Chapter Forty-Six
Forty-Six
Gwen
Natalie’s face was everywhere. Every mention of the murders of James and Oswald was accompanied by a still of her from that video.
I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to hate Natalie, but I didn’t.
She was a girl I had known when I was thirteen.
It had been easy for me to erase her significance since then, dwarfed by my sick brain’s devotion to my father.
But the more I looked at Natalie and the more I remembered, the more it seemed it might be that the reunion we were denied all those years ago was simply inevitable.
She had been my friend and this was what people who were friends with me turned into. Look at her now. Look at Porter and Dominic and even Elyse. I had always been the problem. It wasn’t fair to keep blaming everything on my father. I could ruin lives all on my own.
Now Natalie wanted some kind of revenge. She had killed everyone from my past who knew me as Marin Haggerty. For what? What was her goal and how far was she willing to take it before she came for me?
I gripped the bag holding my chicken wrap and used it to push open the front door to my apartment building. Mrs. Magnus’s cat was sprawled across the bottom step with his butthole exposed as usual and didn’t even flinch as I stepped over him.
I heard a board creak above me and I stopped, straddling the feral feline exhibitionist. I’d thought this part of the game was over. We’d escalated far beyond arms and bloody messages. It was almost too on the nose for it to be her.
I crept up the stairs, ready to defend myself with my keys and a sandwich. I rounded the corner and landed in a sort of half crouch, ready to kick or stab or smother with a wheat wrap.
“Dammit!” I exclaimed when I saw Porter slumped against my door. “You could have called, you asshole.”
He had dark circles under his eyes and pale flesh. His hair was growing back into an unsightly fuzz. I went to him and pulled him to his feet. The putrid smell of his neglected hygiene slapped me in the face. I unlocked the door and shoved him inside.
My phone buzzed in my pocket and I slipped it out as I closed the door behind me. It was Elyse. I rejected it. I had to deal with Porter first—one torpedoed friendship at a time.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Nowhere,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
He flopped down on the couch. “It means it doesn’t matter.”
“No, get up. You’re disgusting.” I grabbed his arm and hoisted him back to his feet. I dragged him to the bathroom and shoved him against the wall while I cranked on the shower. Then I yanked him off the wall and pushed him over the edge of the bath. His knees buckled and he dropped into the tub.
“Stop!” he screamed.
“This is over,” I said, pushing him down. “I don’t have time for this.” I held him by his shirt and let the freezing water fill his nose and mouth. He shook his head and coughed and spit and I pulled him back from the stream. When he started breathing regularly, I shoved him back under.
- - - - -
A half hour later, Porter sat on my couch with a blanket around him, shivering like he’d barely survived the Titanic.
“Where have you been?” I asked again.
“Around.”
“Yeah, you look like you’ve been around; you look like you were living in the sewer.”
“I don’t know if you remember, but I was in that house, I moved that body, and now the cops are everywhere. What if I left fingerprints? What if I didn’t find everything she planted?”
“Okay, well, I also moved the body and I’m functioning.
” I had to stop being salty and act more like an innocent person.
“Do you think I wanted to take care of that body? I was freaking out. I am freaking out. You brought this upon yourself and you dragged me into it.” Saying that was hard to stomach given the irony.
My phone vibrated on the coffee table and I scooped it up. It was Elyse. Again.
Porter continued to whine, making it impossible for me to answer. “I’m going to go to prison if they catch me. I need to get out of here. Leave the country. Get plastic surgery. Change my name.”
I rejected Elyse’s call. I would call her back in two minutes, once I talked Porter off the ledge.
“At this point, I think you need to be more worried about being murdered. You’re the one on Marin Haggerty’s radar.”
“That’s not helping!”
“Do you have somewhere you can go?” I asked. “I mean a reasonable place like an aunt in Nebraska or something?”
“Do I look like someone with an aunt in Nebraska?”
I shook my head at his taking offense to that.
“What if I go to the cops?” he asked. “Tell them everything. I think I know where she’s hiding out. There must be evidence there. They can protect me, right? Give me immunity?”
“You know where she is?”
“I think so. She paid for this room for me in a motel for a couple nights. You know, before I knew she was a psycho. I’m pretty sure she was staying there too.”
I landed on the couch beside him and paused my barrage of questions. It was exactly what I needed to know—where to find Natalie. Only now I’d have to do something I didn’t actually want to do. Something I had never wanted to do—hurt her.