Chapter 4
Greer
My hands shake as I try to keep their quaking from ripping the paper.
I checked the backseat before I got into the car. A nervous habit ever since the stalking started. I didn’t understand the command at first, but that night came back to me in a flash.
The one word that Allison kept uttering over and over and over to me was the one that still lives in my nightmares.
The one that turned my world upside down.
Drive.
How could someone know that?
No one could. Other than Allison.
Anger rises in my chest and spurs me on as I toss the note aside and speed to her place. My Chevy Equinox looks out of place in Green Island Hills, but I make my way through without incident and bang on her door with all the fury of a SWAT team with a battering ram.
“I’m coming! Hold on!” I hear her call out, and her exasperation with my impatience is evident.
She swings the door open. “Greer? Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you non-stop! You never showed up last night.”
“Explain this.” I shove the note at her, and she takes it, uncrumpling it and reading it as she looks back at me.
Tears roll down my cheeks, stinging in the cold as she looks genuinely confused.
Did that night not fuck her up as much as it did me? Does she not recall every fine detail as I do?
“That’s what you said to me that night, remember? You kept telling me to—”
“Drive,” she says, realization filling her face. “Wait, you don’t think I’m the one stalking you, do you? Fuck, how shitty of a friend do you think I am? I know we’re not as close as we used to be, but I’d never do this to you.”
“Then you told someone about the crash.”
Her head shakes violently. “No. I would never. It would ruin us both.”
She looks behind me as if she’s worried we’re being watched right this second as she tugs me inside and slams the door shut. “Tell me where you found this. Tell me everything.”
I recount my day in fine detail, leaving nothing out. Lawyers love specifics, but I wonder what case she’s building as her puzzled eyes stare through me as she listens.
“This was under your wiper,” she confirms.
I nod.
“Then maybe it’s not related to that night? Maybe your stalker just wanted you to go home?”
“Reaching. They already said they knew my secret, Allison. How many secrets do you think I have?”
She shrugs. “For the sake of my sanity, I was hoping your real name is Jim, and you moonlight as Greer for fun.”
“Not funny.”
“Fuck. How does someone know?”
I shrug. “The only people on that road were me, you, and the…” I swallow. “Him.”
“He was dead, G. I felt for a pulse. I tried so damned hard to find one, hoping he wasn’t—” She turns away.
In the following weeks, we watched the news, scoured the papers, and called local hospitals. We found nothing.
It had us believing for a while that we didn’t kill him.
But not every little thing gets reported. Now that I’m older, I know that. Details of the hit-and-run might’ve been hidden for some reason. Maybe the family didn’t want their business aired.
“What are we going to do?” I ask her.
“We’re going to play it cool and not spiral. We don’t know who this nut job is, nor what they think they know. I’ve got my contact in the department looking into your reports, and we keep on the straight and narrow while he does so.”
I lean back on her door, letting my head hit it with a thud. “This is karma coming to bite us in the ass. You know that, right?”
“G. Be realistic. This is probably someone who saw you at the library, got fixated on you, and is now being a psycho and stalking you. Look at you. I’d stalk you.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m going home.”
“Just stay here,” she pleads.
I snatch the note back from her as I turn and grab the door handle.“No. Because wherever I go, they’ll find me. If this is localized to me, I won’t drag you into any more bullshit.”
“Hey,” she says, turning me back towards her. “Your bullshit is my bullshit. Do you understand me? You’re not by yourself with this.”
She thinks this person is stalking me because of my looks, but she’s brushed it off a bit too nonchalantly for my liking, telling me I am by myself. I don’t argue with her.
I kiss her on the cheek and tell her goodnight as I get back in my car and let my head fall back onto the headrest, taking a steadying breath before heading home.
When I straighten and shift my car into drive, something in front of my gauges catches my eye. I turn on the overhead light and see another note plastered against the plastic housing.
Drive.
Penny Brown is a petite sprite of a girl with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes. Her glasses are black-rimmed, and they sit on the end of her nose as she leans over my desk to look at the archived newspaper articles I found on the Oakland Nightstalker.
“So, they were always found in the woods?” she asks.
“It would seem so.”
When the killings were going on, I was Penny’s age. Ripe for the picking, too, because the Oakland Nightstalker always kills college-aged kids, butchering them and leaving them on display in one wooded area or another. He’s not picky.
Or wasn’t.
“I don’t think he’s back,” she says, sitting back in her chair as she shoves her glasses up her nose.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because his modus operandi changed.”
I smirk at her using the correct term for MO. “Did it?”
Since Penny’s paper was based on killers who went silent and the reasoning behind it, I hadn’t looked into the Nightstalker’s recent killings. I’ve been acquainting myself with his earlier work to get her off and running.
Penny sniffs, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and I try to ignore how the action makes my skin crawl. “Of late, he’s been killing men. Some were in their late twenties, but the recent one was thirty-two if I remember correctly.”
“Odd that he’d change how he’s operating, but you have to wonder if it was the hiatus he was on, wouldn’t you?”
She shrugs as if she couldn’t care less. It’s clear that I’m the only one intrigued by this. She’s only here to finish the paper and get it off her proverbial plate.
“I gotta get to a class, but I appreciate all the help. Can we meet again on Friday?”
“Of course. However, on Friday, I leave early. We close at four.”
“I’ll be here before that, then. Thank you, Ms. Allen.”
I watch Penny go, then turn back to my MacBook.
“Weird one, isn’t she?” Melody asks, nodding in the direction Penny took off in.
I shrug one shoulder. “She’s alright. Looks tired, though.”
She sighs. “I know the feeling.”
“Maybe less partying after work would do you good,” I say, instantly wondering who I am because I used to be Melody.
“Sure thing, Mom.” She turns back, and I glide my fingers over the keyboard before I know what I’m doing.
At the touch of a few keystrokes, I pull up all the recent clippings about the Oakland Nightstalker’s return.
The names of his alleged victims are listed, and my heart clogs my throat as I read them.
David Sanke, Jack Clark, and his most recent victim, Daniel Mintz.
All names of men Allison hooked me up with, and I subsequently went on dates with.
They were lured into the woods, killed, and then cut into sections like a butchered animal, laid on the leaves, and placed strategically as if they were a puzzle waiting to be put back together.
Tears spill over my lower lids, and I slam my computer shut.
Grabbing my bag, I bolt from the library.
“Greer?!” Melody calls after me, but I can’t stop running.
I hurry to my car, ignoring the note beneath the wiper, knowing what it says already.
And like a dutiful little captive, I do as I’m told.
I drive.
Allison holds me tight as I sob. “Shh. We don’t know what this means.”
“Yes, we do!”
“No. We don’t. However, we need to alert the authorities about the connection. Then we can find a way to keep you safe.”
I peel away from her tight hug. “Won’t I become a suspect?”
She pauses and considers. “Goddamnit. Yes, you will be. But they’ll be able to rule you out pretty quickly. I still say we need to tell them. Maybe you’re the lead they’ve been looking for this entire time.”
Something in my gut churns at the idea of the cops having any of this information at their disposal, and I can’t even begin to digest why. I stow it away for another time.
“Just… give me some time to try to figure this out. I need to process,” I plead, panic setting in.
She grabs my hands and squeezes. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it. I owe you that much.”
The implication of what I did for her hangs between us, unspoken, where it’s resided for ten years now.
“I don’t want to go to the cops yet. They didn’t believe me before; they already think my stories are fishy, which will sway them away from clearing me.”
“Babe, you’re on the radar of a serial killer. Have you seen what he does to his victims?”
I nod as more tears burn my eyes. “I have. I need to do this my way. For once.”
Her sigh means I’ve won this round, but I don’t think I’ll be able to hold her off for much longer if this escalates.
And lately, that’s all it seems to do.
When I open my car door to head home from Allison’s, I snatch the note beneath the windshield before getting in.
Like before, I lock the car and turn it on before unfolding the paper.
Their blood is on your hands.