The Dead Girls Club (ARC)

by Damien Walters

  My steps grow slower as I approach the French doors, not wanting to see what’s painfully obvious: the thumb-turn lock is in the disengaged position. I jam it to the right, tugging on the handles to make sure it’s secure. Now I know how she got inside, but I wish it made me feel better.

  I rub my upper arms and do a quick check downstairs. I do the same on the second floor, but I’m alone. I’m safe. But something tugs at the back of my mind. It doesn’t make sense. Lauren played her fearful act at the hotel yesterday, didn’t show up for our meeting last night, then broke into our house today to move things around? It doesn’t feel right. Am I missing something painfully obvious? Have I somehow fallen into a trap I can’t see?

  Back in bed, I pull the covers to my chin, but sleep refuses to claim me for its own. When Ryan comes in, I know he knows I’m still awake, but he pretends I’m not. We both do.

  * * *

  It’s easy enough to act like everything’s normal while we’re getting ready for the day. Or maybe it’s because we’re moving in different direction and rarely cross paths. At least not until we bump into each other in the kitchen, both with designs on the coffeemaker.

  As I’m pouring milk into my travel mug, I say, “Did you leave the French doors unlocked yesterday?”

  “No, I wasn’t out back. Why?”

  “They were unlocked when I got home. I probably did it, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “Do you want me to go check?”

  “No, I locked them.” But he’s already out of the kitchen. A few seconds later, there’s the distinctive rattle.

  “Locked tight,” he says when he comes back in.

  “Okay,” I say.

  I feel his gaze on my back, sense the weight of an incipient conversation, but as soon as I’m done making my coffee, I toss a quick “Have a good day” over my shoulder. There’s a pause before he says the same in return. But everything will be okay eventually. I know it will. I just have to get through all this first.

  When I get into the office, I’ve an email from Rachel waiting. I steel myself—for what I don’t know—as I open it, but it’s from her assistant, asking if I’ve had a chance to compile the requested information yet. It takes me a second to realize what she’s talking about. Financial documents pertaining to my supposed divorce. I should write that I’ve changed my mind, but I close the email without responding.

  Nothing from Lauren.

  Still nothing after my first patient leaves. The same after my second. Every time I close my eyes, I envision her sneaking through my house, moving my things. I have a little over an hour before my next patient session. It’s time enough. Clutching my car keys, I tell Ellie I’ll be back shortly and get on the highway, driving toward Lauren’s. It’s probably not the wisest move and she probably isn’t even home, but I need to know why she didn’t show for the meeting. Why she came to my house. And if all this is a trap of sorts, she won’t expect this. At least I hope not.

  The drive’s an easy one, but when I draw near her street, a group of people are huddled on the corner. A red news van is parked at the far end. A few feet away, a reporter is speaking into the microphone, gesturing toward the building. What the hell’s going on?

  I find a parking spot one street over and casually walk toward the group. The air is mild today, but I wish I’d remembered my jacket. In front of Lauren’s building, bright-orange cones are blocking off a section of the road, and inside the rectangle are a sedan, police cruiser, and white van. A woman in a button-down, shiny badge clipped to her waist, disappears into the building.

  Most of the people around me are gray-haired and sun-spotted, wearing elastic-waist pants and floral prints under windbreakers, but there are two younger women with babies in strollers. There’s a current of dark energy here, that hope of catching sight of something illicit, along with the smell of menthol and artificial roses. I maneuver around until I’m next to a sharp-eyed woman in a yellow cardigan.

  “What happened?” I say.

  “A woman got killed.”

  “Killed?”

  Not looking at me, the woman says, “Yes.”

  Another woman, her hair a frizzy halo, says, “They found her last night.” She glances at me, frowning slightly at my creased slacks, my fitted jacket. “They had the whole street blocked off. You couldn’t even stand here.”

  The two younger women are whispering to each other, their heads close. I carefully step toward them.

  “You know who it was, right?” one says. “What the news said? If they’re right, then she deserved it.”

  “Yup.”

  Is it possible?

  When I step a little closer, they both gift me with withering gazes. Flushed with warmth, I move back near the woman in the cardigan and say, “Do you know who—”

  My phone rings, and everyone in the groups shoots a glare. I say, “I’m sorry,” and mute the call. Ellie can wait. The officer with the badge at her waist emerges from the building, glances around, then heads toward us. Shit. I can’t be seen here.

  Phone to my ear, pretending to be engrossed in a conversation, it takes all I have not to run. With every step away, the fear of hearing a command to stop increases, and I don’t allow myself to breathe normally until I’m back in my car. I want to check my browser, but what if even now the women are telling the cop that I was asking questions?

  I’m careful to obey the speed limit as I navigate out of the neighborhood, but once I’ve left it well in my rearview mirror, I pull into a gas station. Open a browser on my phone. “Come on, come on, come on,” I say as it slowly loads.

  On the main page of the Baltimore newspaper: CONVICTED KILLER NOW A VICTIM, with the beginning of the first paragraph below: LAUREN THOMAS, WHO WAS RELEASED EARLIER THIS YEAR AFTER SERVING NEARLY THIRTY YEARS FOR THE MURDER OF HER DAUGHTER …

  I click the link and skim the rest, each detail a sharp little shock. Found by a neighbor in her apartment on Wednesday morning. Killed Tuesday night. Blunt-force trauma. No suspects. Police still gathering evidence. Asking anyone with information to call the tip line.

  I sit back, hands clasped together on my steering wheel. Dead. That’s why she never showed up for our meeting. Someone was bludgeoning her to death.

  I bite back a sound. Will Mikayla tell the police I was there? I tap my fingers. Remember the flash of fear. No, I don’t think she will. Even if she does, I didn’t give her my real name. And I didn’t see anyone else. No one in the group of rubberneckers today will think of me as a threat. An outsider, yes, but a threat?

  A tiny thread of hope winds its way through me. With Lauren dead, am I safe? Is it over? I scroll to the photos of her address and the hotel information in my phone. Hit delete. Check the gallery to make sure they’re gone.

  But what about fingerprints? If I left any in the hallway and they find them, what will I say? I went to see Lauren and she wasn’t home? It’s the truth, but then they’ll want to know why.

  Wait, wait, wait.

  I don’t move. Don’t blink. Don’t make a sound.

  If Lauren was killed Tuesday night, it means she wasn’t in my house yesterday. No. That can’t be right. Maybe it was a misprint. Or the police are wrong about the time of death. Lauren could’ve come to my house in the morning, and then someone killed her after she got home.

  I’m still sitting there when an email arrives. From Lauren Thomas.

  Fingers like ice, I click it open. The message reads WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY DAUGHTER?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THEN

  I stood on Becca’s porch, arms at my sides after knocking. She might not even answer. Might not even be home. But the door creaked opened a few inches and she peeked out. Her hair was grease-slicked to her scalp and her clothes hung loose on her frame, like her bones were a cheap hanger twisted out of shape. Her gaze flitted from right to left behind me, then settled on mine. Her pale eyes appeared almost colorless.

  “Becca?”

  “Duh,” she said, moving asid
e so I could come in. “Who else would I be?”

  As I passed by, I smelled her, sour and biting, but I kept from wrinkling my nose. “Are you okay?”

  “Come on up,” she said, not waiting for me to respond before she took to the stairs. “She’s not home.”

  She was barefoot, the soles of her feet grubby. The curtains and blinds in her room were closed, and the overhead light was off.

  “Sorry,” she said, flipping the switch.

  In the bright, she looked even worse. Her skin was pasty-white, her lips cracked, and sleep grit was collected in the corners of her eyes.

  “She said you’d come,” she said.

  Even her voice sounded wrong. Raspy, yet barely there. Unused.

  Before she’d had a few drawings on her walls. Now they covered almost every space from floor to ceiling in a chaotic, overlapping wallpaper. All the Red Lady. And more were on top of her bed and her desk, piled haphazardly.

  “What’s all this?” I said.

  “Just drawings.”

  “Becca, this isn’t just drawings. It’s, it’s—”

  “I know you’re still mad at me. I know you’re only here because she told you to be. I didn’t think you’d come, I really didn’t, but she was right. She’s always right.”

  Sweeping one foot back and forth, I fought the urge to run back downstairs and out the door. I tried to ignore the drawings, but from every direction, black eyes bored through me, arms outstretched and ready to grab.

  “That’s not true,” I said, but my words didn’t sound convincing, even to my own ears. I picked at a cuticle. “I heard about Rachel and Gia.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They were never important.”

  I rubbed the back of my ankle with the toe of a sneaker. “What do you mean?”

  “They were only my friends because of you.” She paced from one side of the room to the other, her movements strange and jerky, a puppet on invisible strings. “I never took mine off,” she said, lifting the half-heart. “See? I don’t blame you, though.”

  Cheeks burning, my fingers inched along my bare neck. She kept moving, patting things along the way with her fingers. Desk, headboard, nightstand, dresser, and the same in reverse.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “You have to swear not to tell. Do you?”

  “I don’t—”

  “No! You have to swear. Swear on your mom and dad’s lives. Your life, too.” She didn’t stop moving, and her words mushed together. “You can’t ever, ever tell. You promise. You swear you’ll never tell. I’ll know if you do.”

  “But I don’t—”

  She stopped. “Not ever,” she said.

  “I swear I won’t tell.”

  But in the back of my mind, I was trying to figure out how I’d tell my mom what was wrong when I didn’t even know. Becca seemed like an alien or a pod person, not like Becca at all.

  “Good,” she said, raking her hair back. She turned and lifted her shirt. Bruises ran left and right and up and down, underscored with several thin scratches in varying states of healing. She pushed up her sleeve, revealing bruises on her upper arm, too, in the shape of fingers.

  I gasped. I didn’t want to look at the marks, the bruises, but I couldn’t look away either.

  “Lauren did it,” she said. “She’s worse than ever now. As soon as she comes home, she starts drinking. Then she gets mad and tells me everything’s my fault. It’s not so bad on the weekends because she drinks until she passes out, but during the week she’s angry all the time and I don’t even know if she knows she’s hurting me. But she is, Heather. She hurts me a lot here”—she held out her arm—“and here.” She pointed to her chest. “And there are other things, too, but I can’t tell you—”

  I blinked a bunch of times. Her mom did that to her? But moms weren’t supposed to hurt you like that. It was wrong. “We have to do something,” I said. “We have to tell my mom.”

  “No! You swore you wouldn’t.” She came right up to me and pressed two fingers gently against my lips, her breath like spoiled milk and rancid meat. “If you do, I’ll hate you forever and never talk to you again.” She paced back across the room, elbows cupped in her palms. “But she’s going to help me. The Red Lady’s going to make things right. And I need your help, too.

  “Rachel and Gia were lying. They didn’t see her or hear her. I know they didn’t. They just pretended to, but I know you really did. She said so. Once we do what we have to, everything will be okay. She promised.”

  Her eyes were wild, darting like lightning bugs. Her mom hadn’t just hurt her body, but her head, too. She must have, to make Becca say things like that. To make her think a made-up story would help her. We had to tell my mom. I had to tell her, no matter what Becca said. But part of me wanted to run away right now, because I was scared. Her bruises scared me. She was scaring me, too.

  “Please, stop,” I said. “Please just stop.”

  “No, this is way too important. She’s too important.”

  “She’s just a story.” Even if Becca couldn’t see that, I could. But my mom was real and she could fix it.

  Becca spun on her heel and stalked toward me. She got so close I could feel heat coming off her body. “Don’t you say that! You know she isn’t. You know she’s real. Know how I know?”

  I held out my hands, not wanting her to get any closer. “I don’t want to talk about her anymore. Please, please, let’s talk about something else, anything else.”

  “No!” she yelled, her heat burning me up. “We have to talk about her. There’s a lot we have to talk about.”

  I backed toward the door, away from her eyes, her fire. I felt shaky and sick.

  “She knows you felt her. She told me you did.”

  “I didn’t. You have to stop all of this. We can talk to my mom. We can figure out a way—”

  “And if you don’t help me, if you don’t do what she wants, she won’t leave you alone. She won’t ever leave you alone.” She grabbed my wrist, and I cried out. “Do you understand?” she said. “You have to help me.

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you about her. I didn’t tell any of you. Before they put her in the hole, a woman who was her friend, who was afraid to speak up because she knew they’d kill her too, gave her a hug. But she didn’t just give her a hug. She stabbed her in the side, so she would die fast instead of being buried alive, instead of suffocating under all the dirt. But you already know that, don’t you? She said she showed you that, too. She had to, to make you understand.”

  I shook my head, hard, and yanked my arm free. I touched my side, remembering the sharp pain I’d felt when I woke up in the kitchen. When I crouched by the basement window.

  “You’re lying. I can tell. I’ve known she was real since the first time she came to me. Everything else was to prove it to you, Heather. To prove to you she’s real.”

  “She’s a story,” I said, the words small and powerless. “And stories aren’t real. They’re not.”

  “But she is real, whether you want her to be or not,” she said, her cheeks red and spotty. “She’s more real than almost anything.” She caressed one of the pictures, stroking the Red Lady’s face, her own soft, the way a mom looks when she’s holding a newborn baby.

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” I shouted.

  I stomped over, pushed past her, and ripped down the picture. “She isn’t real!” I tore another free, and another, and another. Becca stood to the side, watching. When I had one wall half bare and a pile of torn paper on the floor, my legs went rubbery. I sank down on top of the shreds.

  She knelt beside me. “The pictures aren’t that important. I can draw more.”

  I burst into tears. I didn’t want her to be this way, and I didn’t know what to say or do. She put her arms around me, like she was a mom and me a kid, and I kept crying. After I stopped, she brought me a wad of toilet paper for my face and nose. Maybe if I did what she wanted, everything would be okay. She’d understand that
the Red Lady couldn’t help her. Then we could talk to my mom.

  “What do you want me to do?” I said, my voice still thick.

  “Nothing yet. It isn’t the right time, but soon.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I wanted to go home. Hide underneath the covers and pretend I hadn’t come here, hadn’t seen Becca this way.

  “I know. I’ll tell you everything, but not now. And you can’t help me here. It has to be at the house.”

  I shook my head. “No, uh-uh. I’m not going back there.”

  “We have to,” she said. “That’s where we have to finish it.”

  “Finish what? You’re not making any sense.”

  “The ritual.”

  I groaned. “But we did it already. I don’t want—”

  “This is a different one. One that’ll fix everything. You have to trust me, okay?”

  Next to me, the Red Lady stared up from a torn scrap of paper.

  “Fine,” I said. “But after this, we’re done with her, okay? You have to promise me. When this is over, no more drawings or telling stories about her. We go back to the way things were.”

  “We can’t ever go back.”

  But when I opened my mouth, she held up one finger. “No more drawings or stories, okay. You should go home now. I have some stuff to do, and if Lauren comes home early, I don’t want her to see you. She’ll get mad. Meet me at the house Friday night after your parents go to bed.”

  She practically pushed me down the stairs. I stood on her porch with my arms crossed, thinking maybe she’d open the door, telling me it was all a joke and I fell for it. I waited, but the door stayed shut. I should tell my mom, but Becca was my best friend. I wanted everything to be okay. I wanted her to be okay. I’d do anything to make that happen. I’d do almost anything at all.

  That night I changed into my pajamas early. My mom was in the bathroom, taking off her makeup, and I stood in the doorway, wiggling a little.

  “I have to pee,” I said.

  “Come on in. You won’t bother me.”

  When I finished, she moved aside so I could wash my hands.

  “You okay?” she asked. “You’ve been awfully quiet tonight.”