by Leah Konen
This is random but is there any chance you took home one of my knives one of the times you brought over dinner?
Vera called immediately. “A knife?”
“It’s stupid,” I said. “But I can’t find it, and I thought maybe you had it. It’s got a red handle.”
“Oh,” Vera said. A pause, long and stretchy.
“I’m sure it’s nothing, it just got misplaced, but the way it would look, if the police realized I couldn’t find it. I just thought maybe if you had it . . .” My voice trailed off, and I wondered, for another horrible moment, if she could suspect me.
“Sure,” she said, her voice even and smooth. “Let me check.”
On the other end of the phone, squeaking, and the sound of metal on metal. A drawer shut, another opened.
Finally: “Sorry, but I don’t see anything.”
“You’re sure?” I asked. “Did you check in the fridge? In a pan of leftovers or something?”
I heard a shuffle, another door opening. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I’m sure.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. Maybe I could come over?”
“Now?” she asked, her voice suddenly higher pitched.
“Yes,” I said. “Now.”
A sharp intake of breath. “I’m going out now. Er, I have to run some errands, but . . . you’ll come over tonight?”
“I was planning on it.”
“Okay,” Vera said. “I should be back around, I don’t know, eight? We can have dinner.”
“Sure,” I said. “And—”
The line went dead. She’d already hung up.
Taking deep breaths, I returned to my bedroom, used one of the five knives in my possession to check my hiding spot—everything was there. Then I tore apart the kitchen, searching beneath the refrigerator, in the space between the cabinets and the oven, at the bottom of the recycle bin—anywhere the missing knife could have possibly fallen.
Crumbs stuck on my jeans, dust coated my hands, drops of stale wine were spilled across the floor, and my kitchen was in worse shape than even the cops had left it.
The knife was nowhere to be found.
My heart beat wildly as it sunk in, how incredibly stupid I’d been. John, he wasn’t my punishment. That was only step one. How could grief be punishment enough when I’d already lost my parents? No, the punishment was much more insidious than that, much more true to Davis.
I pictured the missing lingerie, the photos, the note, the now missing knife.
John wasn’t the end goal here: I was.
If Davis had seen us that night, if a plan had started to form, if he had grabbed one of my knives . . . of course he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to use his own pocketknife; of course he’d much prefer one of mine . . .
Only why go around town, asking about me?
To make you squirm. To make you fucking squirm. To let you know, without a doubt, that he’s here. In case the missing items and the faucet and Dusty getting out weren’t enough. To make you sure.
It would be easy, I realized, to use a glove, kill John, leave behind a knife with my prints and DNA all over it. It sounded crazy, it sounded insane, only I knew as well as anyone that crazy was very much possible, that there was plenty you could do if you only put your mind to it . . .
And if it did work out how Davis wanted it to, there was another benefit for him as well.
If he actually pulled it off—if I were actually, god, convicted—Davis would always, always know where I was.
I would be preserved, a precious collectible beneath a bell jar.
Trapped where no one could ever have me but him.
THIRTY-TWO
What do you do when you can’t run anymore?
That’s what I thought about, all day, at home in my cottage like a sitting duck. What was I supposed to do: Go out, buy myself a gun? Booby-trap the place like Kevin Fucking McCallister? Simply wait?
I googled lawyers, wondering how in the world I’d be able to pay one. I checked the locks multiple times. I checked my email, too—and Davis’s social accounts—but there was nothing. Not surprising, since every cog and gear had already been put into place. The knife stolen, used to kill John. I wasn’t sure of his next strategic move, but it wouldn’t come in the form of threats. It would come in person. Him, at my door. I was as sure of this as I had ever been of anything.
Maggie came at four o’clock, T-minus four hours until I’d be once again in the safety of Vera’s company. She chanced a smile as I opened the door, Pepper heeling easily by her side. “I think you could use a walk,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t—”
She held up a thickly veined hand. “Fresh air is good for you in a time like this. Otherwise you’ll go crazy. Come on,” she said, when I didn’t move. “We’ll make it a long one.”
We walked up Shadow Creek Road, past Vera’s, past the house on the corner that had once been a church and was now someone’s beautifully renovated home, the stained-glass windows a reminder of what once was.
Maggie was surprisingly agile for a woman her age, her feet shuffling quicker than mine did. Dusty sniffed eagerly along the edge of the road, every pinecone a new point of interest.
As we walked, I imagined Davis on this street, watching me, making plans. I wondered, again, how he’d found John’s studio. Could he really have tracked John four miles through the woods? I couldn’t imagine it—not Davis. There had to be another way. Perhaps he’d followed Vera, after she’d come back that afternoon with the car. Or—more likely—John had gone there after he left my cottage, and Davis had followed him, discovered his studio, made his plan.
Davis was many things, but impulsive wasn’t one of them. He’d want to make sure to check every box—a guy like him would be destroyed in prison. Perhaps he’d laid low for another day and then gone to the studio, let himself in—the place was never locked, for fuck’s sake—and waited there, ready to kill him, no clue that it was the very night that Vera and I had claimed John had fallen . . .
“My husband died, you know,” Maggie said abruptly as we turned the corner.
My shoulders jolted—and I momentarily pushed theories about Davis aside. “I didn’t know. I didn’t even know you were married, actually.”
“It was a long time ago, so I don’t talk about it much,” she said. “Doesn’t seem to be much of a point to dwell on the past like that. It was when I was in my forties. My daughter was in high school. It was awful for us both. I don’t know what’s harder: to lose a parent or to lose a partner. Both, probably. In their own ways.”
I blinked a couple of times.
“You don’t have your parents in your life, do you?”
I halted, turning, and my chest seemed to constrict. Suddenly, I imagined Maggie, poking around my place, looking for my secrets. Somehow finding a way to listen in on my conversations, asking around town for gossip about me.
“How did you know that?”
“You can see loneliness in others,” Maggie said, lips pressing tightly together. Then she smiled, going on. “I mean, you can see in others what you’ve experienced yourself. You’ve never mentioned your parents,” she said. “I got the sense that you’d lost them, that you and I were united in grief.”
It was funny, grief, the way it could hook you, keep you in its grasp, no matter how complicated it was. I wondered if Maggie knew it like that, if amid the nostalgia, the desire she felt for her husband, there was more there, too. Memories of the bad along with the good. Memories you weren’t supposed to talk about—were supposed to put behind you.
I sighed, knowing it didn’t matter, not really—grief was the same either way. I felt guilty, suddenly, for pitying her the way I had. Between her ugly maroon sweaters and her eagerness to accompany me on walks, I’d pegged her as some sort of sad spinster. But who was I to judge? I was just as lost
as she was, probably a whole lot more. Surrounded by Vera and John, I’d thought I could cover my loneliness up, a nice slipcover over a ratty Craigslist couch. But Maggie could see it still. Perhaps everyone could, I thought, as moisture coated my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, reaching for my arm to console me. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Shall we take another turn?” she asked, as if she were a character in an Austen novel, her hand dropping again to her side. “If Dusty’s up for it?”
I nodded eagerly, desperate to fill the next few hours, to make it to eight, when I’d have Vera, once again. These women, the women of Shadow Creek Road, were like buoys, bobbing along, the only things breaking up a stretched-out sea of loneliness and fear.
“Yes, I think we should.”
* * *
• • •
It was nearly dark by the time I returned to my cottage, the sky velvet, the light fading quickly away. Maggie had turned off with Pepper at her house, and Dusty had dragged me home, eager for rest.
Beneath my feet, gravel crunched, and as I approached the porch, I realized I hadn’t turned the light on—our walk had gone on so long, I hadn’t thought I’d need to. I looked at my watch. It was five thirty. Only another two and a half hours, I thought. One hundred fifty more minutes until I was with Vera again, until, together, she and I could formulate some sort of plan.
I took off my gloves, fumbling for the keys in the dark of the porch, the cold shocking my skin, Dusty scratching at the door. Finally, I sank the right key into the lock, twisting just so. Inside, I unhooked Dusty’s leash, shrugged out of my coat, tossed my bag on the ground, and reached for the light switch, then stopped short.
There was a shadow on the sofa, impossible to ignore. And at the bottom of the shadow, the outline of a shoe. Dusty ran right toward it, his tail wagging, back and forth, back and forth.
I blinked twice, trying to adjust my eyes in the dark, trying to think amid the feeling of my racing heart, the nausea swimming in my stomach, frozen between fight and flight, a scream and a run.
The shadow took a breath. The shadow stood up.
In the dim remnants of light coming through the edges of the drapes, I recognized the outline of his face, an outline I knew too well.
“Hey, babe.”
THIRTY-THREE
Frantically, I flipped on the light.
My heart beat mercilessly as I took him in. He looked exactly the same as when I’d left him—clean-shaven, thick glasses perched on his nose, blond hair sweeping across his forehead just so. It was like not even a day had passed, as if I were back to exactly what I’d run away from. A hollow feeling rippled through my body, and I felt fragile as an eggshell, easy to break.
“Found you,” he said, an awful smile creeping across his face. “Didn’t think I would, huh?”
“No,” I said, voice weak, as my eyes darted around. The drapes were pulled shut so I couldn’t see out—and worse, no one could see in. “No, no, no.”
He frowned. “So you don’t want to talk, I see.”
I struggled to catch my breath. “What do you want?”
“What do I want?” He laughed. “You’re the one who was always going on about relationships needing an open line of communication. I’d hardly call this open, babe.”
I stared at him, and I could see it, beneath his pseudo-calm demeanor: his anger, simmering, just about ready to boil. He was trying to hold it in, trying to keep it from exploding, but I worried that this time, he couldn’t.
“We haven’t had a relationship in a long time,” I said.
He pressed his lips together. “Hard to, when you disappear without so much as saying goodbye,” he said, his voice rising. “When you abandon me, leave me like that—without even checking to see if I was okay or not.”
He glared at me, still trying to hold it together, and my eyes flitted, instinctively, to the door.
I shouldn’t have done it. As if making a decision, pulling the long-sought-after trigger, Davis rushed.
I stepped aside, but in seconds, he had blocked the front door and grabbed my bag from the ground.
Dusty whimpered, tail down and terrified, and I knew it clear as day, knew what I had to do, what I’d been training myself to do for so long.
I ran.
For the sofa, my knee smashing into the hard edge of the coffee table, Dusty quivering as I grabbed him and held his warm body tight.
Then to the kitchen, toward the back door, but Davis was too fast. He blocked the exit, trapping me in the hallway, and in the dim light of the bedroom, I saw it—my dad’s hammer on the nightstand.
I bolted through the doorway, my breath already coming in gasps. Dusty leapt from my grasp, scurrying beneath the bed, and my vision blurred as I flipped around, tried to shut the door.
Davis’s arm stopped me. He shoved the door open, and I backed away, reaching for the hammer, only he was too fast. In seconds, he’d pushed me onto the bed, taken it himself.
Beneath us, Dusty howled.
“What do you want?” I asked, my chest tight and painful, my stomach like a rock, my eyes darting around the room, searching for exits I knew weren’t there. “Whatever you want, I’ll do it if you’ll just leave me alone.”
He ignored me. My bag still in his other hand, he backed away, tipping it over—everything clattering against the hardwood floor—my wallet, loose change, a couple of Dusty’s treats. My phone. In another world, the mess, the chaos, would have driven him nuts. But not in this one.
“You know what I want,” Davis said, desperately trying to return his tone to normal, but I could see it in his fingers, clenching the hammer so hard they’d turned white: The anger was there; soon, it would be more than he could control.
Davis knelt down, carefully plucked my phone from the paraphernalia.
He pressed the button on the bottom, then walked forward, hovered over me again. I could practically taste him as he shoved the phone in my face, he was so close. “Unlock it,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, shoulders hunching. I wanted to become miniature, like Alice in Wonderland, so small I could crawl under the bed, snuggle into Dusty’s fur. Disappear.
“Just do it,” he said again, shoving the phone even closer to my face.
Hands trembling, I took it, holding it out so I could see it, so my eyes could focus through the tears that twisted my vision. I keyed in my passcode, but typed it wrong.
“Don’t mess with me,” Davis said. “I know what you’re trying to do.”
“I’m not,” I said, the words difficult to form as my breathing became rapid, shallow. “I promise.” Hands still shaking, I tried again, and like that, my apps appeared against a background photo of Dusty.
He took the phone, his fingers working quickly.
“I know you’ve got it on here. Ellie told me.”
I stared at him, holding my dad’s hammer, his fingers clenching even tighter. I imagined him lifting it over my head, letting it fall, my skull his nail, smashing me into Maggie’s god-awful quilt, turning me to mush.
It’s all in the wrist, my dad used to say. Gravity does the work.
I held my breath as Davis’s expression changed, as he turned the phone around. It was too close, too blurry. I scooted back, desperate to create space between us, and then, breath still tight in my throat, I saw it.
I saw me.
My face. Turned purple and blue. My bruise, captured in high definition.
Again, I imagined the hammer coming down. A flowering blossom, a spray of red. Dusty crawling out from beneath the bed, lured by the sight of blood . . .
“Delete it,” Davis said.
I swallowed, shaking my head. “Davis—”
For once, his calm tenor escaped him. “Delete it!”
My palms were wet as I took the phone. My fingers felt thick, as if they wer
e drunk, as I clumsily tapped at the trash can icon, playing along with his futile exercise. Finally, the option popped up: Delete Photo.
I tapped it, and Davis took the phone eagerly from my hands.
“Are there any more?”
I shook my head.
“You promise? You swear on your mother’s grave?”
“I swear,” I said instinctively, finding my words, then covering my face, my chin, with my hands. He tossed the phone onto the bed.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said. “I was never going to show anyone else.”
His head tilted to the side, like Dusty’s did when he didn’t understand something I was saying, and the sudden calm, the stillness of his body, scared me more than anything else.
Beneath the bed, Dusty whimpered again.
“You thought because you lost your family, you could destroy mine, too?” he said, his voice wavering. “She was your best friend. You knew what that would do to her, how it would destroy her, and you did it anyway.”
I shook my head, cowering. “I had no choice.”
His hand found my hair, and I thought, for a moment, that he was going to lean in, kiss me, but it tightened, so much that I gasped. Then he pulled down, hard, and I squeezed my eyes shut as he pinned me, his legs rigid on either side, his hand on my neck now, pressing, the other hand still gripping the hammer. “You always have a choice. We always had a choice, until you destroyed us.”
His eyes were cold, ready to bend reality to suit his needs, manipulate the world around him, take the control he desired like a power-drunk kid in a game of Monopoly.
My mouth begged for air, but his hand pressed me down, tightening on my throat, cutting off my oxygen.
Davis came closer, his face suspended over mine. Sweat pricked his forehead. His glasses were about to become fogged. Up close, his lips were ugly, thin, and dry—flaking. His breath was hot. A faint smell of blood.
He killed John, I told myself as my own anger surged. He killed John.
“No matter what you told her, Ellie will always know who you are now,” I said, struggling to get the words out.
