Jessa screamed, but Graf shot her a warning glare over Chad’s neck, and she silenced.
The blood ran hot and fast over Graf’s tongue. His eyes locked on Jessa’s as he sucked down gulp after gulp, the torrent too much for him, leaking out the corners of his mouth to stain Chad’s T-shirt.
To her credit, Jessa didn’t look away. She stood there, her dress crumpled, dingy cotton bra showing above the skewed neckline, and met his gaze while he gorged himself on Chad’s blood. She clutched the open knife in her hands, the blade cutting into her skin. Droplets of crimson fell to the carpet at her feet, but she didn’t react.
Graf drank until he couldn’t anymore, then dropped Chad’s heavy, dead body to the floor. “You got a saw?” he asked, wiping his mouth on his arm.
Finally, Jessa noticed her bloodied hand, and dropped the knife with a scream. Of course, she would lose it now, when it was time to clean up the mess.
“Do you have a saw?” he repeated patiently.
She trembled and stared at the body on the floor. “What for?”
There was no use sugarcoating it. “Because he won’t fit into several garbage bags in one piece.”
She ran to the kitchen and vomited into the sink.
Dropping the corpse, Graf followed her, keeping a respectful and safe distance from the puke. “I know this is probably the first time you’ve seen something like this—”
“No, it isn’t!” She whirled, fists clenched at her sides so violently that her arms trembled. “I have seen worse!”
“Okay.” He took a step toward her, cautiously, not wanting to set off any more explosions of anger or vomit. “Look, I know you’re rocking this whole traumatized shtick and I get it. I really do. But you have a dead body on your floor, and a drunk pseudo-boyfriend who likes to drop by unannounced and who apparently wants you dead. What do you think our next step should be? Freaking out and barfing, or getting rid of the body? It’s up to you, but I’m just saying you need to think about which choice is more productive.”
He figured she would either slap him or see reason, or both. Luckily, she chose door number two, nodding meekly. “Fine. What do we need?”
“A saw,” he repeated. “And trash bags. Four of them if they’re regular ones, three if they’re the stretchy kind.”
“I don’t have any trash bags, you moron,” she snapped. “We haven’t had anything like that for years. What are you going to do, saw him up for fun?”
It would be more fun than standing here arguing with you, he thought, but he knew when to hold his tongue. “All right, good point. We move on to plan B. Shovels.”
“There’s one out in the barn,” she said, more subdued. “But where are you going to bury him? People will notice a patch of torn-up grass that big.”
“Good point. Now you’re thinking, and not just barfing.” He rubbed his chin, staring out the window at the backyard. “What about the woods?”
She shook her head. “You’d never find the space. The roots would be too close together.”
“But we could leave him out there, maybe hack him up a little bit and let a search party find him.” Graf made a mental note to never rely on Jessa for covering up a murder ever again. “People would believe he got attacked by It and died.”
“But he was supposed to be coming here,” Jessa argued. “People are going to wonder why he came out here and never returned.”
“He never got here. You waited for him to show up, even put on a pretty dress. When he didn’t arrive, you figured he changed his mind and went to bed rejected.” People would believe that. Graf hated to rely on the town’s bad opinion of Jessa to make their lie work, but at least they had a few cards in their hand.
He could tell from the expression on her face that she didn’t like the idea. But he could also tell that she knew there weren’t many better options.
“Do you want to go with me?” he offered lamely. “Maybe you wanted to say some words or—”
“Leave my footprints all around the body?” She glared at him. “You really think we’re all ignorant country bumpkins, don’t you? The men who’d be out combing the woods looking for him are the same men who hunt in the winter and can track a deer better than most wolves could.”
He gritted his teeth. “I was just trying to be considerate.”
“And get me hanged for murder, that’s real considerate.” She turned to the sink and ran the water, splashing it around the basin with her hands.
“Fine. You do puke cleanup and I’ll do body cleanup. That’s fair.” He went to the living room and checked out the window before opening the door. The last thing he needed was to walk out with a corpse slung over his shoulder just to run into some smiling townsperson.
Oh, who was he kidding? There was nothing to smile about in this town.
He gave Jessa one last look before he left. She still stood at the kitchen sink, with the water running. Didn’t surprise him. There was a lot to process after an attempted murder.
Disposing of the body took longer than Graf had anticipated. Finding the spot to dump the guy wasn’t difficult, but Jessa had spooked him with her talk of CSI: Walton Mountain, so he did a little extra work. He bashed up the trees, and shredded Chad’s clothes a little. After crushing Chad’s torso to a pulp and obscuring the bite wound on this throat by decapitating him entirely, Graf felt pretty confident with his work and returned to the house.
Jessa wasn’t downstairs. Her bedroom door was closed. Graf went into his room and stripped off his bloody clothes, leaving them in a pile on the hardwood floor. In the morning, he would take them out and burn them. In the meantime, though he’d promised Jessa he wouldn’t mess with her parents’ stuff, he needed something to wear. He rifled through the drawers in the bureau and prayed her father had been approximately the same size as him. He’d just found a pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt that looked like they would fit when he heard a quiet, persistent noise like the sound of a television on in another part of the house. The springs of Jessa’s bed squeaked, momentarily covering the sound, and he realized what it was. She was crying, alone in her room.
He sat at the foot of the bed and listened. He should go in and ask her if she was okay. No, that didn’t seem right. Since when “should” he do anything? He was a vampire. Did a human ask a bowl of soup if it was okay before he ate it?
With a shock, he realized that he didn’t intend to eat Jessa. He didn’t know exactly when he’d crossed her off the menu, but she’d somehow moved into the strictly “do not kill” section of his brain. The thought of eating her was ridiculous; the thought of listening to her cry herself to sleep nauseated him.
He pulled on the clothes and walked to her room, tapping on the closed door softly. She didn’t answer. Was she intentionally ignoring him, waiting for him to go away, or did she just not hear? He knocked again, then pushed the door open.
Jessa lay on her bed, curled into a ball with her arms crushing a pillow to her face as she sobbed. She hadn’t wanted him to hear, still didn’t know he was in the room. He could back out and leave her there, and claim that the strain of the evening and the pot Chad had smoked before he’d consumed him were to blame for the momentary lapse in sanity that had caused him to think of her as something other than a possible victim.
But he’d already moved toward the bed, and any further argument would be futile. He sat beside Jessa and put one hand on her shoulder.
She startled and pulled the pillow away from her face. “What are you doing?”
The genuine fear in her face shot straight to Graf’s heart like a wooden stake. He couldn’t find the words to explain himself. “I’m…sorry?”
“What are you doing in here?” she repeated, sit ting up and drawing her knees to her chest.
“I wanted to check on you.” Why did caring about someone have to sound so lame out loud? “I heard you crying. Are you okay?”
“My ex-boyfriend sent his buddy over to kill me,” she reminded him.
“I k
now.” He leaned away from her, but his hands seemed determined to touch her, as though he could reassure her. “Do you know why?”
“Now that his wife is gone? No. Unless he’s gone completely crazy and managed to take Chad with him, I don’t know why he would ask Chad to do something like that. Or why Chad would agree.” Her face crumpled, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks.
“Hey, hey,” Graf said softly, the words painful as they left his throat. “I’m not going to let anybody hurt you.”
Confusion momentarily broke through her grief. “You threatened to kill me before.”
“Yeah,” he said helplessly. “That was before. It seems like there’s competition for the job now, and I’m not one to follow a trend.”
She laughed through her tears, then fell quiet, playing with the hem of her skirt. “So, are we friends now?”
Friends. He couldn’t remember a time when he described anyone that way. Not even when he was human and therefore supposedly normal. “Are you going to stop being mean to me?”
“I have to, don’t I? You saved my life. You could have let him kill me.”
He didn’t point out the obvious, that which they had already discussed—that he couldn’t have her showing up dead if he wanted to evade suspicion. He wished they had never had that conversation. He motioned to the head of the bed. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead,” she said uncertainly, and he swung his legs onto the bed, lying beside her. He pulled her down, and she lay easily at his side, her head propped on his shoulder.
“Are you wearing my father’s jammies?” she asked with a hitch of quiet laughter in her voice.
“Sorry. My clothes are destroyed. We’ll have to burn them tomorrow.” He looped his arm around her and stroked her hair. “Think of a good excuse to have a fire.”
She yawned and lay silent. He thought she was sleeping, until she said, “Why would Derek want to kill me? He doesn’t hate me. Becky does, but Derek…no matter what he says, he doesn’t hate me.”
Graf believed her. Derek had married Becky, but he had history with Jessa. A fucked-up history, from what he understood, but there was something between them that wouldn’t break. It made Graf strangely sorry for her, and sorry for himself. He’d never had that kind of connection with anyone. He’d thought it made him free. Maybe it just made him kind of pathetic.
Twelve
Jessa didn’t know what time Graf had left her room, but since she hadn’t woken to a pile of ashes in her bed, she’d figured he’d made it out before sunup. She had woken with a lot of unanswered questions in her head, though, and those needed taking care of before she could do anything else.
She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her forearm, but she didn’t stop walking. The day was beyond hot; it was downright hellish. Damn Becky for taking Graf’s car. There would have at least been air-conditioning in it. This was a mission Graf couldn’t be involved in, though, so she had to do it during the daylight hours.
Derek lived in a small house at the back of his in-laws’ farm. Once upon a time, it had housed Becky’s elderly grandfather, but when he passed, Derek and Becky moved their brood into it. A lot of families had done that in the last few years. Pulled together geographically to form their own little compounds. It made them feel safer, she guessed.
Jessa had never been inside Derek and Becky’s house. It had been easier for Derek to come to her, and there had been less risk of getting caught, in those early days when they’d still thought no one was onto them. From the outside, the house looked bleak. Derek was too busy running around with his buddies to keep the place up probably. The siding was dented and splashed with a long streak of roofing tar beneath where a sloppy patch job covered a hole in the roof. The screen over the storm door hung in a limp curl, and Jessa didn’t bother with the rust-stained doorbell. She opened the storm door and hissed as it first stuck, then released violently, bashing her shins with the sharp bottom edge. She hoped that thing about tetanus shots lasting sixty-five years was true.
“Derek?” she called, knocking on the rusted inside door. “Derek, you home?”
At her house, Derek always just barged in, and expected her to be okay with it, but she wasn’t sure if she should do the same at his place. For one, Becky lived there. She was missing now, but there was something just plain not right about “the other woman” walking into the family home. Another knock and a couple minutes of waiting made up her mind, and she tried the knob.
No one in Penance used to lock their doors. Nowadays, with the monster and the isolation and the mistrust that had grown between neighbors, people didn’t just lock up their houses, they fortified them. When the knob turned and the door swung inward, Jessa thanked God that Derek had never lost his teenager’s sense of immortality.
The inside of the house was dark. Sheets pressed into service as curtains kept most of the light out, a smart choice on such a hot day. Still, the dark and heat of the interior suffocated Jessa, and the stench of unwashed dishes and untended trash made her gag. This wasn’t a mess Derek had made before Becky had left. It was evidence that she’d checked out a long time before leaving.
Picking a path through strewn toys and unwashed cloth diapers, Jessa checked the living room and the bathroom. The children’s bedroom, with its dirty walls and dingy, bare mattresses on the floor, was likewise empty. The door to the master bedroom was closed, and Jessa knocked on it before she opened it to find it empty.
She’d told herself that she had come to interrogate Derek, to find out if he truly had sent Chad to kill her. But that would have been a bad plan, revealing that she had seen Chad, that there had been violence. When they found him, all fingers would have pointed her way, and who would have believed her?
Staring down at the rumpled sheets of the bed he’d shared with his wife, she realized she’d come here to prove to herself that he still cared for her, and that he would never have wanted to hurt her. But if that had been true, why would he have chosen this life, with Becky, and not her?
She brushed tears from her eyes and cursed her stupidity. Derek had so casually hurt her in the past, when she’d needed him to stay true to all the promises they had made each other. While she’d tried to put back together the pieces of her broken life, he’d grown tired of waiting. When she’d welcomed him back, he’d been unwilling to come to her—at least, not fully. He’d wanted her, but he’d wanted Becky more, and Jessa had let herself believe a lie.
From the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of black lying on the bed. A book. Did Derek keep a journal? It seemed unlikely, but she crawled over the mattress, pulling a black plastic three-ring binder from the tangled sheets. She flipped it over, a lump of dread in her throat at the thought it might be their wedding album. Then, she saw what had to be a devil symbol drawn in silver ink on the front—the circle around an inverted star—just like she’d seen warnings about all through her youth group years. Silly superstition yanked her hand back, but she forced herself to open the book. The heavy-metal loser kids in high school had carved the same lines into the desks and the devil had never materialized in English class, even if it had felt like hell. She flipped open the cover and the fleeting feeling of relief fell into the sinkhole of her stomach. There, with heart-dotted i and all, was Sarah Boniface’s name. It was on the bottom of every page.
It had been a mistake to come here. She turned away from the bedroom and started back down the hallway, the sound of footsteps in the living room jolting her into panic. She’d never been afraid of Derek before, but now as she stood clutching stolen property, she didn’t know how he would react. The footsteps came closer to the hallway. Those familiar footsteps, the sound of his breathing. She knew him so well, and not at all. Her heart hammered against her ribs. He didn’t know she was there. She could hide in the bathroom, and sneak out when he left. But if he found her there, how would she explain herself?
It was too late. He rounded the corner and looked at her with wide-eyed shock, and his gaze dropped to
the book in her hands. Then she knew. And he knew, as well.
With all of her might, Jessa rushed him and threw her shoulder into his midsection, keeping low and exploding up the way he had taught her when he’d been on the football team. Only now he wasn’t wearing pads and bracing for the force in a practice drill, and he stumbled back with a loud grunt, leaving her free to run for the door. A row of plastic ducks on a cord wrapped around her ankle, and she fell painfully to one knee as a chorus of quacks went up around her. The binder sprang from her hands and she grabbed for it, tucking it close to her chest with one arm. Derek grabbed at her shirt, and she twisted free, kicking the ducks away and lunging for the door. She opened it and slammed it hard into his face before sprinting through and into the overgrown lawn.
The hot air burned her lungs, and pain shot through her knee with every step, but Derek was strong, and she knew he would follow her, so she had to keep going. Heads of blackjacks thumped against her legs as she ran for the road. She crossed it, then cleared the ditch on the other side and plunged into the cornfield.
“Jessa,” Derek called behind her, his calm tone a put-on if she ever heard one. “Jessa, come on back, baby. I’m not gonna hurt you!”
Yes, you will, she pounded into her brain, to keep running. And strangely, she thought of Graf’s promise the night before: I’m not going to let anybody hurt you. She trusted him more than she trusted the man chasing her, and she forced her aching body to keep moving forward. Trapped between two tightly planted rows, she had no other choice but to move forward, pushing glossy green leaves aside so they wouldn’t slap her in the face.
At the end of the rows the ground rose up, and she stumbled, clutching at the tall grass to grope her way up the bank with one hand as she struggled to hold the binder with the other. Her shoes slipped on the soft dirt, and the plants she used as handholds lost their footing in the soil, so she clawed at the dirt, shoulders aching, until she reached the top. Just another few hundred feet, and she would be home safe. She raced across the blacktop for the dirt road—she wouldn’t go through the stand of trees and risk seeing Chad’s mutilated body, even if it was the difference between life and death. Her every instinct screamed to look over her shoulder, to see if Derek still followed, but that would be a mistake; she knew it in her heart. She would turn her head and see him, and that would be when she stumbled and he overtook her. She wouldn’t let that happen, not when she was this close to safety.
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