Chapter Forty-Nine
Forty-Nine
Gwen
I drove around the streets surrounding the motel for what felt like two hours when in reality it was about fifteen minutes.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have the motivation to find Natalie; it was that it was dark and she was clearly hiding or already gone.
I wasn’t going to suddenly spot her on a park bench and tackle her.
Instead, I pulled back into the motel parking lot. The door to her room was still ajar and the prospect of finding something in there that could help me locate her seemed more reasonable than sniffing around the neighborhood like a hunting dog.
The room was tidy but lived-in and I wondered how long she’d been staying there. A notebook rested on top of the nightstand, which was the obvious place to start. I flipped it open and knew right away that it was her journal. She used to keep a journal when we were together. It was my idea.
From the first page, it became clear Natalie had been stalking me, and I mean really stalking me.
My foray in sitting outside her hotel room for a couple of hours was not even in the same stratosphere.
I was pretty sure she had been watching me every day.
I felt bad. What a horribly boring person I must have been to stalk.
I riffled forward in time in the journal, flipping to the last pages.
I wanted to read all of it. I wanted to read about everything she had done and I wanted to read everything she thought about me while doing so.
I wanted to sit for hours and hope to find answers.
There were a lot of answers I wanted, but really only two I needed. Who was Wesley? And where was Natalie?
When I read an entry where she complained about the water temperature in the garage pipes making it hard for her to shower at home, I knew no matter how badly I wanted to keep reading about myself, I needed to find where home was.
I went to the small desk that was also food storage and yanked open the top drawer. There were several pieces of opened mail inside. I guess people from your fucked-up childhood who suddenly reemerge amid several murders still have bills to pay. I guess they also don’t necessarily go paperless.
Good old-fashioned mail was the best clue to where Natalie had gone. There was an address right on the front. Obviously. That’s how mail works.
- - - - -
It was a decent house. Much bigger than any place I’d ever lived in, and I wondered how she could afford it until I spotted the two mailboxes and remembered the garage pipes.
There were no cars in the garage and I made my way to the staircase, headed straight for an enclosed space, something I’d been so adamant about avoiding a couple of hours earlier. At least I still had a kitchen knife in my pocket.
When I reached the door, I knocked. I was, in theory, trying to catch her, but I didn’t want to scare her and I didn’t really know what else to do.
I waited and I listened. Then I heard something.
It was a wet slap coming from inside, like maybe there was a seal in there clapping for a sardine. I wanted it very much to be that. A cute little seal rescued from captivity—or not even rescued; I’d have been content with stumbling upon an underground exotic animal crime syndicate.
I reached for the knob and opened the door. The fact that it was unlocked was not a great sign. I had spooked Natalie by showing up at the motel. If she were hiding inside, she would have locked the door.
It was a studio space. One room with a bed and a couple of chairs. That’s about as much as I could take in before I saw her.
She was collapsed on the floor, curled up on her side, her hand tapping against the vinyl, smacking her own blood, which was pooling around her. Her last movements, trying desperately to get someone’s attention.
I dropped to her, not thinking clearly, and rolled her onto her back. There was so much blood, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I put my hand down on a few likely spots, trying to make it stop, but I only had two hands.
She let out a weak cough, choking on the blood that I had caused to pool in her mouth by rolling her over. I turned her back onto her side and the blood drained out of her throat and down the corner of her mouth.
I leaned closer to the ground, trying to look her in the eyes, eventually giving in and lying down on the floor next to her. I knew that even if I had walked into her apartment and she was dancing naked in front of a shrine to me, I still wouldn’t have been able to hurt her.
She tried to speak, but her mouth was full of blood.
Fading away, realizing speaking wasn’t an option, Natalie crawled her hand to her head. She pawed at her hair, now thick with blood, pushing it away from her face so she could see me. She grabbed at it, desperate for it to stay back.
“Oh, Natalie.” I sighed, reaching out to help her. Her hand fell and I continued to push the hair off her face. “What happened to you?” I pleaded.
Natalie didn’t try to speak anymore. All movement had stopped.
She was looking at me, but her eyes were stuck now.
I should have looked for her. I could have found her.
I could have been in her life and had her in mine.
The sight of her had completely rocked me to the core.
She wasn’t the bad guy I wanted her to be.
I pulled my hand back. I wasn’t comforting her anymore; I was petting a dead body.
I climbed off the floor and washed my arms and hands in the sink, then wiped off anything I thought I’d touched.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her corpse, and then I left her there.
I wanted to know what had happened to her in all the years since I’d last seen her, but what had happened to her in the last twenty minutes was more pressing.
Up until that night, there had been only one other person who I knew was out to kill her. After seeing Natalie brutally slain like that, did I really think Elyse was capable of it? It was so eerily similar to how her family had looked after my father killed them that it was believable.
She had called multiple times while I’d been dealing with Porter. What if she’d been doing what I had begged her to do—call me before she did anything to Marin? What if Elyse had followed me to that motel and when Natalie had run, she’d followed her?
Still, I was more concerned about Wesley. Whoever the hell Wesley was. This reporter who was so involved in my life story but had never introduced himself? He was either the world’s worst reporter or really fucking suspicious.