What She Doesn't Know: A Psychological Thriller

by Andrew E. Kaufman

  Outside, a shock of lightning goes off, setting the night on fire. Thunder cracks and pops like the sharpest of whips, and well-placed rage sparks unexpected power. Riley’s good arm springs up. She grabs hold of Rose’s bicep, giving herself enough leverage to throw a sucker punch into Rose’s abdomen with the hard and weighty cast. As Rose falls off to one side and squeals with pain, Riley’s foot sails into the other woman’s stomach, sending her body into a tumble across the floor. Riley recaptures the knife, then rises to her knees.

  Rose rises, too, but not fast enough. Riley launches herself on top of her, then, with all the strength she can muster, plunges the blade into Rose’s chest.

  Rose lets out an ungodly scream, then gurgles and chokes on her own blood. Riley stabs her again, this time in the neck. Cartilage crackles, blood spurts, and Rose’s mouth pops wide open with lethal alarm.

  She keeps stabbing as Rose’s blood spills across the floor in a slow-moving river of red. The woman is near death, but now fury holds the knife, and it won’t let Riley stop. Each time the blade pierces flesh, memories of Clarissa’s murder whipsaw through her mind.

  Memories initially lost. But they aren’t gone—they resurfaced while Riley was at Glendale. Since then, she’s kept them secret from the world, waiting for this day with only one plan in mind: sharp-toothed revenge.

  Get out. Stay strong. Trust your truth.

  Like frames in a fast-spinning film reel, the images from that horrible day storm through her mind.

  Stab.

  On their way home from school, she and Clarissa have an argument. The disagreement escalates. Riley almost misses a distant and fleeting glimpse in her rearview mirror of a pink bicycle crossing the road.

  Stab.

  Dark skies turn darker. Clarissa’s tantrum explodes.

  Riley flies off the handle. She stops the car, orders her daughter to walk the remaining distance home.

  Stab.

  Several minutes later: Clarissa still isn’t home, and Riley begins to worry. She grabs her coat, grabs her scarf, leaves her house, and hits the sidewalk running.

  Stab.

  On her way, a wicked downpour drops from the heavens like a sheet of lead, followed by an electrical storm. Lightning explodes. Thunder roars and booms.

  Stab.

  She arrives at the spot where she let her daughter out. A stiff gust blows.

  Clarissa screams.

  Riley twists around to look.

  Oh no! Oh God . . . NO!

  Rose is dragging Clarissa’s unconscious body away from the road and out of sight of traffic. One of Clarissa’s sneakers falls off and hits pavement near the curb.

  My baby! My precious girl!

  Stab.

  I have to save her. I HAVE TO SAVE HER!

  She tries to dash across the road, but the speeding cars create a formidable blockade. Wind and rain only add to the problem, making visibility difficult. She helplessly watches Rose drag Clarissa’s wilted body toward the cemetery. Toward the already-open grave.

  Traffic opens up. Like an arrow racing toward its target, Riley takes off across the road. Nearing the middle of the street, she can see Rose hefting Clarissa to the grave’s edge, then, with a foot, she shoves her in. Consumed by visible, naked fury, she shouts into the grave, “You don’t get to have her! I get to have her!”

  At the curb, Riley scoops Clarissa’s bloody sneaker up into her hands.

  Stab.

  Screeeeeech.

  She looks up. A car rounds the corner at vicious speed.

  “NO! STOP!”

  The vehicle swerves close, dangerously close, hurling an aggressive swell of water her way. She tries to dive off the road, but wet, slippery pavement betrays her. She loses her footing, skates forward several feet, and in the process, connects eye to eye with Rose. In that unnerving moment it’s as if time freezes: Rose shocked, Riley racked with distress. Then Riley collides with a roadside boulder.

  A powerful wind rips the scarf from her head and sends it sailing through the air. It snags on a tree branch. That’s the last thing she sees before thick black ink spills across her world.

  She’s out.

  Thunder brings her back around.

  What—Where—How long have I . . . ?

  She’s lying on the ground in the middle of a ruthless rainstorm, has no idea why or how she got here. Her clothes, her body, her surroundings, are soaked. Spearing pain pulsates from her head.

  There’s something in my hand. Someone has put something in my hand.

  She looks down, sees her daughter’s sneaker with streaks of watered-down blood running through the canvas. She touches a finger to her forehead, inspects it, but finds no blood.

  Oh no! No, no, no, no, no! Clarissa’s been hurt! How? And where? I have to find her! I have to help her!

  But her mind is woolly, her memory nonexistent. She clambers to stand, tries to negotiate for stability with the earth but slips and falls. She tries again. Slips and falls again. Then finds success and launches down the road through wind and rain. She hysterically calls out Clarissa’s name to no avail.

  Another burst of lightning opens the skies.

  Boom.

  More rain, harder now, mercilessly pelting her face, her neck . . . everything. She doesn’t even know where she’s going.

  Where am I going?

  She keeps running anyway, then . . .

  Is that—?

  An oncoming police car drives directly toward her. Before she can raise a hand for help, the cruiser’s lights spin, tossing a red-and-blue glow across shiny, wet pavement.

  “HELP ME!” she yells with a voice that sounds as if it’s scraping over bedrock. “PLEASE! HELP ME!”

  She sprints faster toward the vehicle, almost tripping over herself along the way.

  The squad car’s door flies open. The cop piles out. He gets a fix on her, sees the swelling bruise on her forehead. He snatches the radio from his shoulder, calls for help.

  “Someone’s hurt my daughter!” she tries to explain. “SHE’S BLEEDING, AND I CAN’T FIND HER!”

  The statement pulls him to a standstill and paints confusion across his face while he observes the bloody sneaker Riley holds.

  “Ma’am,” he says, “is that your daughter’s shoe?”

  “Yes!”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  He reexamines the bruise on her forehead, seems to make a connection, and his expression shrinks.

  Stab.

  Riley straddles Rose’s bloodied, lifeless body, her face, neck, chest—everything—perforated with so many holes that the woman is unrecognizable. Riley looks to the right, sees the knife clenched in her hand, poised and ready to stab again.

  She lets out a scream but doesn’t know why.

  The apartment door flies open and smashes into drywall.

  She looks up to find Erin standing in the entryway, stunned into silence and staring at a floor covered in so much red that it’s nearly impossible to see what’s beneath it. Then she sees the body, and through a sickened and breathless whisper, says, “Oh, Riley. What have you done?”

  “Justice,” Clarissa calmly says, moving out from the room’s shadowy corner.

  84

  “Riley, please,” Erin says. She’s backing away, staring at the bloody weapon. “Put down the knife.”

  Riley looks toward the corner and speaks to Clarissa. “Come here, sweetheart,” she says, soothing. “No more hiding.”

  Erin looks in Clarissa’s direction, too, and turns alabaster white.

  Clarissa gives her aunt a nod. Riley gently lowers the knife onto the table.

  Erin lets out a sigh of relief, but she’s trembling as she takes in Riley’s face, her hair, her clothes, all covered in coagulating blood. She glances at Rose’s maimed corpse, then all at once becomes animated, covering her mouth and gagging.

  A joyous smile emerges beneath the blood on Riley’s lips. She points to C
larissa and triumphantly says to Erin, “See? I told you it would all make sense. This is it. This is what I couldn’t tell you all along.”

  Erin stops gagging. She takes the hand away from her mouth, and in a quivering voice, says, “W-what?”

  “We can explain everything,” Riley says. Clarissa takes soft, soundless steps toward her mother. She stands beside Riley and takes her hand.

  “We had to keep this quiet,” Riley continues. “Until everything was finished.”

  “I don’t understand,” Erin weakly says.

  “Our plan,” Clarissa says. “Get out. Stay strong. Trust your truth.” Then, to Riley, “Mom, the bus is leaving soon. We have to get you cleaned up and out of here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until I explain this.”

  “Then explain it!” Erin says, mind on the fast track to its breaking point.

  “I AM!” Riley shouts at her sister.

  Clarissa grabs hold of her mother’s arm. “Mom, calm down. This is all a shock to her.”

  Riley nods. Striving for composure, she says, “One night during my stay at Glendale, I woke up to the sound of footsteps. I flipped on the lamp and at first couldn’t believe it. There she was. My angel. My beautiful daughter, and it was amazing, Erin. It was so damned amazing.”

  Erin’s about to speak, but Riley interrupts her with a raised hand. “Stay with me for a minute here, okay? I promise, it’ll all come together.”

  Erin closes her mouth.

  “From that day on,” Clarissa continues with the story, “I came to visit her.”

  “Secretly,” Riley elaborates, smiling at her daughter. “Together, we sat in my room and worked to recover the lost memories. Clarissa would repeatedly tell me the story, then, the next day, see if I still remembered. For a while, I couldn’t, but then the memories started to stick. Eventually, I was able to recall everything, but I kept quiet about it after my release from Glendale in order to move forward with our plan to kill Rose.”

  “The cops will just get in the way,” Erin slowly says, repeating Riley’s comment from when they drove home from the DMV that day.

  “Exactly.” A grin of acknowledgment spreads across Riley’s face. “Now you’re following. That’s why I fought you so hard about calling the police.”

  “I still see her sometimes . . . ,” Erin says, comprehension widening.

  Riley gazes lovingly at her daughter. “We knew Rose would come after me the moment the news reported I was leaving Glendale, hoping to continue a relationship that never began in the first place. Trying to make me her mother. She thought she could evade me with the phony plastic surgery, but right away I saw through it.

  “She wanted to replace me then, and she wanted to now,” Clarissa says. “She even dyed her hair the same color as mine, and that walk . . .”

  “Still trying to imitate that, too, as a way to get my attention. She knew I’d recognize that confident walk anywhere.”

  “The only way she’d stop was if we stopped her,” Clarissa says.

  “And we wanted revenge for her ruining our lives. We had to kill her.”

  “So we decided to set her up.”

  “All this time,” Riley says, “the hound thought she was hunting the fox, but it’s been the other way around.”

  “Except the situation started to backfire. Our plan was for Mom to slowly work her way into Rose’s life, then go in for the kill, but she got ahead of us with her own plan, and that one ended up being dangerous. We had no idea how much more deranged and violent she’d become in the last ten years.”

  “She got unmanageable in a hurry,” Riley agrees, “and it took some time to gain the upper hand.”

  Erin’s growing comprehension looks as if it’s morphed into a full-body chill.

  Riley nods to her sister. “I get it. I’m in serious trouble, but you don’t need to worry. I’ve got an escape strategy. I’ll be far away and long gone before the cops are onto me. It’s been my plan all along.”

  “Here won’t work . . . There’s a better life waiting somewhere.” Erin again echoes Riley’s words.

  Clarissa checks her watch, then looks at her mother.

  “I know,” Riley tells her. Then, to Erin, “Leave now. You have to leave before you’re implicated. Hopefully, nobody knows you were here. We have a few things to take care of, then we’ll be gone, too.” Back to Clarissa, “Right, baby? Go to my room and change into the clothes I laid out on the bed.”

  “Riley,” Erin says, voice weakened by tears, “who are you talking to?”

  “Who do you think? The only other person here is Clarissa.”

  Erin shakes her head.

  Riley takes hold of Clarissa’s hand. She raises it into the air, lets it drop. “Are you blind?”

  Riley looks at Clarissa. Clarissa shrugs.

  “Riley,” Erin says, “Clarissa isn’t here. You think she is, that you’re seeing some kind of . . . ghost. But she’s not real.”

  Riley backs away, head shaking. “I swear, Erin, don’t do this to me again. Do not. Stop gaslighting me. Stop treating me like I’m crazy. That has to end right here.”

  “We need to get you help,” Erin says. “We have to get it right away.”

  “For crying out loud! She’s your niece!” Riley points to Clarissa. “How can you just stand there and not even acknowledge her presence? Why won’t you even look at her?”

  “Because she isn’t here. She is gone,” Erin says with so much sadness, so much grief, while she blinks away more tears. “We lost her ten years ago.”

  “No! She is not gone! She’s not! She came back to life again!” Riley shouts, but it comes out like a desperate plea for affirmation. She’s hyperventilating, her stomach sucking in, sucking out. “LOOK AT HER, DAMN IT!”

  Erin won’t.

  “I SAID, LOOK AT HER!” Riley shouts, louder this time.

  But when she looks to Clarissa for support, Clarissa is no longer there.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Riley says to Erin. “You hurt her feelings.” She angles her head to see toward the bedroom. “It’s okay, sweetheart. Come back out . . . Clarissa? Erin didn’t mean to—Where did you go . . . ?”

  She feels a little light-headed, her perception a little fuzzy, and stumbles as she steps toward the bedroom—then more images whoosh through her mind. Images she doesn’t understand. Are they other lost memories?

  She watches herself going into the bedroom to put away Clarissa’s clothes for the day. She thinks about Rose and how much pain she brought into her life.

  “Child killer!” Clarissa shouts in outrage, reading her mother’s thoughts.

  Riley’s anger ignites, too. She takes off, storms down the hallway, ducks into the apartment under repair, steals a nail from the carpenter’s bag, runs back to her place, and uses the sharpened tip to scratch her daughter’s angry statement into the headboard.

  She sees herself with Clarissa, who pulls the green-handled butcher knife from the dishwasher. She holds it up for Riley to see, then puts it back, leaving the pointed tip sticking up as an angry reminder that Rose must die.

  Erin comes over to help unpack, and Riley accidentally pricks her finger on the knife.

  “What’s going on with you?” her sister asks. When Erin leaves, Riley panics. She hides the knife under her pillow.

  At the breakfast café, Riley intentionally drops Clarissa’s photo while passing by Rose’s table, then moves on toward the restroom. Inside, her daughter waits, sitting on the sink’s countertop. With legs playfully swinging, she smirks, then gives her mother a colluding wink before Rose walks in.

  After Riley’s lunch with Rose, Clarissa yells, “DIE, MURDERER!”

  Riley runs to her car, takes out her key, then scratches Clarissa’s comment into the passenger’s side door. After finishing, she shouts, “QUIT HIDING AND BRING IT ON, YOU COWARDLY ASSHOLE! I’M READY. DO YOU HEAR ME? I’M SO READY!” as people on the street stare at her in confusion.

  Rose comes to Riley
’s apartment and apologizes for her behavior at the disastrous hair appointment.

  “Bitch!” Clarissa shouts after the woman leaves. Riley grabs an old can of spray paint from under the sink, uses it to furiously write Clarissa’s sentiment across the door, then tosses the can down her hallway’s trash chute. A day later, she flies into a huff because nobody has removed the ugly graffiti, then does it herself.

  Clarissa plays her game, moving the doll around Riley’s apartment, then, as her final joke, hides it behind the curtains.

  Riley grabs the butcher knife off the counter, digs the blade deeper into the cut on her wrist to draw blood, then uses it to write while Clarissa dictates: “Mother, we both know the truth. Our truth. We are connected by blood. Our blood.”

  “Riley?”

  Erin has been speaking, but Riley didn’t hear a word of it. She tries to regain her focus.

  “Riley,” Erin again says, eyes flooding with tears, “Clarissa is gone. And that’s not Rose. You killed someone, Riley, but it’s not Rose.”

  “I killed Rose!” Riley shouts. “Her body is right in front of you, and you still don’t believe me?”

  “Just listen!” Erin pleads. “It’s what I was coming here to tell you. Samantha Light wasn’t Rose—she was a woman named Christina Henry. She was an artist. Samantha Light was just her professional name.”

  “Christina Hen—No, no, no, no, no.” Riley shakes her head vehemently. “That’s just a fake name Rose used with Patricia. She used Clarissa’s initials to mock me!”

  “She wasn’t Rose,” Erin reiterates. “Rose Hopkins was killed in a car wreck.” She takes a step forward, pleading again, palms up. “I’ll show you the obituary.”

  Riley, with tears streaming, stares vacantly at the body, then at Erin.

  Erin’s own tears are falling. “Rose was headed for Glendale Hospital on the day of your release. It was the destination on her phone’s GPS. The cops never understood why . . . but I do.” Erin looks at her with an aching heart that almost seems visible. “I should have listened. I should have believed you when you said that Rose killed Clarissa. I . . .” Her voice breaks. “I should have been a better sister. I’m just . . . so sorry.”