreciate it. And of course, let me know if I can be of any more assistance.”

  His mouth twitches, but he doesn’t smile. “Absolutely.”

  I show myself out. The bulletin board near the entrance has a poster of Fiona with a new picture and a fresh red MISSING stamp above her name. I ignore it.

  Outside, the December air is damp and cold. I drive from the police station to Kilduff Park, abandoned at this time of year. It’s late afternoon, the sun tucked behind gray clouds, growing dark like the last time I visited, when I carted a body in a carpet to a clearing in the woods, when one killer first met another, when a new game started, a game with only one winner.

  Now I’m the last player standing, trekking through the forest until I find myself once again in the middle of the circle of trees, the branches and boughs overhead bending under the weight of the snow. The ground here is brown and icy, torn up and frozen from weeks of investigation, bodies collected, analyzed, identified, discarded.

  The police finished their search two weeks ago, reopening the park to curious locals and morbid visitors, internet sleuths and clairvoyants who promised to get to the bottom of things but never did and never will. Perhaps they’ve given up, or maybe the cold has kept them away, but I stand alone in the center of the clearing and turn slowly, scanning the trees.

  If I were Footloose, this is where I would have dumped Becca’s body, returning her to the place it all started, closing the circle. But there’s no sign that she’s here, and no indication that she ever was. As the winter sun sinks out of sight, I stay where I am until the forest is black and the trees are quiet. I peer into them, unafraid, undaunted. I see no eyes staring back, no monsters, no ghosts. There’s only darkness.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing has always been a very solitary pursuit for me, so having the support of a wonderful group of people has been amazing.

  I’m eternally grateful to Jill Marr for offering to represent me and for her determination to find the best home for this story. Thank you as well to Andrea Cavallaro for her diligent work on the contracts, a task I am both unqualified for and too easily distracted to tackle alone.

  Enormous thanks to Alex Logan. It’s been an awesome experience to work with such a skilled and diligent editor, and undoubtedly she has made both the book and its writer much better.

  Thank you to my friend Jenn for agreeing to read an early version of this book and its rewrites, helping me puzzle through feedback, and being a generally encouraging and fantastic person when I truly needed the support.

  And of course thank you to my parents for getting on board with this path I’ve chosen. I look forward to the day we get to stand in a bookstore and read these words together. Well, some of them. Not the whole thing. Maybe just this page.

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  About the Author

  Elaine Murphy is a Canadian author who has lived on both coasts and several places in between. Among other things, she has volunteered in Zambia, taught English in China, and jumped off a bridge and out of an airplane. She has a diploma in writing for film and television but has never worked in either field. She recently took an interest in the dark side and began plotting suspense and thrillers. She enjoys putting ordinary people in extraordinarily difficult situations and seeing what they do about it. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.