#MurderTrending
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Gucci placed an object on the cushion beside the body, and Dee’s stomach convulsed again as she realized it was a head. She wanted to look away, but her eyes were locked onto Blair’s, which were still open, unseeing, as Gucci’s heavily ringed hand rotated it to stare at its own body.
Fucking asshole. How would he feel if someone ripped his head off, huh? He deserved it, not Blair. Even if she’d been guilty of the crime for which she’d been convicted, would she really have deserved this?
But as she watched the screen, Dee saw something that turned her boiling rage to fear. Gucci pushed Blair’s body onto its side, then pulled one thin sleeve of her tank top away, exposing the front of the shoulder. In his hand, he held an item that Dee instantly recognized—a pair of tweezers, hot pink with white polka dots—which he used to slowly carve something into Blair’s flesh.
A heart.
DEE CONTINUED TO SEE the image of the bloody heart long after it had disappeared from the screen. The main video feed was showing a slo-mo replay of Blair’s final moments, pausing at key intervals to add pop-up arrows and snarky commentary.
Millions of people were viewing The Postman’s replay, and their comments flooded the sidebar. #AirBall was instantly popular, followed closely by #deCRAPitation and #OBE or #OutofBodyExperience, and the spikes tally rose exponentially. Ninety thousand. Five hundred thousand. One million.
What about Blair’s viewership rule? Weren’t ratings supposed to be higher in the evening? This was midmorning, and Blair’s murder had racked up a million spikes within minutes.
But while a small nugget in the back of her brain was registering these facts, the heart carving was all-consuming. It wasn’t a coincidence. Dee rejected that possibility out of hand. Etching a heart in the flesh of a dead woman’s shoulder? Okay, not totally out of the realm of possibility for one of the Painiacs, but the needle-point tweezers, pink with white polka dots…
Was Gucci trying to send Dee a message? That was her initial reaction, but there was no way Gucci could have known about her finding the tweezers, which left only one option….
Had Gucci Hangman killed Monica?
It made no sense. MoBettaStylz was one of Gucci’s biggest fans, probably adding to his merchandise sales through her following. So why would he kill her? Besides, The Postman’s killers didn’t murder outside Alcatraz 2.0 for fear of winding up as inmates themselves.
Maybe the tweezers were a coincidence, and Gucci was using the heart to tell Dee that she would be the next one to die. The marking on Monica’s body was public record, so it was almost plausible.
Dee staggered over to a table, knees wobbly and unsure, and sat down. “Shit.”
“The first time it’s someone you know,” Nyles said gently, pulling out the chair beside her, “is always the hardest to watch. At least she didn’t suffer.”
“Oh yeah,” Griselda said, her voice sharp as glass. “I’m sure she didn’t feel a fucking thing when her head was ripped out of her spine.”
“Off her spine,” Nyles corrected. “Technically the vertebral column ends at the atlas or C-one vertebra, which forms the joint connecting the skull to the spine, although…” He squinted at the screen, taking a closer look at the freeze-frame on the bones protruding from the gory stump that used to be Blair’s neck. “Although, it appears that the C-three or the C-four is still attached, which would mean that at least some of the traditional spine was in fact removed with Blair’s head, so I suppose in some regard your description was accurate.” He turned back to Dee. “I was premed at Stanford.”
Griselda stared at him blankly. “Why do I talk to you?”
“The point,” Nyles said, resuming his bedside manner, “is that the first one you watch is always the worst. It gets easier.”
Easier? Was Dee supposed to find comfort in the fact that eventually she’d get used to watching someone she knew get decapitated in front of a live audience? “It shouldn’t.”
“I’m so glad you’re here to tell us these things,” Griselda cried, clasping her hands together in mock excitement. “We really need Princess’s moral superiority to point out what horrible bitches we’ve become.”
“Gris,” Nyles began, “she didn’t mean—”
“Shut up, Nyles,” she snapped. “Just because you shoved your tongue down her throat doesn’t mean you can make excuses for her. Like somehow I don’t care that Blair’s dead because I’m not pale and trembling and ready to pass out.”
Griselda’s words implied that she was truly broken up about Blair’s death, and yet she didn’t seem to be affected at all. Even Nyles was paler than usual, but Griselda’s voice was steady, her breathing normal, and her entire demeanor was calm. It was either the greatest display of self-control Dee had ever seen, or she really wasn’t bothered by what she’d just witnessed.
“Besides,” Griselda continued, narrowing her eyes, “Princess should be upset. She’s probably the reason Blair got killed in the first place.”
“Gris!” Nyles’s voice was sharp, but hardly above a whisper.
Dee caught her breath. “What do you mean?”
“Blair flew under the radar for months,” Griselda said with a shrug. “Then you show up, she’s nice to you, and boom, dead within twenty-four hours.”
“Now, Gris, you’re being ridiculous.” Nyles stood up, gingerly shifting his body weight back and forth between his feet as if the floor of I Scream were strewn with red-hot coals.
“How?” Griselda countered. “Because I’m picking on your new girlfriend?”
Nyles and Griselda bickered, but their voices faded into the background. Could Dee actually have caused Blair’s death? She thought of Mara, who clearly wanted nothing to do with her, of Rodrigo the molester, who’d been ready to get busy until he realized who she was, and the other inmates hurrying by on their way to work, avoiding all contact.
Griselda was right. Sure, Gucci could have carved that heart into anyone’s shoulder, but he’d just so happened to choose someone with whom Dee had established a connection. This was Cinderella Survivor’s fault. Her and her twenty million spikes.
Blair’s death was on Dee’s head, just like Monica’s.
I’ll kill you and everyone you love….
In an instant, Dee was eleven years old again, back in that white doorless room, trying desperately to figure out what the girl in the vent wanted from her, trying to guess what answers would keep her alive. Why is this happening? Is it something I did? Is it my fault?
There were secrets Kimmi had shared that Dee had never revealed to anyone. Not even the police. She’d been too terrified. “If you ever tell anyone,” Kimmi had said, “I’ll kill you and everyone you love. Promise me you won’t tell. PROMISE!”
And so Dee had kept her mouth shut about the secrets of the white room. For six years. Until she’d broken down and shared them with someone.
Monica.
Two weeks later, she was dead.
Was the pattern repeating itself? The last time Dee had trusted someone, that someone had ended up dead, strangled on the floor of her bedroom with a heart carved into her shoulder.
Why is this happening? Is it my fault?
Monica wouldn’t have been Dee’s first choice of stepsister. They were nothing alike. Dee was dark and jaded, and though her dad had kept her in therapy for years after her abduction, it hadn’t seemed to do much good. She had shied away from personal relationships, finding it too difficult to trust anyone. Somewhere along the line, Dee had stopped blaming herself for the abduction and starting blaming everyone else: strangers, friends, maybe even her dad. During the three years since her kidnapping, her anger
had simmered, waiting to explode, and Dee had isolated herself from her peers, unwilling to let anyone inside.
She’d eat lunch alone in the library, scribbling poems into her notebook just as she had when she was a kid. Back then, her compositions were about the great sadness of her young life—the loneliness of being an only child. She’d even had one of them published in the local paper:
My heart wants a sibling,
A friend to call my own
But I don’t know what it means
To have a sister or a clone.
But that was before the white room. After, Dee’s poems reflected the darkness and panic that plagued her, which she feared would haunt her forever.
Monica was the exact opposite. Perky and lighthearted, nothing seemed to bother her. They’d been in the same class together since sixth grade, when Dee and her dad had moved to Burbank and assumed new names. When their parents started dating two years later, and then got serious, Dee vowed that she and Monica would never be friends.
Apparently, though, Monica never got that memo. After they’d all moved in together their freshman year of high school, Dee made it clear at every meeting—whether brushing teeth side by side in their Jack-and-Jill bathroom or eating meals across the table from each other—that they were not, and never would be, friends. And every single time, Monica flashed her kind, warm smile and tried again.
It had taken a year, but Dee had finally relented.
They’d bonded over something totally unexpected: a book. Dee read voraciously, an escape from her life and her memories and her decisions. But she’d never seen Monica pick up a book that wasn’t required reading for school. Then one day, when Dee was reading Jane Eyre for the umpteenth time, Monica walked in and said, “I love Mr. Rochester.”
“You’ve read Jane Eyre?” Dee had asked.
Monica had flashed her warm smile. “Of course! I love a good romance about broken people.”
Broken people. Dee had never quite understood why she loved that book, but those two words encapsulated it perfectly.
Suddenly it was as if the floodgates had opened. Every human interaction that Dee had avoided since her days in the white room came rushing back tenfold. She wanted Monica’s friendship, her approval, her input. And being friends with Monica led to hanging out with Monica’s friends. By the end of sophomore year, Dee had a circle, a community, and for the first time in years she participated in activities at school. She even contributed a few of her poems to her high school’s literary magazine.
And then, one day, the inevitable: Dee told Monica Kimmi’s secret.
They’d been hanging out by the pool in the backyard, enjoying the late Southern California summer, when Monica asked Dee about her kidnapping. Just like that, out of the blue. They’d never talked about it before, and Monica’s question caught Dee off guard.
It wasn’t the first time she’d told the story. Detectives had heard it. Psychologists had heard it. Her dad. But those hadn’t been voluntary. Monica was the first person who heard everything.
Dee told Monica about waking up in the white room, about meeting Kimmi, who she initially thought was a prisoner like herself. Eventually, Dee realized that Kimmi was her abductor, the one holding her there for her own amusement. It had seemed strange to Dee that a teenager could be so vicious, but then Kimmi had talked about her father, and then Dee had understood.
“Her dad,” Dee began, her heart pounding in her chest as she related the secret of the white room to Monica. I’ll kill everyone you love….
“Yeah?”
Dee swallowed down her fear. Kimmi was locked away. It was time to unburden herself. “That room she kept me in. Kimmi said her dad had killed people in there. Many times. She knew because she’d watched a lot of them from the vent. She said he’d made the room white because he liked the way blood looked when it spilled onto the white floor.”
It had felt good to tell someone after all those years. The final weight of her trauma removed.
“She was just trying to scare you.” Monica had smiled. “I’m sure no one ever died in the white room.”
“Yeah,” Dee had said. “You’re probably right.”
At the time of Dee’s escape, Kimmi’s threat had felt overwhelming, and even though she’d been sent off to a mental hospital for an indeterminate period of confinement, Dee had always felt as though Kimmi would follow through on her threat if Dee ever told anyone about the room.
Still, Dee had never seen Kimmi’s dad during her imprisonment, so maybe Monica was right, and Kimmi had made up the story to terrorize her victim.
But what if it was true? What if, by not telling anyone, Dee had ensured that Kimmi’s dad was never arrested and more people died in the white room?
The guilt had eaten away at her for years, finally overcoming her fear. And so she’d told someone she trusted.
Then, in the blink of an eye, Monica was dead, and Dee was on trial for her murder.
Dee pushed her childhood fears aside. Kimmi was not responsible for Monica’s death. But now Dee was convinced that Gucci Hangman, or whoever he was in the real world, was connected to her stepsister’s murder. She just needed a way to prove it.
“Griselda’s right,” Dee said, cutting into Nyles and Griselda’s steady stream of bickering.
“About what?” Griselda asked, eyebrow arched. “That you raided a kindergartner’s closet when you got dressed this morning, or that you’re the root of all evil?”
Neither? “Blair. It’s my fault. I think she was killed because of my—”
Again, from out of nowhere, Nyles swooped in. He cupped her face in his hands and planted his lips on hers.
“Now you’re just doing it on purpose,” Griselda whispered as Nyles broke away.
Before Dee could answer, Ethan barreled through the door, throwing it open with his beefy arms. “Dude, I’m so sorry about Blair.”
Griselda tried to act like nothing bothered her. “Why, did you kill her?”
“No.” Ethan tilted his head to the side. “But you guys were friends and shit. Right?”
“Friends die,” she said plainly. “That’s how it is here.” Again, not an ounce of real feeling penetrated her mask.
Ethan hoisted himself up on the counter and reached out to take her hand. “I know you’re sad on the inside.”
“Sad for you,” she retorted.
Ethan beamed at her, as if Griselda had just given him the loveliest compliment in the world, and for a moment Dee was jealous of his ability to find happiness in just about anything.
Meanwhile, Nyles eyed Dee closely. “Gris,” he said at last, holding his debit card out to her. “I’m in the mood for a milk shake. One of your special creations. One for Dee, too. Would you mind?”
“Seriously?” Griselda asked.
He tossed his debit card onto the counter. “I’m afraid so.”
She sighed heavily, as if she’d just been asked to do a chore she loathed, then smacked Ethan on the arm. “Get me a bag of ice from the freezer.”
While Ethan bounded off to the back room like a puppy excited to be tossed a bone, Griselda snatched Nyles’s card, then stomped around behind the counter, slamming cupboard doors and cooler windows as she gathered ingredients. Chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream, bananas.
Nyles continued to smile, his enormous teeth fully exposed. The grin looked as if it was plastered on his face, held there by an elaborate concoction of duct tape and staples. “You’re going to love this,” he said, his cheeks twitching with the effort to keep smiling. “I promise.”
Dee had no idea why, but clearly Nyles wanted her to play along, to keep her conversation light and generic and absolutely devoid of questions or explanations like the one she’d been about to give when he kissed her. Again.
“I’m sure I will,” she said slowly.
Ethan returned, a heavy bag of ice slung over one shoulder. He deposited it in the sink behind the counter, and Griselda proceeded to grab handfuls of cubes and d
ump them into the industrial-size blender. It was a lot of ice, more than the ratio of ice cream, syrup, and fruit necessitated, and when she slapped on the lid and fired up the blender, the grating of the blades against the ice filled the entire shop with a deafening roar.
Which was, apparently, exactly what Nyles had wanted.
The instant the noise flooded her ears, he leaned forward, his breath hot on her cheek, and whispered just loud enough for her to hear over the din. “Tell me why Blair was killed.”
DEE OPENED HER MOUTH to reply, but the words stuck in her throat. If she told Nyles the truth—that Gucci Hangman was somehow tied to her sister’s murder—she’d be trusting him with some portion of her past. And not only was trusting strangers not her forte, but it also didn’t end well.
But the alternative—trying to prove her innocence on her own—seemed impossible. She knew almost nothing about the island, and if there really was a way to stay alive on Alcatraz 2.0, she was going to need Nyles’s help to find it.
“Blair’s death had something to do with my stepsister’s murder. I think Gucci Hangman was trying to send me a message.”
Nyles stared at her for a moment, eyes unreadable; then he gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head. Instantly, the blender switched off and the room fell silent. Dee wasn’t sure if she should say something else and risk a lip plant from Nyles or just sit quietly. She chose the latter.
“Allow me, milady,” Ethan said. He grabbed four glasses from the shelf and plopped them on the counter beside Griselda, who poured out the liquefied concoction. Ethan grabbed a glass the instant she was finished, chugged it, then coughed, spraying milk shake all over the counter. “Brain freeze. Holy crap. Dying.”
Griselda ignored him. She rounded the counter and set two milk shakes on the table in front of Dee and Nyles, sloshing icy brown gunk all over the place. “Well?”
Dee was pretty sure she was talking to Nyles.
He stared at the table, contemplating his glass. “Ethan,” he began slowly, “how many calories would you say are in one of these?”