Suicide Blondes

by T. Blake Braddy

  But I’m no longer tied up, and so things move very quickly.

  Audrey lunges for me, but I’ve got a plan.

  Before she can react, I snatch the hose running into the car and point it at her face, sending a spray of carbon dioxide into her open mouth.

  She howls and coughs and flails towards me, still holding the gun. She claws at my face, sending tendrils of pain across my cheeks. I can’t quite push the hose in her face—she’s bent it sideways—but then again she can’t see well enough to shoot me, either.

  Then, she manages to get the upper hand.

  She swings the gun butt down in a wild arc and catches the side of my head. It’s not a direct hit, but it’s a devastating one. The world goes wobbly on me, the fine lines of my normal reality turning hazy and uneven under the light of the garage.

  She doesn’t try to shoot me, doesn’t even try to pistol whip me. Instead, she yanks my other hand free of my bindings and pulls me to the ground. On the way down, I somehow manage to dislodge the gun, sending it skittering across the floor away from us both.

  But she’s not focused on that.

  Before I can really get a sense of the situation, Audrey is straddling me, her hands clamped around my throat. I can smell the sickly sweet odor of the cinnamon wafting off of her. She’s huffing and growling like a caged animal.

  “You’re fucking wrong! I’ll fucking kill you!”

  And she is well on her way. I can’t breathe, and a whole galaxy of stars begins to spread out in front of me. The darkness is coming, and it’s closer than I imagined.

  I’ve only got one chance at this, so I have to make it count.

  Gathering all of my remaining strength, I thrust my hips up and sideways. Audrey’s not expecting it, so she goes tumbling drunkenly over to one side.

  I suck in a cold, smoky breath. The car’s exhaust has filled the room, and I don’t think I have much time left to do this. The world is a dull shade of yellow, and the hard lines of reality have begun to soften and sag, like an artist erasing her own drawing.

  But there is life in me yet.

  Rolling sideways, I manage to find my knees. Audrey sits up, but I scramble forward and bowl into her with my shoulder, knocking her flat on her ass. My body doesn’t feel like my own, at this point, but the adrenaline sends me toppling over on top of her.

  It’s not ideal, but it’s more than I can hope for.

  I press my elbows into her chest and push down with my whole weight. She screams in a sort of enraged agony. If I wear her out, then maybe I can flee into the street and call for help. That would ruin the hell out of her plan.

  She swings and manages to catch me in my right temple, and though it sends stars dancing across my line of sight, I keep my focus on Audrey. My life depends on it. If she gets me sideways again, it’s over.

  I thrust my head down, cracking it against her nose, and hear the distinct snap of a bone shifting sideways. Blood pours immediately from the wound in her face.

  But she’s not giving up. There’s a wild look in her eyes, and she smiles as the blood reaches her lips. I slam my head against her face again, but there’s less force this time, and I catch her in the chin.

  She pushes me off of her, and I land hard on my shoulder.

  Audrey gets up and steps over toward the chair, but she’s wobbly, so I’m able to stick a foot between her ankles and send her stumbling forward. She recovers, but it gives me time to think of my next few actions.

  She turns to face me, and I kick her on the inside of one knee. It’s not a heavy blow, but it’s enough to hurt her. She cries out and drops to the floor.

  I kick her again, this time in the chest.

  As she falls backward, I drag myself to my feet. I can barely hold my head upright, but I do it, because the alternative is death.

  Audrey reaches for something next to the chair, and I see it’s the gun.

  Her fingers touch the barrel, and I see the flashes of a terrible few seconds stretching out before me. It’s a world in which she wins, even if she loses. A world in which she gets to tell her story, and I have to rely on a characterization from fragments of the truth.

  And then the redness overtakes my vision.

  Raising one foot as high as I can, I bring it down on her elbow, and I hear a shotgun-blast snap. She shrieks, pulling the limb back and then reaching with the other arm. She uses her good hand to move forward, but I’m quicker than she is. I scramble ahead of her and kick the gun into the corner of the room.

  Sensing the fight is over—Audrey is cradling her broken arm—I lean forward, hands on knees, and try to catch my breath. I’m fairly certain I’ve got a cracked rib.

  I don’t see her next move.

  She’s quick for an injured person. The next moment, she’s got me pressed against the driver’s side door and is using a length of twine she must have grabbed from the ground to choke me. With her full weight against me, I can’t move, and the twine cuts off my circulation.

  The stars return.

  My arms pinned beside me, I can’t get enough momentum to hit her. I feel my legs weakening, and I think maybe this is the end.

  Then, my hand touches something.

  A plastic tube.

  The car hose.

  With one last burst of energy, I grab the garden hose and point it at Audrey.

  It doesn’t do much, but it’s enough to distract her.

  “Fuck!” she says.

  The light comes back to me, and I use my body to slam into her again, and we both go tumbling.

  She screams, and I scream, too.

  But I’m still hanging onto the garden hose.

  I push myself on top of her, and she scratches at my face with her good hand. I feel the blood, warm and stinging, slide from the wound.

  She slaps me, and I nearly fall. I’m on top of her, but my grip isn’t strong enough to hold her down.

  So I do the only thing that comes to mind.

  I bring one fist down on her broken elbow, and when she screams, I shove the hose as deep into her mouth as humanly possible.

  Her eyes widen, and she stops fighting back.

  I scoot forward and put one knee on each of her arms. Smoke pours from her mouth and her nose, and though she fights, she can’t spit out the tube. I manage to change my grip and get a better hold.

  Tears stream from her enraged and desperate eyes, and though I’m crying, too, I can’t let go. The struggle continues for a full minute or more before she finally releases her grip. Her eyelids flutter before unconsciousness finally overtakes her.

  Once she’s out—for sure out—I roll over and weep until I have the sense to call 911 on Audrey’s phone.

  Epilogue

  This is not a happy ending.

  I spend a week in the hospital, maybe a little more than suggested, in part because I can’t seem to find the emotional strength to get up and out of bed. But I’m in the same hospital as my mother, and so the first few days the nurses wheel her into my room so that we can talk at length about the past and the things we miss about Dad. The conversations are short, because I’m on a lot of meds, but talking to her like this feels like being visited by her in dreams, and sometimes I think our conversations might be imagined constructions of the things I’ve always wanted to say.

  She dies in her sleep a few nights later.

  I’m not with her when she passes, but somehow it hurts less than I thought it would. In a way, I became just like my mother, living in a fantasy world of my own making. I ran away not just because of the Suicide Blondes fiasco, but also because I was afraid of dealing with the pain associated with my mother’s mental illness. Her pretend sicknesses infected me, too, and so I couldn’t quite bring myself to confront them interpersonally. The further away I was from everything, the more content I felt in my own life.

  But as I learned by coming back to Nashville, time does not stop, nor does it slow to a crawl, just because you’re away. The years marched on, and my mother aged, and f
inally, when it was her time to go, she just...let go.

  The drugs make it easier to go through the process of burying her than I thought. Easier meaning less panic-inducing. I sleep at the old house while I make all the necessary arrangements, and she is laid to rest next to my father in a cemetery I never visit. I lean on the help of police officers and strangers who have stepped in to assist me, and the funeral itself is mostly a blur. My focus is broken by the hordes of reporters who follow me around. The narrative surrounding the dramatic end of the Suicide Blondes has become a national curiosity again, and I live in a turbulent eye of the storm.

  Luckily, I have help.

  Detective Ciccotelli is there for me.

  He survived the ordeal in the Coughlin garage, and after spending a few days in the ICU, walks out of the hospital of his own free will. He takes on the task of personally directing my security while I bury my mother.

  How he came to step foot inside the Coughlin residence that night seems, at first, like magic but ends up being the result of a tenacious, logical cop’s process.

  When I ask him about it, he shrugs. “Each of the crimes took place in a significant location. After we eliminated the remaining residences”—euphemism for found Gillian’s body—“there were only a few locations where he—they—might have taken you. We sent officers to a few different places, and I ended up with the Coughlin residence. That’s it.”

  That’s not all we talk about, though.

  He and I have conversations about it—all of it—at night, when he escorts me back to my mother’s house. He works through the details, sipping at a few fingers of whiskey his doctors tell him he should give up, and I listen, mostly because I’m interested in the way his mind works.

  “The details are off,” he says. “We’ve got some computer forensics guys connecting the dots between Audrey Winstead and Timothy Allred, but there aren’t as many of them as we’d expect in such an elaborate crime.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, usually—and nothing about this is usual—that other people might have been involved.”

  Ciccotelli occasionally comes up with a comment that sends my blood racing to my heart, and this is one of those.

  I try to block out this insinuation, maybe pointing a finger at someone else in my former friend group, but my mind is constantly turning over the details.

  Eventually, he shrugs. “I guess we’ll never know.”

  “Guess not.”

  Mostly, though, he just runs through the facts, creating a timeline for himself so that he can understand the crime itself.

  It makes perfect sense to me.

  While Audrey certainly elicited the help of Timothy Allred to take me and the other Suicide Blondes down, to me it speaks much more fundamentally to her own deep-seated insecurities and sense of honor. For twenty years, she held this belief that Madeline St. Clair actually determined the trajectory of her life, and she never gave up that idea.

  It led her to do the things she did, and she just reached a point where she could no longer live in a world with Madeline or the rest of us.

  “She must have kept that plan in her back pocket for years,” Ciccotelli says one night, after he’s had a couple of drinks.

  I think about that for a while. “Maybe,” I reply, and he moves on, coming to some other personal revelation.

  Though I don’t think his assessment to be true. I’m a firm believer in fate, and somehow I believe I was bound to end up in this spot, no matter how long it took me to get back to Nashville. Even if I never stepped foot in the Music City again, I remain convinced things would have played out the exact same way.

  But it’s too crazy a thing to admit out loud, so I keep it to myself, even when the silences between myself and the detective get too long and uncomfortable for either of us to bear.

  I get several requests from true crime podcasts to go on and discuss everything, but I decline their offers as meekly as possible. Some of them get angry, but what I don’t think they realize is that I am the least qualified steward for this story. I have lived in the middle of it for so long that I would be such a bore to speak with. The people on the radio, the ones with all of the time and interest, they have the answers.

  I’ve lived it, and that’s enough.

  My name has become synonymous with all sorts of tawdry events, so it is no surprise that the coverage surrounding me does not move the wheel in any way. A tracking poll on CBS or Fox or somewhere posits that sixty percent of people asked still believe that I had something to do with the death of Everett Coughlin.

  But that’s okay, I guess. I’ll have to live with it, either way, so it might as well let people believe what they want.

  And they are not wrong, not really. I did have something to do with the death of Everett Coughlin. I was there, on the computer, with all of the girls who orchestrated it and then pinned it on me. I said nasty things. I started disgusting rumors. I reveled in the misery of another human being. That I didn’t clean out his file is of no importance. I might as well have, and that is enough to make me want to hang my head for the rest of my life.

  Eventually, there is another big crime—a murder or a robbery or something—and the news drifts away from my case. I am brought in several times over the course of the next few weeks—and will spend a dozen hours or more on the phone with police officers—as they finish up the case so they can close it out. But just as fame is given, so it is taken away.

  And I couldn’t be happier. This latest set of circumstances has only convinced me my life will never quite be normal in the way that most people define it, but it’s normal enough, I guess, and I just have to deal with the other stuff.

  But on to Audrey, the belle of this little ball.

  She receives the very public exposure she so desired. Problem for her is, she’s dead and can’t defend herself. Not that anyone would probably buy it. As I told her in the garage, she’s no Madeline St. Clair.

  She is absolutely shredded in the press, and over time the local newspapers name her The Nashville Ripper, the Social Media Monster, the FaceBook Firing Squad, and anything else that seems topically appropriate.

  The internet absolutely loses its shit over her...for about a day.

  And yet, all the coverage is a blip in the media cycle. It’s a supernova of a story, white-hot for a few days and then nothing at all. Even in the wake of Audrey Winstead’s master plan, it doesn’t amount to much. The President somehow manages to wrestle attention away from it, and for that I’m glad.

  Things begin to settle back into a normal ebb and flow.

  After weeks of watching this horrifying story unfold, members of DDA’s alumnae organization decide to hold a memorial service for everyone affected, even the husbands. It is a grand event on campus, featuring giant, photographs of Gillian and Madeline and the others, and though they include Audrey Winstead in the event, her photo is much smaller and is shunted to the side of the stage where the speakers and attendees are not forced to stare into the eyes of the killer in their midst.

  Audrey’s mother and father do not attend.

  No one can really blame them. There is plenty of pity to go around, but this tragedy must weigh especially heavily on them, given that they have to think about how they created such a monster and then released her into the world. If I had an opportunity, I’d tell them it isn’t their fault. We all decide who we’re going to become, and even if we don’t, many times it is despite our parents’ best efforts and not because of them that we step out into the void.

  It was us. The girls. The Blondes. We were always the impetus for all the sickness in this situation, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

  On the day of the event, I dress myself in muted colors and try to blend in as much as possible. It doesn’t help. Somehow, I feel like I am part of this vigil, even though I am very much alive. The eyes of every attendee focus on me like I have risen miraculously from the grave.

  Because of some insistent prodding
from the organization’s director—which began a few days before—I speak on stage about my experiences for a few brief minutes. I talk candidly about my relationship with the girls and where it came from and how, even though I was sometimes an oddity to them, a plaything for them to torment for their own enjoyment, that I still very much felt the kind of love for them only a sibling can experience.

  Throughout the whole of my speech, I notice the faces of the people in the crowd, every single one of them a broken mask, revealing their true selves. For a brief time, my mask falls away, too. I allow myself to be the girl I was in high school, to relate how such a thing can happen to quote-unquote good people. All these years, I’ve resented the things I did and the person I was, but on this podium, there is only a need for catharsis.

  The event’s somber mood is buoyed only by the support I receive from people I didn’t even realize knew me. People who endured the wrath of Madeline or managed to escape the pincers of Audrey Winstead. While sipping rosé in the banquet hall, our discussion turns into a kind of referendum on the horrors of high school. And though I know most of them are just being nice, just trying to connect in some way with the alien among them, it feels good to have something to bond over.

  I exchange numbers with a few women who might have been friends with me in another universe, and we promise to keep in touch, but I know it’s probably not going to happen. Still, there’s hope.

  After everyone is gone, I sit in the front pew and clasp my hands in my lap—and just cry. I glance from poster-sized image to poster-sized image and weep as openly as my whole body will allow. It isn’t until the cleaning crew arrives and glances wide-eyed at me from the back entrance that I realize it’s time for me to go.

  When I return to Seattle, the people at Morning Manatee greet me with a standing ovation, and the next few weeks are absolutely magical, in a way. I’d always enjoyed my work because it afforded me anonymity and silence, but for the first time, I begin to learn the names and interests of the people at the startup, and it is actually exhilarating.