He takes a shaky breath. “She’s my mom,” he says.
We sit in a strip mall coffee shop with our bags tucked under the round table. His containing miscellaneous nuts and bolts and fixtures. Mine containing M&M’S and a small, sharp hatchet that I have informed him is for chopping brush at campgrounds.
The girl at the counter talks to her headset. She has a Sailor Moon tattoo on her shoulder. Above her hangs a pink clock with a mirrored face, but the hands don’t seem to move.
More evidence I am dreaming.
Across from me sits a killer, but he looks like a harmless, lanky boy propping his long arms awkwardly on the table. I look back at him.
The clock still hasn’t moved. Or has it?
I have been listening, not talking. Safer that way.
So far I know that this person claims to have the same two biological parents I do. He is talking about one-in-a-million coincidences. He is apologizing for “springing this” on me when Becca should have been the one to explain.
Explain what? I just keep nodding.
“Are you just in Albuquerque for the night?” he asks me at last. “Or staying?”
“Staying for a few days.”
I should have said I’m just passing through, but it’s too late. The words are out.
To make up for my slip, I start saying “we” instead of “I.” I’m here with a friend, I explain. A girl.
I don’t want to think about Warren. He kept probing like a shrink, trying to connect my night visions to my past. If he were here, he’d be saying triumphantly, See? He’s your brother; that’s why you’ve dreamed about him all your life. Your dreams got twisted, is all.
No, Warren. Babies don’t form memories like that. And how do you explain the things my dreams got right?
The counter girl blends a magenta smoothie. The flowers on the bushes outside are the color of cantaloupe. I think the clock has jumped forward a few minutes.
“Mom didn’t mention me, did she?” asks the stranger across the table.
Becca did mention an older brother, but I assumed he was a half sibling like the two younger ones. “Kind of. But she didn’t tell me your name or send a picture.”
Tears well in his eyes again.
His hair is a few shades lighter than mine, but it falls in the same lank clumps on the same high forehead. I’ve never seen anyone who looked so much like me. Does he feel the same way?
“I guess Mom wanted to let you go at your own pace,” he says. “Not overload you with instant family. And I went and ruined it.”
On certain words, his southwestern drawl comes out—the “desert rat” accent he tried to ditch in the army. He never has an accent when he talks to his targets. He controls what he says to them very carefully.
(If that actually happened, Warren says in my head.)
If I didn’t know better, I’d think Dylan cared deeply about having a long-lost sister, so deeply he could barely express it without choking up.
“It’s okay.” I sound like somebody’s choking me, too. “I can handle it. That’s why I came here.”
“You drove all the way from Vermont?” he asks, not taking his eyes off me.
That’s the opening for me to talk about myself, I guess. I tell him the absolute minimum.
“Oh, I know that,” he says when I say I’m entering senior year, like I’ve accused him of not knowing his own birthday. “I was six when you went away, and you were ten months. You were already named Nina then—you know that, right? Our mom named you after Nina Simone, the singer.”
I nod. Becca told me that, like it gave her a stronger claim on me. Like it mattered that my real mom chose to respect her naming choice when I was too young to remember or give a crap.
“It was right after our dad—well, after he passed away.”
Passed away. Such delicate language from someone who ends lives whenever he feels like it, as brutally as he feels like it.
“You knew that, right?” Dylan asks, his eyes probing my face. “Mom told you about him?”
I nod.
My father “passed away.” It was a “tragedy.” Becca had “trouble keeping her head above water” afterward, and that’s how I ended up being adopted by a nice lesbian. She used a lot of flowery phrases that revealed no specifics, and I didn’t ask.
“Our dad committed suicide,” I say. Something Becca didn’t tell me; something I shouldn’t know.
I want to see how Dylan reacts.
His eyes go wide. “Mom doesn’t like to talk about it. I didn’t know how many…”
“Details she gave me? Not many.” I clear my throat. “She didn’t even tell me his name—your name. My birth name. She only used her married name.”
“It’s Shadwell,” he says. “Nina Augustine Shadwell. That’s the name you were born with.”
“Augustine.” I giggle insanely, watching raspberry-colored liquid whip in the blender behind the counter. “Wow.”
He smiles, his cheekbones becoming hard points. This is my brother, the multiple murderer. The Thief in the Night.
(If he is.)
I remember sitting on our porch in the April sun, listening to Warren tell me how he tried to guilt one of his brothers out of stealing. Warren’s brothers are bad news, but he’s not. Me, I’m used to being the only guilty party in my family. My mom is the most upright, honest, good person I know.
But no. If I know even one thing about Dylan, I know he isn’t part of my family just because we share some DNA. Families don’t work like that.
My phone vibrates inside my bag.
“That’s probably my friend back at the motel. Jaylynne.”
The name of the girl he almost killed at the rest stop. Why did I say that? What’s wrong with me?
He nods like he doesn’t recognize it. “She’s waiting for you, I bet.”
“Yeah, I told her I was running over to buy snacks and—the hatchet. She’s probably worried.”
Jaylynne’s name should have made him flinch, react somehow, but it didn’t. Ten minutes have passed; the spell of the unmoving clock is broken. I can’t sit here with him another minute, pretending everything is fine.
Do people notice we look alike? Do they assume we’re brother and sister?
Dylan passes me a napkin scrawled with an address and phone number I already know.
“I guess you need time to process,” he says. “I sure would. And if you don’t want to spend any time with me or my family while you’re here, I totally understand.”
Aren’t you sensitive!
My mind speaks in the gruff voice of Ruth Gustafsson, the woman who almost got across the brook and into the woods. Maybe she seemed like a “sheep” to her killer, but she wasn’t ready to die.
There’s no killer in his eyes right now, only concern for me. I want to claw it off his face and expose the pitiless blankness beneath.
Again that gentle nudging voice in my head asks, What if you’re wrong?
Dylan’s still talking. “But my girlfriend, Eliana—she does an awesome chicken mole. We could make dinner for you tomorrow night. Your friend’s welcome to come, too.”
“She wants to spend time with her cousins,” I snap. My imaginary Jaylynne has family in Albuquerque.
I understand now why the real Jaylynne went outside with Dylan. When he wants to be, he’s charming without being pushy. Some girls would see the intensity of his gaze as flattering.
“Of course. No pressure,” Dylan says, raising both hands. “It’s an open invitation, Nina. Text me if you want to come over. If you don’t, totally cool. You came to see Mom, not me. But I bet Eli and Trixie would love to meet you. I’ve always told them about my sister.”
“But you didn’t know me,” I say too loudly.
Then I remember the little girl in his head, the one in the car seat, the small, scared person he imagines protecting. The one who disappeared from his life.
He just looks at me, tiny wrinkles forming at the corners of his eyes. “I knew y
ou for ten months,” he says, “and for nine months before that as a bump in my mom’s belly. Believe me, that was enough time for me to know you.”
It wasn’t. You don’t.
“I always remembered you,” he says. “And I’ve missed you every single night since you went away.”
I text Mom and Warren two pics of the Arizona desert that I stole from a stranger’s vacation collection. I’m here! Then I turn up the AC in the motel room full blast, yank the bedcovers over my head, and fall asleep.
When I wake up, the sun is painting the Sandia Mountains bloodred above the roofs. Shadows swath the pool. For an instant, I wonder if it’s still the same day.
Everything comes back at once, too fast. The hatchet, now perched on the edge of the desk. The lady with her louvered doors. A stranger saying, “I’ve always told them about my sister.” A dinner invitation.
Too much. I’m in deep water; every movement, every thought is a rugged current threatening to sweep me out to sea. This bed is my safety zone.
I was going to drive up north, out to the mine shaft. Now it’s too late; I haven’t even stocked up on water.
I eat the M&M’S and sit on the bed watching the sky turn violet. When Mom calls, I pick up.
She starts to talk, but I interrupt. “Why didn’t you tell me I had a brother?”
Silence. Then Mom says in a low voice, “I didn’t know. Nina, what’s happening there?”
“Nothing.” A sob wells up in my throat, and I swallow it. Why’d I say anything? Now I have to lie. “It’s just—well, I guess Becca kind of told me, but she didn’t really tell me. And then meeting him here, at her house, it was—a surprise. And not a surprise, because it’s like I always knew. Did you really not know about him? Are you sure?”
Mom starts talking, her voice firmly in soothing-therapist mode, explaining for the nth time that she never met my birth mother. “Maybe I did know about a brother at some point—but the thing was, frankly, I didn’t especially want to know. Once you entered my life, the past didn’t matter. It’s hard to explain, but a baby is all about right here and right now.”
I can’t blame her for not dwelling on my past—but it’s frustrating. “What about Dory? She worked for social services, right? Maybe she met my brother, maybe she talked about him, and I…absorbed it.”
That might explain why the “boy” in my head had a name almost from the beginning, though I could never remember when or how I first heard it. Mom may not recall Dory pronouncing those four syllables—“Dylan Shadwell”—but I loved unfamiliar words and names when I was little. Sometimes I would sing them to myself for hours. Maybe I heard his once or twice, and it stuck.
Maybe I built an image of my big brother from a few careless words. Maybe my night companion was never more than a reflection of what I wanted, and later what I feared.
Which would mean I’m the twisted one.
And the Gustafssons? They did disappear—but maybe, like that Internet commenter said, it was the slaughterhouse protestors who did it. Maybe they thought Mr. Gustafsson was part of a conspiracy to conceal horrific brutality. Maybe Warren’s right, and it was the article about the protest that put Mr. Gustafsson’s name in my head. Maybe—
These thoughts are the ocean waves that pour into my nose and mouth as I flail—a swimmer out of my depth, losing sight of the horizon, of everything I think I know.
Mom keeps talking in that same calm voice. “I don’t remember Dory discussing your birth family. And I don’t think toddlers ‘absorb’ things like that. Have you asked Becca why she didn’t tell you about your brother?”
Good question. But I’m not ready to have that conversation with a woman I don’t know.
“I’m okay, really.” I cling to scraps of remembered normality, trying to sound like I’m not drowning. “My brother seems really nice, and I’m going to have dinner with him tomorrow.” Am I? “It was just—sudden.”
I let Mom talk on for forty minutes, quoting every adoption book she’s ever read, and agree with her that my “distressed” feelings are normal.
After we hang up, I pull the curtains and crawl under the covers again.
When I finally drift into sleep, he’s already there.
It’s strange sharing somebody’s mind while he’s sleeping. It’s a little like hearing Warren’s breathing across a motel room, except that Dylan’s breathing reverberates inside my head, and it doesn’t take long to sync with mine.
He dreams.
He’s in Home Depot, buying a length of nylon rope. When he looks down the aisle, it starts growing. The empty corridor stretches and stretches till he can’t see the cash wrap at the end. The fluorescents blink out.
He takes a step and kicks something in the dark, and when he picks it up, he feels the curly fur of Trixie’s stuffed poodle. It’s wet like it’s been out in the rain.
Then he’s in the upstairs hall of his house, the toy still in his hand. He tells Eliana they need to teach Trixie not to leave stuff around, but she’s in the shower and doesn’t hear him.
The toy is still damp. He’ll toss it in the laundry without looking at it. No. He’ll go out to the shed and hide it before anyone sees the blood, then burn it later. Eli never goes in the shed.
His mom stands down the hall wearing a necklace made of crystals. She holds out a nylon rope and says, “You forgot this.” Then she says, “If she cries, you just rock her, honey. She’s got a dry diaper. I’m going out for an hour or so.”
From there, his sleep is like jumping off a diving board into a deep, dark pool where we drown together.
When I wake again, it’s nearly four A.M. by the glowing red clock beside my bed, and I know I have to say yes to dinner tomorrow.
Dylan Shadwell hasn’t given a hint of being anything but ecstatic to see me. He did not react to the name “Jaylynne.” He recognized me from Becca’s photos. He has no reason in the world to suspect I know anything.
Unless.
When I was little, I used to wonder if he visited my head at night, too. All my attempts to communicate with him failed, but…
If he has been spying on my nightlife this whole time, what has he seen? The map on my wall? The logbook? The cross-country drive? Warren and me scarfing down pie?
Has he sensed how someone lurks in the corner of my mind every night, terrorizing me?
I’ve learned something from exploring Dylan’s head: the fears and hopes that hide in our mental wallpaper are funny things. When they’re your own, you can instantly pick them out of the loudest, busiest pattern of surface thoughts and sensations. But a stranger inside your mind might see only a darting, persistent shadow.
For instance, the man by the apple tree—Dylan’s dad. I watched him flit through Dylan’s mental wallpaper for years before I pieced together how he died. And I didn’t know that the little girl in the car seat, the one Dylan thought of so tenderly, was me.
So even if Dylan can see inside my mind each night, he may not know I know. I need to be sure, though. I’ll think of ways to test him while I drive to the desert tomorrow. I need evidence, not just of what he’s done but of what I’m up against.
If he does know, maybe I’ll find out how much of that tenderness for his sister is real, and how much is just a memory.
One thing I know: if I put his secret life in danger, if he even thinks I might, everything will change in an instant.
I text Dylan when I wake up, hoping against hope he’ll be busy tonight. Eliana seems like the kind of person who rolls her eyes at last-minute guests. Maybe she’ll tell him no way, she isn’t cooking chicken mole for this out-of-nowhere sister of his, not on such short notice.
But he texts back: Awesome. Will start grilling @ 7.
I do everything you’re supposed to do when you explore the desert. Wait till afternoon, when the sun is lower. Lug several gallons of backup water to my car, plus the bottles in my daypack. Dress light and white, twisting a wet bandanna around my forehead under my visor.
&nb
sp; Nothing prepares me for a world without shade.
First I take the highway north, then a dirt county road that winds into the desert, then a side road marked with a sign that has no name, just numbers. The side road’s not on my GPS, but it’s exactly where I remember seeing it in my sleep.
(Unless you’re just telling yourself that, Warren says in my head. Unless your imagination is bending your memory of those dreams to fit reality.)
Three and a half miles in, the subroad dead-ends, and I’m left staring at blinding blond sand and dark green bushes till purple mountains close off the horizon.
Only when I backtrack, going extraslow, do I spot the ridge to my right. Even then, I don’t see the cabin in its shadow until I’ve parked a safe distance away and started walking.
It’s not much of a cabin—more like a falling-down shack. Also not much of a shadow. But there is a cabin, just like I knew there’d be, even if everything looks harder and more weathered in the blazing daylight.
And if there’s a cabin, there must be a mine entrance on the ridge behind it.
As I hike toward the cabin, I discover that three P.M. in June in New Mexico is still too hot. The visor and bandanna are like a Kleenex at Niagara Falls. My throat already feels dry, my feet heavy, the wind droning in my ears. My sweat evaporates as quickly as it beads.
You can do this. Just thirty feet more.
The cabin door hangs open on one hinge. I reach for my flashlight, half wishing I had Warren’s little Sidekick. What if someone’s camping in here?
The door creaks, nails on a chalkboard. I pause on the threshold, too aware of my prints on the sandy floorboards, and sweep my beam around the single room.
Rot-darkened boards with the occasional dab of plaster. One window, high on the back wall, spills sunlight on the floor.
The floorboards look newer than the walls—I don’t remember that. But there’s the greasy pipe extending from a blackened woodstove through the ceiling. And that must be the metal-and-Formica chair where he sits on winter nights, enjoying the stove’s crackle and the silence.
The Killer in Me Page 14
