by S. K. Grice
I turned, careful not to have my back to her. “You followed me other times, too. Admit it.”
“You really are a ‘Psycho Girl’, aren’t you?” She circled closer.
I backed up toward the fireplace poker as Melissa glared at me with mascara-rubbed eyes. Her overdone red lips against her white teeth made her look like an evil circus clown. The depth of her wickedness had no end, and I only had one chance. Just like I did with Mike. “Yes. Maybe I am a little psycho,” I said in a placating tone.
“Shut. The fuck. Up.” She stood in front of me like a defensive linebacker. “I’m doing the talking here.”
We stood face-to-face in front of the fireplace. The poker was behind me within reach. But my attention stayed on Melissa’s every move. I didn’t dare speak a word. Her reactions bounced like a ball on a Roulette table. Where they would land was anyone’s guess. I wasn’t taking chances.
Melissa reached her hand behind her back and into the back pocket of her denim cut-offs. “I’ve spent years hating you, Jolene Parker. It has been a pleasure making you suffer.”
My legs shook, but I wouldn’t show Melissa my fear. Go, go, go. I turned sideways and reached for the poker.
A sharp jab pierced my hip, and my hand went to the stinging pain. Oh, shit. Melissa held up an empty syringe, wearing a grin of satisfaction so evil that I swore I saw red in her eyes. “What the hell was that?”
Melissa cackled. “A little SUX. Succinylcholine, if you want to get medical.”
Anger rose from my core and I lunged for her throat, but my adrenaline hit the floor and my arms flopped about like a rag doll with no stuffing. My breathing slowed as my throat constricted tighter and tighter until only a slit of air entered my lungs. Everything blurred.
Melissa took hold of my shoulders. “Let’s not fall over,” she said in a voice as gentle as that of a mother soothing a worried child. “Getting bruised isn’t part of the plan.”
She slumped my limp, heavy body into the armchair. My heart raced faster, but I couldn’t move a muscle.
“Try not to panic when you realize you’re paralyzed.”
A fiery blast of burning chemicals flushed through my veins. My pulse slowed and strength flowed out of my body, but I was fully alert.
“In a minute, you’ll feel like you’re choking. Just like Mike would have felt when blood came out of his mouth. And just like Patsy felt as I watched her take her last breath.”
My head fell back. Hot tears filled my eyes. I didn’t want to believe what I’d heard.
Melissa killed Patsy.
My brain told me to move, but my legs grew heavy and strength left my muscles.
Melissa leaned over me, smirking. Terror raced up my spine. She’d killed Patsy. Now she was intent on killing me. “W-why?” My coarse voice scratched against my raw throat.
My eyelids grew heavy as I gasped for air. I willed my mouth to move, to scream for help, but my lips were rubber. Intense pressure squeezed my neck, slowly strangling me, and I was helpless to fight back.
Melissa’s hot breath touched my face. “I kept waiting for you to break down again, like you did when your mother died and went crazy.”
Heat rushed to my skull. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. My mother. I wanted her with me now. I wanted the people who’d loved me the most. Annette, my dearest friend. And my sweet Patsy, her kind spirit taken from all who loved her. Melissa was the antithesis of all that was good in this world.
“After you killed Mike, I thought you might go crazy and get put away where you belong. But you always stay in control, don’t you? No matter what happens, Jolene always manages to stay in control and come out on top.” She let out a cackling laugh, then suddenly stopped. “Not anymore.”
I tried to move. Fingers. Toes. Arms. Legs.
Nothing worked.
Lead weights pulled my eyelids down. Shut.
Melissa’s voice echoed in my mind. Just like Patsy when she took her last breath. She’d killed Patsy, and now she wanted to kill me.
Everything went black.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The cool, tiled floor against my cheek let me know I was lying on the kitchen floor. My head pounded and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My arms and legs were bound in what felt like a straitjacket. It didn’t matter what instruction my mind gave my body—nothing moved.
I cracked open my iron-heavy eyelids and realized my body was wrapped snug inside a paint-speckled canvas sheet. The kind used at construction sites as drop-cloths. Daylight streamed through the closed slats on the blinds over the kitchen window. How long had I been unconscious? An hour? A day? Confusion fogged my thoughts.
Melissa stood at the counter next to the sink. She wore latex gloves and seemed engrossed with writing in a notebook. My notebook. The one I used for jotting lists and reminders.
Rage burned under my skin. She’d killed Patsy. If she’d been capable of murdering a woman who’d shown her nothing but kindness, then she was capable of anything. What kind of evil was she planning next? I tried to move, but whatever drug Melissa had injected in me had depleted all use of my muscles.
I scanned the room through my droopy eyelids, and then spotted an outline of someone lying on the floor near the back door. My vision slowly came into focus, and I saw it was Mrs. Nichols. Her back was to me, her legs askew and one ankle twisted. Blood pooled on the floor like a halo around her head.
The smell. It was the blood. Butcher-shop sharp with a tang which stuck in my nose hair. My stomach churned shooting a surge of reflux up my esophagus. An involuntary moan escaped my throat.
Melissa turned from her writing then fell to her knees and crawled to me, licking her lips like a rabid dog. “Good. You’re awake.” She rolled me onto my back. “Stupid Mrs. Nichols. The old biddy just couldn’t mind her own business. She came by about twenty minutes before you did—probably intended to welcome you home. But I couldn’t let her get in the way of my plan. She was at the wrong place at the wrong time. I had to kill her.”
Saliva and bile trickled down my chin. I looked up at her round face framed in the cheap black wig. She held my notebook and what looked like a man’s brown toiletry bag. “But Patsy… why?” I managed to whisper.
She sat back on her haunches. “Because I’d reached my breaking point. See, after Annette died, I came by to visit Patsy almost every day. Do you remember that?”
I bent my elbows and realized that, when Melissa had rolled me onto my back, the wrap had loosened, giving me room to move my arms. I spoke through my scratchy throat, “Patsy loved your visits.”
She grunted. “I visited her more than you did. Did you know that? It was me. Me who sat with her while she cried and reminisced about Annette.” She shook her head. “But no matter how much love I gave her, she always loved her Joley more.” Her mouth tightened and her nostrils flared. “I couldn’t bear it any longer. You and Patsy together like mother and daughter. You didn’t deserve her.”
I pressed my back flat to the ground as I inched my hands up my stomach, loosening the binding wrap even more. “But Patsy loved everyone. She loved you.”
“Stop with the bullshit. Things only got better for you after she died.” She grunted and rolled onto her knees. “She gave you this fucking house.”
“I didn’t know she was going to do that.”
“I didn’t know she was going to do that,” Melissa mocked in a baby voice. Then her expression shifted into a nasty grin. “Your privileged life is that way. You never know what next good thing will fall in your lap. You just know something will.”
Her evil had no limits. “You killed Jackson.”
“Oh, aren’t you the genius? Yes. I killed Jackson.”
“He was your friend.”
“Yes, we were friends. But see, here you were again, getting it all. Inheriting Patsy’s house and land, traipsing back into the neighborhood like it was a normal thing to have the good things in life handed to you on a platter.”
“What did Jackson do to you?”
“He got close to you, and I didn’t like it. You didn’t deserve to have him. You don’t deserve anyone.”
“It wasn’t like that—” My fingers curled and sensation was returning to my limbs.
“Shut the fuck up. Did I ask you to speak?”
Even if I could reach my arms out, my legs were still hindered by the wrap. I was as helpless as a wiggling worm on hot concrete and had no chance of getting past Melissa. I couldn’t fight if I wanted to.
“Remember the night you came home after visiting Jackson? It made me sick listening to you. Even worse was listening to Jackson talk about you ad nauseam when he was as Ocean Joe’s a couple of nights earlier. You were all he could talk about. How pretty you are, how classy you are, how smart you are. I vomited in my mouth just listening to him. I wanted to kill him that night.”
Hot tears ran down my cheeks. He hadn’t deserved to die.
“So, when you came back from his house on Saturday night, I saw an opportunity to kill the motherfucker and set you up as a suspect.” Melissa laughed, sitting back on her butt with her legs bent. “I grounded an Ambien and put it in your wine. It didn’t take long for you to plonk out. I practically had to walk you up the stairs.”
That night flashed in my mind—how I’d felt so woozy and dizzy and how Melissa had teased me about drinking too much. The combination of Xanax and Ambien had been the real culprit. I groaned, the sound rumbling in my throat.
“As soon as you were in bed, I put on the sneakers you were wearing,” she said. “Then I stole the keys to your Jeep and drove to Jackson’s house. He was more than happy to invite me inside.”
My urge to scream strained my vocal cords, but I let her talk while I worked at loosening the wrap.
“When I told Jackson I wanted to sit outside and light a fire in the firepit, he didn’t complain. Once we were outside, a jab of SUX and a whack to the head with the shovel was all it took. I just dragged his ass to the shallow fire pit and covered him with leaves.”
“What about the tree?”
“A stroke of genius, right? Jackson had oak saplings all around his house. I figured you’d appreciate that touch. Shiiit. I remember the expression on your face when Nancy told you she’d found Jackson with a tree on top of his buried body.” She rolled her head back and laughed. “I wish I could’ve taken a picture.”
Melissa’s twisted mind held no logic, and I grasped at any hope of sympathy. “I want to change things. I didn’t know what I was doing back then. I’m a different person now.” My voice cracked through my raw throat.
“I don’t want to hear your fucking excuses. You’ve never ever been my real friend. Back in the days when you were in college and married, when your life was so perfect, if I had called you in need of girlfriend support, you would have been polite, but you wouldn’t have spent your time with a beach rat like me.” She snorted. “Not like you did after you moved into this house after Patsy died and you had no one. After your brain hit rock bottom.”
“That’s not true.”
“Shut up. I have a plan to make a good life for myself.” A malicious grin underscored her dark eyes. “And I’m going to use your children to help me get what I want.”
Blood rushed to my head and pounded, pounded, pounded. “What do my children have to do with us?”
Melissa opened the brown bag and pulled out a syringe and a vial. “Let me explain how this is going to work. Each vial is one hundred and fifty mils of SUX. It’s the dose I gave you. The maximum safe dose. The reaction is immediate, and as you’ve experienced, it causes temporary paralysis, but keeps you alert—well, that is until you lose the ability to breath for yourself, and you pass out due to lack of oxygen to the brain.”
My body floated, and this didn’t feel real, like I wasn’t in the room with a killer.
This isn’t happening.
I gulped a breath and came back to my senses, because this was happening, I wouldn’t dissociate. Not now.
Melissa grabbed another vial. “Two vials will kill you.” She put the second vial back into the bag. Her lips curled into a devilish grin. “It wasn’t easy getting my hands on this drug, but it’s amazing what risks starving medical students are willing to take for a fresh benjamin in their hand.” She uncapped the needle and popped it into the vial.
“You can’t actually believe you’ll get away with this.”
“I do. And I will. I figure Aaron will come looking for you later on when you don’t show up at the hotel. That’s when he’ll find you.” She glanced at Mrs. Nichols. “Unless Mr. Nichols gets here first. But that old man is like a koala—he sleeps ninety percent of the time.” She shrugged. “Either way, I’ll be long gone. But enough of all this talking. Time is of the essence here.”
Melissa stuffed a cotton dishtowel in my mouth, leaving me to breathe only through my nose.
“I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen from this moment forward.” She held up the spiral notebook she’d been writing in earlier. My notebook, full of notes to myself. Grocery lists, appointment times, miscellaneous notes. “I’ve already written your suicide note.” She chuckled. “As you know, I’m an expert forger.”
Suicide? I squirmed on the hard ground, my feet and elbows pushing against the too-tight wrap. No, no, no.
She snickered at my effort. “Give it up. Besides, we don’t have much time, and don’t you want to hear what’s in your note?”
Tears filled my eyes and sinuses. How could I have missed the signs that Melissa was a monster? How could I have been so naïve?
“Good. Because it’s time to get down to business.” She held the notebook in front of her and read aloud.
“To Aaron, Jennifer and Eric,
I love you all very much and want you to know that my decision to leave this life had nothing to do with my love for you. I simply feel I have nothing left to give and everyone would be better off without me.”
Melissa hesitated and grinned at me, then she continued in her an angel-soft voice.
“Unfortunately, Mrs. Nichols came by the house and tried to stop me. She was just in the wrong the place at the wrong time. I had no choice but to kill her. The courts were wrong to conclude I’m not a risk to society. Not only that, but I managed to fool everyone into believing I wasn’t a risk to myself. I fooled them all.
“The only thing that was true for me in this world was my love for you. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to kill the demons battling in my mind.
“Yours forever, Mommy.”
Melissa stood and placed the notebook on the kitchen dining table. “Short and simple.” Her voice returned to being guttural. “That’s how I like to keep things.”
Overwhelming strain pulled on the muscles in my chest. Hot tears ran down my face. I couldn’t bear knowing my children would face the agony of such a grief at their tender ages. A parent’s death by suicide would forever haunt them. Melissa wasn’t only killing me but killing the happiness of my children by filling them with this lie.
Fear clambered up my spine as Melissa propped the notebook on the kitchen table so it was visible. Using every ounce of strength, I tried to spread my legs apart by pushing against the canvas wrap. Sweat trickled down my neck.
Melissa came back to my side, standing over me with the full syringe in her hand. “I’m going to drag you to your car and give you a three-hundred-mil dose of SUX,” she said. “Then, I’ll start the engine and let the carbon monoxide do the rest. This time, you won’t wake up.”
My cries were useless against the thick towel, and my struggle only put more glee in Melissa’s eyes, so I settled. I could barely get a drift of oxygen through my snot-blocked nose.
“Your life will be over, but I’ll get to start on my new life.” A devious grin crossed her face. “Once you’re gone, I’ll be in the perfect position to console Aaron and the twins.”
Rage burst through my skin, and I squirmed again—harder than before, lifting my butt
off the ground and loosening the wrap’s grip even further. Hope surged through my veins. I had a fighting chance.
Melissa paced the floor beside me. “Oh, didn’t you hear? Aaron has hired me as a nanny to the twins.”
The ground dropped beneath me, and I was falling into a dark hole where all I could see was Melissa’s face. I moaned into the dishtowel as hot tears blurred my eyes.
“That’s right,” Melissa said. “He hasn’t said anything to you because we both decided it was best to wait until you got home. But… since Aaron and India are no longer together, I figured he’d need a nanny.” She burst out laughing. “A friend in need is a friend, indeed.”
I closed my eyes, afraid to foresee the unimaginable. Melissa in my children’s lives.
“And since the children will inherit this house and it can’t be sold or rented… well, who knows what options will open up once the twins become attached to me?”
Melissa stooped and held up the needle, like a viper ready to strike, then she rolled me to my side and stuck the needle in my hip. I winced at the pinch. The surge of heat, stinging, wavering in me until I was enveloped in warmth. My eyelids drooped and I sucked air through my stuffed nose, but oxygen wasn’t reaching my brain.
My eyelids grew heavy as my body fell, helpless against the encroaching paralysis. Jennifer and Eric’s newborn faces looked back at me. I felt the unbearable pain of knowing I’d never see my children again as it gripped my insides, squeezing so tight that each gasp of oxygen burned my lungs.
Melissa kicked me in the back. “I hope you die.”
Searing pain ran up my spine. I wasn’t ready to die, but that wasn’t my choice to make.
I prayed for a quick death.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I was on my back with my eyes shut, sliding backwards across the kitchen floor. An incessant sound reverberated in my cloud-stuffed head.
Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong.
