The Girl in the Headlines

by Hannah Jayne

  Also by Hannah Jayne

  Truly, Madly, Deadly

  See Jane Run

  The Dare

  The Escape

  Twisted

  The Revenge

  Copycat

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2021 by Hannah Jayne

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Casey Moses

  Cover images © Westend61/Getty Images; Alice Donovan Rouse/Unsplash

  Internal design by Ashley Holstrom/Sourcebooks

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To Julie and Christina, for chocolate-chip pancakes (in better times) and lots of FaceTime and group chats. Thanks for keeping me sane (and on track).

  My name is Andrea McNulty. I play center forward on the girl’s field hockey team at Pioneer High School, where I’m a senior, and everyone calls me Andi. I turned eighteen yesterday. I have long, curly brown hair and brown eyes and a nine-year-old brother named Joshua, and I didn’t kill my parents.

  One

  Someone was screaming in my ear, one of those high-pitched shrieks that seems to claw across your forehead, leaving a long, low divot in your skull. I rolled over in an attempt to bury my head in one of my fluffy-soft pillows, but when I did, my whole body protested. Everything hurt. I felt wet, too, and weirdly sticky.

  My head pounded.

  My ears throbbed.

  My knuckles hurt like I had hung on to my stick for dear life, and it felt like I had taken a pair of cleats to the teeth, an opponent’s stick to every single extremity.

  I tried to remember the game, tried to remember the mammoth-sized opposing squad who had done such damage. And then I realized we were off-season.

  Despite the seizing pain, I sat bolt upright, winced, then felt my jaw drop open.

  My room is a baby shade of pink almost completely blotted out by team pictures, a Stanford pennant, and two posters of a bare-chested, soccer-ball-holding James Rodríguez that I keep telling my mother I’m taking down.

  But this wasn’t my room.

  I blinked, taking in the bland, beige-colored walls, the factory art in a frame bolted to the wall, the rumpled second bed.

  “Where am I?”

  I tried to think back to last night, attempted to press my palms to my aching forehead but stopped, staring. Trembling.

  Brick-red crumbles of blood had settled into the lines of my palms, had stained my fingerprints, knuckles, the beds of my nails. There was blood on my wrists, my forearms. I kicked out of the blankets to find that I was wearing only a T-shirt and my panties; my legs were bare but clean.

  I ran to the bathroom and gaped at myself in the mirror: smeared eyeliner and mascara. Ponytail skewed and matted like a rat’s nest. A spray of bloodred specks across my nose and cheeks and half-bare chest.

  “Oh my God.” The tears came suddenly, burning paths down my cheeks, making pink-tinged rivulets. I looked at my hands, threw off my T-shirt, and examined my body, looking for the cuts, the gaping wounds.

  There was nothing.

  “Is—is this a motel? Am I in a motel?”

  The screech came again.

  The television. It was coming from the television, one of those ear-piercing lead-ins to a news flash or special message. I ignored it, slipping my shirt back on, checking the bathroom and the bureau for any information as to how I had gotten here, what the hell had happened to me.

  And then I heard my name.

  It was coming from the carefully coiffed anchorwoman who wore an unnatural scowl as she spat out my name, like it left a bad taste in her mouth. And there, running across the bottom of the screen, were the words that turned my stomach to liquid.

  EDGAR AND ELIZABETH MCNULTY, 49 AND 47, ATTACKED AND MURDERED IN THEIR HOME…9-YEAR-OLD SON JOSHUA MCNULTY MISSING/ENDANGERED PERSON…POLICE ARE NOT CONFIRMING 18-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER ANDREA MCNULTY A SUSPECT, CALL HER “PERSON OF INTEREST”…

  Two

  If my blood was pumping, it would have gone cold in my veins, but everything around me stopped. The television shrank to a pinhole, was nearly blocked out as my vision went black. The breath locked in my chest. I tried to listen to what the anchorwoman was saying, could see her pert, pink-lined lips moving, but all that registered in my ears was a loud, whining beep. Finally, I shook myself and got my arm to move, to turn the volume up.

  “Police were alerted to the house on Poplar Circle early this morning when a neighbor noticed that both the garage door an
d front door of the McNulty house were slightly ajar. After calling the family and then knocking on the front door and receiving no answer, neighbor Janet Coursh called police. Officers responded immediately to the house and, upon entering the dwelling, found a grisly scene.”

  The camera cut to a man in a polo shirt that strained against his barrel chest. I could tell from the edges of the birch trees in the shot that he was in front of our house. I stifled a sob.

  The runner tape underneath the man said that his name was Lieutenant Detective Gabe Littleton. He cleared his throat.

  “We are very concerned about the whereabouts of nine-year-old Joshua McNulty. We have reason to believe that there was a struggle with the child and he was taken off premises. At this time, we are actively searching and hope to recover the child alive and unharmed.”

  My stomach lurched, bile itching at the back of my throat. I gagged, doubling over and dry heaving, snot and tears burning down my face.

  “Joshy.” My little brother. Struggled. Taken off the premises… They hope—hope?—to find him alive and unharmed.

  I couldn’t breathe. I scratched at my throat, clawing, as though I could shred my way to breath. My heart slammed against my bruised rib cage, and I was sobbing, huge hiccuping cries. Joshy, my parents? What the hell happened?

  “Josh?” My voice was a croak, a raspy whisper. “Josh?”

  We were attacked. All of us? Maybe I—I pressed my fingertips to my forehead, felt around my skull for the lump or gash that would tell me that they had knocked me out too.

  But maybe I woke up.

  Maybe I woke up and got Josh, and we crawled away from the “grisly scene.” Maybe we escaped, and that was why we were saved, and he had to be here somewhere. I checked the dinky motel bathroom and the closet and lay on my belly and checked under the bed. Josh had to be here.

  I threw open the door and cupped my hands. “Josh?”

  His name echoed back to me, bouncing off the cracked concrete. Nothing changed. Nobody called back.

  “We are also seeking the whereabouts of Andrea McNulty, the eighteen-year-old daughter.”

  I turned back to the television. A disembodied voice asked, “Are you concerned that Andrea was taken along with Joshua?”

  The lieutenant snapped his head back and forth. “There is nothing to indicate that. At this point, we’re not entirely sure that Andrea was at home last night or at the time of the attack.”

  I tried to remember last night. I had slept at home last night, hadn’t I?

  It was my birthday.

  Was there a cake?

  A party?

  Hadn’t I read Joshy a story and gone to bed?

  I looked around the motel room, at the bed I had crawled out of.

  Hadn’t I?

  I pressed my fists against my temples, trying to force memory into my brain, past the thudding ache. There were flashes like fireflies in the mess of darkness. “Okay, okay, yesterday,” I murmured. “Yesterday.”

  I remembered waking up. I was in my bed, and it was shaking, like a herd of—it was Josh. I smiled. Josh was jumping on my bed, singing the nine-year-old-boy version of “Happy Birthday,” the version that included an impressively long verse about how I smelled like a monkey or his butt. I grabbed one of his feet, and he came down hard on me, all angles and elbows, and I snapped at him because it was 6:50, and I was trying to sleep.

  And then what?

  Breakfast. Pancakes. Birthday cake pancakes with sprinkles and a candle in the middle and Mom and Dad sitting around a table with Joshy to my left in his usual spot. Was that this year or the year before?

  Every year, there were birthday cake pancakes with a mass of sprinkles and a single candle, because my mom was that kind of mom and my dad was the kind of dad who sang “Happy Birthday” annoyingly loud and horrendously off-key, adding in the “chachacha” between every verse because he thought it was cool.

  But yesterday…

  I sat up straight. It happened. It happened because the pancakes were a little raw in the middle, and my mom apologized and said that tonight would be the real treat.

  That’s right!

  Then there was school—a huge bunch of balloons from Lynelle, Cal handing me a single red rose that I tossed in the trash. We hadn’t spoken since prom, and I hadn’t told Lynelle why, and she was mad at me.

  I remembered changing for field hockey, the girls all singing to me on the field.

  Static shot across my skull, thick and electrical, and I winced.

  And then what?

  I tried to remember practice, tried to remember the feel of the stick in my hand, but it blurred into a thousand other practices, a thousand other days where we screamed at one another over the shower walls and were the last students to leave school.

  No.

  My eyes widened, my heartbeat speeding up. I left practice early. I didn’t shower there; I went home.

  My mother’s voice, light and happy: Tonight will be the real treat!

  I sucked in a breath, watching myself in my mind’s eye. I drove home. I sang along to the radio. I parked in the driveway. I put my key in the lock.

  And then I couldn’t remember anything else.

  I started to shake, a small tremor that started at the base of my spine and made my teeth chatter. And then, from the TV, that voice again. “Can you confirm that Andrea McNulty is a suspect in this attack?”

  Littleton had an unflinching poker face. “Are there any other questions?”

  I felt like I could breathe. Littleton must not believe I was a suspect.

  Another disembodied voice. “Is it true that Mrs. McNulty is actually in critical condition? That she’s comatose?”

  Littleton’s eyes narrowed as the breath caught in my chest. I leaned forward, staring, praying, waiting.

  “If there are no other questions, we’re done. Thank you.”

  I felt like I’d been stabbed. My mom could be alive? Mom could be…alive.

  I wanted to cry, to scream, to pick up the phone and tell the cops where I was. I wanted to find Joshy and tell him everything was going to be okay—but nothing was okay.

  This didn’t happen to people like us. People who lived in nice houses with hardwood floors and who ate Cheerios every morning and who drove a decent car and went to church on Sunday and Pizza Jakes on Fridays. We were normal. Plain. The American stereotype: two parents, two kids, a minivan. We had a picket fence, for God’s sake!

  Something dark oozed into me.

  But maybe we weren’t.

  Three

  I yanked the blankets off the bed, looking for my purse, my phone, anything that would give me some kind of clue as to what happened—how I got here.

  I found my jeans in a heap half-shoved under the bed, and when I wrapped my hands around the fabric, the dampness burned at the palm of my hand. “Oh God.” I pulled it away as if stung, and my palm bore a faint red stain.

  There was blood on the hem of my jeans. Spattered up toward the left knee.

  Gingerly, I rifled through my pockets. My cell phone went skittering across the floor, its face shattered but still working, the battery flashing an eighth of an inch of solid red: almost dead.

  I scrolled through my call log, through my photos and text messages. There was something—a message from Josh, something from my father—but the phone gave an agonizing series of beeps until it died in my hand.

  “Shit.”

  I would call the police. I would call the police and tell them where I was and that I didn’t know what happened—

  “While the police won’t say outright that daughter Andrea is a suspect, it’s only a matter of time. Calling her a ‘person of interest’ is just, in a sense, covering them legally.”

  My head snapped back toward the TV where a man in a suit was in a split screen with the anchorwo
man. I squinted at the television and read the headline underneath him: STANFORD UNIVERSITY CRIMINOLOGY PROFESSOR ANTHONY THOMAS.

  My heart slammed against my rib cage. Stanford. My dream school. The reason I took SAT prep courses starting as a freshman in high school.

  And now a professor there was commenting on me?

  “The police did acknowledge that the McNultys’ Lexus SUV is currently missing, presumed taken by the suspect or suspects involved in the murder.”

  I shook my head. I had my own car. A used Honda Civic that I paid for out of my babysitting and mall job money. My parents paid the insurance. I never drove the—

  A key chain slid out of the back pocket of my jeans.

  The Lexus emblem caught the light.

  I slumped against the bed, the whole ugly motel room spinning in front of me. This was a dream. This had to be a dream. There was no other explanation. I thought of doing something stupid like pinching myself, hoping against hope that I would be snapped back to my cozy bed, but I was paralyzed. My blood turned to hot lead in my body.

  My brother, Josh, was still out there. He was still out there, and I had to find him. A new round of sobs stuck in my chest.

  How can I find Josh when I don’t even know where I am?

  The chain lock was hanging open on the motel door, but the bolt was latched. I opened the door and poked my head outside, certain I would see some weird dystopian world, that I had been hit on the head and delivered to another dimension, but outside was this world, albeit a sad one: cracked motel parking lot bookended by a drugstore and a boarded-up cafe. Two cars that looked like they needed one-way tickets to the dump. A dry pool surrounded by a dented cyclone fence. My mother’s shiny SUV, parked directly in front of the door to my room. I pulled my shirt down over my thighs and paused on the threshold of room 6. I waited for someone to spot me, for a herd of police to come in with guns blazing, but no one did. The traffic kept humming past on the interstate; the breeze kept lifting the half-dead weeds sprouting through cracks in the concrete. A waft of heat kicked up from the blacktop, and I picked my way to the car, clicking open the front door and peering into the driver’s seat. There was blood on the floor mat, stained into the seat.