Follow Me

by Kathleen Barber

  “Audrey?”

  His voice was so calm, so normal that I almost believed it was an auditory hallucination. Slowly, I opened my eyes. Max was standing in the doorway, wearing his favorite Ted and the Honey T-shirt and an expression of concern.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, setting down a paper Whole Foods bag and holding out a hand to help me up from the floor.

  I scrambled to my feet without assistance and grabbed a thick towel, wrapping it protectively around my body. “Max? What are you doing here?”

  “Checking on you. I knew you were here alone, and you weren’t answering my calls. I was worried. I wanted to make sure you were okay.” His voice dropped as he looked at me closely. “Are you okay?”

  I ached to fling myself into his arms and let his gentle hands soothe my rattled nerves, but I took a step back instead. I still had some serious questions about those photographs, and, besides, I’d told him I needed time to think. He shouldn’t have just come barging into someone else’s home looking for me.

  Someone else’s locked home, I remembered with a start.

  “How did you get inside?”

  He tilted his head slightly. “The door was unlocked.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, it was. When you didn’t answer after I knocked, I got concerned. I tried the knob and it opened.”

  He was lying. I had locked that door. Or I thought I had locked that door. But if I had, how had he gotten inside?

  “I was right to worry, wasn’t I? You look scared.”

  Of course I’m scared! I wanted to scream. Someone has been stalking me and I’m afraid it’s you!

  “I heard someone in here,” I finally said.

  His eyes widened. “What? Here? Audrey, why are you still here?”

  “The police came and said no one was here. They said I was safe.” I cleared my throat and watched him carefully as I spoke. “But now I wonder if maybe they missed something. Maybe there’s another entrance. After all, you got in.”

  He blinked. “I told you, the front door was open. You don’t really think … Christ, Audrey. I know you’re still mad at me, but there’s no way you think I would break into Cat’s apartment to see you, right?”

  I couldn’t answer. I focused instead on the Whole Foods bag at his feet, one of Nick’s bad jokes from my first date with Max coming back to me: Watch out for bags of zip ties and collections of sharp instruments.

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “Oh,” he said, brightening. “I almost forgot. I brought you something.”

  With a flourish, he pulled out a bouquet of fat orange roses. My blood turned to ice and I stumbled backward.

  “Why did you bring me those?”

  “I thought you’d like them,” he said, looking hurt. “I made a mistake, and I know it. I want to make it up to you.”

  “No,” I said, voice trembling. “Why did you bring me those? Why did you bring me orange flowers?”

  “Because orange is your favorite color.”

  “But how do you know that? I never told you that.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “No,” I objected, although suddenly I wasn’t certain. We’d spent so many hours talking about so many things—it was possible I had mentioned my favorite color. But I couldn’t ignore the coincidence between these flowers and the orange bouquet tied to my gate. I’d found that months ago, long before I met Max … but around the time the strange photos on his computer must have been taken.

  “Baby, come on. This is ridiculous. Here, I’ll go put these flowers in water.”

  “You’re lying,” I blurted. “You’re lying about that, and you’re lying about those photos.”

  He froze, his face an unreadable mask. “What?”

  “I searched online for them. They’re not there, Max. I don’t think they ever were. And you know what? I’ve thought about it, and even if you had come across them on some random website, why would you download them? I could see one or two, maybe, as evidence or something, but all of them? There must have been thousands.”

  He swallowed audibly. “I love you.”

  “You took them, didn’t you? You took those photos.”

  It was no longer a question in my mind, but I was still surprised when he whispered, “Yes.”

  “Jesus,” I murmured, staggering. “I don’t understand. But how … ? Why?”

  “Because I love you,” he said, his voice plaintive and his eyes going liquid. “I’ve loved you for more than eight years, Audrey.”

  “Eight … ?” I choked out.

  “That was when I first laid eyes on you. I really did come across your photo on a dodgy site, but it was just a screengrab from your Facebook. When I saw it … Audrey, you hit me like a bolt of lightning and I just knew. I knew we were destined.”

  Destined? I gaped in horror at this man I thought I knew, this man who I was just now realizing was completely unhinged.

  “I’ve read everything you’ve ever posted,” he continued earnestly. “All your blog posts, Facebook statuses, tweets, Instagram posts and Stories. I’ve listened to all the playlists you’ve made on Spotify. I’ve watched every movie you’ve ever recommended, read every book. I know everything about you, and I love every bit of you. Every last, incomparable bit.”

  I shuddered and clutched the towel more tightly around my body. Naked desperation was shining in Max’s eyes, and I knew I needed to be anywhere other than alone in an empty house with him. I glanced toward the staircase, my only escape route. It was just five feet from me, but he was standing in front of it. I took a minuscule step toward it, hoping I might get past him if I moved slowly enough and kept him distracted.

  “What about those other orange flowers?” I asked. “The ones tied to my gate? Were you the one who left them for me?”

  He nodded proudly. “I knew you’d like them.”

  “They were beautiful,” I allowed. “But what about the others? The headless ones? Was that you, too?”

  “I needed to send a message,” he said, his expression darkening. “You were ignoring my requests for a second date, and then you had over that knuckle-dragging ex of yours. I know what you do with him. It’s disgusting.”

  My mouth dropped open in surprise. “How do you know about Nick?”

  “I told you, Audrey. I know everything about you.” At his side, one of his fists began clenching and unclenching. “I’ve done so much for you, so much that you don’t even know about, and then you just ran back to that meathead’s arms? That hurt. I had to show you how you were destroying something beautiful.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said weakly, inching toward the stairs. “I didn’t understand.”

  “I know,” he growled. “If you had understood, you wouldn’t have kept running back to him time and again.”

  “I didn’t,” I protested, shaking my head wildly as if this—this misunderstanding—would be the thing that cleared up this whole nightmare. “I swear. I wasn’t ever with Nick after we started dating.”

  “You’re lying,” he snarled, his fists tightening, knuckles going white. “Just like you lied then. You told me you had to work, but then you invited that pompous ass into your home. So I had to teach you a lesson. I had to show you, once and for all, that you shouldn’t leave me.”

  “Oh my God,” I murmured, suddenly understanding. “You trashed my apartment. But how … ?”

  “Your landlady is sweet,” he said, meeting my eyes defiantly. “And a little daft. All I had to do was tell her that I was your boyfriend and that you’d locked yourself out, and she gave me the key off her own ring.”

  “Jesus, Max, I trusted you. And it’s been you this whole time, hasn’t it? Following me around, creeping in the alley.”

  “I had to see you,” he said, voice softening. “You get that, don’t you? You’re everything to me, Audrey. My sun, my moon, every last one of my stars. I’m sorry if I scared you, but—”

  “If you scared me?” I said incredulously. �
�I’ve been terrified, and you knew it. You were scaring the shit out of me. For God’s sake, Max, you stood over my bed and watched me sleep.”

  “That wasn’t what you think,” he started.

  “And tonight?” I interrupted. “When I thought someone was here earlier? That was you, too, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I swear.”

  “How do you expect me to believe you? You’ve been stalking me, Max. I can’t trust you at all.”

  “You can. I promise you can. Just listen—” he started, reaching for me.

  I sidled out of his grasp, closer to the staircase. “Not another inch.”

  “Please, Audrey. Listen. I know you’ll understand. I’ve loved you from afar for so long. And then when you moved here, to my city, I knew it was fate. We were fated.”

  “That’s not fate.” I paused as a thought dawned on me. “What about Cat? Does she know about … all this?”

  “You being friends with Cat was just a happy coincidence.” He smiled slightly and took a step toward me. “See what I mean? Fate.”

  I looked behind him to the stairs. They were so close now—with just one large step I was certain I could be on them—but Max was standing within grabbing distance. There was no way I would ever make it past him and down those stairs without him stopping me.

  “Max—” I started.

  He reached for me suddenly, and I instinctively tried to dash past. My bare foot slipped at the top of the spiral staircase, and I grasped desperately for the railing. It was too late; my balance was too far off. Max’s face contorted, his mouth opening in a cry as he grabbed for me, and then everything went black.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  MAX

  All I had wanted was to see her. She had disappeared from my screen, and I just wanted, needed, to see that she was okay. I’d grabbed the flowers and headed to Cat’s apartment, the keys she’d given me jangling a happy tune in my pocket. Those flowers (orange, her favorite color, which I knew because two years ago she posted a photo of her open palm filled with orange Starbursts captioned as such) would get me through the door, I was sure of it. Then we would start talking, and then she would realize how awful I felt that she’d had to find those photos. I felt sick whenever I thought about how easy it would have been to store that folder anywhere other than on the desktop.

  But then she was looking at me as though I was a stranger and asking questions I didn’t like in an accusing voice, and it was clear she didn’t understand. I had done everything for her. I’d been a devoted follower for years, made her my religion. I’d decorated my apartment with art she would appreciate (I even sourced a print of her favorite Jackson Pollock after reading about it in a blog post titled “Let Me Tell You Why Jackson Pollock Is the Bomb,” posted May 21, 2014) and peppered my shelves with books she liked, from Gone Girl (WTF?! ♥, she had captioned an image of the book on September 3, 2012) to a dog-eared, secondhand copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Poems (finding the poem that had inspired her tattoo and flagging the page with a bookmark, so that she might stumble across it, then flip over her wrist to show me the very same lines indelibly marked on her body).

  I’d kept a detailed spreadsheet of all the music she posted about or added to public playlists, and then I used that as a guide while I painstakingly assembled a record collection from scratch. That first Ted and the Honey album had been hard to find (there hadn’t been many pressings, and with the band having hit mainstream success, people weren’t parting with theirs) but I did. Knowing how much she loved them, I even listened to their entire catalog despite the lead singer sounding like he had a mouth full of gravel and the whole thing being a bit too noise-rock for my liking. I knew which songs were her favorites, and I learned the lyrics, would be able to sing along if the situation demanded. I even threw out all the animal products in my kitchen in case she decided to open my cabinets. How could she not understand?

  Did she have any idea how much effort I had put into our first meeting? I’d originally planned to “meet” her at bar trivia, hoping I could catch her alone at the jukebox. How about something from Abbey Road? I’d planned to say. When she asked what my favorite song from the album was, I would say “I Want You” both because I knew it was her favorite (“Unpopular opinion: ‘I Want You’ is the best track on Abbey Road,” she had tweeted last April) and because the words were true. I imagined her catching the double meaning and the corners of her glistening, bitable lips curling up, and then the two of us discussing the finer points of Lennon’s songwriting and debating which Beatle had the most successful solo career, conversations that I had researched and prepared for. But then that idiot Connor had tried to swoop in on her and ruined the evening.

  Even so, fate had offered a silver lining: that night I saw Cat Harrell in person and realized Audrey’s best friend was the same Cathy from Camp Blackwood. Later, when I observed Audrey and Cat discussing the Rosalind preview through the RAT, I realized that would be a better venue for our first meeting. Audrey would be primed and in her element. All I needed was to get myself in the room and I could let Cat do the rest.

  I agonized over the perfect location for our first date, knowing I needed something that appealed to Audrey’s aesthetic interests but that also looked effortless. Audrey liked things that were lovely but easy, and I knew hitting that sweet spot was the key to charming her. That Kalorama Heights mansion ticked all the boxes, and it wasn’t hard to extract the lockbox code from Tag. Then there was everything I had done to make the setting perfect for her: the small fortune I’d spent on candles and foliage, the recipe I’d carefully selected based on her expressed desire to go to Thailand (and the travel blogs I’d read about Thailand so I could pretend I had been there), the way I had practiced making that damn dish three times a day for days until I knew I had it down. By the time the date arrived, I had never wanted to look at tofu curry again.

  Everything else—the picnic carefully selected to be as photogenic as possible, the Tabasco I sprinkled on popcorn after noticing her multiple tweets over the years about loving spicy food, the Negronis I’d learned how to mix after seeing a Story in which she raved about them, the donation I’d made to the Hirshhorn to gain access to the Rosalind preview, the anonymous comments and posts I’d made in a deliberate attempt to unsettle her so she would seek shelter in my arms, and so much more—had all been done because I loved her. Why couldn’t she see that? I had done everything for her, had bent myself completely into a knot in the service of pleasing her.

  But she didn’t understand that, and so I knew I needed more. I needed to touch her. I just needed to take her small, soft hands in mine and kiss her rosebud lips, and then everything would be okay again. She would feel the electricity crackling between us and understand we were destined. Our love was unbreakable; it could survive anything.

  But she kept evading me, and as I reached for her, certain that this would be the magical touch that reaffirmed our connection, suddenly she was slipping, falling head over heels down that spiral staircase, leaving a trail of water and blood behind her.

  For a moment, nothing seemed real. I stared down at her perfect body crumpled at the foot of the stairs, and I thought, She looks just like a beautiful, broken bird.

  And then I saw the pool of dark red blood forming around her head and spreading across Cat’s pristine floor. My stomach twisted at the sight. I clambered down the stairs so fast it was a miracle I didn’t fall myself, and pressed both hands against the wound on Audrey’s head. As her sticky blood seeped through my fingers, I was entranced and sickened by the sensation of having her life pulsing beneath my hands.

  “Audrey,” I said gently. “Are you okay?”

  Her eyelids didn’t even flutter.

  “Audrey,” I said again, more loudly, more desperately. “Audrey, please.”

  But she wasn’t waking up.

  My body began to cave in upon itself. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be. We were supposed to spend a
n eternity together; we were supposed to live happily ever after. We were fated.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CAT

  As I climbed the steps to my apartment, holding the extra key I’d left at Priya’s for emergencies, I desperately hoped that Audrey was elsewhere. I hoped she’d followed my advice and called Nick, or that Max’s ill-conceived plan to win her over through surprise flowers had worked. I couldn’t face her after my catastrophic failure in court that morning; I couldn’t handle her faux sympathy and her Oh Kitty-Cats, especially when she was the reason everything had fallen apart. If only she hadn’t distracted me with those texts.

  God help me, I thought as I twisted open the front door. Audrey, if you’re here, I might actually kill you.

  I stepped into my apartment and stopped short. I blinked, hoping that the gruesome scene before me was just a manifestation of my subconscious.

  “Oh my God,” I managed, dropping my suitcase and taking an involuntary step backward. For all the wishing Audrey away I had done that afternoon, I never wanted this.

  Max Metcalf was crouched at the base of my narrow spiral staircase, cradling Audrey’s lifeless, naked body in his blood-streaked arms. Dark red dotted both of them and was smeared on the floor beneath them.

  “What happened?”

  Max raised his head to look at me, and I shuddered. With a slash of blood on his cheek and almost feral eyes, he looked wild and dangerous.

  “She fell,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “She fell?” I repeated dubiously.

  He nodded, gazing down at Audrey and stroking her face, leaving a ruby smear along her pale cheek.

  “She’d just gotten out of the bath,” he said quietly. “Her feet were wet. She slipped. I tried to catch her, but it happened too fast. She hit her head and …”

  As he trailed off, my eyes traveled from Audrey’s wan face to the dark blood matting her hair. A memory flashed through my mind: another head wound, another beautiful girl’s hair streaked a sticky red. Spots swam in my vision. This couldn’t be happening. Not again.