It Ends With Her

by Brianna Labuskes

  Once she flew through the first switchback of the descent, her mind began to probe her relationship again.

  The thing was, she’d always thought she’d have known better.

  Her mother’s life had been a long parade of failed relationships, and Bess had vowed never to lose herself like that in someone else, to give up her identity, her thoughts, her passions, for something as fleeting as lust cleverly disguised as love.

  Once upon a time, Melissa had been a wide-eyed romantic, and then Bess suspected that her father had happened. There had always been something about the way her mother’s voice cracked along the edges when he was mentioned, even in the abstract, that turned her wary. She’d never pushed for any information on him, never found out if he was the drug addict who had routinely stolen from her mother, the married guy whom her mother still kept a picture of hidden under her pillow, or the one who’d rearranged her mother’s pretty little nose so that it bent to the left now.

  Whoever it had been that Bess could technically call father didn’t matter. What mattered was he was the first in a long string of lessons that Bess should have learned from.

  To her credit, Melissa tried. She tried to provide Bess with a life that didn’t revolve around the shitty men who traipsed through their tiny apartment.

  She’d filled Bess’s brain with writing from feminists such as bell hooks and Gloria Steinem, propped her on her shoulders at rallies for local female politicians, and had her watch every horrible domestic violence PSA-type video there was, the ones filled with shadows and bruises and melodramatic tears. Bess had judged the women in them. Both the actresses and the characters they’d played.

  Now it was her reality. Well, that, but without the bad lighting and cheesy dialogue.

  And didn’t that blow.

  It hadn’t always been like this. The start had been sweet enough. Textbook, probably.

  He’d been the first guy to really pay her any attention. To tell her she was pretty. She’d sunk into it, like a cloyingly warm bath that left you burned if you stayed in too long but felt like golden silk at first.

  The flare-ups had scared her, but she’d been lulled with soft pets and affectionate words, and the warning bells had been quieted. The first serious red flag had come when she’d ended up Jason DeSantos’s beer-cup partner, a stand-in for a girlfriend who had run to the bathroom. Bess’d sunk a beauty of a shot on her first try, and they’d celebrated her beginner’s luck with an impetuous hug. Jason paid for it with a sucker punch from Jeremy, who had then gripped her wrist with a hand bleeding from the knuckles and dragged her from the party.

  The scariest part had been that he hadn’t even said anything. Jason was sprawled on the floor, and Jeremy didn’t even acknowledge what had just happened. They had never talked about it, because she’d let it go.

  She picked up speed as she hit the flat stretch, letting her legs fly beneath her. The trees rose up around her, sentries guarding her as she ran. It was peaceful in their shadows.

  What had proved even more insidious than the outright violence was the emotional abuse. He tested the waters with it. Tested to see how much she’d put up with. Little jabs and digs at first. The put-downs that were so neatly and precisely dressed as concern. But even when she knew it was happening, it didn’t stop her from internalizing it. From accepting it as truth, as the water scalded her degree by degree until she was so used to it she didn’t feel the blisters covering her skin.

  Suddenly there was no ground beneath her feet. She was on all fours, with sharp pain radiating in throbbing circles from a point just below her kneecap.

  The world had shifted so quickly that nothing made sense. Her brain scrambled to process what had happened, and that’s when she noticed the rogue root behind her. She shifted slowly to her butt and brushed at the little pebbles that had dug into the soft flesh of her palms.

  A thin line of red snaked its way down her shinbone, and she cursed the razor-edged rock that mocked her from its home beside her knee. She swiped at the blood, but there wasn’t much to do about it now.

  So she stood, shook out the muscles that had gone stiff from her prone position, and started toward town once more, at a more sedate pace.

  She walked until she got to the intersection where her road and Main Street crossed, then hooked a left. The town had sort of a gray pallor that clung to the facades of the businesses and to the faces of the permanent residents. Tony’s Pizza, closed down and boarded up, marked the start of the nonresidential section of Main Street. A caricature of Tony, fat-faced and rosy-cheeked, gave her a thumbs-up from the sign that was missing one of its z’s.

  She swung into the little pharmacy/grocery/catchall general store, heading for the water section. It was only when she had a bottle firmly in hand that she realized she’d forgotten to stash a few dollars in her belt, like she normally did before a run.

  Licking her lips, she couldn’t tear her eyes from the water in her hand.

  “Miss, are you all right?”

  Bess swiveled toward the voice, knowing she must have looked a little rough for wear, with the blood and the sweat and just enough of a “Shit, shit” expression on her face to make a truly delightful sight for any passerby.

  But she smiled at the man, a polite tug of lips upward that she had learned would keep Jeremy from making wild accusations about her flirting but satisfied her own deeply entrenched manners. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  With great reluctance, she put the water back and turned to head toward the door.

  “Oh, wait, don’t you want that?” the man called after her.

  “It’s okay, I changed my mind,” she said, waving a hand.

  He just raised an eyebrow, tossing his red Gatorade from hand to hand as he watched her.

  She laughed, knowing she was busted. “Actually, I forgot my cash. But I’m okay, really. I’m not staying far from town. I can make it until I get back.” She turned, starting down the row of cake-mix boxes and yellow bags of chocolate chips.

  “Uh-uh,” he said, and she stopped again, wishing she weren’t so thirsty. He was shaking his head at her. “You are not running back in this humidity without some water. My mother would knock me senseless if I let you do that.”

  He reached into the cooler, nabbing her an even bigger bottle than the one she’d pulled out, and walked over to her. She took the already-sweating plastic, trying not to snatch it too eagerly. Relying on strangers made her uncomfortable, but what was ninety-nine cents, really?

  “Thank you,” she said, a bit embarrassed but mostly grateful.

  She actually looked at him this time. He wasn’t much older than she was, maybe early thirties, with shaggy brown hair that fell over deep brown eyes. Slender, but not thin, with enough muscle to add some power to his frame. The bones in his face were delicate, but it all added to his mysterious look. He had an old-world-vampire air about him, and she almost giggled at the thought. Too much Buffy fan fiction for her, apparently.

  He was attractive, she realized with a start. When she’d first seen him, he’d blended in with the background, just another vague, average white man. But up close, when he smiled down at her, she felt a little tingle of awareness.

  “And maybe a Band-Aid, too.” His eyes had slipped from her face down to her knee, where the blood had started to pool on the edge of her sock.

  “Oh no, no, I couldn’t . . .” But she was talking to his back as he swung into the pharmacy aisle, and he emerged a few seconds later with a little white box. He motioned for her to join him on his way to the register.

  “It’s nothing. Really,” he said, and she wondered if she noticed the slightest Southern drawl in the way he dragged out “really.”

  “Thank you.” She shifted, her fingers tugging at the hem of her shirt as he tossed a few bills on the counter, waving off the cashier’s offer of a plastic bag.

  “Come on,” he said, his hand a gentle push on the middle of her back. She grimaced at the idea of him having to touch her
sweat, but he didn’t seem to mind. And she felt compelled to follow him.

  There was a bench just outside the doors, its green paint chipping into large flakes that fell to the ground around it. He nudged her to sit down, then ripped into the box, which it turned out was a little first-aid traveling kit.

  “You’re visiting around here?” he asked as he tore into the foil package of the antiseptic wipe.

  “Yes, staying at a house on Brown’s Lake.”

  He met her eyes. “That’s about six miles up at the closest, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “I like running.”

  He smiled at her, then lifted her calf, his long, pale fingers wrapping around the muscle, to bring her leg up to rest on his. Then, using the wipe, he dabbed at the cut, which was mostly scabbed over at this point.

  A few stray pebbles had to be brushed from the wound before he swiped at the dried smears on her leg. She was thankful she’d shaved that morning.

  “Do you live here?” she asked, remembering to pick up the conversation. She’d been so conditioned to avoid talking to strange men she sometimes forgot the proper protocol.

  “Passing through,” he said, laying a Band-Aid over the newly disinfected cut before releasing her leg. “There, good as new.” He stood up to toss the remnants of the little package into the trash and then returned to her, holding out a hand to help her up. She took it even though she didn’t need it.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Where would we be in this cold, hard world if we couldn’t rely on the kindness of strangers?”

  They stood smiling at each other over his slightly butchered reference, until she felt it turn awkward. She sighed. It was past time to head back anyway.

  “Okay, bye,” she said, brushing past him to get to the sidewalk. But then she stopped. And turned. “Oh, I’m Bess, by the way. I don’t think I got your name?”

  He smiled at her, and at this distance he was back to being a nondescript white dude. “Simon. My name is Simon.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CLARKE

  July 14, 2018

  The wispy white clouds that marshmallowed the sky below the plane matched the fuzziness in Clarke’s head. If she could just trace her fingertips through the bits of fluff, dip the palms of her hands into them, maybe the buzzing that hovered at the edge of her hearing would subside.

  This was her life now. Plane rides. Hotel rooms. Long car trips that just led to more pictures that led to more long car trips that led to more hotel rooms that led to more planes. Would it end? Would it ever end?

  In her head was Sam’s quiet voice telling her yes. But too much time staring at marshmallow clouds had let the bastard slip under her defenses. Even after she’d built up her walls brick by brick, he’d still found a way in.

  Her next breath met a solid wall of resistance as she tried to pull it into her lungs.

  Moments later she was bent at the waist, her fingers pressed into the crease in her arm, to seek comfort from the ink that lay below the fabric of her coat.

  “I’m a nervous flier, too, dear,” the woman next to her said, patting Clarke’s shoulder blades with a pudgy hand. “Do you know what does the trick?”

  Clarke’s mouth was sandpaper, and the words she tried to say caught in the roughness of it. She just shook her head instead.

  She leaned closer so she could whisper to Clarke. “Pot.”

  The surprise of the answer was enough to reset Clarke’s erratic synapses.

  She laid sweaty palms on her jeans so she could push back up into a seated position, just as the plane nosed downward, and offered the woman a weak smile. “I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”

  “First time flying?”

  “Uh, no. But gets me every time.” Clarke waved toward the window as if it were their descent that had her stomach trying to eat itself and not the absolute soul-sucking futility of putting one metaphorical foot in front of the other in the never-ending shit parade her life had become.

  The woman nodded and patted her again, this time on her forearm. “My son is like that, too . . .”

  And Clarke let herself tune out as Mrs. Claus tried to matchmake her with the very eligible, handsome, smart, wealthy doctor—“Can you believe he’s single?”

  While she pretended to listen to a barrage of the son’s many and varied hobbies, she palmed the phone in her pocket, the silver one.

  She never had to dig deep in her memory for the taunting voice that had been on the other end. It had just been more of the same, the words. The ones that were dripping with false affection on the back of the postcards and pictures he sent.

  “Did you miss me?”

  The way his tongue slid over vowels, though, made it different, so different from just reading them.

  It made her itchy. Made her want to pick at the scars on her legs with jagged fingernails, until they opened up and let the pain seep out as the relief created champagne bubbles in her blood.

  But that was her being selfish again. The want—the need—to chase the high instead of focusing on finding the girl was temptation at its hardest to resist.

  There were promises to keep, and a bullet with the bastard’s name on it, and if she was going to be itchy for something, it would be to help that slick piece of metal find its home.

  The countdown, the one that reset with each photo, had started. It stayed with her always, a constant reminder of each second slipping into the next. The game was on, and the only chance they had at winning was to beat that clock.

  A part of her realized how addictive it was. The chase, the excitement, the rush that came from outwitting the bastard.

  They always had ten days for the first clue, the one that was mailed to headquarters. But it was a sticky, sweet sickness in her gut that made her want to figure it out in nine—in eight, if she could. As if it would prove something to him.

  The first clues were the hardest anyway. A snapshot of a barren landscape or even a quick, shared moment caught in time. He knew it would take them longer, and it always did. The next one would be easier. They’d have nine days to figure it out. It was beautiful in its simplicity, really. A countdown they could never seem to beat. It kept them moving; it kept them on the defense; it kept them always searching desperately for a hint of the next location in a cryptic photograph instead of searching for the man behind them, the man holding the puppet strings.

  And the punishment if they became distracted was swift and merciless.

  They learned that with Eve McDaniel. The second girl. It was after Sam hopped on a plane to Florida to drag her into the case.

  There had been nothing to even do for months. But then Eve’s picture ended up on Clarke’s desk, mailed without a return address. The girl’s face was narrow, like a fox, her nose sharp and her eyes green. Her hair was auburn and cut into a short bob that slid just beneath her chin. Della had found her easily. A grad student at Northwestern, studying political science. She’d been missing since a week after Sam arrived at Clarke’s apartment in Florida.

  Clarke had gotten cocky in those early days. She thought she could challenge Cross. Hadn’t realized that if she played by his rules, the girls were kept alive long enough for her to have a shot at finding them. If she didn’t . . . Well. It had been too late by the time she realized he wasn’t bluffing, and she paid for her defiance with Eve McDaniel’s life. With at least a week left in the game before the final deadline, local police, through an anonymous tip, had found Eve’s body in a hotel on the outskirts of Detroit. There had been a note pinned to her chest.

  Naughty girls who break the rules don’t get to play. Simon

  When Clarke couldn’t sleep at night, she’d run over the details of each case, wondering where they could have been faster, could have been smarter. And then when the sun crept through the curtains and she still had no answers, she simply said their names.

  Lila Teasdale. Eve McDaniel. Charlotte Collins.

  And
now Anna Meyers.

  When their names stopped being enough, she studied their pictures. The ones in which they still had sly smiles and bright eyes. And red hair. Always with the red hair.

  It would be over soon, though. Patterns could be infuriating when they trapped you in their labyrinthine walls, but they also offered a sort of solace that made it almost bearable. She had to hold herself together for only a week. That was it. One week. The promise of that, the promise of not needing to be strong forever, the promise of not having to keep the molecules that made up the gossamer web of restraint from flying off into the ether—well, that was something to hold on to. She could handle one week.

  The minute the wheels hit the tarmac, she turned the little silver phone on. She didn’t like having it off.

  It vibrated and went still as she switched airplane mode off on her own phone.

  Then it beeped with an incoming text.

  Play nice, Clarke.

  She smiled, and she didn’t need to see the way her lips stretched to know it was a bit feral as she pictured him huddled over grainy security footage of her in Gary’s. Obtaining it from the CCTV camera would have been as easy as sliding a twenty across that cheap laminate countertop, and it would have been quite the prize for him. She imagined his eyes flicking over her shadowed profile, desperate to see his puppets dance. He must not have liked her flipping him off.

  Perhaps she could get under his skin, too.

  “Did you sleep at all?” Sam asked, not bothering to look up when Clarke walked into what she liked to think of as Sam’s Command Central with two large cups of black coffee. It was one of the nicer offices in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, which, to the dismay of far too many FBI recruits, tended to have more of a paper-company vibe than the high-tech labs they’d imagined in training.

  But Command Central was one of the exceptions. Monitors lined the wall in front of them, and fancy, sleek computers, which she liked to avoid touching, perched on the desks. Clocks marking the time in different parts of the world hung around the room, and there was always low chatter coming from one of many police scanners Della had rigged up. It felt like home.