“Hide where the choir would stand. I’ll draw Todd away.” I push myself up. “After we’re gone, get Lily out of here.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
.....................................................................
It was never supposed to end like this.
—The last words of Tessa Waye’s diary
I wait for Todd in the dark, and when he fills the doorway and his flashlight illuminates his face, I lift my chin, and promise myself I will make sure Todd never hurts anyone ever again.
“You.”
“Me,” I agree.
Todd lunges forward without checking the room, without lifting his feet high enough to clear the storage boxes I shoved in front of the doorway. He hits them hard, dropping to his knees, hands outstretched to break his fall.
And I smack him in the temple with a paperweight the size of a grapefruit.
He hits the floor hard, writhing in pain, giving me the second I need to duck. I leap over him, my feet churning before they’re even near the carpet. When I touch down, I’m gone. I’m running fast, faster than I ever have before. I streak down the catwalk, passing where Griff and Lily are hiding as Todd screams in fury.
And sets off after me.
I can’t see the stairs ahead of me, but somehow, I find a rhythm.
I clatter down the steps until I hit the bottom floor—and trip. I stab my good hand into the wall. Right myself. Take off running again.
But the mad dash and stumble make me dizzy. My brain feels turned inside out, and I almost miss my turn. I make a hard left, plunging through a doorway where the Sunday school rooms line each side of the hallway.
Griff and I discovered these during our first-floor search. The rooms open to the hallway, but they also open into one another from the inside. I cut into the first room on the right, and thanks to the moonlight coming in through the windows, I make my way into the third room via the inside doors.
“You bitch!” Todd snarls. He’s farther behind me now. By the sound of his voice, he’s near the first entrance, the one I took to get into the hallway. That’s good. It’s where I want him.
Now I just need to draw him closer.
“I know you think you’ve won, but the police haven’t arrived yet.” Judging from Todd’s voice, he’s coming down the main hallway, so I edge closer to the inside door. He’ll check every room, and with this much moonlight, he’ll see me for sure. “They’ll still have to save you, and do you really think I’ll let them? Do you really think there will be anything left of you to save?”
Not if you catch me. With a shaking hand, I pull out Griff’s cell phone—the one he gave me just before carrying Lily to safety—flip on the iPhone’s voice recorder feature, and announce: “Then come and get me, Todd. You want a chase . . . I’ll give it to you.”
Todd’s hand snakes around the door frame and I take off, using the inside set of doors to head back to the hallway entrance. But Todd is just a bit faster and he’s on me. His fingers tangle in the tips of my hair, closing in, and I scream in panic. I reach with both hands, catch the nearest door, and as I duck to the left, I slam the door.
It catches Todd’s forearm squarely in the jamb. Now he’s screaming and I’m away. I race down the hallway, catching the barest hint of flashing blue lights through the windows.
They’re almost here. I head for the kitchen, pinwheeling my arms for balance when my socks hit the linoleum. Please say Griff’s got the doors all unlocked by now.
Somehow it’s darker in the kitchen than I remember. I’m groping my way again, and I can’t afford to slow down. I can hear Todd’s footsteps growing closer.
It takes two hands, but I pry open the dead freezer, pin back the door, and hit play on the iPhone’s recorder before sliding the cell across the floor. It skids under some shelving and hits the rear wall as Todd explodes into the kitchen. I hit the floor and scramble backward until I’m pressed against the cabinets. I can’t really see anything now. But I can hear him. The soles of his shoes snap like teeth.
This isn’t going to work. He won’t fall for it. I shrink down, praying Todd continues straight or else he’ll trip right over me. He keeps moving . . . he stops.
Right there in front of me.
I can smell him. Blood and peppermints.
He’s going to catch me. I’m screwed!
“Then come and get me.” The iPhone finally comes to life, repeating my earlier words. Todd pauses. I still can’t see him, but I can feel him panning the dark, searching.
Please move. Please take the bait. If it keeps repeating, he’ll know it’s a recording. I can hear sirens growing closer, but they won’t be close enough if he finds me crouching here. I’ll be dead before the police hit the parking lot.
Please. Please. Please.
Todd takes one step. . . . Then another. He stands at the broken freezer’s entrance, and I pull my feet under me. He hesitates, walks over the threshold, and I stand. I count three of Todd’s footsteps before I move toward the door. I make myself count two more before I grab the freezer door handle.
“Then come and get me, Todd. You want a chase . . . I’ll give it to you.” I hear his shoes scrape as he bends down.
He’s found it! I shove the door shut with my shoulder, and Todd shouts. There’s a scuffle. He’s coming! Lock it!
But my fingers feel like overstuffed sausages. I can’t see well enough to drive the pin into the lock. I fumble and Todd hits the door, bouncing me hard. I ram my shoulder into the metal, and my vision blurs.
My arm. I can’t hold him for another go. The pain is crumbling my knees, driving me to the floor. Have to get the pin in. Have to.
Todd pulls back for another leap and—
The pin slides home! He hits the metal door with a resounding slam, but it doesn’t move. I’ve got him.
And just like that, my legs crumple. I slide to the floor and lean my head against my knees as sirens scream and two cops kick through the kitchen door.
In horror movies, you always cut away after the bad guy dies. You don’t watch the blood-covered girl let the cops into the church. Which I did. You definitely don’t watch her vomit in the kitchen sink. Which I also did.
And you really don’t get to see the moment where she realizes nothing will ever be the same now. Her life will be forever divided into Before and After. Her monster may be gone, but in some ways, he’ll always live on.
Because she lived on and she will remember.
I’m never going to be free of this. I bend toward the grass, grip the ground until my fingers are buried.
Then I hear my name. I look up and see Griff running toward me. Griff, who saved my sister. Who saved me. He’s shouting my name and, I think, something more, but his words are floating away. My ears are ringing. At some point I must have smacked my head. But I do understand this: Griff came back for me.
I blink up at him. Lily and Bren are hot behind him. My sister’s hair is a streak of light as she runs toward me. And somehow, that’s what undoes me.
I pitch face-first into the grass, grabbing handfuls of dirt to anchor me until Lily kneels down. She’s got me by the shoulders now. Everyone’s screaming and grabbing at me, but Lily doesn’t let go. Somehow, we get to our feet, and I walk toward Bren with my sister holding me up.
What Happened After
Because what goes around really goes around.
—A quote from Wicket Tate’s blog, KarmaBitchSlap
Yeah, so I guess this is the part where I talk all about how I rode off into the sunset or whatever. Except there is no sunset and there’s no riding, unless you count trips on Griff’s motorcycle. I’m not going to bother changing any names to protect the innocent. They’d probably be mad if I did.
Lily’s started cheerleading. Yeah, exactly. You read that right. Cheerleading. I asked her if she was sick. She asked me if I was a bitch. We both about died laughing.
Then I watc
hed Lily do her dance routine, and I understood. She loves the music and the movement. I would never have guessed, and maybe I don’t really get it, but I’m glad. She’s trying things she would never have dared to try before.
I guess we all are.
My dad’s not coming back. Ever. The police caught him with so much evidence he ended up taking a plea deal—not that it’s going to do him much good. He’s still looking at almost fifty years behind bars. It makes me sound vindictive, but I’m glad. And relieved.
Todd confessed too. Turns out he had been carrying this craving for as long as he could remember, but it wasn’t until the past six or seven years that it became unbearable.
He used Bren to fix himself, marrying her because she was successful and couldn’t have kids. He thought it would be perfect . . . until Bren wanted children. They moved to a family community, became involved with the church. Suddenly he was surrounded by the very thing he wanted to avoid. He couldn’t get away. And then, slowly, he didn’t want to get away because there was Tessa.
God, poor Tessa. I don’t think he wanted her because she was beautiful, but because she was broken. It drew him, or at least that’s what Norcut says. She thinks that in that horrible moment when Tessa found the courage to say no, Todd found himself, his real self. He discovered he enjoyed inflicting pain, and the man he was afraid of becoming was exactly who he wanted to be.
I guess we’re all figuring out who we want to be. Bren’s dealing by divorcing him and expanding the business. Our adoption papers went through last month, and we’re thinking about moving. Turns out the local folks don’t really understand how you couldn’t know your husband was a psycho. They’ve been pretty ugly to her—well, everyone except for Mrs. Waye.
We ran into her at the lawyer’s office and instead of screaming, instead of melting down, she just touched Bren on the arm and told her how sorry she was, how bad she felt for Bren’s loss. I thought that sounded a little Dr. Phil, but she has a point. The girl Mrs. Waye loved is no longer here. The man Bren loved never existed.
I don’t know. Maybe Tally just asked Mrs. Waye to be nice. I guess I’ll never know, but it meant a lot to Bren, and for that, I’m grateful.
Everyone else in town is blaming her. They think Bren knew and turned a blind eye. But other people’s choices—your dad’s, your husband’s, your sister’s—don’t make you who you are. You make you. I know Bren still feels guilty, though. She thinks she should’ve known. Sometimes, late at night, I catch her still awake, still mining little details of their married life, looking for clues.
“It’s going to be okay,” she tells me. “It will be.”
Bren repeats it like she’s convincing me, but really she’s convincing herself. Usually this kind of panicked positivity makes me nervous, but she looks so lost, I stick around. We sit on the cold kitchen floor with her hand wrapped around mine and I tell her that of course it will be okay.
The lie is so smooth it might have some truth to it. So what else? Oh, turns out Mr. Waye kept coming by our house because he suspected Todd. The night I came down to confront him, he thought he saw Carson’s car approaching, panicked because he knew how nuts he’d look, and took off.
He said he suspected Todd because he had “fatherly premonitions.” I hate that description. It makes him sound like a good guy. But maybe he isn’t entirely bad, because when Waye heard what happened, he came up to the hospital to check on me. Forgiving him didn’t feel right and neither of us knew what to say, but he stayed.
So did Griff. He has to be the only person who can make me grin just by thinking about him, and I’m sure I have stupid cartoon hearts in my eyes every time I look in his direction. It’s nauseating . . . and awesome. I’m lucky. It’s like I got my very own happy ending.
Or I would, if Carson would let me go. The police chief gave him a promotion—like he did any of the work—and now he has his own team. Between his suspicions and what Todd must have told him, Carson knows I hack, and he says he’ll devote the rest of his life to proving it . . . unless I help him.
It’s been pretty easy stuff so far, but now the detective has a new target he wants me to investigate: a local judge. Carson knows the guy’s dirty, and I have my own reasons for agreeing with him, but I don’t want any part of it. The judge’s assistant was murdered. Stabbed to death. But before the killer dumped her body, he carved:
Remember me
About the Publisher
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Table of Contents
Disclaimer
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Second Half Title
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
What Happend Her
About the Publisher
Table of Contents
Disclaimer
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Second Half Title
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
> Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
What Happend Her
About the Publisher
Find Me Page 21