Chapter Nine
Nine
I looked to Dominic. Why was Elyse Abbington there? What was happening? Was this a trap?
Dominic reached out and grabbed Porter’s arm to settle him. “Hey, quiet.”
“What?” Porter was not there to be scolded.
“She’s a human being, you know,” said Dominic, “not a sideshow attraction.”
“Why is she here?” I asked, barely audible, ventriloquist style, struggling to move at all.
“Jake said she doesn’t mind,” Porter insisted. “She likes to talk about it.”
“Jake’s full of shit,” said Dominic. “He’s probably trying to cause a scene.”
“How do you know her?” I asked with more volume, trying to put the pieces together without sounding accusatory.
“She’s Jake’s girlfriend. I think that’s why the stuff about Abel really struck a chord with me. You know, because I know her. It hits so close to home.”
Hitting close to home was right. She must be the girl I saw climbing out the window. There was a reason I had felt so compelled to watch her.
The last time I’d seen Elyse Abbington, she was eight years old.
She was rail thin back then and always filthy.
Her parents didn’t pay much attention to their kids and Elyse used to wander uninhibited all over the neighborhood.
No one wanted to play with her; she was too little and always had snot all over her face. She was that kid.
“Will you introduce us?” Porter asked.
Dominic sized him up. “Are you going to play it cool?”
“Obviously,” Porter said, brushing him off.
Dominic turned to me. “What do you think?”
“I’d like to meet her,” I said, trying my best to play it cool.
Porter took hold of my arm and practically yanked it out of its socket. “She’s on the fire escape.”
Porter lifted the curtain and heaved himself through the window first. Dominic held his hand out for me and I used it to climb through next.
She just sat there on one of the metal-grate steps. She wasn’t filthy anymore. Her nose was snot-free. She was beautiful and haunting and dark—all of the things I wanted to be, but instead I was standing in my fake pearl earrings, holding my peach cardigan.
“Hey, Elyse,” Dominic said as he followed through the window behind me.
“You actually showed up,” she said—her voice was different now, of course. Part of me was expecting her to sound the same. She would open her mouth and her shrill little eight-year-old voice would spill out.
“Yeah, I needed to get you two off my back,” he teased, shuffling in front of me. “These are my friends. The new friends I am proactively making,” he accentuated for her benefit. “This is Porter…” Dominic gripped his shoulders and repositioned him to better reveal me. “And this is Gwen.”
Porter lurched forward with his hand and Elyse hesitated a second before obliging him with a handshake.
“Awesome,” said Porter, totally fanboying.
Dominic leaned over to assist Porter in letting go. I let him shield me from Elyse again. I wanted to see her without her seeing me.
From Dominic’s shadow I looked up over his shoulder and found her eyes waiting for mine.
Everything stopped again. Did she recognize me?
Did she already know who I was? Was she the one leaving me gifts?
She parted her lips and I realized my lips had parted too—maybe not visibly, but I could feel the separation.
What was she going to say? What did she want?
To kill me? To torture me? What if she wasn’t involved at all and just recognized me from my face? Stop looking at me.
“Dominic took us on the tour today,” said Porter, bringing sounds back to the world.
Elyse blinked and released me. She turned to Porter, probably feeling his eyes boring into her soul.
“It was really intense,” he added.
“He does a good job,” she said.
“Oh my God, have you done it?” Porter glowed.
She smiled politely. “No, I don’t think it’s for me.”
Porter brought his hands to his face and rubbed his cheeks—the tactile sensation heightened by whatever he had ingested at the party so far. “This is so fucking cool. You were, like, there. What was it like?”
“Okay, buddy.” Dominic took him by the shoulders. “Let’s go sit down.” He pulled Porter back toward the window against his will.
“What?” Porter begged for me to back him up. “I was just asking.”
Go, I mouthed.
I could have followed them—taken my cue to exit—but I stayed. I walked to the edge of the balcony and leaned against the railing—staring out into the street.
“So what did you think of the tour?” she asked.
I turned back around to look at her; there was no longer a shadow to hide in. “It was…informative, I guess.”
“I bet.” She lifted a beer bottle to her lips and took a swig.
“Does it bother you?” I asked.
“What?”
“That Dominic does that.”
“No, not really,” she said. “It’s nice someone is still thinking about it.”
“Well, it’s not exactly paying homage to the victims. Honestly, it kind of glorifies the killings.”
She shrugged. “Gotta give the people what they want.”
“You seem jaded.”
She took another sip of her beer, drawing it out, exemplifying her jadedness. “I was eight. It’s like it wasn’t even me. Do you think you’re the same person you were when you were that age?”
“I don’t know.” I waited for her to react. Was that a weighted question? Did this girl know we’d been children together?
She raised her eyebrows, then smiled, relaxing them. “How do you know Dominic?”
“I met him at— I ran into him and he convinced me to go on his tour. It was only Porter and me. Things got a little…comfortable, I would say, and then he invited us here.”
“I swear he only does that tour to try to meet other freaks who want to talk about Abel Haggerty all day. No offense.” She smirked.
“Aren’t these freaks your friends?”
“I’m sitting alone on the fire escape, aren’t I? They’re more Jake’s friends than mine. They only like me because my whole family was massacred. It makes me interesting.”
I didn’t really know how to respond. It did make her interesting, I supposed. Of course, I could have walked in there and stolen all her significance with one honest sentence, but I was only being petty. What she was saying was sad and I could tell it made her sad.
“They want to ask me all sorts of sick things,” she continued, “but they don’t want to scare me away, so it’s like a dance.”
“Why do you even hang out with them, then?” I asked.
“It can be intoxicating,” she said. “How can I describe it so you’d understand?”
She thought about it, but I already understood. It was envy and obsession. To be obsessed over, to know something everyone else craved to understand, to hold it all inside while those around you salivated—it was our own special brand of celebrity.
“I get it,” I said so she could stop thinking.
“A dead family is the best currency you can have around here.” She smiled to prove it was a joke and that pity was unnecessary. “What about you? Where did you grow up?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Tell me about it.” She gazed at me. What did she want me to say? She either knew the truth and was my super-stalker, or maybe she didn’t and was hungry to digest my lies. She was hard to read.
“My parents died in a fire,” I recited, a story I’d told a million times.
“Holy shit,” she said. “I feel like an asshole now.”
“Why?” I laughed. “You just said that was the best currency you can have around here.”
“I’m used to being the most tragic one in the room, I guess.”
The curtain was pulled back and we both turned to see Dominic in the window. “You might want to take Porter home. The guys have him in the kitchen chugging rum right from the bottle.”
This was what I got for having a kid as a wingman. I rolled my eyes, but Porter was honestly doing me a favor. I needed time to process the reappearance of Elyse Abbington before I revealed too much.
“It was nice meeting you,” she said as I moved toward the window.
“Yeah” was all I managed before leaving her there, alone on the fire escape—a fire escape my fake parents really could have used.
- - - - -
I shoved Porter into the back of an UberX. He fell on his face and I reached in to turn his head to the side to prevent him from asphyxiating on the upholstery.
“He’s not going to puke, is he?” asked the driver.
“No,” I said, having no idea if it was the truth.
Dominic held the door open for me while I rearranged Porter. “Thanks again for coming on the tour and, you know, the rest of the night.”
I wriggled the top half of my body back out of the car to bid him adieu.
“It was fun.” I hesitated a second to consider what Elyse had said about him and the fact that we had barely scratched the surface on what he was doing with Abel.
“If you want someone to talk to about your book, you can call me.”
“Really?” His eyes expanded. “What’s your number?”
“I’ll text it to you.” I lowered into the back seat. “I still have your business card.”
“Right, great. Okay, well, good night.” We closed the door together, me pulling from the inside, him pushing from the street. It was a pleasant simpatico moment at a time when a potential cuckoo-nuts murderer was out to ruin my life.
- - - - -
I dropped Porter off and got back to my apartment a little after eleven.
Of course, he had ended up barfing, so after I helped the pissed-off Uber driver scrub the back seat, he agreed to still bring me home if I gave him an extra forty dollars in cash.
The car reeked, even from the front passenger seat with all the windows open, and I was pretty sure the driver was going to absolutely destroy my rating.
I collapsed onto the couch. What a day. I had so many new acquaintances—new acquaintances who were maybe psychopaths and killers.
I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes.
There was a part of me that wanted to spend every free moment thinking about life and death.
Why did people put so much work into something that could be taken away in an instant by anyone?
I could have walked downstairs right then and slit the throat of Mrs. Magnus. I wasn’t going to, but I could have.
I didn’t let myself think like that very often.
My job was 90 percent talking to people about their futures—career trajectories, advancement opportunities, compensation structures.
It wasn’t hard. I liked it. I was being paid to read people—see through the fake bullshit, find the best candidates, persuade them to take the job, and then let my boss take all the credit for hiring them.
Money, prestige, security—their wants were fundamental. I was under no illusion that I worked for Greenpeace or anything close to it. Still, it was my job to convince them I was invested in their futures and not that I could shove a letter opener into their jugular at any moment.
I had to numb those parts of my brain. I couldn’t come home every night and think about killing people if I hoped to be normal—a normal woman who worked in a high-rise downtown and went on occasional dates with guys like Brian.
People are nostalgic for things from their childhood.
It didn’t have to mean I was defective. Evil thoughts are not the same as evil actions, and bad children can be decent adults.
That was the kind of thing I reminded myself of regularly, but it never stuck.
I was defective, and all I could do to manage it was maintain a crafted isolation.
As soon as I got this severed-arms situation under control, I would go back to the disciplined life I had created.
I nodded off to the image of Mrs. Magnus taking a bite of an English muffin with thick peanut butter, swallowing too soon, a chunk getting lodged in her throat.
She gags, trying to breathe, finding no oxygen.
Her hands move to her throat. I’m choking, help me.
She drops to the floor. She knows she’s done and at the last second, her hands fall from her neck.
A quiet scratching interrupted my slumber.
At first I thought it was Mrs. Magnus’s feral-ass cat, but the sound was more like shoes shuffling than that thing’s nasty claws.
The noise was right outside my door and I sat up in silence.
The shuffling stopped and I held my breath.
Then there were footsteps going down the stairs.
Oh no you don’t, you fucker. I jumped from the couch and raced to the door.
The hallway was empty, but at the bottom of the stairs the outside door was wide open.
Barefoot, I flew down to the first floor and into the street.
It was deserted. The only sound was the wind—no footsteps, no one running into a trash can, no barking dogs or car alarms. I spun around slowly like I was being mirrored by a guy with a Steadicam, capturing my bewilderment for the big screen.
The theatrics dissipated once all I could focus on was how cold my feet were.
I returned to the house, pulling the front door closed. It stuck on the runner and I unleashed my fury, stomping the rug flat and slamming the door shut. They really needed to rip that thing up. I had a stalker, after all.
At the top of the stairs I realized I was right; someone had been outside my door. Written in big bloody letters was the word LIAR.
Of course, I was lying; everything about Gwen Tanner was a lie. Was there something I had done that day that was particularly triggering? A lie worse than any other?
I wiped my finger along the edge of the R and brought it to my nose.
I sniffed it, then dabbed it on my lip. I swept my tongue over the substance.
Corn syrup or something—not blood. I guess they’d run out of arms. I’d been waiting for their next move, but maybe they were waiting for mine.
All it took was reuniting with Elyse Fucking Abbington to prompt another visit.
I brought over a sponge from the sink and scrubbed away the stupid message. I didn’t like cleaning and I really didn’t like being threatened. I could feel my blood pressure rising. My father always told me that we were not the type of people to mess with.