You Are Not Alone (ARC)

by Greer Hendricks

  Then she smiles.

  If I was scared of Valerie before, now I’m terrified.

  Valerie begins to walk toward the platform, maintaining the painful pressure near my elbow joint. I have no choice but to keep pace with her; I haven’t looked down yet, but I’m certain she’s pressing a gun against my torso.

  A man carrying a briefcase passes us going the other way and I try to catch his eye, but he’s looking down at his phone. Even if he did see us, what would he notice? We look like two girlfriends huddled close together, maybe because of the cold, heading out to a late dinner or concert.

  We approach the platform. “Look, Shay, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Half a dozen people are milling around—a few businesspeople, a young woman wearing bulky headphones, and a mom absently rolling a pink stroller back and forth. But they all seem lost in their own thoughts.

  Valerie’s voice is soft and gentle now; I’d almost believe her if I didn’t know what she is capable of. “Cassandra and Jane and I just need to talk to you.”

  It’s eerily quiet down here, between the rush of trains.

  “I know you and Cassandra and Jane are sisters, and that you had a stepbrother named James.” My lips are so dry and rigid it’s hard to form the words. “But why did you set me up for his murder?”

  “Cassandra and Jane want you to know it was nothing personal.”

  Valerie leads me farther down the platform, by the support beam. She pulls me to a stop not far from where Amanda stood when I first glimpsed her, then positions herself directly behind me.

  Time seems to be slowing down. I’m acutely aware of my breath shuddering in and out of my lungs and what must be a gun against my ribs as Valerie adjusts it a little higher.

  I could jerk away from her and try to run back up the stairs. I read somewhere that it’s difficult to shoot a moving target. But I’m so weak and my brain is so foggy that I can’t risk it. I’ll never be able to outrun her. Plus that little pink stroller is somewhere behind me … if Valerie fires her gun, the bullet could go anywhere. With so much metal down here it might ricochet.

  Valerie’s hair brushes against my cheek as she leans closer to me. “Come, Cassandra and Jane are waiting for us. We’ll get this all sorted out as soon as we see them.”

  The LED display shows the next subway is due in two minutes.

  A woman in gym clothes strolls toward us, appearing bored, one of her hands in her pocket and the other swinging free.

  “Not a word,” Valerie whispers, her breath warm against my ear.

  But the woman isn’t even looking at us. It’s like no one in this city sees me.

  I glance around. There’s no escape. I feel a faint vibration beneath my feet.

  One minute, the LED light announces.

  The woman is closer now, but she’s glancing at something back in the shadows beneath the overhang of the stairs. She casually raises her right hand, running it over the top of her hair, as if smoothing out her ponytail.

  My body is completely rigid as I hear the rumbling of the train.

  Valerie takes a big step, forcing me toward the edge of the platform.

  Too close.

  Suddenly I know what she intends to do. Cassandra and Jane aren’t waiting for us. Valerie wants this to look like I committed suicide; she’s replicating Amanda’s last moments.

  She’s truly trying to turn me into Amanda.

  Valerie’s gun is digging into me, and the oncoming train is almost in front of me. I’m trapped between two horrible fates.

  The thunder of the train fills my ears.

  Then I hear a shout: “Police! Valerie Ricci, put your hands up!”

  The command comes from behind us. Valerie’s head whips around as she twists slightly away from me and momentarily lowers her gun.

  In that moment my instincts take over, marshaling every bit of my remaining strength as my legs and core tighten and keep twisting, continuing the rotation as I pull Valerie in a half circle with me. Then I ram my elbow into her chest, pushing her away from me.

  The train appears in the mouth of the tunnel as Valerie falls backward onto the tracks.

  The train whips past, erasing her, as I collapse onto the platform. I squeeze my eyes shut as the subway cars frantically grind to a stop, making shrieking noises that sound horrifyingly human.

  People are shouting and rushing toward me, but I just lay there, feeling numb. When I finally open my eyes, I see the overturned pink baby stroller—with a plastic doll dangling out of it.

  The woman pushing it was a cop, like the woman in exercise clothes, I realize.

  I was never alone down here on the platform, just as Detective Williams promised when I called her from the cab.

  A hand on my shoulder, her steady, familiar voice in my ear: “You’re okay now, Shay.”

  It’s good she heard everything, I think as she gently unzips my coat and checks the wire she outfitted me with shortly before I arrived at the subway station.

  After all, two other sisters need to be punished.

  EPILOGUE

  SHAY

  Two months later

  Three things that saved me:

  1.  When Valerie, the former actress from L.A., pretended to be Detective Santiago by channeling the detective’s thick Brooklyn accent, she asked which exit I was near on the “freeway.” That’s a West Coast term, as I once noted in a Data Book when I jotted down regional terms like bubbler for “water fountain” and gravy for “tomato sauce.” Anyone born and bred in New York would have said “highway.”

  2.  The woman who was with James Anders on the night he was murdered—by now she has been identified as Amanda Evinger—wore hoop earrings and dropped one as she left Twist. The bartender spotted it and called after her, but she didn’t hear him. The real Detective Santiago collected it when she questioned the bartender following the discovery of James’s body. She knew I couldn’t have been with James at Twist. My ears aren’t pierced, as Amanda’s were.

  3.  When Detective Santiago asked Jody to bring her the picture of Amanda that was planted in my Data Book, Sean accompanied Jody. He described how the Moore sisters had set me up with a house-sitting gig, how shocked I was when they knew about my smoothies, and how he’d listened during my phone call with the sisters as they urged me to take Amanda’s vacant alcove studio, in a location and with a rent that seemed too good to be true. He also told the police he’d stake his life on that I was a victim in whatever was going on. When I finally got my iPhone back from the sketchy hotel, I saw he’d left a half dozen messages.

  —Data Book, page 84

  I STEP ONTO THE subway car just before the doors close and grip the overhead metal bar, my body swaying as the train picks up speed.

  My old tote bag, containing my Data Book, is slung over my shoulder again.

  I look around, collecting details the way I always do. Thirty-five other people are in this car. So out of the thirty-six of us, twelve—or 33 percent—likely consider themselves very happy, according to one survey on the emotions of Americans. A different study says four, or about 11 percent, are probably deeply unhappy.

  As we pull into the station on Forty-second Street, I slide onto an open seat. I’m on my way home from my new job at Global Metrics. The person they hired right after I botched my interview didn’t work out, so I went after the position again, and this time I won it. I’m looking forward to a quiet night in my studio apartment on the Upper West Side. It doesn’t have the charm of Amanda’s place, but at least the memories there are all my own.

  On the happiness spectrum, I’m somewhere in the remaining 56 percent.

  A guy across from me is staring. I don’t think it’s because I’m his type, though. My face was plastered on the cover of the New York Post when the paper broke the story of the Moore sisters’ arrests for being accomplices in a homicide. Cassandra and Jane are currently being held without bail as they await trial, along with the other women in their group. They�
��re going to be convicted, Detective Williams assures me; there’s an awful lot of evidence against them.

  I look a little different these days. I’m growing out the layers in my hair, though I’ve decided to keep the highlights, and I alternate between contacts and glasses depending on my mood. It’s like I’ve taken on some parts of Amanda; the new me is a hybrid of the two of us.

  Though I think about the sisters less and less, I’m still frequently reminded of them. Like when I see a trio of women sharing a bottle of wine and laughing, or when I remind myself to stand up straight instead of hunching, or when I watch friends link arms as they walk down the street.

  It’s hard to admit this, but even after everything they did, a part of me misses them. When they were around, I never felt alone.

  I also remember all three sisters whenever I step onto a subway platform.

  What are the chances that I would bear witness to two violent deaths in the same precise spot, only months apart?

  But I try not to dwell on that data.

  There’s also a stat I’ve thought about a lot lately: that the average person will walk past sixteen killers in the person’s lifetime.

  I watch as a woman moves down the subway aisle.

  I keep staring at her as she passes my seat. I wonder if she will walk past fifteen others during her lifetime.

  I’ve never told anyone about how after the police officer yelled for Valerie to put up her hands and she reflexively turned, I continued twisting, forcing her between me and the platform. The body I used to try to minimize by shrinking into myself was my greatest ally in that moment; I needed my bigger limbs, stronger muscles, and extra few inches of height to overpower her. Then I used my last bit of strength to push her away.

  I glimpsed her eyes as she was falling onto the tracks. They were wide open, glittering with a silent accusation.

  Some people might consider me a murderer. But I hope most would say I acted in self-defense.

  My subway car grinds to a stop and the doors wheeze open. A few people get off, and others crowd aboard.

  I watch them move in and out of view. Some will get raises during the next year, while others will be asked for a divorce. A percentage will suffer physically—anything from a broken bone to the diagnosis of a terrible disease—while others will fall in love. The numbers tell me so.

  As for me, I don’t know what the future holds. But I choose to believe that the statistics are now in my favor.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TK