They were starting over.
And from that day on, the name Dolores was never spoken.
So who else knew about it? Kimmi, of course. Kimmi’s dad. Dee’s dad. The police detectives who had taken Dee’s initial testimony, Dr. Farooq, and the therapist Dee had seen right after her abduction. It was a short list.
Could The Postman have gotten his hands on the details of Dee’s trial? Possibly. He seemed all-powerful. But the simpler solution was that he was intimately acquainted with both Kimmi and Dee.
Was it really possible that Kimmi’s dad was The Postman? Dee didn’t see why not. No one seemed to know anything about The Postman other than that he was a Hollywood producer who had come up with the perfect solution for America’s rising tide of violent crime. Even though most of the news reports that Dee had seen swore that violent crime in America was at an all-time low. But apparently, facts didn’t matter under this presidency. The government cut a deal with The Postman and turned over a portion of the prison system to him, and once The Postman app was launched, introducing 250 million Americans to televised capital punishment, no one cared about the rationale anymore. You couldn’t argue with ratings.
But why would a Hollywood producer want to run a glorified death row? Sure, the ultimate reality show was ridiculously popular, but this whole setup must have been ridiculously expensive, too. Was it really worth the expenditure? What could The Postman hope to gain: Power? Fame? The sick thrill of having so many lives in his hands?
The white room. Kimmi had said that her dad killed people there. What if it was true? What if the entire rationale behind Alcatraz 2.0 was to satisfy The Postman’s own bloodlust?
She needed to talk to Nyles. He’d be walking up to the guard station in a few hours for his noon meeting with his attorneys. She’d have to trust him with the secret of her past, the thought of which made her head ache. But there was no helping it. If she was right, the world needed to know.
It was half past seven when Dee slowly rose from her vigil on the stairs. She didn’t bother to get changed, just splashed some water on her face as usual, ignoring the sparkly cosmetics provided for her intended use, and headed downstairs. Coffee and a banana, then she’d wait for Nyles out front. She didn’t want to miss him.
Dee was nuking her coffee, when Mara appeared at the back door.
She clearly wasn’t expecting Dee to follow through on her offer of breakfast. Mara knocked on the sliding glass door but kept her arms wrapped tightly around her body, as if she thought Dee might tell her to fuck off.
Sadly, there was a part of Dee that wanted to, not because she didn’t like her neighbor, but because she was concerned for Mara’s safety.
People connected to Dee ended up dead, plain and simple. Monica. Blair. Even Dr. Farooq. It was bad enough that Nyles, Ethan, and even that pain in the ass Griselda might be in the firing line. Did she really want to add another name to the list?
Still, she didn’t have the heart to ignore her neighbor. Just a quick cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt.
“Hey,” Dee said, lifting the booby-trap cardboard cup from the counter as she slid open the door. “Hungry?”
Mara didn’t step inside. “Are you sure? I have some burrito left over. I can just eat—”
Dee shoved a banana into Mara’s hand. “I’m sure.”
They ate bananas and sipped black, watery coffee outside on the moldy wicker furniture and made small talk. Dee learned that Mara was from Orange County, just an hour and a half away from where Dee lived in Burbank, and had been about to start college when she was arrested over the summer.
“Mr. Carpenter was a teacher at my high school,” Mara said. “He taught Safety Ed and remedial math. They said I shot him dead in his classroom after summer school one day. A premeditated fit of jealousy.” She bowed her head, her face pinched with embarrassment. “Supposedly, I was in love with him and he rejected me.”
“Were you?”
“Ew, no! I didn’t even know who he was.”
“What happened at the trial?”
“All these horrible girls from school testified that I used to hang around Mr. Carpenter’s classroom.” Mara clenched her jaw, her fingers wrapped so tightly around her coffee cup that Dee was afraid it might crumple. “They supposedly found my fingerprints on the murder weapon, but I’d never even seen a gun in my life, let alone fired one. I wouldn’t know how. The whole thing felt like the Salem witch trials, you know? Guilty no matter what.”
Dee smiled wryly. “I know how you feel.”
“Well,” Mara said, standing up. “Thanks for breakfast. I should let you go to work.”
“Can I ask you something?” Dee asked, before her neighbor dashed back into her own house.
Mara glanced at her apprehensively. “Okay.”
“Did you write fan fiction on The Postman forum?”
Mara’s green eyes grew wide. “I would never.” She sounded mortally offended.
“Oh, sorry,” Dee said quickly. “I just thought that stuff about Molly you mentioned—”
“It’s not fiction.”
Something about Mara’s tone—sharp and serious, like a child who tells a fanciful tale but insists it really happened—gave Dee pause.
“You mean Molly Mauler is actually a forty-three-year-old stay-at-home mom from Michigan?”
Mara gave an emphatic nod, then dropped her voice. “Her name is Ruth Martinello and she lives at one-fifty-seven Hillcrest Avenue.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is.” Mara’s voice was hardly above a whisper. “And I can do better than that. I know all of the killers’ secret identities. Where they live, what they do, and most importantly, where they kill.” She leaned forward. “That’s the reason I’m still alive.”
DEE STARED AT MARA, her heart racing. Could it be true? Was there really a secret to staying alive on Alcatraz 2.0 after all? Dee slid the glass door closed and glanced around the backyard. The nearest crow camera was perched on the fence about twenty feet away. Maybe if they kept their voices down, it wouldn’t pick up their audio.
“How do you know all that?” she whispered.
“Logic.”
Logic was figuring out who was in the CONFIDENTIAL envelope during a game of Clue, not unmasking the well-kept secret identities of The Postman’s killers.
“Every serial killer has a unique style,” Mara said quickly. “Like a fingerprint of their murders. The way they dress, the way they talk, the way they kill, and where they do it. They like order and routine. If you piece together enough of them, a picture starts to form.”
Dee thought of Kimmi’s white room, and what she’d said her dad had done there. Routine. Order. But Dee had difficulty believing that watching a dozen videos of Molly Mauler tossing victims to hungry lions like Caligula in the Colosseum would reveal enough hints about her alter ego for Mara to narrow it down to one person in the Upper Midwest.
“You did all this research here?” Dee asked. “From Alcatraz two-point-oh?”
“Of course not. I’ve been studying The Postman’s killers for over a year.” She seemed totally unembarrassed about the fact that she was some kind of Postmantic superfan. Dee didn’t want to judge—after all, Monica with her MoBettaStylz alter ego had been one of Gucci Hangman’s biggest fans—but the idea of analyzing the Painiacs and their kills seemed incredibly disturbing.
“You don’t believe me,” Mara said, misinterpreting Dee’s silence.
“No, I just…” Dee wasn’t sure what to say. I think it’s weird? It creeps me out?
Mara pursed her lips, took a deep breath, and sat back down on the moss-covered wicker chair.
“My first clue was the accent. Molly may not sound like she has one, but if you slow the video down and run a static filter to remove microphone interference and background noise, you’ll notice first and foremost the ‘th’ stopping. Molly says ‘the’ like ‘da.’ Just slightly. That narrowed her area of origin down to the Great Lakes region. Second
ly, she speaks with a northern-cities vowel shift, also indicative of the inland north. Lastly, when Molly unleashed a hormonally enraged congress of male chimpanzees on former Michigan congressman Daniel Yssap after he was convicted of killing that intern he’d been having an affair with, she referred to him as a ‘dumb Yooper,’ which is really only used in the Upper Peninsula. From there, tracking her down was a relatively simple process of Facebook stalking, travel records, and Instagram posts.”
Dee stared at her blankly. “Wow.”
Mara smiled. “And once I knew where she was from, I understood the joke of her moniker.”
“How so?”
“Molly Mauler from Marquette, Michigan? It’s like she was dropping a clue.”
Mara’s excitement over her deductions was familiar to Dee—it reminded her of how Monica used to talk about Gucci.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” Mara blurted out, her voice no longer a whisper.
It was a good question, a smart one, considering where they were. Dee didn’t know Mara at all, and she realized that she’d broken Blair’s first rule of Alcatraz 2.0: Never volunteer to help anyone.
But she couldn’t help herself, and she knew exactly why.
“Because you remind me of my sister.”
“I do?”
Dee nodded. “She died.”
Mara stared at her with unblinking eyes. Did she know that Dee had been convicted of killing Monica? Probably. It would have been all over The Postman’s feed. But Mara never alluded to it.
“I’m sorry,” Mara said. “There’s too much death in the world.”
“Tell me about—”
And then, as if on cue, the double doorbell notification rang out from the living room.
Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
Dee and Mara sat frozen in their chairs. Dee didn’t want to look, but she knew she must. What if it was someone else connected to her trial? The judge? One of the detectives? Her attorney?
She took a deep breath and marched through the kitchen and into the living room, Mara following close behind. And though she was prepared to see something horrible on the screen, what she saw drained all the warmth from her body.
Nyles and Griselda hung side by side by their wrists from the rafters twenty-five feet above a concrete floor. The interior of the room had the height of one of the old warehouses, but instead of corrugated metal and moldering wood, this space was painted a cheerful yellow, with exposed metal support beams flooded with natural light. Nyles and Griselda were gagged, their ankles cuffed and their wrists bound with a heavy cord that was looped through metal hooks attached to thick, rusty chains. Nyles wore a pair of plaid pajama bottoms and a long-sleeve thermal shirt, but Griselda was still in her club-girl getup from yesterday. They must have been nabbed from the Barracks either late last night or this morning, and Griselda, like Dee, probably hadn’t gone to bed last night.
Griselda glared at the camera, her teeth bared over the black fabric of her gag. She was desperately trying to show resistance to the end, just as Blair had done, and despite their differences, Dee had to admire her courage.
Nyles, meanwhile, looked utterly confused. His eyebrows were drawn together, and he kept trying to speak through his gag, and though the words were incomprehensible, Dee knew exactly what he was saying.
“Diplomatic immunity,” she said out loud.
“Huh?” Mara asked.
Dee pressed her palm to her forehead. It was damp with sweat from her growing panic. “This doesn’t make sense. Nyles’s case is in appeal. He has diplomatic immunity. He was supposed to meet his lawyer today and…” She let her voice trail off. Did she really want to get Mara involved in the plan? She’d managed to stay alive on Alcatraz 2.0, keeping out of sight and out of mind. And everyone involved with Dee had a tendency to end up dead. Would Mara be next?
“And what?” Mara asked.
“I…” She was saved an explanation by a voice on the live feed. It was electronically manipulated to sound like a metallic, robotic tone, and it was like nothing Dee had ever heard on The Postman before.
“Cinderella Survivor,” it crackled. “We have your friends.”
Oh God. It was happening again. Just like Blair, Nyles and Griselda were going to die, and it was all her fault.
“My girls are dying to play with them.”
The Hardy Girls skipped into the frame, holding hands. The sisters, who usually dressed up as famous duos from history, wore matching powder-blue dresses with puff sleeves, and lacy white knee socks in black patent-leather Mary Janes. Their light brown hair was combed to one side and secured with barrettes that allowed it to swoop gently over the white bandit masks that covered their eyes.
The girls stopped directly beneath Nyles and Griselda, whose feet dangled above the girls’ heads, and curtsied.
“The girls have been taking swimming lessons,” the voice continued, harsh and soulless. “And they’d like some new friends to take to the pool.”
The Hardy Girls skipped back out of view. They returned moments later, pushing a large glass tank on wheels. It had a thick black hose attached to a hole in one side. Dee was pretty sure she recognized the tank from Molly Mauler’s piranha kill a few weeks ago, and as the Hardy Girls positioned the tank directly beneath her friends, she remembered Molly’s victim, locked in that tank filled with flesh-eating superfish, the clear water slowly turning a foamy, rusty red as it filled with blood and chunks of flesh.
Once they had the tank perfectly aligned, the sisters disappeared to different corners of the room. Dee heard the squeak of a wheel turning, then a whoosh, and seconds later, water began pouring through the hose into the tank.
Immediately the hooks holding Nyles’s and Griselda’s wrists separated, dropping them into the tank, where they collapsed into a heap.
As Griselda and Nyles struggled with their bonds, the water sloshed around them, already an inch deep. Meanwhile, the Hardy Girls skipped back up to the tank with twin rolling ladders, which they positioned on either side. They climbed up and flipped a transparent panel from the back side of the tank over the top, creating a lid, which they then padlocked into place at the two front corners.
The plan was clear. The water would eventually fill the tank, and even if Nyles and Griselda could free themselves from the ropes, they’d still be unable to escape from the tank and would drown.
“It should be completely full in twenty minutes.” A red digital timer appeared in the corner of the screen. “Can you save them, Cinderella Survivor? Their fate is in your hands.”
DEE STARED AT THE clock as it counted down. Nineteen minutes and fifty-five seconds. Fifty-four seconds. Fifty-three.
Their fate is in my hands.
“Wow,” Mara said, letting out a breath. “The Postman must really hate you.”
You have no idea.
“I feel bad for Nyles. He was really nice to me my first day.”
“I have to save them,” Dee blurted out.
Mara laughed. “Save them? Why?”
Because they’re my friends.
Dee stopped herself before she said the words. No one had friends on Alcatraz 2.0, and yet her instinct showed where her heart was. Nyles and even Griselda were her friends. They’d risked their own safety to help her. She wasn’t going to let them die.
“Because they’re my—”
Dee’s answer was cut off by a quick series of raps at her front door before it flew open, ripping the spearmint dental floss and spork contraption away from the wall. Ethan bounded into the living room. Mara screamed and fled for the backyard.
“Mara!” Dee cried. “It’s okay! He’s a friend.”
“Dude!” Ethan said, oblivious to Mara’s presence. “What are you going to do?” Then he paused and turned around. “And why was your door unlocked?” He sniffed the air. “And why does your living room smell minty fresh?”
“I want to save them,” Dee said, feeling utterly helpless. “But with all those warehouses on the island,
it’ll be a miracle if we find Griselda and Nyles in time.”
“Th-the old navy brig,” Mara said tentatively, peeking out from behind the dining room wall, as if ready to bolt out the back again at the smallest sign of danger.
Dee caught her breath. “What?”
Mara’s voice sounded small, but she spoke with total conviction. “When the Hardy Girls dressed up as Merricat and Constance Blackwood and killed Nikolai Ivankov by force-feeding him sugar-covered blackberries until his stomach exploded, I compared screen grabs of their kill room to photos of the old naval prison on the island. Part of it was turned into a wine-tasting room twenty years ago, but there is a ninety-five-percent chance that it’s the same place.”
“Duuuuude,” Ethan said slowly. “She’s so badass. Wait.” He cocked his head to the side. “Who the hell are you?”
“This is Mara. She lives next door.”
Ethan nodded. “You used to work at the bodega. I remember the red hair. Any idea why there’s, like, no food in there right now?”
That was so not important at the moment. “Ethan, do you know where the navy brig is?”
“Not really. But we could probably find it.”
She appreciated his use of the pronoun “we,” but without knowing exactly where the prison was, they had no chance of reaching Nyles and Griselda in time. They needed a guide.
“Mara,” Dee began gently, “can you take us there?”
Mara recoiled. Her shoulders pinched toward her ears and rolled forward, as if she were trying to wrap herself into a cocoon. “Go to a kill room? Voluntarily?”
Eighteen minutes and forty-nine seconds. “We don’t have time to find it ourselves. Please, Mara.”
“I—”
“You won’t even have to go in. Just point it out and go home.”
Mara’s eyes shifted from Dee’s face to the TV screen. Nyles had managed to wiggle his wrists free of the ropes and was working to untie Griselda. The water had risen past their ankles. Would they even have the full twenty minutes? Dee wouldn’t have put it past The Postman to lie to them.
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