Chapter 12
TWELVE
HIM
The little bird blinks back at me from the screen.
SmartLittleBird.
It’s the perfect little inside joke. Tallulah will get it without even trying.
I watch the cursor pulse at the bottom of the chat window. The handle on the other end—Nightjar—has been quiet for ten minutes. Long enough for panic to start nipping at her heels. Long enough for her to debate and decide who, exactly, just called her back into the story.
you really are still watching
I send it and sit back, letting the words hang there. Taunting.
The laptop hums on the motel desk, a cheap thing I paid cash for in a town two hours away. The curtains are drawn. The heater rattles every few minutes like it’s choking on dust. Outside, the parking lot is a slurry of gray snow and older sedans.
It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t have to be. That’s not the point—finishing what I started is the point.
On the other bed, a plastic Ziploc bag catches the dim light. Folded inside is a single printout from a news site, the photo slightly blurred from where I smoothed water across it.
STATE POLICE INVESTIGATE POSSIBLE CONNECTION TO PRIOR CASES.
They don’t say my name. They don’t have to. I can hear it in the way they dance around the words. “Prior incidents.” “High-profile investigation.” “Community still healing.”
They talk like any of this belongs to them.
It doesn’t.
The woman on the rocks earlier this week wasn’t special.
Not to me. She was useful—right age, right size, right level of caution.
Cautious enough to buy the right shoes and bring a water bottle.
Not cautious enough to notice when someone stepped off the trail behind her, matched her rhythm, waited for the moment.
She screamed. Briefly.
The Falls took the rest.
Placing her was the real work. Jason always left this part to me anyway, so it was nothing new. Dragging, lifting, the strain in my muscles that made me feel alive. He would’ve called this one “a workout,” laughing while I chose my angles.
I did it alone this time.
The shelf halfway down the cascade is slick, treacherous, beautiful. People used to climb out to it, take selfies. Somebody broke their leg one year, and the town nailed up more signs.
No one took the shelf away. They just pretended that hiding the path meant the drop didn’t exist.
I like the shelf. It’s liminal space—too high to reach without commitment, too low to see without leaning. The perfect place to leave a question mark.
Was she a fall? An accident? An echo?
I laid her out with care, her arms reaching just so.
Head turned toward the overlook. From above, she would look like a distant shape out of place on the smooth gray rock.
It would be enough of an anomaly to itch at the back of somebody’s brain.
Enough to make a hiker stop. Squint. Lean in for a closer look.
That moment between not-seeing and seeing is the closest thing to religion I have.
I timed the rest, from the first call to the sheriff’s office to the wash of lights against the trees, to the dull thunder of boots hitting dirt.
They’re faster than they were last time. Better resourced. More afraid.
I’m flattered.
The laptop pings—someone in the chat room invoking my ghost.
you think it’s him?
Nightjar thinks so.
I scroll lazily past the chatter. I’ve watched these people chew on my name for years now.
They make conspiracy boards and fan art.
They assign me motives they can understand and ignore the ones they can’t.
Half of them think they’re helping. The other half just want to sit close to the fire without getting burned.
They all listen when she speaks.
Nightjar has that effect. She’s small, but the room stops and listens when she speaks.
I’ve been listening to her for a long time.
The first time I noticed her, she was just text on a screen. No face. No weight. Precise, clever sentences mixed with a little snark that cut through speculation like a scalpel.
He’s not random. Look at the dates. Look at the gaps.
She was right, which was both irritating and interesting. Most people are lucky at guessing and bad at pattern recognition. She saw more.
She couldn’t let it go. Even after the town buried its dead and packed away its candles, she kept the file open in the back of her mind.
Her apartment is nothing more than old dust and cheap wiring. I could hear the heater trying to die when I pressed my hand to her window, glass cold under my palm. I could see her eyes jump from point to point—door, kitchen, safe, knives—mapping, calculating.
That part of her I respect.
She still has a blind spot, though. She thinks as long as she’s the one holding the information, she can stay behind it. That the story can’t touch her if she’s the narrator.
That’s what last night was for. Knocking on the glass. Reminding her she’s on the stage, too.
The sirens were an interruption, not a defeat.
Leaving when I did wasn’t fear. It was discipline. I’ve seen what happens when you let the thrill of improvisation run the show. Jason loved that—pushing one step farther, just to see if he’d fall. He liked the roar in his ears more than the plan.
I don’t.
I like the aftermath. The part where everyone realizes what they missed, goes back over their steps, finds all the ways they were careless.
Right now, half the town is doing that. Checking doors. Adding chains. Pretending those inch-thick pieces of hardware change anything.
Nightjar is doing it differently. She’s watching her feeds. Watching me. Her fingers are probably flying even now, trying to connect the shelf, the timing, the article’s careful wording.
She’ll come to the right conclusions.
That’s what she does.
The cursor on the private message box flickers to life.
She’s typing. Stops. Starts again.
who is this
I smile.
Oh, honey. You already know. Of course you know. That’s what makes it fun. We’re past masks. Past “maybe.” Past the strange relief of pretending this is anybody else’s game.
But she wants to hear me say it.
Not yet.
I flex my fingers once, knuckles popping, and type.
someone who appreciated your decorations last night
I can almost see her go still.
I was close enough to that window to memorize the way her shoulders tensed under that too-big shirt. Close enough to clock the exact moment my voice collided with recognition in her head.
Close enough to see that little bird swing.
There’s a hitch in the message flow. The system shows me her typing…then nothing… typing again.
You can tell a lot about a person from what they erase before they hit send.
how long have you been in town
she settles on.
You assume I ever left, little bird, I think.
I don’t answer the question. I scroll back through the earlier thread instead, the one from last night in the main room where she dropped my name like a match.
I heard it’s Henry Thurston.
She knew exactly what that would do. She threw my name into the water and watched the ripples. Not to warn anyone. Not really.
To see what came back.
I almost answered there. Could have. It would’ve been easy to slip in under one of the throwaway handles, toss her a crumb.
He’s closer than you think, I could have said. That would have absolutely sent them.
But I wanted this conversation where it is now: alone. Direct. No audience. No noise.
She worked for this. She deserves my full attention.
More typing dots. Then—
you’re not very subtle, you know
No, I’m not. Not with her.
Subtlety is for strangers. I spent the last year practicing on people who didn’t matter, places that meant nothing. Quiet towns. Forgettable women. That was rehearsal.
This is the show.
I tap out another line.
and you’re still curious
I don’t ask. I state.
There’s a small, jagged pleasure in it. In holding the shape of her inside my skull and knowing I’ve got the angles right.
She pretends otherwise. She’ll tell herself she’s doing this for the next girl, the way she did last time. She’ll wrap her obsession in civic duty and call it altruism.
We both know better.
Tallulah Gentry can’t stand an unresolved line of code.
I lean back in the motel chair and listen to the heater rattle. Somewhere in the room above me, somebody argues, a TV bleats the news too loud, and footsteps pound back and forth.
Transience. Noise. Background.
On my screen, the room we’re actually in is quiet. We’re just two names. Two cursors.
Nightjar and SmartLittleBird.
The sheriff’s name pops up in another window—a brief, encrypted notification from one of the feeds I still have tucked inside his department. He has a new patrol pattern. A new cruiser positioned outside her building. They’re trying, bless their hearts.
I saw the new variable earlier, too. The big man getting out of the unremarkable SUV. Broad shoulders, measured walk, cop eyes but not a cop. I watched him stand on her sidewalk, scan her windows and the street, look up at the pathetic little tree like he was memorizing it.
He’s not from Lucy Falls. He doesn’t move like the locals. He’s heavier in a way that suggests intention, not laziness. There’s a particular way men walk when they know what it feels like to put someone through a wall.
Interesting.
I should be annoyed. It complicates things. Adds weight I didn’t plan on—one more object orbiting around my star.
Instead, I feel…awake.
They sent her a wall. How flattering. How desperate.
Under the laptop’s hum, the old clock on the wall ticks, slow and steady.
I count. Every fifth second, I think about the body on the rocks.
Every tenth, I think about the way the big man put his hand on her arm when she slipped on the ice outside Karla’s.
How easy it would be for that gesture to reverse.
Protection and pressure look very similar from far away.
I could use that.
Finally, her answer arrives.
curious isn’t the word i’d use
I tilt my head, considering. There’s a crack in the sentence. A little jag of something more than fear, less than bravado.
No emoji. No nervous laugh. No “lol” to make it look like a joke.
That’s the thing about smart people: when you scrape away the performance, what’s left is very clean. Honest.
I run my thumb along the edge of the laptop, feel the plastic give a little under the pressure.
They’ve crowded her. Jack in his cruiser and the deputies lining her street. The wall posted up in her living room. They think more bodies in the room make her safer.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes they just make better leverage.
I picture her at that couch, laptop balanced on her knees, knees pulled tight to her chest so she takes up less space.
She thinks she’s deep in a bunker.
She’s not.
She’s under a looking glass.
you picked the wrong word then
She’ll ask which one I’d choose.
She’s predictable that way. Not in a boring sense. In the sense that gravity is predictable. You can do all kinds of tricks while you fall, but gravity is still going to win.
I don’t send anything else. Not yet.
Conversation, like killing, is all about pacing. You don’t dump everything out at once. You leave white space. You let the other person fill it with their own noise, their own fear.
She’s going to tell Jack about this, of course. Show him the messages. She’ll show the wall.
They’ll argue about how much to let me talk. How much to let me see.
They’re already a step behind.
They keep thinking the work starts when I step into the light—when I knock, when I write, when I press my hand to glass.
That’s just the moment they’ve noticed me.
The work started months ago, when I first looked up Lucy Falls again on the map and listened to the way the name sounded in my head.
When I checked the school calendar, the local events, the Friendsgiving invitations, the due dates on their babies.
When I watched the circle of people around her tighten and loosen, breathe in and out.
When I learned the cadence of her typing.
I’m not improvising.
I’m finishing a story she interrupted.
I close the laptop halfway, letting the screen go dim, her last message washing out in the reflection until all I can see is my own face.
I don’t look like the monster they brief about in seminars. I look like half the men in this motel. Tired. Unremarkable. The kind of man who could hold a door, fix a tire, help you carry your suitcase.
It’s always more disappointing to people than they expect. They want horns. Red eyes. Visibly sharp teeth. They don’t know what to do with ordinary.
Tallulah does. That’s the difference. She knows monsters look like neighbors and doctors and men who smile at the right time.
She’s not scared of my face.
She’s scared of my name. My pattern. The shadow I cast over her data.
Good.
Fear is attention. Attention is a tether.
I open the laptop again and watch the cursor blink.
The bird’s still in the cage.
And the bars are nice and thin.