The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  When I reach for my water glass for the tenth time, trying to keep the food from sticking in my throat, I catch her staring at me. My mom never asks me what’s wrong—I just see my pain reflected on her face. When I was little, she used to cry whenever I skinned my knee or got a splinter, and after a while I learned to put on a tough act so I didn’t have to see her fall apart.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” I say. “Just a little stressed. You know. Finals. College plans.”

  She makes a pshaw gesture. “You’ll get in.”

  “To UVM—sure.” I consider broaching the subject of applying to schools with better film-production programs, maybe even out of state. But this is no time for that conversation.

  Instead I ask, “If you know about a crime after the fact and you don’t say anything, do you think that makes you an accomplice?”

  She flinches, probably thinking Rye’s made some nasty confession to me, and I add quickly, “This has nothing to do with anyone you know. It’s something in a book we’re reading for school.”

  Mom relaxes. She doesn’t wear makeup, and her cheeks are raw from the winter; sometimes it hurts me how pretty and fragile she looks. “Legally, I think that does make you an accomplice.”

  “If you knew I killed somebody, would you tell?”

  She grins at me and spoons up soup. “Never. To my grave.”

  “Aw, stop it. You would.”

  “That’s why I’m glad I know you’ll never kill anybody, Warren.”

  I narrow my eyes and try to look villainous. “Can you be sure? How well do you really know me?”

  She meets me with a smile as trusting as a first grader’s. “Some people I might have doubts about. But not you.”

  When I check my mail that night, there’s a message waiting from the New Mexico PI I paid to trace the Sequoia’s plate. My heart pounds as I open it, though I tell myself this doesn’t mean anything. For all I know, the guy we chased was a random innocent.

  The Sequoia is registered to Dylan Patrick Shadwell. He’s twenty-three—will be twenty-four on August third. He lives at 7348 Piedmont Drive NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico. My own quick search reveals a Facebook account for friends only, a bunch of listings and five-star ratings for his custom furniture-making business, and a Twitter account he doesn’t use.

  His profile pictures show an outdoorsy type, facing away from the camera toward a mountain vista. As far as I can tell, his record is clean.

  On Saturday, they find the Gustafssons’ Hyundai.

  It was parked behind a defunct auto-parts store in a gravel lot with no security-camera coverage. The police are combing it for evidence, the TV reporters say.

  I almost call Nina a few times. I can’t stop thinking about her saying she knew the killer “in a way,” and then not denying it when I asked if she knew him online.

  There are chat rooms where you can connect with sickos, and it’s not that hard to stumble in by mistake. She could’ve been looking for a discussion of Nick Cave or H. P. Lovecraft, and boom, she’s talking to a psycho.

  Things like that have happened. Charles Manson built a cult of pretty young women, and he didn’t even have the Internet.

  I can’t exactly see Nina as a Manson groupie, but now this idea’s in my head, I can’t get rid of it, either. So on Sunday evening, after a short and nasty struggle with myself, I hack her e-mail.

  It’s way too easy—her password is her birthday and her cat’s name, just like it was in eighth grade.

  Her in-box is full of messages from the school, her mom, Kirby Blessing, iTunes, and me. A few things from girls I don’t know, but no IMs from sinister strangers, and certainly nothing from Dylan Shadwell.

  In fact, only one message catches my eye. RE: Staying at Hacienda Zamora.

  If Hacienda Zamora is a hotel, it’s nowhere around here. I click.

  Dear Ms. Barrows: We understand your concerns about finding safe lodging for your daughter. Rooms at Hacienda Zamora are key-card-locked, and front-desk personnel are on duty 24/7. We would need from you a letter attesting to your taking full financial responsibility for your daughter during her stay with us….

  I skim down to the quoted text. Nina wrote to this place pretending to be her mom: I am considering booking a room for my seventeen-year-old daughter this June….She must have wanted to make sure the hotel wouldn’t turn her away when they saw she wasn’t of age.

  Except Hacienda Zamora isn’t a hotel; it’s a bed-and-breakfast, specializing in weddings. And it’s located twenty minutes north of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  When I ambush Nina at her locker again on Monday, after the last bell, she doesn’t even try to get away. She just lowers her head and asks, “Want to go outside?”

  We sit on a rotting log behind a clump of cedars. The girls’ track team is pounding around the soccer field in their shorts and sweatshirts, and I hear a couple of them griping because the soggy ground is ruining their shoes.

  I’ll start slow—not mention that I know she might be planning some kind of crazy trip to New Mexico.

  Nina says, “I wish I had a smoke. That’s what people do out here.”

  “You don’t smoke.”

  She gives me a look, like How well do you know me? “Actually, I have.”

  “Well, I don’t.” And then, awkwardly, I say, “We need to talk.”

  “I wish you’d forget I ever told you anything. That was just me being weird.” Nina shakes her head. She’s wearing a turquoise pullover with ribbon around the neck, and her own neck looks fragile, like someone could come along and snap it.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, ‘weird’ is definitely a word for it. But Nina, I can’t forget. You know stuff you shouldn’t—I mean, unless—”

  “Unless I had something to do with it.” She laughs, short and brittle.

  You don’t. Please convince me you don’t. “Those people could still be alive,” I blurt out before I can stop myself. “You could be the one to save them.”

  “They’re not alive.”

  “How do you know?” I lean toward her, but she’s staring at mushed-down dead leaves. She seems way too sure about the Gustafssons.

  And how can anyone be sure except the person who took them? The idea makes the world go gray and tilt, like I’m going to be sick, bile pressing itself up into my throat.

  It’s an effort for me to look at her, and maybe an effort for her to look back. I can tell she’s clenching her jaw so her lip doesn’t quiver.

  I fight the nausea. “The Gustafssons were, like, sixty, Nina. Were. Are. They couldn’t fight back.”

  “Stop it,” she says in a low voice. “Stop it.”

  “Do you know what happened to them?”

  She nods, and her face starts to crumple as she fans dead leaves with her left Converse. Above our heads, the golden-green maples are leafing out. The sky is baby blue, and the air feels sticky.

  “They found the Hyundai,” I say—feeding her scraps of info to get her to spill, detective-style. “Will they find anything in it?”

  “I don’t know.” After a minute, she adds, “Probably not. He’s careful.”

  “Who’s he? The guy in the Sequoia?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have proof it’s him.”

  “No e-mails, chats, nothing like that?”

  “No.”

  Mating birds warble like crazy in the trees. Clumps of tightly curled, emerald-green fiddleheads pock the forest floor. The world is too spring-feverish for this conversation.

  Nina takes a deep breath. “I think they’re in garbage bags, under some junk, in an abandoned cabin in the woods. The Gustafssons, I mean.” She glances up, and the golden light turns her face sickly yellow. “I don’t think they’re in one piece.”

  I shiver. Please let that not be true, even if it means she is crazy. No one deserves that.

  “You could tell the police. Do it anonymously. Just so, you know, the Gustafssons’ family would know what happened to them.”

  “Maybe,�
� Nina says, in a closed way that tells me she’s already considered this and ruled it out. Because an anonymous tip might be traced back to her? Because she doesn’t want the killer to be caught? Because she doesn’t really know anything?

  “What do you know about him? You know—the guy?” My hand dips discreetly into my backpack for the crappy tablet I borrowed from Rye. “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know.” Lip caught between her teeth. “Well, okay, yes. I know his name. It’s—Shadwell. Dylan.”

  My heart pounds against my army jacket. “You know where he lives?”

  “Albuquerque.”

  The biggest city in New Mexico—an easy guess.

  She goes on, “I know his house number starts with a seven, but not the rest of it or the street.”

  I’m suddenly drenched with sweat under my jacket. I would make the world’s worst detective.

  “Can you describe the house?” I almost whisper.

  Nina gives me a hard look. “Why? It won’t prove anything.”

  “Please.”

  “Okay.” Nina closes her eyes, like darkness helps her remember. “It’s Spanish-style, two floors, small. White stucco with red tiles. There’s a front porch with a juniper bush next to it, and the yard is just rocks except for a strip of shrubs.”

  “Xeriscaped,” I say. “Because it’s so dry there.”

  “Whatever. There’s a little window high up, in the living room, that’s shaped like a flower.” She opens her eyes. “Is that enough?”

  Sweat drips down my nose, and I brush it away as I swipe the tablet. The image from Google Street View is loaded and ready.

  I wouldn’t have called the window a flower. To me it’s more like an amoeba, or just a random-shaped ornamental window.

  Everything else is the way she described it. I brought the tablet so we could both see the details.

  Nina snatches the tablet from me, shaking so hard she almost drops it. “I’ve never seen it before twilight,” she says. “In the sun. Like this.”

  I expect her to ask how I got the address, or why I didn’t show it to her right away. But she just keeps staring, her face two inches from the screen, like I’ve disappeared into thin air. Like nothing exists anymore but her and that house.

  “So you’ve seen his house,” I say finally. “Nina, is this Shadwell guy, like, related to you? Or a friend of your mom’s? Have you seen him do bad shit before?”

  She puts down the tablet and gazes into the distance. “I have. But it’s not like you think. And I can’t explain.”

  “Try me.”

  “It won’t help.” A softness flits over her face, like she’s considering telling me. Then her jaw stiffens again. “Even if you believed me, it wouldn’t change anything. They’re gone.”

  And now I play my last card. “Would it change anything,” I ask, “if your mom knew you were planning a trip to New Mexico?”

  Two seconds ago, Nina was acting like she’d lost the will to live. Now I’ve never seen her so alive with anger. Two pink spots appear on her cheeks, and her eyes go wide, fixed on me. My pulse races and pleasure centers click on in my brain, until I realize what I’m seeing is her excited about hating my guts.

  “How do you know? What did you do?” And then, in a lower voice, she says, “I know I brought you into this mess, but why can’t you just stop?”

  “Because you did bring me into it. And now I’m here.” I clear my throat—then, gingerly, reach out to touch her hand where it grips the log. She shudders but doesn’t pull away.

  “Whatever you tell me,” I say, “you can trust me not to tell anybody else.”

  Part of me knew I’d never make that call to her mom.

  She shudders again—then, to my surprise, opens her hand and clasps mine. Her palm is clammy, but her fingers feel wiry-strong. “You’re going to think I’m crazy. Crazier.”

  I repeat, “Try me.”

  I don’t know Dylan Shadwell. He doesn’t know me.

  But he’s with me every night as I drift off to sleep. Always has been, as far back as I can remember.

  Maybe it’s better to say I’m with him, dreaming my way into his life. I can’t try to stop him, only watch what happens through his eyes, and hear it through his ears, and taste it with his tongue, and feel it through his skin.

  It starts with shifting, pulsing pictures as my thoughts fray into unconsciousness. I fall out of myself—can’t stop it—and now I’m looking through a hole in a frosted-glass window. Everything he thinks and experiences in the present moment is sharp-edged and vivid; the rest bleeds and blurs in the background. I know his hopes and fears only when they crowd their way into the now.

  He’s been with me so long, it took me years to realize I was the only girl who closed her eyes and saw pieces of a life that wasn’t hers.

  And he wasn’t always like this.

  My first memory of him is also my first memory of me.

  I’m four, staring at my night-light, a strangely terrifying white bunny chomping a plastic carrot. Pink eyes leer through the dark, ready to swell to monster size when mine close. Mommy’s room is just a few steps down the hall, but she says big girls don’t run from what scares them.

  Instead of running, I pray: Let me close my eyes and wake up with Mommy.

  My prayer is half answered. I close my eyes and wake up somewhere else.

  The bunny-light is gone. It’s daytime.

  I’m gazing down at a mean-looking, red-striped turtle sitting on a rock, enclosed in a glittery glass box. Every detail is perfect, yet I know I’m not here. I can’t control my body, only watch it do things.

  I reach into the box with a hand that’s bigger and browner than my real hand, a hand with scars and blunt, bitten nails. A boy’s hand. I feel the pinch of cold raw hamburger between my fingers as I set it in the turtle’s bowl.

  This is my hand, only I am somebody else. A boy. Somebody who doesn’t run from what scares him.

  The turtle lashes its flexible neck to snatch the meat. Its eyes are dead. The boy who is me yanks his hand back, and we feel a rush of excitement—that turtle could take my finger off. The turtle is a hundred times scarier than my bunny night-light, yet I’m no longer afraid.

  A chuckle rises in my throat. A deep boy’s chuckle. Then come thoughts:

  Turtles can live fifty years. T. Rex will outlive me if I die when I’m thirty-four like Dad did. Turtles don’t off themselves. Too smart.

  So the boy has a dad. His dad is dead. I can’t imagine knowing a dead person. The boy feels older than me, but not grown-up.

  T. Rex is the turtle’s name. And the boy’s? He doesn’t like his first name, so he gives himself a new one every few months, naming himself after cartoon superheroes, wrestlers, ninja warriors.

  It will take him a while to become the Thief.

  In the early years, I never saw him hurt an animal, a younger kid, even an insect. Nobody hurt him.

  Of course, I saw only a sliver of his life.

  Ordinary stuff. I watched his hands—my hands—carefully paint a model orc to add to the battle scene in his bedroom, or position one last playing card to finish a magnificent castle. I savored the fake-flavor explosion of Doritos as he slumped on the couch watching a scary movie my mom would never have let me watch. The boy lived in a trailer, somewhere dry and hot. He had all the things I wasn’t allowed to have, like junk food and hundreds of cable channels. He had a young, pretty mom who wore tight jeans and smelled like cigarettes when she kissed him good night.

  Their family had been bigger before the Bad Days. There’d been his dad, an aunt and uncle in California, and a baby he remembered in a car seat beside him, maybe a cousin. Occasionally, the boy would think tenderly of that baby, like when he built a dollhouse for a friend’s kid sister: I’d have built her an even better one.

  He didn’t think about the Bad Days.

  He did think about his father, who was dead. He remembered strong hands hoisting him into an apple tree. Sun sho
ne through the leaves. The boy noticed a white sheet dangling from a bough, just limply hanging, and everything about that sheet was suddenly so wrong that he shoved the memory to the back of his mind.

  I took it all in stride. I let the boy, who was six years older than me, give me a new vocabulary. One day when I was seven, I called my mom a douche bag.

  “Who taught you that, Nina?”

  “Kids at school.”

  This seemed to upset her, so I came clean and told her the truth: I saw a boy every night. No, not in my room. No, not in my dreams, either—or was he? I still wasn’t clear on what was a dream and what wasn’t. But I knew I never saw the boy during nap time—only when I went to bed between sunset and sunrise. When I did see him, it always lasted for about half an hour.

  I expected Mom to be shocked and disbelieving, but instead her voice went calm and soothing as she said, “It sounds like you have a friend in your imagination.”

  Imaginary friends were normal, I learned, and they could be boys or girls. What seemed to interest Mom wasn’t that I was seeing through someone else’s eyes each night, but that he was a he. “It makes sense for you to be curious about boys, Nina,” she said.

  And so my confession became a longer conversation where Mom explained to me that sometimes women love other women and prefer their company. She was like that, and that was fine, and because she was like that, and because her surviving family was mostly female, too, I had not known a lot of boys or men in my life so far. She told me it was perfectly normal for me to fantasize about having a dad, a grandfather, a big brother.

  Everything was fine in this conversation, everything was okay, so I just kept nodding. But I’d seen how Mom’s face looked when other parents made comments about our family: Oh, I’m so sorry, Nina. I didn’t realize it was just you and your mom.

  Their tone of voice said it wasn’t fine at all. Something was missing from our family—someone was missing. If I kept talking to Mom about my night boy, she might think I’d imagined him to fill the gap.

  And that might make her sad, so I decided to keep the boy to myself. Separate. Mine. I never mentioned him again.