As Good as Dead

by Holly Jackson

  Yes, that was it. Pip had reread it, her heart kicking up as she realized its relevance. How strange, that a throwaway detail back then could be so vital now. Almost like all of this had been inevitable, since the very beginning. A path Pip didn’t know she’d been following all along.

  Next, she’d researched where Green Scene Ltd. and Clean Scene Ltd. were based: a yard and office complex in Weston, near Devil’s Den Nature Preserve, about a twenty-five-minute drive from Fairview. She’d even visited, through Street View on Google Maps while she sat on her bed, virtually driving up and down the road outside. The complex was off a small country road, surrounded by tall trees, captured here on some past cloudy day. She couldn’t see much from the road, apart from a couple of industrial-looking buildings, parked cars and vans, all encased within a tall metal fence painted forest green. There was a sign on the front gate with the colorful logos for both sister companies. Up and down she’d gone, haunting the pixelated place like a ghost out of time. She could stare at it all she wanted, but it wouldn’t give her the answers she needed. There was only one place she’d get those. Not in Weston, but in Fairview.

  Right here, right now, in fact, as she glanced up and realized she’d almost arrived. And something else too. There was a woman walking toward her, a face she knew. Dawn Bell, Andie and Becca’s mom. She must have just left the house, an empty plastic bag swinging from her arm. Her dark blond hair was pulled back from her face and her hands were lost in the arms of her oversize sweater. She looked tired, too. Maybe that’s just what this town did to people?

  They were about to pass each other. Pip smiled and dipped her head, not knowing whether to say hello or not, or to tell her she was just about to knock on her door to speak to her husband. Dawn’s mouth flickered, as did her eyes, but she didn’t stop, looking instead at the sky while she slid her fingers beneath the gold chain of her necklace, fiddling the pendant back and forth so it caught the morning light. They passed each other and carried on. Pip checked over her shoulder as she went, and so did Dawn, their eyes meeting for one awkward moment.

  But the moment went out of Pip’s head as she reached her destination, staring up at the house, her eyes following the crooked roofline to each of its three chimneys. Old, stippled bricks overwhelmed by shivering ivy, and a chrome wind chime mounted beside the front door.

  The Bells’ house.

  Pip held her breath as she crossed the road toward the house, glancing at the green SUV parked in the drive, beside a smaller red car. Good, Jason must be here, then, not already on his way to work. There was a strange feeling at the base of her spine, uncanny and otherworldly, like she wasn’t really here, but in the body of herself from one year ago. Displaced, out of her own time, as everything came back full circle. Here, at the Bell house once more, because there was only one person who had the answers she needed.

  She rapped her knuckles against the glass on the front door.

  A shape emerged in the frosted glass, a blurred head, as a chain scraped against the front door and it was pulled open. Jason Bell stood in the threshold, buttoning the top of his shirt, smoothing down its creases.

  “Hi, Jason,” Pip said brightly, her smile feeling tight and rubbery. “Sorry to disturb your morning. H-how are you?”

  Jason blinked at her, registering who it was standing on his doorstep.

  “What, er, what do you want?” he asked, dropping his gaze to do up the buttons on his cuffs too, leaning against the doorframe.

  “I know you’re heading off to work,” Pip said, her voice jolting nervously. She fiddled her hands together, but that was a bad idea because they were sweating, and now she had to look down to check it wasn’t blood. “I, um, well, I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. About your company, Green Scene.”

  Jason ran his tongue over his teeth; Pip could see the bulge of it through the skin of his top lip. “What about it?” he said, eyes narrowing now.

  “About a couple of your ex-employees.” She swallowed. “One of those being Billy Karras.”

  Jason looked taken aback, his neck receding into his shirt. His mouth formed around his next words before he finally spoke them. “You mean the DT Killer?” he said. “Is that your next thing, is it? Your next cry for attention?”

  “Something like that,” she said with a fake smile.

  “I obviously have no comment on Billy Karras,” Jason said, something stirring at the corners of his mouth. “I’ve done everything I can to try to distance the company from the things he did.”

  “But they are intrinsically connected,” Pip countered. “The official narrative is that Billy got the duct tape and the blue rope from work.”

  “Listen to me,” Jason said, raising his hand, but Pip spoke over him before he could derail the conversation. She needed answers, whether he liked it or not.

  “Last year, I spoke to one of Becca’s friends from high school, Jess Walker, and she told me that on April eighteenth, 2014—the night Andie went missing—you and Dawn were at a dinner party. But you had to leave at some point because the security alarm was going off at Green Scene; you had an alert on your phone, I assume.”

  Jason stared blankly at her.

  “That was the very same night the DT Killer murdered his fifth and final victim, Tara Yates.” Pip didn’t stop to breathe. “So, I was wondering whether that was it: DT breaking into your offices to take the supplies and accidentally setting off the burglar alarm. Did you ever find out who it was? Did you see anyone there when you went to check it out and turn off the alarm? Do you have security cameras?”

  “I didn’t see…” Jason trailed off. He glanced up at the sky behind her for a moment, and when he looked back at her, his face had changed, angry lines arranging themselves around his eyes. He shook his head. “Listen to me,” he spat, “that is enough. Enough. I don’t know who you think you are, but this is unacceptable. You need to learn…Don’t you think you’ve interfered enough in people’s lives, in our lives?” he said, slapping one hand into his chest, wrinkling his shirt. “Both of my daughters are gone now. Reporters are back, lurking around my house, trying to get quotes for their stories. My second wife left me. I’m back in this town, in this house. You’ve done enough. More than enough, believe me.”

  “But, Jason, I—”

  “Never try to contact me again,” he said, gripping the edge of the door, his skin overstretched across the whites of his knuckles. “Or anyone in my family. That’s enough.”

  “But—”

  Jason closed the door on her. Not a slam—he did it slowly, his eyes holding Pip’s until the door broke them apart. Detached them. The click of the lock. But he was still there, standing at the door; Pip could see the shape of him through the frosted glass. She imagined she could feel the heat of his eyes on hers, though she couldn’t see them anymore. And still his outline hadn’t moved.

  He wanted her to leave first, to watch her walk away, she realized. And so she did, hoicking up the straps on her bronze backpack, her sneakers scraping on the front path.

  It might have been wishful thinking to have brought her microphones, her laptop, and her headphones. She should have expected that reaction, really, given what Hawkins had told her. She didn’t blame Jason; she wouldn’t be welcome on a lot of doorsteps in this town. But she really needed those answers. Who had set off the alarm at Green Scene Ltd. that night? Was it Billy, or was it someone else? Her heart was still going too fast, much too fast, and now the beat sounded to her like a timer, ticking down to its own end.

  Halfway down the road, Pip checked over her shoulder, looking back at the Bells’ house. Jason’s silhouette was still there, in the doorway. Did he really need to watch until she was out of sight? She got the message; she would never go back there. It had been a mistake.

  She rounded the corner onto Main Street and her phone started vibrating in her front pocket. Was it Ravi? H
e should be on the train at this time. She slid her hand into her jeans and pulled out the buzzing phone.

  No Caller ID.

  Pip stopped walking, stared at the screen. Another one. A second one. It might just be a robocall, but it wasn’t, she knew. But what should she do? She had only two options here: red button or green.

  She pressed green and held the phone up to her ear.

  The line was silent.

  “Hello?” she said, her voice coming out too strong, crackling at the edges. “Who is this?”

  Nothing.

  “DT?” she said, eyeing some children squabbling across the street, recognizing one from Josh’s soccer team. “Are you the DT Killer?”

  A sound. It might have been the car driving past her, or it might have been a breath in her ear.

  “Will you tell me who you are?” she said, scared she would drop the phone because her hands were suddenly slick with Stanley’s blood. “What do you want from me?”

  Pip stepped out into the road, into the crossing, holding her breath so she could hear his instead.

  “Do you know me?” she said. “Do I know you?”

  The line crackled and then it cut out. Three loud beeps in her ear, her heart spiking at each one. He was gone.

  Pip lowered the phone and stared down at it, two steps from the curb. The outside world blurred, disappeared for her as she stared at her empty lock screen, where he had just been moments ago. There was no mistaking who the calls were from now.

  Her against him.

  Save yourself to save yourself.

  Pip heard the crackling of the engine too late.

  The screaming wheels behind her.

  She didn’t need to see to know what was happening. But in that half second, instinct grabbed hold of her, launched her legs forward, reaching for the sidewalk.

  A screeching sound filled her ears and filled her bones and her teeth as the car swerved away from her. One foot landed and skidded out from under her.

  She crashed to her knee, catching herself with one elbow, the phone skittering out of her hand across the pavement.

  The screeching broke into a growl, fading as the car turned right and sped away, before she’d even had a chance to look up.

  “Oh my god, Pip!” called a bodiless, high-pitched voice somewhere in front of her.

  Pip blinked.

  Blood on her hands.

  Actual blood, from a scrape across her palm.

  She pushed herself up, one leg still jutted out onto the road, as a set of footsteps hurried toward her.

  “Oh my god.”

  A hand came out of nowhere, held in front of her.

  She looked up.

  Layla Mead. No, she blinked, not Layla, Layla hadn’t been real. It was Stella Chapman standing over her, Stella-from-school, her almond eyes downturned with concern.

  “Fuck, are you OK?” she said as Pip took her offered hand and let Stella pull her to her feet.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Pip said, wiping the blood off onto her jeans. This time it left a mark.

  “That dickhead wasn’t even looking,” Stella said, her voice still high and panicked as she bent down to scoop up Pip’s phone. “You were at the crossing, for fuck’s sake.”

  She placed the phone into Pip’s hand, remarkably unscratched.

  “Must have been going at least sixty.” Stella was still talking, too quickly for Pip to keep up. “On fucking Main Street. Sports cars think they own the damn road.” She ran her hand nervously through her long brown hair. “So close to hitting you.”

  Pip could still hear the screeching of the wheels, left behind as a ringing in her ears. Had she hit her head?

  “…going so fast I couldn’t even attempt to read the license plate. It was a white car, though, I could see that. Pip? Are you OK? Are you hurt? Should I call someone for you? Ravi?”

  Pip shook her head and the ringing in her ears faded. Turned out it was just in her head after all. “No, it’s OK. I’m fine. Really,” she said. “Thank you, Stella.”

  But as she looked at Stella, at her kind eyes and her tan skin and the lines of her cheekbones, she became someone else again. A new person but the same person. Layla Mead. The same as Stella in every way, except her brown hair was now a dusty, ashy blond. And when she spoke next, it was in Charlie Green’s voice.

  “How’ve you been, anyway? I haven’t seen you in months.”

  And Pip wanted to scream at Charlie and tell him about the gun he had left behind in her heart. Show him the blood on her hands. But she didn’t want to scream, actually. She wanted to cry and ask him to help her, help her understand everything, understand herself. Beg him to come back and show her how to be OK with who she was again. Tell her, in his calm, soothing voice, that maybe she was losing this fight because she was already lost.

  The person in front of her was now asking her when she was off to college. Pip asked the same question back, and they stood there on the street, talking carelessly about a future Pip wasn’t sure she’d have anymore. It wasn’t Charlie standing in front of her, talking about leaving home. And it wasn’t Layla Mead. It was Stella. Only Stella. But, even so, it was hard to look at Only Stella.

  “Another one?” Ravi didn’t move, the expression on his face held there like he was suspended in time, on that one patch of carpet. As though to move either way, forward or back, would confirm the thing he didn’t want to hear. If he didn’t move, it might not be real.

  He’d only just walked through her bedroom door; it was the first thing Pip had said to him. Don’t freak out but I got another blocked call today. She hadn’t wanted to text him earlier, distract him while he was working, but the waiting had been hard, the secret burrowing around under her skin, looking for its own way out.

  “Yeah, this morning,” she said, watching his face as it finally shifted, eyebrows climbing up his forehead, away from his glasses that he’d remembered again. “Didn’t say anything. Just breathing.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” He stepped forward, closing the gap between them. “And what happened to your hand?”

  “I’m telling you now,” she said, running a finger down his wrist. “And nothing, really. Car nearly hit me as I was crossing the road. It’s fine, it’s just a scrape. But, look, this call is a good thing because—”

  “Oh, it’s good, is it? Getting calls from a potential serial killer. Good. Well, that’s a relief,” Ravi said, hand raised to theatrically mop his brow.

  “Can you listen?” she said, rolling her eyes. Such a drama queen when he wanted to be. “It’s good because I’ve spent all afternoon looking this up. And look, see. I’ve downloaded this app.” Pip held up her home screen to show him. “It’s called CallTrapper. And what it does is, once you’ve activated it—which I now have—and paid the frickin’ six dollar subscription fee, when you get a call from a blocked number, it will unmask it. So you know the number that’s calling you.” She smiled up at him, hooked her finger onto his belt loop, like he always did to her. “I should have installed it after the first call, really, but I wasn’t sure what it was at the time. Thought it might have been a random butt dial. Never mind, I have it now. And next time he calls me, I’ll have his phone number.” She was being too cheery, she could tell. Overcompensating.

  Ravi nodded, and his eyebrows climbed back down just a little. “There’s an app for everything these days,” he said. “Great, now I sound like my dad.”

  “Look, I’ll show you how it works. Call me with star-six-seven at the front to block your number.”

  “OK.” She watched Ravi pull out his phone and tap away at the screen. It was sudden and unexpected, the feeling that stirred in her chest, watching him. A feeling that dawdled there, took its sweet time. A slow burn. It was just an unexpected nice thing, to know that he knew her number by heart. That some par
ts of her lived inside him too. Team Ravi and Pip.

  He would look for her if she disappeared, wouldn’t he? He might even find her.

  The feeling was interrupted by her phone buzzing in her hands. No Caller ID. She held it up to show Ravi.

  “So what I do is, I press this button twice to decline the call,” she said, demonstrating. Her phone returned to its lock screen, but only for half a second before it lit up with another call. And this time, Ravi’s phone number scrolled along the top. “See, it diverts it to CallTrapper, where the number is unmasked and then they redirect the call back to me. And the caller has no idea on their end,” she said, pressing the red button.

  “Can’t believe you just hung up on me.”

  She put down her phone. “See, I have technology on my side now.”

  Her first victory in the game, but not one to linger over: she was already way behind.

  “OK, I’m not going to go as far as to say that that’s good,” Ravi said. “Not referring to anything as good after reading Billy’s police interview and realizing that a serial killer the whole world thinks has been locked up for six years might actually be hanging around, threatening to brutally murder my girlfriend, but it’s something.” He wandered over to her bed, sat down inelegantly on the comforter. “What I don’t get, really, is how this person has your phone number.”

  “Everyone has my phone number.”

  “I damn well hope not,” he replied quickly, appalled.

  “No, I mean, from the posters.” She couldn’t help but laugh at his face. “We put up missing posters for Jamie all over town with my phone number on them. Anyone in Fairview could have my phone number. Anyone.”

  “Oh right,” he said, chewing his lip. “We weren’t thinking about future stalkers slash serial killers at the time, were we?”

  “Hadn’t crossed our minds.”

  Ravi sighed, dropped his face into his cupped hands.