by Blake Pierce
Trudy had even said so …
“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”
Still, might Trudy be worried about Riley by now?
Riley certainly hadn’t gone to find her roommate again to notify her that she might stay out for the whole night.
She asked Ryan, “I’m sorry, but … I’ve got to make a phone call. Is it OK for me to use your phone?”
“Go right ahead,” Ryan said, pointing to the phone that was mounted on a nearby wall.
Riley went to it and dialed their dorm room number. She soon heard Trudy’s voice on the outgoing message. When she heard the beep she said, “Hey, Trudy, if you’re there, pick up.”
No one answered. Riley glanced at the clock and saw that it was still pretty early. It was also Saturday, and Trudy might well be fast asleep.
Or …
Riley smiled as she remembered Trudy’s doe-like eyes as she’d sat staring at Harry Rampling.
Maybe she got lucky too, she thought.
As much as Riley disliked the campus super jock, she knew that most other girls didn’t share her personal distaste for him. To a lot of them, he was a hero. How could she blame Trudy for being like those other college girls?
She said into the phone, “Well, in case you didn’t notice, I didn’t make it back to the room last night. And, uh, I’m fine.”
She almost added, “I guess we’ll need to compare notes.”
But she reminded herself that Ryan was right there within earshot, and it might be kind of a tacky thing for him to hear her say.
So she simply said, “I’ll see you soon. Bye.”
She hung up the phone and headed back over to the table. She gave Ryan a quick kiss on the forehead and sat down again to eat.
Ryan sat looking at her for a moment.
Then, a bit timidly, he said, “You were fantastic last night.”
Riley smiled back at him, again remembering their lovemaking.
Surely it went without saying that she felt the same way, but …
Say it, Riley, she thought.
After all, he might feel insecure.
“You were fantastic too,” she said. “I really mean that.”
She took a bite of food and added, “And breakfast … wow, this is great.”
The two of them didn’t talk as they devoured the food. But Riley felt that the silence was OK, not the least bit awkward. It was only natural that they’d both be a little shy after last night. The shyness would surely pass.
She was right about that. Before long, conversation started to flow easily between them. Ryan opened up about his working-class background and his hard work and ambitions, and Riley found herself admiring him more and more.
Riley told him the bare bones of her own life story, skipping most of the unpleasant parts. She mentioned that her mother had died when she was little, but not that her mother had been murdered right in front of her. Riley appreciated that he didn’t press her for details. He seemed to be aware that it was a painful topic for her.
She surprised herself by opening up to him about her rebellious teenage years. Soon both of them were laughing at her stories of those wild times. It hadn’t occurred to Riley that those stories were really quite funny, but they were—at least in hindsight, now that that turbulent part of her life was over.
It felt good to be able to laugh about all that at long last.
One topic that neither of them broached was Rhea’s death, and Riley was relieved about that. Everything else was so lovely that morning, she figured it would be a shame to spoil it by talking about how obsessed she’d been about the crime and the monster who had committed it.
Riley soon sensed that she and Ryan weren’t going to spend the whole day together. That was fine with her. It would have felt forced somehow, and she was just as glad for them to go their separate ways. She got dressed, and Ryan drove her back to the dorm. When he stopped the car, they looked at each other for a moment, and Riley found herself wondering …
Are we going to make plans for a “next time”?
She sensed that Ryan was wondering the same thing.
But she didn’t want to push the issue, and she could tell that he didn’t either.
Neither one of us wants to seem clingy, she thought.
And that seemed to her like a good thing. It boded well for whatever times they might share together later on.
She leaned over to Ryan and gave him a lingering kiss, then got out of the car and went into the dorm. As she walked down the hall toward her room, she again wondered about Trudy …
Did she come home last night?
If so, Trudy was going to want to hear all about Riley’s night.
And Riley suddenly felt oddly shy about the possibility of having to tell Trudy any details. What she and Ryan had shared together had seemed so effortless, warm, and pleasant …
Why spoil the memory by talking about it? she thought.
Riley pulled out her room key as she neared her door, but then she noticed …
The door was already open just a crack. Trudy must be home after all.
Riley hesitated there in the hallway. Her heart was pounding, and she found it hard to breathe.
She wondered where her feeling of alarm could be coming from.
This makes no sense, she told herself.
Still, Riley stood frozen for another long moment.
“Trudy?” she called through the door.
No answer came.
Riley pushed the door open.
When she saw the blood on the floor, her whole world seemed to disappear.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Riley sat very still. She was staring at an open doorway, watching uniformed people coming and going, crowding in and out with ghostly efficiency.
They must be making a lot of noise, she thought.
But she couldn’t hear it. Her brain must have been shutting out the noise.
Like so much else, she thought vaguely.
With a lot of effort, she realized that she was sitting on the edge of her own bed in her dorm room. Those people she could see were rushing in and out of her room.
She didn’t dare move her head or her eyes for fear of what else she’d see.
She felt as if her body were uninhabited—as if she herself wasn’t in it.
Where am I? she wondered.
If not here in her body, in her room, then where?
It was the weirdest feeling Riley could remember ever having.
Or was it?
She thought she’d felt just this way at one other time in her life, a long, long time ago.
But she couldn’t remember when that was. The truth was, she was having trouble remembering anything at all.
She kept reminding herself of her own name …
Riley. My name is Riley.
The numbness that gripped her whole body began to ebb a little, and she felt a terrible pain in her chest and head.
I’m not breathing, she realized.
Then she felt her lips silently shape the word …
“Good.”
She didn’t want to breathe.
Someone else wasn’t breathing anymore, and Riley had failed to make that person start breathing again, so she thought she shouldn’t be breathing either.
She had no business breathing. In fact, she wanted to stop everything else as well—especially time.
She wanted to freeze time, make everything stop moving, and then maybe she could find some way to turn time backward to …
When?
Before it had happened—whatever it was.
But the precious numbness that shielded her from reality was fading rapidly, and her chest hurt more and more, and her lungs were burning.
Finally her body betrayed her and she gasped for air.
She felt overcome with horror and guilt.
I failed, she thought. I breathed.
But she couldn’t stop the gasping and panting now, and she felt her self sliding unwillin
gly back into her body.
She heard somebody say, “Where are you wounded?”
Who said that? she wondered.
Then she realized—someone was prodding her body in different places.
It was a white-uniformed man crouching beside her.
“Where are you wounded?” he repeated.
Wounded? she thought.
She wasn’t wounded—or at least she didn’t think she was.
She clenched her fists as she tried to understand, quickly noticing how sticky her hands felt. She lifted up her hands and looked at them.
They were covered with blood.
But how?
Why?
Now she could hear all the noise in the room. There must be lots of people packed in there with her.
She started to turn her head to look around, but the man who had been prodding her grabbed her chin to stop her and said sharply but sympathetically, “No. You don’t want to do that.”
Then the man held her eyelids open and shined a light into her pupils.
“Can you tell me your name?” he said.
It now seemed like a lucky thing that she’d already gone to the trouble of remembering.
“Riley Sweeney,” she said.
Then the man asked other questions—about what day it was, what town they were in, who was the President of the United States …
It took some effort, but Riley managed to answer all the questions.
Then the man rose to his feet and called out to the others present, “I don’t think this one is injured. She’s in a bad state of shock, though.”
Riley was horrified to feel a spasm of laughter trying to make its way up through her windpipe.
Why?
Was anything funny about what was happening right now?
No, but she felt some kind of grotesque irony in the words that the man had just said …
“I don’t think this one is injured.”
She managed to push the laughter back down into her abdomen. As confused as she was, she knew she mustn’t laugh.
She looked at her hands again and wondered …
If I’m not injured, where did this blood come from?
Then memories started flooding back.
She remembered someone screaming—very loudly, for a long time.
It was me, she thought. I screamed.
The whole dorm must have heard her screaming.
Still screaming, she had crouched down by the bleeding body on the floor.
Whose body? she wondered. Mommy’s body?
Horror came crashing down on her like a tsunami.
It had been Trudy’s body.
She’d found Trudy’s body.
And Trudy hadn’t been bleeding from her chest like Mommy had, but out of a huge wound in her throat.
Riley’s screaming had waned and she’d tried to decide what to do.
Try to stop the bleeding?
No, even though blood had been everywhere, it hadn’t looked like Trudy was bleeding anymore.
Which had meant Trudy must be dead.
But Riley hadn’t been able to make herself believe that.
She’d yelled at Trudy and shaken her. She’d tried to perform CPR, pressing down on Trudy’s chest, but she’d had to stop when blood started to bubble from the wound again. Could she have done anything else?
There must have been something, she thought. I failed.
But all these people hadn’t been able to bring Trudy back either.
And how had they all gotten here?
Had she called 911?
No, she was sure she hadn’t. Somebody else had done that—somebody who had heard her screaming.
Once again, she almost turned her head to see Trudy’s body. But she managed to stop herself. The memory of what she had seen was already more horror than she could handle.
Now she noticed that lights were flashing in the room. She didn’t know what they might be.
She heard someone say to her, “Stand up, please.”
She numbly obeyed, and a male cop with a camera moved around her snapping pictures. The flash from the camera hurt her eyes.
But why was the cop taking pictures of her?
She looked down at her clothes, which were drenched with blood.
“This is wrong,” she whispered aloud. “I shouldn’t be breathing.”
A terrible sob burst out of her throat, and then another, and then another on top of that, until she was sobbing uncontrollably.
She felt a comforting hand on her shoulder. A woman was looking at her sympathetically. Riley recognized her right away. It was Officer Frisbie, the cop she had spoken with on the night of Rhea’s murder.
“Come on,” Frisbie said, taking Riley by the hand. “Let’s get you out of here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
As Officer Frisbie helped Riley up from the bed, Riley heard her call out something to one of the cops in the hall. It was a simple order of some sort, but at the moment it sounded like gibberish to Riley.
Riley did make out a woman’s sharp reply. “Do you think that’s a good idea? I mean, isn’t she—?”
“Don’t argue with me,” Frisbie snapped back. “Make it fast.”
Officer Frisbie took Riley gently by the arm and led her out of her room. The hallway seemed painfully bright, and Riley had to squint. She couldn’t actually feel her legs, but she knew they must be down there, obediently carrying her along. Still, she didn’t think she could rely on them, and she was glad that someone was supporting her.
Officer Frisbie led Riley into the bathroom and said, “Get out of those clothes, honey, and give them to me. We’re going to get you cleaned up.”
Obeying mechanically, Riley removed her clothes. She handed each piece to Officer Frisbie as she took it off.
Frisbie folded the garments carefully and put all of them into a large plastic bag.
Once she was naked, Riley felt strangely unsure of what to do next. Officer Frisbie gently tugged Riley over to a shower stall, turned on the water, and felt it until it seemed like a good temperature, then helped Riley step inside. Frisbie shut the frosted glass door behind her.
As the water sprayed over her Riley realized that she was sobbing—that she’d been sobbing since before she’d left her room, but hadn’t been aware of it. The comforting deluge settled her down and the sobs finally stopped.
It felt good to have pellets of hot water pounding her body.
But that also made her feel guilty again. What business did she have feeling good in any way? She shouldn’t even be breathing.
The shower stall was supplied with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo, so Riley began to scrub herself all over. The blood seemed to dissolve from her hands before reappearing on the tiled floor and vanishing down the drain.
Riley’s mind started to clear.
I really lost it for a while, she realized.
She wondered—why was that?
Several weeks ago, when she’d been the second person to see Rhea’s body, she’d managed to keep herself under control. She’d even had the presence of mind to keep other students from going into the room and messing up the crime scene.
This time, she’d completely fallen apart.
Of course she had … she had been closer to Trudy.
But why did she feel so guilty this time?
Then she remembered again what Trudy had said to her before they’d gone to the Centaur’s Den …
“Whatever you do, don’t leave without me.”
… to which Riley had replied …
“I promise.”
Riley shivered, despite the heat of the water.
Now she understood the difference—she hadn’t promised Rhea anything. But she’d broken her promise to Trudy. She should have kept that promise, no matter what, no matter how much Trudy protested, even if she’d had to drag Trudy away from that quarterback.
Instead …
A truly sickening realization began to come over her.
Possibly—just possibly—at the very moment when Trudy had been killed …
I was having sex with Ryan.
The thought made her shudder all over.
But this horror ran far too deep for tears. She knew she was going to be carrying this terrible guilt around for a long, long time. Maybe for the rest of her life.
When Riley finally turned off the water and stepped out of the shower stall, Officer Frisbie wasn’t there anymore.
Instead, she saw a smaller female cop, a young woman with a pinched and unsympathetic face. She was wearing a nameplate that said B. Danforth, and she was holding a towel and a small pile of clothes.
The woman handed Riley the towel and said in a disagreeably sharp voice, “Dry yourself and get dressed. I got these for you from your room.”
Riley remembered that back in her room, Officer Frisbie had called out some kind of an order to somebody who’d replied …
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
Now Riley understood.
Officer Frisbie had ordered this woman—Officer Danforth—to get a towel and clothes from Riley’s closet. Danforth apparently hadn’t much liked that idea, and judging from her expression, she still didn’t like it.
Riley dried off her body, then towel-dried her hair. She didn’t want to ask for Danforth to fetch a hairdryer from her room. Then she put on the clothes Danforth had brought—fresh underwear, jeans, a shirt, and sneakers.
Danforth led Riley back into the hall. Riley saw that cops were still clustered around her dorm room door, including Officer Frisbie. Another was Officer Steele, the overweight, unfriendly cop who had cut off her questions at the police station.
But Riley didn’t see any students anywhere.
Where was everybody?
Then she remembered that students had been ordered to stay in their rooms the night of Rhea’s murder. They must all be cowering in their rooms right now, wondering what was going on just outside. Riley almost envied them their temporary seclusion.
She herself had no chance to hide away as Danforth led her toward the cops.
As they approached, Officer Steele eyed Riley suspiciously. Frisbie looked up from the notes she’d been jotting down.
