by Hannah Jayne
“What is—?”
“Shh.” He held his finger to his lips. “Just watch. Always watch. Longer than you think you should. That way, they won’t even know you’re coming.” He pulled his gun closer to him, leveling it.
Beth Anne turned her eyes back to the twitch in the grass and lost her breath. A rabbit, not much bigger than one of her stuffed animals, scampered toward the clearing. His nose twitched against his nut-brown fur and he pushed back, standing on his haunches, the fur of his belly a pale, pale brown.
“No, Daddy.” Beth Anne’s protest was so soft she wasn’t even sure if she had said it out loud.
Her daddy cradled the butt of the gun and squinted one eye. “Don’t worry, Bethy. He won’t even know what hit him. He’s doing us a favor, and I promise, it won’t bother him none.”
The entire world slowed down. The rabbit’s ears poked straight up. His nose swished back and forth, the tall grass moving around him like ripples in a puddle. The click of the gun’s safety switching off was as loud as the shot.
“Beth Anne!” Her daddy’s voice roared in her already-ringing ears. Her eyes burned. Her nose was assaulted with the wicked stench of hot metal, of exploded gunpowder.
The gun dropped, flattening the grass, and Beth Anne’s daddy grabbed her hands in his, his palms cool against her singed ones.
“NEVER put your hands on the muzzle of a gun, you hear me? You could have gotten us both killed pushing away like that. What were you thinking? Look at your hands. Look at how red your palms are!”
But Beth Anne wouldn’t look at them. Her eyes were stuck on the rabbit as it scampered safely away.
Bex pressed her forehead against the carpet, trying to push the memory out of her mind. Her father had taken her hunting. Her father had told her that killing that rabbit “wouldn’t bother it none.” Bex shuddered. Did that prove anything? Did that prove her father was a murderer?
“Just watch. Always watch…”
Bex clenched her eyes shut and counted slowly until her breathing was at a normal cadence before pushing herself up and glancing out the window. The sedan was gone; the man watching her from the driver’s seat was gone—so why wasn’t the sickening feeling in her gut?
Thirteen
The yellow sunlight was nearly blinding when Bex opened her eyes. The man in the sedan seemed like the last remnants of a bad dream, but she checked out the window anyway, breathing contentedly when she saw that the street was empty. Her relief was short-lived when she turned around and glanced at the clock: eight forty.
“Oh my gosh!” She rifled through her clothes, jumping into her jeans and pulling on a T-shirt as she stumbled down the stairs. “I’m late. I’m so late!”
Denise and Michael sat at the table, staring at Bex with none of the urgency she felt.
“I slept through my alarm!”
“Oh, no, honey,” Denise said, standing. “I turned it off. You had a rough night. We thought you should take it easy today.”
“I’m not a fan of missing school, but I think Denise is right on this one. You’ll have an extra day so you can just relax and…regroup.”
Denise and Michael shared a glance, and Bex was struck with a sour feeling in her gut.
“I’m okay.”
Michael smoothed the newspaper in front of him under his palms and Bex could see that Darla was still on the front page, the same picture of her that the media and the school had been using, the same photo that looked so much like the girl with the scarf. She had to look away.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” Bex forced herself to nod her head.
“Because you can stay here.” Michael was gesturing to the house, but the thought of hanging around alone there made Bex even more certain that she wanted to be anywhere else—even if that was at school.
Denise looked from Bex back to Michael. “If you’re absolutely sure…”
Bex nodded. “I am.”
“Okay then,” Michael said. “Grab a piece of toast, and I can drop you on my way to the university.”
The ride to the school with Michael was long and silent but not uncomfortably so. He called the administration office on the way and told them that Bex would be there. “You’re all set,” he said to her, grinning as he pulled the car to a stop in front of the school.
“Jeez.” He leaned forward, craning his neck to see over Bex’s head. “More media. They’re vultures.”
Bex shuddered. “I don’t know what else they think they’re going to uncover here.” She hiked her backpack up and stepped out of the car, leaning down toward Michael. “Thanks for the ride.”
The reporters were still huddled in strange groups all over the front grounds of the school, but the frenetic bustle was gone—until Bex stepped onto campus. They immediately started toward her as if some sort of starter gun had gone off, calling her, “miss” and “young lady” as they closed in on her. Her panic started to rise and Bex shrank back, exposed, a deer caught in the laser-sharp sight of a hunter.
She saw the school’s security guard rushing through the gate toward her, barking at the reporters to get back and leave her alone, but nothing would stop them as they surrounded her, shoving microphones in her face and flicking on enormous lights that seemed to blank out the sun.
“Miss, miss, are you a student here?”
Bex felt her face flush, felt heat all the way to the hair follicles on the top of her head. Her stomach lurched and her palms were sweating. She couldn’t have answered the woman even if she wanted to. Her mouth was dry, her tongue a deadweight. She was seven years old again and everyone wanted to know what she knew, whether her father shared anything other than the macabre trinkets of his deeds with her. They wanted to know what she said to indict him, when she realized what he’d done was wrong.
“Please go away.” Bex was surprised by her own voice. “Please, we don’t have anything to say.”
It was exactly what her grandmother had said when they stepped into the big marble hallway in the courthouse after her father’s pretrial hearing.
The reporters bustled there too, but all Beth Anne could hear was the reverberating sound of her grandmother’s voice, half pleading, half demanding. There was the blinding flash of a camera snapping, and while Beth Anne tried to blink away the black blobs in front of her eyes, she saw her father in his nice, gray suit watching, the courtroom door just open enough for him to peer out without being seen.
Her heart swelled, and she knew that her daddy could stop it, would save her like he always did.
“Daddy!”
The horde of reporters followed Beth Anne’s gaze and turned on her and her grandmother then, shoving past them to get to Beth Anne’s father before his lawyer whisked him away. The last thing Beth Anne remembered seeing was the flash of silver around her father’s wrists, his hands clasped together, and the awkward way he walked, his ankles shackled. She had betrayed him again.
“What is your name, please?”
“Did you know the deceased?”
“Are you a student? Are you involved in the case?”
Bex took a step back, the lights and camera flashes blinding her, cell phones shoved in her face. She held up an arm to protect herself and clamped her mouth shut against the bile that tore through her stomach and itched at the back of her throat.
“Step back! You all need to step back!”
The security guard had pushed his way into the suffocating circle and tried to barricade himself against the reporters so Bex could slip between them and through the gates of the school. She took a step and then another, seeing her path to blessed silence, but stopped.
A car was idling in the school parking lot, right at the middle of the horseshoe-shaped drive. It was a dark sedan with a man in the front seat. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. His eyes were shadowed, but Bex didn’
t need a clear view to know that his gaze was laser-focused on her.
The driver put his foot on the gas, the squeal of his tires cutting through the cacophony of reporters and security guards as he sped down the Kill Devil Hills High School driveway and disappeared into traffic.
Fourteen
Even sitting in the school administration office, Bex couldn’t shake the odd feeling she had gotten from the man in the car or the prickly memory of reporters surrounding her. The smell of office supplies and the hypnotic tapping of one of the secretaries typing should have calmed her, but she jumped each time a door opened, each time a phone buzzed.
“I’m sorry, hon.” A pudgy secretary with cheeks like Red Delicious apples grinned up at Bex. “You needed a late pass, correct?”
Bex nodded.
“Do you have a note?”
Bex shook her head and cleared her throat. “No, my…dad…called about twenty minutes ago. My name is—”
“Bex, Bex Andrews.”
That stripe of heat went up the back of Bex’s neck once more. “Yeah…”
“You’re very popular today, Ms. Andrews.” The secretary leaned over and signed the bottom of the hall pass with a big, squiggly flourish. Bex could read the woman’s name as Mrs. Snowbury. “You have a message.”
Bex raised her eyebrows. “I do?”
Mrs. Snowbury produced another square of paper. “A gentleman called and asked if you were a student here. Naturally, we couldn’t give him that kind of information but he did leave a number.” She handed over the pink hall pass and the phone message, and Bex stared at them like they were about to bite her.
“He said his name was Brewster, I think. Or Schuster. It was a little hard to hear. The connection wasn’t so good. We normally don’t take messages for students, but it was slow and your file shows you’ve recently transferred so I thought…”
Bex couldn’t hear if Mrs. Snowbury had finished talking because her heart was clanging like a fire bell. Who knew she was here? Who knew she was Bex Andrews? Why would anyone call the school looking for her?
She snatched the notes from Mrs. Snowbury’s outstretched hand and may have muttered a thanks or an apology. She pushed out through the administration doors and speed walked in the direction of the nearest girls’ room, a bead of sweat rolling down the middle of her back.
“Hey, beautiful, I hope you’re rushing toward me.” Trevor was in the hallway, a lazy smile on his full lips that should have made Bex swoon. He opened his arms and Bex dutifully hugged him, her whole body stiff and humming, focused on the man in the sedan, the Raleigh-area phone call, and now someone trying to contact her at school.
“You okay?”
“I just… I… No, I’m not feeling so hot. Girls’ room.” She pointed over Trevor’s shoulder.
He looked stricken. “Do you want me to wait for you? I can walk you to the nurse.”
Bex shook her head. “No thanks. Just…excuse me.” She pushed past him and yanked open the girls’ room door, letting out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding when a wisp of cool air washed over her face. The bathroom was blessedly empty, the only sound the gentle whoosh of the breeze coming from the bank of open windows. Bex found a stall and went in.
What the hell is going on?
Her head was swimming with memories, dream images, things she’d made up. It was a consummate mess, and every image just ratcheted her anxiety up more. She stared at the note in her lap. The paper was already soft from having been balled up in her sweaty palm, and Mrs. Snowbury’s swirly cursive message was starting to bleed.
Brewster/Schuster? For Bex Andrews. Please return call at earliest convenience: 919–555–0512.
Raleigh.
“I don’t even know anyone named Brewster or Schuster,” Bex muttered. Maybe a reporter?
She thought back to the slew that had knocked on her door. It had seemed like hundreds at first, before the police made them stand back on the sidewalk. When the arraignment happened, there were fewer, most doing their harassing and postulating from the courthouse steps. The reporters were mercifully glued to the hallways of the hall of justice during her father’s pretrial hearing, gasping when Jackson Reimer pleaded not guilty, all their focus on him. It wasn’t until that night when news broke that Reimer had slipped custody that the cameras turned back to Beth Anne, back to her grandmother—the glare of camera lights flooding the living room from their station on the front lawn, the red record lights, the pointing fingers and hurled accusations.
Bex was going to be sick.
She whirled around, grabbing the sides of the toilet while her stomach rolled over itself.
What day is it? What day is it?
At one time, the dates of every one of her father’s crimes were imprinted in Bex’s mind. She knew the women’s names and their birth dates too, and she carried around guilt that made her shoulders sag and alternated her thoughts between the poor women who lost their lives at her father’s hand and the tiny, niggling possibility that her father was innocent. Either way, Bex had worked long and hard to erase those memories from her mind.
“September sixteenth. Melanie Harris.”
Melanie had been seventeen. She had blue eyes and, in her graduation picture, a wide smile that showed off two crooked front teeth. She had been a tennis player and worked at the sports club where Bex’s father played racquetball. She had gone missing on September twelfth, her naked, destroyed body found by a Food Lion clerk on the sixteenth. Melanie had been placed in her car, which was parked in the grocery store lot, her purpled, warped hands wrapped around the steering wheel.
Bex might have worked to erase the memories but there they were—buried, not gone. She dialed the number on her phone and, with a shaking hand, held it to her ear.
Each ring made the knot in Bex’s stomach pull tighter. She didn’t realize she had been holding her breath until she heard the click of the phone, the gravelly voice of the man on the other end of the line.
“Beth Anne?”
Bex’s fingers were numb. The phone slide through them and fell like deadweight into the toilet. The Call in Progress icon kept dancing and she stared at it, transfixed, until the screen began to blacken. The man’s voice reverberated in her head.
Beth Anne.
No, she was Bex Andrews now. Beth Anne Reimer didn’t exist. Beth Anne Reimer had a father who was accused of killing six women before he took off. Beth Anne Reimer had disappeared right along with him. The man’s voice kept echoing in her head and she tried to focus on it. There was a slight accent. The man had pulled the end of her name up, just barely. He wasn’t sure it was her.
Was he her father? Would she recognize him if he was?
The school bell shocked Bex and she backed into the corner of the stall, suddenly terrified, suddenly certain that whether or not her father had been on the phone, he was at the school. She started to shake, started to plan her escape. She could dye her hair again or maybe shave it off. She could get a wig and glasses and a bus ticket and go—where? She had eleven dollars to her name. Eleven dollars that wouldn’t even buy her a ticket to get across town.
“It’s still weird not having her here, you know?”
“I feel bad for getting so mad at her.”
There was a clamor of chatter as the bathroom door opened and closed, but Bex could pick out Laney and Chelsea’s distinct voices. She should have been calmed but anxiety tightened in her chest.
“Bex!” Chelsea’s hand was on the stall door and Bex cursed herself for not locking it. “Are you okay? You look…not great.”
She wanted to tell them everything. She wanted to run away from Kill Devil High and never return. She wanted to be able to speak. Instead, she pointed to the toilet.
“Phone,” she offered in a croaked whisper.
Chelsea gave a cautious glance toward the toilet bowl, her face
breaking into a grin. “Oh, that sucks.”
Laney came up behind her. “Ew, toilet phone. Double ew, public toilet phone!”
“At least the water looks clean. It’s clean, right?”
Bex nodded. “Yeah, I just… I was texting and…” She shrugged. “What should I do?”
“Put it in rice,” Laney said. “Like, a tub of uncooked rice. It draws out the moisture and… How long has it been in there? Like a second or like ten minutes?”
For the life of her, Bex couldn’t remember how much time had passed since she’d been in the office, since she’d received the note, since she’d heard the man’s voice.
“Does it matter?”
“Well, yeah. Had they gotten to the Titanic in the first five minutes, it would have been a bad day instead of an international tragedy.”
Chelsea shook her head, disgusted. “I think this one will be an international tragedy.”
Bex actually felt a small sense of lightness.
“Aren’t you going to get it out?” Laney wanted to know.
“Can’t I just flush it?”
“It’s a cell phone, not a goldfish. And it might still work. Or they could save the SIM card and at least get all your contacts back. But if it’s already synched to your computer, you’re totally fine.”
“No.” Bex shook her head. “Not synched.”
“I forgot you came from the Ozarks or whatever.”
“Raleigh is hardly the Ozarks.”
Chelsea shrugged. “Are you really going to let it sit there?”
Bex slowly pulled up her sleeve, eyeing the drowned phone. Finally, Laney shoved her out of the way, snatched the phone from the toilet bowl, and handed it to her.
“Ew!” Chelsea screamed, running out of the stall. Laney chased her, flicking toilet water in her direction while Chelsea continued to gross out.
“You should wash that,” Laney said.
Bex dumped the phone in the sink and turned on the tap, letting the water pour over it. She imagined the voice and the number with the Raleigh area code slipping down the drain. She’d start fresh again.