by Kelly Oram
“That’s not true. I do that because those are just the things I like to do. I like to go shopping. I like to do hair. I thought it would be fun to clean you up. You’re pretty, Ellie. You don’t think you are, but you are. Excuse me for wanting my baby sister to understand that being a girl isn’t a bad thing. There’s more to life than just playing hockey with the J’s, and you know I’m right. I know you’ve had some fun this summer. I know you’ve liked hanging out with me, too.”
“If you like me so much, then why are you trying to ruin my life? You’re perfect—pretty, smart, popular. Guys fall at your feet and worship you. Like, every guy. Even Dave. Even the J’s drool over you.”
“Dave likes me?”
Oh, geez! “Why do you have to take away the one guy who’s ever liked me? The one guy in the world that doesn’t call me by my last name, or tug my ponytail, or who wouldn’t laugh if I wanted to put on a dress? Does it really bother you that much that Seth didn’t pick you? Is that why you hate him so much?”
“Oh, shut up. You know that isn’t true. As soon as I realized he liked you, I was the one who tried to hook you up, remember? You know exactly why I don’t want him near you.”
I let go a semi-crazed laugh. “Angela, you can’t really believe Seth is a serial killer! It’s crazy! You know it’s crazy. You said so yourself when I first mentioned it.”
“Ellie, Travis is in the hospital.”
That stopped me short. “What?”
“That’s what I came to tell you. Dave called. Travis was attacked last night. It was a carjacking.”
“A car…” I was in so much shock, I couldn’t even finish my sentence.
Angela nodded. “He was going home from some party downtown last night and his car was stolen. Ellie, he was stabbed.”
“Just like Seth.”
“Exactly like Seth. And he was beat up so bad that he’s still unconscious. Dave says everybody thinks Seth did it.”
“What?” I gasped.
“Ellie, you were there at the park. You heard what he said.”
“H-he-he—” I stammered. “He wouldn’t.”
“So this is what? Another coincidence? That the same thing that happened to Seth would happen to Travis just a couple days after Seth threatened to kill him? I know you don’t want to believe it. I know you don’t think he would hurt you but—”
“He wouldn’t hurt me,” I said fiercely. That much I knew.
Angela sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt you. But would he hurt someone else if he thought he was protecting you?”
Yes. He’s told me so several times.
Angela could read the answer on my face, but she didn’t rub it in. “Is it such a stretch to think that if Seth could do that to Travis, that he could do it to someone else? Ellie, those girls…”
“He didn’t do that!”
“How do you know?”
“Because I just know! He may have attacked Travis, but if he did, it was only because Travis hurt me. He was just protecting me.”
“Should it make a difference? Travis is in the hospital.”
All of the fight, all of my anger, my defiance, all of it left me, and I slumped into my chair as far as I could go. How could he do it? How could he hurt someone like that? Because he cares about me.
“I care about you, Ellie.”
I looked up at my sister in shock. Not because I’d somehow said my thoughts out loud again, but because of what she’d said in response.
Angela’s eyes welled up again and she reached for another tissue. “You’re right,” she whispered. “Maybe I have been a little embarrassed of you. We’ve both been pretty nasty to each other over the years. I know you think I’m awful, and I can’t blame you for hating me, but I don’t hate you. I’ve liked getting to know you a little this summer. I’ve liked having a sister I can talk to and hang out with. I’m really sorry about getting you arrested, and more sorry about your first kiss. But you have to trust me. I’m not trying to break you up with Seth because I’m jealous. I’m scared, Ellie.” She shrugged awkwardly and blew her nose. “I sort of just found you. I don’t want to lose you.”
My eyes burned and my chest felt like it was caving in on itself. I was so shocked, and more overwhelmed than I think I’d ever been in my life. “I’m sorry, too,” I managed to choke out. “I’ve spent my whole life having to hear everyone say over and over how perfect you are. Even our own mom. I’ve always hated you for that. I guess you’re not the one who’s been jealous.”
“You shouldn’t be jealous of me. Guys like me because I’m pretty, but they like you because you’re cool.”
When I looked up at Angela, she shook her head. “I never noticed it until that night at Rachel’s lake house. I always just thought you were a geek who only hung out with the J’s, but you had just as many friends at that party as I did, and the people that didn’t know you spent the night asking me about you.”
“I think that was just your bikini.”
Angela laughed at that, but shook her head again. “You’re fun, and tough, and confident. It took me a whole thirty seconds to convince Dave that you’d be an awesome girlfriend. So you guys didn’t have it. But now that he’s put the idea into people’s heads that you’re a dating possibility, they’re probably all calling dibbs over who gets to take a shot next. Trust me, they can’t all be like Dave. Somebody’s bound to make you swoon.”
Angela started to laugh, until she saw the look on my face. Somebody already had made me swoon. It just turned out that he was a jealous, overprotective, emotionally disturbed psycho. “Ang,” I whispered. “What am I gonna do?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “But don’t worry. We’ll figure something out.”
And that’s when the unthinkable happened. Something that I don’t think has ever happened in the history of man except through excessive force. Angela and I hugged each other. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” I said with a squeeze.
She hugged me back just as tight and said, “No, I’m sorry. I should have trusted you when you told me he was weird in the first place. It’s my fault you fell for him.”
Of course that had to be the moment when my dad decided to check on us.
“All right, girls. How come I don’t hear…?” His voice trailed off and I looked over just in time to see the gum fall out of his mouth. “Karen!” he shouted, gaping at us. “Karen, hurry!”
My mom probably thought I’d killed Angela the way she came running. When she burst into the office and saw my sister and me with our arms around each other—and not because we were choking one another—her knees just about gave out. “Who are they and what have they done with our children?”
“I don’t know, but I think Hell must have frozen over.”
“Are you sure it’s real?”
“Did you put something in their dinner tonight?”
Dorks.
“Dorks.”
I was startled when my thought echoed me. This whole saying my thoughts out loud thing was starting to get out of hand. But it turned out that Angela and I just think alike. It was her who’d called them dorks.
My parents finally started laughing at themselves and congratulating each other on their excellent parenting skills, earning eye rolls and groans from both Angela and me. “Can we come out now?” Angela asked.
“I don’t know,” my mom said. “I’m thinking we should leave you in there forever.”
With another groan Angela looped her arm through mine and tugged me past them. “We’ll be in Ellie’s room.”
For the second Sunday in a row Michigan’s parks were free of any dead redheads, and it’s because Seth spent the night in jail. At least, that’s what Angela told me when she woke me up bright and early at eight that morning.
Last night, after we’d escaped our parents, we were up in my room trying to decide whether we should tell them about Seth attacking Travis, when two cop cars showed up at Seth’s house. We watched fr
om my window as the cops took Seth away in handcuffs. His Aunt hugged him tightly before they put him in the back of the car. When the cops drove away, Ms. Wainwright followed in the Beemer. The car had not come back yet.
“But he told me yesterday that murderers would never go after people they know. Travis, he knows. And has reason to hate. If Seth were a killer, he wouldn’t be that stupid. He may have attacked Travis, but he isn’t the Slasher.”
“Who else could it be?” Angela said. “Last weekend Seth spent the night here with you and there was no murder. Last night he was taken to jail and once again, there was no murder.”
I had to admit, it looked bad.
“Ellie, we have to tell mom and dad. We have to call that detective.”
“No!” My heart was racing. Watching Seth get carted off last night was awful. I sat all night in my window, waiting for his aunt to bring him home. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being in jail. I knew he could take care of himself against the other criminals, but there was a part of him that was so vulnerable.
I just wanted him home where I knew he was safe. I needed to tell him I was sorry for getting mad yesterday and let him know I appreciated that he wanted to protect me, even if he did take it too far.
“He was only protecting me,” I said, frustrated. “That’s the only reason he went after Travis. I’m not going to blame him for the Saturday Night murders unless we have proof. Actual physical proof.”
I glanced at the house across the street, sitting there so empty and tempting, and sighed. “I have to know for sure.”
Angela watched me slip on my shoes. She followed me all the way across the street before asking, “What are you doing?”
“What are we doing?” I corrected her. “It’s a little thing called breaking and entering.”
“What? We can’t!”
“Why? It’s not like Seth’s never broken into my room. I have to at least try to figure it out. If he has any kind of proof over there, then I’ll accept that my boyfriend is a psycho killer and we’ll call that detective. I promise.”
“But you can’t just go breaking into people’s houses, Ellie. You could end up in jail, too.”
“I need closure,” I admitted desperately. “I still like him, okay? Angela, I like him a lot. If he killed those girls, then I need proof. I have to see it with my own eyes. I need something that’s going to make me stop liking him.”
A sinking feeling crept into my stomach just then. I stopped everything I was doing and looked into Angela’s eyes. “And if I do find proof that he killed those girls,” I whispered, pushing back nausea, “then I’m really going to need my big sister there to keep me from completely freaking out.”
Angela stared back at me, swallowing horrible thoughts of her own, and grabbed my hand. “Okay,” she said, sounding resolved. “Okay, lets do it.”
“Thanks.”
As it turned out, my first criminal act was surprisingly easy to accomplish, because Ms. Wainwright had left in such a hurry last night that she’d forgotten to lock the front door. “I wonder if we’ll get half the time, since we’re only entering and not actually breaking,” Angela said when we shut and locked the door behind us.
“Lets just hurry so that we don’t get caught, and then we won’t get any time.”
“So what are we looking for? Where do you think we should start looking?”
“His room,” I said automatically. “There’s a metal box under his bed I’ve been dying to look in. I saw it once when he had me pinned to his floor.”
I started to head up the stairs, but Angela was just standing in the middle of the room gaping at me. “Ellie,” she said slowly, her cheeks turning a light shade of pink. “I know the whole dating thing is really exciting, but I don’t know if you should be moving that fast. I mean, you only got your first kiss a couple weeks ago.”
“What do you think I was doing?” I gasped when I finally caught Angela’s meaning. “He’d kidnapped me and trapped me in his room. After I smashed his lamp in a million pieces and bruised his head with his alarm clock, he had to pin me to the floor to keep me from throwing anything else. We weren’t doing anything.”
“Oh. Good.” Angela followed me upstairs. “Because that would be really awkward if you guys did do something and he ends up in jail for life. You’d have to go on an episode of Dr. Phil to get normal again.”
“I need to go on Dr. Phil just because I live with you,” I argued as we walked into Seth’s bedroom. He’d cleaned up the sodas and Twizzlers from our game night and had my beanbag tucked neatly in the corner with his game chair.
“Kind of creepy in here, don’t you think?” Angela asked.
I looked around. “Looks like a normal room to me. Just really, really clean.”
“What do you think I mean by creepy?”
“Whatever. Just start looking for anything weird.”
I reached under his bed and pulled out the metal box. It was a small red toolbox and, unfortunately, it was locked. “Quick, there has to be a key somewhere. Look around for a tiny key. Check his dresser drawers or something.”
“I’m not looking through his underwear. He’s your boyfriend. You check the dresser.”
I rolled my eyes and started rummaging through his drawers. Two seconds later, I felt Angela hovering behind me. “Huh,” she said. “Boxer-briefs. Interesting. Wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“I thought you didn’t want to go through his underwear.”
“I’m not. You are.”
“There’s nothing here,” I said, closing the last drawer.
Angela picked up a bottle of cologne while I went to the nightstand. “This looks expensive,” she said, squirting some on her wrist.
“Could you at least try to be helpful?”
“Wow, this smells good. Does he always smell this good?”
Unfortunately. “Nothing in the nightstand but his taser,” I said. I couldn’t help picking it up and pushing the button. Blue sparks sizzled. “I wonder how bad this thing hurts.”
“I dare you to try it.”
I held the taser out to Angela and pushed the button again. “Try it on you?”
“Funny. Put that thing down and lets see what he’s got in his closet.” Angela slid open the closet door and began looking at the hanging clothes. “Ooh, it’s too bad it hasn’t been cold out. I bet Seth looks gorgeous in this,” she said, pulling a dark brown suede jacket off its hanger.
When she tried it on I asked, “Are you even looking for evidence, or just snooping?”
“I wonder how much money he dropped on this wardrobe. I wish I had—wait.” Angela gasped. “What is this?”
There was something taped to the back of the closet. I shoved all the clothes aside and Angela let out a quiet shriek. “What is it? Some kind of shrine?”
“Don’t be stupid, idiot. Shrines need like candles and stuff.”
“What’s he doing with pictures of dead girls taped in his closet?” Angela asked.
“I’m more concerned about the girls up there who aren’t dead,” I whispered.
Until that moment I never actually believed Seth had anything to do with the Saturday Night Slasher. But we were looking at a collage of pictures, police reports, and post-it notes, all from the Slasher case. Heather Monroe, Olivia Harvey, Crystal Chambers, and the first victim, who’s name turned out to be Monica Stanley—they were all there, staring me right in the face with the pictures of three other girls who all fit the same profile.
“It’s not a shrine,” I whispered. “It’s research. He’s studying the case. Look how he has it all organized. It’s like he’s trying to solve it.”
“Are you kidding?” Angela asked, pointing at the picture of a girl named Jennifer McConnelly. “That is not solving it. That is a picture of his next victim.”
I tried not to believe her. “What about all this information, then? All the police reports. All the profiles of the people working on the case. Why would he have that?”
“No! It’s not enough. It can’t be him.”
Yeah, I was in complete denial. So what?
“Ellie, you promised. What more do you need? For him to come after you with a knife?”
“Pictures!” I gasped.
Angela was starting to get frustrated. “What do you think these are?” she yelled.
“No. I mean polaroids. The killer left polaroids of the victims behind, right? So they’d connect the murders? Well, don’t all killers like to take souvenirs? He’s taking pictures of them. If Seth is the killer, then he’ll have those pictures.”
“Hey, good thinking.”
“I’ve already checked the dresser and nightstand.” I looked around the perfectly tidy room and went back to Seth’s bed. “Help me lift his mattress.”
“Careful Ellie, do you really want to know what he keeps tucked between his mattresses?”
“Oh, shut up and lift.”
“Ellie, if he is really killing people, do you think he’d be dumb enough to keep the evidence between his mattresses? You have to get more creative than that.”
“And where do you suggest I look?” I snapped as I pushed my arm under his mattress. “The only place you seem to be looking is over my shoulder. Would you please help me?”
Angela sighed as if I were asking her to take my finals for me. “All right, fine.” With a look that suggested I was an idiot, Angela reached beneath the bed and pulled the toolbox into her lap. After examining the small lock she said, “It’s not much more than something you’d find on a suitcase. I’m sure we can pick it. Do you have a Bobbi pin?” She and I both snorted at the same time. “Sorry. I forgot who I was talking to.”
“Will this work?” I asked, handing her my keys with the pink Swiss Army knife keychain.
“Aw, this is so cute,” she cooed. “Where did you get this?”
“Seth gave it to me for my birthday.”
