by Riley Sager
“Still waiting,” I say.
“It’ll happen.”
“And what about you?” I ask, only half teasing. “Have you finally found a girlfriend?”
“Nope.”
I arch a brow. “A boyfriend?”
“This visit is about you, Quincy,” Coop says, not even cracking a smile.
“Of course. You ask. I answer.”
That’s how things go between us when we meet once, twice, maybe three times a year.
More often than not, the visits resemble therapy sessions, with me never getting a chance to ask Coop questions of my own. I’m only privy to the basics of his life. He’s forty-one, spent time in the Marines before becoming a cop, and had barely shed his rookie status before finding me screaming among the trees. And while I know he still patrols the same town where all those horrible things happened, I have no idea if he’s happy. Or satisfied. Or lonely. I never hear from him on holidays. Never once got a Christmas card. Nine years earlier, at my father’s funeral, he sat in the back row and slipped out of the church before I could even thank him for coming. The closest he gets to showing affection is on my birthday, when he sends the same text: Another year you almost didn’t get. Live it.
“Jeff will come around,” Coop says, again bending the conversation to his will. “It’ll happen at Christmas, I bet. Guys like to propose then.”
He takes a gulp of coffee. I sip my tea and blink, keeping my eyes shut an extra beat, hoping the darkness will allow me to feel the Xanax taking hold. Instead, I’m more anxious than when I walked in.
I open my eyes to see a well-dressed woman entering the café with a chubby, equally well-dressed toddler. An au pair, probably. Most women under thirty in this neighborhood are. On warm, sunny days they jam the sidewalks—a parade of interchangeable girls fresh out of college, armed with lit degrees and student loans. The only reason this one catches my attention is because we look alike. Fresh-faced and well scrubbed. Blond hair reined in by a ponytail. Neither too thin nor too plump. The product of hearty, milk-fed Midwestern stock.
That could have been me in a different life. One without Pine Cottage and blood and a dress that changed colors like in some horrible dream.
That’s something else I think about every time Coop and I meet—he thought my dress was red. He’d whispered it to the dispatcher when he called for backup. It’s on both the police transcript, which I’ve read multiple times, and the dispatch recording, which I managed to listen to only once.
Someone’s running through the trees. Caucasian female. Young. She’s wearing a red dress. And she’s screaming.
I was running through the trees. Galloping, really. Kicking up leaves, numb to the pain coursing through my entire body. And although all I could hear was my heartbeat in my ears, I was indeed screaming. The only thing Coop got wrong was the color of my dress.
It had, until an hour earlier, been white.
Some of the blood was mine. The rest belonged to the others. Janelle, mostly, from when I held her moments before I got hurt.
I’ll never forget the look on Coop’s face when he realized his mistake. That slight widening of the eyes. The oblong shape of his mouth as he tried to keep it from dropping open. The startled huffing sound he made. Two parts shock, one part pity.
It’s one of the few things I actually can remember.
My experience at Pine Cottage is broken into two distinct halves. There’s the beginning, fraught with fear and confusion, in which Janelle lurched out of the woods, not yet dead but well on her way. Then there’s the end, in which Coop found me in my red-not-red dress.
Everything between those two points remains a blank in my memory. An hour, more or less, entirely wiped clean.
“Dissociative amnesia” is the official diagnosis. More commonly known as repressed memory syndrome. Basically, what I witnessed was too horrific for my fragile mind to hold on to. So I mentally cut it out. A self-performed lobotomy.
That didn’t stop people from begging me to remember what happened. Well-meaning family. Misguided friends. Psychiatrists with visions of published case studies dancing in their heads. Think, they all told me. Really think about what happened. As if that would make any difference. As if my being able to recall every blood-specked detail could somehow bring the rest of my friends back to life.
Still, I tried. Therapy. Hypnosis. Even a ridiculous sense-memory game in which a frizzy-haired specialist held scented paper strips to my blindfolded face, asking how each one made me feel. Nothing worked. In my mind, that hour is a blackboard completely erased. There’s nothing left but dust.
I understand that urge for more information, that longing for details. But in this case, I’m fine without them. I know what happened at Pine Cottage. I don’t need to remember exactly how it happened. Because here’s the thing about details—they can also be a distraction. Add too many and it obscures the brutal truth about a situation. They become the gaudy necklace that hides the tracheotomy scar.
I make no attempts to disguise my scars. I just pretend they don’t exist.
The pretending continues in the café. As if my acting like Coop isn’t about to lob a bad-news grenade into my lap will actually keep it from happening.
“Are you in the city on business?” I ask. “If you’re staying long, Jeff and I would love to take you to dinner. All three of us seemed to like that Italian place we went to last year.”
Coop looks at me across the table. His eyes are the lightest shade of blue I’ve ever seen. Lighter even than the pill currently dissolving into my central nervous system. But they are not a soothing blue. There’s an intensity to his eyes that always makes me look away, even though I want to peer deeper, as if that alone can make clear the thoughts hiding just behind them. They are a ferocious blue—the kind of eyes that you want in the person protecting you.
“I think you know why I’m here,” he says.
“I honestly don’t.”
“I have some bad news. It hasn’t reached the press yet, but it will. Very soon.”
Him.
That’s my first thought. This has something to do with Him. Even though I watched Him die, my brain sprints to that inevitable, inconceivable realm where He survived Coop’s bullets, escaped, hid for years, and is now emerging with the intent of finding me and finishing what He started.
He’s alive.
A lump of anxiety fills my stomach, heavy and unwieldy. It feels like a basketball-size tumor has formed there. I’m struck by the sudden urge to pee.
“It’s not that,” Coop says, easily knowing exactly what I’m thinking. “He’s gone, Quincy. We both know that.”
While nice to hear, it does nothing to put me at ease. I’ve balled my hands into fists pressed knuckle-down atop the table.
“Please just tell me what’s wrong.”
“It’s Lisa Milner,” Coop says.
“What about her?”
“She’s dead, Quincy.”
The news sucks the air out of my chest. I think I gasp. I’m not sure, because I’m too distracted by the watery echo of her voice in my memory.
I want to help you, Quincy. I want to teach you how to be a Final Girl.
And I had let her. At least for a little while. I assumed she knew best.
Now she’s gone.
Now there are only two of us.
2.
Lisa Milner’s version of Pine Cottage was a sorority house in Indiana. One long-ago February night, a man named Stephen Leibman knocked on the front door. He was a college dropout who lived with his dad. Portly. Had a face as jiggly and jaundiced as chicken fat.
The sorority sister who answered the door found him on the front steps holding a hunting knife. One minute later, she was dead. Leibman dragged the body inside, locked all the doors, and cut the lights and phone line. What followed was roughly an hour of carnage th
at brought an end to nine young women.
Lisa Milner had come close to making it an even ten.
During the slaughter, she took refuge in the bedroom of a sorority sister, cowering alone inside a closet, hugging clothes that weren’t hers and praying the madman wouldn’t find her.
Eventually, he did.
Lisa laid eyes on Stephen Leibman when he ripped open the closet door. She saw first the knife, then his face, both dripping blood. After a stab to the shoulder, she managed to knee him in the groin and flee the room. She had reached the first floor and was making her way to the front door when Leibman caught up to her, knife jabbing.
She took four stab wounds to her chest and stomach, plus a five-inch slice down the arm she had raised to defend herself. One more thrust of the blade would have finished her off. But Lisa, screaming in pain and dizzy from blood loss, somehow grabbed Leibman’s ankle. He fell. The knife skittered. Lisa grabbed it and shoved it hilt-deep into his gut. Stephen Leibman bled out lying next to her on the floor.
Details. They flow freely when they’re not yours.
I was seven when it happened. It’s my first memory of actually noticing something on the news. I couldn’t help it. Not with my mother standing before the console television, a hand over her mouth, repeating the same two words: Sweet Jesus. Sweet Jesus.
What I saw on that TV scared and confused and upset me. The weeping bystanders. The convoy of tarp-covered stretchers slipping beneath yellow tape crisscrossing the door. The splash of blood, bright against the Indiana snow. It was the moment I realized that bad things could happen, that evil existed in the world.
When I began to cry, my father scooped me up and carried me into the kitchen. As my tears dried to salt, he placed a menagerie of bowls on the counter and filled them with flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. He gave me a spoon and let me mix them all together. My first baking lesson.
There’s such a thing as too much sweetness, Quincy, he told me. All the best bakers know this. There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more.
Now the only taste in my mouth is a dry sourness. I dump more sugar into my tea and drain the cup. It doesn’t help. The sugar rush only counteracts the Xanax, which is finally starting to work its magic. They clash deep inside me, making me antsy.
“When did it happen?” I ask Coop, once my initial shock reduces to a simmering sense of disbelief. “How did it happen?”
“Last night. Muncie PD discovered her body around midnight. She had killed herself.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
I say it loud enough to get the attention of my au pair look-alike seated a table away. She glances up from her iPhone, head tilted like a cocker spaniel’s.
“Suicide?” I say, the word bitter on my tongue. “I thought she was happy. I mean, she seemed happy.”
Lisa’s voice is still in my head.
You can’t change what’s happened. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.
“They’re waiting on the tox report to see if she had been drinking or was on drugs,” Coop says.
“So this could have been an accident?”
“It was no accident. Her wrists were slit.”
My heart stops for a moment. I’m conscious of the empty pause where a pulse should be. Sadness pours into the void, filling me so quickly I start to feel dizzy.
“I want details,” I say.
“You don’t,” Coop says. “It won’t change anything.”
“It’s information. That’s better than nothing.”
Coop stares into his coffee, as if examining his bright eyes in the muddy reflection. Eventually, he says, “Here’s what I know: Lisa called 911 at quarter to midnight, apparently with second thoughts.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She hung up immediately. Dispatch traced the call and sent a pair of blues to her house. The door was unlocked, so they let themselves in. That’s when they found her. She was in the bathtub. Her phone was in the water with her. Probably slipped from her hands.”
Coop looks out the window. He’s tired, I can tell. And no doubt worried I might one day try something similar. But that thought never occurred to me, even when I was back in the hospital being fed through a tube. I reach across the table, aiming for his hands. He pulls them away before I can grasp them.
“When did you hear about it?” I ask.
“A couple hours ago. Got a call from an acquaintance with the Indiana State Police. We keep in touch.”
I don’t need to ask Coop how he knows a trooper in Indiana. Massacre survivors aren’t the only ones who need support systems.
“She thought it’d be good to warn you,” he says. “For when word gets out.”
The press. Of course. I like to picture them as ravenous vultures, slick innards dripping from their beaks.
“I’m not going to talk to them.”
This again gets the attention of the au pair, who looks up, eyes narrowed. I stare her down until she sets her iPhone on the table and pretends to fuss with the toddler in her care.
“You don’t have to,” Coop says. “But at the very least you should consider releasing a statement of condolence. Those tabloid guys are going to hunt you down like dogs. Might as well toss them a bone before they get the chance.”
“Why do I need to say anything?”
“You know why,” Coop says.
“Why can’t Samantha do it?”
“Because she’s still off the grid. I doubt she’s going to pop out of hiding after all these years.”
“Lucky girl.”
“That just leaves you,” Coop says. “That’s why I wanted to come and tell you the news in person. Now, I know I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, but it’s not a bad idea to start being friendly with the press. With Lisa dead and Samantha gone, you’re all they’ve got.”
I reach into my purse and grab my phone. It’s been quiet. No new calls. No new texts. Nothing but a few dozen work-related emails I didn’t have time to read this morning. I shut off the phone—a temporary fix. The press will sniff me out anyway. Coop is right about that. They won’t be able to resist trying to get a quote from the only accessible Final Girl.
We are, after all, their creation.
Final Girl is film-geek speak for the last woman standing at the end of a horror movie. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. Even before Pine Cottage, I never liked to watch scary movies because of the fake blood, the rubber knives, the characters who made decisions so stupid I guiltily thought they deserved to die.
Only, what happened to us wasn’t a movie. It was real life. Our lives. The blood wasn’t fake. The knives were steel and nightmare-sharp. And those who died definitely didn’t deserve it.
But somehow we screamed louder, ran faster, fought harder. We survived.
I don’t know where the nickname was first used to describe Lisa Milner. A newspaper in the Midwest, probably. Close to where she lived. Some reporter there tried to get creative about the sorority-house killings, and the nickname was the end result. It spread only because it was casually morbid enough for the Internet to pick up. All those nascent news sites starving for attention jumped all over it. Not wanting to miss a trend, print outlets followed. Tabloids first, then newspapers, and, finally, magazines.
Within days, the transformation was complete. Lisa Milner was no longer simply a massacre survivor. She was a straight-from-a-horror-flick Final Girl.
It happened again with Samantha Boyd four years later and then with me eight years after that. While there were other multiple homicides during those years, none quite got the nation’s attention like ours. We were, for whatever reason, the lu
cky ones who survived when no one else had. Pretty girls covered in blood. As such, we were each in turn treated like something rare and exotic. A beautiful bird that spreads its bright wings only once a decade. Or that flower that stinks like rotting meat whenever it decides to bloom.
The attention showered upon me in the months after Pine Cottage veered from kind to bizarre. Sometimes it was a combination of both, such as the letter I received from a childless couple offering to pay my college tuition. I wrote them back, turning down their generous offer. I never heard from them again.
Other correspondence was more disturbing. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard from lonely goth boys or prison inmates saying they want to date me, marry me, cradle me in their tattooed arms. An auto mechanic from Nevada once volunteered to chain me up in his basement to protect me from further harm. He was startling in his sincerity, as if he truly thought holding me captive was the most benevolent of good deeds.
Then there was the letter claiming I needed to be finished off, that it was my destiny to be butchered. It wasn’t signed. There was no return address. I gave it to Coop. Just in case.
I start to feel jittery. It’s the sugar and the Xanax, suddenly zipping through my body like the latest club drug. Coop senses my change in mood and says, “I know this is a lot to handle.”
I nod.
“You want to get out of here?”
I nod again.
“Then let’s go.”
As I stand, the au pair again pretends to busy herself with the toddler, refusing to look my way. Maybe she recognizes me and it makes her uncomfortable. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.
When I pass, two steps behind Coop, I snatch her iPhone off the table without her noticing.
It’s slipped deep into my pocket before I’m out the door.
• • •
Coop walks me home, his body positioned slightly in front of mine, like a Secret Service agent. Both of us scan the sidewalk for members of the press. None appear.
