“Where are the Coughlins?”
Somehow—distantly, I suppose—I hope they’re still home, that he’s somehow forgotten about this one little detail so that I can scream and plead until they call 911.
But he’s ready for that question. His eyes drift toward the ceiling.
“They’re upstairs sleeping,” he says. “Well, I mean—in a way.”
His smirk is horrific. The sort of thing you might see in a comic book, the wide, jagged-toothed grin of a monster about to attack.
“You killed them? You killed them?”
I can’t wrap my mind around the reality of it.
“But they were nice people. They...didn’t deserve this.”
“I mean, you could argue that I actually helped them. You should see their bedroom. It’s just one big memorial to the pain and suffering they’ve endured.”
He takes the gun and places the barrel against his cheek. He doesn’t seem to notice how dangerous that is.
“And they owe it—all of their pain and suffering—to you.
I hope desperately for him to have an accident, to pull the trigger and end this whole thing. But he doesn’t do that.
“Oh,” he says when he notices me looking. “Safety’s on. You didn’t think I’d accidentally shoot myself in the face, now did you? Silly girl.”
“That was you in the house, wasn’t it?”
He only stares.
“I mean, that night. The night I came home from the party. You followed me around and then broke into the house. Didn’t you?”
He shrugs. “Old habits die hard,” he says, a smile stretching out one side of his face.
Prison has done something to him. He’s leaner, harder. Tattoos peek out from beneath his sleeves and above the neck of his shirt.
He’s been broken.
Wherever he was, it broke him.
“I don’t want to die,” I tell him, though the lingering effect of the pills causes me to slur everything into a single word, a winding syllable that fades away rather than ending.
But he seems to catch what I’m saying, because his face droops, as if the grand prize from a second-rate show has been taken from him.
He makes direct eye contact, and then he says, “I love you, Mary Ellen.”
It looks like he wants to tell me something else, to explain himself, but he doesn’t get the chance. A loud pop interrupts him, and in a kind of slow-motion horror, blood and bone and brain matter spray all across the room’s interior.
The smile on Allred’s face remains fixed for a moment before his slumps to one side.
It is an accident, I think. He’s gone and shot himself in the head, and now I’m going to die all alone in this fucking garage.
Speaking of irony.
But then reality sets in, and I hear someone talking.
“Jesus Christ, that was like the end of a really bad LifeTime movie,” says the voice. “Two crazies find love in an old garage.”
The voice’s owner steps out from beside the car.
“And then one of them gets shot in the fucking head.”
I look up.
It’s Audrey Winstead, and she’s so drunk she’s lopsided, holding the gun precariously in her right hand.
“You know, this is turning out even better than I had planned,” she says. “It’s going to be utterly believable you two were in a death pact.”
“What are you doing, Audrey?” I ask, hoping against hope that what I’m seeing is just not true. “Help me out of this. Come on.”
There is a part of me that thinks maybe she really will help me, and I have to take that chance. But she only smiles and totters over, still holding the gun.
“Man, you are way tougher than I expected.”
“Then let me go,” I say.
“No, I’m afraid I can’t do that. God! I’ve been waiting all night to say that.”
I see flashes of how the night will turn out. My body crumpled over in the garage, the air filled with exhaust. A production carefully laid out in specific detail.
A more adult version of Barbies. Ken, your body goes here. Barbie, I’m going to place you next to the pink Corvette in the garage. Ooh, yes, let’s put the top down! It’s so cute! Now, who’s going to call 911?
Audrey walks over, nudges Timothy Allred’s body over onto a side, and then trades her gun for his. She presses the handle against his palm and then gently places a finger between the trigger and the guard.
“Give a guy a cross-country plane ticket, and he thinks suddenly everything is about him. How insane is that?”
She giggles. Her laughter is meant to be sardonic, but it only gives her an absolutely insane look, and for some reason I think she knows it.
“Besides, I have the sneaking suspicion he’d have confessed at some point before this was all over. I can’t quite take the chance on that, now can I?”
She’s wearing latex gloves, so I suppose she thinks there will be no fingerprints on the weapon. Her hair is tucked in a net fast food workers wear, and she’s even got little booties over her shoes.
For once in her life, she isn’t wearing high heels.
“Do I not look the part?” she says. “I got the booties idea from the end of that movie The Departed. Did you ever see that one, a few years back? Oh, it’s a great movie! No spoilers, though, just in case you ever wanted to get to it.
“Anyway, Timothy here responded well to my uneven scribblings. See, the way I wrote him, he thought I was you. When it wasn’t the Mary Ellen Hanneford who met him at the airport, he got seven shades of pissed, let me tell you. But that quickly ended when he figured out what I really wanted to do. And then he was all over it.”
She takes a few steps back, watching bitterly as the blood seeps out of his body and onto the floor of the garage. There is an inhuman, animalistic hatred in her eyes, and it is compounded by the violence surrounding her.
“Still, he wasn’t a keeper,” she says, looking pitiably down at him. “Great with a computer, hell with research, but one hundred percent out of his fucking mind.”
“Then why would you work with him?”
“I needed a scapegoat,” she says, matter-of-factly. “Just like we all did with you. It’s like the story has come full circle, Mary Ellen.”
She pauses thoughtfully, then flips the safety off on her new pistol. “See, if he kills you and then himself—a super morbid murder-suicide—it closes the circle. The motive is there. The motivation is there. I mean, there’s no way I could let him live, right?”
She nudges his body again.
“In the end, he wasn’t trustworthy. Not like the girls. Girls really know how to keep a secret. Especially Madeline and Gillian. They took the secret to their graves. Literally!”
“Never a slip-up? Not once? I mean, you almost said it to me in the bar that one night.”
She rolls her eyes and affects a drunkard’s posture. “Oh, you mean how dr-dr-drunk I was the night you saw me?”
She straightens up. She’s actually drunk—I can smell it on her—and she doesn’t even have the slurred speech of a two-martini lunch yet.
“That, honey, was my way of stringing you along, getting the motor revved up. I knew it would start that big brain of yours cooking on the quote-unquote unsolved case of Everett Coughlin”—she makes those bullshit quotation marks in the air—“but it was all just like everything else in this, an act.”
She curtsies and almost stumbles, the gun dangling from one freshly-manicured hand.
“In all the years since it happened, not one part of what occurred in the garage with me and Everett Coughlin ever got out. We made a blood pact over it, and it worked.”
“And all you had to was betray me.”
She almost finds that laughable. She says, “All we had to do was promise to sink one of us, and, well, it’s obvious who that turned out to be, am I right? I mean, one of us had to be sacrificed so the others could live.”
“You could have just let Everett Coughli
n, I don’t know, live, instead of killing him the way you did. That was a sick thing to watch, by the way. I can’t believe you.”
“Stop talking to me like that.”
“I will—”
“I have the fucking gun, Mary Ellen,” she interrupts, “and you will listen to every word I have to say before this is all done.”
“Why?”
“After tonight, after I list it out for you like some dimestore villain, I’m never going to speak of it again. This is where the hatchet is buried, or whatever the proper metaphor is. I need to have all my words in the ether so that I can go on without speaking them ever, ever again.”
Audrey’s face contorts as an unexpected sound cracks this little scene of ours in half. It comes from just on the other side of the garage, and for a moment I believe—truly believe—that reality is folding in on itself around me.
All of a sudden, the door leading from the garage to the house opens and a figure steps inside. It’s Detective Ciccotelli, and he appears to be sweating from every pore on his face.
“Put the gun down and step away from the young lady,” he says.
Audrey makes a face. “Young lady? Asshole, she’s middle-aged, at best. She doesn’t even get botox.”
“Drop the fucking gun, or I blow the back of your head all over the far side of this garage. I mean it. Drop the fucking gun.”
She doesn’t give him time to respond. Her gun goes off, and his gun goes off, but it is she who is still standing when it is all over.
Ciccotelli spins like a top and goes down.
Audrey bellows, a dissonant, unsettling sound. “Fuck!”
She raises the gun, looking like she might empty the clip into his unmoving body, but at the height of tension, she lowers it and screams again.
“This ruins everything,” she says. “How in the hell am I going to explain this now? There is no feasible narrative for why the cop showed up. Wait, are you crying?”
Blood seeps from under the detective’s body, and I have to strangle back tears. He is my last hope for a positive outcome, barring some kind of miracle.
“Did you have a crush on that old tub of lard, or do you just see the last moments of your life slipping, slipping, slipping away?”
For a few moments, Audrey has lost her pincer’s grip on me, as I glance over and dwell on the other corpse in my midst.
“I mean, I can probably make it look like—shit, I wish I hadn’t downed all that cinnamon whiskey. Really clouded up the old freight train, know what I’m saying?”
She burps. “Phew! Maybe that made some room!”
At this, she paces around, trying to plan for how to reconfigure this bloodbath to her advantage.
“Maybe,” she says, biting her lip, “maybe the detective shows up because he’s figured something out about you, and he—goddamnit!”
She’s clutching the gun like a talisman, and for a moment I fear—really fear—that she is going to turn on me and fire. That is the whole inevitability of this situation, right? That she kills us all and then gets away scot-free?
“This isn’t going to work. It just isn’t going to work now. Too many moving pieces. I mean, the detective has to have briefed somebody on all of this, hasn’t he?”
I open my mouth to say something, and Audrey senses it, because she steps over and places the gun against my face, pushing, pushing, until the barrel is jammed between my teeth, sliding against the back of my throat. I have to tense my jaw muscles to keep from gagging.
And she notices.
“Guess that’s why Madeline never accepted you,” she says, her eyes cutting into me, and suddenly I can see her finger trembling on the trigger.
She wants to do this. Wants to just get it over with.
But she hasn’t wrapped her head around it, and so she can’t.
Not yet.
And so suddenly, the gun slides back out, leaving an oily, metallic taste in my mouth.
Still, the question remains, the one that I have to ask, just to put it out of my mind and into the air around me, because I cannot die with it still in my brain. It will live on with me, interred with my bones, and I will have to spend eternity contemplating it.
“Why are you doing this?”
The question stops her in her tracks. She smiles like a pageant girl being asked a question about world peace.
She pulls back, momentarily lowering the gun. She smiles unevenly. “So glad you asked that. You see, I’ve already survived the awful wrath of the revenge killer. I’m the lone survivor. The final girl. The hero in all of this. When this is all said and done, as they say, I’ll be seen as a hero. No more living in the shadow of the Suicide Girls.”
She saunters forward, her eyes wider than usual.
“I can already see the headlines: Suicide Girl Goes on Murder Rampage. You see, coming back home just triggers all the old emotions, and they come flooding back, too much for you to handle. That, and the fact that your cuckoo mama just seems on the verge of keeling over. So you take it out on the rest of us. First, Madeline, of course, because she’s the ringleader in everything. She was the boss bitch, and so she deserves what she gets most of all.”
She stops herself, places the edge of the gun’s barrel against her lip.
“And on and on. No need for all of the details. You get the idea, right? Now, on with the show. I need to set everything up and get back to the house before I’m missed.”
“It doesn’t make any sense, though,” I say. “You’re killing me because I was finally moving on with my life?”
“No, silly,” she replies. “I’m killing you for my career. And to get back at the bitch who took my husband away from me.”
And there it is.
It’s a land dispute. Madeline took what Audrey had claimed was hers.
“So this is about Madeline sleeping with your husband?”
I see the mask slip for the first time tonight. “She wasn’t just sleeping with him,” she says. “She was fucking him, and she had planned on leaving Colton for him.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m highly motivated. There’s a difference.”
She really has thought about this for quite some time, hasn’t she?
So I have to dig deep for something that might knock her off her perch. I say, “You will never be me. And you will certainly never be Madeline St. Clair.”
She leans close and says, “You’re so wrong. You’re so absolutely wrong.”
“You were always clinging to Madeline’s coattails, like the rest of us, and now that she’s dead, no one will care about you, either. Your stock will plummet after this is all over. You’ll barely be able to get your name on a billboard in a few months.”
She laughs, and I can smell the vodka. She stumbles, and it takes her a few tries to stabilize herself.
The next moment, her hand snaps out and pops me across the jaw. I can taste blood, but I don’t give her the satisfaction of reacting to the fiery pain in my face.
“You deserved that,” she says. “You haven’t been here in two decades, so what the fuck do you know? Secondly, this isn’t high school. I am a successful woman. I’ve done things to separate myself, up to and including Madeline St. Clair. She was lucky to get the send-off she did. She was a faded starlet, a sad hologram of her former glory.”
“And when you went to the hospital, there was barely a mention in the Tennessean, so what does that make you?”
She lunges for me again, and this time she strikes me with the butt of the gun. Right on the top of the head. It is a white-hot, absolutely blistering pain, and something inside me seems to break loose. Like two ends of wire don’t quite connect.
“There’s no way this works,” I say, trying not to slur my words. “You’re not Gillian. You can’t pretend this plan is airtight. There’s going to be a full investigation. They’re going to collect DNA evidence, check all the—I don’t know—bullet fragments, and they’re going to conclude another person was here, orchestr
ating all this.”
She seems to think about that.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Even if they do, there’s no way they’ll think it’s me. I’m the sweet survivor. Check this out.”
And just like that, her face changes. She puts on her sad mask, and she says, “I—I just can’t believe someone would do that. My only hope is that my friends find the peace in death they weren’t able to in life. I’ll miss you all. Dearly. Truly. Honestly. I will. Oh, God.”
And then she whimpers as if surrounded by cameras.
I’m tied up, but as she’s putting on this little performance, I pull one wrist toward me and feel how loose it is. When they find my body, it can’t look like I was tied up. There can’t be ligature marks.
She’s thought of everything...except what I do next.
“What are you doing?”
Her face becomes a cartoon version of itself, all wide eyes and crystalline teeth. A malfunctioning Stepford Wife. She sees the way I’m twisting my wrist inside the restraints. She is a pre-planner. She has never been able to account for variables.
Me, I’m the variable. If I don’t play nice, her plan will go upside down on her.
And yet, I have to keep an eye on the exhaust, which creates an ever-present haze that will soon drag me into a permanent slumber.
“The big problem is,” I continue, “once we’re all dead, you won’t have anyone left to impress. As shitty as Madeline was to you, she was the only person who ever mattered in your life. Not your parents. Not all the terrible, disinterested frat guys you bedded. Nope. Just Madeline. And she’s fucking dead. You killed her.”
“Stop it!” she says, a tone of desperation creeping into her voice.
She kneels down and begins to untie me, then stops mid-action. She knows what will happen if she does, and also what will happen if she doesn’t.
To drive the point home, I saw my forearm side-to-side to create an ugly red rash at the point of contact. It burns like hell, but this is literally the only way I can think to save my own life.
When my hand is just free enough, I yank down, sending a spatter of blood to the concrete floor next to me.
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