The Final Girl

by Kenneth Preston

  Jill felt like she was going to cry. She wanted Detective Moore to stay. She needed her to stay. She desperately wanted to tell her, but her mother was watching.

  Detective Moore frowned. She placed a hand on Jill’s forearm, and Jill’s skin tingled again. She liked the feeling.

  “I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that everything is going to get better overnight,” Detective Moore said. She was practically whispering, as if it were a secret the two of them shared. “It’s going to be a hard road, but it will get better.” She paused. “Trust me; I know.”

  Jill smiled and found herself placing her hand over the detective’s. “I know you do.”

  Detective Moore returned the smile, squeezed Jill’s hand, and stood. Glancing between Jill and her mother, she said, “There will be police outside the house day and night. You have nothing to worry about.” Jill took this to mean that Detective Moore believed her story. Why would they need a police presence outside of their home twenty-four hours a day if the police already had their man on a metal slab at the county morgue? “And I meant what I said,” Detective Moore added, looking directly at Jill. “Call me if you need anything.”

  It was a comfort, but a small one. The detective was moving toward the foyer. She would soon be out the door. And the fear was beginning to set in. She had to stop her.

  Jill rose. “Detective Moore!”

  Detective Moore stopped in her tracks and turned to face Jill. “Yes?”

  Jill didn’t have to look at her mother to know that she was staring at her. No, glaring at her.

  “Thank you,” Jill said.

  “I’m just doing my job,” Detective Moore said. She smiled that motherly smile. “But you’re welcome.” She held that smile and Jill in her gaze a moment longer before heading to the front door, Jill’s mother on her heels.

  Jill knew what was going to happen when the door closed and her mother returned, but Jill wasn’t going to have any of it. She braced herself as her mother stepped into the living room. Her mother was intent on slapping her, maybe even hitting her with a closed fist, but Jill was not going to be the victim, not this time. She’d already been the victim of something her mother would never understand. It was time to turn the tables.

  “What were you two talking about?” Jill demanded.

  This question, and the tone with which it was delivered, stopped her mother in her tracks. She had never heard Jill speak to her this way before. Jill glanced down at the woman’s hands. She was flexing them, as if deciding whether to clench them or leave them open. She was indecisive. Jill had clearly caught her off-guard.

  “We were going over security precautions,” her mother said. She was employing the tone of a woman in charge, but Jill knew better. She knew her mother all too well. There was a hint of fear in that voice. The monster was stepping out of her cage.

  “Bullshit!” Jill barked.

  Her mother flinched and took an involuntary step back. “Excuse me?”

  Jill clenched her own fists. She had never hit anybody in her life, but in this instance, she thought she might like it. She took a sharp step forward. “You’re lying!” she spat. “You were talking about my father.”

  “No.” Her mother’s voice quavered.

  “You’re lying!” Jill repeated. “You’re lying to me, and you were lying to her. I saw you looking at that photo.” She pointed to the framed photo of her father hanging on the foyer wall. “You were saying something into her ear, trying to turn her against me.”

  Her mother hesitated. “How could I possibly do that?”

  “By lying to her, by telling her that I didn’t do what you and I both know I’m capable of doing.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her mother said.

  “You called me a monster.”

  “I already told you, that wasn’t meant―”

  “Do you believe it?” Jill interjected. “Do you believe that I brought him back?”

  Jill could feel her mother’s fear, and she liked it.

  “No,” her mother said. “Of course not. Not the way you mean.”

  “You’re in denial...again. You’re always in denial. You were in denial when I killed him...”

  Her mother covered her ears and closed her eyes. “Stop...please.”

  “...and you’re in denial about this. Richard Caulfield didn’t kill those kids.”

  “Stop,” her mother whimpered.

  Jill took an aggressive step toward her mother. “And I didn’t kill those kids.”

  “Please.” Her mother was sobbing now.

  Jill grabbed her mother’s wrists and yanked her hands away from her ears. “Dad killed them!”

  Her mother yanked her right wrist free and slapped Jill across the cheek. The smack startled her mother more than it affected Jill. It wasn’t the first time she’d hit her daughter, but it just might have been the last. Her mother took a step back. She was frightened, and she wasn’t trying to hide it. It was the smile. Her mother had slapped her for the umpteenth time in Jill’s seventeen years on the planet, and Jill had reacted with a smile. She wasn’t hurt. Never again would she be hurt by this woman.

  “You’re tired,” her mother gasped. “You’re not thinking clearly. I think you should get some rest.”

  Jill waited, savoring the moment. “Okay, Mom.” She moved toward her room, bumping her mother ever so lightly as she passed.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Her left cheek stung, but she was back in her room now. Alone at last. Before meeting Richard Caulfield, that was something she’d never had the opportunity to say because she’d always been alone. Even with her mother in the house, she’d been alone, spending most of her time in her room. It was her sanctuary, the only home she’d ever known, and she hadn’t known how much she’d loved it until now, on her bed with the door closed. Alone.

  Except for that persistent buzzing beyond her shaded window. All of that attention for freaky Jill Turner. First, Richard Caulfield. Now, the world. She couldn’t help but be a little flattered. She peeked between the slats of her vertical blinds. The crowd was thicker than she remembered. She scanned the crowd, looking for familiar faces. There must have been quite a few of them out there. After all, she was a national sensation. CNN was out there. MSNBC. FOX. She was keeping an eye out for Anderson Cooper or someone of his ilk, but the crowd was too thick. Trying to find a famous face was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. She decided that she didn’t care much and let the blinds fall back into place.

  Then she felt him.

  She parted the blinds again and saw him. The Man with the Pushed-in Face. Her father. He was well across the street, apart from the crowd in the neighbor’s yard, partially obscured by a tree. He was just standing there, staring at her. Watching her. And nobody seemed to notice. She wanted them to notice. She wanted them to see the real story. She wanted to give these reporters the big scoop.

  She slid the blinds to the right, grabbed the vertical sliding window, and thrust it open. Only a screen separated her from the press, the cops...and him.

  “Look!" she screamed, jabbing a finger against the screen. She'd gotten their attention. But they weren't interested in The Man with the Pushed-in Face; they were only interested in her. The reporters erupted like the hometown crowd at a baseball game after a walk-off home run. They pressed against the police barrier, their microphones held aloft, shouting questions. But she couldn’t make the questions out, and she didn’t care to. She just wanted them to look.

  She banged her finger against the screen. “Look!” she repeated. “Look! Look! Look!” But they weren’t looking, not at The Man with the Pushed-in Face. They only had eyes for her. But he was there, right behind them, and she would make them see.

  “LOOK!” she bellowed.

  She heard her bedroom door open, heard her mother’s footfalls, felt her mother’s hands on her shoulders. Her mother pulled her away from the window.

  “He’s out there!” Jill
said, struggling to get back to the window.

  “Who?”

  “The Man with the Pushed-in Face.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “Look,” Jill said.

  “There’s nothing to look at.”

  “He’s out there, Mom.”

  Her mother sighed. “Okay.” She released Jill, walked back to the window, and looked out, her eyes scanning back and forth, to and fro before closing the window and sliding the blinds back into place.

  “He was out there!” Jill argued. She walked back to the window and parted the blinds. The Man with the Pushed-in Face had left.

  “Listen to me,” her mother said, guiding Jill’s hand away from the blinds. “There is no Man with the Pushed-in Face. He’s a figment of your imagination.”

  Jill shook her head. “You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you? You can’t believe it because you don’t want to believe it. You’re in denial.”

  “Please stop this.”

  “He’s out there. You know it.”

  Her mother looked to the bedroom door, as if she were thinking of making a run for it.

  “The Man with the Pushed-in Face is my father,” Jill said. “You should know; you were there when I pushed his face in. You watched it happen.”

  “You’re right; I did watch it happen. And I saw your father die. You helped me bury him. Do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember. But he’s back. I brought him back.”

  “Honey, this needs to stop.”

  “I pulled him from the ground, and now he’s out there. He killed those kids because they were picking on me, and he’s not done. He has a list of everybody who’s ever wronged me. And he’s not gonna stop until they’re all dead.”

  “You’re delusional,” her mother said. “This is all in your head.”

  “You don’t believe me, but Detective Moore does.”

  “Detective Moore doesn’t believe you,” her mother said. “She was just humoring you.”

  “I’ll show her the letters.”

  Her mother glared at her. “I burned those wicked letters.”

  “He sent more. And if you burn those, he’ll send more. You can’t stop him.”

  Tears pooled in her mother’s eyes. “Please stop,” she sobbed.

  “It’s not me who needs to stop,” Jill said. “It’s him.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The sun was setting when Darlene pulled her car alongside Harry’s in the diner’s parking lot. She’d gotten his call twenty minutes earlier and was both frustrated and intrigued when he told her that he couldn’t talk about this mysterious lead of his over the phone.

  She stepped into the diner and found Harry sitting in a booth nursing a cup of coffee. The sight and smell of it had her calling the waitress over and asking for her own cup of coffee before sliding into the booth opposite Harry.

  Harry had that look on his face, the one she knew so well. He was tentative, a nervous smile pressing at the corners of his mouth. Whatever he was about to drop on her, he wasn’t thrilled about it.

  “Well…?” she said.

  “You’re not gonna like it.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. Out with it.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve been doing some research...”

  “Yes, I know. Something so sensitive that you decided to keep your partner in the dark, thank you very much. Out with it.”

  “I think Richard Caulfield and Jill Turner planned this whole thing together.”

  She could feel her face scrunching as she struggled to find something akin to an appropriate response. “Come again?” That was about as appropriate as it was going to get.

  “Let me explain.”

  “Yeah, that would help. And please make it a good one.”

  “I went to the high school and got a look at Richard Caulfield’s records.”

  “Which ones?”

  “All of ‘em. I wasn’t particularly interested in his academic records, but I took a look at them and found that his grades took a nosedive in the last quarter. He went from being an A and B student to a D and F student.”

  Darlene shrugged. “So his grades slipped.”

  “They didn’t just slip,” Harry said. “They dropped off a cliff.”

  “What else do you got, Harry?”

  “I went through the school psychologist’s files. As it turns out, he was seeing the psychologist on a weekly basis, and he was considered a possible suicide risk.”

  “Shit,” Darlene muttered.

  “That’s what I said. So I checked his medical history.”

  “And?”

  “He was being treated by a psychiatrist, as well. And as you might guess, he was also considered a suicide risk by his doctor.”

  “And he was being medicated, I’m assuming.”

  “Of course. That’s what psychiatrists do. But here’s the real kicker: He began seeking psychiatric treatment at about the time his grades began slipping.”

  Darlene furrowed her brow. “So he was an A and B student―”

  “And he was on the honor roll.”

  “So he’s an honor roll student, then all at once―”

  “His grades take a nosedive.”

  “So let me get this straight; Richard wants to kill himself, and he uses this Final Girl game to end it?”

  “According to Diane Wright, Richard was never satisfied with the game. He was always trying to make it as realistic as possible. When he decided to kill himself, he decided to go out doing what he loves.”

  “We already pretty much pegged him as our perp, anyway,” Darlene said. “But Jill? Why would she do something like this?”

  “I don’t know,” Harry conceded.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Richard seduced her, manipulated her. But my hunch tells me that he told her that she was going to be the final girl, and my hunch tells me that the two of them planned to turn the tables on Gary Butler, Denise Richardson, and Jessica Lewis. I think it’s possible that Jill was fed up with being pushed around, and she used this game as an opportunity to get her revenge.”

  “This is insane,” Darlene said.

  “I agree. It is insane, but it doesn’t make it any less true.”

  “She was stabbed, Harry. Did you forget that part?”

  “It was a superficial wound. Did you forget that part?”

  Darlene was doing everything in her power to keep her emotions in check. “You’re telling me that Jill and Richard killed those kids and then...what? She stabbed herself in the stomach? Or she let Richard stab her?”

  “I think it’s possible,” Harry said.

  “But highly unlikely.”

  “Gary Butler, Denise Richardson, and Jessica Lewis were butchered. And Jill Turner walked away with a superficial stab wound to the stomach. Think about that for a second.”

  She thought about it and pushed it aside.

  “Well, it seems that we have competing theories here,” Harry said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You believe that Randall Turner killed those kids.”

  Darlene hesitated. “I don’t know what to believe.”

  “But you want to believe it.” A pause. “You want to believe it because you’re desperate to believe that Jill Turner is innocent.” Another pause. “I’m sorry, but I’m not buying it, and I’m not buying that she had the strength to kill Richard. The only scenario that makes sense to me is that Richard wanted to die and that he allowed Jill to kill him, that he convinced Jill to kill him. She knew what was going to happen that night, and she let it happen.”

  She took a moment to consider his theory. On the surface, it made perfect sense. But she didn't believe it. She couldn’t believe it.

  She didn’t want to believe it.

  That was it, wasn’t it? She didn’t want to believe it. And acknowledging that she didn’t want to believe it was akin to acknowledging that Jill Turner wasn’t quite
as innocent as she wanted to believe.

  Darlene looked away. She could feel the tears rising to the surface, and she fought like hell to push them back. She was not going to break down in front of Harry.

  “Are you all right?” Harry asked.

  “Fine,” she muttered because it was all she was capable of saying at the moment. She was anything but fine, and they both knew it.

  An endless silent moment crawled by before the waitress returned with her cup of coffee. Darlene sipped it slowly, staring through the diner window, waiting for the moment when she would find her voice and the courage to concede that maybe Harry was right.

  That moment was upon her when her cell phone rang. She snatched the phone from the table and looked at the screen. “Well, that was fast,” she mumbled before taking the call. “Hello?”

  “Detective Moore, it’s Jill.” She was speaking softly, like she didn’t want to be overheard.

  “Jill, is everything okay?”

  A pause. “Can you come over? I have to show you something.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Amanda Turner appeared none too happy to see the detectives on her doorstep.

  “Jill called us,” Darlene informed her. She looked past Amanda to see Jill standing behind her in the foyer, holding what appeared to be a shoebox.

  Amanda turned to face her daughter and sighed. “What are you doing with that thing?”

  Jill didn’t respond. Her eyes were trained on Darlene.

  “May we come in?” Darlene asked.

  Amanda hesitated before stepping aside and gesturing for the detectives to enter.

  Jill kept her eyes on Darlene and walked hip to hip with her as they entered the living room. She waited for Darlene to take her seat on the couch before parking herself next to her, so close that their knees were touching. Darlene had the sneaking suspicion that Jill wanted her to save her from something...or someone.

  Amanda stood in the center of the living room, her eyes fixed on the shoebox. Jill clutched the shoebox in both hands, the tips of her fingers creasing the cardboard.

  “I saw my father outside,” Jill said.