Deadly Little Voices

by Laurie Faria Stolarz

  But he doesn’t wait around to hit me this time. He smacks me in the jaw so hard that I feel the sting in my eyes.

  The piano music sounds muffled.

  And everything fades to black.

  WHEN I WAKE UP, things are a blur. My head aches. My nose throbs. I can barely open my eyes. Lying on my side, with my cheek pressed against the cold wood floor, I’m able to make out two people fighting—men, I think. I can see their legs as they battle back and forth.

  I try to see their faces, but I can’t from this angle. Plus, the light burns my eyes. And the sockets hurt too much for me to focus.

  I start to get up, but there’s a knifelike sensation pressing into my ribs, keeping me down and making it hard to breathe.

  The fighting persists. I can hear their grunts, their yells, their gasps for breath. “Ben?” I whisper, wondering if one of them is him—if by some miracle he’s managed to save me once again.

  My head is spinning, and I suddenly feel sick. I close my eyes, but the spinning continues. Meanwhile, the piano still plays in the distance. It’s all I can hear now. Everything else evaporates into blackness.

  I wake up and notice right away that Adam is crouching down at my side.

  “Camelia?” he asks, smiling when I open my eyes.

  I try to sit up, but he stops me by touching my shoulder. “Don’t try to move,” he says.

  “We’ve called the police and an ambulance. So, the good news is that we’re getting you help.

  But the bad news is that you have to go back to the hospital.”

  “We?” I ask. There’s a sweatshirt draped over me like a blanket. It’s navy blue, thick, with a zip-up front; I recognize it immediately. “Ben?” I whisper, knowing he’s there. It’s the same sweatshirt he lent me at the labyrinth.

  Footsteps move toward me from across the room. “How’s she doing?” Ben asks, squatting right beside me now. There’s a pair of scissors in his hand.

  He sees that I notice them and gestures to the girl from the bathroom. She’s sitting only a few feet away on the L-shaped sofa, no longer gagged. The duct tape has been cut from her ankles, though the chains remain on her wrists.

  “Is she okay?” I ask.

  “For now,” Ben says. “But she isn’t talking.”

  “What’s her name?” I ask, still dumbfounded that it isn’t Danica. I start to take another look, but it hurts to move my eyes.

  “Rachael Pete, according to her ID,” Ben says.

  “Pete,” I whisper, noting the same last name. Danica’s sister? Danica’s cousin? “How did you know where to find me?” I ask him.

  “It wasn’t easy,” Adam says before Ben can answer. “The ivy-covered building…that sort of architectural style is pretty rare around here. I forced my way into at least four brownstones tonight, but this one was the charm, especially when I picked up on the whole piano clue from the napkin drawing.”

  “Some charm,” I say, somehow mustering a smile.

  I look at Ben, wondering how he found me—if he came here with Adam, or if he sensed something on his own.

  Ben’s eyes meet mine, clearly sensing my question without my having to ask it. “I called Adam on my way home—just to check in and say I was coming back. He mentioned that you took off from the hospital, and then he told me about the clues on the napkin. I pretty much figured things out from there.”

  I run the sleeve of Ben’s sweatshirt over my cheek, noticing how it smells like him—like bike fumes tangled in spearmint. “I thought you weren’t coming home for a few days.”

  “Plans change.” Ben looks toward the guy passed out on the floor. “Anyway, Adam arrived here just in time. I only witnessed the tail end of things, but you should’ve seen the way Adam pounded him.”

  “Really?” I ask, surprised at the news. Before I can probe any further, I hear police sirens outside.

  Some medics burst in and assess the damage—to me, to Rachael, to the guy. While Adam is questioned by the police, I’m placed on a stretcher with ice packs on the top of my head and ribs.

  “I think someone’s already called your parents,” Ben says, kneeling down by my side.

  “They’ll probably be meeting you at the hospital.”

  “Will you come to the hospital, too?” I ask him.

  His eyes look slightly redder than usual, and there’s a spot of blood on his lower lip.

  “Ben?” I ask, trying to sit up, noticing that he looks almost as pain-stricken as me. “Is everything okay?”

  “Adam will go with you,” he says quickly, quietly, avoiding the question—even though the answer’s obvious.

  “What happened to your lip?” I ask.

  He licks the spot and then wipes it with a finger. “I bit it by accident on the ride over here—too much anxiety, I guess.”

  “Why won’t you even look at me?” I ask, desperate for a connection.

  But then Adam busts into the conversation: “We’re heading to Hayden General. Ben, will you be coming along?”

  “No,” Ben says, finally looking at me. I can see the conflict in his eyes. He leans in to kiss the side of my mouth, and I can taste the blood on his lip.

  “Are you sure?” Adam asks. “There’s plenty of room in the ambulance.…”

  Ben nods, un sure. But he shakes Adam’s hand and tells him to take good care of me. And then he watches us go.

  Dear Jill,

  I feel like I’ve been put through hell. The police searched my apartment, questioned my father, and checked out my car. They’re asking me if I was the one who did the hit-and-run on Debbie Marcus a few months back, but they’ll never be able to prove it.

  I want you to know that I never meant to hurt Debbie that night. I’d been following her, watching as she walked home from a friend’s house, making sure that she got there safely. The problem was she kept stumbling out into the street, not paying any attention to where she was going.

  She wasn’t killed. A coma isn’t death, so I don’t understand why they’re making such a big deal of it. Plus, I know for a fact that Debbie is out of the coma, which is why I’ve moved on to bigger and better things.

  Like you, Jill. The cops say that you refuse to talk-that I’ve done that to you. They don’t understand that you’re choosing to remain silent to protect me, which only makes me love you more.

  They asked me all kinds of questions-how I met you, what my intentions were, why I was forced to tie you up like that.

  I tell them the truth: that, as with Debbie Marcus and some of the others, I saw something in you that reminded me a lot of myself. And so I watched you and studied you and learned all of your habits. I wanted to show you how beautiful you really are, because despite what anyone says, you deserve to be loved-to be my Jill forever.

  I know that when you start speaking again, you’ll tell the police all this, which is why I’ve been writing it down for you, documenting the beginning of our love story together, so you’ll know just what to say, and remember how good it really was. It can be that good again one day. I promise it can and it will.

  Always your love,

  Jack

  Dear Jack:

  I have no idea who he was. But he saved me. From you.

  I watched from the doorway as he smacked, punched, and threw you against the wall.

  You fought back hard—I’ll give you that—but you were no match for him.

  And when it was over—when you’d finally passed out—the boy made direct eye contact with me. He removed the rag from my mouth and asked me if I was okay.

  “Yes. I mean, I think so,” I told him.

  But it was her that he was really interested in: the girl who was lying unconscious on the floor. Her eyes were swollen, and there looked to be a trail of blood running from her nose.

  The boy wiped her face with a rag. And then he kissed her, and held her, and ran his hand over her cheek, finally grabbing his cell to dial 911.

  He was wearing gloves, which I thought was weird. Maybe he wa
s concerned about his fingerprints, from breaking in. But once he hung up, he removed the gloves, took the girl’s hand, and placed it on the front of his leg—as if it were some magical hot spot that would make her better somehow. Tears welled up in his eyes as he apologized for not getting there sooner.

  “I’m so sorry,” he just kept saying.

  And suddenly I felt sorry too.

  Apparently it was the anniversary of something tragic that’d happened. I couldn’t really hear him clearly, but I was pretty sure he’d mentioned visiting an old girlfriend’s grave.

  “You deserve someone better,” he told her. “Someone who’ll be open and honest: who won’t be afraid to share everything with you.” He draped his sweatshirt over her, kissed her behind the ear, and then promised to love her forever.

  A couple minutes later, another boy came in, all out of breath. “Is she all right?” he asked.

  The boy who saved me stood up, wiped his tearful eyes, and told the other guy to sit with her until she woke up. And then he went to find scissors for me. He cut me free and brought me out to the sofa. “My name’s Ben,” he said. “And help is on the way.”

  When the girl finally did wake up, Ben allowed the other guy to take credit for saving her life. I wanted to ask him why, but I haven’t been able to speak.

  That’s what this letter is for. My therapist says that I need to tell my side of things in order to regain my voice. She suggested that addressing my thoughts directly to you might help provide some closure.

  So far, it hasn’t done the trick.

  Never your Jill,

  Rachael

  IT’S BEEN TWO WEEKS since Adam saved my life. And two weeks since Ben walked out of it. I’m back at school, bandages and all, but Ben’s taken a leave of absence—his second one since arriving in Freetown last fall.

  Meanwhile, Ms. Beady is up my butt, making sure that I’m truly okay to resume my classes, and offering to have one of her infamous tea sessions with me (whereby we sit in the cushy chairs in her office and she pretends to know what’s wrong with me). But I’ve decided that, as far as Ms. Beady is concerned, I’m boycotting tea altogether.

  Luckily, Danica’s sister is okay. She still isn’t speaking, but her physical wounds have mostly healed. I ended up having to lie to her father, saying that I’d seen someone whom I believed to be Danica (obviously, Danica’s twin sister), being followed by a dark sedan on more than one occasion.

  “It was the only logical explanation I could think of as to why I’d been so convinced that Danica was in trouble,” I explain to Kimmie and Wes. “Short of telling him the truth, that is.”

  “And we all know the truth is the last resort,” Wes jokes.

  It’s a Saturday afternoon, and both he and Kimmie have come over. While Wes rifles through my desk drawer, allegedly searching for a stick of gum, Kimmie sits beside me on my bed, giving me her version of therapy, in the form of a manicure, using black-and-white nail polish.

  Danica’s coming over, too. She called me just a little while ago, saying that she wanted to stop by.

  “And how were you able to explain that you knew where Jack lived?” Kimmie asks.

  “That’s where Wes’s high-speed chase story came in,” I explain. “When, on a whim, we decided to follow the sedan in question. Only, instead of admitting that we lost the guy, I’ve been telling people that we followed him to his apartment.”

  “I actually like that version of the story much better,” Wes says, his ego inflating before our eyes. “And while you’re at it, be sure to tell people that not only did I get us across the train tracks just in the nick of time, I also managed to jump a bridge just as it was opening up for a boat to pass through.”

  “Right, I’ll be sure to tell them.” I roll my eyes.

  “And what about the timing of things?” Kimmie asks. “The reason you had such an urge to leave the hospital to go find the damsel in distress—”

  “Okay, well, thankfully, no one’s asked me that yet.” But I suspect it may one day come up, especially since I told the officer at the hospital about my premonitions.

  “I didn’t even know that Danica had a twin,” Kimmie says.

  “No one knew Danica had a twin,” Wes says, correcting her, having finally given up on his gum-searching. He’s now using one of Kimmie’s nail files to scratch his near-nonexistent facial scruff.

  “But that’s obviously why I felt so connected to her,” I tell them.

  “And it’s obviously what the ‘there are two’ clue was all about,” Kimmie adds.

  Rachael didn’t go to Freetown High. She and Danica—a.k.a. Dee, according to those closest to her, which now includes me—moved here in the sixth grade, started at the same elementary school together (on the other side of town), but then parted ways to go to different schools, shortly after all the harassment started.

  It was that first year, in the sixth grade, when Rachael began skating with some of the Candies; when they told her that she was worthless and talentless, because they were jealous of her skill; and when they barricaded her in the girls’ locker room so she’d miss the tryouts for the skating team.

  The Candies were punished for the incident, but Rachael decided to give up skating altogether.

  “What happened that day didn’t make Rachael depressed,” Danica explained on a visit to my house right after the incident at Jack’s apartment. “It just shined a spotlight on her already depressive thoughts.”

  And just knowing that—how unhappy Rachael was, even when she was much younger—brought everything full circle for me. Rachael’s depression was most likely the reason the voices in my head had been so dark and self-loathing all the time.

  But now that the danger’s over, I haven’t heard those voices again.

  “Anybody home?” Danica asks, poking her head in through the open door. She steps inside, armed with a box full of treats from the Press & Grind. “Your dad let me in.”

  “Great,” I say, perking up, glad that she’s been feeling comfortable enough to come around on occasion. She’s even ventured to have lunch with us a couple of times at school.

  “Are you sure?” She looks at Kimmie and Wes. “Because I don’t want to interrupt.…”

  “Not at all,” Wes says, eyeing the box of treats.

  Danica sets the box down on my lap. “Double-dip chocolate cookies,” she says. “They always make me feel better.”

  “Thanks,” I say, noticing how cute she looks in a hooded pink rain jacket with matching rubber boots. Her hair is tied into two tiny pigtails, and a silver heart necklace dangles around her neck (instead of the sea glass pendant that she once borrowed from her sister). “Have a seat,”

  I tell her. “We were actually just talking about you. Or at least about the whole Jack incident.”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t really stay.” She looks down at her watch. “My dad’s just doing a loop around the block.”

  “Well, at least tell us how your sister’s doing,” Kimmie says.

  “Better, I guess.” She shrugs. “I mean, I think it helps that she’s been writing about what happened. When you look into her eyes, you can see that she wants to talk—that she has a lot to say. Initially, her expression was pretty lifeless.”

  “You know what’s really weird?” Wes says, unable to resist the box of cookies. He opens it and helps himself. “For all the time I spent at the Press & Grind, I never even noticed your sister worked there. I mean, not that I even knew the girl, but I was pretty sure I could ID all the employees.”

  “It was a relatively new job,” Danica explains. “My father thought it’d be good for her—thought it’d help her gain some self-confidence—and the guidance counselor at Humphrey said it was fine. Rachael was originally only supposed to be working in the back.”

  “But then she quickly got promoted to the front,” I point out.

  “Right, which is when I got hired,” Danica says. “They needed someone to take her place baking treats.”


  “And that’s when she met ‘Jack,’” I add.

  Danica nods, tension visible in her jaw. “I really wish she’d told me about him.”

  “Do you think that’s why you were getting harassed at school?” Kimmie asks. “Because of your sister, I mean, and her history with the Candies?”

  “Guilty by association.” She nods again. “Only, the difference between Rachael and me is that she actually cares what people say.” Danica looks away, leading me to assume that Rachael cared a little too much.

  A little too deeply.

  Which was probably just one of the reasons she’d found Jack so appealing. Instead of making her feel as if something were always wrong with her, he made her feel like everything was always right.

  “Rock-out Mama?” Kimmie offers, holding up a bottle of coral nail polish. “This is what always makes me feel better.”

  “Excuse me?” Danica makes a face.

  “That’s the name of the shade.” Kimmie giggles. “I bet it’d look pretty stylin’ with that supercute outfit of yours. Interested?”

  “I actually have to go,” Danica says. “I just wanted to say hi and drop off the cookies.

  Another time?”

  “Sure,” Kimmie says.

  I get off the bed to walk Danica out, giving her a lame-o hug at the door, so as not to smudge the polish on my fingernails. “Thanks again for stopping by,” I tell her. “Come visit whenever you feel like it.”

  “I will,” Danica says.

  And I happily believe her.

  “Do you think we freaked her out?” Wes asks when I return to my room. It appears he’s eaten over half the box of cookies.

  “I think she’s just leery of trusting,” I tell him, returning to my spot on the bed. “But she’s definitely coming around.”

  “And considering what happened to her sister,” Kimmie says, applying Rock-out Mama to one of her pinkies, “it probably takes more than our mere presence to get her freaked.”

  “You know what’s really freaky?” Wes segues. “The fact that the psycho in question was the same guy who was after Debbie Marcus.”

  The whole fiasco with Debbie Marcus happened at around the same time that I was getting stalked. But instead of taking her seriously, people chalked her stories up to pranks and practical jokes, concluding that Debbie had gotten paranoid as a result.