Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
Gwen
All I thought about was killing Natalie.
What it would feel like. What it would mean.
How I could continue justifying that it was nothing like what my father did when he took a life.
How I could go back to work and to Painting Pots and on dates with Brian knowing I had killed again, telling myself it was different this time.
I was glad I had finally visited my father, confronting what I had long been afraid would happen if I did so.
It felt good to defy him, to deprive him of what he wanted, but my mental state was like that of a zoo animal set loose into the wild—appreciative of my newfound freedom but ill prepared to survive on my own.
It didn’t help that I was focusing so much of my attention on Natalie and what I was going to have to do to her.
The mental gymnastics required to feel free from my father while planning a murder were causing my brain to overheat.
I craved being near Elyse. She was a release valve for the pressure in my head.
I had earned her trust somehow—I was the worst possible person in the world for her to trust, but she did.
She didn’t know I was Marin Haggerty, but she’d figured out that Gwen Tanner was dark and fucked-up too.
My parents dying in that fire must have really affected me, because I was not appalled by her plans or the callousness with which she discussed them.
I encouraged her to talk about killing Natalie, letting her say all the things out loud so that I didn’t need to think them alone.
I sat in Elyse’s aesthetically dull kitchen. I watched her run a sponge around the edges of the sink, pausing in spots to scrub hardened grossness away.
“I was thinking about motive,” she mused. “If I take a bunch of things like jewelry and her wallet, the cops will think it was a robbery gone bad.”
“Marin is too much in the public eye right now,” I cautioned. “It’s going to be suspicious no matter what you do.”
“They’re going to assume it’s whoever did the other killings.”
“But how are you going to actually do it? The act?”
“Stab her?” Elyse kept scrubbing at the counter that was already spotless five minutes ago. “What do you think?”
“I think stabbing is really personal,” I said. “You’ll have to be so close to her and she’s going to look you in the eyes. She’ll beg you not to do it. If you panic and don’t finish it, you’re done. You’ll go to jail and she’ll be a hero.”
Elyse pulled the sponge away from the counter to look at me. Her face was unaltered by my attempt to set the chilling scene. “I can stab her from behind,” she suggested. “I would surprise her.”
I had to remember who I was dealing with.
She had seen her whole family dead, splayed out, covered in blood.
The thought of her nemesis in that condition was not going to spook her.
My only chance was logic. “You have to hit an organ or cut a vein. There are lots of places you can survive a stab wound.”
She was scrubbing again. “What do you think? I should shoot her? I don’t know how to get an untraceable gun.”
“Guns are too loud.”
“What, then?” She pressed for my advice, frustrated. “It has to be something quick.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like there’s an easy answer. Getting away with murder is supposed to be difficult.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of this?” She turned back from the sink.
“I get it if you don’t want to be a part of this.
I know it’s a lot.” She tried to inhale, but her breath caught in her throat and she flipped up her palms, gesturing defeat.
“I know it’s really crazy and you don’t owe me anything. ”
“I said I would help you and this is me helping you. You can’t half-ass it. Every detail needs to be worked out and you have to know one hundred percent that you want to kill her. I mean, she was just a kid.”
“I was just a kid!” Elyse threw the sponge into the sink for good. “You don’t do that and then puberty turns you into a well-adjusted person, while I’m stuck sitting in this apartment watching her crush my brother’s skull over and over again.”
“It won’t make you feel better,” I insisted.
“Any relief you’ll get from her being dead will be marred by the act you committed.
You’ll watch her life fade away at your hand.
There will be blood spilling out. She’ll cry and beg you for help and you can’t help her.
Then she will just be a body and her eyes will be glued open and staring at you.
” I leaned over the table, trapping her eyes symbolically with mine.
“That’s what you’ll see every day for the rest of your life.
If someone cuts you off in the street and you think a bad thought about them, you will see them dead, because your mind will know what you are capable of.
It will not end. It will be who you are now. ”
“Good,” she said as she stood back up and walked away.
Her cold indifference sent a charge through my body—an attraction clouded by guilt.
Elyse was innocent and the point was to keep her that way.
She wasn’t like us. I didn’t know what had happened to Natalie or why she was doing this, but regardless of any aliases or wigs, this was our mess alone—mine and Natalie’s.